Level Up A5E Hits Different

Level Up A5E hits different for me. The game is like a "community feedback" for the original 2014 5E rules, and incorporates the best-of-the-best ideas from D&D 3.5E and D&D 4E, along with tightening up the game's math to a degree that I have not seen either D&D 2024 (which got more OP) or even Tales of the Valiant (which mirrored 2014) ever do. The game explicitly supports the three pillars of play through its design: combat, social, and exploration. The entire SRD was rewritten from the ground up to create the world's only complete and freely available 5E SRD, with all options from the A5E core books available.

That last part is the real difference. The official D&D SRD and the Black Flag SRD were written to leave large chunks of the game out on purpose. You get one subclass per class, a handful of backgrounds, selected spells and monsters, and enough rules to build new content without being able to actually play the full game from the document. A5E did the opposite. Go to a5esrd.com, and you have every heritage, culture, destiny, class, combat maneuver, journey challenge, exploration procedure, and monster from the core books. You can sit down and run a complete campaign with nothing but the free SRD. No missing pieces, no "buy the book to get the rest of the options."

A5E did the work that 2014 needed but never received. Combat maneuvers give martial characters real decisions every round without turning them into spellcasters. Exertion is a resource that actually feels like effort instead of another pool of points that resets on a short rest. Expertise dice sit between advantage and a flat bonus so the game has texture instead of binary outcomes. Fatigue and strife tracks make exploration and social scenes have teeth. The journey system turns travel into something you play instead of something you skip.

It also makes the darkvision problem matter again. Both D&D and Tales of the Valiant still treat darkness as dim light for anyone with darkvision, so sight-based Perception is at disadvantage, and passive Perception takes a –5. ToV reduced how many lineages get the trait, but the rule itself never changed, and most tables still ignore it. A5E does not. Because it has a highly robust, dedicated exploration system, walking into a dungeon with a –5 Passive Perception penalty is incredibly dangerous. Under the Trials & Treasures rules, an unlit party relying purely on darkvision will consistently miss hidden traps, walk straight into environmental hazards, and fail to spot hidden monsters before an ambush. Light sources are not flavor. They are how you survive the Exploration pillar.

Heritage plus culture plus destiny is a cleaner way to build a character than race-plus-background ever was. You get the mechanical bits you need without the identity argument every time a new book drops. Classes have choices at every level instead of dead levels and "you get another use of the same thing." The marshal exists. The ranger is not a joke. Weapons have properties that matter. Supply is tracked without becoming a spreadsheet.

This is the version of 5E that still believes the world is bigger than the character sheet. You can drop the 10-minute exploration turn, wandering monster checks, mapping, and resource attrition on top of it, and it does not fight you. The math is tight enough that a tough fight stays tough. The exploration rules already assume you are going to spend time in the wilderness instead of teleporting past it. Social encounters have procedures instead of "roll persuasion until the DM gets tired."

2024 went the other direction and made everything a little more powerful and a little more same-y. Tales of the Valiant stayed close to 2014 and did not really fix the exploration or martial problems. A5E is the one that treated the three pillars as equal design space instead of afterthoughts.

If you want to run 5E like an old-school game, this book already did half the work for you. The rest is just putting the procedures back in: time, light, food, mapping, and making the players tell you what they are actually doing instead of what skill they are rolling. A5E will not fight you on any of that. It was built for it.

Revisiting Level Up A5E

I still really like Level Up: Advanced 5E. I originally bought the A5E Monstrous Menagerie by accident, thinking this was a normal 5E Bestiary, but then I found it was for another version of 5E, and I felt I wasted my money. Then, I got the other two books...

And happily, I was wrong.

The Monstrous Menagerie is not a clone of the Monster Manual with extra pages. It is the best monster book you can drop onto a 5E table right now. Every creature has something to do besides soak hit points and wait for its turn. They have motivations. They have signs and foreshadowing hints that they are already in the area before anyone ever rolls initiative. They have behavior lists, so you know what they actually do when the party is not looking.

Unlike D&D 2024, which generalizes everything and strips the lore right out of the monsters, A5E’s creatures have ecology, motivation, and personality. The dungeon is not a video-game instance. The orc is not a bag of numbers. You hear the drums. You see the tracks. You smell the campfire. Then you decide whether you want the fight.

That is old-school thinking. Once I had the Menagerie, I picked up the Adventurer’s Guide and Trials & Treasures. Same pattern. They did not “power up” the game. They stayed inside the original 5E math and then gave every pillar something to do.

Exploration is no longer a montage. There are journeys. There is terrain that matters. Exhaustion is not a joke. Gold actually has places to go besides magic shops. Martial characters get maneuvers instead of “I attack again.” Heritage and culture are split so a character is more than a race line on the sheet. Destiny gives you a reason to care about the story that is not just another subclass feature.

None of this breaks compatibility. You can run any 2014 adventure, any 2024 adventure, any third-party module. The numbers still work. The difference is that the referee now has procedures instead of vibes.

That is what I have been chasing on my blogs for years. The 10-minute turn. Mapping. Resource tracking that actually hurts. Player skill instead of “I roll Perception.” A5E already has most of those tools printed and playtested. You do not have to invent them in the margins of your 2014 books.

I still run Greater 5E. Characters from 2014, 2024, Tales of the Valiant, and A5E sit at the same table. But when I want the game to feel like 1980 instead of 2014, I reach for the Level Up books first. The Menagerie sits next to my other monster books and gets used more than any of them.

I thought I wasted money on a book for “another version.” I ended up with the version that actually remembers why we sat down at the table in the first place.

The 10-Minute Exploration Turn

What a messy topic. I could deep-dive into this, but once you dig deeper, you realize that time and movement have always been D&D's fatal flaw. Early versions of the game had you moving 120 feet every 10 minutes while mapping and exploring, and when you figure out the actual rate of speed, you have people literally moving in slow-motion through a dungeon.

At 0.136 miles per hour, the three-toed sloth is faster than you at 0.17 miles per hour. But this is careful exploration and mapping, so you will explore at a sloth's pace. Of course, the 10-minute exploration turn was always an artificial game construct, and we never questioned it - it just worked.

This was "game time" and "game movement," and it aggregated a lot of activities into one clean turn of time, and a 10-minute window. This isn't GURPS with its one-second turns. Simulation games were a natural reaction to this aggregation back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and the original Top Secret game in 1980 also had one-second combat turns.

And I know, if you are exploring that slowly and that carefully, how does anyone fall into a pit trap?  Every 12 feet you move, you take a minute checking the walls, ceiling, floor, and poking everything with a 10' pole. You poke the single foot of distance ahead of you for five seconds, then the next foot takes another five seconds, and so on, all the way down to 120 feet of hallway.

Then again, in real life, some things you would not expect to take an hour end up taking longer. When your life is on the line in a dungeon, I can see why many things all of a sudden take a lot longer to do.

AD&D had special multipliers for different types of movement. The game still used the 120' per 10 minutes for mapping and exploration, multiplied that speed by five for movement through known areas or using a map, and by ten if you were fleeing. Often, they kept the same movement on the map; they just reduced the time it took to move it, using fractions of a turn.

AD&D 2E tried reducing exploration rounds to a minute as cracks in the wall started to appear, and simulation games like GURPS and Champions started using real-world movement rates. The 10-minute turn was retained, but only for things like spell and torch durations.

D&D 3.0 and Wizards of the Coast removed the 10-minute exploration turn entirely. They used a system of "local movement" for 1 minute and "overland movement" per hour. "Tactical movement" was the combat per 6-second round.

D&D 5E is more of a freeform time tracking, whereas D&D 5.5E feels a little more structured and formalized. Dungeon movement is 200' per minute for slow, 300' for normal, and 400' for fast. All times are "as needed," so if searching a room takes 10 minutes, then it does. Movement is typically tracked per minute. Pulling in ToV and A5E: ToV tends to be like 2014 D&D, while A5E uses a journey system, but the movement rates are the same as in 5E.

Of all the 5E versions, D&D 5.5E has the cleanest exploration rules, with a dedicated section on the topic and suggestions for 1-minute and 10-minute blocks, depending on what is needed. D&D 2014 and ToV feel the softest on exploration structure, while A5E takes it on a more macro-scale and defines a journey for longer treks, while still keeping that softness at the lower scale.

All this to get to the point. What if you wanted to roll random wandering monster encounters every 2 BX-style dungeon exploration turns? In D&D 2024, this feels the easiest. Stick to one and ten-minute time blocks for movement and searching, keep an organized time record, and every 20 minutes roll for wandering monsters. The fact that D&D 5.5E has a dedicated section for exploration in the DMG helps a lot, and it allows me to easily slot this procedure in, along with a time tracker.

This can be easily extended to D&D 2014, ToV, and A5E. What makes D&D 2024 the winner among all other versions of 5E is that the game recognizes that structure is needed for running exploration and explicitly lays out a section to cover it. The earlier editions feel too soft on dungeon exploration (outside of A5E's structured journeys and the excellent rules for those), and that low-level, turn-by-turn, time-tracking, and torch-burning game just feels absent.

D&D 5.5E also adds more detail and structure to equipment, formalizing the in-game use of each item. This is likely the designers' experience with Pathfinder 2E coming up, with items needing discrete game uses and rules inside of them, rather than being more "loosey gooesy who cares" things you write on your character sheet to be used if the DM asks if you have something. D&D 5.5E also wins in terms of equipment rules, with a stronger set of rules to back them up.

Shadowdark, providing an excellent, tension-filled turn-based experience, likely influenced D&D 5.5E in tightening up the dungeon exploration rules and laying out the methods for those out in a section of the DMG. Competition here improved the game; the other 5E-based games were happy to stick with the very loose exploration system that felt more like narrative gaming.

What a messy, complicated subject!

So, in short, keep a tight time tracker for dungeon exploration, and track time in blocks rounded to the minute. If you rule, it takes 5 minutes to spike a door; mark 5 off the time tracker. One minute is the shortest measure of time tracked in the books outside of combat. Longer actions are best measured in 10-minute blocks.

Every 20 minutes, roll an old-school wandering monster check.

Every hour, another torch burns out.

Lanterns burn for 6 hours on one flask of oil.

It is easy to add detailed time-tracking to your game, along with old-school wandering monster encounters. What do you get for the effort? A ticking clock, forcing players to manage resources, spend time wisely, and it makes the environment come alive as wandering monsters creep about and hunt the characters in that maze of tight, twisting passages.

Alignment

 

Of all the modern 5E versions, in terms of alignment support? D&D 2014 and 2024 clearly win the alignment battle. Both systems preserve the classic AD&D-style 9-axis alignment system, so popularized in memes since the Internet was born. D&D 2024 reduces the mechanical aspects of alignment by removing it from monsters and by making spells such as "detect evil" detect only certain creature types. Also, where D&D 2014 has typical alignments for monsters, D&D 2024 does not.

So in a way, D&D 2014 is the strongest in terms of alignment and rules. I can see why the interactions with alignment rules were removed in 2024; they are an extra layer of rules used infrequently in special situations, and it is easier to leave them out, remove the special cases, simplify the game, and reduce the layered complexity of the system as a whole.

D&D 2024 is a more streamlined version of the concept, with alignment shifting toward a role-playing and personality-framing tool. It has very little to do with mechanical rules, and the game seems to be putting up a wall between roleplaying traits and traits that affect the rules. But they still kept the system and did not remove it entirely, unlike every other Open 5E clone.

Tales of the Valiant got rid of alignment entirely. Level Up Advanced 5E moved the entire system to "alignment traits," and it is removed from character creation. So, D&D 5.5E deserves praise for keeping alignment alive rather than throwing it all out. If we can point to bad choices, we have to point to the laudable ones.

The only game with the traditional alignment as we knew it in the old-school is still D&D. This is laid out best in the AD&D DMG:

BX only used three alignments: Lawful, Neutral, and Chaotic. So, what does this do for us in an old-school game? Let's go back to the source material, again:

"Alignment describes the broad ethos of thinking, reasoning creatures — those unintelligent sorts being placed within the neutral area because they are totally uncaring. Note that alignment does not necessarily dictate religious persuasion, although many religious beliefs will dictate alignment.

The overall behavior of the character (or creature) is delineated by alignment, or, in the case of player characters, behavior determines actual alignment.

Thus, alignment describes the world view of creatures and helps to define what their actions, reactions, and purposes will be. It likewise causes a player character to choose an ethos which is appropriate to his or her profession, and alignment also aids players in the definition and role approach of their respective game personae."

-AD&D 1E, Dungeon Masters Guide, p23

From the master himself, Gary Gygax, on why alignment is important. Now, while AD&D 1E did have mechanical alignment rules (detection spells, etc.), the description of alignment feels more in line with the streamlining of D&D 5.5E. It is kept in the game because it is such a strong roleplaying tool, and given how complicated the rest of 5E is, something has gotta give, so alignment was shifted away from the mechanics and moved back to a pure roleplaying guide.

Alignment defines the reactions, actions, and purposes of intelligent beings.

That's it. Gygax hit the nail on the head there. If you need a guide on how to roleplay a creature, alignment shall be your guide. Do you roll a friendly reaction from a group of chaotic evil bugbears? That could happen. Just because they are friendly doesn't mean they are all just as noble and caring as you. Due to their evil nature, they may stab you in the back when they see a chance. Alignment tempers reaction rolls and acts as a buffer so that every friendly creature towards your party doesn't become a paladin who hangs out with you constantly as best friends. You still shouldn't trust those bugbears, even though they are acting all nice right now.

This is a huge failure for both ToV and A5E. We can always port it in, but we should not have to. This is a clear failure of the game design communities listening too much to social media, feeling that "alignment is outdated," overreacting, and removing it entirely, with nothing to take its place. Saying "the game should not make moral judgments" is weak, and really, it is removing a critical tool that the DM will use to do the same thing.

Games that want to focus on selling you prewritten stories will slowly remove the tools that you can use to make your own. Of course, alignment isn't necessary if you get everything from the adventure module. All the motivations are there! You don't need these "extra words telling you something twice."

Alignment is such a necessary rule; I find myself subconsciously importing it into ToV and A5E, since those games are harder to roleplay without this universal and useful tool. Not having alignment makes the game harder to play and also harder to DM. This group of orcs? They are lawful evil, and they will generally stick to a deal they made, even though they are still rotten to the core. They make deals, expect them to be honored, and have just enough belief in order and structure to stick to their word, too.

D&D does alignment the best, it always has, and I hope it will continue.

If you are running a story-based game, alignment fades in importance since the prewritten story tells you all you need to know.

If you are running a sandbox game? Alignment becomes one of the most important factors in reactions and trustworthiness, and gives you a broad brush to begin painting with before you settle on the fine details. Alignment is critical for sandbox games.

Level Up Advanced 5E

Level Up Advanced 5E rewrote the SRD before the OGL debacle even was a thing. They rebuilt the game for community feedback, creating an adventure-compatible version of 5E that feels solid and supports the three pillars of play (combat, social, and exploration). Everything has been rethought through and redesigned from the ground up.

So this game was OGL-exempt because they rewrote everything as their own IP, then they licensed it out under three licenses (OGL, ORC, and CC-BY). That took an amazing amount of foresight, and it set them up well when everyone else was scrambling to remove the OGL from their games.

This game is sort of like Nimble 5e, a re-interpretation of 5E that does its own thing, but remains math-compatible for adventure support. Subclass compatibility is not recommended here, which is why ToV is the stronger choice for that type of 3rd party material.

What I like about Level Up A5E is that, since they rebuilt the game with extensive community feedback, it has many fixes inspired by old-school play, such as exploration being a core system, death mattering, and the removal of many of the 2014 annoyances and exploits. Of the three games we have considered, A5E has the most old-school DNA built into the system.

Martial classes are the best here, with combat maneuvers costing a stamina resource, and martial classes collecting and mastering new abilities as they level. This keeps them apart from caster-classes design-wise, but gives them cool powers they can use for resource management.

Rangers are similarly redesigned and can learn survival skills and become specialized in different survival techniques. This adds to the record-keeping and complexity of the game, but if you are deep into modding 2014 5E, you will find a lot to love here. You need rangers for wilderness adventures, and they do so many cool things.

The wilderness exploration game here is the best out of any version of 5E ever written, and actually beats the BX wilderness game in many areas. If you love survival-based games combined with 5E, you will find an excellent home here. The combat is also highly rated, with many options open to martial characters, making a strong core of non-caster class abilities and depth.

The backgrounds have the special game built into them, and also provide an amazing amount of interplay with the world, with those backgrounds able to "level up" and provide new bonuses and perks. Are you a soldier? Someday, you may earn the right to be able to call up a small force of soldiers yourself, be called upon for emergencies, and be given special missions by those you know.

Of all the 5E games, Level Up A5E has the best old-school feeling, since a lot of the feedback was from old-school players who wanted more of that in the game. Yes, this is still 5E, but it feels more like a heavily modded, deadly, and advanced version of the rules than anything else out there. If D&D 2024 is "BX 5E" then Level Up A5E is more like "AD&D 5E."

The six-level fatigue system was split into mental and physical tracks, which reduces its impact on combat effectiveness and makes it more usable and thematic. This is a step up from 2014 D&D and ToV, and on par with D&D 2024's ten-level straight modifier system. I can see how D&D 2024's ten-level system, past a -4 modifier, is equal to 2014's "one level and we are hosed" system.

Compared with D&D 2024? Level Up feels equal. While D&D 2024 is focused on streamlining and speed of play, Level Up A5E is more focused on creating depth in every subsystem, complicating the game while adding structural value through those additions and expansions. They go in opposite directions, with D&D 2024 being simpler and A5E being far more in-depth.

Every monster except orcs is in the Monsterous Menagerie. Orcs are now a core race, so they are excluded and use character classes as their "monster types," just like elves or dwarves. It is an alright change, one that fits the game's lore, but I still miss the Orc entry.

It is not like I don't have them in D&D 2014, and those port right in.

Here, Orcs are more their "World of Warcraft" style inspirations (early WoW, not today's jokey Orcs), so they get a bit more recognition and respect, and possibly their own kingdoms and holdings of lands with tribal infighting and politics. I actually do not mind that and see it as a strong point for the game, if you are going to pull Orcs out of the Monster Manual, make them equals in the strength of lore and the worlds. This is something Faerun and Greyhawk still ignore for the most part, and these races should be stronger in lore and the world's history, with their own lands, subfactions, conflicts, and history.

And no, these are not the silly Tex-Mex Orcs out of D&D 2024. What were they thinking?

While Level Up is still 5E, this game feels more old-school in spirit, and there isn't much I would want to change to make it feel that way. Death matters here, and even dropping to zero hit points has a cost. A lot of the rules incorporated are early D&D 2014 houserules, when old-school players still loved 5E, and that culture of play was trying to find a home in 5E before the Critical Role crowd took over, and the old-school players left for BX and 1E.

I can play Level Up with an old-school tone and feeling, not change any of the rules, and it automatically feels that way and works mechanically. Yet, the game is still 5E at heart, beating with the OG 2014 blood.

It is a unique, niche, and recommended game if you love the early days of 5E, before the drama and YouTube crowd, and when old-school play in 5E was still possible. Of all the games we talked about, Level Up Advanced 5E is the best old-school experience in 5E.

Level Up A5E is a niche game, but well worth your time.

The second best would be a tie between D&D 2024 and Tales of the Valiant. Both offer high ease of use and play improvements, and D&D 2024 reintroduces a wilderness exploration game. ToV does many things well and has a solid library of class designs that are on par with D&D's 2024 classes. ToV's support is better in many ways than D&D 2024's, and it is not tied to a live-service model. ToV will need a few extra books to support wilderness exploration, but the parts it needs are still here.

And D&D 2014 would take last place with its six corebooks and lack of a wilderness exploration game. While some of the patches make this a better game, the amount of books and patching needed drag this down.

Morale

Morale is a solid rule. This kept most OSR combats from becoming the modern "to the death" affair we saw starting in D&D 3 to 4, and it continued into 5E (where morale was an optional rule in the DMG). People play 5E like Diablo, where every monster in a room must be killed, and that is not old-school play. The OSR games were not like that, and if characters beat a side down hard and fast, they would flee, fight a retreat, or surrender.

This is when alignment came into play. Lawful characters would not kill those who surrendered.

Morale in BX was rated on a 2-12 scale, with 2 meaning the creature will not fight, and 12 being the creature will fight to the death (and never check morale). This was checked on a 2d6 roll; if the roll exceeded the morale number, they failed. The number could be adjusted by a few points up or down, depending on the situation.

"In general, morale is checked in critical combat situations. Two recommended times for morale checks are:

1. After a side's first death in combat (either monsters or characters).
2. When half the monsters have been incapacitated (killed, asleep due to magic, and so forth).

Monsters that successfully check morale twice will fight to the death."

-Dungeons & Dragons Basic Rules, Moldvay edition, 1980, page B27

In 5E, we do have morale rules, as follows:

• D&D 2024: Fight of Flight, DC 10 Wisdown saving throw
• D&D 2014: Morale, DC 10 Wisdown saving throw
• ToV: Morale, DC 10 Wisdom Save (TOV GMG, p75)
• LU A5E: No morale system, relies on the bloodied condition and mental stress.

This is the first time Level Up A5E fails at a category, interesting. It is not all that hard to standardize on the DC 10 Wisdom save for all games, since they are pretty much the same. Morale in any 5E version will work just like BX when it is checked, and what happens on failure.

This will most likely make fights easier, since if the players can take out a substantial number of creatures, they may break, organize a fighting retreat, or surrender. This is usually balanced by wandering monsters, so don't worry about challenge; let the dice fall where they may.

Morale introduces complications and moral quandaries into the adventure. What do you do with prisoners? Do you let them go, with them possibly running off to tell others? Do you use your only rope to tie them up? Is it even ethical to leave goblins tied up in a dungeon full of monsters that can eat them? Do you lock them in a room and spike the door shut, using a spike and time, and making noise that could attract wandering monsters? Do you cast a sleep spell on them all and hope for the best?

This is why we had alignment.

The lawful paladin would never allow a chaotic thief to kill helpless prisoners (or sleeping creatures), so the system built in a simulation of morality, mixing roleplaying with tactical decisions that could affect survival.

It is easy to treat monsters as video game enemies; you simply kill them all, and they "poof." When monsters act with self-preservation in mind, it introduces a double layer of decisions into the game. Is how you are going about "clearing this dungeon" ethical and moral? And how do you handle the inevitable surrenders when you lack the resources, time, or people to address them?

BX did a lot for us, even though by today's standard, it was a simple game. The depth of ethical and moral choices it forced upon us during a session surprised us all, and brought out the best and worst in people we thought we knew. You don't get the raw, visceral reactions when playing online of seeing people's faces and body language as they make these choices. You do when you are in person.

Nothing is stopping us from implementing these morale rules in our 5E games; most games already have them, though they're mostly forgotten. Well, in our old-school 5E game, we adopt the classic BX systems and let them work their magic.

A Blog for Everyone

Why did I start a 5E blog?

This came to me after realizing that many OSR YouTubers were treating BX as a "solve every problem" game, leading people to believe that a rule system was the answer to why they had fallen out of love with roleplaying. This is the classic "game hopping" cycle that even I go through constantly, and if you are a reader of my main blog, you know how the winds change in my mind.

But something told me "BX is not the answer," but people were getting this wrong, at least a part of it. I had to ask myself, "Can I have BX-style play in ANY game I play?"

And the answer is yes, I can.

I just need to go back to BX, pick out the classic methods and procedures of play from that game, identify them, and show people how to use them in any game. Any game can play "like" BX. Is it as lethal and deadly if I use 5E? No and yes, it depends on how we play the game. There are TPKs in 5E, but in general, it is less lethal than a BX game, which has a higher default tension level.

But lethality aside, my 5E game can be played using a BX turn structure and feels just like an old-school game.

And I went out and got D&D 2024, even though I feel I don't need it, and wasn't positive about the changes they made. I am supporting the game for this blog so I can speak to those players. The fact that most of the in-store play in this area is D&D 2024 means in-person play is very strong, and it may be a VTT thing where the D&D 2024 softness is seen as the lock-in of D&D 2014 content on VTTs, which means many are hesitant to break what they built online in their digital libraries.

And yes, I will try to play D&D 2024. If I want in on those local games at the hobby store, to finally become real again and play with real people, I will learn the new game. I am not so much of an ideologue that I will refuse to try new things, and I can gloss over parts of the game I dislike or disagree with (such as the missing humanoids from the Monster Manual and some of the art).

And I play Tales of the Valiant, so that gets supported here, too. All versions of 5E, even 2014, are supported here. This is a big-tent site, and all versions of 5E are loved and supported, as long as the character-building we love is there, and they can be modded to support an old-school style of play.

And since this is still 5E, moving between versions of the game is super easy. The differences are minor, and when you look at the entirety of 5E, they are so compatible that they are all house-ruled versions of each other, with D&D 2014 as the source document. Even if you are mixing rules in your head between versions, it won't really matter too much, and your game will be fine.

Even the excellent Level Up Advanced 5E, a niche version of 2014 that just amazes me with how well designed the game is, and it goes in a new direction, supporting all pillars of play. That is supported here, too. This has so many old-school nods, and D&D 2024's support for the exploration pillar of play was likely influenced by this game. Those wilderness adventure rules did not come out of nowhere, and the lack of decent wilderness exploration rules in 2014 is a sore spot, leading people to think D&D was solely a tactical, dramatic combat game.

Level Up A5E is excellent, and I am still a fan.

And, yes, we also support the classic D&D 2014 game. I have friends who are so broke they can't afford new books, so why should we exclude them? If this is what you have and love, why are we excluding you? Welcome, 2014 players, and your six core books with all those rules patches. I love this version, too, classic, unbalanced, broken, double-casting, broken combos, but very OG cool.

Plenty of people still play patched and fixed versions of D&D 2014, and they are just as viable and playable as any alternatives.

What unites us is old-school play. We don't want to change games, like all the YouTubers are begging us to play BX and other games, because it would fix every problem we have with roleplaying, and we still want to be able to walk into a hobby store and play with others. While I love a great, tension-filled, harsh game of BX, the 5E players do not have to be excluded from that experience because they don't change their game.

We can adopt BX's core principles and apply them in 5E. Will our game be as deadly and tension-filled? Will we be playing by BX rules to the letter? No. I don't expect that out of this. But we will have an experience that is much closer to the heart of the game, instead of the narrative story game that modern D&D has wandered off into the narrative story gaming of YouTube live-play, and we love the classic, tension-filled, resource-tracking, players-make-the-map, absolute blast of classic D&D.

We can get pretty close to classic D&D by combining BX procedures with 5E rules. The rest we can houserule, and we don't lose the games we love, nor do we have to change systems.

The dungeon turn? Players making the map? The wilderness turn? Monster reactions? Morale? Interactive play that does not rely on skill rolls? Light and torch-tracking? Wandering monsters? Time tracking? Clearing hexes and building domains?

None of those are magically dependent on the BX rules.

I can port all those structures and procedures directly into 5E and end up with an old-school 5E game that feels much more authentic than a FATE-like narrative story game that uses the 5E rules. Those procedures and methods are universal truths that we should not forget, nor write out of the game.

We can still play 5E and have an authentic, old-school experience.

Will it be exactly the same? No.

The real game here is in the methods, structures, and procedures. This is our Rosetta Stone, our source of truth for roleplaying. The way we play is much more important than what we play. If we can preserve the old-school style in our play structure, any game we play will be more fun for us.

Yes, BX is amazing and fun. The OSR YouTubers are often right; that simple, deadly game is a classic.

But the way BX was played can enrich and enhance any game we play.

And to the BX YouTubers, you need to go beyond procedure and structure, and explain why the BX rules and math are better than 5E. The procedure and structure can be easily ported to 5E. I know what I love about BX, but consider this a challenge to go beyond the obvious and get deeper into the why.

It is easy to be negative.

It is much harder to be positive and constructive.

If I can help you find a fun way to play 5E, take this old-school style into a gaming store, and show a table of players there "the way" while still playing the store-preferred D&D 2024 game, then my work here has value and is worth the effort. If I can make the game more fun for you and keep you from burning out, then that is one less person who leaves the hobby. If it helps you see 5E in a new light, not as a game where "skills solve everything" and "wilderness is just a cut scene," then I will have helped open the door to you for new adventures.

You will still be playing D&D 2024. But you will be playing it exactly how we used to play the original. You get the best of both worlds. Your table may see the game in a new light. You will bring the magic back to the table and not shortcut or shorthand the procedures of play for expediency. There is a magic in these old, dusty tomes of BX D&D. Let me help you find it.

The way we played is an absolute truth.

What we play can change.