The Player’s Case for Level Up: Advanced 5e
During a recent podcast, Mike Shea mentioned that PJ Coffey had written an excellent case for GMs to upgrade from vanilla 5e to Level Up: Advanced 5e, but what about the player side?
TL;DR:
First, let me warn that this is going to be long, and if you want the short version, this is it:
You likely will find that Level Up is better for you than 5e if you like having a high degree of customization, if you’ve gotten sick of being pigeonholed by “correct” 5e builds, and if you’ve wanted more things to do in the game, especially outside of combat, and/or if you’ve gotten sick of some of the “legacy tropes” in 5e. It will not be for you if what you really want is an OSR game: stripped-down, highly-lethal, and based more on dungeon survival than heroic fantasy. It also will likely not be for you if what you want is an indie RPG or story game.
Authorial Bias
Let me get this out of the way upfront: if you want an objective, journalistic take on this subject, or if you want someone to absolutely shred the system and claim it’s horrible, you’re likely going to be disappointed, because I’m not the person for either of those takes. I was part of the original design team for Level Up: Advanced 5e and I am currently the most prolific producer of third-party content for it. I also regularly contribute to the official books and the monthly Level Up periodical, The Gate Pass Gazette. I like the system quite a lot, and I am very, very familiar with it. That combination of positive feelings and deep familiarity means that I can make a pretty detailed case for the system, though, and if you’ve been interested in it, this is why I think you should take the leap.
Using This Article
One of the many things to recommend about Level Up is that EN Publishing is extremely committed to open gaming and the core rules (and a fair number of the supplemental ones) are available on the a5e.tools site. Where appropriate, I will link to entries on that site so you can check the various subjects out for yourself in more detail if you’re interested in doing so.
Note: toward the bottom of this post, some links to DriveThruRPG (only) are affiliate links; if you buy something using them, I may earn some credit based on your purchase.
Origins
Level Up uses the term “origin” as an umbrella term for the mechanical aspects of a character that define their life prior to their adventuring career. It is broken down into four subsections, each covering a different aspect of that personal foundation. Before we get into that detail, though, this entire portion of character creation is a major upgrade on its own; going through the origins portion of character creation leaves you with a character that feels way more like an actual person than the corresponding parts of 5e do. Let’s dig into how that works.
Heritage
The concept of “race” in D&D is broken down into two components in Level Up: Advanced 5e: heritage (nature) and culture (nurture). Level Up is not the first place where this distinction has been drawn, but it works well here.
Heritage covers the biological and physiological parts of a character such as their general physical size, senses, and so on. Each heritage has a set of traits common to all members of that heritage and a set of gifts that allow for diversity within that heritage. For example, with dragonborn, gifts can allow you to make a character that has tough, scaly skin and claws, or who instead has aquatic traits like being able to hold their breath for a long time and a swim speed, or who has wings (yes, dragonborn are actually playable now). Also at level 10, you receive a heritage paragon gift, which often builds on the original gift selected, but not always. Mixed-heritage characters can take a set of traits from one heritage and a gift from another. There’s no set mix of heritages that are biologically-compatible, leaving it to setting designers and Narrators/GMs to determine what heritages can have children together and/or have been mixed by magic or whatever other means exist in the world.
What you will not see in the heritage section is ability score increases; those have been moved to the background section.
Culture
The other half of what used to be “race” in D&D is culture, the environment that the character was raised in. Mechanically, these provide capabilities that are learned as part of the character’s upbringing or cultural formation such as languages, weapon and tool proficiencies, and so forth. Each heritage usually has a few associated cultures, such as high elves, wood elves, shadow elves, and eladrin for the elf heritage. However, there are some cultures not closely tied to any individual heritage, and the heritage and culture of a character can be mixed freely. This lines up better with fictional characters such as Carrot Ironfoundersson from Discworld who was a human raised by dwarves, or Aragorn from Lord of the Rings, who was a human with significant elven influence.
In some ways, cultures allow for the kind of variation that used to be confined to “sub-races” but without needlessly pigeonholing a player. Even if some combination is strange or likely to be extremely improbable, player characters are often extraordinary people who have lived extraordinary lives. So if you really want to play that tiefling with a forest gnome culture, go for it!
Background
If heritage represents a character’s birth, and culture represents their formative experiences, then background covers things like their formal education and career training. It works pretty much like it does in vanilla 5e with a couple of key differences: first, you will get two ability score adjustments from your background: one that is fixed and one you get to pick (but they can’t be for the same ability score). This represents the idea that people are stronger, or more learned, or more perceptive because they have trained those parts of themselves via use rather than through birth, which makes a lot more sense.
Additionally, backgrounds come with three additional traits now: a connection, a memento, and an adventures and advancement section. The connection is someone from the character’s background that still affects their life in some way; they can be a friend, an enemy, or anything in between, but they tie the character back to their past. Likewise, the memento can be a useful object, a sentimental trinket, or even just a piece of actual junk, but it also ties back to the character’s past and is added to their starting gear. Finally, the adventures and advancement section gives some brief guidance for how the character may “move up in the world” of their old background through adventuring if they desire to do so. These can be leaned into as much or as little as the player desires.
Destiny
A new mechanic in Level Up, Destiny replaces alignment and the bonds, flaws, and character traits section of a 5e character sheet as well as supplementing the inspiration mechanic. Destiny covers a character’s motivations and provides new ways to both gain and spend inspiration. Of the changes Level up has introduced, this might be my favorite, because it builds in characters with actual motivations and goals from the outset; think of the characters in a game like Octopath Traveler II: all eight of those people wanted to do something specific. Sometimes it was big and world-altering, sometimes it was small and personal, but they all had a personal goal. Destiny works like that, and there are a good number of them. They’re also not all things like “save the world,” either; revenge, wealth, excellence, and metamorphosis (turning yourself into a different type of creature!) are all on the default list of destinies in the Adventurer’s Guide.
As you can likely see, while this process does leave you with a bit more to keep track of than a character made with the 2014 Player’s Handbook, there’s also a lot more flexibility to define characters as people with actual histories and motivations in Level Up. Those distinctions carry real mechanical weight, too; you can make two characters with the exact same everything except one of their origin components and that alone will change both their capabilities and their flavor. There’s a ton of room to fully realize character concepts.
Classes
All twelve of the classes found in the 5e SRD have been reworked and the Adventurer’s Guide also includes a brand-new class called the marshal that fills the old “warlord” role that was popularized back in the 4e era.
Three of the classes got new names; the monk is now the adept, the barbarian is now the berserker, and the paladin is now the herald. These changes were made with the primary goal of opening them up a bit, conceptually; adepts can still be wuxia style martial artists, but they can now be Greek-style “exalted athletes” and grimy street fighters, among other things. Berserkers are now less about being from a tribal or low-tech society and more about ferocity and toughness, and heralds are likewise intended to encompass a wider array of supernaturally-empowered idealists.
New names weren’t the only changes, though; rangers are no longer spellcasters by default and every class now has much greater potential for customization. Where appropriate, new defensive choices were added (such as an armored option for adepts and an unarmored one for clerics) and every class has received a bunch of additional social and exploration features to help them be interesting and have things to do outside of combat.
This notably does not mean that every class is a “party face” now. Some considerable effort was taken to make sure that the new features still fit the overall style of the character. For example, one of the fighter class’s social abilities is the second-level feature Steely Mien, which gives you three options to choose from when you get it: closed helm, which makes it harder to read you with Insight or to charm or frighten you; Heroic Flair, which helps you influence your allies; or Watchful Eye, which makes you good at keeping an eye out for threats or interesting details. None of these are primarily combat abilities, but they feed into the “fantasy warrior” flavor of the fighter class and let players actually be good at acting like that type of character outside of actual fights. You won’t find the dedicated social mechanics of a game like Burning Wheel or DramaSystem in here, though; it’s still 5e at its base.
It also doesn’t mean every class is a ranger, either. Every class gets an a la carte menu of class-specific exploration and investigative abilities to choose from. Pivoting from the fighter to the herald for this example, they get things like the ability to go longer than normal without food as the strength of their conviction sustains them (allowing the party to make do with fewer resources while exploring before it starts hurting them) or the ability to sense when a place they’ve entered is of special holy or unholy import.
Pulling spellcasting out of the ranger class also gave their martial and exploration abilities real room to breathe; the class really feels like Aragorn or Davy Crockett or a fearsome tribal hunter now; it is stealthy and deadly and very much able to keep a whole party protected and supplied in the wilds.
The classes have also been rebalanced to eliminate the worst of the “cheese builds” in 5e. While character optimizers might chafe at this a bit, the end result is that more character builds are viable now; rather than being confined to a limited number of “correct” builds, a Level Up player has greater flexibility to play what they want without feeling like they’re dragging the party down (though ability score placement does still matter). And in some cases, that rebalancing added new capabilities of its own; bards now have a neat new feature called Battle Hymns they can use to get additional effects out of their Bardic Inspiration, for example. Druids can now cast a limited number of spells and talk while wildshaped. The fighter’s Indomitable feature now can be used in additional ways.
Taken as a whole, while an A5E character tends to be “wider” (with a greater variety of things they can do), the system has been smoothed out to keep them from being unreasonably “tall” and able to “nova” even deadly encounters in the first round of combat. Key features like Divine Smite and Eldritch Blast scale with levels of the class that grants them rather than other considerations now, meaning that if you just want to play a single-classed herald or sorcerer or warlock, you’re no longer leaving power “on the table” if you do so. Put another way, an A5E character will be a little less powerful, but much more versatile.
Multiclass and martial characters also got some interesting new capabilities all their own that we’ll discuss in just a moment.
Feats
One of the coolest new additions to Level Up (at least in my opinions) is the idea of synergy feats. These are short feat chains, typically 3 feats in total, that tend to fall into one of two broad categories: multiclass helpers or transformations.
The multiclass helpers let you make multiclass characters feel more like a unified whole, feeding the features of one class into those of the other or combining them in interesting ways. There are only a few of them in the core rules, but the third-party community has been very dedicated to expanding the number of them (I’ve made it a particular focus in my own releases).
The transformation chains let you play things like a lycanthrope, revenant, or vampire without hideously unbalancing the game as you do, spreading the powers of the creature out in a logical and level-appropriate way.
Combat Maneuvers
Another common complaint about vanilla 5e was that martial characters like fighters, rangers, barbarians, and even rogues often didn’t have much to do in combat other than basic attacks. On the flipside, cinematic, anime-style combat as seen in products like the 3rd-edition Book of Nine Swords and the 4e rules was derided as “weeaboo fightan magic” by large swaths of the community. Level Up threads this needle with a lot of more grounded combat maneuvers that roughly approximate things an actual trained weapon user can pull off, though there are some clear literary references here and there; for example, the Painful Pickpocket maneuver seems to be a reference to a specific scene that happens late in Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell.
The maneuvers are divided up into a bunch of different combat traditions and martial classes get to select a number of these traditions (typically two) from a limited set to draw their maneuvers from. This subdivision means that each martial class (with the exception of the fighter, which gets to pick from the whole list of traditions) has a fighting style that, while unique to the character, also fits with the general flavor of the class. For example, a rogue might pull their maneuvers from the Biting Zephyr tradition which focuses on ranged attacks and the Mist and Shade tradition which emphasizes trickery. Similarly, a berserker might choose Adamant Mountain which emphasizes heavy weapons and Tooth & Claw, which is all about animalistic ferocity and mobility. Maneuvers are powered by a new resource called Exertion.
Level Up also has a set of basic maneuvers that don’t use exertion and are available to all characters and don't need to be learned, further expanding what you can do in combat.
Equipment
Speaking of options in combat, weapons and armor also have more properties available to them, which means that a longsword and a battle axe are no longer functionally the same weapon. Characters can now choose weapons and armor that fit with their preferred fighting style and actually see that matter. In addition, Level Up has added a bunch of new equipment and has a lot more magic items in its core rules than vanilla 5e.
Those magic items also come with actual purchase prices and can be commissioned too, meaning that for groups that want to play in a setting where magic items are being produced and sold rather than being relics of a bygone age, that option is supported by the core rules.
Other New Elements
Speaking of spending gold, there’s lots more you can spend it on in Level Up. The game has a strongholds and followers system (that is much more grounded than the MCDM one), and also has options for buying pets, and doing charitable work in addition to the old favorites like spellcasting services.
The stronghold system feeds into a new rating called Prestige that basically serves as an indicator of how well-known a character is and who they can realistically seek out an audience with. Level up has also added a number of new conditions, which helps streamline how various spells and features work and also separates exhaustion into fatigue and strife, which measure physical and mental strain, respectively.
The new supply system makes activities like hunting and foraging actually worthwhile, and combined with the journey rules and large number of pre-built non-combat encounters, exploration-heavy campaigns like hex crawls and “west marches” games take on additional life and vibrancy.
Spells now have non-classical schools like fire and obscurement in addition to the classical ones like evocation and illusion, making them easier to sort, and a bunch also have rare spell variants that are based on the “normal” version of the spell but are altered (usually improved) in some way.
Expertise as a mechanic, while not new per se, has been revamped and expanded upon. In vanilla 5e, the bard and rogue classes get a feature called Expertise that lets them double their proficiency bonus with a very limited number of skills. In A5E, instead of a static bonus, you get a +1d4 bonus instead. If you’d have more than one of these bonuses for the same roll, you instead increase the size of the bonus die one step, to a normal maximum of 1d8. This flexibility means that there’s more of an opportunity for characters to be especially good at specific things, and you’ll find expertise dice granted by origin, class, and archetype features, feats, spells, and more. They also can apply to just about anything that needs a d20 roll, including saves and attacks. A related mechanic is the concept of skill specialties, which are used to represent specific areas of knowledge. For example, a cleric might have proficiency with the Religion skill and a specialty in holy symbols. To recognize a prayer they overheard, they’d roll religion normally adding their relevant ability score (which can vary from roll to roll in A5E) and their proficiency bonus, but if they happened across a holy symbol that they wished to identify, they’d also get a +1d4 bonus on the roll to do so.
Compatibility
By this point, I have covered a lot of new stuff that’s in A5E, but it also bills itself as being backwards-compatible with 5e, so what does that look like?
Probably the best analogy I can come up with is console (or operating system) generations. A Playstation 5 can run things made for a Playstation 4, but the reverse is not necessarily true. That’s how you can expect Level Up to work. Put more directly, you can generally use subclasses, feats, spells, magic items, and the like unmodified with their A5E counterparts. Trying to port an archetype written for the A5E fighter back to the 2014 D&D one is far less likely to work; like the PS 5 vs PS 4 analogy, there are features in the newer system that aren’t present in the older. That’s what backward compatibility means; the newer system (or console or OS) can use the resources of the older system.
However, that’s not the entire story; you will likely find that third-party content such as that found in products from companies like Ghostfire Games, Kobold Press, and the like works with fewer issues than material drawn from 2014 D&D books. This is because of the common baseline of the 5.1 SRD. In essence, the closer something is to that shared baseline, the more compatible it will be with things that draw from it. The 5e family tree has forked pretty dramatically at this point; D&D has Xanathar’s Guide and Tasha’s Cauldron which both include elements that the open gaming community cannot reference or account for. That means that content from them will likely have more problems than content from the PHB or (as previously mentioned) material from other publishers using the SRD; that content isn’t down one of the design “branches” very far, it’s closer to the “root.” That also means that you might need to do some tweaking if you want to bring in something from Tales of the Valiant or C7D20. As always, talk to your GM.
On the GM side, it’s way less granular than this, by the way. Your GM/DM/Narrator can pull freely from basically any reputable 5e source or variant that exists for things like adventures and monsters and they’ll work fine; there’s literally no problem at all mixing and matching monsters from the 2014 Monster Manual, the A5E Monstrous Menagerie, and MCDM’s Flee, Mortals! In the same encounter, to say nothing of different encounters in the same campaign.
Also, because an A5E character still has the same basic building blocks as a vanilla 5e one, you can run characters from both systems in the same party. I personally think that’s likely to leave the player of the vanilla 5e classes feeling like there’s less for them to do, but it’s also likely to be very campaign-dependent. I’d personally recommend against multiclassing two versions of the same or corresponding class (fighter/fighter, adept/monk, etc.) together in the same PC, but otherwise, you should be fine.
Who A5E is NOT For
If you’re a die-hard WotC fanatic where you consider official D&D branding to be the only valid choice, obviously anything from any other publisher is not for you. If the regular version of 5e is already more than you want to deal with and you prefer a simpler, more stripped-down system, A5E is probably going to give you a headache. If you’re a hardcore OSR type and want super-lethal combat, while you should know that A5E is actually a touch more lethal than standard 5e (check out the massive damage rules) it still has death saves, healing word, and so on.
Likewise, if you have strong indie RPG sensibilities and want a mechanized social interaction system like Burning Wheel’s Duel of Wits, you’re also going to be disappointed; it’s still 5e.
Licensing and Support
Finally, in the light of January of 2023, it’s worth looking at the licensing picture with A5E. And to be blunt, it’s hard to imagine that being any better in a realistic way, at least from a company that’s still a for-profit business.
EN Publishing has adopted a Paizo-like stance, releasing basically the entirety of the three core rulebooks’ mechanical content as a massive SRD that independent creators can license using the OGL, ORC, or Creative Commons licenses as they see fit. This makes for an extremely creator-friendly environment for building content for the system, and there are a number of creators doing so (including myself). EN Publishing also lists third-party products using their compatibility logo on the tools site.
In addition, there’s the Gate Pass Gazette, which is a monthly periodical of new A5E content, and EN Publishing releases a couple of hardcover supplements each year. Last year’s supplements included the Dungeon Delver’s Guide, which Polygon included in their best new tabletop RPG books of 2023 list.
Conclusion
Much has been made of the benefits to GMs in Level Up’s books like the Monstrous Menagerie and Trials & Treasure, but the new system has at least as much to offer players. If 5e is feeling stale after a decade of play, A5E could be just the ticket to refreshing your gameplay experience without reinventing the wheel.
