Troll Lord Games

So, I leafed through this at the FLGS. My first impression was, if you hate 3.5 and you hate 4e, you will hate this twice as much.

Am I wrong?

I bought the hard-cover, and loved reading it.

Haven't played it yet, but can't say I hate what I've read.

What is it you hate, Icons, OUT?
(I never played 3.5 or 4, but have played PF, but find it a bit crunchy for my taste)


BoomerET

Yeah, extra 'story telling rules' is one smell that sometimes indicates I will dislike a game. The "escalation" die reminds me of Marvel Superheroes and the Doom Pool, which I find channels everyone into now making whatever is happening into a 'scene' that is 'about' something and that something defines success.

I also get the impression that this is one of those games where what you are and what you can do is what is on your character sheet, and players will be glued to it for the whole game.

Levelled damage implies HP bloat and long high level combats?

Again, I just skimmed and much of my opinion comes from the marketing materials. I could be way off.

Also, Finarvyn mentioned in a post he uses the backgrounds. I generally respect his opinion as an old schooler so I suspect I don't have the full picture.

I looked at this and felt that it was too crunchy for me.

R-

Yep, while it looked gorgeous, I felt it was too crunchy and brought nothing original to the "game", IE I have seen all the rules elsewhere, and this is only "unique" in how it packaged them all together. Now if its ideas were new and fresh to me, maybe I would have liked it enough to give it a try. Fortunately I got the PDF on sale for either $5 or $10, so if anyone ever convinces me I just have to give it a try, I'll be able to.

Aergraith wrote:Finarvyn mentioned in a post he uses the backgrounds. I generally respect his opinion as an old schooler so I suspect I don't have the full picture.

I appreciate the vote of confidence and will try to give some of the highs and lows of the game system. I play in a weekly 13th Age game but have only GMed it a handful of times.

Here's my take on it, as semi-random bullet points:

(1) Character creation is a little more crunchy than I like. Our GM knows the system well, provided pregens, and updates the character sheets for us so I don't have to make many decisions. I like playing it more than running it. However, each race and each class has a few abilities that make them cooler than the rest. The folks I play with seem to really like the fact that they can play any race-class combo. As an old-timer I have mixed feelings on this, but I've been playing a dark elf sorcerer and it's actually fun.

(2) The escalation die is really a neat mechanic and is simple to run. The premise is that the characters will "figure out" the weaknesses of their enemies the longer they engage, so they start to get bonuses as the battle goes longer. (Monsters don't get this option.) The die starts at "zero" when the battle begins and increases +1 each round until it hits 6, and stays there until the end of the battle. There are some subtle add-on rules that work with the escalation die (some types of actions only kick in when the die reaches a certain number, for example) but you can probably ignore a lot of that and be fine. This is one rule I swiped for my C&C/OD&D games.

(3) 13th Age has parts of 4E that I like, and gets rid of a lot of what I didn't. I kind of like the "at will" spells and stuff like that. I kind of like healing surges because it keeps characters alive. (If a cleric casts a healing spell on you in battle, for example, it uses up one of your healing surges. Otherwise you need to heal in between encounters.) I like the fact that each character has actions that he can do each turn.

(4) The "story telling" stuff is really clever and some of my favorite parts of the game. The icons are okay and can be used to advance the plot, but to me the best thing is the backgrounds. (That's the big thing I mentioned in the other thread.) What I like about backgrounds is that you are getting "skill packages" and you don't need to determine what is in that package in advance. If you "sailed with Davy Jones" and need to climb a rope, you can present your case to the GM that a sailor would have that skill and when you make your stat check you can add your "sailed with Davy Jones" bonus to your roll. There is no pre-determined list of backgrounds and players are encouraged to be creative and come up with neat ideas, which the GM can steal as plot threads along the way. As a GM I can appreciate this because it means I don't need to make up all of the details all of the time, but instead can let the players fit their ideas into my campaign. Win-win, in my book. This is another rule I swiped for my C&C/OD&D game.

(5) I like the fact that 13th Age doesn't require minis, and you don't count squares on a battle mat. (You could count squares as in 4E, of course, but the game is designed to be more vague. That's pretty much the way I play already.) Basically you are "near" or "far" and can move some vague distance as long as the GM allows it. In that sense you don't really need a map at all, although we typically sketch something on notebook paper at the least so everyone can "see" the situation.

(6) Having said all that, 13th Age has some of the same issues as 4E in terms of pacing. I'm not sure if it's the way the adventures are written by Pelgrane Press or a function of the rules, but a typical game session can boil down to a somewhat linear battle-to-battle-to-battle sequence if you aren't careful.

So ... is 13th Age as "old school" as C&C or OD&D? No. But it is by far the best of the "new school" D&D 3E/4E style RPGs that I've found so far. In my opinion, that is.

Yeah, the Escalation die idea is one I have considered, but I think reaching a +6 is a bit too high for C&C, so I was thinking, if I ever decide to give it a try, to limit it to a max of 3 for C&C. Or maybe scale it to level, maybe a +1 for every 4 levels of the party, so that when I run a campaign to 12th or 16th level it can even reach +4, or if for some reason I ever run a C&C game to 20th, even get to +5. Or maybe let it scale a bit faster by limiting it to a +1 for every 3 levels of the party. I also like how this feeds into the idea that as they gain experience their ability to more effectively "read their opponent" also improves, allowing the die to escalate.

Treebore, your ideas of scaling the die are good ones. We've found that most combats don't seem to last too many rounds where the extra plusses are too unbalancing, and the die helps to speed along the end of battle because things kind of accelerate and feel faster.

I wish I had collected data on how many rounds it takes to kill monsters in our games, becasue getting to +4 (the 5th round of combat) seems pretty rare and getting to +5 (6th round) or +6 (7th round and higher) even more so.

Yeah, I know as it is that most combats last 3 to 4 rounds, so I am figuring this will speed it up a round, if I decide to use it. My group seems luke warm to it at best so far.

13th age is a great 4E alternative. If you hated 4E for any reason besides the grid or combat time,you will prob dislike 13th age.

I myself find it a fun system that needs tweeking. Most encounters by the book are too easy,some of the magic systems like retuals need work.

My local 13th Age GM announced he would run two sessions at GenCon. Filled up within a half hour and I didn't even get in. Wow.