WIR 13th Age #2

 Picking up where I left off, it's away from skills ... I mean backgrounds, and into feats.

You get a new feat at every level. In your early levels, these are adventurer tier feats, then champion feats and finally epic feats. This is our first sign that the scale of this game is super-compressed. I might get more into this later, but there are only 10 levels in the game. To someone coming in from D&D 3.x or 5e which have 20 levels, or D&D 4e with its 30 levels, this feels very small. The feats generally feel pretty significant, so it's likely that each level will represent a significant bump in ability.

The downside of this section is its brevity. There are only a handful of feats listed here, with the majority of the space taken up by lists of feats elsewhere in the book. Since feats are intended to be significant, they often work to enhance the specific powers of the various classes and need the context of being in the class description in order to make sense, I guess.

Some feats list benefits for multiple tiers and I'm not 100% sure what happens with those. Like if a feat has an adventurer and a champion entry, what happens when my character hits champion tier? Do they automatically get the champion benefit? Do I have to take the feat again, this time at champion tier, to get the benefit?

There are a couple of references in the text to re-speccing your character as they advance, so I'm guessing that you can have a feat at adventurer tier, then once you become a champion, you can spend your champion feat slot to upgrade the feat to champion, but then you are left with an empty adventurer tier feat slot so you can fill that with a another adventurer tier feat. It feels complicated, but it's probably fairly simple once you actually get in to it.

The gear section is unimpressive, but that's probably more feature then bug. "This is supposed to be the indie-style, story-telling game of heroic fantasy, not a bean counting simulation" I imagine someone saying, though it doesn't appear in the text of this book. No information is given other than an item's name and its price. No weights, because "encumbrance rules are stupid." and no other details because "that would just restrict the possibilities of the story." Again imagined quotes. But they do spend some time on what the coins used in the setting look like, which does hit the "style over substance" vibe that they seem to be going for.

Now we get into the races section. This was published before "races" became problematic enough that publishers started exploring other terminology. I'm going to use "race" here just because they use it.

They are divided between major races and optional races. The major races are human, dwarf, 3 kinds of elf, half-elf, gnome, half-elf, half-orc and halfling. The optional races are dragonspawn, Holy One, Forgeborn, and Demon Touched.

The optional races are versions of the various races that were made core in 4e that got backlash. The Holy Ones are Aasimars and the Demon-Touches are tieflings. Dragonspawn correspond to D&D's dragonborn and the Forgeborn are intended to be the warforged. 

The rules surrounding any of them are very simple. They get a +2 bonus to any one stat (most races have a few defined options, but humans get "Any")  and a power that they can enhance with a champion tier feat.

The class section begins with a listing of the game's classes in order of ease of play. Not only is that sort of refreshing, but the fact that the fighter class isn't the highest on the list is a pleasant change as well. Both D&D and Pathfinder have positioned the fighter as the "I hit it with my axe" class, where the rookie player can just roll to hit when called upon in combat and basically do fine. But in this case, the barbarian is the "roll and shout" class. Fighter is actually in 4th place behind the barbarian, ranger and paladin.

WIR 13th Age #1

 We'll see how long this lasts. One thing that's been keeping me down is that I haven't been doing much reading to go into my writing. So I decided to take my writing club time and dedicate it to doing some reading. And now, book report style, I get to tell you what I read.

I decided to start alphabetically with 13 Age, because numbers come before letters apparently. While this is something I've read before, having purchased the core book at DunDraCon a number of years ago, I do have some supplements for it that I might get to as well.

The elevator pitch for 13th Age is pretty much: D&D, but cool, modern, and hip, like those indie games kids are playing these days.

The first chapter of the book introduces us to the setting via the Icons, the major iconic figures of the game. I just want to say that I appreciate this. Rather than bury you in history and detail, you're given these very evocative figures that you can have a relationship with. And I do mean that. One of the things you will write on your character sheet is your relationship with at least one of these Icons. That's not to say that the Lich King is your buddy or that there are embarrassing photos of you and the High Druid from that holiday party, but you're on each others' radar.

The next chapter is focused on character creation, and it mostly glosses over the tedious, mechanically necessary details like AC and hit points, while spending significant time on their big indie-style innovations: The One Unique Thing and Backgrounds.

Evey character has One Unique Thing that sets them apart. While this Thing can have some utility, they spend a lot of page space telling you that it shouldn't necessarily be a power that your character has and that it should have some story consequences, either positive or negative.

Backgrounds are more or less skills as they appear in D&D, but you're encouraged to make them up. And rather than describing one narrowly focused ability, a Background can be used for anything you can justify.

Less of a fan of this sort of thing. Not that it's bad. It's mostly with my limitations. I don't really do that whole "just make stuff up" bit. If I were to play this, I would probably just port over the skills and rename them to sound like a Background. "I'll take the History skill, but then I'll just call it the Historian Background and call it good."

Only about 40 pages in, but that's actually more reading than I do in a week, so I'm going to call that progress.

What's in the Box?

 The San Diego RPG Meetup group has recently been doing monthly GM Meetups as well as the monthly general Meetups. And a couple of interesting topics emerged.

One of the roundtable questions that every GM was asked was "What is your white whale? What is the game or campaign that you've always wanted to run but never thought you could get the players or other resources together for?"

I somewhat misspoke when I answered "Star Trek." I did run a roughly 5 month campaign of GURPS Prime Directive when I was a member of the Fantasy Gamer's Guild at Humboldt State (now Humboldt Polytechnic). Perhaps the reason that it had slipped my mind is that it was from a period where I didn't have the confidence to create my own adventures, so I leaned on published scenarios. So while I did run a Star Trek campaign, I have yet to create my own Star Trek adventures. I still want to/hope to.

Though I did also have a backup answer: A 20-year OSR campaign.

I'm sure I've posted here about my perspective on running such a long term campaign. Rather than focusing in taking the players through a single, large story arc like a (It's hard to believe that this is) traditional "Adventure Path"-style campaign. For something intended to be that long-running, the goal is actually to be much less plot-oriented. The GM's task becomes, in large part, managing and presenting the setting rather than writing ever-expanding scripts. And that's what a lot of the tools in the early D&D game were there to facilitate.

But the big thing that I took away from that session was during the freeform discussion near the end. Someone was talking about making house rules and how they don't like to be "trapped in the box" of an overly restrictive rule system. I commented that I actually liked the various "boxes" of limitations that games create.

 This clearly surprised him, especially as he knew I was an OSR guy and one of the mantras that goes around there is "rulings, not rules."

But my own take on the OSR is that it's very much a "storygame," just like something more modern and "indie."

To demonstrate my point about the joys of restrictions, I picked an example of a game that everyone at the table was familiar with: Monsterhearts. It's a game of supernatural drama, somewhere between Buffy the Vampire Slayer and True Blood. One of the premises of the game is that the characters are all in high school, so logically, the GM should be able to make a story about a math test, or a history report or other sort of school assignment. But the rules of the game don't include anything about how good the characters are in their schoolwork. There's no "Intelligence" stat on the character sheet, or anything remotely close. (For the record, the character stats in Monsterhearts are: hot, cold, volatile, and dark)

It's perfectly possible to house rule something to represent a characters' studiousness, but if we just let ourselves spend time in that box that is Monsterhearts, another solution presents itself. There are no rules for getting good grades, but there are lots of rules for manipulating and controlling others. So the way to run a "big math test" scenario for Monsterhearts would be to focus on what the game already does. It becomes a question of finding the right study buddy, getting leverage on the teacher to let you pass regardless of the quality of your work, or perhaps engaging in skullduggery to get the answer key to the test. All of these require no extra design work on the part of the GM and leave everything focused exactly where the game wants us to be focused.

Likewise, running a dungeon-focused OSR game allows the game to focus on what it's good at instead of trying to force it into a broadly useful generic game engine. I actually prefer the retroclones that give the fiddly stat adjustments, like % chance to Bend Bars/Lift Gates rather than the more broadly applicable Strength Modifier because I think that specificity and the "box" it creates is more interesting.

I had a second session of the "one-shot" at Lestat's, and am looking forward to part 3, which I have been assured is the conclusion. I'm looking forward to running something there. Probably a Fiasco to start with, but maybe something more intensive later on.

I do still want to run an OSR campaign, but I'm continuing to rethink what it's going to look like. As much as I love the OSR, i'm not a fantasy fan in general, so the prospect of building a setting is hard to get excited about. At the same time, ever since my Castle of the Mad Archmage campaign fell apart, I've wanted to do it better. Which in part means presenting a coherent setting outside of the dungeon.

I might just select a handful of modules from my collection and place the various dungeons on a larger overland map and let the various names and places form the basis of the setting and just go from there.