13th Age pros and cons?

[Skyscraper]

Hi,

I've been reading a bit about 13th Age and it seems like an interesting game/setting. I'm considering buying the core rulebook.

I'd like to read your thoughts, you that have actually played the game. Tell me what you like and what you didn't like, and how that materialized in your game.

Thanks for any comments or thoughts.

 

[Pheonix0114]

I've only done a one shot with 13th age, but I'll give you my groups rough experience:

Pros: Character Creation has interesting and meaningful choices and everyone liked putting their abilities and backgrounds together. Story wise I used the Icon roles to great effect to allow an almost entirely improved session which they seemed to really dig.

Cons: Combat takes some getting used to, it's enough like DnD that the differences stand out and threw my players a bit, particularly the fighter and his flexible attacks.

Overall though I really enjoyed it and have decided to use it in the future for any traditional fantasy game that i want to use classes with, especially once 13 true Ways launches.

 

[Evenglare]

13th Age is my current system of choice. It's definitely a rules lite system so if you are expecting a rule that covers everything you should probably find another system. It's definitely a narrativist system focusing more on the story. Since there are only 10 levels every level is a pretty distinct shift in power, however they do have incremental level advancements, so you can get your next level over the course of the current level. It's really cool. Combat is sped up through the use of the escalation die and powers and other things key off of it. I love it and use it whenever I play any other d20 system now. It's... it's just a easy fun system. I love that you only need a one page character sheet for everything. Other than that, specific questions are a bit easier to answer than just vomiting up everything that's awesome about the system lol. I also have created my own Druid and Dragoon class so if anyone wants those I could upload it...

Also attached is my own character sheet I use if anyone is interested.

 

[demoss]

My group is three sessions in now. I would link to my blog for session summaries, but my postcount is too low. See rpgist dot wordpress dot com. (Unfortunately the summaries are a bit vague due to playtesting).

I really like, and find completely unproblematic:

• One Unique Thing.
• Backgrounds and skill check rules.
• Gridless movement mechanics.
• Mook rules.
• The gonzo default setting.
• Icons in general, and their connections to characters.
• Liveliness of combat in general.
• The escalation die.
• Great many small things in presentation: it's a Recovery, not a Healing Surge. It's shrugging off fatigue, not magically sealing wounds -- unless it happens that the latter makes more sense for the character in question! (I'm an advocate of not narrating HP loss of a PC as a notable wound unless they're taken down for the count; that is for me enough to remove all cognitive dissonance of fast healing.)
• The hackability of the system.

I mostly like, but don't yet feel have a handle on:

• Icon relationship roll rules in detail. It's not the improvisation that throws me -- that I'm fine with. It's the dual nature of the relationship roll results: they're sort of both player currency and GM story seeds. It's the frequency: the guideline is to roll once per session, and I'm finding that is way too often given the leisurely pace at which our game is moving.
• Low mortality. My last D&Dish game was ACKS (and old-school retroclone) and I haven't yet quite adjusted my expectations.

I'm not quite happy with:

• Length of combat, though again, my expectations here are based on OSR experience and I think 30minutes is a long drawn-out fight... Also, our fights have been fairly narration heavy and bunch of rule-learning has been involved; still, I do want to shorten them a bit more.

 

[Dungeoneer]

I'm not quite happy with:

• Length of combat, though again, my expectations here are based on OSR experience and I think 30minutes is a long drawn-out fight... Also, our fights have been fairly narration heavy and bunch of rule-learning has been involved; still, I do want to shorten them a bit more.

30 minutes is pretty typical for a d20 game. You're way ahead of 4e, where most fights take an hour and combat can easily drag out to 2 for n00b players.

We recently added a chess timer, set at two minutes, to our 4e game. We've discovered the average turn can indeed be taken in less than 2 minutes. And 4e is a more complicated system than 13A, so you might be able to go as low as a 90 seconds. I gave the players tokens that could be exchanged for re-rolls and other goodies when they stayed under the time limit.

Another thing I learned from 4e is that how you setup a battle has a huge impact on time. A fight on pretty normal terrain with the same number of monsters as players and just 1-2 monster types should take a normal amount of time. When you start adding lots of mooks, multiple monster types and complicated terrain features the fight will take longer. Basically, battle time scales with complexity.

This doesn't mean you shouldn't have complicated battles, just that you should save them for more significant encounters where you don't mind them taking a little longer.

But like I said, just getting a timer could speed things up significantly.

 

[demoss]

30 minutes is pretty typical for a d20 game. You're way ahead of 4e, where most fights take an hour and combat can easily drag out to 2 for n00b players.

Eh, I wasn't quite clear. I think 30min is fine for a long drawn out combat, and that was my experience for the dungeon crawl I ran two years back. Our 13th Age combats have taken at least couple of hours each. (Many of them have been double-strength battles, though, but still...)

My impression is that this is not typical, though.

In addition to the slight fumbling and requests from clarification coming from now having all rules quite down yet (say 30minutes of that max per battle), the biggest timesink seems to be that

1) everyone is incredibly engaged with the fiction, leading to more verbose descriptions than usual

2) that in turn feeds into asides about the situation

=> turn that could be over in 10 seconds can easily end up taking a couple of minutes.

This is a bit of a conundrum, really. In my experience when fights drag everyone is unhappy. Here it's not that they drag as such: they're just take a long time. Yesterday when I muttered something after the game about the fight having taken way too long my players said something to the tune of "...maybe, but it was a great fight!"

The rules handling is fast. I have zero issue with that. The complexity hasn't been that bad either; none of the environments have been entirely featureless, but nothing overly hairy and the typically there has been only two types of opponents in each fight.

I'm trying to figure out a way to bring up the pace a bit without impacting on the fun and awesome, because I'd really like to be able to include more non-combat stuff in a session. (Thanks for the tip on the timer!)

 

[GameOgre]

13th Age Rocks! Game play has been fast and fun without all the rules look ups and hassles of Pathfinder and being MUCH faster than 4E.

Really,I can't tell you how much it's rocked.Especially for the guy running the adventure. Entire short adventurers take about the same time designing a single pathfinder encounter would take.


All that said there are a few cons to the game. Keep in mind these are cons to my group and probably don't reflect most peoples ideas of cons.

Con#1- Levels. My group is just MUCH more comfortable with the 1-20 power structure and I can honestly say that it has negatively effected some of the players view of the game. It doesn't seem to matter that 13Th Ages 1-10 is the same power range as Pathfinders 1-20 only with half the numbers. Nope,several players just flat out don't like it. Silly perhaps but there you go.

Con#2-Magic Items. My guys love Pathfinder and 3.5 and the magical gobs of treasure that go along with those systems.The standard 13th Age Magic Item rules leave them wanting.I have tried to jury rig a alternative system much like Pathfinders but with a lower + end effects range but I still am unhappy.

That's it,two complaints to a otherwise great game.

 

[Tun Kai Poh]

Hi,

I've been reading a bit about 13th Age and it seems like an interesting game/setting. I'm considering buying the core rulebook.

I'd like to read your thoughts, you that have actually played the game. Tell me what you like and what you didn't like, and how that materialized in your game.

Thanks for any comments or thoughts.

My players love the flexibility in character creation. I've seen player character concepts such as a stranded astronaut from an advanced gnome civilisation, a wizard who had her name eaten by a rogue spellbook, a one-armed dwarven dual-wielding expert (juggles two axes at once), a rock guitarist bard version of Slash from Guns N' Roses...and those are just quick concepts made from pre-gen templates! I've seen Backgrounds used to simulate things such as a personal butler (who does all the trivial work), sky piracy, political commissar training, and abstract religious concepts.

The game also provides a pretty quick-flowing d20 combat engine with math that scales up well and allows for decisive strikes to change the battle quite fast - critical hits matter a lot and can take down a character or monster surprisingly fast. Some of my players would say it's a bit too swingy, but in practice it's not all that random. However, some 4th Edition veterans complain that the melee classes aren't sticky enough to keep enemy combatants from getting through to the casters, and I would say that this is as valid a complaint as it might be in earlier editions of D&D - if you're spoiled by the awesomeness of 4th Edition Defenders, you should be aware that this game doesn't have the same level of detail in tactical combat, not the same amount of battlefield control (though it does have some).

Spellcasters have plenty of options in and out of combat, with a sort-of-Vancian casting system that also includes the option to fill some spell slots with at-will powers. Ritual casting is pretty freeform - you negotiate a non-combat effect with the GM, sacrifice the necessary spell from a slot, and roll to see how well you accomplish your ritual effect. So in some ways it's more flexible than in 4th Edition, but also more malleable and subjective compared with 3rd Edition.

As a GM, this game challenges me more than other d20 games, because of the Icon Relationship story guide rolls. I have to keep on my toes and introduce opportunities and benefits that match the story guide rolls, instead of being lazy and laying out a pre-planned story on autopilot. So it's more tricky to GM, but I think it adds enough spice, randomness and player input to make it worthwhile.

 

[Eugee]

I was running a 4EE game for awhile when I found 13th Age and picked it up. I was drooling over the book and thinking about introducing it to my table when I accidentally TPK'd them. (It really was an accident, but they didn't even try to run when they were losing.) Anyway, I took the opportunity to finish the session out by having them roll up characters. That's the first of my pros: One Unique Things.

I ended up with a half-elf bard who is the disappointing son of the High Druid, a dwarven ranger who is actually the FIRST dwarven ranger in over an Age, a human barbarian, former king of his clan, captured and enslaved to fight as a gladiator, and now free, and lastly, a human sorcerer, living with a DEMON trapped inside him, put there by his father, a cult leader who tried to imprison a demon in his son but died in the process.

I've never had such fleshed out level 1, never been played characters.

Backgrounds are so much better than skills--people focus on WHO their character is, instead of gaming their points. I was just making a Star Wars EotE character, and I must have spent 20 minutes agonizing over where to put my last skill point. My paladin in 13A has +1 Entitled Noble, +2 Courtly Knight, and +5 Dawnwarden Legionnaire (undead hunting knights). My skills are whatever fits into those descriptions.

I love the range bands in 13A, instead of counting squares, especially since typically the squares aren't needed. Usually you are either close enough to move and attack, or you need to use two moves to get close enough. Beyond that it's probably not an encounter anyway.

The escalation die is fantastic too--really adds tempo to the combat--it even stops my players from "going nova" all the time. They tend to wait until the die climbs a bit before breaking out the big guns.

Icon relationships are cool, and at the very least, tell you where the players would like the story to go.

Combat is smooth and simple, and a lot of complexity fits into a single d20 roll. Monster construction is transparent.

Hell, ALL the rules are very transparent, with in-depth notes from the developers about why certain decisions were made. It made changing those rules more comfortable, with a reasonable expectation of what you're tinkering with.

Basically the whole game is a pro for me. I'm trying to think of a con right now...

...

Um... new material is slow to arrive on shelves?

I guess that's the biggest problem.

I really liked 4EE (4E Essentials) and I think if 4E had started there it would have done better. I was really disillusioned with D&D Next, as I just had no interest in it, I felt like they were going back to mechanics that are old and out-dated (like spells using Saving Throws again instead of attack rolls), and I just didn't feel excited. Then I found 13A and started reading--and fell in love. It's 4E if you just made it awesome.

 

[Skyscraper]

Wow, nice reviews, thanks to everyone for taking the time to write. Many of the points that are raised in this thread are really relevant to me; the story-driven character creation probably at the front of these.

Specific questions in no particular order, if I may:

1) Realistic time for one combat = ?.

Background: I played 4E and some people posted that combat was allegedly quick if you knew what you were doing. That is an outrageous lie Well, maybe for them it went well, but really, 4E combat was very long for most groups. Our group of experienced players NEVER got any combat done in less than 1.5 hours; and it usually took about 2.5 to 3 hours per combat. Sometimes 4 hours, for particular big battles. Sure, we're a laid-back group that role-plays during battle, but still, I never got how some groups managed to end all their 4E battles within 1 hour, according to their posts.

Now, we'll remain the laid-back group that we are, and I'm most certainly not going to use a chess timer at my table. We're just out of a DCC campaign where combat never took more than 30 minutes, often only 10 or 15...

So, what of 13A? Do people say that it doesn't take long because they like the game? Because nobody talks during combat and they use a chess timer to quickly end any player's turn? Or because it's really quick? At least one poster here says that it's 2 hours per combat. To me, that's way too long. I like interesting battles, but in a 4-5 hour session, I can't systematically have half of the session spent on a single battle. Consider us slow players in getting battles done, if 4E is any indication. 2 hours + for each combat is a deal-breaker for me, so please be frank and not optimistic

2) Monster and NPC creation time = ?. I'm thinking about possibly using 13A to DM. As always, I'm going to create my campaign. 4E had GREAT monster creation rules. But it takes 30 minutes to get a flavorful and balanced monster created from the ground up. Again, can't have that.

3) I've read a review of the core book. It says there is no art for the monsters. True? If so, bummer. (No deal-breaker or course.)

4) What is 13 True Ways about? Why is this supplement eagerly awaited? How many books do I need to buy to run a campaign in this setting? How many am I likely to want to buy once I buy the core rulebook?

5) Spells: what do they look like? 4E did away with spells (in my humble opinion). Are they back to 3.5-ish? I'm not sure I understand the above posts about spells. Do you have examples of known spells and how they work, so I may understand a bit better?

6) Classes: fun options for all? DCC spoiled us with really nice options for all classes, be that the fun warrior Mighty Deeds of Arms, the luck use by thieves, the incrementally powerful spellcasting results for clerics and wizards, spellburn, disapproval, ... Each class really gets a specific mechanic that is fun to use and opens up some interesting in-game moments. If I compare to D&D 3.5: a lot of stuff in 3.5 was passive bonuses or other elements that didn't open up in-game opportunities for players. Your fighter is a fighter because he gets greater bonuses to hit (passive stat), he's allowed to wear better armor that, in turn, provides a better AC value (passive stat), he has more HPs (passive stat) and he can wield a weapon that deals more damage (passive stat). That's why he's a fighter. What of 13 A?

Thanks again for your time and information,

Sky

p.s.: I like 4E for what it is, by the way, and I've played a lot of it, during a couple of years. I'm not bashing it, I'm using what I feel are it's weak points to try to understand 13 A.