An outstanding re-write of D&D 5e. Manages to incorporate many of the best features of Pathfinder 2e without bogging the game down in unnecessary crunch. Unlike many supplements which introduce power creep that makes balancing encounters increasingly difficult, this allows characters to be developed more laterally by allowing them a greater range of what are effectively mini-feats. And probably best of all, it's a great way to tell Hasbro and WotC to go pound sand while still getting to play a better-written version of their own handbook.

One quibble that I would homebrew modify: "Remove Curse" appears on the bard and druid spell lists, but not that of the cleric. It's got to be one of the most quintessentially cleric-y spells in existence, so that's my edit.

The marshal class is a nice addition for players who excel at teamwork, but they're even better when the party is in need of a martial DMNPC who won't hog the spotlight while optimizing the performance of the party.

The short of it:

My party agree, this is the answer to 5e's short falls. There are some quirks and if you want to mix with standard 5e rules, your DM is going to have to do the work to make it happen. But, it could be worth it for your party.

This product absolutely fell short of the mark. It's not as compatable with 5E as they lead you to believe. It's not Advanced 5E. It's an unnecessary RPG that takes a lot of cues from D&D.

If you're looking for something different there are many excellent options out there. Steer clear of this one.

I was really excited for these updates, fully backed the kickstarter, but was underwhelmed with the final product. I don't think this is a fully independently playable alternative to 5e, that is also compatible, as balanced, and would be as fun on it's own as 5e is. The design is just not quite there. Lots of great ideas and fun ways to spice things up, which I definitely recommend hacking into 5e if your PCs are interested in specific areas/ideas, but I feel like if you want to add things like more old-school exploration and resource tracking to your 5e (or 5e adjacent game), for example, things like Five Torches Deep do it better and simpler. And sadly the complexity/mechanics they add just doesn't quite come together for me to seem like it'll add a corresponding amount of fun.

Also, the other two books are still great and perfectly good additions as DM tools for 5e, so I think their overall value is retained despite A5E not quite coming together as a system for me.

But again, lots of fun ideas and inspirations, even if the system as a whole doesn't quite fulfill what was promised.

Honestly the best system to play DnD. With this book every class has it's purpose and tools to roleplay (man I love Sorcerer and Bard from now). Lots of small mechanics, that I was looking for too long (medicine, weapon difference and adventure mechanic). Will never return to DnD 5. Only A5E!

Just to put this out there at the start: This is a product conceived of, designed, and published by enthusiasts working loosely collaboratively, not a dedicated professional design team backed by a megalithic corporate publisher. It is very obviously not a product of a single vision, and that makes it a challenge to write a concise review of the entire product or give it a single rating. Some parts of this product are quite good and some parts needed a bit more revision. Some parts cohere really well and some parts appear to have been designed completely in isolation. Etc.

It's also worth it to be clear at the start -- the product description, as of the date of this review, explicitly states that this product is "An advanced rule system which adds depth to the core 5th Edition rules while maintaining full compatibility." This is false. It is either a mistaken advertisement on the part of the publisher, or is a duplicitous statement that depends on a definition of "full compatibility" that means something other than "entirely compatible." You simply cannot drop components of base 5e into this game or vice-versa. Most crucially, you can't swap subclasses between this game's classes and base 5e's classes without work on your part to adapt to mechanics shifts such as the A5E fighter lacking the base figthter's Action Surge feature.

Having gotten those major gripes out of the way at the start, what I can say is that this product is well-conceived and that parts of it really improve on the base 5e experience. For groups looking to give their players a greater number of mechanical options at character creation and advancement, most of the content in this product will be a fun, welcome addition to play. For those looking to beef up the tactical combat experience of base 5e, the system will deliver a lot -- a LOT -- of new crunch. For those playing in older-style sandbox games where the fun is in meeting a new mechanical challenge, regardless of where that challenge comes from or how it "fits" in the world, this system will be a slam-dunk.

But, for those for whom immersion is a major priority, the sizeable dissonance between mechanics and theme will be a constant, jarring presence during play. For those frustrated with WotC's problematic racial essentialism, the new character origin rules will be an incomplete solution. For those who don't have a ton of time to sift through rules and try and parse out rules-as-intended from rules-as-written, you had better hope your DM has more time and patience on their hands than you do.

The best feature of the game, by far, is the revamped expertise system (which, just to be clear, is another component of this game that simply isn't compatible with base 5e). Rather than doubling your proficiency bonus, gaining expertise in a circumstance grants you an additional die to roll, similar to but broader than the base DMG's alternative "proficiency die" system. It really helps give player characters a sense of specialization; in particular, it met the needs of one of my players who dislikes 5e's bounded accuracy system because it makes him feel like he's never truly advancing. There are a variety of places where expertise comes into play in A5E, and there are a lot of options for how to gain it, when to apply, etc.

The system also does a good job of codifying and reducing ambiguity in certain base 5e situations, such as a player saying "I want to jump on this dragon and try to attack it while it flies away!" and the DM scratching their head and trying to remember the grapple rules. The set of "basic combat maneuvers" helps put players on the same page with respect to those kinds of called-shots situations.

Not every new system or mechanic is as well-designed as the expertise system, however. Within the 20+ pages of combat maneuvers available to players, there are more than a few head-scratchers -- "trap" choices that are clearly inferior to similarly-worded alternatives, maneuvers that clearly were designed mechanics-first and immersion second or not at all, ambiguous wording that means your group will have to house-rule more than a few maneuver outcomes, maneuvers that seem to be custom-made for certain classes but are inexplicably unavailable to those characters, etc. The most frustrating example for me, and an example that IMO best demonstrates the idea that the game's disparate parts were designed largely siloed from one another, is the maneuver "Death Blow" -- basically an assassination feature. It is, incredibly curiously, unavailable to the A5E's version of the Assassin Rogue subclass, the Cuttthroat. There are also maneuvers that might let a gnome with STR 6 throw a red dragon 15 feet, etc. etc. It feels whoever designed this section of the game thought primarily about "fun mechanical things to do in a tactical combat game" rather than ways to create evocative combat scenes in a tabletop RPG.

The character origin system is another point of frustration for me. Most of it is useful and good, but the system still doesn't avoid the racial essentialism of WotC's origins system, even though it describes explicitly the importance of distinguishing between a character's cultural upbringing and their genetic heritage. The most egregious example is the dwarven heritage, which leans deeper into the "all dwarves are crafty" stereotype than even base 5e does, giving all dwarves proficiency with artisan's tools, a far more niche choice than weapon proficiencies. There also isn't a coherent and consistent theme throughout the origins chapter -- some heritages, like dwarves, lean heavily on a creation narrative (leading to, e.g., artisanry being a "heritable" component of being a dwarf somehow), while others talk about how heritages evolved (occasionally leading to equally frustrating "heritable traits" such as, e.g., the human's "sheer stubbornness and will to live" or the still-tribal wilderness-wanderer focus of the orc heritage).

For me, personally, the biggest frustration with this system is the dissonance between features' mechanics and theme. For better or worse, one of the ways that base 5e stands out is that subclass options feel very coherent with the theme of the character. In A5E, it feels like features either come from a mechanics-first mindset and have a thin veneer of flavor on top of them, or feel like someone said "wouldn't it be cool if you could do this!" and didn't think about how the feature would play out mechanically. And it really, REALLY takes me out of the game when reading the rules.

The most hilariously egregious example is the Marshal class's "miraculous protector" feature, which, when an ally "within range of your Commanding Presence" (which, when you gain the feature, is a 30-ft, LINE OF HEARING aura-style radius) is hit by a critical hit, you can use your reaction to "become the target of the attack." In a vacuum, this seems like a cool tactical moment where you shove a party member out of the way of an attack and take the hit. BUT -- because your Commanding Presence is 30-ft radius and line-of-hearing only, your Marshal does not need to be adjacent to their ally, or even be on their feet or free to move. They can be fully restrained and behind a wall, still allowing you to "become the target" of the attack -- which also raises questions about what it means to "become the target" of a melee attack 30 feet away from you and on the other side of the wall. There is no explanatory language in the feature that could lead a DM to make a consistent ruling based on more than a personal sense of what should or shouldn't be possible, and unless your group is highly coherent and functional, I could see it leading to rules squabbles. Another example is how Marshals and Berserkers gain abilities that "take control" of NPCs, such as requiring an NPC to "make or accept a challenge" (so a 9th level berserker can challenge the Queen of the realm to a duel and somehow compel her to accept the duel?) or other things like that.

For your group, these might be features, not bugs -- beer-and-pretzels groups where it's fun to see what kinds of silly escapades you can get into and out of, or monster-of-the-week groups where there aren't lasting consequences will probably just incorporate these things without problems. But for narrative-heavy groups, these rules introduce ambiguity and chances for frustration or above-the-table conflict.

All of this says nothing of the fact that the book is simply not well-edited. It is riddled with typos, creating further ambiguity in the rules, and would have benefited from another layout pass (the character origin chapter mentions skill specialties only in passing and refers you to two other sections 400 pages later in the book, one of which only refers you to the other section), and -- most egregiously -- doesn't include the Journey rules that so many characters' features make reference to.

From this review you can probably gauge what kind of game I run, and you can probably gauge whether these criticisms are likely to apply to your own usage of this product. My opinion is that this product solves some of the well-known problems with base 5e that have cropped up over the years, and makes good use of its basis in the 5e system, but introduces a host of new problems that, to me, signify a less experienced hand at the tiller and a lack of care for elegance and coherence in design. It borders close on being a system "designed by committee," and you'll notice the places where its Frankensteinean creation process resulted in obvious stitches and grafts.

Really obsessed with this product! They provide so many more options for Players and GMs alike, all while keeping everything within a manageable level of complexity. I look at 5e with a bit of disappointment now that I have A5e. On top of everything, the creators are really involved in the community and offer lots of support and updates.

Even if you decide you don't want everything in these books, they're still invaluable resources for providing more options and guidance on how to run your 5e game. That being said, I don't see myself going back to 5e any time soon now that I have this!

To be honest this book was a great disappointment for me and my group. We followed the project since the early days and had hi expectations for it. But at some point in the playtest it lost their way. To a point that even having the option of using the classes players prefer to use the original 5e ones. At some point we abandoned this book just for lack of popularity on the table.

It was a shame cause we all agree with the diagnosis. But we did not like the particular solution that this book offers.

To put salt in the injure. The compatibility with the original 5e is misleading. It sure is compatible but with a lot of limitations and extra work. To the point that you have to choose to go with full original or full this new rules. And we end up opting for the original.

Everything in 5e, plus a whole lot more. With no increase in complexity. I recently started two tables of mostly new players. One with 5e. One with a5e. It took us a couple of sessions to get going, and then we were racing. But a5e just has a hell of a lot more possiblities in play.

I introduced Level Up: Advanced 5E to my gaming group, and it has quickly become a favourite. We all like D&D and 5E, but 5E is so cookie-cutter that characters often feel flat or like retreads. A5E offers a huge variety of character creation and advancement options by decoupling a PC's species (or "heritage") from their culture (among other changes), as well as extensive changes to the classes themselves. The addition of features like expertise dice make skills and ability checks feel valuable, and not just accessories tacked on as an afterthought to combat abilities. Exploration challenges offer a great variety of additional engagement for players, making travel fun and interesting again. Where we have made use of 5E material, there has been little to no difficulty in making it work equally well with A5E.

I'm very pleased with this system, and look forward to running and playing it even more!

A few sessions into a new campaign using this system, migrating from D&D 5e, and it's already proving to enhance our game significantly. Extra systems for traveling and downtime help round out connective pieces that our group loves to engage in, while changes to more directly existing 5e rules help solve some of my personal gripes with how death and injury work. While these changes initially appear to appeal to a slightly more tactical end of the spectrum, many of them are focused on subtely guiding story or narrative beats. Each class has been given a suite of entirely social class abilities to compliment their combat abilities, which are greatly expanded in options. Martials in particular feel like much more interesting options than their original 5e counterpart with the addition of Combat Maneuvers.

I do feel like I should throw a word of warning here: Some of the marketing for Level Up claims it adds depth without complexity, which I don't think holds up. There is some additional complexity here with character creation that is unavoidable, with some level of decision making required almost every level. Many people, myself included, welcome this additional complexity, but a few people in my party have expressed some difficulty adjusting from original 5e's ability to pick a class at level one and a subclass at level three and call it a day. Again, martials in particular involve interacting with an unavoidable new breadth of options, there's no pick and forget class option here. However, other options for additional depth and complexity, like the journey mechanics, are just that, options and are there if you find that sort of thing engaging, and easily brushed over if you don't.

That said, all of this additional complexity has hit a sweet spot for me, providing much more interesting options, a stronger reason to look excitedly forward to the next few levels, without becoming overbearing. Other rules like chasing a bigger Expertise die create interesting feedback loops that drive interesting plans and focusing on characters strengths in a way that the binary Advantage can't. Finally, it's worth nothing the Foundry VTT system my group uses to play is phenomenal even in its early stages, which is important to my group for any game we play as we're all spread over the US.

My only gripe is that A5E came up with a less confusing word to denote different tiers of Combat Maneuvers (which are rated by degree, instead of level), and did not apply this distinction to Spells, which continue to share namespace with the wildly different scale of character/class levels.

This game is a little more complex than what some people may percieve going in, but on the whole, its an incredible and rewarding addition to D&D.

Biggest Pros:

1. Heritage, Culture, Background, Destiny replace race and background in terms of your character building (i.e you can have a dwarf who was raised by elves, who gets dwarven racial feats, but elven cultural traits. Stat boosts come from background (which you can read to be more like an occupation, or just 'what your character did'), which makes MUCH MORE sense than purely racial. What you do should be more important than what youre born as.
2. The exploration pillar. My goodness its totally rebuilt and better than I thought possible. It's mechanically sound and gives the ranger an area of expertise (while theyre still very useful inside any city as well). If you don't use exploration, at all, then youre missing out on a really great system. The exploration bullet points apply more to the
3. The character options have been improved, and martials feel awesome. I love the changes to Fighter, Monk (adept, in this system), Ranger, Bard (instruments have a purpose!!!), Sorc and Wizard. I havent gotten to try much else, given its only been out for a month.
4. The Marshal class. I think people were saying its "4e's battlemaster?" I did not play 4e, but if that helps you visualise it great. Its a martial support class, which can use one of its attacks to compel one its allies to attack instead. This is a unique class, and I love the idea of a support like this. One excellent feature is "Help" as a bonus action
5. Spells, and RARE SPELL Variants. Special variants of spells that do unique things.
6. The "Rattled" condition, and the reworking of special maneuvers (shove, grapple, disarm) to only use one of your attacks (meaning at higher levels, it can be beneficial to to use a special maneuver instead of 2 attacks, since you dont have to sacrifice all your damage that turn.
7. Theres a lot more, but Strongholds, Followers, Strife and Fatigue, and Crafting all have great reworks/additions that make them important.

Biggest Cons:

1. The character creation process, because youre probably coming over from 5e, is extensive, since you need to re-learn a few things, and there are so many options for Heritage, Culture, Background, and Destiny. You might need an extra long session 0.
2. If you run a one city campaign, the exploration pillar might not be used at all, which, imo, may kneecap this system. iMO the class and fatigue/strife things are well done enough to subsist, but I think Rangers become pretty meh in a "one city campaign" scenario. Exploration and journeying is so baked into the idea for this system, I think its important to include it.
3. The book is meaty, but the journey activities section is totally located in the DMG (trials and treasures) meaning the players dont know about that entire aspect of the system, until you can work it out with them.

Overall, its a super strong system with a lot of positives that you can structure a campaign around to make it a superb experience.

This book is really terrific. The authors have taken 5e's pretty whitebread version of d20 and given us a number of great ways to use it.

Highlights at my table:

• Ranger and adept (monk) players are very excited that their character now seems to better match the source materials. If I can get someone else to run, I'll pop into a marshall.
• Culture half of the old "race" concepts worked so well with backgrounds.
• My players are very interested in the exploration and social interaction part of the storytelling so it isn't just interconnected fights.

There's a lot more to praise here, but most of that is in the other two books.

This is a 1 star product and earned its 1 star review. Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition is a perplexing product to everyone save those who have been involved with it from inception. The marketing materials used misleading language, and it's best to know what exactly it is, and what it isn't. First, it is not "compatible with Dungeons & Dragons" as almost every Game Master and player would define compatibility. Some of the material used this, or similar phrases, which is inaccurate. It is an entirely new rule system that shares some common traits with 5th Edition D&D, so they can technically say that 5e D&D modules can be used with Level Up, with some tweaks, much like how Pathfinder could run 3rd ed D&D modules, with (fewer) tweaks. It is not actually compatible, given the staggering amount of rule changes, many of which are very poorly thought out.

A lot of core feats and spells were changed from their D&D versions, purportedly for "game balance" reasons. If the end result was a tightly balanced game, this could be excused, but for every supposed "imbalance" in the original (far superior) 5e D&D rule set (which is not even one of my favorite editions of D&D, notably) they "fixed," Level Up adds at least three new glaring imabalance issues. Despite a second round of edits, the game is riddled with poorly thought out mechanics, poorly worded mechanics, and unusable mechanics. The amount of house ruling it would take to make this game functional is so massive that very little could be used "out of the box" in any kind of a functional game experience.

Those who remember 3.0 D&D's Toughness feat and other similar options recall the issue of "trap" choices and builds. Level Up has added many, many more of these than D&D has ever had in any edition. There are now even "trap" mechanics built in alongside core elements like Grapples and Bull rush. A new armor table is both massively complicated and further unbalanced. It introduced armor and weapon breakage and repair rules that are mandatory, not optional, as the entirety of the balance of the armor table is based on some armor types, otherwise objectively better than others, breaking more often. This is the kind of tedium that most editions of D&D, especially 5e, have moved away from for a reason.

On the rules as a whole, a big letdown is how inseparably linked they all are. It is not possible to treat Level Up like a "optional add on rules toolkit." It is a full system replacement, only, and cannot function otherwise. You cannot use the armor and weapon table without adding the breakage and repair rules. You cannot use many exploration pillar class features without the paired rules limiting carrying capacity in strange, unrealistic ways. The game wants foraging for food to be ever-present, even for level 20 planeswalking characters, so now decanters of endless water produce non-potable water, food stored in bags of holding does not satiate hunger, and spells like Goodberry and Create Water no longer relieve hunger and thirst.

It's unclear who Level Up is for. It is far more complicated than Pathfinder, 1st or 2nd edition, massively more complicated than 5e D&D, and any prior edition including 2nd edition Advanced D&D, and the payoff is dubious, at best. It is not a rewarding system tactically, but rather, riddled with trap builds, bizarre, illogical mechanics, and in need of more than another round of edits, but a complete ground up revision, making it much more of a hassle for potential Game Masters than it is worth. Some of the ideas were sound, like giving classes things to do outside combat that lacked them, adding on martial maneuvers, magic item prices and item creation, and so on. From multiplying static modifiers on critical hits, to altered spells, feats, expertise as rolled dice instead of a double proficiency bonus, and other altered rules, Level Up seems to have made an effort to be as incompatible as possible with D&D rules, while still claiming compatibility with D&D modules.

All of this is so poorly worded, balanced, and presented, in the book, that I cannot imagine a GM who doesn't opt to either find another third-party product that adds similar elements in a more professional fashion, elect to form their own house rules instead, or just play a different game entirely - which could include simply choosing to play 5th edition D&D, since it is a different game from Level Up. It is very strange to see the game made more incompatible than it needed to be, with all of its bizarre rule changes, when none of them were required to "add content to 5e D&D that was not there." Magic item prices are a welcome addition. Creating a system both more complex than simply tracking encumbrance, and less realistic, adds both abstraction and needless minutae that does not fit within the heroic fantasy mold of D&D, or the grittiness of many "hard core" OSR throwback games.

If you want to have to read every new class ability multiple times and then take your best guess at what the designers "meant," since what is written is incomprehensible, have at it. If you want to run official D&D modules but think that weapons and armor breaking mid-combat, followed by a series of largely negligible difficulty rolls to repair them, somehow adds verisimilitude to your games, maybe Level Up is of value to your group. If you plan to use any actual 5e D&D content, however, whether it's classes, sub-classes, races, or feats, whether from Wizards or third parties, you cannot, with the Level Up rule system. There are vague claims that it has been playtested and balanced to work alongside actual D&D classes and races, yet it cannot, by definition. Feats, spells, and abilities those D&D classes rely on to function are altered beyond recognition. New rules for the exploration pillar are addressed in features of Level Up classes that obviously do not exist for actual D&D classes, being new rules, making D&D classes unable to function with these rules, unless the GM wants to engage in such laborious house ruling that it calls the whole endeavor into question.

Level Up is made to replace D&D, and for most, it simply isn't good enough to do that. It is certainly not made to "work alongside" D&D. It is not a series of rules "expansions" that can be cherry-picked from. Everything is, regrettably, linked, so Level Up is a rule set that is all, or nothing. For me, I prefer "nothing," given that the effort of trying to pluck the good bits from this linked web of rules would be extreme (there are some good bits, just not enought to warrant the effort). If you are just looking for magic item price guidelines, there are official Wizards sources, as well as free resources for those. Other third-party products have provided Tome of Battle style martial maneuvers that "add on" to D&D without a system replacement. Essentially, everything Level Up offers that is of worth can be found elsewhere in a version that is more compatible with D&D, more professional, and better thought out.

This game is needlessly complex. Dense rule sets like Exalted, Anima: Beyond Fantasy, and 1st edition Pathfinder running with multiple supplements, are more intuitive. It is extremely imbalanced, adding far more balance problems than those it "corrects" from 5e D&D. Many new rules simply do not make sense, and a GM will have to guess what was intended, because it certainly wasn't written down coherently. It seems to lack editing and playtesting. Given that some major rules changed during the short window between the books' "beta" versions and "final" drafts, by definition those versions of the rules were not playtested, since they were brand new, last minute course corrections done in a span of weeks.

It is entirely understandable that a product like this can happen, unfortunately. With enough time and resources spent on something, re-writing and revising a work multiple times, as well as conducting surveys, reading suggestions, and so on, after enough time a version emerges that seems "good enough." If you've spent long enough on something, it must be good, right? Not in this case. Some works need to be crumpled up and tossed aside for a fresh start. This game clearly needed that at some point, but after sufficient time and investment, a project presses on, whether it has merit and value or not. Level Up does not.

Buyer Beware, and all that.

I am thrilled with the plethora of ideas and options presented in this book. The designers basically stripped the 5e core down to its roots and rebuilt it from the ground up. Its recognizable as D&D, and many of the classess or options could be floated directly into your 5e game, but I think you'd be better off just running it fully as your core game. For me, the redesigned classes have really breathed life back into the original concepts for the standard rogue/fighter/wizard/etc core classes, cleaning up much of the problems found in their original designs. FINALLY! FRIKKING FINALLY! Some monk designs my players want to play. Excuse me.. Adept! :)

The product also went to great lengths to try to strip out old stale design language that might be problematic for some people, as well as changing old conventions to avoid cultural stereotypes. So Herald instead of Paladin, Adept instead of Monk, etc. And I, as an old grognard who started playing D&D back in '79, appreciate it. I love this game and want it to be able to be shared by everyone, the effort to make it accessible is an extra plus in my book. +1 bonus star.

I've bought many RPG products for various games, this is one of them that gave me content that I KNOW I'll use at my table!

Game on!