Quote from: S'mon on November 27, 2024, 05:30:23 AM

Quote from: Festus on November 26, 2024, 10:59:46 PMIf it's WotC's business practices (poor quality, OGL bs, AI bs, etc.) then either Level Up Advanced 5e from ENWorld or Tales of the Valiant from Kobold Press are very similar and in ways superior versions of 5e.
If your issue is WotC's wokeness, you may not find Kobold or ENWorld to be much different.

To me Kobold Press seems a fair bit less woke than WoTC, ENW, or Paizo. You will get some Woke stuff from them and some non-Woke stuff.

Kobold Press didn't seem overtly woke. TotV did have a section on safety tools but their X account doesn't have any weird pro-LGBT nonsense (not like paizo/wotc, there was no kobold wearing pride colors for pride month for example) that I could tell. They do have diverse people on staff (the guy who does their streams is he/they pronouns IIRC) but like it doesn't seem being shoved down people's throats like WotC or Paizo. So as far as I can tell they are "diverse" but not "woke" which I personally don't have an issue with.

Quote from: Nobleshield on November 27, 2024, 09:12:59 AM

Quote from: S'mon on November 27, 2024, 05:30:23 AM

Quote from: Festus on November 26, 2024, 10:59:46 PMIf it's WotC's business practices (poor quality, OGL bs, AI bs, etc.) then either Level Up Advanced 5e from ENWorld or Tales of the Valiant from Kobold Press are very similar and in ways superior versions of 5e.
If your issue is WotC's wokeness, you may not find Kobold or ENWorld to be much different.

To me Kobold Press seems a fair bit less woke than WoTC, ENW, or Paizo. You will get some Woke stuff from them and some non-Woke stuff.

Kobold Press didn't seem overtly woke. TotV did have a section on safety tools but their X account doesn't have any weird pro-LGBT nonsense (not like paizo/wotc, there was no kobold wearing pride colors for pride month for example) that I could tell. They do have diverse people on staff (the guy who does their streams is he/they pronouns IIRC) but like it doesn't seem being shoved down people's throats like WotC or Paizo. So as far as I can tell they are "diverse" but not "woke" which I personally don't have an issue with.

Is Tales of the Valiant 100% compatible, with their excellent Tome of Beasts and Creature Codex releases for 5E?

Quote from: Man at Arms on November 27, 2024, 02:22:10 PM

Quote from: Nobleshield on November 27, 2024, 09:12:59 AM

Quote from: S'mon on November 27, 2024, 05:30:23 AM

Quote from: Festus on November 26, 2024, 10:59:46 PMIf it's WotC's business practices (poor quality, OGL bs, AI bs, etc.) then either Level Up Advanced 5e from ENWorld or Tales of the Valiant from Kobold Press are very similar and in ways superior versions of 5e.
If your issue is WotC's wokeness, you may not find Kobold or ENWorld to be much different.

To me Kobold Press seems a fair bit less woke than WoTC, ENW, or Paizo. You will get some Woke stuff from them and some non-Woke stuff.

Kobold Press didn't seem overtly woke. TotV did have a section on safety tools but their X account doesn't have any weird pro-LGBT nonsense (not like paizo/wotc, there was no kobold wearing pride colors for pride month for example) that I could tell. They do have diverse people on staff (the guy who does their streams is he/they pronouns IIRC) but like it doesn't seem being shoved down people's throats like WotC or Paizo. So as far as I can tell they are "diverse" but not "woke" which I personally don't have an issue with.

Is Tales of the Valiant 100% compatible, with their excellent Tome of Beasts and Creature Codex releases for 5E?

Almost. There are a few minor touches to make the monsters TOV compliant. But that is also in a free PDF conversion guide.

So yeah if you just want 5e with a fresh coat of paint and less overt Wokeness, Tales of the Valiant sounds like a fair bet. Certainly the average quality of KP products is vastly vastly better than WoTC material.

My big problem with modern RPGs are the inclusion of so-called "safety tools". Because frankly, they are not. They are a waste of space in the books that could be used for things actually critical to running the game.

Quote from: Darrin Kelley on November 27, 2024, 03:36:00 PMMy big problem with modern RPGs are the inclusion of so-called "safety tools". Because frankly, they are not. They are a waste of space in the books that could be used for things actually critical to running the game.

They are, but personally my #1 issue with them is that they come from the BDSM world. I get why they're included, because there are a lot of weirdos who think that "it's just a game" is carte blanche to have like graphic sex scenes and torture.

Quote from: weirdguy564 on November 23, 2024, 08:58:41 PMWhat game do you recommend to somebody who wants to play 5E, but not buy official D&D 5E from WotC/Hasbro?

For me I would recommend getting Olde Swords Reign.  It has feats, weapons and armor with traits, but is a simple OSR style game with only 4 races and 4 classes.

I would also add 'Into the Unknown' for a 5e game pared down to an OSR style game.

They are cheap enough that you might as well get both. They are very cross compatible, and make for a very complete game at a cheap price. And they will be immediately familiar to 5e players.

Personally - I would not get Five Torches Deep. Just Old swords Reign and Into the Unknown.

And if you get those two; download the Shadowdark QS. You can use its rules for changing casting to a roll if you are so inclined.

Quote from: BadApple on November 24, 2024, 10:22:32 AM...  There is a lot of games using the 5E SRD as a core as well:

Carbon 2185 - 5E but anime cyberpunk (the best presentation of the 5E rules I have ever seen)
Humblewood - 5E but all the PCs are birds
Ultra Modern Redux - 5E but gonzo underground comics
Esper Genesis - 5E but slick modern space opera
The Ruined - 5E but post apocalypse
Black Iron - 5E Sword and sorcery
Adventures in Middle Earth - 5E but more Tolkien

The list goes on and none of it requires paying WOTC at all.
...

The problem I have with most 'based on 5e' games, is that they either up the complexity level, are essentially a 5e re-skin, or pare everything down to near B/X levels of simplicity. With nothing in-between.

But I cannot blame people as the general 5e player base prefers re-skins over game overhauls. And those that want the OSR feel want the game taken down to B/X complexity levels.

Quote from: Nobleshield on November 27, 2024, 04:23:37 PM

Quote from: Darrin Kelley on November 27, 2024, 03:36:00 PMMy big problem with modern RPGs are the inclusion of so-called "safety tools". Because frankly, they are not. They are a waste of space in the books that could be used for things actually critical to running the game.

They are, but personally my #1 issue with them is that they come from the BDSM world. I get why they're included, because there are a lot of weirdos who think that "it's just a game" is carte blanche to have like graphic sex scenes and torture.

Anyone who knows a thing about BSDM and D/S is that torture isn't a part of the experience that real practitioners tolerate. The torture is abuse. Which is frowned on.

D/S is about consent. Giving consent to someone you trust. It isn't about involving random normies in the kink for shock value.

None of this belongs in a tabletop RPG. They are apples and oranges different from each other.

Yes, I have some experience with BDSM and D/S from my days in Second Life. One of the biggest problems there are the amateurs who think they know what those things are about. But end up doing serious harm to others in the process.

The ones pushing this into RPGs do not even understand the source one little bit.

Quote from: BadApple on November 24, 2024, 10:22:32 AMThis thread kind of confuses me.

5E SRD is a thing and there's so much third party stuff that you never need to give a coin to WOTC. 

The SRD is nice, but my players and I prefer physical books at the table.  I suppose one could print out pages and pages of an SRD and bind them together, but for me its much nicer when a physical book exists.  Or at least having a PDF like D&D 5e Basic or D&D 5e Essentials, which can then be uploaded to Lulu to create a professional-looking physical book.

Quote from: Nobleshield on November 27, 2024, 04:23:37 PM

Quote from: Darrin Kelley on November 27, 2024, 03:36:00 PMMy big problem with modern RPGs are the inclusion of so-called "safety tools". Because frankly, they are not. They are a waste of space in the books that could be used for things actually critical to running the game.

They are, but personally my #1 issue with them is that they come from the BDSM world. I get why they're included, because there are a lot of weirdos who think that "it's just a game" is carte blanche to have like graphic sex scenes and torture.

I resent safety tools as yet another push towards commodifying, classifying and ultimately systematizing human interactions which should properly be the province of common sense, intuition and experience. It's part of a broader campaign against nuance and human understanding, which serves only to socially retard young people, setting them up for lives of loneliness and misery, and making them far more vulnerable to ideological indoctrination.

Quote from: Jaeger on November 27, 2024, 04:24:33 PMThe problem I have with most 'based on 5e' games, is that they either up the complexity level, are essentially a 5e re-skin, or pare everything down to near B/X levels of simplicity. With nothing in-between.

Agreed in large part. There's nothing wrong with the base skeleton of 5e as a game. I dislike proficiency bonus as a mechanic, but it's hardly a deal breaker. The chief problem is there's just too much of it. Too many races, too many subclasses, too many feats and powers and so on. At the same time, if you want something that plays like an OSR game, why not just play an OSR game? I would however mention Free League's LOTR 5e game as an exception. That does strike me as a middle ground between full 5e bloat and OSR levels of simplicity.

Has the Pundit at some point refused to make his version of the 5e? Given he was one of the consults, his take on the game would be more interesting than some others'.

Quote from: Mrod on November 28, 2024, 02:23:26 PMHas the Pundit at some point refused to make his version of the 5e? Given he was one of the consults, his take on the game would be more interesting than some others'.

It would sure get my attention.

One of my big beefs was the removal of the Consultants from the 5e books. i thought it was very crappy. And then they turned around and filled the credits with do nothing corporate suits and DEI hires instead of actually giving credit for people who actually did the work on developing 5e.

WotC can crash and burn for all I care. They stole Pundit's literary credit from him.

Tales of the Valiant is the closest you're gonna get to "I can't believe it's not 5th edition." I have it's three core books... and it's just, a slight iteration on 2014 5th edition.

And, as much as I fucking hate to say it... Honestly? Just buy the 2024 5th edition rules.

I've bought all the other knock offs out there, 13th Age, Pathfinder 2e, and Tales of the Valiant.

Then I bought the 2024 player's guide so I could check it out for myself.

It's just better than all of the others. I hate it, I hate it...I wish WotC had made the product shitty, I wish it wasn't the best iteration of the 5th edition rules... But it really is. You're wasting your time with the knock offs now in my opinion.

Granted if you don't want "5th edition" feel at all, then go grab something from the OSR like Worlds Without Number.

Well I can think of a few games I'd go towards but not necessarily D20 systems.
The ones on my mind not in any specific order are.
Sword world
The current version is 2.5 and it covers a lot of the ground most people want out of dnd and does some of the things people complain about with dnd.

The konosuba rpg
this was fan translated a few years back I had a copy on my old computer and its solid enough.
It has a baked in humor edge but you can mostly ignore that and play it as a game that fits in the genaric fantasy realm that people claim dnd is.

The log horizon ttrpg
It has a baked in agro system and exhaustion system but gives a bigger swath the konosuba rpg does by default.
the way the game is structured you can strip out the MMO references and more or less run it as a generic system. It has some baked in quarks but is all in all solid.

Mostly I made this post to throw out some options that would be outside of the normal considerations that would normally be found here.

Yeah, Tales of the Valiant would be my go to for a 5e clone. Kobold Press has their own setting for it, they're working on Foundry/Shard/VTT support, publish their own supplements at a decent schedule and are pretty community friendly. It should also require zero tweaks to use any other third party 5e content for ToV as well.