For the past year, I've been running Tales of the Valiant (ToV) for my local gaming group's weekly game session. The campaign started with Princes of the Apocalypse but after several side quests, the players have become thoroughly distracted and it's now a mix of Princes, Saltmarsh, and random Kobold Press and other adventures I find on Drivethrurpg.com. Some of my players are using Tales of the Valiant player guide, others are using Dungeons & Dragons (2014) and sometimes one even dips into Dungeons & Dragons (2024). Despite a distinct lack of player focus and an impossible diversity of source material, the game is holding up with no conversion required. This is my review of Tales of the Valiant after a year of weekly gaming.
The goal of Tales of the Valiant was to safeguard what we know generically refer to as "5e", which refers to the fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons, a game that millions upon millions of players had come to know and love. As D&D's publisher geared up for its next edition, there was no reason to believe we wouldn't all still be playing a variant of 5e well into the future. And then Wizards of the Coast famously attempted to overturn its own open gaming license in a ploy to make money on any and all third-party material published for the game. It was a move, if successful, that would have destroyed the third-party market that we gamers had grown and fostered since the start of the 21st century. Someone had to step in and protect the tradition of dnd from its current publisher, and with its proven track record for great dnd gaming material, Kobold Press was an obvious candidate. It already had a wealth of 5e-compatible modules and monsters and spells and character options and the Midgard setting, so it made sense to publish a ruleset to go along with its existing material.
In both theory and practise, Tales of the Valiant does exactly what it set out to do. It preserves the 5e system with an open source license, meaning anyone can develop "5e" material and share or sell it without obfuscating the intent (for example, you don't have to write "for the world's most popular roleplaying game!" as code for "5e" or "Tales of the Valiant") or obtaining permission or licensing from any publisher. And it does this by balancing backward and forward compatibility with the 5e of 2014 and anticipated trends in games of the near future.
I don't have an enumerated list to demonstrate it, but I have a sense that Tales of the Valiant characters are a little more powerful than 5e (2014) characters. For example, the old "standard array" for character attributes was 15,14,13,12,10,8 but in ToV the standard array is 16,14,14,13,10,8. And that's just the start. New abilities and class features (like the rogue's Appraising Eye) often feel oddly powerful even in early levels.
At first, this was a mild annoyance to me, but only because I hadn't expected it. I adapted quickly because it has two notable benefits. First, it anticipates power creep. It happens, it's unavoidable, so we may as well be ready for it. Players get more powerful the more a game system gets expanded. For ToV characters to compete with bigger and badder threats, they need to start powerful and then get more powerful as they level up. With an over-powered character build, you have assurance that you can take a ToV character into a new adventure without feeling like you're using an outdated class from way back in 2014. A ToV character is fresh and new, it's got all the latest features, and can play in anything from 2014 adventures to tomorrow's newest module.
Secondly, powerful characters ensure that the story of your adventure progresses. Any game master knows that success is the easiest way to get players through a story. A good game master can also spin failure into a kind of story success, but players don't always understand that. Players often feel that when their character fails, the players have failed, and the story probably can't even continue. They've "lost" the game. I think failure is a vital feature of a good RPG experience, but I also acknowledge that sometimes the story stalls due to silly failures. There were several times when I ran Tomb of Horrors for my players that their "over-powered" builds were exactly what they needed to get past some of the obscure obstacles Gary Gygax wrote into his famous dungeon. Amazingly, over-powered characters can still take damage, and the way I run Tomb of Horrors meant that they definitely took damage (the party barbarian was down to 3 hit points, which NEVER happens!) As a game master, you adapt the adventure for your party. Use the first few levels of ToV to get a feel for just how breakable the player characters really are, and then start adjusting the monsters and threats as the characters start to level up. You'll find the right balance quickly, just as with any RPG system.
The 5e system has a metagame subsystem called Inspiration, which requires the game master to reward players for "good" role play. When you had an Inspiration point, you could spend it to re-roll a bad roll, and probably some other stuff. I never loved this subsystem because I just couldn't get players to remember that they had Inspiration, even after I made a big deal of rewarding it to them. Additionally, I didn't love having to be the judge of "good" role play. Usually, somebody in the game didn't get rewarded as often as somebody else, and anyway I had to reward people early enough in the game that they had meaningful options for their Inspiration point (even though the inevitably forgot they had it, no matter what.)
Tales of the Valiant both succeeds and fails to fix this problem. Instead of Inspiration, ToV uses the Luck subsystem. The game master is no longer required to be the arbiter of "good" role play, and instead a failed hit roll or saving throw grants a player 1 Luck point. Players can spend 1 Luck point to add a pip to any roll, or 3 Luck points for a re-roll. It's a fun minigame that adds a lot of player flexibility. It's probably my fault for not reminding my players about it constantly but, as with Inspiration, Luck is simply not a minigame any of my players choose to engage with. They don't track Luck, and when they do track it they forget to use it. And besides that, you get Luck so frequently that it's almost easier to just assume everyone always has at least 1 Luck point to spend, which means that every roll is in a perpetual state of being potentially +1 pip higher, so I guess we could just treat all DCs at -1. It's a mess, and when we were trying to make it work, we were constantly trying to balance a pontential +1 to the roll or a -1 to the DC, and whether either of these things were actually true, and whether it even mattered.
It was the worst kind of rules debate because it wasn't a philosophical discussion of the simulated reality, but confusion and uncertainty about the state of the engine. Not fun, and we have thrown it out now in favour of the Deck of Dirty Tricks. At the start of each session, each player draws a card with a surprise benefit on it. This represents their Luck for the session. They can spend the card at any time during the session, and even trade cards between players. If they still have the card at the end of the session, then they lose it. It's simple, it's surprising, it's flexible, it's fun, and they mostly remember to use it because there's a big bright red card sitting in front of them that's sort of hard to ignore (I admit, though, they still sometimes forget.)
I never like the concept of Passive Perception, and I still don't. ToV uses it and another Passive skill, and I never use either of them. I don't want to have to remember Passive numbers for every player in every game I run, so I refuse to engage. I don't see the point, I've never encounter the use case.
The main thing Tales of the Valiant has done for my players, I think, is demonstrate that the tabletop roleplaying games of the 21st century are open and communal. I'll take some of the credit, because I'm the one pushing the ToV system into the group (an easy thing to do, as game master, but even when someone else runs a one shot, I build my characters from the ToV book because it's the book I carry around with me now.) We use ToV and WoTC sources indiscriminately. After we've written something down on a character sheet, or we've looked something up online, we don't even bother checking what system it's intended for, as long as it's got a 5e badge.
I remember there used to be this funny term, "official," that we'd all include when discussing things about D&D. We said things like "It's an official class option" or "It's a spell from the official rulebook." I haven't heard that word for over a year. Everything's "official" now. Is it an idea that somebody had for the game, and can we all access it while we play? If so, it's official. Far from threatening the bounds of reality within our simulated game world, this kind of haphazard hoarding of game sources has liberated my gaming group to embrace a wide variety of inspiration. We don't focus on the corporate interests of Wizards of the Coast or Kobold Press or Frog God Games. We pick what we think sounds fun, and we put it into the game. If it's overpowered, the game master compensates. If it's not fun, it goes away.
The reason this is top of mind currently is because the Labyrinth expansion has just been released after a successful Kickstarter campaign. In the Tales of the Valiant system, the great Labyrinth forms pathways between worlds and demiplanes. It's not Planescape, because you're not traveling across planes, it's actually more like Spelljammer in the sense that you're moving between worlds with an occasional encounter with the Astral Sea or a demiplane. I'm reading through it now, and it's exactly the quality I'd expect from the publishing company started and run by Wolfgang Bauer (one of the original authors of Planescape.)
With the Labyrinth released, the next big project is Player's Guide 2, which is potentially even more exciting for its new classes, the most significant of which, I believe, is the Witch class.
The point is, Tales of the Valiant is a system that can leverage the previous and current editions of D&D, all the third-party material from across many publishers and content creators, while also paving a way forward for a game that is mostly already perfect. If you're looking for a stable but innovative game system for your heroic dungeon crawls, take a look at Tales of the Valiant.