It’s been a while . . .
I can only apologize. Wyrmling Number 2 is on the way, work has been work, winter has been winter, and progress has been slow. But: a first draft of the Unfinished Halls is nearly complete. Which is good, because the title was starting to become horribly ironic.
I’m also about to wrap up a homebrew campaign. It started nearly a year ago, and was meant to last until 20th level, but . . . life had other ideas.
And this was our first campaign running Level Up 5e.
Unlike everyone else in the D&D world, I never got round to reviewing the 2024 rules revision (which WotC is now calling ‘5.5’). After nearly a decade of running 5e, I was burnt out on it. I didn’t love the feel of the new edition—weapon mastery, bastions, power creep, Capitalizing Everything Like It’s a Video Game—and the rest just felt like rearranging the furniture. But it got me thinking: is there a version of 5e, not produced by Hasbro, that actually fixes the things that needed fixing?
‘Level Up: Advanced Fifth Edition’ is published by EN Publishing here in the UK. I think it’s fair to say that it’s a ‘crunchier,’ more detailed version of vanilla 5e. The core system is the same, but, principally, it expands character creation, adds structured exploration and travel systems, and gives martial characters much expanded tactical options. Crucially, it remains completely compatible with the wider 5e ecosystem. But this is also one of the tensions of A5e: it’s different enough that players occasionally have to relearn things, but similar enough that you assume everything works exactly the same. It takes some getting used to.
It’s worth noting that this is not a paid review, nor did I receive any review copies of Level Up 5e. Also, we made a real effort as a group to follow the rules as written instead of defaulting to our usual 5e habits.
Let’s start with presentation. I’m only going off PDFs, but the books are easy to read and well organized. In some ways, they’re clearer than the official 5e rulebooks. But they’re certainly not prettier. Indeed, the artwork is one of its weakest elements, and not in a charming way like ‘old-school’ art can be. I don’t want to dump on any individual artists, and it’s still miles better than AI slop, but it also doesn’t compare to the production values of, say, Free League, or the stylishness of gorgeous games like Blades in the Dark, and it’s one of the main reasons I never bothered buying physical copies. They’re functional, not collectable.
So how does it run?
First off, character creation is significantly more elaborate than standard 5e. You choose your ancestry, your background, your destiny . . . it means that even first-level characters feel distinct. The options are genuinely interesting and meaningful. But there’s a trade-off for all of this: time. I really notice how much longer it takes to build a character, and that might be a turn off for groups who like to get started quickly.
And there’s something else you start to notice as you tinker away. You start to ask yourself, is it crunch for the sake of crunch?
Take destiny. On the one hand, it gives your character narrative arc, a unique way of using inspiration, and eventually leads to a cool capstone ability that’s tied to the character’s story in some way. All very cool—but at our table, most players forgot about it within a few sessions, and the capstone abilities almost never came up in actual play unless you, as a DM, make it happen.
There’s a lot of this kind of thing.
The clearest win over vanilla 5e is what Level Up does with martial characters. All martial classes gain manoeuvres—think of the options you get as a battle master fighter—and this makes combat so much more interesting for these characters. Suddenly, martial characters have real decisions to make each round instead of just declaring an attack and rolling damage. This alone might justify looking at A5E. Manoeuvres also support character concepts that standard 5e never handled well, like the marshal, a battlefield commander in the mould of the warlord from 4th Edition. It’s the kind of class that fans have been homebrewing for years, me included, and in Level Up 5e, it actually works.
Some of the smaller changes are where A5E shines brightest. For example, warlocks can use Intelligence instead of Charisma as their primary ability score. This just makes sense, like Lovecraftian scholars who’ve dug too deep into forbidden knowledge. Several notoriously strong feats have been rebalanced, like Great Weapon Master and Sharpshooter. The A5e versions are either less extreme or don’t become available until higher levels. It’s the sort of thing I wanted to see more of in the 2024 rules.
More examples: grappling now forces a saving throw rather than an opposed ability check, thus closing an old loophole where legendary low-Strength monsters could be locked down far too easily. Counterspell has been reworked: a countered spellcaster can now redirect some of the spell’s energy into a lesser effect. Much more fun!
So yes, there’s crunch, but there are also refinements—the kind of thing many of us hoped 5.5 would do, but largely didn’t.
But not every change earns its place.
Take initiative. A5e makes a point of saying that initiative doesn’t have to be tied to Dexterity—that any ability score could apply. But in nearly a year of play, we’ve used Dexterity almost every time. The same is true of pairing skills and abilities: the system stresses that skills aren’t locked to specific ability scores, but in practice the obvious pairing is obvious for a reason. Removing the associated ability score just makes the character sheet more confusing.
Then there are rules for critical successes and failures on skill checks. This became tedious fast. The failures rarely produced interesting consequences, and the successes often felt forced, or even bizarre. By mid-level play, I think we’d largely stopped using them.
And we’re back to the broader issue: added flexibility or granularity, which sounds good on paper, but makes no practical difference at the table, or even gets in the way.
And this is where my enthusiasm cooled somewhat. A5e dramatically increases the number of character abilities and options, and in my opinion, the more options you add to a d20 system, the harder it becomes to predict how they’ll interact. 5e already has this problem—it gets worse with every new book they release—and in A5e, it’s probably even worse.
As a DM, I noticed how easy it was for players to pile up features and remove the challenge from the system. Whenever the party faced a meaningful skill check, it took very little effort to layer on advantage, expertise (a bonus d4 essentially), and sometimes other modifiers, until eventually the roll itself was kind of a formality. Another example: every elf has access to the divination wizard’s portent ability. That’s crazy good!
It’s a problem with vanilla 5e, too, of course, but I don’t love it, and it felt worse to me in Level Up somehow. This is just my opinion, but without a bit of grit in the gears, there’s no tension, and without tension, there’s no failure, and without failure, ultimately, player choices don’t matter. And where’s the fun in that?
I could go on. But in essence, you start to question the design choices a bit. And perhaps the most glaring example of this for me was the decision to introduce pricing for magic items. I’m just not convinced it’s an improvement. The original 2014 rules deliberately avoided assigning prices, and while many players maybe disliked this decision, particularly those familiar with 3.5 and Pathfinder, for me it helped to preserve the sense that these objects were rare and wondrous. Once magic items have price tags, they start to feel like equipment in a video game shop. And there are balance issues with it. Potions of resistance, for instance, cost about 300 gold. That’s cheap enough that even a low-level party can stock up. During a recent encounter with a great red wyrm, the first thing the players wanted to do was buy fire resistance potions. At that price, it felt routine—like picking up health packs before a boss fight. Most groups won’t deliberately exploit the system, but the fact that they easily could is what undermines the magic for me.
If I had to pick one area where A5e is unambiguously better than any other version of 5e, it’s monster design.
Hands down, the Monstrous Menagerie is the best monster manual available for the 5e ruleset. Creatures have more interesting abilities, they hit harder without feeling unfair, and the flavour text is far more useful at the table than anything in the standard Monster Manual (either edition). The only limitation is IP: you won’t get WotC properties like mind flayers in this one, but everything else is gold. If you buy nothing else from the A5E line, buy this book. It works perfectly well with standard 5e.
There are other positives. Unlike official 5e, which went years between major expansions like Xanathar’s Guide to Everything and Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything, A5e feels like a system that’s being actively maintained. There’s a regular zine introducing new subclasses, monsters, and options, later collected into annual volumes. Larger supplements appear too, including the dungeon design book Dungeon Delver’s Guide, which I backed on Kickstarter. It’s solid. For a third-party product, that level of ongoing support is impressive, and it gives the system a creative energy that official 5e has sometimes lacked. Curse of Strahd: Revamped anyone?
I also value the official reference site, which probably gives away far too much of their good stuff, and in practice, I found myself using it more than the PDFs. There’s also a character builder called Level Up Gateway. Some of my players used it and found it functional, but maybe not as polished as D&D Beyond. But it’s there.
So, the big question: should you switch?
When I look back, my favourite stretch of 5e was probably 2014 to 2019. The adventures were strong, the character options felt balanced, and the system hadn’t built up the power creep introduced in later supplements introduced (silvery barbs, twilight domain clerics, gloomstalker rangers, etc). To me, A5e feels like a product from that kind of era: an attempt to refine and deepen the system as well as adding to it, and I think it’s an admirable and impressive attempt. Where it focuses on fixing particular pain points, like boring martial characters, counterspell, monster design, the warlord, it’s fantastic. But where it adds complexity for its own sake, or opens up new options for optimizers to abuse, it undermines itself.
If you were curious about some of the new stuff in 2024 revision, like bastions and weapon mastery, A5e does it all with more care. And if you do nothing else, get the Monstrous Menagerie. It’s the single best upgrade you can make to a 5e table. Otherwise, I don’t think A5e exactly replaces 5e, but it offers an interesting interpretation of it. Some players will love it, a few will dislike it, but most, I suspect, will be rather indifferent to it. As with anything in the 5e space, perhaps it’s best to pick and choose what you like from it and leave the rest.
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