Level Up (A5E) The big difference between A5e and 5e?

[mAcular]

Hi everyone. I have acquired the A5e books during the kickstarter, but I have not had a chance to play it yet. What I am curious about is the play experience: how exactly does it feel to actually play it compared to 5e? Or would someone not really notice? What is the big difference? Is it mostly on the GM side, making it more convenient to run games, or does the game itself feel way different?

 

[Tessarael]

Traveling is significantly more of an adventure for the players, with various things available for characters to do as they journey. You can hunt, cook, keep watch, and so forth - it is part of the daily routine. Managing supply (food and water) resources is also important during travel.

I was quite frustrated about this with D&D. For example, despite having the Outlander background, additional time (i.e. distraction from traveling with slower travel time) would have been required to gather food and fresh water. That was a reasonable DM ruling under the circumstances. Ultimately, it became something that we mostly glossed over.

In general, the character classes seem better designed. Fewer fallow levels, more utility skills, and somewhat less opportunity to level dip and pick up a bunch of power that made for multi-classed excessive power-gaming - there's still some opportunity to do that, but it is less. There's also more reason to stay single-classed, as the classes progress more consistently in power at higher levels.

Combats are still fairly similar from a spell caster perspective. I think there's more to do as a martial class with maneuvers. I gather that monsters are more consistent with their CR, but I'm not a DM and haven't looked through it - just repeating what I've read in the forums.

 

[MegaloRob]

I have been a player and DM for both O5e and A5e.

The big difference that both player and DM will feel is story.

A5e characters tell a much greater story. Even in simply character creation.

In O5e you pick your race, class, background. Dragonborn, monk, city guard.

But in A5e you add in culture and heritage.
You don't just pick dragonborn. You get a choice of a physical gift, which could be a dragonborn related thing or you could choose to me half-dragonborn and pick a gift from another heritage. A dragonborn/gnome is an easy thing. Then you pick a culture. Grew up in the circus.

So the monk/adept dragonborn/gnome who grew up in a traveling circus and found a job as a city guard before he became an adventurer.

So see ... The story is richer just in creating your character.

Then the journey activity adds to that. Using mechanics to manage supply/rations is one thing. But you pick and describe your activity as you travel so you have more opportunity built into the game to story tell your character.

For the GM side of things. Everything is built around ease for the GM. In building an encounter it doesn't tell you to use an experience budget. It tells you a hard encounter will have a total CR of half the players total level and to work around that. So I know if I am trying to build a medium difficulty encounter for 4 1st level players I can quickly say "well a total CR of 2 is hard so I'll build out a total CR of 1.25."

And the monster menagerie book is fantastic. It gives advice on environmental signs the players would find if that monster is in the area, suggestions on what it would be doing when the players come across it. And the books gives encounter building advice each monster.

 

[mAcular]

For the GM side of things. Everything is built around ease for the GM. In building an encounter it doesn't tell you to use an experience budget. It tells you a hard encounter will have a total CR of half the players total level and to work around that. So I know if I am trying to build a medium difficulty encounter for 4 1st level players I can quickly say "well a total CR of 2 is hard so I'll build out a total CR of 1.25."

Interesting! Does it say how much CR total you need for an Easy, or Medium, or Deadly encounter? Or only Hard? And is it just a straight addition of CR, it doesn't care about how many monsters there are?

 

[MegaloRob]

Straight math.
Basically 1/4 of total party level is easy, 1/3 is medium, and 1/2 is hard.

You said you have the books. I think in the monstrous Menagerie book is a fantastic table. It sets the number of PCs and their level and tells you the total CR you want to use for the difficulty you want and the highest CR you would want to have in the encounter.

The table is automated on the a5etools website too.

 

[lichmaster]

Interesting! Does it say how much CR total you need for an Easy, or Medium, or Deadly encounter? Or only Hard? And is it just a straight addition of CR, it doesn't care about how many monsters there are?

It says how much total CR you need for an Easy, Medium, Hard, Deadly and Impossible challenge. It tells you how many encounters of each type a party of a given Tier can probably manage in a day. It tells you that Tier 0 characters can be very squishy, so low CR monsters should be accounted as one step larger. It tells you that no matter what the total party level the group is, a single monster with a CR 1.5x the average character level will probably result in an Impossible challenge even if the total CR would not suggest so.

It is SO MUCH BETTER than o5e's messy and vague approach

 

[mAcular]

Hmm... so a CR 6 monster would be impossible for a level 4 party?

I like the multiplier for the lower level monsters.

Is it much harder to make a character? Time and focus wise. Actually, how's the balance on the player side of things? Are they much stronger than normal 5e characters?

 

[Morrus]

Hmm... so a CR 6 monster would be impossible for a level 4 party?

I like the multiplier for the lower level monsters.

Is it much harder to make a character?

Exactly the same level of difficulty I’d say. You don’t have to do anything any more complicated than you would in a 5E character. You just have a couple more choices to make, but they aren’t complicated choices.

Time and focus wise. Actually, how's the balance on the player side of things? Are they much stronger than normal 5e characters?

They’re about equal power wise but more flexible and have more stuff they can do in the social and exploration pillars. They’re broader, not taller.

 

[MegaloRob]

Morrus made the game so always go with his advice.

I find character creation in A5e significantly more satisfying then O5e.

O5e character creation:
Race: dragonborn
Background: guard
Class: fighter

A5e character creation
Heritage: dragonborn
Heritage gift: I'll be half dragonborn and take the gnome gift that gives me an unarmed attack and a burrow speed. Bullet born!
Culture: circus folk
Background: city guard
Destiny: underdog, I have something to
prove. The destiny gives an additional way to earn inspiration and to use inspiration, but you can use it to set your characters tone/feel too.
Class: fighter

So both created a dragon born, city guard, fighter.
But you can see just from my choices in A5e who my character really is.

So yeah. A5e and o5e are adjacent power wise but .... That A5e character is truly mine in every aspect of it. More satisfying.

 

[Timespike]

A5E is, frankly, less susceptible to "cheese." The charisma class exploits between warlock, sorcerer, and paladin(now herald) have all been shut off.

A5E characters in general tend to be much more flexible and varied in what they can do, but are slightly less in terms of raw power; the initial attribute adjustments come to +2 rather than +3-+6 for O5E. And as mentioned above, destiny and culture help them feel like more fully-fledged individuals than many O5E characters. There is a bit more to keep track of, no two ways about it, but it's worth it.

 

[lichmaster]

Hmm... so a CR 6 monster would be impossible for a level 4 party?

It's the maximum suggested CR monster for level 4 characters. Above this and one-shotting PCs, or even TPKs, become a very real possibility

 

[Eyes of Nine]

A5E is, frankly, less susceptible to "cheese." The charisma class exploits between warlock, sorcerer, and paladin(now herald) have all been shut off.

A5E characters in general tend to be much more flexible and varied in what they can do, but are slightly less in terms of raw power; the initial attribute adjustments come to +2 rather than +3-+6 for O5E. And as mentioned above, destiny and culture help them feel like more fully-fledged individuals than many O5E characters. There is a bit more to keep track of, no two ways about it, but it's worth it.

Has anyone used A5E characters in the published WotC adventure paths? (I know, I'll probably run Holdshire AP once it releases for my first A5E AP; but wondering about after that...)

 

[Morrus]

Has anyone used A5E characters in the published WotC adventure paths? (I know, I'll probably run Holdshire AP once it releases for my first A5E AP; but wondering about after that...)

Yes we played through Tomb of Annihilation.

 

[Stalker0]

Probably the biggest difference I notice in the core interactions is the increase in various social and exploration abilities. A lot of my warrior type players in my games will still get knowledge through their "cosmopolitan" ability or glean the surface thoughts of their adversary by "reading the room", etc.

I think the monster math is a bit tighter and the encounter guidelines are much more solid.

 

[Eyes of Nine]

I, like the OP, had similar questions, and this thread has been very useful. Thanks. Keep them coming!

 

[mAcular]

Another question. Compared to WOTC material, how many subclasses are there? Is it just the stuff in the PHB that got converted or something equivalent, or is there a decent selection?

 

[Morrus]

Another question. Compared to WOTC material, how many subclasses are there? Is it just the stuff in the PHB that got converted or something equivalent, or is there a decent selection?

Well you can use all the WotC subclasses, and any 3PP 5E subclasses, and any 3PP A5E subclasses, so it's all them plus the ones in the Level Up core book, the Gate Pass Gazette, and other books. For ones made by EN Publishing there's a list here:

Archetypes | Level Up

a5e.tools

 

[Mike Myler]

Hi everyone. I have acquired the A5e books during the kickstarter, but I have not had a chance to play it yet. What I am curious about is the play experience: how exactly does it feel to actually play it compared to 5e? Or would someone not really notice? What is the big difference? Is it mostly on the GM side, making it more convenient to run games, or does the game itself feel way different?

My core group moved to A5E and the biggest thing I've noticed so far is that they're realizing they have more agency than before. There's a lot of, "hold on a second, I have <feature or trait> and that means I can <new thing>!"

For my spoons combat is also a more engaging experience than before but it's not coming up every hour like the <new things> are.

 

[noodohs]

We've been playing an A5e game for several months now and the maneuvers and the wealth of features you get have made a huge difference. As Mike said, there's a lot of "I have a thing for that!" moments outside of combat in particular, which is just amazing. I am intentionally playing a character with no spellcasting and the maneuvers and features have added a lot of variety that was lacking in O5e. The items also get new features, so now you have trip bonuses and things like that to provide situational advantages, and there are even some terrain/positioning-based advantages you can use. All of this makes for much more engaging combat all while still giving everyone, even barbarians, a lot more to do outside of combat.

From the DM side, the things I think our DM likes the most are that the CR is actually representative of the difficulty, so it is much easier to craft encounters. She also is very fond of the exploration challenges, again for more non-combat activities. Monsters also have more unique/fun abilities instead of everything just being two claws and a bite, so again, there is more variety.

Really the takeaway is that A5e is just a more varied, engaging game.

 

[TheHand]

Has anyone used A5E characters in the published WotC adventure paths? (I know, I'll probably run Holdshire AP once it releases for my first A5E AP; but wondering about after that...)

Currently running Witchlight with A5E characters and it's going great!