D'karr
Adventurer
I agree some of those things look different but are still there in a certain manner. I believe my only gripe with 13A is that the classes needed a bit more work. 13 True Ways really starts to show how flexible the system can be.
D&D 4E Who's still playing 4E
- Thread starter Mondaynightgamer
- Start date
EzekielRaiden
Follower of the Way
I can definitely appreciate both sides of this. A lot of my play experience has been with very light systems, often from the more "indie" side--a Dogs in the Vineyard take on Exalted (the DM got impatient waiting for Exalted 3e!) and a couple long-running Dungeon World campaigns. One of my DW co-players can never keep down character sheet details--even with the 'single page' nature of DW character sheets, it took a good 6 months to make sure the player remembered how the Thief's sneak attack works, to say nothing of the variety of level-up moves the character has gained. I can deeply appreciate why the "casual" or "no memory for this sort of thing" player would blanch at seeing a 4e character of anything beyond 3rd or 4th level--that many discrete elements with specific hooks to them would be awful.
On the other hand, though, DW leaves me constantly hungry for more. I've worked out a Compendium Class with my DM that helps, but only so much. It would be totally broken in a general campaign, but when we only have 3 players and I'm the kind of player to put roleplay before effectiveness, it's not so bad. (The "opening move" was +CHA to Last Breath, with some deity shenanigans involved; in a different kind of campaign that would've been difficulty-shattering, but I've only had to roll a Last Breath once, and that was technically kinda-sorta on behalf of someone else--Paladin healing stuff was involved.) 4e is of course my preferred game, so straining against the confines of the comparatively ultra-light DW has led to interesting results. Fortunately, in the other campaign (technically Dungeon Planet), I play a Technician, which makes that character essentially a techno-cleric-wizard, so I'm less starved for mechanics there (but still not satiated).
Hear, hear. To be fair, though, there is a 13th Age SRD. While not quite as easily searched as the Compendium, and not an exhaustive listing of all official stuff, it's a good help if you want to search through the base game.
Some of them could probably be carried over without too much issue. I imagine the Great Gold Wyrm wouldn't be hard, from what little I've read. In fact, the Icons might be really nice, because they give you a way to have important movers and shakers that *aren't* the gods. Obviously the fallen ex-god of corruption etc. would need to be an Icon (possibly a reskinned, triumphant Lich King), but there's a lot you can do with the base Icons. Perhaps some are dead; the Priestess might be a good example, since the gods are out of reach, as well as the Archmage, since the Shadow has nigh-unquestioned control of magic. Others are wholly under the Shadow's thumb, e.g. the Diabolist is given free rein as long as its actions serve the Lich King's purposes, and the Orc Lord is clearly allied with him rather than opposed. The Elf Queen could go a variety of ways--dead, sleeping, wounded--but would make a lot of sense because of Midnight's history. The Emperor expressly doesn't fit, but he could be turned around--rather than representing the august and well-established ruler, he could be the young conqueror and far-sighted statesman, perhaps his Draconic Seals being some form of not-yet-well-known force that can oppose the Shadow. You probably don't need all 13 Icons anyway, unless you get a really heterogeneous group.
On the one hand, I'd like to get some hands-on experience with 13A, because it sits somewhere between two games I like (that is, 4e and DW). On the other, I have some doubts and reservations about it, and how it implements certain classes (especially the Paladin, and not just because it's so deeply passive in nature). It also sounds like Midnight is a tough setting to play in, for someone with my sensibilities (I love Paladins)--sort of a more "traditional fantasy" parallel of Dark Sun.
Last edited:
dream66_
First Post
Sorry, hate wasn't fair, it was a emotional reaction to what I saw, I don't want to take this too far off topic, but I admit to having a very emotional reaction to 13th age, nothing about it looks like 4e, but looks like it would be familiar to a 3.x player and that bothered me because they have pathfinder they don't need 13th age, we needed it.
Scrivener of Doom
Adventurer
Actually, I do agree about the classes.
I ended up making cheat sheets at late-Heroic onwards covering all the triggered powers the PCs had. I also experimented a few times with preparing their character sheets in the same format as monster stat blocks. Basically, I just needed to get them over a hump of refreshing their knowledge of the character sheet for a few minutes before play. It took a couple of levels but eventually they go there.
That was also my experience with 5E. I had flash backs to AD&D and realised that those things I hated about AD&D were only a few sessions away. Combat is an important part of the game regardless of edition: let it have some substance.
I must admit, I am glad Pelgrane published a very generous SRD for 13th Age. It's also going to be handy when I get around to writing up stuff for a Midnight conversion because I can just use the SRD documents as the base.
I have to admit: I don't like the Icons. I like the basic idea but I don't like the 13th Age world and I don't like the Icons they use. One of the things I hated about AD&D was the generic cleric; Icons are just too generic. (And I do understand why so it's not a complaint. This is purely subjective and all about personal taste.)
Exactly! Actually, it was after Dark Sun was published for 4E and the enhancement bonuses became an option that I realised I could also run Midnight using 4E. And I am still really tempted to do that!
However, at the risk of annoying Midnight purists, I wouldn't play it as purely grimdark. In fact, I would base it on on the original Star Wars trilogy - with each movie representing a tier - with the possibility of the PCs actually destroying the Shadow's master mirror at the end. I don't think you can play in a world like Midnight - or Dark Sun for that matter - if there is no hope. Hope has to be the overarching theme otherwise drink absinthe and listen to Leonard Cohen.
Hehe... and I find it looks more like 4E than 3.5E. But, hey, if you don't like it, you don't like it.
And we don't need 13th Age. All of the books and PDFs still exist. The electronic tools still exist. Our brains and the creative bits of our brains still exist. We can keep playing 4E until we die.
tyrlaan
Explorer
I actually think it's sort of a clever layout/formatting trick to be honest. 4e-like rules written in a 3e-like style.
I've always felt that some of the backlash tossed at 4e ultimately came down to presentation, which highlighted aspects of the game in ways that weren't quite as clear in prior editions. So 13thAge, for example, basically gives you A/E/D mechanics but just writes them up in a different way.
Incidentally, my initial reaction was similar to yours. I saw it and went "meh this is just a spin on 3e". It took me a deeper read through to realize I was incorrect.
Aye, the latter. Apologies for not clarifying. Definitely has no impact on actual gameplay.
Agree. I think this is something that I hadn't really noticed, but now is quite clear to me as a result of this discussion thread.
Yeah me too. I'm hoping I can craft up an excel spreadsheet to serve as a monster builder and another as a character builder. I'm no coder, but I can at least do some neat stuff in excel
AbdulAlhazred
Legend
Yeah, there's a few weird things that bothered me about 13a. The whole "pick what you know about" approach to skill/background is nice in some respects, but OTOH it still suffers from the question "what don't I know?" If you didn't come up with some backstory why you DO know all about say 'boat building', then what exactly do you know? Nothing? I thought 4e's approach was better there.
I think the advancement in 13a is a bit borked. I 'get' why they have 10 levels, but each level is too big an increment. I think 20 levels and use half-level bonus works better. Yeah, you gotta know how to divide by 2 and round down. Frankly I think anyone that can't achieve that probably shouldn't play D&D...
I'm just not THAT fond of the classes. The class features seem somewhat arbitrary in implementation. There are like 7 different 'sort of spell casting' subsystems. Some classes use THREE different schemes for their powers, its just ugly. I fault 5e for this, but 13a has it in spades. Sorry, stick with powers, the power system is just BETTER. I feel like both 5e and 13a avoid it "just to be different from 4e" not for any good reason.
The icons are an interesting and quirky feature of 13a, but its not at all clear to me how that translates to other worlds or variations on the genre. 13a seems maybe not totally tied to its world-concept, but it seems like its pretty heavily coupled.
I don't think 13a's combat system and monsters are as interesting as 4e's. They're OK, but not as good.
AbdulAlhazred
Legend
Its 'tactical' combat is purely TotM. Obviously you can draw a map and put minis on it, but rules-wise positioning is highly abstract and there's nothing like 'flanking', 'pushing', etc except as a purely abstract narrative component of the game.
There's nothing even close to AEDU in 13a. In my mind 'AEDU' or 'power system' implies a uniform rule which covers all sorts of 'special actions' which characters can take and grants all characters uniform access to a selection of such options with some sort of resource/timing mechanism that is common to all powers and all classes. 13a has nothing like that. It has simply 'class features', which usually have no common structure at all between classes. They may happen to often be allocated on a timing schedule of "N times per encounter" or "N times per session of play", but that doesn't make it an 'AEDU system'.
I agree, 13a has non-magical healing. It works somewhat differently from 4e's version, but it does accomplish many of the same goals, and in this respect 13a is more like 4e than 5e is. 13a IN GENERAL is I think closer in genre/tone to 4e by a great deal than 5e is. I just find 4e to be the superior implementation between the two.
tyrlaan
Explorer
I completely understand all of your distastes for the system. What doesn't work for you seems to work for me (at least so far, I've yet to play the game), but I can very much respect why these aspects stick in your craw.
Blue
Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal
Actually 13th Age has a more granularity that D&D (any edition). The DM grants Incremental Advances, suggested every session, each of which gives part of the next level. In the order the player desires. If you play ~5 sessions a level (so 4 IAs and then the full level) that's 45 advancement steps from lowest level to highest. (Once you are the highest level you aren't working towards your next, unless someone comes out with the equivalent of Epic advancement for 13th Age.)
Tony Vargas
Legend
To be fair, 13A doesn't talk up being a continuation of 4e, just that one of it's two design partners was the guy behind 4e, it also draws heavily from 3e, and from Classic D&D, much like 5e did.
5e does go farther in the direction of "narrative" or story-telling style than 4e did. Characters get a lot of 'ribbons,' like "One Unique Thing," choice of weapon & armor, and re-skinning and whatnot, that do contribute to defining the character, but have little or no mechanical impact. Tactical combat is not absent, it's just more abstract, as a result of the game actually being designed for TotM (unlike 5e which just tells you to use TotM).
But it does abandon some of the best things 4e did. The common class structure is gone in favor of resource-varied classes with balance imposed by arbitrary day length. While balance is (somewhat, if heavy-handedly) maintained, the classes end up being a lot less developed, individually, while still presenting a higher bar to learning more than one class or just 'getting' the system, in general. Similarly, it keeps a surge-like mechanic, but abandons some of the coolest uses for it, (though the Commander class does trigger 'rallies' which isn't terrible).
Ultimately, 13A isn't remotely a Pathfinder-like 'clone' of 4e - it's really a lot more like 5e in what it tries to do (and succeeds in doing), just with somewhat less D&D baggage, and a lot more indie innovation (and much better support for TotM, of course).
"AEDU" was really more a short-hand for saying that 4e classes had a common structure (which made them so much easier to balance), than that it had 3 different kinds of resource-recovery.
13A uses different resource-recharge mixes among the classes, and balances them with a large hammer called a 'full-heal up,' that is DM mediated. It works - better than anything done to balance 5e, 3e, or classic D&D, certainly - but it it's clumsy, arbitrary, and just blatantly obvious. For people who don't like 'seeing the strings,' I suspect, it has to be a deal-breaker.
OTOH, 13A monsters and encounters seem to work pretty well, and show clear 4e, as well as indie, influence.
Last edited:
