Level Up 5th Edition adds extra complexity to 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons

Wizards of the Coast released the 5th edition of Dungeons & Dragons in 2014, trimming down much of the complexity found in previous versions of the tabletop role-playing game in order to make it more approachable to new players. But eight years later, even the game’s most devoted fans have started to get a bit bored with the system.

“We’re all massive, massive, massive fans of D&D,” said Russ Morrissey, owner of the TTRPG news site EN World and CEO of EN Publishing. “It just got to a stage where we’d like if there was a little more depth to it, if there was just a little more to look forward to as you level up your fighter. That was what we were seeing in all areas of the game. We thought if we felt like that, there must be other people out there who felt the same way.”

That hunch led to the development of Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition, a series of rulebooks that are backward compatible with modern D&D, but can also be played as a stand-alone game system. These include the Core Rulebook, titled Level Up: Adventurer’s Guide, Monstrous Menagerie: Level upContains new, upgraded bad guys for fighting. Level Up: Trials & Treasures, the system’s corollary to the Dungeon Master’s Guide. Together, they add complexity to almost every aspect of play, by both modifying existing 5E systems and bringing back elements of previous editions, like the combat maneuvers first introduced in 3.5’s The Book of Nine Swords: The Battle of Tome of Battle.

“When you go into a combat, the wizard is selecting from a list of spells and has something fun to choose each round, whereas often the fighter is just, ‘Oh, I’ll move and hit,’” Morrissey said. “A fighter is deliberately designed to be simple, the easiest class to get into. But after you’ve been playing a fighter for seven years, you kind of feel, ‘It’d be nice if I had a few choices like the wizard had.’ Combat maneuvers are the martial equivalent of spells, where you have a whole bunch of different things you can do, just to spice the combat up and make sure you’re doing something different each round. There’s a little bit of resource management in there. We’ve generally found it just makes combat just feel more fun.”

Step up also borrows aspects from 4th edition D&D — namely, the ability for tough characters to mark foes as a way to protect their allies. This new Marshall class combines elements of both the 4E Warlord and 3.5 Marshall to make it unique. Level Up resurrects 4E’s “bloodied” condition, which gave monsters new abilities when they’d been reduced to half of their total hit points. Paul Hughes is the Blog of Holding author Monstrous Menagerie: Level upThis new edition provides rules and guidelines for all creatures not subject to copyright in the 5th Edition Monster Manual. It’s become the top seller of Level Up’s three core books because it provides an easy way for dungeon masters to spice up their games.

“We hope that people will adopt our game completely just because we’re very proud of it and we think it’s very good, but we’re also very, very happy when people just take bits of it and use it in their 5E games,” Morrissey said.

EN Publishing collected feedback from thousands of players over the course a year to balance the changes. The creators also received feedback from players about character choices, such as rules to play as a vampire and vengeful regenerator. Get Leveled The 3.5 prestige and 4E aspects can be combined to create multiclassing feats, which allow you to personalize higher levels of characters. An eldritch archer is a fighter/wizard that shoots magical energy-imbued bows. A cleric/sorcerer has the ability to combine both their spellcasting abilities.

Image by EN World Publishing

The new rules also significantly expand on D&D’s social and exploration pillars, which have traditionally been underdeveloped compared to combat. So that classes can level up, they will have more access to skills as well as the ability to pair them with their primary attributes.

“If you have a social scene and the barbarian has to sit and watch, or an exploration scene and the rogue’s doing it all and everyone else is just twiddling their thumbs, that’s not fun for everybody at the table,” Morrissey said. “But we also wanted to make sure that it made sense. So you’ll get some people that say, ‘I don’t want my gruff dwarf to have social skills, that’s not his character.’ My reply to that is, ‘Antisocial is a type of social.’ Your gruff dwarf can intimidate people, he can resist charms or resist things that other people are doing.”

It was important that every aspect of the game functioned at higher levels. Level Up’s developers went through every spell to make sure exploration didn’t become irrelevant as characters got more powerful and gained the ability to teleport and generate their own food and water. Level Up’s developers went through every spell to make sure exploration didn’t become irrelevant as characters gained more power and the ability to teleport or generate their own food and water. Level Up: Adventurer’s Guide provides rules for strongholds, based in part on Morrissey’s What’s O.L.D. N.E.W. Game System, which ensures players get excited about winning gold.

“One of the big things people asked for was things to spend money on in 5E, especially as you get to higher levels,” he said. “So we went and gave prices to every single magic item and we’ve added the strongholds that give your character a place in the world, something to be proud of, something to come home to, something to develop. Your stronghold is upgradeable as needed. It can be used as the basis for a campaign. I think that is a fun way to play.”

EN Publishing put out an open call for designers who had worked on 5E before, and assembled a diverse team that Morrissey said helped address some of the more dated aspects of D&D. Some of these designers have disabilities and proposed that languages should be able to sign. The designers also created rules to assist with wheelchairs and prosthetics. The race has been separated into heritage and culture.

“We wanted to separate out the cultural baggage from everything,” Morrissey said. “A monk is pretty much linked into an Asian stereotype. I didn’t want to say you can’t play that, but you could also play this big Irish bearded pit fighter and any other type of unarmed character. It’s the same with the barbarian, which is kind of based around a Conan archetype. The idea was to have elves dressed in armor and charging into battle like unstoppable Juggernauts. It’s just expanding those areas of design space.”

Step up The compatibility logo is available for free and the license can be used by any publisher that wants it.

“All these publishers will make the whole ecosystem of the game bigger and better,” Morrissey said. “The core publisher can’t do everything because you have to pick and choose which you’re going to do, and there are certain things where a third party might be more adventurous, might do something wacky that you haven’t thought of, might take something in a totally different direction.”

EN Publishing is working on Level Up and has a number of other products, such as a deck with maneuver cards. These will be available in August. A Dungeon Delver’s Guide Kickstarter will bring new options to Kickstarter, as well as rules for 100 traps or dungeons. These can also be generated by random rolls.

“A lot of people ask, are we trying to compete with 5E?” Morrissey said. “We’re not. We’re running alongside 5E, and we’re an option for those people who just want a little more depth to it. What we really, really hope is people come to our system and enjoy it enough that we get to support it with a whole line of sourcebooks.”