Why did they scrap Orcus?

[MfA]

And if it isn't a requirement, why have it at all?

The kind of people who unironically use the word rollplayer seem really incredibly fond of trap options with impressive sounding fluff ... I think a game would disappoint them if they couldn't flaunt their disregard for character competence by taking these kinds of options.

[NineInchNall]

Excelling in mediocrity demonstrates your superiority.

It's really not that much different from people who express disdain toward the "intellectual" or "ivory tower" elite. Probably a case of sour grapes when you get down to it.

[Simon Rogers]

The latest Escalation Edition version is up with minor changes this time. Pre-orders can download it from your order page. Read more about the changes here. Feedback from people who have played the game is now up to 800 pages.

After the next edition is released in another ten days or so, I'll go through the ms myself and offer my feedback. I'll also pass on any other useful and constructive from this thread to Rob.

If you have any unconstructive comments, please endeavour to make them amusing at least. By all means construct straw piñatas and beat them to death for the pleasure of the viewing audience, but try not to whine too loudly while you do it - your mother is trying to sleep upstairs.

(Is this sufficiently rude? I'm not sure of the correct form.)

[tussock]

Looks all passive-agressive, eh. If you don't find it comes easy to tell people to go fuck themselves, for whatever reason, just be honest. If ideas here don't make you feel good, you're not going to use them to make your game better. We understand.

Also, wow, people are paying you money to playtest your house rules for you. Awesome.

[Simon Rogers]

Looks all passive-agressive, eh. If you don't find it comes easy to tell people to go fuck themselves, for whatever reason, just be honest. If ideas here don't make you feel good, you're not going to use them to make your game better. We understand.

Also, wow, people are paying you money to playtest your house rules for you. Awesome.

I'll paraphrase what I said. I hope this is clearer.

If you have any interest in your views and suggestions informing the game, then be critically constructive. If not, do whatever you like.

I've found much of the feedback from the people here useful, where I haven't it's in the main been rather entertaining. I don't enjoy reading posts which consist of dull and ill-informed invective, but I realise that's personal preference, and this is not my bailiwick.

I do not have any desire to tell people who are discussing a game in a heartfelt fashion on the internet to "go fuck themselves," nor do I "feel bad" if people have ideas I don't agree with about games. That must be rather wearing, and I don't think I could keep up that level of outrage.

No, people are not paying us money to playtest our house rules. People are pre-ordering a game, for which they get benefits above buying the game when it's released. and they can take or leave giving feedback as they wish. It's been an enjoyable and engaging process. About 20% of the pre-orderers are offering feedback.

If anyone has any further questions about the rules, the setting, or anything else related to the game, by all means post away and I'll do my best to answer.

[Simon Rogers]

Wade has put together some info about the 13th Age:

"13 Facts About 13th Age" is up at See Page XX: http://www.pelgranepress.com/?p=8583 -- This is my attempt to give someone who hasn't seen the game a decent idea of what the heck it is, without writing pages and pages of description.

[OgreBattle]

If anyone has any further questions about the rules, the setting, or anything else related to the game, by all means post away and I'll do my best to answer.

Why would someone who hates 4e want to try 13th age?
Why would someone who enjoys 4e want to try 13th age?
What problems of 4e does 13th age fix?

Are any ideas in 13th age from 'proto' 4e development? This thread was originally to discuss proto-4e ideas left on the cutting room floor

[Simon Rogers]

If anyone has any further questions about the rules, the setting, or anything else related to the game, by all means post away and I'll do my best to answer.

Why would someone who hates 4e want to try 13th age?
Why would someone who enjoys 4e want to try 13th age?
What problems of 4e does 13th age fix?

Are any ideas in 13th age from 'proto' 4e development? This thread was originally to discuss proto-4e ideas left on the cutting room floor

These questions dive straight into the matter of taste and it depends on your view of 4e.

So, what do you hate about 4e, and what do you enjoy about it? What problems do you think need fixing in 4e? Then I've got a better chance of answering you - although I might have to seek outside assistance.

I can't answer the last question, but I'm happy to move threads if I'm being off-topic.

For the moment, I'll tell you what the rules currently say about it, anyway:

Critics complained that 3E weighed everything down with rules for everything, turning an open-ended roleplaying game into a complicated simulation, arithmetic on a grid. 13th Age is a rules-light, free-form, gridless way to play a story-oriented campaign.
3rd Edition took the game forward in terms of player options and universal mechanics, and we have followed suit.
Critics compared 4E to a board game or miniatures game that distanced itself from its roots. 13th Age is about story-oriented campaigns not minis, and it revisits its roots with its setting and rules.
4E took the game forward in terms of balance and game play, and so do we.

[Avoraciopoctules]

If anyone has any further questions about the rules, the setting, or anything else related to the game, by all means post away and I'll do my best to answer.

Let's say a PC wants to hire a company of mercenaries, buy a trained monster, or, raise some undead minions. How would 13th Age handle this?

[MfA]

I came a bit late to the party of D&D ... but I have my doubts about all this back to roots business as far as miniatures is concerned. I do know people shuffling around pewter miniatures on a hex map were a D&D stereotype long before WotC came around and pushed their plastic ones with 3e (nothing against plastic by the way, I always thought they had a pretty good price/quality balance).

A quick google turned up ]a poll which suggests it to be an accurate stereotype for people still playing AD&D, was it really so different in the past?

[sabs]

D&D comes out of ChainMail
ChainMail came out of miniature gaming. It was basically the first set of rules for plaing an individual miniature and adventuring with it, as part of a group.

The reason Gary Gygax is known as a dick and a PC killer, was because the game basically came out of war gaming. The DM played one side, the Players the other. And it wasn't about.. 'challenging' the pcs. It was about trying to beat them in a confrontational way. All the "story" stuff doesn't really happen till much later.

But even so, all the powers/abilities had a certain versimilitude. You moved 40' per round. Your attacks had a range of 30 or 100 feet, etc. The spells had an area of effect measured in feat. You could play it with miniatures and a square mat., but you didn't HAVE to. You could play it on just table top, or you could do it all in your imagination.

4E and 5E(it seems) shat all over that like hobos with diarrhea. 4e powers have ranges of squares, and effects of 1burst, and 5flush and other shit like that.

Seriously Prismatic fingers:
area of effect, 5 adjacent so that it hits every creature in a 5x5 square area, where one of the edges has to be touching your caster. It shoves all creatures inside of it, 3 squares back, and causes 5 points of psychic damage.

They don't even have CONES anymore. They just have MMO style target the ground hit the Area.

[Voss]

I came a bit late to the party of D&D ... but I have my doubts about all this back to roots business as far as miniatures is concerned. I do know people shuffling around pewter miniatures on a hex map were a D&D stereotype long before WotC came around and pushed their plastic ones with 3e (nothing against plastic by the way, I always thought they had a pretty good price/quality balance).

A quick google turned up ]a poll which suggests it to be an accurate stereotype for people still playing AD&D, was it really so different in the past?

It varied. Some people were big on minis in the 1st/2nd period. My groups usually weren't- if a combat was particularly complex the DM would sketch out the area on a piece of paper, but that was usually as far as it went. Part of this was (particularly for 1e) the bizarre hybrid that Gygax had developed in terms of distances- some things were in terms of inches, other things weren't, and the distances an inch represented actually changed depending on if you were inside or outside. (Feet vs yards, iirc). He kept some aspects of the wargame rules, but ditched others in his typically inconsistent way.

The big difference was the emphasis on small distances in 3rd- AoOs particularly meant you suddenly had to care about short distances, or things stopped working. Long distances could still be handled successfully abstractly, but melee really wanted you to care about AoOs and shit like cleave, which only function well if you know exactly where everything is.

4e, of course, was almost slavishly tied to a grid, since pushing shit around was something everyone was supposed to care about as a meaningful effect. But it was much more a board game than a minis game- you can just as easily play it on a checkerboard with chips or tokens.


But anyway, the short version is Simon's quote is really rather odd. Sabs is right- the 'roots' of D&D are wargames, and the story aspect came much, much later. So, if anything, 13th Age is moving away from the 'roots' and more toward the early 90s focus on melodrama that typified White Wolf games.

[Simon Rogers]

I am sorry, I thought I'd be able to have time for this today, but stuff happened. I'll see if I can find anyone else.

[fectin]

I'm really interested in your answers to OgreBattle's questions.

[Chamomile]

I am sorry, I thought I'd be able to have time for this today, but stuff happened. I'll see if I can find anyone else.

So this is basically a forfeit and Den wins by default, right?

More seriously, I am also interested in an answer to those questions as well, or at least the question of "why would anyone, ever want to play 13th Age?" This is a product that you're selling, surely you have a sales pitch for it? If you can't even tell me, a potential customer, why I would want to buy your product, how do you expect to move any units at all? I mean, this isn't even a rules issue or anything, I'm not saying 13th Age sucks because I don't know yet, I'm just saying you should be able to tell me whether I should bother looking into at all. Who is this game made for? What is it designed to do, and how does it do it differently from everyone else in the same market?

[rasmuswagner]

But even so, all the powers/abilities had a certain versimilitude. You moved 40' per round. Your attacks had a range of 30 or 100 feet, etc. The spells had an area of effect measured in feat. You could play it with miniatures and a square mat., but you didn't HAVE to. You could play it on just table top, or you could do it all in your imagination.

How about you read your fucking books again, sonny? Indoor inches and outdoor inches ring a bell?

4E and 5E(it seems) shat all over that like hobos with diarrhea. 4e powers have ranges of squares, and effects of 1burst, and 5flush and other shit like that.

so fucking what? 20 feet and 4 squares are both 6 meters (or "the entire apartment") in people terms. Or maybe the arithmetic is too hard for you?

Seriously Prismatic fingers:
area of effect, 5 adjacent so that it hits every creature in a 5x5 square area, where one of the edges has to be touching your caster. It shoves all creatures inside of it, 3 squares back, and causes 5 points of psychic damage.

They don't even have CONES anymore. They just have MMO style target the ground hit the Area.

You seriously think the lack of 3rd style cones is a great loss? I'm gonna have to disagree. Those things are a pain in the ass for almost zero gain.

[Stubbazubba]

These questions dive straight into the matter of taste and it depends on your view of 4e.

So, what do you hate about 4e, and what do you enjoy about it? What problems do you think need fixing in 4e? Then I've got a better chance of answering you - although I might have to seek outside assistance.

Don't you give us that market-speak!

If the only way you can answer these questions is to know the asker's personal biases so you know how to frame your answer, that says to me that this game was not born from a clear, consistent vision of what 4e should have been; it's pandering to an audience who generally liked 4e's mechanics but felt it missed the mark somewhere, but it itself has no idea where the mark is, either. If you don't have a clear vision of what's wrong with 4e, how can you attempt to make it better? This is exactly the same problem we're seeing with D&D Next; the designers don't even know what they think would work, they're just trying stuff and playtesting it long enough to see what sticks, hoping that enough user feedback will create a coherent rules-set (spoiler alert: It won't).

What are 13th Age's core design principles? What are you actually aiming to achieve? And I don't want any market-speak "a love letter to D&D" or "bringing it back to it's [insert favorite aspect of game] roots" or "a harmonious union of storytelling and combat," no, I want to know what aspects of 4e your designers concluded needed addressing and how they went about doing so; "not enough fluff for the world" is the only thing I can see from it so far. And I'm not sure they handled that one very well at all, but I do see plenty of effort there.

[Simon Rogers]

@stubbazubba I am not the game designer, and I haven't played 4e enough times to speak authoritively about it. This wasn't marketing speak. Unless I know clearly what the answers to the questions are (and it isn't you I asked) I can't answer them. I am only equipped to give practical answers to practical questions. You make the rash assumption that the game set out to solve problems rather than being a thing in itself.

If you have specific questions by all means ask them.

[Avoraciopoctules]

If you have specific questions by all means ask them.

Let's say a PC wants to hire a company of mercenaries, buy a trained monster, or raise some undead minions. How would 13th Age handle this?

[waderockett]

If anyone has any further questions about the rules, the setting, or anything else related to the game, by all means post away and I'll do my best to answer.

Why would someone who hates 4e want to try 13th age?
Why would someone who enjoys 4e want to try 13th age?
What problems of 4e does 13th age fix?

Are any ideas in 13th age from 'proto' 4e development? This thread was originally to discuss proto-4e ideas left on the cutting room floor

Let's say a PC wants to hire a company of mercenaries, buy a trained monster, or, raise some undead minions. How would 13th Age handle this?

Simon asked if I could help him get answers to some of these questions, and clearly I'm going to have to have words with him. He's supposed to be getting ready for Gen Con, not hanging out in forums trolling people. Jesus.

I'll ask Rob what he can reveal about Orcus and the extent to which you can find traces of it in 13th Age.

I will also ask Rob if he thinks there are 4e problems that 13th Age fixes, but he may answer that "fixing 4e" wasn't a goal for him. One of the first things he told me when I signed on was that he wanted to design a game based on what he and Jonathan play at their table now. That's the actual game he's reworking into 13th Age, not what he designed for WotC -- although obviously there are elements in common.

And I'll look in the current draft of the manuscript and check what the rules or guidelines are for handling things like hirelings etc.

Right now, I will pretend I'm at the Pelgrane booth at Gen Con and answer the question, "Why would someone who hates 4e want to try 13th Age?"

(Note: I have not fully proofread this for typos.)


TL:DR
- I don't know what you hate about 4e, so I will pull some complaints about the game I've heard from other people, and assume those are your beefs
- No grid but still structure enough to keep combat from going off the rails
- No XP system, so you can do other things with monsters and treasure than kill and steal them and not be penalized
- Combat goes faster and is simpler
- Its focus is story and roleplaying, not combat
- Skills are flexible and intuitive
- The classes are different from one another: a fighter's abilities do not operate the way a wizard's abilities do
- Prep is minimal: GMs can create monsters on the fly, and the rules place a big portion of creating adventure hooks and world building on the players as they play
- If you hate 4e because you hate D&D, you can approach 13th Age as a story-focused indie game set pretty much anywhere and anywhen you want, without monsters, treasure or combat, never roll attack or skill checks, and have a great time

Depending on what you specifically hate about 4e, the differences between the two games could be either good news, or bad news for you. For eexample, if you hate everything about 4e EXCEPT the grid, you're out of luck.

You'll find that 13th Age is different in a few important respects. One of the biggest things is that combat is gridless, as I mentioned. This encourages characters to do the sorts of crazy, creative stunts in combat that in 4e were represented as highly specific powers you could use X number of times a day, and which relied on the grid to use in play. However, the combat rules have enough structure that those sorts of maneuvers aren't just conjured out of the air by players and GMs. You should see a decent mix of free-form and structured to keep things interesting.

Also, there is no XP in the game. You level up when you've fully healed three or four times, and you come up with a story that justifies to everyone why your character reached this watershed moment where his or her life changed for the better. In the meantime, PCs get incremental improvements to their character sheets afetr successful adventures. Because you don't rely on gathering treasure and killing monsters to get experience points to level up, you can choose not to fight or grab treasure and not be penalized for it.

Combat goes faster, for a few reasons. One is that 4e has a rule for nearly everything you might do, more rules than most people can memorize. So there's often a lot of paging through various rulesbooks and discussing what someone can and can't do given their race, class, current status, and position. Combat in 13th Age is simpler: you're either near someone or far away from them, engaged in a fight or not engaged in a fight.

Also, in 4e you may have run into situations where combat drags on well past the point when you know you're going to win, and you're just going through the motions so you can finish. The 13th Age Escalation Die rule is there to help combat move faster the longer it goes on by adding bonuses to PC's attacks. (The bonuses don't apply to monsters because they start out more powerful than the players -- another difference between the two games is that in 13th Age, unbalanced encounters are fine. There is a rule that lets the PCs automatically succeed in running away from a fight, but they are penalized with a non-combat setback as their enemies take advantage of their foes' defeat.

I've been talking a lot about combat because one of the common complaints about 4e is that it's socombat focused. If you hate 4e, you might like the fact that 13th Age is first and foremost focused on story and roleplaying. You're more likely to solve a problem or reach a goal by drawing on a relationship with a powerful NPC, or leveraging your background, or using a rule called your character's "unique feature" that can provide you with a powerful non-mechanical resource. In fact, the first chapter in the book is an overview of the 13 "icons" -- NPCs who are the game's equivalent of our world's most powerful individuals and their organizations. Your relationships with those icons, whether they're allies, enemies or something more ambivalent, is one of your most impotant defining aspects.

Skills are much simpler and more flexible. The game's background rules let a player say, "My character is a low-ranking street thief in the city of Glitterhaegen" and from then on, the PC is assumed to have skills that match the background. These could include standard thief-type skills such as picking pockets, climbing walls, and checking for traps; but it can also include intimidation, underworld contacts, contacts with corrupt government officials and merchants, knowledge of the city, and anything else that reasonably occurs to you in the course of an adventure. That PC could have an additional background, "Former novice at the temple of Baldur," which brings other implied skills. The character is more firmly grounded in the setting and you don't have to kick yourself because you forgot to buy a skill that you really should have and suddenly need.

Another complaint you might hear about 4e is that in the interest of balance, the distinctiveness of individual classes was removed. Everyone has powers that move enemies around and either do damage or give hit points to others. The classes in 13th Age are designed to play differently from one another. For example, a wizard casting spells (Vancian or non-Vancian) operates very differently than a fighter, who rolls an attack and then based on the outcome chooses which maneuver they want the attack to use.

Designing an adventure and preparing for a session are much easier in 13th Age than they are in 4e. One big reason for this is that monster creation rules are simpler, so you can come up with enemies on the fly. Another is that the collaborative nature of the game means that the players are doing a great deal of the world-building and adventure plotting through their icon relationships, backgrounds and unique features. One of my players wrote down onhis character sheet that he's a former altar boy of the Great Gold Wyrm. I hadn't planned that the Great Gold Wyrm would have churches or temples, with hierarchies that included altar boys, but Joe helpfully filled in that blank spot for me. If it had really conflicted with something I had planned I could have said no, but 13th Age is ideally a "yes, and" game.

All this assumes that you hate 4e because you like D&D but hate that edition of the game. If you hate 4e because you hate games where fighters and wizards hit orcs, and you prefer story-focused indie games, with the rules I described above you can easily play a fantastic game of 13th Age without ever rolling an attack or a skill check. You can replace fantasy icons like the Archmage and Lich King with powerful NPCs from any setting such as Abraham Lincoln, William Blake, your school's hockey coach, or the mayor of a small town of loathsome Lovecrartian hybrids. Maybe the icons aren't even people, but factions, nations, eras, schools of magic, or teenage cliques.

[Stubbazubba]

You make the rash assumption that the game set out to solve problems rather than being a thing in itself.

Maybe you're not aware, Mr. Rogers, but the only descriptions on Pelgrane Press' website about 13th Age seem to make that assumption, too:

13th Age is a love letter to D&D: a rules-light, story-oriented RPG that honors old school values while advancing the OGL art.

For being "a thing in itself," 13th Age seems to struggle to define itself without mentioning or referencing D&D.

Our goal with 13th Age is to recapture the free-wheeling style of old-school gaming by creating a game with more soul and fewer technical details.

He uses the term 'recapture' and the comparatives 'more soul' and 'fewer technical details.' He is literally defining the game by comparing it to other games. How does that not come across like they set out to solve problems? Besides the extremely nebulous "too many technical details" and "not enough soul," I'm curious just what those problems are. All I've seen is the idea that you need more fluff. A good start, but that wasn't a problem with the rules-set.

What is this "soul" that 13th Age has more of? Is it just fluff? This game is supposed to be rules-light but still has multiple phases every turn where effects may or may not end? I understand that it's gridless, but that alone does not make rules-lite.

[Avoraciopoctules]

Skills are much simpler and more flexible. The game's background rules let a player say, "My character is a low-ranking street thief in the city of Glitterhaegen" and from then on, the PC is assumed to have skills that match the background. These could include standard thief-type skills such as picking pockets, climbing walls, and checking for traps; but it can also include intimidation, underworld contacts, contacts with corrupt government officials and merchants, knowledge of the city, and anything else that reasonably occurs to you in the course of an adventure. That PC could have an additional background, "Former novice at the temple of Baldur," which brings other implied skills. The character is more firmly grounded in the setting and you don't have to kick yourself because you forgot to buy a skill that you really should have and suddenly need.

I can certainly see some appeal in this. What about the flip side?

From what I can see, monsters seem to be just a collection of combat stats. Can 13th Age model somebody finding a magic ring with a genie bound to it and using that genie's powers to build a palace in the desert?

Can demons do interesting things out of combat? If "is a Fiend of Corruption" is the only thing you have to go on when figuring out what a demon can do besides stab people in the face, that seems like it could mean drastically different powers in different GM's minds. That could be really problematic if people are trading the role of GM back and forth.

[Chamomile]

So, right now I'm struggling to see how this game differs significantly from just doing totally freeform roleplay, the sort you'll find if you punch in "forums RP" into google. I get the numbers are there, but they don't really seem to do anything.

Also, I struggle to see why "level up every fourth time you heal" would possibly be a preferable solution to "gain XP for completing quest objectives."

[Previn]

Also, I struggle to see why "level up every fourth time you heal" would possibly be a preferable solution to "gain XP for completing quest objectives."

I don't see any difference. You get 1 xp each time you heal, and you level up after every 4 xp.

The game's background rules let a player say, "My character is a low-ranking street thief in the city of Glitterhaegen" and from then on, the PC is assumed to have skills that match the background.

I have a big problem with this. If I'm going to have a skill system, I want those skills to be pretty well defined so I'm not arguing with the DM or a player, about what being a street thief means or able to move from group to group, and know what being a "a low-ranking street thief in the city of Glitterhaegen" actually does so that when my old group let me detect traps with the, my new one says that 'street' thieves don't have that experience.

[Stubbazubba]

Also, I struggle to see why "level up every fourth time you heal" would possibly be a preferable solution to "gain XP for completing quest objectives."

I guess it depends on who is in control of defining quest objectives. If the GM states them, then that's bad news for Players; even if they want to make peace with the bandit clan and have them become highway protectors instead of robbers, if the GM says that killing them is the quest objective, it cuts off that avenue of approach. If the players decide, then they can decide that their failure to do much to the bandits was successfully "observing their numbers, encampments, and testing their threat level," and thus get the same XP as if they had actually won the encounter. Which, btw, is exactly how 13th Age operates, except apparently only combat encounters matter, since healing is the basis for XP. Diplomacy is a loser's game. Then I suppose there's the middle-ground; defined by PCs but enforced by the DM. The PCs state what their goal is before they go out, but they are chained to that initial decision.