Am I using the right system?

[aramis erak]

Yeah. GURPS can really do it all and yeah, there's a learning curve. But once you get it, you'll wish you had gotten it years earlier.

Or you'll grow to find it annoyingly bad in all the important places. Few find a middle ground.

 

[Himbo_Jones]

Yeah. GURPS can really do it all and yeah, there's a learning curve. But once you get it, you'll wish you had gotten it years earlier.

I'll give it another look! It does seem like a system I'd enjoy since I am a big fan of modular systems, so I'm sure this will be one that I need to keep under my belt. Thanks for the recommendation!

My favorite 3pp source for Level Up: A5e is the Manual of Adventurous Resources (MoAR as in More): Complete from Purple Martin Games.

This honestly may be the push I needed to fully commit to A5E. After having looked at the base classes and seen what they have to offer, the idea that there's high quality (and endorsed, it seems, by the makers of Level Up) 3rd party work on Drive Through makes me excited to see what I can do. It also seems like it'll be a pretty straightforward task to import some of the homebrew classes and subclasses I already have on hand since the way maneuvers are handled is, to my eyes, quite elegantly designed.

Having a bunch of maneuvers all under a certain "schools" and then giving those martial classes access to a select number of schools based off of the vibe of the overall class is brilliant and quite flexible. I am also seeing that some supplements are adding additional options not only to the maneuvers but to the base classes as well (the Warlock, for example, having two additional Pact Boons given through Gazette #20), which just gives me a ton of ideas for adding additional options to base class features. The only tricky part for me will be coming up with "knacks", but I am sure that is something I will learn in time.

Cheers for the help!

 

[Corinnguard]

This honestly may be the push I needed to fully commit to A5E. After having looked at the base classes and seen what they have to offer, the idea that there's high quality (and endorsed, it seems, by the makers of Level Up) 3rd party work on Drive Through makes me excited to see what I can do.

Several of the designers for Level Up: A5e do frequent the forums here on EN World.

Having a bunch of maneuvers all under a certain "schools" and then giving those martial classes access to a select number of schools based off of the vibe of the overall class is brilliant and quite flexible

The Combat Traditions in Level Up: A5e are the martial equivalent of spells. Since they are only 5 degrees (the equivalent to a spellcasting level) of maneuvers for each Combat Tradition, the martials are sort of like 'Half-casters'.

 

[Himbo_Jones]

The Combat Traditions in Level Up: A5e are the martial equivalent of spells. Since they are only 5 degrees (the equivalent to a spellcasting level) of maneuvers for each Combat Tradition, the martials are sort of like 'Half-casters'.

This alone patches up a huge problem I have with 5e and where the majority of my homebrewing efforts were going to be spent. It's so well done that I'm even reconsidering if I should go ahead with adding in weapon "arts" that are active (and sometimes passive) abilities inherent to weapons that must be selected in much the same way as maneuvers but which are tied to specific weapons and can, theoretically, be accessed by any class. It almost seems unnecessary.

But what I'm really enamored with are the social skills and how martial classes have so much more pull in that aspect of the game than they do in base 5e. Just seeing a berserker have the ability to waltz into a town and get the respect of mercenary groups who will house and feed both them and their party creates so many built-in opportunities for roleplay and story hooks that I, as a Narrator, almost don't have to do much to make the world feel alive. It just is.

Bless the designers for giving their GMs so many more avenues and tools to make good stories and to settle the PCs into the world in very real and tangible ways.

 

[innerdude]

Yeah. GURPS can really do it all and yeah, there's a learning curve. But once you get it, you'll wish you had gotten it years earlier.

Or you'll grow to find it annoyingly bad in all the important places. Few find a middle ground.

Just following up on @aramis erak 's statement --- My experience with GURPS was very much the opposite of Theory of Games'.

After 25+ sessions across both GURPS 3e and 4e, my overwhelming experience was that despite its supposed flexibility, GURPS consistently led to suffocatingly boring, sterile, and lifeless play, with the added bonus of an insufferably arrogant and dysfunctional local gaming community, at least where I lived at the time.

 

[Theory of Games]

To keep this from turning into an essay on the minutiae of particular inclinations toward TTRPGs, I will just say that I like a fair bit of crunch in my games (martial combat maneuvers, weapon skills, robust crafting systems, professions the players can pick up during downtime, rules for raising and leading an army, heck even rules for characters going steadily mad from the horrors of the unknown), and have been gathering homebrew/building my own to compensate and it's all becoming... a lot, obviously. I don't mind "a lot", but I also don't want to be doing all of this work when there might just be a simpler answer in the form of a system that does what I am looking for.

Sometimes going back to the old-school works. I can also suggest the D&D Rules Cyclopedia, since it has rules for most of what you want to do (you could swipe the Insanity rules from the AD&D DMG to handle horror). You won't have feats or as many classes, but the RC covers levels 1-36 and beyond (Immortal rules)