Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition Impressions, part one

 I backed the kickstarter for EN Publishing's Level Up, and I've had the three core PDF's for around a week now. I've been wanting to write up a deep dive into some RPG book for a while now, and I've got some opinions about these books. So let's do this thing!

What's the Plan?

The plan for this series of posts is to go through the core rules of Level Up and talk about things that catch my eye. I'm reading the early release PDFs, so I'm not going to be talking about layout or editing mistakes, though there are a few editing choices that I may touch on if they seem to be in final form. I'm interested in game design decisions, not layout or editing (though I'll talk about layout if it seems like it would affect the game).

I'll talk about what the game is as a whole, then I'll go through the Monstrous Menagerie, Adventurer's Guide and Trials and Treasures PDFs, noting my thoughts on elements in the order they appear. I thought about starting with the Adventurer's Guide, as the most core of the core books, but I chose the Monstrous Menagerie to start because a) it's the entire reason I bought the books and b) Level Up is, or at least claims to be, built to play seamlessly with Dungeons and Dragons 5th ed., so you shouldn't need other books to use the monsters, for instance. And that brings us straight to 

What is Level Up?

The full name of this product line is 'Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition.' It's being sold as a top down upgrade to 5th ed D&D, while staying broadly balanced and compatible with the original. It claims that you can mix and match any elements from this game with the original (with a few important caveats). So D&D characters can use Level Up magic items to fight a mixed group of original and new monsters, and presumably a character made with Level Up can be used in a group playing D&D. If anyone tries this without warning the DM ahead of time, 1) you're a monster and 2) tell me all about it, that sounds hilarious. 

I could go on talking about the claims made about this game, but I think that's enough for an introduction. There is just one more caveat to make  before I finish up this introduction and start on the next post:

What I assume of you

I'm going to be writing under the assumption that you, the reader, are familiar with 5th edition D&D at least enough to recognize terms such as advantage, modifier, ability check, attack roll, etc. We'll see a few points in the coming reading where some noises about new players are made, but make no mistake: this game is clearly built for people who have played the other game before, and unlike it's authors, I'm not so polite as to pretend otherwise.

That said, if you're unfamiliar with D&D or I use a term that's more obscure than I think it is, let me know and I'll try to explain things a little better. I am going to be touching on some wider game design concepts through here, and I suspect some of it will be applicable in the wider world of table top RPGs. 

Next up: the Monstrous Menagerie OR I eat my dessert first.