Getting Started With Tales Of The Valiant
Tales Of The Valiant is an early-access RPG from Iron Oak Games that translates tabletop mechanics into a video game format. You build a party, roll dice for combat checks, and push through dungeons. It's rough around the edges, but the core loop works if you approach it the right way. The character creation screen looks overwhelming at first because it throws a lot of numbers at you. Class, race, background, skills, feats — it's a lot. I spent about twenty minutes on my first character just agonizing over whether to put the starting feat on Strength or Dexterity. Didn't matter much by the end of act one, but it felt important at the time.
Setting Up A Playable Party
Here's how I actually approach it now. Pick your main class first based on what you enjoy playing, not what the tooltips say is optimal. Then fill your party slots by looking for gaps. If you're a fighter with heavy armor, don't bring another fighter. Bring a healer and someone who can handle ranged threats. The AI party members follow basic aggro logic, but they won't coordinate flanking or focus fire the way you would. That's on you. Race matters less than the guides claim. Half-elf gets you skill versatility and the extra feat slot, which is nice. Dragonborn has that breath weapon that feels good in a pinch. But don't stress it. The stat adjustments are small, and you'll be making ability score improvements at levels 4, 8, and beyond anyway.
Understanding The Dice System
The combat uses a d20-based resolution system familiar to anyone who's played D&D 5e. You roll against an opponent's armor class, add modifiers, and compare. Crits happen on a natural 20, fumbles on a natural 1. Simple enough on paper. Here's what the manual doesn't tell you: the difficulty of encounters scales with your party's average level, not individual levels. If you have a level 5 and a level 3 in the same party, the game treats you as a level 4 for encounter design. This means carrying a low-level character through a zone will make fights trivially easy for them and annoyingly hard for everyone else. Level your whole party up together before pushing into new areas. I ran into a specific issue where my paladin's smite ability didn't trigger correctly during a boss fight. The visual cue played, the damage numbers appeared, but the bonus damage was missing entirely. I ended up just restarting the fight and using a different build approach. I later found that unequipping and re-equipping the sacred weapon resolved it. The bug seems to persist in the current build, so if you hit it, that's the workaround. Patch notes mentioned some smite fixes were coming but they haven't landed yet as of my last play session.
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Inventory And Resource Management
Your inventory is tight. The game wants you to make choices about what you carry. I learned this the hard way on my third run when I filled every slot with potions and scrolls I never used, then couldn't pick up a legendary weapon because I had no space. Now I keep three potions, two scrolls, and everything else goes to the vendor or the stash. The stamina system is another thing that trips people up. Every action costs stamina, and sprinting drains it faster than most players expect. When stamina hits zero you're slowed down and you can't initiate attacks for a couple seconds. It's not a hard stop, but it's punishing in tight corridors with multiple enemies. Manage your sprints like you manage your resources. Don't burn it all running away from one fight you could have handled normally.
When The Game Won't Work For You
This is early access. Expect bugs. Some dungeons have pathfinding issues where party members get stuck on geometry and can't reach enemies. Combat stutters occasionally on larger encounters with four or five enemies and multiple spell effects. The UI has been improved between updates but there are still moments where you can't tell what a skill does because the tooltip is cut off. If you need a polished, bug-free experience with full feature parity, this isn't it. Wait for a later early access stage or full release depending on how much these things matter to you. If you're okay with some roughness in exchange for a game that respects your choices and lets you build parties the way you want, it's worth your time. It runs on Steam at a reasonable price point for what it offers, and the developer is actively patching based on community feedback.
