The classic D&D 2014 lore is preserved and expanded upon in Tales of the Valiant. The game is 100% compatible with D&D 2014 subclasses and adventures. The monsters hit hard and go down easier, leading to tougher, shorter, and more intense fights. Everything feels perfectly like classic D&D 5E. The classes and gameplay flow perfectly, matching exactly what I expect.
The luck mechanic is far, far better than Heroic Inspiration, turning close rolls into successes, and giving the player a bennie for a clear miss.
If I'm playing 5E, I'm playing ToV.
The Player's Guide 2 adds the missing subclasses, filling out all the expected roles in the game. While the first book covers the core basics and is great for new players, the second book expands on it and delivers the theme-supporting subclasses we expect. Nature clerics, mockery bards, elemental druids, twinblade fighters, grenadier mechanists, elemental voice monks, unbound paladins, shadow rangers, trapsmith rogues, and wizards get necromancer, arcanist, and summoner. Keep the corebook new player-friendly, and leave the advanced classes fully fleshed out in the expansion.
Yes, yes, and yes.
The D&D 5.5E Monster Manual pushed me over the edge. Yes, they streamlined monster complexity and optimized for speed of play. Those are laudable goals, especially for a game notorious for combats that take hours to resolve. But they cut too many abilities out of the monsters, and they now all feel like generic stat blocks. Most of the humanoids are gone, and they are confusingly split up between specific and generic types. And the writing team sanitized and scrubbed anything cool about the monsters, and rewrote most of the creatures into terrible Tumblr fan fiction.
Some of these are abjectly horrible to read, cringe-worthy, and turn D&D into a generic fantasy slop game. I can get monsters like these anywhere, heroic lizardfolk nature defenders that are abjectly horrible. The cyclops? They became future-seeing fortune-tellers who protect fate. Wouldn't that make them always win initiative? No? No room for that, or didn't think of it? They were reculsive, primitive, animal-raising brutes who mostly wanted to be left alone and turned into somebody's anime fan fiction. There is nothing wrong with having them be more pastoral and simple folk. Even the art looks like an AI edit, the same pose as the 2014 art, but with a magical time mage in the background. Monocular Servants of Destiny? What is this book?
I get trying to "spice up" underused monsters, but these examples make no sense. Part of the heart and soul of D&D are the monsters. Changing the classic D&D monsters removes any desire for me to play the game, as I could get the same generic fantasy slop elsewhere. The book tries too hard to present monsters in a positive light, watering down true evil, removing the Conan-like edge from any savage species, and "nice-washing" every monster into a kinder and gentler variant.
You know it is bad when some cultists are described as "privately pursuing esoteric secrets." Let's not judge them, okay? It is like describing cannibals as people with "abnormal culinary tastes" and using the tagline for the monster entry, "Self-Consuming Anti-Agrarian Collective."
I tried to play D&D 5.5E. I bought character sheets. I got a campaign book. I wanted to give it a chance. The D&D 5.5E Monster Manual ruined it for me. The book is filled with tripe and fan fiction. It removes any background, lore, or inspiration for using a monster, leaving generic, dreamed-up reinterpretations.
But I gave the game an honest try.
This is the worst Monster Manual since the loose-leaf binder they sold us back in AD&D 2nd Edition, but at least that had great lore and ecology. The fact that these aren't even the same monsters as we had in that book, and that the lore on them has drastically changed, puts this squarely as the worst Monster Manual ever, with the D&D 4E Monster Manual a close second, due to the fact that some monsters had 1,400 hit points and took a day-long fight to defeat.
Tales of the Valiant? Ah, there are the D&D monsters I know and love! Just as progressive a company, but they have significantly more self-restraint, can deliver the product, and are not rewriting the game to protect players' feelings. You enter this world, there may be things that upset you, like there are things in a Conan novel that may upset you, and we will talk about it if it does. We are not rewriting Conan to protect readers' feelings. People love the D&D monsters and their lore, and this is what sets D&D apart from every other fantasy slop game on the market.
Only, D&D does not have the D&D monster lore anymore.
Tales of the Valiant does. Or D&D 2014. Or even, Level Up A5E, another very progressive company that can focus and deliver the product that gamers want. When D&D changes its lore, this is like Coke changing the formula. You have lost. Pepsi gives every employee a day off. The cola wars are over. D&D isn't D&D anymore unless we have a spare 2014 Monster Manual lying around and use it.
Could I play this?
With this?
Yes. I may have to. This may actually be more fun than playing D&D 5.5E and cringing whenever I look up a monster. I don't want to use a monster that I might accidentally mock or make fun of during play, since the lore and rewritten fan-fiction are so silly. I want the original lore and formula, not the new fantasy-slop versions. If I am not "getting the D&D," I might as well go play Daggerheart or Pathfinder.
Then again, if the 5.5E Monster Manual is that messed up, why would I want to play here? What else did they mess up in the Realms? Is it all rewritten to be audience-friendly and non-triggering? I stopped playing in the Pathfinder 2 world since the changes were terrible, and I have a feeling this will be more of the same.
The less I fight the source material, the more fun I will have.
Again, the Kobold Press alternative may be the better choice here.
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