Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition, a new tabletop RPG coming this November, appears poised to do with current-edition Dungeons & Dragons what Pathfinder did with its third edition. But while Pathfinder became a franchise of its own, Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition aims to supplant only the current core rulebooks of D&D 5e and be used with existing D&D settings and modules.
Level Up: A5E is based on the core framework of the Dungeons & Dragons 5e ruleset. It has d20 rolls, six ability scores, ACs, DCs, saving throws, etc. It is not, however, a supplement for D&D. It is its own, standalone game, with three original sourcebooks - Core Rulebook, Trials and Treasures, and Monstrous Menagerie - meant to replace their D&D equivalents. Level Up is essentially an unofficial D&D 5.5 (mostly developed before Wizards of the Coast announced the official D&D 5e revision), compatible with D&D supplements but building on and overwriting its basic ruleset.
That said, each sourcebook can be individually used in place of its D&D counterpart. For example, players can use the Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition Core Rulebook in conjunction with D&D's Monster Manual (with some extra calculation) or use the D&D Player's Handbook with Level Up's Monstrous Menagerie. The new rules themselves are not modular; players can't use Level Up's new armor types without its new subsystems for breakage and damage type vulnerability, for instance, but they can use the sourcebooks as desired.
This is where Level Up: Advanced 5E differs from Pathfinder. In an interview with Screen Rant, Russ Morrissey, owner of Level Up creator EN Publishing, said Level Up is distinct from Paizo's D&D 3.5 successor because it is aiming to "remain 100% compatible" with D&D modules and supplements, now and in the future, whereas Pathfinder became its own gaming line separate from D&D, with its own adventures and supplements. The announcement of D&D's revised, 5.5-edition rulebooks for 2024 means Level Up's compatibility strategy could keep it relevant for years to come, though it might face a few challenges.
Level Up: Advanced 5E Is A Familiar System, But Still Has New Rules To Learn
The goal of Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition, per its designers, is adding meaningful choices at every character level, giving all character classes more options outside of combat, and addressing some of the flaws in D&D 5e's monster design. Though it is its own game, Morrissey said it's meant to add new layers to a system seasoned D&D players know well.
"Our target [is] people that have been playing 5e for seven years and love it. They want to carry on playing 5e - they don't want to switch to a different game system - but they would just like maybe a little more depth."
Still, certain changes in the work-in-progress, pre-release rulebooks provided to Screen Rant seemed at odds with making D&D 5e players feel at home. As part of Level Up: A5E's replacement rules, there are new rules for basic mechanics like critical hit damage calculation, as well as the way armor categories work. Some D&D feats, like Polearm Master and Great Weapon Master, have also been weakened in their Level Up analogues. While players won't need to learn an entirely new system, they will have to unlearn plenty of individual rules. Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition's first-level adventure, Memories of Holdenshire, is designed to gradually introduce these rules to veteran D&D players, so running it could help ease users into the changes.
Level Up's Monster Book Has Fixes For All D&D Groups
For those who don't want to change the way D&D plays, Level Up: Advanced 5E's Monstrous Menagerie could be worthwhile. Poor D&D monster design is often noted as a needed fix for 5e, particularly when it comes to monsters with large pools of HP and few interesting attacks and actions. The Monstrous Menagerie's lead designer, Paul Hughes (who Morrissey called "one of the most expert persons on monster math for D&D in the world"), said on his blog that Level Up: A5E gets rid of "the boring bag-of-hit-points monsters. Every monster does something interesting." Every creature from the official D&D Monster Manual, apart from Wizards of the Coast's originals like mind flayers, gith, and displacer beasts, has been rewritten and rebalanced for Level Up, and using the Monstrous Menagerie with standard D&D rules does not require the same conversion calculations needed for using the Level Up Core Rulebook with D&D Monster Manual encounters.
Similar to first-edition Pathfinder's Combat Maneuver Bonus and Combat Maneuver Defense rules, which could be calculated for standard D&D 3.5 monsters based on their stats, Level Up introduces the Maneuver DC mechanic. Calculated similarly to spellcasting DCs, Maneuver DCs are used for some physical contests, including Level Up's new Combat Maneuvers. The Monstrous Menagerie's creatures already have Maneuver DCs calculated, but players using only the Menagerie in conjunction with the D&D Player's Handbook can simply disregard this new statistic, using the new monsters with the original 5e rules.
Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition's Rules Address D&D 5e's Weak Points
Player feedback helped shape these and other Level Up D&D rule replacements. When approaching the design of Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition, EN Publishing collected a series of surveys on things current D&D 5e players liked and disliked about the game. A surprise focal point of the results, Morrissey said, was pricing and crafting rules for magic items. To address this, Level Up provides a list of prices for all magic items, along with crafting rules and wealth guidelines for characters starting at higher levels, thereby adding back standard rules from third and fourth-edition D&D that were omitted for 5e.
Another of Level Up: Advanced 5E's major additions is its Combat Maneuvers for martial characters. These draw from a pool of exertion points, scaling based on a character’s proficiency bonus, and allow for things like disarms, blinding cuts, and heavy weapon smashes that can drop a group of enemies prone. Combat Maneuvers give non-spellcaster characters something akin to a spell list of their own and function similarly to the Martial Powers of fourth-edition D&D or the Tome of Battle maneuvers of D&D 3.5. For GMs and players who want to add complexity to non-spellcasters, the Combat Maneuvers alone could make the Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition Core Rulebook worth looking into.
While combat is the design pillar of Dungeons & Dragons with the most rules and Level Up adds new options accordingly, the game also elaborates on exploration and provides each class with new features for use outside of battle - an improvement especially evident in classes like the Fighter, which has few out-of-combat options in D&D 5e. Even archetypally antisocial D&D characters receive social-pillar benefits in Level Up: A5E; Morrissey said the game's designers view characters "being antisocial [as] a type of social. If your gruff dwarven fighter is intimidating or is able to shrug off charm spells, ... that's all part of the social [pillar]."
Level Up's changes seem to be resonating with D&D fans. Seventeen days after its campaign launched, Level Up: Advanced 5E has far surpassed its initial funding goal on Kickstarter, reaching more than 13 times its $41,387 target. PDF copies of the game will be available in early November.
Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition's digital release is planned for November 5, 2021. Screen Rant was provided with a work-in-progress PDF copy for the purposes of this article. This article's author financially supported Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition on Kickstarter before beginning work on the article.