Is 13th Age stealing dnd next's thunder?

[Pog]

It's a shame 13th Age isn't more widely known about - it really is a version of dnd IMHO rather than a whole new beast. But then again web chat about it is increasing, and it isn't actually out yet ... . Whether it supplants dnd, well maybe not - but I do suspect that the dnd market is getting more fragmented, and maybe 13th Age will have a sizeable minority share in it.

 

[Mercurius]

There are always lots of fantasy RPGs out there.

Have been since D&D 3.0 came out.

I see nothing new here at all.

There have been lots of fantasy games well before the 3.0 era - Tunnels and Trolls, Runequest, Rolemaster, Talislanta, Warhammer, and Ars Magica, just to name a few of the more prominent ones that came out in the 70s or 80s (there are dozens more that are less well known).

I think 4E will remain the game for the 4E crowd.

Edit: I removed my response because I decided to start a new thread rather than hijack this one.

 

[Blue]

Yes and no. I'm excited for 13th Age and bought the "Escalation Edition" pre-release. It's got a lot going for it. Though I wish they did playtesting like Evil Hat (Dresden, etc.) and let people talk about it, because it almost didn't have enough oomph for me to plunk down $ on it that early. Video games long ago learned that betas are also to drum up interest and player involvement, and NDAs get in the way of that.

That said, part of what's cool about 13th Age is the setting which is very evocative and supported by the mechanics (which few D&D settings were, Dark Sun is the only one off the top of my head). So I'm definitely interested in running and/or playing 13th Age. But it doesn't offset Next for me, because if I want a setting-agnostic fantasy RPG system for a homebrew, that's likely to be it. (Not putting down 4e or 3.x - I currently play or run both. But a new D&D campaign would most likely be Next.)

 

[ForeverSlayer]

I would be more worried about [notranslate]Pathfinder[/notranslate] stealing the thunder than 13th Age. [notranslate]Pathfinder[/notranslate] continues to show signs of growth and no slowing down.

 

[Grazzt]

I'd say no.

I image that the average dnd player, has never heard of 13th age. At this point in time the average Dnd player hasn't heard of NEXT yet, and won't till it's ready to be sold.

Yep. Exactly this.

 

[waderockett]

As the marketing/PR guy for 13th Age, I thought I might chime in here with what it looks like from my side.

It was indeed a coincidence that 13th Age was announced around the time that WoTC announced Next. At first we were concerned that the 13th Age announcement would be completely drowned out, because Next was huge news, and would hold the attention of the fantasy RPG community for the foreseeable future.

It's impossible to say what might have happened if Next hadn't been announced when Pelgrane started the 13th Age playtest. What did happen Next-wise, though, was that people wrote blog posts and started forum threads to talk about what else might be out there in case Next didn't deliver the experience they wanted. As a result, for several weeks our game was mentioned in the same breath as Dungeon World.

We've gotten great buzz so far. We've seen positive 13th Age writeups and designer interviews on the top gaming blogs, and threads on the major forums. The game's been talked up on Haste, Geek in Review and That's How We Roll, and was featured twice on the cover of Kobold Quarterly magazine. We ran well-received demos at Gen Con, PAX and Metatopia, and got a shout out on Penny Arcade.

But we're still not anywhere close to stealing Next's thunder.

The game is unlikely to do so for a number of reasons. D&D is the hobby's strongest brand, and you'd go through a substantial list of other strong brands before you eventually got to 13th Age. We don't have anywhere near the marketing resources WoTC has (I work on it part-time on top of a day job and a regular gig at Kobold Press), and 13th Age is a quirky, designer-driven game that's not going to appeal to everyone. (Here are the grappling rules in their entirety: "We don’t want general grappling rules. If you decide to allow normal PCs and monsters to grab hold of people, try something like this: their puny grabs are like real grabs but they don’t prevent opportunity attacks, don’t provide an attack bonus, and only apply a –2 disengage check penalty.")

In the end, we really, really want Next to succeed, because when D&D does well, the hobby does well, and our game has a better chance of doing well.

By the way, if you want to hear 13th Age being run by one of its designers, all this week BJ Shea's Geek Nation podcast will be posting daily actual play recordings with Rob Heinsoo GMing for the group.

 

[GhostBear]

As others have said, 13th Age doesn't have the name recognition or market penetration to do much thunder stealing.

I'm in on the 13th Age pre-order, and I've had a chance to play around with it a bit. There's a LOT to love. I don't see my group moving to it entirely, but we are definitely stealing a good chunk of it for our existing 3.5/PF/Fate bastard child. It's a very nice product and I'm looking forward to the final version.

 

[mlund]

People seem so confused about the marketplace.

Traditional RPGS are a dying niche market. There's still money to be made there, but it all depends on what your overhead is to produce and what your profit goals are. If you have a tiny project like 13th Age and you aren't basing your business model on some massive growth over 10 years or whatever that's perfectly viable. If you're a big-fish/small-pond operation like Paizo then getting large market-share in the traditional RPG niche is enough to justify your business.

If you have a huge brand like Dungeons and Dragons and you have Hasbro's corporate growth models in place then all the money in the dying niche market isn't sufficient. You have to earn your keep leveraging your brand outside the traditional RPG market through things like video games, board games, novels, electronic supplements, etc. You have to try growing the pie by going beyond the traditional pen-and-paper RPG. Your presence in the traditional RPG market is almost perfunctory at this point. There basically has to be a halfway decent game to keep up your brand identity if you're going to leverage those other markets.

- Marty Lund

 

[Pog]

Thanks for the input waderockett - I'm glad 13th Age is doing well, and I wish it the best of luck. I also want dnd next to do well - indeed, from a purely selfish point of view I want it to be the best fantasy rpg ever.

For the moment, though, I'll be playing pathfinder and 13th Age! Played some pathfinder today, and am looking to starting a new 13th Age campaign in the new year . It's a good time to like playing fantasy RPGs.

 

[Dragonblade]

13th Age is amazing, and I love how it appears right now that I could run either Next or 13th Age as my base, and steal lots of bits from the other. For example, the entire magic item doc in the Next playtest can pretty much be dropped as is into a 13th Age game. Likewise, the advantage mechanic from Next is a perfect fit for 13th Age.

Conversely, I can go the other way and import Backgrounds, Fail Forward, the Escalation Die, and the mook rules from 13th Age into Next. I love it!