Level Up 5th Edition adds extra complexity to 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons
Wizards of the Coast released the 5th edition of Dungeons & Dragons in 2014, trimming down much of the complexity found in previous versions of the tabletop role-playing game in order to make it more approachable to new players. But eight years later, even the game’s most devoted fans have started to get a bit bored with the system.
“We’re all massive, massive, massive fans of D&D,” said Russ Morrissey, owner of the TTRPG news site EN World and CEO of EN Publishing. “It just got to a stage where we’d like if there was a little more depth to it, if there was just a little more to look forward to as you level up your fighter. We were finding that was happening across all aspects of play. We thought if we felt like that, there must be other people out there who felt the same way.”
That hunch led to the development of Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition, a series of rulebooks that are backward compatible with modern D&D, but can also be played as a stand-alone game system. They include the core rulebook titled Level Up: Adventurer’s Guide, Level Up: Monstrous Menagerie filled with new and upgraded bad guys to fight, and Level Up: Trials & Treasures, the system’s corollary to the Dungeon Master’s Guide. Together, they add complexity to almost every aspect of play, by both modifying existing 5E systems and bringing back elements of previous editions, like the combat maneuvers first introduced in 3.5’s Tome of Battle: The Book of Nine Swords.
“When you go into a combat, the wizard is selecting from a list of spells and has something fun to choose each round, whereas often the fighter is just, ‘Oh, I’ll move and hit,’” Morrissey said. “A fighter is deliberately designed to be simple, the easiest class to get into. But after you’ve
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