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No reason at all that you can't use a grid. Just don't expect the mechanics to fill you in with square measurements and LOS / cover rules akin to with 3.5 and 4E D&D did. 13th Age doesn't include that kind of infrastructure in the base game. Your Mileage May Vary. Personally I find that the...

I have to concur with people suggesting 13th Age. If you aren't married to 20-30 levels as a paradigm, don't need gridded combat to have fun, and aren't obsessed with building the closest thing to a quadratic wizard you can lay your hands on its definitely your successor edition to 4E - all the...

Is something broken under one otherwise plausible reading of the rules? Does it vastly deviate from the rest of the game's framework? Then you probably need a ruling to keep things consistent. Is something that the PCs or NPCs want to do not have specific rules? Looks like you need a ruling to...

Swashbucklers and other finesse fighting styles are handled just fine between the Bard, Ranger, and Rogue classes. All of them can fight in melee with their Dexterity and all 3 represent some varied mechanical styles. Bards have flexible attacks. Rangers can fight with 2 weapons or pole-arms and...

Well, that explains everything. Medieval peasants are stinky as a matter of course. No healing for them! ;) In all seriousness, though, NPC and PCs don't have to operate under the same rules at all. The player's handbook tells us how PCs work. PCs are assumed to be able to recover from any sort...

Hating evil doesn't mean you are good. It just means you hate evil. Maybe you hate yourself, but have a job to do killing worse people. Maybe your ideal world would be the one that starts the moment after you fall on your own sword - because you were the last monster left. Evil Paladin is...

I think it generally shakes out OK on the DEX/Con front vs. other classes. Among the standard character classes the characters who use Strength as their primary attack stat have good Heavy Armor and shield options to help their AC. They can dump Dex and push Con and Wis along with another...

Well, it's worthwhile enough as part of the Ranger Ex Cathedral talent for me to drop Spiritual Hammer before going off the deep end with Two-Weapon Fighting. - Marty Lund

Frankly, I think 13th Age handles keeping the number of actions available at any given point to a minimum compared to many other editions. Yes, there are more and less complex characters. Some characters wind up with maybe 10 or so spells or equivalent class abilities by the end of their career...

I'm actually very taken with the idea of using Goals as the measuring stick for XP / level advancement in story-driven campaigns rather than XPs-per-kill or flat "Get here, gain a level" markers. Tabulate successes and failures as it relates to Goals to achieve campaign victories and what 13th...

"Elspeth twists just in time catch the arrow on her mailed shoulder instead of her exposed neck. With a grimace, she wrenches away the splintered remains snagged in her armor." Because non-magical arrows from hand-draw bows can't penetrate properly made chain mail in the first place, after all...

Remora LeTreya is an attractive 20 year old human spy who enjoys toying with people's emotions - at least when she doesn't need them dead. STR 3, AGI 6, END 3, WIL 3, INT 7, CHA 6, REP 4 GC +7 +1000 Gold Carrier Path: Noble to age 10, Minstrel to age 12, Ranger to age 13, Assassin for the...

What's the deal with some of the Traditions having this +1 or +2 CR stat? I didn't pick up that stat anywhere. Is it supposed to be CHA instead? Also, how are you supposed to take Burglar? There's no Street Thug tradition. - Marty Lund

Since Chess and Go are both games even though all players have perfect knowledge I must obviously have screwed up what I was trying to communicate. You don't remove the target numbers and rolls - I'm purely pointing out that you can make the knowledge of the targets public to the players. The...

I think the point missed here is the we can't appeal to "realism" and "simulation" or rejection of "abstraction" to try to convert a what is represented by a failed melee attack in D&D (6 seconds locked in melee with one or more opponents) into meaning that no physical contact or injury could've...

Problem is, the world is also rarely impacted by the magical power of just one person either. Unless you're reading a fantasy paperback banked upon an over-done Chosen One or One True Evil you don't get that happening - and neither of those archetypes are appropriate design space for a...

But "My character couldn't find a good opening in the enemy's defenses this round (6 seconds) despite circling, jabbing, and feinting - maybe next round," works perfectly well to describe a failed attack roll. As does a series of blows the glance off ineffectually from armor, a shield, or...

My alternative view is that the idea situation is the player says, "Gongar attacks at the goblin!" while rolling Atk + Damage dice. When the dice turn up a successful attack and the damage is talley the DM says, "That's a hit and he's bad off, but still alive," to which the player says...

First, "controls" necessary to keep spells like Wish from breaking game economies are like I outlined: generally cost-prohibitive to reloading every morning - moreso than the XP and GP costs f prior editions. Second, to make up for the way some of the most ill-conceived spells in D&D history...

Well, to be dramatic about it, this Rule of Three looks like the kiss of death for my interest in 5th Edition. So Wizards get increasing reality-warping magics (the incidentally destroy the economies of the game system and game world relative to the PCs) and the Grogs get ... extra attacks ...