Imaro's First 13th Age Session: "Six Months and a Day" Campaign

[Imaro]

Yep, that makes sense for the backgrounds. I was wondering about the Icon relationships.

D'oh... Just chalk that up to human error, I mis-typed it should only be one in each.

 

[LostSoul]

Great write-up!

The only issue I had was that sometimes it’s awkward explaining how two or more mooks were killed when the damage is high enough but the fiction and descriptions don’t necessarily fit with the resolution.

Just a thought - that should be taken with a grain of salt since I don't have 13th Age - could you only allow the extra damage to kill more mooks if it does line up with the fiction? My guess is that the players would throw themselves into the fray against mooks a lot more, which might be nice if you like that sort of thing.

I wonder if you could make it a choice. If they don't throw themselves into the fray like that, maybe they get a boost to AC/Defences? Just a thought; could be bad, as I don't know how the system works.

 

[Manbearcat]

Thanks for writing that up @Imaro. Thorough, clear, provocative. Looks great. Xp for you. I will post thoughts, commentary, questions in the next few days.

 

[Warbringer]

I wasn't sure about this when I read the rules - you don't have to commit to your number of recoveries first, and then roll to see how many hp you get back? If you don't roll enough, it's OK to spend more and roll more dice?

Reading the rules you spend a standard action to role for recovery, I guess you just spend another recovery role by taking another standard action. (page 168)

 

[pemerton]

Reading the rules you spend a standard action to role for recovery, I guess you just spend another recovery role by taking another standard action. (page 168)

This is in reference to the rally rules, though, which require saves to rally additional times in a battle.

could you only allow the extra damage to kill more mooks if it does line up with the fiction? My guess is that the players would throw themselves into the fray against mooks a lot more, which might be nice if you like that sort of thing.

I wonder if you could make it a choice. If they don't throw themselves into the fray like that, maybe they get a boost to AC/Defences?

The rules deal with it this way (p 199):

The GM should take pains to allow you all the kills you get, letting you narrate attacks that cleave multiple foes, sudden leaps, whirlwinds of blows, mooks that faint or turn and run, or whatever it takes to make sure the mooks get their due. Storytelling unexpected mook kills is worth the table time.​

This is part of what I had in mind when I asked [MENTION=48965]Imaro[/MENTION] about gonzo vs gritty - if Imaro is running with a slightly more gritty flavour than the default suggests, I'm interested to hear how that worked.

 

[Warbringer]

This is in reference to the rally rules, though, which require saves to rally additional times in a battle.

True, but as you don't lose your action, no real downside to trying each round .. (apart from dying of course)

 

[pemerton]

True, but as you don't lose your action, no real downside to trying each round .. (apart from dying of course)

OK, I see what you mean.

 

[Imaro]

Imaro, the comments below follow the sequence of your post and so I make no promise about the logical coherence of my sequence of thoughts!

No worries, and sorry it took me so long to reply, I got hit with a ton of work and still haven’t caught up entirely.

This would have implications for the impact on the story of these player choices - but you said in your OP, didn't you, that you're aiming for a long campaign.

The main issue I see arising is that the diversity of icons and the strength of their presence would be less than what the default would create. Right now I’m not sure this would be such a bad thing, especially as I need to get used to the improvisation necessary to use icons in this way. In all honesty I think I would be more comfortable with the “roll before the next session” alternative in the book as I don’t want to fall into a mode where every little thing has a different icon behind it but the game starts to loose cohesiveness as I struggle to make it all connect.

Do you do a long rest at the end of every session? If not, rolling once per long rest could be another compromise option - apart from anything else, the passage of time during a long rest creates the veneer for concealing GM manipulation of the backstory to give effect to the icon rolls.

No, we don’t do long rests at the end of every session. I think this might be a good suggestion once I get more experience in the improvisation area. I think the biggest issue I found with the icons in this first session was that there just wasn’t enough time and progress to work them all in, especially since it was a short session due to character creation. The thing was, and this may have been a mistake, I didn’t keep the rolls a secret from my players and so they were interested in seeing how the icon they rolled for would show up in the game session, and when I only had time and fictional circumstances to work one in they didn’t want to roll again until they could see how they interacted with the ones that were left.

On a related note I think my handling of the icons in the second session was much better because I had time to think on them in the context of the player who rolled it and the defining traits of the character they were playing.

The paladin Kal’ Ruin received a vision of the Priestess (whether this was THE Priestess, caused by the Priestess or the fanatical hallucinations of Kal’ Ruin was left up in the air) who spoke in a strange tongue (I did this because it was a 5 and that meant some form of complication, of course it wasn’t a major issue since Kal’ruin had Quinnton decipher it) giving Kal’Ruin advice on where to seek out information concerning a cure for the plague (In case you’re wondering it was a riddle that pointed to the hedge witch Rainya they had saved earlier).

The other instance was with Vince the ranger, who had discovered the plague’s beginnings were tied, time wise, with the arrival of a new food supplier for the town of Mistwood a merchant named Dyonus. Vince, assuming the merchant was in league with the orc and goblins brashly confronted him with accusations, whereupon he learned that the merchant was actually the agent of a mid-ranking house from the city in the Dragon Empire run by the Three (Can’t remember the name of the city they control in the Dragon Empire right now) and possessed a writ of official Empire business. Vince was arrested for impeding official Empire trade and while he was in his cell, Dyonus had a pit fighter placed in the cell with him to teach Vince a lesson. Vince was almost able to overcome him but 2 20’s rolled back to back by yours truly ended up leaving Vince on the cell floor battered and bloody. Feeling his message had been sent, Dyonus released Vince. However later in the adventure an agent of the Prince of Shadows offered Vince information on a future time and place in which the merchant Dyonus would be unguarded and vulnerable, in exchange the PoS asked that he be granted one future favor of equal value (I did this because Vince has a conflicted relationship with the Prince of Shadows). Vince however was unwilling to make a decision at that time but the PoS was willing to leave the deal open… for now.

Did the players know this? Or otherwise pick up on it?

The players did know this, but it was because I told the players since I figured having served in this legion for 6 months prior to these events they would have heard this information by now. I also told them it was symbolic of a dwarf being forever bound to silver as opposed to gold.

Did they go gonzo or gritty? The general vibe I get from the 13th Age rulebook is gonzo, but the general vibe I get from your posts is a somewhat gritty tone.

This is a really good question and I ran into the same problem with 13^th Age that I did with 4e. Mainly the issue being that the descriptions varied depending on player, and this does tend to create a dissonance in the fiction sometimes. In general we tend to play with a gritty style but there is still low-level gritty and gonzo gritty. On a more granular level I realized that my younger players are very much gonzo gritty in their descriptions and trend towards describing the things their characters do in the vein of shows like Naruto, FullMetal Alchemist and such… while my older players tend to be more along the lines of say Brotherhood of the Wolf, Gladiator or at the top end of the power spectrum like the movie Troy. The tone I run my enemies in used to lean heavily towards the Gladiator/Brotherhood of the Wolf vein but in this game I am trying to find a medium where I slightly tailor the style of the scene for the character(s) taking place in it. It’s not perfect and it doesn’t always work but I’d be happy to hear some suggestions as far as dealing with this (Oh, and remember I do have players that range from 10 to their early 30’s.)

Did they suffer any consequence for being half-an-hour late other than the encounter? Would the situation with the hut and woman have been different if a different amount of time had passed?

Well they were going to run into the hut either way since it was an important part of the area around Mistwood and I wanted them to know about it. In all honesty most of the advantages/disadvantages I had for the amount of time spent before they found the scouting party were centerd around the difficulty of following their tracks back to the goblin wagon village and the situation when they arrived (Of course the players decided to go straight to Mistwood as opposed to the goblin’s wagon village so I kind of dropped the ball on this one in that respect).

My 4e game is approaching mid-Epic, and we don't use the Expertise feats because in general I've felt that to-hit bonuses were adequate without it. But I am thinking of introducing the escalation die for some of those epic combats against high-level opponents like gods, demon lords etc. Because it's not a general feature of the 4e mechanics I would be looking for some ingame rationale for those cases where it applies (eg a magical boon).

Well my players definitely love it and I enjoy the speeding up effect it has on combat as it grows… I think I really want to hold off on judgement though until they face their first opponent who can also use the escalation die (HINT: The Orc Lord’s agent they will be facing in our 4^th session this weekend.). I’m curious to see if it creates a more tense environment in combat, especially since my players have made jokes about the fact that monsters can’t use the escalation dice (apparently they didn’t read their books very closely lol). If I were looking for an ingame rationale, especially at mid-Epic I would probably go with either something similar to ambrosia, the food of the gods, or just make it an aspect of the players creeping towards their epic destinies… perhaps they’ve grown so integral to the legends of their world that fate itself is intervening on their behalf.

I wasn't sure about this when I read the rules - you don't have to commit to your number of recoveries first, and then roll to see how many hp you get back? If you don't roll enough, it's OK to spend more and roll more dice?

Ah, I see this was answered already but no you don’t have to. The thing is it’s a double edged sword because you can quickly burn through more recoveries than you planned to and still have less hit points than you want/need. I realize this may not vibe with everyone’s play style but we like those types of resource choices in our game

 

[Imaro]

Great write-up!

Thanks!!

Just a thought - that should be taken with a grain of salt since I don't have 13th Age - could you only allow the extra damage to kill more mooks if it does line up with the fiction? My guess is that the players would throw themselves into the fray against mooks a lot more, which might be nice if you like that sort of thing.

I wonder if you could make it a choice. If they don't throw themselves into the fray like that, maybe they get a boost to AC/Defences? Just a thought; could be bad, as I don't know how the system works.

I don’t think I’d change the rules since my group likes the actual mechanics of it the chance to miss or kill multiple mooks. I noticed you cited jumping into the fray, and I agree it’s harder (though not impossible) to describe 3 mooks felled by an arrow than by multiple swings of a sword. What we’ve really done so far is allowed for slight changes in the fiction to account for the mechanical effect, as an example if the shot from the bow fells 3 mooks we have no problem allowing 3 shots to have been fired fiction wise, though splintered arrow pieces, ricochets, etc. have accounted for their fair share of mooks so far as well.

 

[Manbearcat]

@Imaro Going to digest and comment/question in pieces.

1 - Your usage of mandated story for deployment of Backgrounds in non-combat conflict resolution was absolutely excellent. The perfect marriage of system and refined GMing technique. Great stuff. You mention concern about the length of time required for your players to accomplish this. Couple thoughts here:

A - Do you think it likely that they will hone their proficiency at impromptu Background justification as story with time/practice/experience? I suspect you'll see the story:unit of time ratio contract and they'll likely create better stories to boot.

B - If it doesn't improve appreciably, do you think the backstory they create while doing so (and thus the content/cues for you to engage with in the future) is worth the time investment (whatever it turns out to be) or do you feel that the pacing ramifications will be too punitive.


2 - Mook rules in 13th Age seem to functionally serve much the same mechanical (but not fully) and fully the same narrative space as swarms in 4e. Free descriptor Mook slaying per attack is how 4e swarm combat works out in play. Did you play with many swarms when you played 4e and is that pretty much the sense that you got (that within the fiction they map 1:1).


3 - I'm assuming you used stock monsters from the book. If so, have you considered a random encounter paradigm whereby you could just have a pool of stock features for various antagonists (1 feature per Race and 1 feature that facilitate various Combat Roles; eg controller, leader, skirmisher, soldier) and try out the of-level Monster Math, bolt on 2 features (one for Race, 1 for Role), fill out the encounter budget and give that a go? I'm curious how the "off the cuff" monster creation/math functions.