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<blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9612309" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Well, at least IMO, that's the beauty of 13th Age's &quot;Nastier Specials&quot; concept.Nastier Specials are not designed for predictability! They are designed to be both scary and interesting--a big difference compared to a lot of &quot;gotcha&quot; monsters, which lose their interestingness as soon as the &quot;puzzle&quot; of the monster is understood. In 13A, a creature's XP rating does not include any Nastier Special features that creature might have (and the book explicitly says so). The game's baseline balance assumes you are not using them, but various creatures like dragons, mind flayers, liches, etc. have them baked-in, and (IIRC?) there's a section, possibly in the supplemental book 13 True Ways, with more generic Nastier Specials if you want to add them to other monsters.This gives us the best of both worlds. Folks who want consistency in order to cultivate a specific kind of experience have exactly what they need, and don't need to do the laborious and often exhausting task of either (a) learning all the monsters they can't use because they're too hard or (b) tweaking all the monsters they ever use so they won't be too hard. Folks who want spontaneity and stiff challenge already have it, baked right into the rules as-is, they just have to elect to use them, rather than not using them.I really cannot overstate my praise for (most of) the game design of 13th Age. It isn't perfect by any means, but it genuinely has a ton of clever fixes to long-standing design issues, implemented well. It just remains extremely obscure and unknown because it doesn't have the fourth, twenty-seventh, and fourth (again) letters of the alphabet emblazoned on the cover. (Yes, I said &quot;twenty-seventh&quot;, the ampersand was considered a letter of the English alphabet at one time!)</blockquote>

[QUOTE="EzekielRaiden, post: 9612309, member: 6790260"] Well, at least IMO, that's the beauty of 13th Age's "Nastier Specials" concept. Nastier Specials are not designed for predictability! They are designed to be both scary and interesting--a big difference compared to a lot of "gotcha" monsters, which lose their interestingness as soon as the "puzzle" of the monster is understood. In 13A, a creature's XP rating [I]does not[/I] include any Nastier Special features that creature might have (and the book explicitly says so). The game's baseline balance assumes you are not using them, but various creatures like dragons, mind flayers, liches, etc. have them baked-in, and (IIRC?) there's a section, possibly in the supplemental book [I]13 True Ways[/I], with more generic Nastier Specials if you want to add them to other monsters. This gives us the best of both worlds. Folks who want consistency in order to cultivate a specific kind of experience have exactly what they need, and don't need to do the laborious and often exhausting task of either (a) learning all the monsters they can't use because they're too hard or (b) tweaking all the monsters they ever use so they won't be too hard. Folks who want spontaneity and stiff challenge already have it, baked right into the rules as-is, they just have to elect to use them, rather than not using them. I really cannot overstate my praise for ([I]most[/I] of) the game design of 13th Age. It isn't perfect by any means, but it genuinely has a ton of [I]clever[/I] fixes to long-standing design issues, implemented well. It just remains extremely obscure and unknown because it doesn't have the fourth, twenty-seventh, and fourth (again) letters of the alphabet emblazoned on the cover. (Yes, I said "twenty-seventh", the ampersand [I]was[/I] considered a letter of the English alphabet at one time!) [/QUOTE]

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