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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7748801" data-attributes="member: 996">I'm not sure what you even think a "role-playing rule" /is/, so that's hard to answer.  13A, 4e, & 5e all have rules that define the character concept & tie it back to the setting (backrounds & icon relationships; backgrounds & Themes/Paths/Destinies; and backgrounds & personality traits, respectively) and rules to resolve challenges out of combat (backgrounds, skill challenges, and attribute checks, respectively).  All three use alignment in some form.  Ultimately, though, they are Role-Playing Games - everything you do in one of them /is/ roleplaying, and all their rules support that.   13A is actually a lot like 5e - no really, I can explain - not in design or implementation or even in presentation, but in that it hits many of the same goals, albeit from an entirely different angle.  13A combats are faster, not because options & monsters are paired down and set on easy mode, but because of the ingenious 'escalation die.'  13A evokes much of the 'feel' of the classic game, not by re-hashing its flaws but by lampshading & rationalizing the oddities those flaws led to that have become emblematic - the stand-out example, IMHO, is the conceit of the 'Living Dungeon,' but a more cogent one is the class designs, which harken to the problematic resource imbalances of classic D&D, but impose day-length arbitrarily (full heal-up after every 4th encounter, or campaign loss) to neatly solve them, where 5e just presents a guideline.  13A supports TotM, not by saying it defaults to it, but by having workable rules throughout that facilitate that style of play.  One could go on and on.  But for not legally being able to put 'D&D' on the cover, 13A could be one of the best versions of that game, ever (OK, it's rather like PF, in a way, too).  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />Conversely, 13A bears strong superficial mechanical resemblances to 4e - recoveries & rallies are rather like surges & second wind, it uses 4e's attacker-rolls-vs-defense scheme instead of AC & saving throws, monsters/NPCs are mechanically different from PCs, etc - but it doesn't retain as much 3.x-style customizability as 4e did, nor does it prioritize balance in the same way.  FWIW.  But, to get back to the table-flip topic, 4e, 13A & 5e can all be run without minis.  13A, as already alluded to, has solid rules built in from the ground up that work smoothly with that mode of play.  Ranges & areas (and, critically, who's caught in them), movement & melee can be run in an abstract, easy-to-track way, or they can be placed on a grid for ease of handling greater precision.  4e states everything in 'squares' and areas are neatly abstracted to squares (or cubes) as well - intentionally or not, that lends itself to much easier tracking of movement/positioning and who gets caught in what AE, even when you're /not/ using a grid.  5e, OTOH, approaches everything in terms of concrete feet:  you move a certain number of feet, your range is so many tens of feet, areas are handled with a variety of precise geometric shapes to the foot.  It's easy enough to divide by 5 (or even 10, almost everything is in increments of 10), create some 3.x-style templates, and run that on a grid, but it doesn't lend itself well to "TotM" unless you just toss it and ballpark everything under the rubric of DM's judgement (which, honestly, is exactly what you're expected to do - and for a lot more, besides).I think D&Ds success, this long-anticipated come-back finally materializing, is largely because it's threaded the needle between being accessible (not intimidating, say, before you even try it) to new players, but acceptable to the old guard wining their endorsement (or at least, placating them enough that they refrain from actively campaigning against it).  It's the same conundrum as faced comics franchises and any other properties with a very nerdy, committed fanbase when trying mainstream.  If you just go forward with the status quo, you have something that's intimidating to the masses, and even if they try it, only a few will stick with it.  If you change it enough to be more appealing to the vanilla set (once they try it), the existing fans will pan it, and fewer people will even try it ("wow, if the people who loved this hate it, it must not be worth even a look").  That's double true of a come-back property that was a huge fad in decades past:  if you're going to try it, don't you want to 'see what all the fuss was about' with an 'authentic' version, rather than a modernized 'better' version that the few existing fans openly hate?  3.5 with 'back to the dungeon' & lavish rewards for system mastery appealed to the hard-core hobbyist, but was intimidating as heck to the potential new fan, while 4e was easy to learn/play/run for new/casual players (and didn't give system-masters too overwhelming an advantage), but utterly repugnant to the hard-core.  5e navigated between that Charybdis & Scylla - and it's success in doing so had nothing to do with nominally defaulting to TotM.</blockquote>

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