What a load of shit.

RPGPundit

Quote from: PelgraneThe first post playtest download is now ready. Rob summarizes the changes here and Adam Dray talks has more here.

Interesting.

I wonder if, for the first time ever, the official D&D edition will be surpassed by its clones both in quality design and even identity. Because, judging by the previews so far, both The 13th Age and Dungeon World seem much better designed and simply more interesting than "D&D Previous".. oops, I mean "Next".

Quote from: Pelgrane;554603The first post playtest download is now ready. Rob summarizes the changes here and Adam Dray has more here.

Thanks for posting this. Although the changes are specified only cursorily, it is encouraging to read what Rob and Jonathan focused their efforts on when revising the original document.

Best of luck with the final product. My own prediction (at the moment) would be that 13th Age will likely need a polished re-edition in two or three years from now, once even more feedback from actual play has been collected; I hope Pelgrane Press sticks to the product long enough for that to come about.

Quote from: Windjammer;555592Thanks for posting this. Although the changes are specified only cursorily, it is encouraging to read what Rob and Jonathan focused their efforts on when revising the original document.

Best of luck with the final product. My own prediction (at the moment) would be that 13th Age will likely need a polished re-edition in two or three years from now, once even more feedback from actual play has been collected; I hope Pelgrane Press sticks to the product long enough for that to come about.

It's certainly not going out until it's ready - we aren't in a rush. I've no doubt corrections will gather over the years, and no doubt that we'll do a new edition at some stage, but this will be a polished, finished game when we release it.

We are certainly in this for the long term - commercially it's already successful by our modest standards, and we will support it with quality supplements in the vein of Bookhounds of London, Armitage Files and The Book of the Smoke.

Incidentally, we are after suggestions for supplements if anyone has any.

Quote from: RPGPunditWhat a load of shit.

That was my initial reaction as well. It's been tempered somewhat as certain things came to light, but it's pretty much my final assessment as well. Here's the part that partially changed my mind:

Quote from: Kele the BirdTURBODRACULA was a mean mean. He was building his character to see if he could make a rogue as a vampiric style thing, and was happy with his results! The 13th age chargen is pretty robust that way. He was as serious a character as anyone else, a robot that stalked the nights drinking blood.

Later he killed my character.  

I played the bird elf!

None of us were trolling. It's mean to say so! We were all having a good time, although since we were playtest characters we turned our icon relationships all the way up to 11.

Everything about that is full of fail. But all of that fail is player-generated fail. Apparently, those character sheets were made by a group of SA "Trad Goons" and the complete over-the-top special snowflakism is because they decided to do that on their own. It's one of those moments when you're trying to RP with twelve year olds and they start asking if their character can marry Optimus Prime or some shit.

So the fact that one of the characters has the equivalent of "the most powerful witch in the setting comes to toilet paper my house on a regular basis because she thinks it's funny" and another character literally has "used to be a bird" as one of their skills is not actually the fault of the game. The game just says "write in some backgrounds" and that particular group of playtesters decided to be a bunch of twats.

Now the problem remains that the core combat engine is shit. It's basically 4e, and 4e's biggest problems are that it is way too fiddly and way too grindy. For the fiddliness issue they... have not addressed it at all. You still have one round buffs that might end at the beginning of your turn, or the beginning of the target's turn, or the end of your next turn, or the end of the target's turn, or at some other time. And all those are subtly but importantly distinct and you will often be under the effects of two or more minor effects that are roughly the equivalent of a one round +2 bonus to AC or something that will end at different phases in the same turn, forcing you to track all those separate accounting phases and redo the math several times in the round for no perceivable benefit. And for the grindiness, they appear to have basically given up and merely handed out a battle timer that shuffles the enemies off the board when the PC's actual damage output is inevitably insufficient to do the job in a reasonable amount of time.

Certainly not a game that appeals to me in the slightest. But the big horrifying crap at the top of the character sheets where the characters look like lame chosen-one parodies written by pathetic man children is not actually part of the game. It's that those particular playtesters were pathetic man children who thought it would be "funny" to write up all their characters as lame tongue-in-cheek Mary Sues.

-Frank

Quote from: FrankTrollman;556716That was my initial reaction as well. It's been tempered somewhat as certain things came to light, but it's pretty much my final assessment as well. Here's the part that partially changed my mind:



Everything about that is full of fail. But all of that fail is player-generated fail. Apparently, those character sheets were made by a group of SA "Trad Goons" and the complete over-the-top special snowflakism is because they decided to do that on their own. It's one of those moments when you're trying to RP with twelve year olds and they start asking if their character can marry Optimus Prime or some shit.

So the fact that one of the characters has the equivalent of "the most powerful witch in the setting comes to toilet paper my house on a regular basis because she thinks it's funny" and another character literally has "used to be a bird" as one of their skills is not actually the fault of the game. The game just says "write in some backgrounds" and that particular group of playtesters decided to be a bunch of twats.

Now the problem remains that the core combat engine is shit. It's basically 4e, and 4e's biggest problems are that it is way too fiddly and way too grindy. For the fiddliness issue they... have not addressed it at all. You still have one round buffs that might end at the beginning of your turn, or the beginning of the target's turn, or the end of your next turn, or the end of the target's turn, or at some other time. And all those are subtly but importantly distinct and you will often be under the effects of two or more minor effects that are roughly the equivalent of a one round +2 bonus to AC or something that will end at different phases in the same turn, forcing you to track all those separate accounting phases and redo the math several times in the round for no perceivable benefit. And for the grindiness, they appear to have basically given up and merely handed out a battle timer that shuffles the enemies off the board when the PC's actual damage output is inevitably insufficient to do the job in a reasonable amount of time.

Certainly not a game that appeals to me in the slightest. But the big horrifying crap at the top of the character sheets where the characters look like lame chosen-one parodies written by pathetic man children is not actually part of the game. It's that those particular playtesters were pathetic man children who thought it would be "funny" to write up all their characters as lame tongue-in-cheek Mary Sues.

-Frank

Thanks for the analysis but Pundie said it better without making me waste time confirming I'm not stupid in arriving to the same conclusion.  Nice to see I actually fully agree with you for once though.