Level Up (A5E) What's your favorite thing about Level Up?

[Scribe]

The Enchanted Gear section. I love items.

 

[delericho]

Hours? Seconds, mate!

Fair enough. I was asleep at the time, so wasn't able to be sure.

 

[bassplayer]

The Bard. It's probably the best version of a Bard I've ever seen in a DnD- like TTRPG. Not sure if it's the most powerful (O5e's is powerful), but thematically it's perfect. The magical musician partner is very well translated and it has a lot of nice actions to use.

 

[niklinna]

What I like most, as I read from the beginning (I'm halfway through Origins), is how organic it all feels. The heritages, cultures, and such have a real narrative feel, not the bags of features of O5E, half of them crap. Every feature in A5E, even those that look more limited than O5E type origin features, clearly has a purpose and will be useful at some point. Many features are clearly designed to fit well with particular classes, too, or to supplement a "non-optimal" or "non-syergistic" class. The classes I've looked at have a similar well-motivated feel.

Reading O5E, I felt I was struggling to find combinations of race/class that fit my concepts for characters. With A5E, I find that every new section I read inspires multiple new, realizable concepts i hadn't even considered before!

In the Holdenshire adventure, one of the Travel Scenery encounters is simply "A shrubbery."

I'm gonna add a favorite thing: the whimsy!

 

[Dionysos]

The wizard class.

Wizards have always been powerful in D&D, but designers have usually missed out on the fun factor. Academic magic is a fun concept! There’s a lot you can do with it. One of the most popular IPs in the world is based on it, for crying out loud. There’s no reason the other caster classes need to have all the flavorful abilities, while the wizard is pretty much just a spell list.

Thanks for using mechanics to bring this class’ flavor front and center. This is the best wizard class D&D has ever had.

 

[VenerableBede]

Green Knight Heralds can get plant monsters as their familiars. I thought the improvements to warlock would, alone, be my favorite addition… but somehow this has excited me more than anything else I’ve read.
This is Fun Guy, my violet fungus, AND I WILL DIE FOR HIM. And carry him whenever we need to run, because 5ft movement speed…

 

[Nebulous]

I'm really glad you changed how Counterspell works.

 

[Lithrac]

My favourite thing atm is that heritages don't grant any bonus to ability scores. I can now truly hope that players will choose their heritage according to their own preference and roleplay intentions rather than because of ability scores!

 

[Lord Mhoram]

I've only really started getting into the Adventurer's guide, so my answer is what I love in that book - and it is the Maneuver system. I've seen a number of third party try and do something like this for earlier editions and for Pathfinder (spheres, Bo9s, Path of War, the updates to unleashed fighter among other) - I really like how these work, and being integrated into the core system.

 

[VenerableBede]

My favourite thing atm is that heritages don't grant any bonus to ability scores. I can now truly hope that players will choose their heritage according to their own preference and roleplay intentions rather than because of ability scores!

As long as heritages get bonuses that are more favorable to one class than another—which isn't universal in A5e, but is present—heritage will never be a decision that's entirely decided by role-playing, unless you weren't planning on making your racial decision based on the class you wanted to play anyway.
But yes, divorcing ability scores from heritages is a step in this direction, and probably the biggest one that could be made without having the various heritages be an exclusively aesthetic choice.