New 13th Age 'Escalation Edition' Coming Next Year!

There's a new version of 13th Age coming! Pelgrane Press announced at Gen Con that the 13th Age 'Escalated Edition' will be coming to Kickstarter next year. It will be backwards compatible with the current game. They'll be starting a playtest program very soon, which they are inviting game groups to join.

13th Age was released in 2013, designed by Rob Heinsoo (D&D 4E) and Jonathan Tweet (D&D 3E), and is a 'variant' of D&D.

 

[Eric V]

I am currently running Eyes of the Stone Thief on Foundry and the 13A support by Asacolips and his team are just fantastic. I switched from Roll20 because of them and they continue to improve and see new development monthly (thank you a ton for the default monster icons you added a few weeks ago!). Quality work, y’all, and hugely appreciated!

!!!!

If you are ever looking for a player...!

 

[EzekielRaiden]

EzekielRaiden, that was a very thoughtful post. More importantly, I'm so sorry you're going through that.

I fully agree. Thoughtful and interesting information. I too am sorry about your situation.

Thank you for your kind words--I'm glad it was useful to you, and I appreciate the well-wishes. We're keeping on keeping on, as it were, and there's good hope of brighter days ahead. There's a decent chance that the bone marrow transplant could in fact cure the cancer by replacing the damaged cells, and if we're lucky it won't even require therapy to prevent rejection.

!!!!

If you are ever looking for a player...!

Big mood.

 

[Eric V]

There's a decent chance that the bone marrow transplant could in fact cure the cancer by replacing the damaged cells, and if we're lucky it won't even require therapy to prevent rejection.

Definitely something to hope for! Wishing you all the luck!

 

[Nikosandros]

It also has another problem: session length. I'll just take my own gaming as an example: I'm in one game that runs on Wednesday evenings, where we in theory play from 7 to 10 pm. But of course, some people are late, and there's a bunch of chatting and catching up before each game, and sometimes we end a little early when we get to something that looks like a fight and it's 9:30 already. So effective game time is something like 2 hours. I have another game that shares some of the same players on Saturdays. We usually get started at like 4 pm, then eat while chatting and stuff, and are ready to go before 5 pm and then keep going until maybe midnight: 7 hours of game.

In a 7-hour game, I could likely find nice places to have 1-3 bits of icon influence. In a 2-hour game? Doesn't sound likely.

Yes, those are precisely the reasons I strongly dislike per-session mechanics.

Even within a single campaign, I can have huge variance in effective session length. In my weekly game, sometimes we're focused and game more, sometimes there's some real word fact that we talk about for a third of the session...

 

[Blue]

I don't care for the One Unique Thing - as it has the tendency to turn my games silly (i.e. "I'm the only halfling who is actually a baby goose and my name is Ryan Gosling.")

This feels more like a disconnect between the type of campaign you want to run and the type your players want to play in. That happens regardless of system.

OUT are fantastic for me - customization you can't find elsewhere that can also let the player have some authorship in the world. "I have a mechanical heart made by the dwarves" days a lot about both your character and about the dwarves in that Dragon Empire.

The Icon relationships rolled every session feel chaotic, forced, and impertinent to the story the group is telling. Sometimes they make no sense at all. (I've scrapped the concept of the Icons in some games.)

This I agree, I had problems until I moved it to basically player-instigated meets currency. Very excited that they are revamping this.

And then the worst is the inflated die rolling. As you go up in level, having to keep increasing the damage dice gets tedious, throwing big fistfuls of dice around every turn.

I think it is safe to say players like rolling dice. Allowing martial characters to have a chance to roll lots in one go, instead of having lots of separate attacks that take so much longer to resolve is just a bonus on top of that.

 

[Blue]

So, if its backwards compatible, that means that it should be backwards compatible with all the books in the 13th Age line and 13th Age: Glorantha.

They said that the monster stat blocks aren't changing (which keeps the Excellent bestiaries fully compatible) , and that means combat needs to be really close to before.

 

[Jer]

I think it is safe to say players like rolling dice. Allowing martial characters to have a chance to roll lots in one go, instead of having lots of separate attacks that take so much longer to resolve is just a bonus on top of that.

And for the folks who don't like rolling lots of dice there's an alternate mechanic in the rules that I believe is actually the recommended approach - roll some fixed number of dice and add the average of the rest of the dice. So if you're supposed to roll 8d6 you roll 4d6+28. I have different players who prefer to roll all of the dice and others who prefer to take the average.

Where the numbers do get annoying is having to do subtraction in my head as the DM to keep track of hit points. As I joke with folks I was a Math major as an undergrad and it killed my ability to do addition and subtraction in my head The larger the numbers get, the slower I am at it. (Am I too stubborn to just get a pocket calculator to have at my side, or just too forgetful to remember to grab it before the game? Who can say?)

 

[orion&patchwork]

So instead of substracting, you can just add up hit points received. Bloodied will still be midway, no ?

 

[Jer]

So instead of substracting, you can just add up hit points received. Bloodied will still be midway, no ?

I do it that way now - the math degree didn't do quite a bad a number on my ability to sum as it did to my ability to subtract, but it's still there. I definitely make fewer mistakes when I'm tracking hp in a 5e battle than in a 13th age one (fortunately it seems to matter less if they go uncaught until after the battle ends in a 13A combat than in a 5e one too).

 

[ruemere]

I love the news. This was probably the best version of D20 as it fixed most, if not all, problems of the game:

• linear fighters, quadratic wizards,
• magic rules, fighters boring, rogues are pathetic, druids come to the game with their own bestiary,
• long boring fights (4E), rocket tag encounters (3.xE)
• "I win" spells,
• Christmas tree syndrome,
• alignment.

To add some great stuff they produced (the rules already were mentioned):

• fabulous, background rich bestiaries,
• opportunity for the players to create parties not composed of canonical four,
• the great power scaling,
• daring and inventive class mechanics.

Now, it would not be fair if I failed to mention the issues it introduced:

• disjoint between narrative mechanics and simulationist mechanics (icons vs. in-game everything),
• big HP at the end game levels,
• toolkit approach to products... this deserves a whole article since this criticizes Pelgrane Press release policy for the game line. For now however, let's just say that toolkits are not ready-to-run products. They are also structured as loose guides... So if I want to reference anything, I am on my own. And so, unless you memorized it, you end up with huge page count that is not reusable.
• many, many editing or structuring issues. There is a reason I prefer to use online SRD.
• the setting. It was too gonzo for me. And the tropes were so stale. Had to reinvent a lot of stuff to keep the players interested.