Tales of the Valiant: Tight Design

Guilt-free 5E is a great place to play in. ToV and Level Up A5e are awesome games with differing design philosophies and goals, and I can see myself playing either. Decolonizing my table from any traces of Wall Street influence has made me happier.

The rules are just that - the rules. Not a controversy. There's no threat of monetization or a VTT. There are no endless inane playtest document YouTube videos. There are no AI art blow-ups. People in the company aren't out there saying stupid things. There aren't people making clickbait videos about stock prices or who D&D could be being sold to. We are not wondering where the Spelljammer art originated and how it got approved. Nobody is angry about a classic module being changed. The community around D&D is huge but massively toxic, and the parent company does not help things. I don't need to 'make excuses' about why I am playing a Wizards game.

With Open 5E, my mind is free.

The game is about my world again.

The rules are a neutral space.

The negativity and 'why am I supporting this' feelings are gone.

When I ask myself 'Which games do I want to sell' - part of that involves the question, "If I had one fantasy game and no others, which one would make me the happiest?"

Some of the games ending up on the losing side of that question - at least for me - are shocking. I limit the pool to 3 or 5 games, which is a tricky question to answer. A version of Open 5E is always in that group. Pathfinder 1 and 2 are not. DCC is on the fence, leaning yes. C&C is also on the fence but leaning no. OSE is not in my group. Shadow of the Demon Lord isn't. S&W isn't. Games from Wizards are in my sell boxes, and going out the door, I don't care for them anymore.

I spent some time reading the ToV alpha release and beta documents and trying to forget A5E for a while. If ToV was my game, could I play here and have fun? The answer is always yes.

Like A5E, there is a lot of "nut tightening" in ToV. The balance of the game is essential, which will give us a lot of complaints from the power gamers. The tight rules here and the simple presentation give me that Old School Essentials vibe. It is not the depth of reworking that A5E does to the system, but it is more like straight 5E in the theory of play.

The math and game mechanics design in Kobold Press is solid and much better than the Wizards team. They do great work here and care that all options seem balanced and fun. I am here for stories and adventure, not broken builds and exploits.

This is a reworking of class mechanics and balances for 5E while keeping the game as simple to play and learn as possible. Again, this reminds me of OSE. A5E takes a lot of "mental operating system space" to play, just because of the depth of the changes - ToV does not have that deep of a reworking. That is a huge plus. I would miss the A5E improvements, but...

This blurb from the ToV GM's Guide intrigues me:

Go beyond the basics! Use new Game Master tools to customize your TOV campaign for advanced combat, social, and exploration encounters.

They know there is a demand for advanced rules covering these areas, just like A5E gives us, and they want to deliver their version. They will be optional and plugged into the game, and the phrase on customizing campaigns and "advanced combat, social, and exploration" gives me hope the classic pillars of play will be explored and expanded upon.

ToV will be a solid offering if they keep a strong base 5E compatibility and expand the game modularly. This is what I am looking for in a new version of 5E. With Level Up A5E, they created a compelling modded game that stands independently. ToV is a new "clean room" version of 5E with a robust and compatible base and possible modular expansions.

Both of those are highly appealing.

If ToV embraces a modular approach, this will be highly appealing.

Kobold Press also has many class option books for many backgrounds, class options, and heritages. These convert in quickly, so if you wanted to stay in the Kobold-verse with ToV, your options would be amazing.

That, and Midgard is the next Forgotten Realms. I put Midgard a step above Golarion in quality and detail, offering a lot of variety. ToV feels massively underestimated, like Pathfinder 2 was when it was released. People want more, and they want a lot. If ToV can deliver a classic, simple, expandible game, it will be a massive win for Open 5E.

Part of the problem with launching a new version is the pressure of people wanting more.

What this needs to be is a fresh start in a familiar place.

Kickstarter: Tales of the Valiant Game Master's Guide

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/deepmagic/tales-of-the-valiant-game-masters-guide-5e/

The Tales of the Valiant Game Master's Guide Kickstarter launched today, and it is worth checking out. They are past $150,000 on the first day, which is a great start.

Here is a quote from the FAQ on what is in the book, and the highlights are mine:

What is the difference between the 5E DMG and Tales of the Valiant GMG?

The big-picture goals for Tales of the Valiant Game Master’s Guide are:

1) Provide extensive guidance on organizing and running games, including:

• How to find players

• Dealing with scheduling

• Running games for different personality types

• Creating effective session notes

2) Present expanded rulesets to enrich the elements of the game that your table cares about most:

• The Advanced Combat chapter includes rules for running colossal monsters, creating minion-versions of monsters, staging mass combat scenarios, and using a brutal injury system to track damage.

• The Advanced Exploration chapter includes rules for running exploration as a hex crawl, constructing chase encounters, and playable resource scarcity options for survival-style gameplay.

• The Advanced Social chapter contains rules for an attitude system to combine roleplay with rolling and reputation mechanics to track PC influence with factions.

• Other highlights include rules for sentient magic items, magic-item crafting, firearms, siege weapons, skill challenges, monster harvesting, and MORE!

3) New options for mechanics introduced in the Players Guide and Monster Vault. These plug-and-play options include :

• A huge selection of curses, diseases, hazards, and traps to raise the stakes of your encounters.

• More vehicle stat blocks of every type—including suites of burrowing, submersible, and flying vehicles!

• Expanded lists of poisons and poison-types

• Random treasure tables and random magic item tables to generate killer rewards quickly—all using treasures from the Player’s Guide.

• Random encounter tables for every environment and tier of play—all using creatures from the Monster Vault.

4) An extensive suite of homebrewing tools. These tools provide specific and actionable guidance whether you want to modify existing options quickly or build brand new options from scratch. Best of all, we show you every step of the math we use to build our obsessively engineered monsters!

And quite a lot more. See the sample PDF for a complete table of contents.

Wow, a few thoughts:

• Minions? 4E mechanic, love this.
• Brutal injuries? Advanced wounding and grim & gritty games are possible. Nice.
• Hex crawls plus survival gameplay? Be still my OSR heart.
• Monster harvesting? Very interesting.
• In the GMG preview, they have monster templates to change things up, like undead owlbears.

Looks good! Loving everything I am seeing here, and this is an A5E replacement contender now.

Too Big to Fail?

D&D YouTube is going on and on about people arguing that "5E is D&D" because it is too big compared to the alternatives.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_retailers_of_the_United_States

AOL and MySpace would like to have some of that optimism back, along with the American Mall. Many online news and gaming sites would also love to hear that said about them today. Circuit City, Comp USA, Toys R Us, and many other stores would love to be in that "too big to fail" bucket today. Some of these, like Sears, were thousands of times bigger than Wizards in their golden ages.

I could go on and on with this, but typically, the bigger you are, the more danger you are in of failing and disappearing overnight - because you didn't live up to Wall Street's outrageous expectations. This is not the same as a garage operation; if investors don't see you growing "fast enough," they will shut the company down and liquidate everything.

One or two competitors slowing growth by 10% could doom Wizards. We have already seen competition with games like Shadowdark, Pathfinder 2, MCDM RPG, and Tales of the Valiant. We are likely in the "matter of time" phase as the new options become viable and supported.

A competitor does not have to equal Wizards to threaten it.

Just prove the company is on a downward path with declining interest and slowing growth.

Wizards live in the "Crazyville" of NYC finance and do not have the same mental operating space as a Paizo or Kobold Press. Yes, Wizards could be sold and continue operations, but their world is very different from any of their competitors. A smaller company can weather a few bad years and keep going without drastic changes. A Wall Street company typically can't.

The ship hitting the iceberg always happens in slow motion. Some don't even realize it is happening. Some will deny the impossible.

Many of these companies these days are in a symbiotic toxic relationship with gaming and culture YouTube creators. They rely on outrage and bad news to keep them being talked about and thus are seen as a market leader. The company will use these creators as "anti-marketing" and try to appear as a victim, doing or saying something dumb to get in the news again, and this cycle never ends. We are also entering the age of the paid influencer positive symbiotes that will support the dumb thing versus the negative symbiotes.

Don't fall into that trap or feed the insanity.

Find things you enjoy and insulate yourself from the negativity around them.

And for me, size does not matter, but the heart does. Being a good company that supports its workers and the gaming community matters. No matter what size, we can have principles and stand up for our beliefs. Otherwise, positive social change will never happen.

My version of Open 5E is a fun, happy place where my ideas and game worlds matter more than the junk 5E YouTube spits out for clicks and views. It is a decolonized space immune to the "latest outrage" and Wall Street monetization schemes.

Building an A5E Library, Part 7 (Open 5E)

To appreciate 5E, I had to eliminate all of my Wizards of the Coast books. They sit in my sell boxes, and I have no intention of taking them out before they go out the door (other than to create a packing list for the boxes). Those books fueled my negativity toward the whole system.

That, and nothing I found in them, was good. There were trash classes in the core books. They invented 'tool proficiencies' to patch a broken skill system (a flaw I still feel: tools != skill). Tasha's blew up complexity. Everything had another level of exploits and power-gaming layered on top, likely to sell books. None of it I wanted, nor was it the game I wanted to play.

I deleted a paragraph here. It went over with Wizards last year; everyone knows these things. Repeating all this horrible news just breeds more hate. They made their choices, and I chose to be done with them.

Time to move on.

I could not escape the negativity and stored all my 5E books, which hurt A5E and Kobold Press. YouTube fueled this feeling, and I started unsubscribing from the trash 5E channels specializing in clickbait. Even the endless repetition of the playtest packet information became spam and anger. Likely engineered by marketing to create buzz. I ended up hating 5E.

I did not hate 5E for what it was.

I hated what it had become.

With zero Wizards books, 5E is still a good game. It works. It has a few balance issues. It tends towards too powerful players at high levels and too high survivability, but those can be fixed.

The 5E Hardmode guide is an excellent collection of optional rules that can easily applied to any version of 5E. This book has excellent options for both rests and death saves that turn the game's difficulty up a notch. The book fixes the dark vision problem, adding escape and chase rules to mitigate encounter difficulty. There is also a suggestion of spells that can be removed to increase the challenge of adventures. I could plug these into A5E or ToV and have a game as deadly and challenging as B/X, without changing rule systems.

A few communities have put a fantastic amount of work into creating standalone options, some focused on old-school play, some simple, some the game taken in a new direction, some low magic, some pulp-action, and others as a modern action-movie game.

It is not fair to hate their hard work.

I love Level Up 5E, and I also like Tales of the Valiant. The latter, my final verdict, will come when I have the books, but as a simplified version of 5E, I can see using a B/X style game. I plan on supporting the upcoming Game Master Guide for the game, and I haven't soured on the game like some have.

So I asked myself, could I love the rules and system again if I de-colonized my game? I use that term with a ton of sarcasm, but the hobby has been colonized by greedy tech executives and Wall Street, and you see this in the lock-in strategies many companies use. The over-reliance on computers to create characters. 90% of the books I covered do not have that program data in any online or purchased 5E character creation software or websites, so those products get locked out of the market.

If I do my characters by hand, I have infinite options.

I can use books from other publishers.

There is a diverse and level playing field of creators from every background and income level. Also, players of every income level can play the game when it isn't locked behind a subscription paywall.

Now we are getting walled gardens and books that aren't PDFs locked into those. More colonization efforts to lock in customers and lock out competitors. Yes, it is easy to use, but at what price? I can put all my rules on any device, phone, or tablet and have the PDFs. Even if the store folds and shuts down - I have them. I own them. I am not "renting access." Ownership is freedom and breeds healthy competition.

Free and open rules mean everyone can play.

So, I have my shelves and am still sorting my 5E books. I am saving a few for Tales of the Valiant and will give that game a chance. I discovered the fantastic 5E implementation of Lost Lands and one of my all-time favorite mega-dungeons. Then it hit me: how cool would it be to play through that with 5E characters? I played a little A5E and enjoyed the run. How cool would it be to play that again?

Then, I discovered I loved the 5E system again.

And what I did not like became crystal clear.

Is it sad to toss D&D out? Not really. We get rid of the things we used to love all the time when we outgrow them. 5E is a different game owned by a community that will grow and flourish like the OSR community. People see the OSR, and they don't see Wizards any more. It doesn't even cross their minds. The same will happen with 5E.

We are not at the end of indie 5E.

We are at a point right before the beginning.

Open 5E (O5E) will likely be more significant in ten years than the OSR. Millions of players are ready to create their own things and make that happen. The stigma that 5E is an "easy game" will disappear when people write tabletop games based on 5E they want to see. The demographics of the Open 5E movement will go over the entire OSR community like a tidal wave.

The size and scope of what we have yet to see will likely shock many. The OSR was a trial balloon.

None of it will be Wizards, either. Even if 2024 is popular, it will only delay the inevitable by a year or two. The genie is out of the bottle. The desire for more and "my own version" will become too great for the community to ignore.

Open 5E is the future and the next OSR.

Tales of the Valiant Redux

I am warming up to the game as we get closer to this Tales of the Valliant's release.

I had felt a slight sense of regret, having Level Up A5E already as my decolonized 5E of choice, but I see a place for ToV in the "new 5E" games. ToV will be the "basic 5E" - the easy to get into and play one. I felt a pang of regret shortly after the project hit its target, with the criticism that it was "just another 5E" biting a little hard. That hurt, and those words made me feel a little regret.

The world needs a better presented and easy-to-follow 5E like the OSR needs B/X.

If Level Up A5E is my Labyrinth Lord, ToV is my Old School Essentials.

Do I "feel bad" that OSE doesn't have some things that LL has? Do I "not play it?" No, and no. ToV is shaping up to be a better laid-out and organized game compared to even the Wizards books. There is a lot more care and effort put into this game. Like A5E, I bet the math and exploits are getting fixed.

5E, without Wizards, is still a good game. The rules system didn't fire people before the holidays, attack the hobby, say stupid stuff weekly, or try to pull the OGL. 5E didn't create Tasha's or any of the power gaming expansions. And we did not have to be here. But we are.

So let's move forward.

The project has been delayed until May since the planned 352-page books have expanded to 384 pages, so they need the time to proofread and beta test. That is another 64 pages of the game, which is very welcome. I love how they are expanding the books for no extra cost, and it is a huge thank you to the community. This generosity will go a long way.

They announced a DM's Guide with optional rules supporting the pillars of play (among other optional rules). I look forward to seeing what they come up with. The complete game plus DMG will clock in at nearly 1,000 pages. This is a serious game, well on its way to being the Pathfinder 1e to the 2024 book's 4E, and a solid alternative - familiar but improved in many ways.

The thing is, 5E is amazingly easy to house rule. A more straightforward base game like ToV will better fit modified 5E games than a heavily customized version of 5E like Level Up A5E. I can get some of what A5E has by doubling up the background picks. Some other stuff, like A5E's martial options - are a wait-and-see. Exploration and social encounters are also a wait-and-see for the DM's Guide.

But the Old School Essentials comparison for ToV is apt here. This is shaping up to be a very easy-to-learn game. The page layouts and art are equal to any game on the market, except for Free League. The rules are not so heavily modded you need to re-learn them completely.

Could this replace A5E for me?

We will know in May.

And the DM's Guide will play a massive part in that with the options they present.

Building an A5E Library, Part 6

As I go through shelves of books and box up the ones I am selling, I write these little articles to help work through them. Sometimes, I must give a game or book another shot by writing them. This was true for Amazing Adventures 5E and the Arcanis Campaign Setting for 5E.

I had these two books in a sell box, ready to make a packing list and get a quote to get a mailing label and send away. For a few books, I referenced them, and they are going out the door. If it is from Wizards, it is gone, and I am not dealing with that negativity in my gaming life again. The 2014 D&D books have too much baggage. Today's game differs from the game back then, and those books represent an out-of-touch company.

I could have fun with these two books. They have some great ideas in them. They have a second chance at my table. Do they work well with a community-focused version of 5E? Can they be used to de-colonize my game from Wall Street negativity? Yes, they can. The third-party 5E community should no longer be called "third party" - because they are the party now. They are primary providers of 5E games. Even the language and even the playing field.

Whenever a negative Wizards story emerges, I say, "They don't make my game. I do not support that. The causes I support, free expression and workers' rights, I am not hurting a community by the game I choose. My conscience is clear."

And this series proves there is a lot of great primary-provider 5E stuff to support. We have quite a surprise to discuss today regarding campaigns on which to base your indie 5E game.

Oh, apologies to all my old-school games for this one. I was saving this for Castles & Crusades, but then I realized how old-school this setting is. And how the old school influenced Level Up A5E. Then it went 'click,' and I realized how perfect this combination really is. This is the newly-updated 5E version of the setting, so zero conversion and use as-is.

Check out this art from the introduction. This is perfect. Exploration, an encounter with a young dragon, they are lost and likely thought their ranger they did not let come along from a 2104 copy of D&D instead of LUA5E. Half of them are probably dead, and they will be lucky to make it the mile and a half back to the castle.

This is straightforward in a Swords & Wizardry or Castles & Crusades game - the GM rolls a random encounter, and you die.

In A5E, exploration mechanics help mitigate this situation with rules. A good ranger would have a decent chance to spot this and avoid trouble. From what I have seen of ToV, we are back in 5E and not really doing robust support of the exploration pillar. With other versions of 5E, you are back to the OSR, a random encounter, and you don't die because you can't die in 2014 5E. People complain at the DM for wasting 2 hours of the session on a pointless encounter that "wasn't even in the module!"

A5E does old-school play very well, and you can build characters that excel in combat, social, and exploration parts of an adventure. A5E is "old school with rules."

We need our Waterdeep, right? We have another newly updated book for 5E, same world, and still very old-school. And these books have the traditional mix of a human majority with elves, halflings, and dwarves in here too - but if you want dragon people, drow, tieflings, crow-people, wolfen, fae, and any other fantasy race to blend in - that is up to you. These old-school books can be filled in with the kin you want instead of having a setting force clockwork and steampunk on you when that is not your ideal fantasy world (Midgard suffers from this).

We have a giant book devoted to a vast fantasy town, ready to be used as-is or sprinkled with different backgrounds and cultures - this is your choice.

To complete our old-school betrayal to de-colonized 5E, let's add in another newly-updated 5E book. The Rappan Athuk mega-dungeon is located in the same setting, and it is a deadly, challenging, and years-long campaign focus for any group. This is also very old-school and fits the A5E theme of "5E but old-school" we aim for.

This setting would not play as well with Tales of the Valiant. It would play nicely but feel more like a Basic D&D with fewer rules, simplified and streamlined. I would miss the pillars of play support that the more in-depth (and complex) A5E brings.

If I want a purely social or exploration character, I can do that in A5E. In 2014 or 2024 D&D and Tales of the Valiant, we are leaning back towards the combat-focused 5E for the stories I want to tell.

This trilogy of books is one of the best old-school flavored 5E settings out there, with the best level of support. This feels more like the Forgotten Realms as we ran it back with AD&D, a lower-tech world with low magic and high danger with a considerable focus on exploration and social.

There is also a setting-neutral world book. At around 500 pages, it goes into Midgard-level depth, so you can get lost here. The Midgard book has more town maps, which puts it a step above this, but this is a fantastic world steeped in a lot of old-school charm. This and Midgard are my top two settings in depth and detail, along with the area they cover.

The special ancestries were special; even an elf in human lands was a thing. If I want the dragonkin to enter the game, they can set up an embassy or fort, claim an area of undead land as theirs, and clear it, and everyone can buzz about them. I love the "year zero" introductions of a race into a campaign world - it lets me do it how I want to, with allies and enemies, and how they learn to come together and get along. There are a lot of adventures in these introductions, and they give every background a place and story in the world rather than being "another funny shape on the bus."

I can start this area as a traditional fantasy 4-race mix and then tell how everyone came together.

And A5E puts substantial penalties on "pop-up" healing. This will make the game dangerous, not dull, zero-death, player entitlement like 2014 5E. Due to the dark magic at play, I can put a substantial penalty on death saves and healing checks in some areas. In some areas, if you die, your soul will be trapped until the area boss is killed (or you figure out what object or magic in the area is trapping them). Sometimes, the soul may be in a "soul jar" that could be taken to another part of the labyrinth as a tribute to the demon king of the dungeon.

Ticking clock! Better find that jar to have a chance of resurrecting the dead character. If you even know of its existence.

That is, assuming you even know that, haul the body back to the local temple, pay the tiny 1000gp fee, and find out the spell didn't work, and all they say was, "The soul could not return to the body, or did not want to. And the fee was non-refundable." You will have a player screaming, "But I want to!" and smashing that X card, but that is the danger you accept when you enter the business. All you say is, "But you can't," and leave it at that - let the party figure it out.

The players agreed to that safety tool sheet the GM gave out before the game started if needed.

No resurrection if the soul is trapped (in 5E and A5E, this is in the Resurrection spell; the soul must be free for the magic to work). Who says it is trapped? The GM or the module. Won't that scare people? Yes, that is the point. Don't die in a necromancer's graveyard tomb. You won't make it out.

That is if you even have the body. It could fall down a 300' shaft and land on level 16 somewhere; good luck getting enough character levels to go down there fast and find it before the ghoul ravagers get hungry.

In other places, especially the end level, forget it; the soul will never return.

This is the old school.

You need all that player power for a reason.

Some of the characters will not make it out of these places alive.

This is also why the GM fills out a list of safety tools before the game begins and tells the players, "Unrecoverable death will be in the game." The X card will not save you (except maybe sparing the grisly description of what happens next, just fade to black). You accept it, or you find another game. This is just like hardcore Diablo or World of Warcraft (or any other game) with permadeath, and you agree to that when you check the box and press play. These tools work both ways for a reason. The other players at the table who agree to this experience have a right to play how they want, too.

If you want to do an old-school 5E, A5E is the game, and this is the setting you need to get.

The 4E "Renaissance"

This thing on 5E YouTube is doing a hard sell on 4E as "the next big thing."

As someone who played the game heavily since the first book came out and collected an entire 4E library - and played them all - I can't think of more of a silly and disingenuous thing to try to sell the community.

And we LOVED 4E compared to all the haters. We bought every book and played it. We watched the books get patched before they hit the store shelves, making the physical copies worthless. We did the whole thing with dungeon tiles and figures and played every night for 3 years. We watched them constantly fiddle with monster hit points and damage, making later book classes so overpowered as they tried to patch the game in motion - making the core classes underpowered and weak. We have seen 4E Essentials beta-test the 5E concepts and be this strange dongle reimagining of the game, yet it is compatible with it (that looks like 2024 suspiciously).

But the game let us down so hard that we left Wizards and the barely play-tested, buy-the-next-book, string-you-along garbage they put out. It hurt 5E and made us switch to Pathfinder 1e because it left a bad taste in our mouths.

The 4E "Renaissance" has nothing to do with 4E being great. This game breaks past the 12th level with stun locks, turn-denial, and thousands of hit-point monsters whittling them down with the same powers, turn after turn. Tracking short-duration turn conditions requires a spreadsheet. The game at 1-5 is excellent! Past 6th level, it starts to slowly break down before it fails hard, freezing up and dying a "why are we playing this" death.

By the 18th level, you are standing in a circle around a 1500-hit-point monster, watching yourself make 20 points of damage, and then waiting for the person with the stunning power to deny the monster their next turn. If you miss, ah, well! We will get back to you for the next go around!

Repeat this for 30+ turns of play for four hours for one combat.

The powers in the later books made it worse. You gave the DM a list of "expected gear upgrades" for your build, and optimization was required and assumed for every magic item slot. Optimization was required to keep up with monster progression, and you were stacking bonuses in every slot they gave you.

The math was unconstrained, adding +28 to a d20 attack roll to hit an AC of 35. People's brains were fried after a 3-hour session since it felt like a rapid-fire immersion session for basic math.

There is no way in hell they play-tested this. If they did, it was in one of the best echo chambers ever designed.

5E has a way better high-level game than 4E, and that isn't saying much.

Pushing 4E keeps you from leaving Wizards and trying other games, thus leaving the 5E Wizards community for good. This is why 4E is being pushed. When 2024 D&D comes out, 4E will be dropped by these channels, and you will be out a ton of money buying PDFs you will never use. Wizards will be happy they have the extra money, and the channels don't care as long as you give them views and stay in the D&D cave.

The company does not deserve your business, honestly. There are better and more exciting spaces to play now instead of living in the past.

We are in the early phases of the 5E alternative games, and the time to jump in is now.

Some 5E alternatives take the best of 4E and improve it - mixing the old and the new while staying true to the classic pillars of play.

And there are so many other games to explore, with unique communities and experiences.

I still have those books above; that is my photo.

But we loved 4E. We bought the maps and figures. We played it every night. We did the whole "progression of a game" through the books. We even bought every Essentials book, thinking, "This is gonna finally fix it!"

And in 5E, they ended up doing it again, though this time, they had a better base game to build upon and eventually ruin by the end of the run. The companies rebuilding 5E is where the fun is at these days. Going back to 4E and waiting for the next version of D&D to "finally fix it" is like waiting for Godot.

YouTube is full of it at times with these fads and "keep the community together" tactics, and people that buy into this will likely be unhappy (unless you are a true fan, but even then) and be sucked into wasting money on PDFs. I never bought the 4E PDFs. I have no use for them. The game is that broken. I keep the books because I want to remember the good times.

And you know, when 2024 comes out, 4E will be dropped by the YouTube community as the "we tried it, but it sucked" game that it was, and this is coming from someone who loved 4E and bought the entire run of books.

Loving 4E is about loving what they tried to do, the world they tried to build, and the game's new direction. The only two 4E books I recommend getting are the essays on the design of the world and then using a new set of rules to play in the world that these inspire. These two books made us fall in love with the new world, but the game let us down.

https://www.dmsguild.com/product/56956/Wizards-Presents-Races-and-Classes-40

https://www.dmsguild.com/product/56955/Wizards-Presents-Worlds-and-Monsters-4e

The imagination and energy behind 4E were amazing and what we loved. The rules broke the promise.

Games like Level Up A5E (and even ToV) are better systems that try to continue that legacy and move forward. They are a fresh start with no baggage, with communities and teams trying to improve the core design. Playing 4E keeps you from leaving and trying something new and keeps people in that toxic relationship with a Wall Street company.

The new games are coming out now and are exciting places to be in. Don't be fooled back into the cave.

Who makes the game matters, and supporting the people out there making a change for a better future today is a much better place to be than listening to people trying to endlessly sell you the past.