WIR 13th Age #6

 The adventure is the last real item in the book, so I'll go over that and then address some final thoughts.

"Blood & Lightning" is such a simple adventure that I'm not going to worry about spoilers.

The adventure opens with the party traveling to a location called Boltstrike Pillar. There are three different descriptions of this pillar, based on which of 3 Icons controls it. Which is one of the things that can be decided when you roll your Icon Relationships at the start of the adventure.

Another plot-relevant element that can be determined at this time is which of the Icons is backing the goblins that try to prevent the party from reaching the Pillar. Stats are provided for the goblins, including variations depending on which of the 3 potential villainous Icons is backing them.

Which brings up my only real complaint about this scenario and 13th Age scenarios in general: How much work is the GM expected to do to accommodate the different Icon Relationships? It would be one thing if the GM could roll them while doing their adventure prep and work from there, incorporating them from the start. But it looks like Icon Relationships are rolled at the beginning of the session, once everyone has sat down to play. And this adventure sets an example that the relevant Icon has a mechanical effect, giving these goblins some cool little extra power.

Once the goblins are defeated, the party arrives at Boltstrike Pillar. And depending on which Icon controls the Pillar, the commander and their lieutenant are different. Different names, different career paths, different everything. Not that it matters too much, because they mostly exist for plot exposition.

The goblins weren't supposed to be able to get that close to the Pillar, so divination spells are cast and another group of interlopers is identified in an area called Greenstand. But the area is basically loaded with magical mines that just need someone to say "Shazam!" to set them off. So the party is sent on this mission and provided with a bit of magical kit to help them on their way.

But by the time they arrive at Greenstand, the interlopers have all been slain. The party can do some investigation, but there's also the risk of errant magical defenses going off. They discover that the area was attacked by a lightning breathing blue dragon and its lizardfolk allies. And that dragon is flying towards Boltstrike.

So it's back to Boltstrike for the final showdown. The defenders of the Pillar have been slain or routed, there's a dragon flying around and something magical seems to be going on at the top of the Pillar. The dragon seems pretty dangerous, but the fierce fighting before the PCs showed up has softened it up and made it beatable by a 1st level party.

Once that's done, they still have to deal with whatever's going on at the top of the tower. Which turns out to be the lieutenant performing a dark ritual of transformation. There are stats for him before and after transformation into some sort of dragon monster.

All in all, it's not a bad starting adventure. It's pretty linear, but it doesn't feel constrained.

One beef that I have specific to this adventure is its handling of rewards. After the goblin fight, you are instructed to give the characters an advance. Once you slay the dragon, you level up. There are suggestions that the characters be given magic items at the beginning of the adventure from their Icon Relationships and in the middle when they're hanging out at Boltstrike Pillar, they are handed some of the garrison's magic item stash.

I have 2 thoughts here:

1) It feels like each of these rewards is too big for what is done to earn them. Offering consumable items, like the potions or runes seems more appropriate. Something like a metacurrency would also work.

2) The Tyranny of Fun. It might still be a loaded term in some places, but I'm using it here to mean the idea that the game must continually be "fun." In between cool battles, you get cool stuff and your character gets cooler and more powerful.

Using a dragon as the climax of the adventure actually leans into this idea. Dragons are cool and fighting dragons is fun. Slaying a dragon is epic, and you get to do it at 1st level in your first adventure!

Overall Thoughts on 13th Age

Believe it or not, 13th Age has grown on me a little. It's gone from something that I wouldn't want to play to something that I might play.

Things I Liked

The Combat System: I actually give a lot of props to the combat system. It's designed for Theater of the Mind play and still offers fun options for players. Monster stats are simple and generate interesting results even if the GM is just making an attack roll for them every round.

Incremental Advancement: The fact that there were only 10 levels was a bit of a turn-off for me initially. Making the GM decide when to advance the characters and making the advances so chunky felt like it would be hard to the GM to manage well. Creating multiple smaller breakpoints gives the GM more flexibility in how their campaign is paced.

Things I Disliked

The Combat Focus: I have a lot of respect for a game that knows what it's about and does that thing well. But just about everything outside of combat was either handwaved or a really neat idea that didn't have a solid implementation.

Icon Relationships: This was a neat idea, but like nearly everything else that wasn't combat, it wasn't very well developed. And in the sample adventure, having each Icon give a different combat advantage to the monsters is a neat idea, but signals to the prospective GM the degree of design work they have to do.

No Metacurrency: I admit this is a personal taste thing. But I feel like there were shortcomings in how certain things were addressed that could have been better handled with a metacurrency. Rewards, especially, have the ability to feel very coarse-grained or chunky.

Now for the next question: If you are going to play or run some sort of D&D, is this the kind of D&D you should play/run?

13th Age is a great game if you:

Don't like bean-counting: There's fairly little to manage. There's very little to buy with money past a certain point. There's no XP to grind. Casters don't have to worry about filling their lower level spell slots because they disappear.

Love combat: This is the one area where the game really shines. It's not complicated, but players are sure to have cool things to do every turn.

Prefer Theater of the Mind combat: While other version of D&D can be run Theater of the Mind, 13th Age is really built for it.

Want characters to feel cool and awesome: Your character is going to be kicking butt and taking names right from Level 1.

WIR 13th Age #5

 Now we're in the Monsters chapter.

The rules for monsters are deliberately simple. Again, 13th Age shows its 4e heritage with small, straightforward combat oriented stat blocks. There is an image accompanying each monster stat block, but it's more iconography than illustration. Monsters have standardized hit points and damage values, and don't usually roll for either.

The stats are simple and straightforward. The main thing to note is that many special attacks and abilities trigger on a specific roll of the dice. While I've been invoking D&D 4e a few times when discussing the designers and the overall combat focus of the game, it's important to note a significant difference between this game and that: While 4e had very crunchy, tactical, map-based combat, 13th Age's combat is very loose, simple, and geared towards "theater of the mind" play. Most of the time, the GM will be making basic attack rolls, with monster special abilities being triggered by specific rolls of the dice. Rather than the complex tactical machinations of 4e, 13th Age is able to get quite a bit of mileage out of "clickety clackety, I roll to attack-ety."

The monsters are very much the D&D standards. Orcs, zombies, trolls, and gelatinous cubes are all represented. Dragons and demons also use the categories that every D&D player has learned to expect.

There are also a few tables for quickly generating monster stats for your own creations. Overall, 50+ pages of exactly what you expect.

The next chapter is a description of the default 13th Age setting, The Dragon Empire. They make a point of reminding you that there's a lot of empty space on the map that you can freely fill outside of the landmarks that they've posted. On the one hand, that feels obvious. On the other hand, if you're accustomed to a very lore-heavy sort of setting where every building has several paragraphs of lore somewhere or the GM feels the need to lead you by the nose through the highlights of the setting, it can be good to have that reminder.

While there's a lot of information about each of the locations shown on the map, it's all very loose. There's an emphasis on plot hooks and things to do and see rather than hard details.

About 100 pages ago, we were promised magic items and this next chapter finally (claims to) deliver. The first topic is consumable magic items, like potions, oils and runes. Potions are for healing or energy resistance. Oils provide flat bonuses to certain combat stats but only for one battle. Runes provide pluses like oils, but also another sort of bonus or effect as well.

Then we get to the more typical sort of magic items: magic weapons, armor and other magical trinkets. The sort you expect from a D&D-alike or "fantasy heartbreaker."

They spend some time talking about how many items you can effectively use, which is basically "1 item per level, and no more than 1 item of each type." Also, each item carries a "quirk," a habit or personality detail that the wearer manifests which connects to the item's theme.

The items are listed by type, such as magic weapon, armor, and other categories. The descriptions, like most things in this book are terse and efficient, making it very easy to breeze over. There's one illustration per item type, which, like the monsters, feels more iconic than illustrative.

There are no prices given for any of the magic items, on the assumption that they are all too special to have fixed prices. They even discuss the idea of keeping a magic item for the length of your career rather than constantly looking out for the next higher bonus. This is refreshing, as someone who started in Third Edition D&D, where it felt like there was a constant pressure to upgrade and make sure that you had proper gear for your level or you risked falling behind.

Our next section is an adventure, so this feels like a good time to start a new post. I've been sitting on this one for long enough.

WIR 13th Age #4

Though I forgot about this, did you? It's just that a lot of my writing time was taken up by RGPaDay. And now I'm back to this.

Now that all of the character details have been described, it's time for the combat rules.

Like a lot of other things in 13th Age, there's not a lot of detail, but for the most part, that's fine. It's supposed to be the "good parts" version of D&D, and obsessiveness about tactical detail is "unfun."

A couple of things that I didn't mention in the characters section do become relevant and discussed in more depth here. First of all, weapons do their damage die per level, so as you advance, even the fighter needs to worry about rolling buckets o' dice. That longsword does 1d8 damage at first level, but 5d8 once you make to 5th. Once you get to 10th level, you could be rolling 10d8 for a successful attack with an ordinary longsword. So this is where the book offers tips to manage large amounts of dice.

Also, characters have different Defenses instead of saving throws. Whoever makes the attack, whether it's a strike for damage or a mind affecting spell, rolls the dice instead of the subject of the effect rolling to resist it. I think this was a 4e innovation to make everything consistent, but 5e got overtaken by nostalgia from earlier editions and saving throws came back.

Then we get to the next big innovation of 13th Age: The escalation die. It doesn't have to be a die, just a way to track a value from 1-6. Basically, it goes up every round of combat until 6, where it stays if the bad guys aren't dead yet. The number on this escalation die is added as a bonus to PCs attack rolls, giving them a little boost even if their dice aren't on their side. There are also character and monster powers that engage when the escalation die reaches a certain point.

The GM chapter opens with advice on using the Icon relationships, which more or less demonstrates that the whole idea is really neat, but not fully baked. They suggest that GMs can use Icon relationships to add in plot twists, or allow players to add plot twists (more as a "get out of jail free" card), or even just have them manifest as cool stuff that the Icon connection gives the character access to. They then take this lack of clarity even further by openly suggesting "Once we publish this, people will figure out their own way to make this mess sort of work! Check the internet!"

We spend spend the smallest amount of time possible on some topics that the designers don't care about, dealing with skill checks and traps/ Then something that the designers care about: building battles. D&D has had encounter building rules in several editions intended to create a sense of balance or fairness into the proceedings, and this is no different. Though they do follow up their "fair fight" rules with suggestions to make things "unfair" and therefore more interesting.

Now we get to the rules for leveling up and one of the things that kinda kills my interest in this. And that is the fact that there is no XP. I understand the reasons behind this. It reduces the bean-counting in the game and the longstanding convention of XP for monster kills is not conducive to productive play. which has been known and understood pretty much since it was first implemented.

Maybe I'm spoiled on storygames, but even more traditional games will offer up some sort of Drama/Fate/Cool Point for leaning into the genre, doing cool stuff, or just making the GM laugh. While Icon Relationships can kinda sorta be that, it's also kinda sorta a lot of other things too.

Earlier in the book, it mentions that it uses alignments throughout the book as a way to define characters, but you don't have to. In fact, you can borrow the character description tools from other RPGs if you want. They mention Burning Wheel's Beliefs and Instincts, but you could also do things like character Aspects from Fate. And that's a problem, because those aren't just methods of describing your character's personality, but are also backed by those sorts of Drama Point mechanics.

It's just another point in the "Did they really think about this before writing it down?" column, really.

So the lack of XP sets up two issues for me.

1) The lack of mechanical incentives reduces player engagement/agency. While there are many ways to reward characters and get them involved in the action of the campaign, 13th Age leaves that largely in the hands of the GM rather than the rules. Not that this is necessarily bad, but it puts an extra burden on the GM, in my opinion.

2) If advancement isn't about rewarding players, it instead acts as a pacing mechanism, setting up how quickly the campaign escalates. Making the call on how quickly to advance with only 10 possible steps can be a challenge for the less experienced GM.

They do address some of this by providing for incremental advancement, breaking each level into 5 or so stages, so there are 50+ breakpoints instead of 10. They also discuss the idea of the 10-session campaign, where the party advances after each session. 

Now they get talking about treasure acquisition. And again, because it's a major source of bean-counting, they do their best to avoid it. You can get minor loot from various things, but magic items are serious business. They're not detailed here, but we are assured that they are.

Then there's a small discussion about rituals, which are basically spells that are cast out of combat. Some of the designers here worked on D&D 4e, so having the game focus on cool combats and kind of shoving everything else off to the side feels about right. So spellcasters have their combat capabilities well structured, but ritual casting is much more loosey goosey.

There are also small sections discussing the Icons and the gods of the setting. Icons are big, but also kinda vague. You can also make up your own Icons if you want, but the ones that are there make a pretty good set. The gods are just sorta there. They need to exist for the cleric and paladin classes to work, but most of their role in the setting is taken up by the Icons. If you want to use them in a story, you can.