In my recent gaming adventures, I've delved into the world of Tales of the Valiant, a new 5E game by Kobold Press. It's a compelling alternative for those who may not be fans of Wizards. However, the electronic character sheets in Hero Lab, while functional, seem to have been left in a state of limbo, with no new updates or content for months. I have not been able to buy anything for the designer since it came out (remember this point).
I still like ToV for the "clean room" 5E it is, and it lacks the barrage and drama of D&D 2024/5. It is a good system if you are stuck using 5E.
I am also comparing it to Pathfinder 1e, the classic 3.5 system that refuses to die for me. Pathfinder 1e is my peak, all time best, d20 fantasy game. Having a complete set of books for this makes it hard to play this "D&D style sword & sorcery" with GURPS, so I use GURPS for dark fantasy, gritty fantasy, and other fantasy genres. Pathfinder 1e has never been topped, and I know how broken this game is. Like GURPS, it has exploits up the wall, and we house rule and disallow the obviously broken parts.
So, why bring these two up?
I can design fantastic characters in Pathfinder 1e with the Classic Hero Lab. I did a dual-wielding, short-whip plus short sword drow cleric who wears leather armor. She came out great, so I said, hey, let's try to design her in 5E!
No, please, no, don't.
The 3.5 rules have a relatively open feat list, which allows you to give clerics a two-weapon fighting feat and even weapon finesse to reduce her penalties to a +0 on each hand, so she is doing a d4 and d6 attack every turn with a DEX of 15. All she needs is combat casting, and she is complete. Though I could replace her weapon finesse feat with that, give her a -2 in each hand, and improve her combat casting. At low levels, I will cast spells out of combat and stick to hitting as much as possible until I get that feat when the spells get good.
But designing her in 5E? The designers know better than you. Trying to get a cleric proficient in martial weapons is hard enough, and dual-wielding is out of the question. I was trying to design her with my tools and ran into these "not in our design" roadblocks at every turn.
The trouble is, she is a valid character archetype! I could see a drow cleric like that in my world, using her whip to pull enemies toward her for a quick stab with the short sword. The problem is that most 5E designers can't, and they don't allow you to design anything remotely creative or fun. Between 2024 D&D and today's versions of the game, your options and creativity have gone down to what the designers allow you to do and nothing more.
In ToV, I am the classic D&D plate priest or the cloth-wearing World of Warcraft priest.
She is boring and, in some games, limited to blunt weapons only.
Again, the West Coast "big tech" design philosophy of D&D and these other d20 games comes up, and I feel I am playing a mobile game that won't let me do this with one type of currency and not something else with another. The shell game of 5E involves the designers laying out a maze of options for every character build, forcing players to go to Internet forums to find the best one. Eventually, the really broken stuff gets errata, and the best stuff is the new balance baseline for the next monster book. Everyone else "doing their own thing" gets left behind and seen as amateurs.
More often than not, the designer of a 5E game tells you what you can't do rather than what you can.
Pathfinder 1e, though my all-time great, still needs to catch up in many places, and I had to pay a lot of money for books and Hero Lab expansions (remember what I said?) to get any level of flexibility. This is another pillar of West Coast design theory, taking away as many options as possible in the base game and forcing players to pay to get them back, one at a time.
You can design your dream character once you give the company and its partners a few thousand dollars. This also puts the "sunk cost" strategy in play, where the whales will be vocal about "defending their investment" online, and you get these vocal advocates on social media who have the incentive to turn the hobby into a combat sport to justify all the money they wasted on a West Coast design.
I am being sarcastic and cynical here, and that scent of vinegar is in my words since I am cleaning my coffee maker today, but all this is true. I spent a few thousand dollars on Pathfinder 1e over the years, and I only now have the flexibility I have with the eighty-dollar Dungeon Fantasy boxed set.
I created her in Pathfinder 1e; the flexibility comes within 10% of GURPS. Pathfinder 1e has a lot of options, and I can build a wide variety of character types, but GURPS just blows any of these "dungeon crawl" games out of the water in terms of character design.
Very little here tells me what I can't do.
90% of GURPS is options telling me what I can do.
If it doesn't exist, I can design and have it myself. In West Coast games, I pay for a few options at a time and hope I get what I want someday. In GURPS, I have the full power of the game designer.
I can design her in GURPS easily, and better than even Pathfinder 1e with a bunch of custom spells she can use in her unique fighting style. Is she "system optimal" in GURPS? No, there are clearly better combat builds than hers, but her distinctive style of whip-and-short-sword is a fun, classic drow, evil-fighting style I can see enhanced by her dark cleric magics that I can give her in Dungeon Fantasy.
In Pathfinder 1e, I don't have many "combat enhancement" spells as a cleric, whereas, in GURPS, I can make a bunch of new whip and short sword spells if I don't have them.
The only thing West Coast games have over GURPS is ease of use. I can pop in and play with Pathfinder 1e, though character design takes just as long with as many books as I have. Still, when I play, there are many tables and random charts to make playing the game easy, along with giant lists of monsters and treasures. I have samples of NPCs created. All the spells are there. The magic items are plentiful. Everything is done for me. Though 90% of it I will never use, it is there.
When you boil it down, lists are just worthless lists.
The character is the heart of the game.
And if a game limits my character, it limits my fun.
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