Level Up (A5E) I have a ridiculously homebrewed 5E campaign and I’m debating on whether to convert it to A5E

[MutterBoutASaurus]

Hey there, new to the forum! And I’m here with a novel of an opening post ahahaha.

I have something of a dilemma that I’ve been mulling over for the past few days and, essentially, getting nowhere with it. I’ve been running a fortnightly campaign that is pretty heavily modified for my needs. I’m a big fan of the Fire Emblem series and, one day, thought that the Path of Radiance and Radiant Dawn stories could make for a very fun tabletop experience. Since 5E is such a simple system and I was getting back into DMing after a long break, it was a no-brainer to pick it as my system of choice to frankenstein for my needs. This has included:

• Custom races, although most are built from cobbling together abilities from other 5E races. All other races are not allowed. This is not a setting with elves and dragonborn - and what races do exist not only tie into the lore, but also the plot of the story.
• No player-available languages other than common. I’ve told my players to just substitute a tool proficiency whenever they would gain a language.
• A system to manage a group of NPCs, which I have been calling Vanguards. To give an incrediblt basic overview of the rules, a player can bring a vanguard along on an adventure and, in turn, a vanguard provides their player with a few benefits. Each provides a small, passive bonus just for being around. But they also give a payer an extra ability (on recharge) they can use in combat as an extra action. Vanguards can also be sent out together on missions, potentially bringing back loot or additional story hooks. Here’s one of my vanguards as an example!
• Low magic item availability. This is for two purposes. The first, flavour. There just aren’t a lot of permanent magic items in this setting. Consumables such as potions and scrolls are still abundant, but crafters have struggled to get magical enchantments to “stick”, as it were.
  The second is that it provides a bit more of a focus on vanguards as a player resource.There are still magic items around, and my group’s Artificer has made it his mission to become the party craftbot for what few schematics I allow him. I very much want my group to be surprised at any magical goodie being thrown their way.
• Banning of spells that allow for the raising of the dead and for extraplanar travel.
• A severe reduction of monsters, especially intelligent ones. There are no illithid, djinn or yuan-ti, as a quick example. While there are monstrous foes such as elementals and undead, this is just a world where, more often, the real threat is a man with grand ambitions and people willing to follow him.
• A lot of junk lore attempting to fit this anime-video-game-shaped square peg into this dnd-shaped square hole.

And it has resulted in an enjoyable campaign! As far as I’m aware anyway, my group can be frustratingly hard to get feedback from at times, hah.

I was introduced to A5E through the Dungeon Delver’s Guidebook kickstarter, although I only recently picked up the core books thanks to the Bundle of Holding package. And I really like what I’ve read of it! I’ve already brought in some of the rules that fit my setting. Strife and Fatigue are significantly more interesting than exhaustion, my aforementioned artificer player is incredibly thankful for the less vague crafting ruleset and the A5E encounter building tables make my job infinitely easier.
My group is going on break for the next month and bit - a lot of people are going to be busy for the holidays. I’ve decided to use this time to polish up and consolidate all the little additions and changes to the rules that have happened over the course of the year of playing. Redraw some maps, do a little planning or the next part of the adventure, that sort of thing.

Which brings me to the topic at hand. I’m already rolling in a few A5E rules to my game. Should I just bite the bullet and convert the whole campaign to the system?

This is probably the only good chance for me to do so. My group is at level 5, so any character rebuilding they may need to do wouldn’t be too much work. But I have some reservations that I wouldn’t mind some outside feedback on, especially from people more familiar with the system than I. Here are my main concerns.

• Reworking my custom races into heritages and, to a lesser extent, culture and background. While I can easily just use the stats for humans for one of the races, the other 3-ish will require a lot more custom work. Gifts and Paragon traits especially intimidate me.

I am aware that I could just ignore A5E’s character origins and tell my players to just stick with their 5E Race, but doing so feels a bit lame. I do really like how A5E handles this part of character creation and, given how limited my roster of available races is, I think that the addition of culture and background would make for a needed breath of variety.

• Vanguards not meshing well in with some of A5E’s systems. Specifically Followers, but I’m also worried about them feeling a little bloated alongside the combat manoeuvres. These NPCs are an important part of my campaign - a big part of the story and campaign-feel is of my players making allies and those allies assisting them in meaningful and exciting ways. (Also, I’m just a little bit pleased with how I’ve managed to cobble together this system. According to another of my players, I’ve done the unimaginable and made an NPC-heavy campaign that is actually enjoyable.)

My initial thought is to just not bother with the followers, but I know they’re part of the Marshal kit. My initial thought is, if we ever get a Marshal in the group, to allow them to apply a follower bonus to one of the existing vanguards. Or something, it feels clunky.

So yeah! Thank you in advance for reading through this, I know it’s a lot. I’d love to hear some additional thoughts and constructive dialogue.

 

[Faolyn]

May I ask what the races are? Or is there a current heritage that could just be renamed to be one of your heritages? The same thing with cultures--you can easily rename any of the cultures. Like "Wood Elf" could be "Tree Villager," and it's populated by humans or whatever your preferred woodland-dwelling people is.

Followers don't really have full stats (they mostly get killed with a single attack) and they don't fight. If your vanguards have stats and can fight, then they wouldn't be followers.

 

[xiphumor]

I second Faolyn about needing to know more about the Vanguards system in order to see how it would mesh with Followers, but as far as races and cultures, I would pick up Homebrew and Hacking in order to see just how all of the different heritages and cultures break down and see how they compare to O5e’s races using Detect Balance, which uses basically the same evaluation system.

 

[VanguardHero]

I definitely think it would be worth it. As someone who loves depth in character creation, I definitely agree that the Culture system would significantly help to counterbalance the limitation of very few Races/Heritages. Encounter building you're already using so that helps a lot, as does actual math based Monster creation. Other than that a5e adds a lot of options and balance that should work nicely, especially in a Martial heavy setting as something Fire Emblem inspired.

There's no reason not to just lift Gifts and Paragon Gifts from existing options that won't be available in your campaign. Given how free form half-heritages are, everything is assumed to work perfectly well with anything else. Any problems with specific combinations are likely to be apparent from the jump or make themselves known quickly for rapid adjustment.

And yeah as far as Vanguards (great name btw) it really depends on how active they are in combat. If they are an active part of combat, you've got them figured out already and it shouldn't be an issue. Tied into Followers for out of combat stuff and you should be golden. Might be worth considering treating the abilities they give as Combat Maneuvers to tie those into one neat package?

 

[MutterBoutASaurus]

You may! Here's a link to their full stats.

But as a quick overview, you have:

• The Beorc, which are humans by another name. In this 5E version of the setting I've broken them up into different sub-races depending on what region they come from, just to add some variety to the setting.
• The Laguz, which in turn are seperated further into Beast and Bird tribes. They are a race of natural shapeshifters, able to freely swap between a humanoid form (with some animalistic features) and an animal form dependant on what tribe they are from.
• And the Branded, a hybrid race that is decended from both a a laguz and a beorc. In appearance, they appear as regular humans, outside of a tattoo-like marking somewhere on their bodies. They live longer lives than beorc and tend towards exceptionalism, but are thought to be cursed, heretical creatures.

I used the 5E Race Analysis sheet for balancing. I don't recall being able to find anything else at the time. A shame, Detect Balance is significantly more comprehensive.

My current thoughts are to:
a) Consolidate the Beorc into just a single standard heritage. Culture is a better system for giving them a more diverse feel anyway. As a bonus, a number cultures presented in the Adventures Guide slide well for the setting.
b) One heritage for beast laguz, and one for birds.

I'm unsure how to handle the branded. I was originally thinking of giving them the human traits presented in the Adventuer's Guide, as I very much feel the flavour of inginuitive survivors fit them very well. That does leave the beorc out to dry, however. The other thought would be to turn them into a beorc gift? :/a
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As for vanguards, their stats are mostly there for flavour. Outside of the abilities they gave my players, they don't really fight. The last thing I wanted was to bog down my battlemaps with a bunch of friendly NPCs each time combat starts - my thoughts on designing them was as an aid to my players, more akin to a magic item.

EDIT: Man there was one reply to this when I started. XD Give me a bit and I'll have up a doccument detailing how Vanguards work too. I would link the PDF for the setting I drafted up, but a lot of the info in that is out of date.

 

[aco175]

@MutterBoutASaurus welcome to the boards. Stay a while and argue about all sort of things. We may be taking a more friendly tone once Christmas Season begins though.

As for your question, I would ask if you are planning on using the 5.5/1DND upgrade in 2024. You would not want to upgrade twice, but you still get 2 years out of upgrading to A5e and if that is more than one campaign, that I would say yes.

At least it gives you a chance to cut things and add things that makes sense.

 

[Faolyn]

The Laguz, which in turn are seperated further into Beast and Bird tribes. They are a race of natural shapeshifters, able to freely swap between a humanoid form (with some animalistic features) and an animal form dependant on what tribe they are from.

The mimickers from my Handbook of Heritages is basically that (or at least, one of their Gifts allows for shapechanging into animals; the other gifts allow for shapechanging into humanoids or shapechanging into plants).

As for Vanguards, you could easily use the followers rules. Most of the abilities they grant are 1/day things and usually aren't used in-combat. You could always run them as full NPCs, if you like. Then you as Narrator would choose when they use their abilities and that would free up the character sheets a bit.

 

[MutterBoutASaurus]

As for your question, I would ask if you are planning on using the 5.5/1DND upgrade in 2024. You would not want to upgrade twice, but you still get 2 years out of upgrading to A5e and if that is more than one campaign, that I would say yes.

I was not. I admit, I've not been super interested in 5.5/1DND for the purposes of this campaign. Part of that comes down to not being particuarly enthused with a lot of WotC's recent offerings. What's been attractive to me about 5E has been the deluge of interesting homebrew and 3rd party content.
Once we move on from this campaign, well I'm not sure what my plans are tbh. That's not likely to be for a while, however.

 

[MutterBoutASaurus]

Okay, sorry for the delay!
Here's the rules I've primed for my vanguard system.
And for a bit more of a reference, here's the current roster of vanguards my group has been able to recruit. They have yet to unlock any of the once-a-day 'heroic' abilities.
Hopefully this is easy enough to digest how it works. I'm not the greatest at technical explanations.

I did want to give a little bit of an explanation on why I came up with these rules. As I mentioned, this campaign is following the story of a game I love - which is a turn-based RPG with a focus on recruiting a bunch of characters to your cause. Your character is the leader of a mercenary company, surrounded by friends and companions just as capable and interesting as he is.
When drafting up the initial idea of turning this into a tabletop campaign, I knew I wanted to try and preserve a bit of that feeling of recruiting useful and interesting people to the party’s aid. But I didn’t want to just draft up a bunch of character sheets for standard NPCs who fight alongside the party. That would not only bog down combat as I juggle both allies and enemies, but it would also take focus away from my players and their characters - a cardinal sin of Game Mastering if there ever was one. But the rules for followers I’d found didn’t really feel chunky enough for my needs either. They should feel like a valid part of the mercenary company, just as capable of holding their own as the players if imagination calls for it.

This ruleset felt like a nice balance between the two extremes. Treating these NPCs as an equipable toolset means that, first and foremost, the players have autonomy on how their abilities get used. They aren’t sitting back and waiting for the NPC to do a thing the narrator thinks is cool, they get to make important decisions, make dice rolls and gain interesting buffs to their own skills.
In turn, the vanguards feel like an impactful part of both gameplay and the story. These aren’t just guys you hire and forget about, they’re friends and colleagues fighting alongside you. Or they’re fellow co-workers you send off to deal with other jobs while the party is busy sorting out something more major.

For what it is worth, the feedback I have gotten from my players about vanguards has been positive. When presented with a quest or a new situation, the party'll strategise over which vanguard to take with them, which is always delightful. Balancing around their pressence hasn't been too hard either - typically asumming the group has one extra player in the party usually does the trick. Even with the presence of a few healing-capable vanguards, my party has had more than a handful of nail-biting encounters.
I feel that this is a defining system for my campaign, it just wouldn’t feel quite the same without them and I am loathe to give it up entirely unless absolutely necessary.

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Thank you all for the kind words and information thus far, by the way! I'm a bit socially anxious, so I was a little worried about bringing my absolute mess of a game into public view, but no, your critique (and book links!) has been very helpful and I appreciate it.

And yeah as far as Vanguards (great name btw) it really depends on how active they are in combat. If they are an active part of combat, you've got them figured out already and it shouldn't be an issue. Tied into Followers for out of combat stuff and you should be golden. Might be worth considering treating the abilities they give as Combat Maneuvers to tie those into one neat package?

Hmm, moving them into combat maneuvers is actually not a bad idea, although it would require a hell of a lot of rework. I feel like that would have been the ideal solution - when I was first drafting this campaign up many moons ago and I was still figuring out what to do with these NPC buggers.

 

[VanguardHero]

Hmm, moving them into combat maneuvers is actually not a bad idea, although it would require a hell of a lot of rework. I feel like that would have been the ideal solution - when I was first drafting this campaign up many moons ago and I was still figuring out what to do with these NPC buggers.

I just meant something to the effect of like, for the big Heroic abilities that are 1/Day, maybe let them burn like 5 Exertion to repeat them beyond that? Just a small way to tie them in to LU systems. Other than that, stapling Follower bonuses on to them seems like it'd be easy and expand them in line with LU, while allowing for standard followers to exist without Vanguard benefits. I feel like you managed to thread the needle of making them flavorful and relevant but without significantly tipping the power scales, so pretty much anything is to taste honestly.