Tales & Battlezoo = My D&D

There is an innocence and clean implementation of Tales of the Valiant that I really appreciate. This is the best "generic 5E" you can get, and unlike D&D, I don't have to keep telling myself excuses to justify playing the game, despite all its baggage from Wizards.

I grew tired of the constant virtue signaling in the art, the absolute disaster of the OGL, them telling an entire group of players they could not leave fast enough, and all the terrible, negative, hurtful things they did over the years. The warning labels on the older books were like those on cigarette cartons. The disrespect thrown at the game's original creators.

There comes a point where you prove the company is unworthy of carrying the legacy forward, and Wizards has done that over and over again. And I don't really trust "the new guy" since these people come and go every few years. I saw this with the D&D 3E, 3.5E, 4E, 5E, and 5.5E teams and creators. Nobody stays at Wizards for long. In a few years, it will likely all be run by AI anyway.

Tales of the Valiant has a no-AI pledge, and the company needs this game to be their lifeline should 5E get dumped into the dustbin of history by Wizards, and make no mistake, that day is coming. They say 5E is evergreen, but history proves that a new team will make something new, and that will be the next, new, official thing.

The 5E "platform", just like the Linux "platform", is a solid, workable, good system. Just like there are some Linux vendors I can't stand, there are some 5E vendors I refuse to work with. One of them is Wizards, despite my memories, nostalgia, and history. I support the 5E platform, not D&D.

ToV was written as a beginner's game, and it was criticized for offering only two subclass choices per class; this was later addressed in the Player's Guide 2. Then again, for a beginner's game, I only want two subclass choices per class instead of D&D's four per class. The book gets too big for new players to grasp; there are too many choices, and those entering the hobby will walk away with choice paralysis.

Two clear choices are better than four for a starter game, and the ToV ones are very clear, offering "A or B" choices that support new players, and don't leave me feeling "did I make the wrong choice?"

ToV feels like old-school Labyrinth Lord back in the day. The "no baggage" and "clean support" version of BX that introduced me to the OSR. I have my original BX books, but I still chose LL over that. LL had the support, community, and love of its creator to drive interest. There is no "product identity" in here lying in wait as a trap, so I can't share content; if it is in the Black Flag SRD, it is pretty widely supported everywhere.

ToV's designs are close to the original 2014 standards, and all the "roleplay" powers are bept intact. A clear example is the ranger. The D&D 2024 version of the ranger feels like a combat-only class that focuses more on tactical battles, and the nature and roleplay powers were stripped out, likely because they were harder to support in a (now defunct) VTT.

Tales of the Valiant's ranger preserves the nature skills and abilities, and it aligns closely with my ideas of what the "5E ranger" is all about. I want a design closer to 2014 than Tasha's or 2024, and ToV hits that nail on the head. ToV keeps the best parts of the game, fixes all the problems, and creates a "clean room" version of 5E that can be supported forever.

D&D 2024 will only last as long as it takes Wizards to pump out a new version of D&D, and the life left in 5E as "the D&D system" is on a short clock. If the 2024 version failed, it would trigger the official D&D 5E support's sunset phase.

I would rather have a system that will be around a long time. And that is Tales of the Valiant.

The Battlezoo books complement the game perfectly, adding all sorts of all-ages fun while preserving the innocence of the core game. These are my "expansion books" that fill in a bunch of thematic gaps, and add a wealth of new options for dragons, monster training, and a rich assortment of other backgrounds to play.

If I am going to invest in a Battlezoo campaign and the hardcovers, I am going to invest in a 5E system that won't be replaced a few years down the road.

And there are all sorts of fun things to play here, and so many adventures to be had with all of these wonderful books. The Roll for Combat team "gets it," and they keep their books family-friendly while overdelivering value and creativity. These are fun books meant to engage your imagination, 5E system-neutral, and highly compelling, delivering enjoyment.

If I wanted to play a dragon, I could play a dragon.

Instead of promising adventure and delivering virtue signaling, these books expand what is possible and deliver amazing potential and infinite stories. They stay out of politics. They stay out of the online culture wars. I want an escape from this world, and they deliver.

ToV does the same; it doesn't insult old-school players by removing orcs and goblins from the bestiary. If I want them, they are there, just like they were in 2014 D&D. Nobody is making that choice for me; I make it. D&D 2024 feels the need to make these choices for us, and it rubs me the wrong way, like the designers are making a value judgment on me and how I play, and that is no place for them to be.

Sometimes the best thing a designer can do is stay out of my game.

But these days, I only want positive influences and happy games that don't trigger hurtful feelings or memories. I don't want to see the war on the Internet all over the pages of a game I use to escape it. I want something suitable for everybody, without hidden sex coding or demon fetishes all over the art.

If I want mature concepts or the sensitive topic of devil worship, I will add them myself. My choice: stay out of it, agenda-driven design team. A family-friendly game that avoids prejudging old-school players gives me the room to make that choice.

All of this works together so well, and the Battlezoo books are the last reason I keep 5E around on my game table. Highly engaging and worth the money.

Digital Only and Partnered Releases

The trend of "digital only" DLC for D&D sucks. Now, we are expected to buy our games from only one storefront and never have a physical copy? Not even a PDF that will last beyond the life of D&D Beyond? When the website shuts down, is it over? Like D&D 4's errata and online character creation tools, gone forever?

The partnered content, too, does not feel great. Are we getting no hardcovers from now on? Have we moved into a "no announcements, DLC only" model of releases? Are these D&D Beyond-only releases, too, without PDFs?

The game has taken a turn for the worse. Even if I were still giving them a chance, I would be very unhappy about the state of affairs. Yet D&D YouTube pretends "this is fine," and there isn't much alarm there as they pray the golden goose doesn't die anytime soon. It is a tough position to be put in, and you pray another game takes off in popularity and sustains your viewership.

Even criticizing the current state of affairs will breed negativity and force viewers away.

If I want to play 5E, I have Tales of the Valiant or Level Up A5E. I have books, PDFs, crowdfunding campaigns, and everything the "market leader" isn't giving me. Ten-year-old books still work with the Open 5E version of the system, and newer stuff works, too. ToV offers greater compatibility, seamlessly working with existing classes and subclasses.

Since I adopted ToV as my "long-term support" 5E, I have been happy with the system and support.

All my Wizards D&D books are in the garage. Even the monster manuals and campaign books.

I am just happier where I am.

Crowdfunding Trio!

We have a trio of great crowdfunders today! First up is Pinball Crawl Classics from Goodman Games:

https://www.backerkit.com/c/projects/goodman-games/old-school-adventures-1

Next up is Night Hunters for 5E and Tales of the Valiant:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/deepmagic/night-hunters-gothic-horror-for-tov-and-5e-dandd

Adventures Dark and Deep Book of Fell Wisdom is a wonderful expansion for the premier 1E retro-clone.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/brwgames/adventures-dark-and-deep-book-of-fell-wisdom

I am onboard with all three. This is a good day for crowdfunding, bad for my wallet, but I am a fan, and they earned my support.

Poor Timing on My Part

The same day I pull my Castles & Crusades books out of the closet, the Tales of the Valiant Player's Guide 2 PDF drops to backers. It is like the 5E universe is trying to send me a message and pull me back into the fold. The timing is far too strange. I was just mentally getting prepared to bring C&C back to my shelves, and this drops?

It is silly to think this was intentional, but it just highlights my terrible timing in life.

I was thinking about C&C. I have a few shelves of BX, OSE, S&W, and OSRIC books, and I was looking to organize them. The reforged copies of C&C were always out, sitting on a spare storage shelf and waiting to go with the other books in my closet storage crates. I had C&C in those crates to give other games room to breathe, since C&C is a game that will end play for every other game around it. C&C is just that good.

Why did I pull C&C out?

I have an issue with games being so in-depth and complicated, and requiring character designers for complex characters, that I never play them. The choice comes down to: do I think about playing a game, or actually play one? Even Shadowdark requires a map, player markers, and a torch timer. GURPS needs a hex map and a detailed character build. 5E needs a VTT and web-based character sheets.

C&C needs a character sheet the size of an index card.

All the rest is theater of the mind.

If I am not playing any of these, if I choose a game where all I need is a few 4x6" cards and some dice, and I sit at a card table with a book or two at my side, then I can play. There is no book reference, no looking up charts, and no complicated collections of action types and abilities.

C&C is easier than Shadowdark, OSE, and many other rules-light games.

Yet it provides a complete 1E-like experience.

Castles & Crusades is a game that throws out every chart in the OSR. We begin with the ability score charts, one for each, with columns of esoteric modifiers and adjustments for bending bars and lifting gates, number of followers, system shock, maximum languages, hit die modifiers, and all the pedantic OSR ability score modifiers columns every game loves to include. C&C needs none of those charts.

The huge list of saving throws in OSR games, one for two types of magical implement, and all the other very specific categories? We need one chart per class, and leveled all the way up. Every time we add a class, we add a new saving throw chart. All of those are gone in C&C, replaced by a straightforward ability check system using the SIEGE Engine.

The huge thief ability chart? Gone. The bard ability charts? Gone. At most, each class gets a level chart that tells us a few key pieces of information, and when different class abilities are granted. Otherwise, ability scores do the rest of the work. I can see why this was the last game Gary Gygax was involved in; it reduced the D&D concept into an easier, more accessible form.

You play from your character sheet with near-zero book reference.

Your ability scores matter.

5E is similar to C&C, since 5E borrowed the "one chart per class" concept of the game, and did the entire "leveled class abilities" thing. Where 5E stumbles is in its subclass design, which muddies the class's identity and fails to let strong multiclassing handle that level of customization. In contrast, C&C's classes were designed to be multiclass, not in a "pick a new class every level" sort of way, but rather you will always be a "fighter/wizard" at the game's start, building your XP chart, and slowly gaining the abilities of both classes. There are no "one-level dips" in C&C to steal a few class abilities to break another class with; essentially, the game design of 5E relies on exploits.

C&C has classic multiclassing as intended. It is a far better system than 5E's chaotic, idiotic level-dipping mess. I can be a "class and a half" illusionist-bard in C&C, and it means something. I chose that to start, and I will be that all the way.

In many ways, C&C is not an OSR game, but an entirely new one. It may share the math, combat, ability score, and other numbers of the OSR and remains compatible with the adventures there, but the rest of the game is brand-new and so different that what it throws out defines the game. Just the best parts, the character classes, spells, magic items, and monsters, are kept, and all the reference charts are thrown out. 5E would do well to copy C&C more and start throwing out huge sections of the rules, starting with the multitude of action types.

Many parts of 5E serve no good purpose other than to slow down gameplay and require constant rules reference, serving the game designer's hubris and need to force players into a book rather than into a live, immersive world and real-time decision loop. This is one of the flaws of Dungeon Crawl Classics; the game needs the core book's charts as training wheels to create an authentic old-school experience.

I love DCC, and the charts are the only way to communicate to today's players "what it all was about" back in the day. But for those of us who were there, we don't need the charts and find them limiting on our imaginations, which go far beyond what can be printed in these books.

5E is a different type of game. It is designed for competitive play and those who need rules to manage the insecurity of playing with complete strangers. Honestly, Pathfinder 2 does a better job providing rules frameworks for social play, and 5E is sort of a middling game that tries to be everything to everyone.

5E requires you to flip through the book for every action attempted, forcing you to check action types, see if different things combo, and taking you out of the game world and putting you in the rules world on almost every turn of play. Your mind is 10% in the dungeon and 90% living in a book outside the game. You could make the argument that 5E is not a role-playing game, but a 1970s wargame with roleplay elements. 5E is closer to Advanced Squad Leader than it is to Dungeons & Dragons.

In C&C? My character sheet is in front of me. A list of class abilities and spells is there for me to consider. I have my equipment and weapons. My ability scores are ready to use. That's it. I am "on the metal" with my decision tree. I do not need to open the book or check action types to figure out my next turn or plan of attack. The game doesn't have "infinite cantrips," so spells are rare and powerful.

What I have on my character sheet is it. No rulebook is going to save me or define my actions on a turn.

What I see is what I have.

Otherwise, I am immersed in the world and must pay attention.

If my druid casts entangling vegetation on a group of goblins, I may just rule as a C&C referee (Castle Keeper) that the encounter ends if the druid flees, and just "give them that." Single-use spells should be ruled more powerful and narratively impactful. That spell is once per day; give the incantation its due.

Spells in C&C and old-school games are magic.

In 5E? I need to sit there and make rolls to escape every turn, follow the rules to the letter, and play this out to "maximum rules coverage." I could make that old-school ruling in 5E, but by the letter of the rules, the game defaults to rules-based simulation more than to storytelling. Spells you can get back on a short rest, or fire off on every turn? Really, they don't mean as much anymore and have far less impact on the narrative.

Spells in 5E are powers.

Note the subtle difference there, as it means a lot.

The legacy of Wizards of the Coast and the influence of Magic: The Gathering on the D&D's design is clear. The experience is less a role-playing game and more one that relies heavily on rules and tournament-style play. Modern D&D is rules over immersion.

C&C is a game that tells you, get your nose out of the book, stop endlessly trying to cheat the game's rules, stay engaged, stay immersed in the world, and keep making in-character choices. Shadowdark is very similar, and this is why that game does so well. Players stay engaged and in character. Nobody is stuck in a book, finding a rule or chart. The referee and players can use their imaginations to create "the old school flavor and immersion." If something old-school and strange happens, it will be because of someone's imagination, the referee saying "that's cool, allowed," and not a random chart result.

The more a game expects you to stick your nose in a book, the less fun it is.

But some players will say, "But I like the extra rules!" To which I will say, "I don't care." C&C is rules-light, but it has enough rules to cover everything that it doesn't feel like a traditional rules-light game. Every rule, skill roll, saving throw, class ability, and situation is covered by the game's fallback system, the SIEGE Engine. It all comes back to your ability scores, making them matter again.

With the Player's Guide 2 drop, the book is sort of worthless to me until I have this on the Shard Tabletop, "so I can start using it." This is the world you get stuck in with 5E. A book isn't "real" unless you own a digital copy somewhere to use on a paid character designer. And you are forced to buy it twice. It is nice to read ahead and plan a few builds, but the book's arrival in PDF form is a non-event beyond reading material. I am so dependent on Shard that until I can "pay for it again there," the book is meaningless.

With 5E, it is always, "Did you pay for it twice?" No? Well, then, you can't use it.

We are so used to the rip-off that we can't see it anymore.

I like 5E, but the forced computerized character sheets are terrible. The 5E business model is exploitative and sucks, and it approaches insurance company levels of terrible. ToV is the best 5E clone out there, but still, there are moments when I wonder why I even bother. It is a good game, but the hobby is in a sad state. Still, I will likely buy this again on Shard, since I support them.

With C&C? No character designer needed. I can go back to my OGL books, pull in classes there, and use them, or combine them in multiclass builds. All my old books are perfectly usable, even with Reforged. People without Reforged can play in the same game; it is just a handful of name changes, and all the old books are 100% compatible. Reforged did a better job "cleaning the game" than Pathfinder 2 did with the Remaster, where parts of the world felt like they were lobotomized and entire races removed from the world.

Having the ToV Player's Guide 2 PDF is nice, but I really don't "have" it until I pay again somewhere. It is another "book of rules" which will slow down the game. The options are great, but the design is still inferior to a game designed to play "reference-free." Where 5E is the Blackberry with the physical keyboard and clunky design, C&C is still the iPhone with a minimalist design but high ease of use.

With C&C, all I need to do is own a book to use it.

Mail Room: Player's Guide 2 (ToV)

The Player's Guide 2 was released today for backers, and I am enjoying this. More soon.

Off the Shelf: Tales of the Valiant

One of the things that I love about Tales of the Valiant is that it is a drama-free version of the fifth edition. I can play with all my fifth edition books and never need a physical copy of either the 2014 or 2024 Dungeons & Dragons. I own my PDFs, and I do not need to sign up for a website to have an electronic copy at hand or on my phone. It makes it easy to support the 10-year legacy of great products for the 2014 D&D.

Everything works. People complained that the game offered nothing new, but there are plenty of balance improvements and other tweaks to the system that significantly improve the quality of life. The game is designed to be easy to teach and learn. All the exploits are fixed. I don't need to patch the game with a later book, as all the fixes are in the player's guide and ready to use.

Inspiration or luck? Whatever you want to use, plenty of people prefer the luck system to the inspiration system. You could use both if you wished, but luck is enough. I like the luck system in Tales of the Valiant because it does not require a game master to grant inspiration. A player can manage the system on their own, occasionally receiving bonus luck points from the game master if they want. This speeds up play by giving players a trackable resource without gaming the inspiration system or exploiting role-playing for mechanical gain. One of the most annoying things about 5E is when players constantly try to take advantage of the inspiration system to gain an unfair advantage.

I have a library of my best-of-the-best fifth edition books on my shelves, and Tales of the Valiant runs everything without me needing a single book from Wizards of the Coast. It's zero drama, and I don't get constantly sucked into D&D YouTube, watching the latest drama videos posted by that clickbait crowd over there. I understand that clicks pay the bills, but at one point, I just get so tired of it all, watching the outrage of what the company did this time, and I stop caring altogether. I don't have any time, energy, or emotion left to spend on the stupid things a Wall Street company does.

I want to play a game that works without drama.

Tales of the Valiant also does not insult old-school players. Orcs, goblins, hobgoblins, gnolls, and all the other classic humanoid monster creatures are in the Monster Vault. They were removed from D&D due to fake Twitter outrage by people who likely don't play the game. I want the real world removed from my games as much as possible, and I enter my fantasy world to enjoy the adventures there.

Being reminded of current-day social strife is the last thing I want when I'm playing my fantasy game.

We left a silly few years of history, and we are living with the damage. I want a game that is made for the fans. Tales of the Valiant does not go out of its way to anger people. There are some admittedly progressive nods in ToV, and I understand and support them. But the designers realize that people love how the game was, and that experience should be preserved and supported.

Tales of the Valiant feels like playing Windows games on Linux while sidestepping Microsoft and our AI overlords. I can support the game companies I like, protect my privacy and freedom, not hand money to Microsoft as they sell my personal data, and own my hardware all at once. With Wizards and D&D Beyond, the AI is coming, and I want to own my PDFs, characters, campaigns, and ideas without having them fed to the digital beast.

I can create ToV characters on the Shard Tabletop and even print character sheets. Everything D&D does, I can do here, and I can own my digital copies. Not changing the game too much from 2014 D&D is a feature, not a problem. If you want a completely different game, play Shadowdark, Draw Steel, Dragonbane, or Daggerheart. If you wish to play something slightly different, play Level Up A5E.

Now, I have a choice when playing 5E.

I am making an informed and ethical one.

This is not just about anger, either. I enjoy the design of Tales the Valiant far more than I do either 2014 or 2024 Dungeons & Dragons. Everything that I like about the fifth edition is here, cleaned up, ready to go, and fun. Everything on my shelves works without change. All of the dumb exploits are fixed, which I understand makes some people angry, but I don't like having to sit there and ban exploits. All the money I spent on books for the fifth edition can be used and enjoyed, and I can get my money back without having them sit in my garage and storage crates. 

There isn't too much wrong with the fifth edition; my biggest complaint is that characters are too invincible and heal too quickly. This is easily fixed with a few mods. I can tune this game to run exactly like an OSR game with just a few minor changes. The game can be just as deadly as I would like it to be with just a handful of tweaks and adjustments. I can enjoy the in-depth character builds and the progression without having to abandon the game and feel I wasted my money on my entire fifth edition library.

I like Tales the Valiant and keep it on my shelves. The money I have spent on the fifth edition will not be wasted, and I will get the gameplay I bought.

Old School Games Never Let You Down

I bought a few D&D adventures a while back, and I discovered that the resale prices are about $3-4 per book, just like the 2014 edition, but they are now considered "out of date." I'm unable to obtain PDFs for them, as it's policy and walled garden content. I will probably end up playing most of these with Tales of the Valiant, since I have given up on D&D as a system, and ToV has good 2014 compatibility.

What good are these books if I don't own my PDFs?

Tales of the Valiant will be the system I will still be able to play all these with when D&D 6E comes out in a few years. All these books will be "previous edition" someday, and in a way, they already are. It feels strange to call ToV an "old school game" - but one of the most essential traits of an old-school game is to maintain compatibility with previous edition adventures, and what does that sound like? That sounds like ToV. With D&D moving on, ToV is now in the OSR. This feels so wrong, but it is true, and in a few years, it will be even more so.

As D&D moves on and abandons its history, we will see rewrites for every classic adventure and module, even classics like the Keep on the Borderlands, which does not need a rewrite. We are being told we need to buy the same thing repeatedly. Tyranny of Dragons proves we can have "new stuff," and we don't need endless nostalgia bait and companies forcing us to buy the same thing repeatedly because they feel they can pull at our heartstrings.

I'd love to see a new team create something like The Tomb of Horrors. Classics. All-time great adventures. These are beloved works of fiction and do not need cigarette pack warnings. Throwing these into compilations and cheaply converting them to 5E is disrespectful. Goodman Games did it the best by expanding and celebrating them, while printing the originals in their entirety to preserve them.

I doubt the current team at Wizards has the skill to create a classic like the Tomb of Horrors. I highly doubt we will see the innovative and original adventures our hobby needs to thrive and survive.

My problems are, 5E conversions have a "shelf life" on them, without ToV. The originals? I can still play them with any OSR game of my choosing, such as Basic Fantasy, Old School Essentials, Swords & Wizardry, Adventures Dark and Deep, Castles & Crusades, and even Shadowdark.

All my OSR adventures still work fine! These can be played with any OSR game. They hold their value exceptionally well and can be played with anything I own. They are all "new stuff" created by talented people, and I am seeing new adventures and thrills, rather than retreads and conversions. I pulled these out of storage the other day, and guess what? All of them still work flawlessly.

Lovely to see you again, old friends.

And I don't need to depend on online character sheets to create a character, which is a strike against ToV and all of 5E. That dependency on online character sheets will be ToV's downfall when those eventually go away and become unsupported. With old-school games, I don't need any of that online garbage. Just some dice, pencils, and paper.

The world could end, and I will still be over here playing my OSR games.

D&D players will be wandering around like the hordes in The Walking Dead, moaning about their phone's 5G bars, and looking for an Internet connection. They will be cut off from their digital copies and character sheets, and I will still have mine. But you can never replace books. Books survive wars, plagues, and famines. Print is eternal.

Full-game 5E is flawed, and since it relies too much on online support, it will die. As sites close down, publishers pull their character sheet tools, VTTs get bought out and go belly-up, we will see huge groups of people lose access to their games and content. This also means Tales of the Valiant is flawed, and can't be truly considered an old-school game. Yes, you can run a character sheet by hand, but 5E was not designed to support that, and it was built to create add-on support sales. ToV is fun and I support it, but in a bittersweet way since I know the game has inherited a fatal flaw.

All my old school games?

As long as I have a hand, a pencil, and paper, I can play them.

Even the ones in science fiction, cyberpunk, post-apocalyptic, and other genres are all cross-compatible. Do I need a quick space alien mutant monster? One where several lifeforms were merged together by a space virus? The chimera from Old School Essentials (or any other old-school bestiary) looks nasty, so I'll use it as-is, just reskinning the looks, but the stats all work perfectly fine for Stars Without Number. Giant space bugs? Hey, that ankheg from OSE looks cool as a giant hive insect. Some ravenous space slime? A black pudding from the same book works well, and is only hurt by fire, so break out the flame units.

Do I need those for a post-apocalyptic game? I have the rules, and all my monsters still work. That chimera is just as frightening here, and just as deadly, and it doesn't need a stat block a page long to do it, either. This mutant could be roaming a long-abandoned research facility, terrorizing its main corridors. OSR monster stat blocks are wonderfully brief and concise, and like alignment, say a lot with very little text. This is another reason to love an OSR game over 5E.

Cyberpunk game? I have that covered, too. All those monsters and adventures still work. That chimera is something that escaped from a megacorporation's bio-research labs and is now crawling around the sewers, subway lines, and drainage tunnels of the city, causing havoc. It all works together, giving me instant access to adventure and on-demand content at my fingertips.

Fantasy game? I have dozens of old-school fantasy games that all work amazingly well. I have not even mentioned Worlds Without Number, ACKS II, AD&D (1e or 2e), For Gold & Glory, or Dungeon Crawl Classics in this discussion yet, but they are all compatible. That chimera? It is a chimera here. Everything still works together, and I have my choice of systems to play with.

All my old-school games work together in a way none others do. This puts the current crop of narrative and "post-5E" games to shame. All those games will let you down someday. Daggerheart, Cosmere, MCDM RPG, ToV, and all these "post D&D games" have a lot to prove. None of them works with anything I have, and they are asking me to "buy more."

Any OSR adventure I buy will be playable from now until the end of time.

Any OSR game I have will work with any of these adventures.

Old school games will never let you down.

D&D Without Alignment is Pointless

The newer editions of 5E are becoming increasingly difficult to like. Level Up A5E, Tales of the Valiant, and a game I won't play, D&D 2024, all remove alignment. Level Up A5E does the most creative thing, adding a destiny system, but it feels too narrow of a tool instead of alignment, which says so much while using so few words. ToV and D&D 2024 eradicate alignment.

What is the point of these games again?

Alignment held together the world models, the fight between good and evil, the maps of the worlds, the beliefs of the peoples, the behaviors of the monsters, and the entire story of the game. Why adventure? Why does the world work in the way it does? Why do demons exist? Are the undead not evil? Are angels not good?

Every campaign setting we love is built off the alignment system. You can't just pull that all out and expect people to be able to tell the same stories there. These worlds don't exist to mirror the current day, and every classic adventure breaks if the concept of good and evil do not exist. The Temple of Elemental Evil becomes "The Temple of the Elemental Perspective." The Keep on the Borderlands is populated by humanoid monsters, and those are no longer monsters listed in the Monster Manual.

Now, I play a few games without an alignment system and love them, such as GURPS. What is the difference? In GURPS, you are defined by your actions, and your disadvantages drive behavior. Why shouldn't D&D be any different?

D&D should be different. This is why we love this game in particular. It reflects a broader conflict in the universe between the forces of good and the forces of evil. This conflict is built into our DNA, and to deny it is to worship nihilism and death. D&D is the story of the battle between good and evil.

Remove alignment, and the game is nothing.

Well, what about GURPS? Is that nothing? In a way, GURPS always piggybacked on the concept of alignment from D&D and inherited those concepts. GURPS Dungeon Fantasy goes this far in its glossary:

"Devil, The: Godlike boss of all Evil. Wants your soul." - GURPS, Dungeon Fantasy, Adventurers, page 4.

That is a remarkably bold statement, and it draws upon a wealth of biblical lore that underlies much of fantasy. This is the core of the fight between good and evil, and it boils everything down into something anyone can understand. Remove evil, and your game becomes far less understandable and relatable.

Dungeon Fantasy goes even further: 

"Elder Thing: Any entity that exists outside time, space, and standard concepts of Good and Evil. Causes madness."

"squid: Euphemism for Elder Things. Squid cults (foolishly) worship such entities."

"monster: Any being that tries to slaughter adventurers right back."

- GURPS, Dungeon Fantasy, Adventurers, page 4.

There is worldbuilding going on here that mirrors the old AD&D setup, and it is clear what constitutes a monster. There is no lack of clarity here, either. Evil is evil, and the creatures beyond space and time exist in a realm of madness nobody with a human mind can understand or even comprehend. I love the theory that Elder Things are outside the realm of evil, and are just wickedly cruel and heartless beings, which does make them evil in a sense, but it gives them something more than just an alignment tacked on there.

This modern design theory of putting "feelings and emotions" on everything, even Elder Chthonic Gods sitting around talking like people in a coffee shop, is just lame, stupid, and childish writing. It isn't relatable; it's just dumb, and it shows what a waste college has been for these writers, who have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars learning nothing. The funny quip and the writing for a Tweet have surpassed deep thought, lasting emotion, and reflection. I'm not angry; I just feel sad that a generation grew up this way.

Educate yourselves. The classics already solved all the problems we have today. Read poetry if you need to find the meaning of life. All the secrets of life were discovered long ago, and they are in books hundreds of years old.

You will find no mental nutrition in the works financed by Wall Street corporatists.

It is a vapid, soulless, empty and meaningless life designed to keep you consuming the escapist opiate.

GURPS simulates and inherits so much from other games that if you were using GURPS to simulate a D&D world, you would just "bring in alignment" and have it in your game, either the 3-axis Original D&D or the 9-axis AD&D, whatever you want. Just because GURPS does not have alignment does not mean it is not a part of the game, and this is a key concept to understanding how GURPS works.

And Tales of the Valiant, you are in this camp, too. I want Open 5E to succeed, but why did you have to listen to them? I can port in alignment here, too, but I would have liked to see that theme of the battle between good and evil upheld in one of the modern Open 5E games. Even the title of your game assumes heroism and valiance. Why couldn't we have something more than a nebulous "default hero assumption?"

I have another game on my most-played shelves that sits there and screams fun at me. The concept of good versus evil is built into this game's DNA, woven directly into its spell system, highlighted in its classes, and reflected in the elder beings you deal with. This is Dungeon Crawl Classics. There is no "ripping out the battle of good and evil" here, since the entire game was written to put that battle at the center of everything - from those you deal with, to the magic you cast, to the heroes you are destined to be (or die as).

I love the OSR types who criticize this game for the company trying to market DCC to a modern audience. How else will the contemporary audience learn about fantasy gaming, and how it reflects the battle between good and evil? They sure aren't getting it in college. Let them find it through gaming.

Welcome to what we already knew; we are happy to have you finally join the fight.

The Bible tells us souls can be redeemed and saved. All of them, not just the few that play the games we like. In this eternal battle between good and evil, we must reflect on our values and continually invite people into the light. Pride is a sin that many in the OSR succumb to, and we should strive to be better people and more inviting. Without the Bible and, by extension, the classic fantasy stories that retold these tales, roleplaying games would not exist.

This is not a fight about worldviews, gaming purism, modern language, or sides; it is a battle for control of human truths. Some of those are muddled by gaming fads and wrapped up in this battle, but only one "rulebook" stands as the core truth of life. My Bible sits on my gaming bookshelves. It is a core book. It will also dispel any argument made against it. It is the single best magic item I have in my home.

D&D's loss of the battle between good and evil will be the inscription on its headstone.

I love Tales of the Valiant, and while it can coexist with DCC, the fact is that DCC is the better game, with a stronger heart and rock-solid core ethos. ToV gave up the moral fight to be with the cool kids crowd, but that will not last since there is nothing brave about a fleeting fad. You can deal with evil in DCC to gain power, but you will deeply regret it. This is a choice the game presents to you, and it serves as a valuable lesson. Where else will new gamers learn this?

Not in D&D. Not in ToV. Not in any of these new games that cowardly pander to social media.

DCC and the OSR will kill Open 5E for me if this trend continues.

Just Play...

I go on YouTube and see all this content farming, and a few say, "What happened to Tales of the Valiant?" They moan on and on, and farm clicks off of painting it one way or the other.

It is here.

Just play it.

I don't need any other reasons than that it is a better-designed 5E and does not come from Wizards.

There is another reason that hides under the surface. Stale product identity has saturated D&D, and this huge Planescape-era framework hangs over them and their creators like a wet towel. They want to do what every creative company does and "reimagine it all," and you have another side trying to shoehorn in Magic: The Gathering lore. It feels like a huge mess and a pile of decades of legacy products. Everything Wizards does will be compared to TSR and Gary. They will never live up to impossible expectations.

I loved Greyhawk and the Forgotten Realms.

Decades ago.

Like a classic rock song I have heard over and over, those wear a little thin, and I want to create new worlds again. Yes, I love all that, the Tomb of Horrors and all the classic adventures. I even love the 4E setting. But D&D has this massive scaffolding of villains, planes, worlds, settings, personalities, special named wizards, NPCs, video games, and tons of other stuff they need to work with to deliver anything. As a DM, I need to be current on the lore and have that all in my mind.

Tales of the Valiant has no Wizards IP.

It is a clean, fresh start.

They go back to the DMG-era "here is a list of historical gods you can use," and the entire three-book game feels like a throwback to classic AD&D. This is a clean-room 5E with no nostalgia, reimagined things to make you angry, reverence to a cartoon, lore you need to keep in mind, NPCs you have to know, settings you have to take into account given the planar framework, lists of product-identity gods, lists of demons and devils longer than a book on Satanism, and all this other stuff that bloats and clutters what should be a game about your imagination and ideas.

That is precisely what I want. I don't want to be sold on the TSR-verse again or Wizard's 3E, 4E, 5E, and 5.5E reimagining of ground that better writers have already tread. The last D&D setting Wizards made that was original and not TSR was Eberron. That was a fantastic setting, a precursor to Paizo's OG 1e Golarion (pre-retcons and sanitizing), and I was sad to see it abandoned.

Eberron also broke with the past, a more generic world where the gods of Greyhawk and the Realms did not fit in. It used all the pieces, but the legacy product IP did not feel at home. I did not see the classic D&D bad guys fitting in all that well. I suspect the lack of nostalgia and dependence on copyrighted IP killed it. Dark Sun was the same way, though Dark Sun had a ton of TSR IP to farm and is a stronger setting for Wall Street to nostalgia mine.

ToV doesn't even try to cover the Midgard gods. The game isn't trying to sell you on anything but itself, and being a blank canvas for your imagination to create a world and story upon. The monsters are all wonderfully generic and setting-agnostic. The game gives you a huge box of toys, and dares you to build a world out of them. You do not have to worry about legacy settings, planes, places, people, games, or anything else. You are not being resold the beholder or mind flayer as the villain again, because it is better to use copyrighted stuff instead of a generic monster as a bad guy.

Your world is yours.

Your planar structure is yours.

You do not have to worry about decades of legacy content.

This is beautiful.

2024 D&D is full of fluff and bloat. The books are not cross-referenced, and there is too much fluff art. They are more collectors' items than gamebooks. ToV is a tighter game, with room for my ideas instead of someone else's or trying to live up to a past that the current writers will never live up to.

At that point, I gave up, kept what I loved about the past, and created my own place using those as inspiration. I used a game that gave me the room I needed to create my story instead of forcing me to tell someone else's.

Tales of the Valiant, Player's Guide 2: Final Day!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/deepmagic/players-guide-2-new-power-for-5e-and-tov-players/description

It is the last day to get the Player's Guide 2 for Tales of the Valiant. This does not ship until January 2026, so if you want early access, jump in now or find yourself waiting!

There has been a notable upswing in support over the past day, so I hope they can reach the $250,000 stretch goal. With over 3,000 backers, this is also a strong indicator of support for the system, particularly among those seeking Open 5E games as they try Daggerheart and transition to a longer-term support version of 5E.

The link is on the sidebar!

Tales of the Valiant is a Reset

Many of my third-party 5E books exist to address issues with the original D&D 5E edition. We have "fix-it" ranger and monk subclasses everywhere; they are even in Tasha's. We apologize, but please either pay us to fix it or pay someone else to do so. We promise we won't do this again! Not until we remove humanoid monsters from the 2024 Monster Manual, and, oh, oops! Did we do it again? I am sure a third-party Kickstarter will be along shortly, and you can pay seventy dollars to fix our omissions.

I have shelves full of books that the cottage industry of third parties makes to fix Wizards' mistakes.

But I am finding a cleaner, more focused game is more fun. As a result, I am putting many of my third-party 5E books away and keeping only my Kobold Press and Tales of the Valiant books as my supported system. ToV gets better the less junk you pile on it. I like additional subclasses, but not every one in every book is a great fit. Many of them are random junk.

I look forward to the Player's Guide 2 and the rest of the game's curated subclasses. We have the core selection in the base books, but these are the expanded roles that many feel the game is missing. With PG2, we will have the complete game we expected at release. That Kickstarter wraps in a few days, so if you are interested, this is a good time to jump in and support Open 5E. 

ToV is my reset game for 5E. There are plenty of other new systems coming out, and even Shadowdark, but only a few games directly replace 5E for me and feel like the clean reset the game needs after 10 years of expansions and patching. 

I have seen a character designer fully decked out with 2014 character options in 2014 D&D, and it is a mess few can navigate. There are so many options in there, the few players I put that character designer in front of quit rather than design a character. I thought I was giving them options! They took one look and bailed on playing D&D. We should have played Shadowdark instead.

The more I cut my 5E library down, the more compelling the game becomes. The more I focus on ToV, the stronger the game gets. My A5E and 2014 D&D books are in storage, and I don't even care about "losing the monsters" because they are 2014 versions and weaker, and I am tired of the Wizards product identity. I want to explore new lands and battle new monsters.

Books with extra monsters? Unless they are Kobold Press' "extra hot" versions of 5E foes, they will be weak, and those need to be put away. This really simplifies everything.

Even random campaign settings are finding a spot, or being put away, so I can focus on just the one I want to run. I don't need everything; I just need the best of one thing.

Mail Room: Labyrinth Hardcovers

I got my two Labyrinth hardcovers today, the World Book and the Adventure Book, along with the early backer coin, which is very lovely. I like the Tales of the Valiant universe setup; it is one reality, one universe, one place, and it is connected by pathways "between space and time" called the Labyrinth.

There are no planes. There is no plane walking. There is no "Prime Material Plane" with infinite universes.

Where the gods live is a realm beyond anyone's ability to get there, and it keeps players from hunting and killing gods and elder demons. They can project a form into this world, which may take hundreds of years to reform, but you aren't killing them permanently.

Thank you for a sane universe setup, Kobold Press. Planar campaigns have ruined my campaigns for over 40 years, and it is way past time this was put to a stop. Planar campaigns killed D&D 4E for us, as every one of the iconic worlds, including the forever utterly destroyed Forgotten Realms that collapsed the entire Underdark and cratered the world, were turned into level 1-10 "MMO starting zones" before the planar adventures started.

Come to think of it, we loved D&D 4E, but what D&D 4E did to the established campaign worlds was to completely destroy them all. The changes were too significant, as the shoehorned-in races into the worlds that never belonged there, because the game did not want to mess with the "MMO character creation" of the core books. They advanced the plots through terrible retcons and world-spanning changes for the sake of the "rule of cool."

Every world was destroyed by Eberron's design sensibilities. I loved Eberron, but only there, not everywhere.

Kobold Press and Tales of the Valiant get it right. You get one universe to play in, as many campaign settings as you can imagine, but only one universe with no planes. Where you are right now is important, and it means something. You can't just "colonize the planes" as if it were some place with infinite land and resources, building utopias "just because" and seemingly having infinite resources to support city-sized populations "because of magic."

I hate this notion that magic is free to use, without an ultimate cost or price. It is "running up the National Mana Debt" clock, getting infinite free resources, food, goods, and anything else you want, "just because I want it." I love a yin-and-yang to magic; what you get is what you must pay. Sustain a population on magic? Prepare to have them start to change and mutate after a few generations, as those chickens come home to roost.

Nothing is free. Farm the land and live a sustainable existence, just like how this world works, and you will be safe. Live off of magic, and that karma debt keeps piling up every time you get free stuff. Even in Tales of the Valiant, this will be a theme for me. On the small scale, you will be fine. Try to live off magic on a civilizational scale, and you are asking for trouble, like, on a Pompeii or City of Sodom level of trouble.

Just because one character can do it does not mean magic is the enabler of free everything in a society. If it scales to industrial levels, it isn't magic. Yes, part of this is Eberron's problem as well, and it sort of started the "free civilizational magic" thing. Looking back, Eberron had its flaws.

This is why Dungeon Crawl Classics is the best magic system in gaming. You will eventually pay a price for everything. Even divine magic comes with a cost.

The Labyrinth books are cool, and they are an excellent framework to stitch together campaign worlds and settings without needing to drag Heaven, Hell, the gods, all the demons, elemental planes, a Great Wheel, various neutral places nobody cares about, spoke-like structures that don't really have a concept in reality, an axial hub that stretches the metaphor, cities with billions of people living there like this is a usual place, and all this planar baggage we need to go through just to go visit another world.

We even get more character options here, which is always welcome and tides us over until the Player's Guide 2, which is in its final days as a Kickstarter, and please go support that to keep Open 5E alive and well.

Highly recommended.

Mail Room: Labyrinth Worldbook Hardcover

 

I have a shipping notification for the hardcover of the Labyrinth Worldbook. This should be here shortly.

Kobold Press is launching its core book Kickstarter projects this year and has all the momentum. 

Life is good.

Off the Shelf: The Strange

This game, I never expected to pull from storage, but the Tales of the Valiant universe model of the Labyrinth is eerily similar to the infinite, connected worlds concept they present here. The Strange is a strange game, where you can play someone from Earth, an alien, or someone in a fictional universe who "wakes up" and realizes their whole life has been this strange simulation, and things are not really as they seem. You can visit or be any character from any game, movie, TV show, book, or any other product of imagination.

The game is truly "out there" in terms of its scope and the odd, between-the-cracks, strange universe of aliens that inhabit these realms and the forces present in the setting.

The Labyrinth is like that in structure, minus the aliens and between parts - this is just the connected spaces and pathways. But the concept of strange, interconnected, vastly different, and sometimes worlds from fiction are the same. Sometimes these are entire game worlds from other games, such as a D&D world or Pathfinder's Golarion. They will all follow the "home system" of Tales of the Valiant (or 5E), but the concept of interconnected settings through a strange and shifting system of pathways is the same.

Even the fact that worlds can be dreamed into existence is the same, though with the Strange, there is usually a world age involved where they get larger over time (or not). In the Labyrinth, worlds can be destroyed, appear, disappear at will, or stay around forever. They can be of any size. They can just contain a favorite adventure. The inhabitants of these places typically don't know they are in some sort of interconnected world.

Where the Strange comes in is that they have a fantastic system for designing interconnected worlds, worlds from fiction, and other worlds that follow all sorts of different rules. In some worlds, magic may not work normally, or at all. Some worlds have mad science. Some worlds have psionics. Some worlds exist with strange physics, or a set of rules that do not let modern devices work at all. 

Recursions (this is what they call worlds) can have special traits, or even grant foci (special powers) to everyone inside the world, such as a world that grants superpowers. You could have a world where reality gives everyone magic spells and powers.

If you get deep into the Labyrinth and its worlds, picking up a copy of The Strange as a companion book to use for creating worlds is a great idea.

The Strange uses the Cypher System as its resolution engine, and everything is abstracted and given one number as its "power level" - like you may say a monster is Power 5 (but it defends on a 6 and attacks on a 4), and the system figures the rest out. So the system can model longswords and laser rifles just as easily as it does orcs and walking sci-fi battle walkers. In 5E, you will need to create monsters with the ToV system, and then approximate strange weapons and technological items.

The Cypher System is truly an elegant and cool system that can do anything, but with a heavy layer of abstraction. 5E is 5E, very specific and with special case rules everywhere, and you're buying books to fill those gaps. In Cypher System, you can just wing everything and have it work out fine. A heavy laser cannon is a heavy weapon that knocks 2 points of defense off its target if it does not have a "heavy armor" trait. I made all that up, but it works just fine in the game.

The Cypher System is one of those "desert island games" that can entertain you endlessly.

In the Strange, you may step into a world or reality, and it alters your powers and appearance to match what the world is. Your party could be dressed as fantasy heroes in a Medieval world in one reality, step into another, and then become gangsters, private eyes, and gun molls in the 1920s. Your wizard's magic would be converted into powers that match reality, such as those of a mad scientist (if the world supports that).

I wish this game sold better and was more well-known; it is quite the mind-altering trip to play and very fun if your game master is deeply into pop culture.

But using The Strange as an assistant to create worlds and create ideas for the Labyrinth is a great idea. It gets you thinking about what special rules and laws of physics each world has, outside of the standard ToV and 5E rules, and a world based on a science fiction epic or sitcom will have different physics and rules, where some things can and cannot happen in those worlds.

Now, the concepts of creating "world attributes, traits, and foci" in Tales of the Valiant are outside the system, as the game's "reality model" is "everyone acts like a 5E character and the 5E rules are the rules of everywhere in the Labyrinth." If you are a level 14 rogue, you will be one in any world in the Labyrinth, and nothing will touch your powers that much. The base ToV rules will be the same everywhere, unless GM Fiat takes over.

In The Strange, these worlds can change you, introduce special rules, limit magic, give you powers, alter your powers into new forms, or mess with physics. Mitch Buchanan can meet Michael Knight. You can stumble into Alice in Wonderland, and things work in strange ways there. You can visit a world filled with robot life only on a dying world, and everyone in the party becomes robots that are seen to live in that world. You can stumble into GTA 5. You could be playing heroes in the Forgotten Realms. You could find yourself in Conan, Tarzan, or John Carter's Mars. You can care about the interconnected places and plots, or not.

These are cool concepts, worth exploring.

Again, we can do so much more when we abandon the "Wizards' IP" and not limit ourselves to their ideas being superior to yours. Gothic horror is a vast world, encompassing multiple places and being much more diverse, not just Ravenloft.

Break your mind free of the D&D dungeon, and there is so much more out there to do, and games that let you express your imagination much more vividly.