@dArtagnan a lot of the changes you describe sound positive to me!

you mention near the start that you weren't very happy with the ToV changes, and same, but curious if you've dived into A5e at all?

imo, A5e's base changes are really good. but also i think their model is really good for making it easy to get on board: make the material free to access online, and lean heavily into public playtesting and transparent decision making.

@chaosfae I've looked into A5e, yes. The first time it made me angry. But that was because I think it was over complicating things. And given how my frustration lead to some particular design choices I would not want to budge on.

I would like to actually go through the rules and see how I feel about it by its own merits.

It has some interesting choices. Many I don't specifically want to replicate per se, but they are interesting

@dArtagnan it definitely adds an extra couple layers of player creation complexity. based on your work, i'd expect the base rule differences to be the more interesting part, rather than player option changes and stuff like skill specialties.

there's a number of places that commonly accepted beneficial 5e table rules are how the A5e rules work.

we took a long while to come around to A5e. first looked at it back in 2022 or early '23, but only in the last few months really changed our mind to liking it best of the 5e-ites.

@chaosfae I also agree to making the material publically and easily accessible, but as it stands now, I don't have a large active userbase (and more importantly for real life, much money to work with).

When it's done I plan to make a public SRD akin to what pathfinder has, and not like ToV or D&D have. But until then, this is to be a more enticing incentive to toss me a buck than a month's worth of early access to the abundance of free things I throw out weekly.

@chaosfae As I said, I need to give it a fair shake. I did like, however, how it integrated backgrounds into a sort of progression and gave all the martial some combat flexibility without doing the very lame ass weapon mastery thing (god the fighter's interaction with weapon masteries annoy me)