I like Tales of the Valiant.
That is not a small statement. I spent a decade inside 5E. I own the books. I ran the modules. I built the characters. I kept the binders. And then the desire to sit down and play that game fell off a cliff.
It was not boredom with fantasy. It was not a sudden love affair with some other system that “does it better.” It was simpler and more insulting than that. I put more into 5E than I ever got back.
I do not mean the dopamine of a new subclass or a feat that lets me stack another rider on a cantrip. I mean the actual session. The hour at the table. The fight that should have been dangerous and instead became a spreadsheet. The character that started as a person and ended as four pages of exceptions, riders, bonus-action tax, and features I had to look up because they only fire once per long rest and I forgot they existed.
5E rewards building. It is generous there. It is stingy at the table.
You spend an evening assembling a character. You hunt for the right lineage, the right background, the right feat chain, the right magic item that patches the hole the class left open. You print another page. You add another box. You write another reminder in the margin because the game will not remember it for you. Then you sit down to play, and the return on that work is a long fight, a monster that is a bag of hit points, and a feature you never used because the trigger never quite lined up.
After a while the wheels come off.
The sheet gets thicker. The character does not get more interesting. You are carrying more rules than personality. You are carrying more options than decisions. You are carrying a legal document that happens to have a name at the top.
I had the proof sitting right in front of me at a quarry.
The party was up against goblins and dire wolves. Interesting terrain. A timer. Hazards. Elevation. Places to shove people off a ledge. All the encounter-design boxes ticked. A good story attached to it, too. This was not a hallway with six identical rooms. This was supposed to be the kind of fight you remember.
After a while, I got so bored I started fudging the rolls just to make it end.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I didn’t miss the goblin. Hit with the arrow. Why is this still going? The characters felt invincible. They were invincible. There were no stakes. The wolves were scenery. The goblins were speed bumps with hit points. The timer stopped mattering because nobody was actually going to drop. The terrain stopped mattering because nobody was scared enough to use it.
Why did I even bother?
I wanted ToV to be the fix. On paper it should have been. Luck instead of Inspiration. Lineage and Heritage instead of the old ability-score tax. Talents instead of feat shopping. Monsters that are supposed to hit harder and die faster. Printed books I actually own. Compatibility with a decade of 5E material. The Monster Vault looks meaner than the 5.5E book. The design says the combats should squeeze.
At my table, they did not.
Same chassis. Same long rounds. Same invincible party. Same feeling that I had built a good scene and the system paid me back with a grind. I still found myself staring at the dice and deciding the goblin got hit so we could all move on. ToV did not change that experience. I am still struggling with it.
That is the honest part I have to write down, because this blog is not a press release. ToV is still the 5E I chose. I still prefer it to 5.5E. I still want the books on the shelf instead of a client and a subscription. I still think Kobold Press kept more of the game I liked. None of that made the quarry fight scare anyone.
The problem is deeper than branding. It is the 5E math, the action economy, the way hit points and healing and bounded accuracy conspire to make a “deadly” encounter into a twenty-minute accounting exercise. You can dress it in Black Flag language, and it is still the same machine. You feed it a better encounter, and it gives you a safer one. You feed it a clock and a cliff, and it ignores both until you start lying to the dice.
I am not done with the 5E library. I am done pretending the official game, or the better clone of it, is paying me back for the work.
If the character needs a second page, it had better be because something interesting happened, not because the rules ran out of room on the first one. And if I build a quarry with wolves, a clock, and a drop, I want the fight to scare the table. I do not want to sit there and start missing on purpose so we can all go home.
ToV is still on the shelf. I still like it. I am still looking for the part where the table feels dangerous again.
