Quote from: Omega;860320The joys of being on the other side of the desk in the gaming biz. Few players have even the slightest idea of how fucked up things can be from the designer and publisher side.

There is a certain book that exists that I was asked to co-write and it was a HUGE amount (like 40k words in two and a half weeks). It was for Goodman Games and Joe and I had talked about my problems with 3.x and I wanted to try and push the ante in small ways by creating beefy 5-level PrC's with non-standard saves and abilities.

The 3.x orthodoxy raked me over the coals for it. Most reviews liked what Mearls and I did - but I ain't gonna lie, it was a tough assignment and long nights.

My overall goal was to beef up the non-casters by creating very powerful prestige classes that frontloaded a lot of benefits in order to give them more flexibility down the line. One of my big influences at the time was d20 Swashbuckling Adventures. Their PrC's are *very* powerful in a low-magic setting. The assumptions being that for SOME reason, people actually thought casters were in balance with non-casters. Anyone that did *any* kind of design in 3.x could/should have known it was nowhere near the case.

Well ENWorld was not very kind. Joe came to bat for me - to his credit. He did understand what I was trying to do and liked it, but the institutionalized minds of the 3.x fandom had already calcified. I still stand by it to this day.

TL/DR - I disagree with 90% of Tweet's views on 5e and his own game 13th generation. But his contrition on how fucked up 3e is gives me a little bit of closure. Not that it changed how I ran games. It made me realize how much I'd come to dislike what D&D and later Pathfinder had become.

I think 5E is more similar to 1E/2E (which are fundamentally the same game) and I can see the lineage when I play 5E. Tweet kind of turned me off on his game but I guess I'm really not his audience.

Quote from: James Gillen;860217I think 13th Age is a 4E that sorta works.

JG

That's about right, I think.

Quote from: Ulairi;860205I checked out the 13th Age website and it doesn't seem, to me, to be a call back to AD&D (1E) and it seems to me not in the same vein both in play and in tone. Am I missing something? Should I pick up the book? I enjoy D&D to play like AD&D (1E/2E). 5E does that, for me, more so than 3E did and certainly more than 4E.

Its core mechanics are a pleasant variant of 3E. Tweet is right that some balance issues have been addressed, but they've done that largely by completely gimping the spell lists (which means that it doesn't feel like D&D to me). Heinsoo brings in a large sampling of 4E's "dissociated for no real purpose whatsoever" mechanics, but they're not quite as all-encompassing and horrible as 4E.

If you've got a bunch of 3E and 4E gamers glaring angrily at each other, you might be able to use 13th Age to convince them to all sit down and begrudgingly play a game together. Otherwise, I don't really understand what the point of it is supposed to be.

Quote from: Omega;860222That would be 4e D&D Gamma World.

No. Really. One of the most common good things people say about the game, after saying how much they hate the not-GW-setting, is that it was a 4e that worked.

4E D&D Gamma World took the worst aspects of 4E and doubled down on them.

(It does, OTOH, have some truly kickass character creation mechanics.)

Quote from: Ulairi;860205Jonathan Tweet, one of the designed of 3E and the designer of the 13th Age did a Reddit AMA (ask me anything) yesterday and I found something interesting:

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3oq1iy/im_rpg_designer_jonathan_tweet_lead_designer_on/



I may be really stupid but I wasn't familiar with the 13th Age prior to this AMA. I have read the 5E books and played through the starter adventure as well as the Dragon Queen module. I have played 2E extensively.

I checked out the 13th Age website and it doesn't seem, to me, to be a call back to AD&D (1E) and it seems to me not in the same vein both in play and in tone. Am I missing something? Should I pick up the book? I enjoy D&D to play like AD&D (1E/2E). 5E does that, for me, more so than 3E did and certainly more than 4E.

He doesn't seem to be claiming that 5e doesn't feel like D&D. He seems to be saying this about 2e, which is weird since mechanically 2e is 99% the same as previous editions. And about 4e, which is fair enough - I'm a 4e fan but it does not play anything like what I consider "D&D" to me.

Quote from: tenbones;86030413th Age (...) plays like a 4e hack.

Which shouldn't come as a big surprise - it is 4e: The Directors Cut.

It is what 4e should have been from the get-go: its own game, separate from the D&D brand. And it's quite sad that they still piggyback on the D&D name, or define themselves in D&D's shade, instead of letting the game shine on its own merits.

Earthdawn was built on a lot of D&D assumptions but tried desperately to hide them - and succeeded. While 13th Age desperately tries to be - as Simlasa and Tahmoh put it - "Hipster D&D".
What will happen to it when the hipster crowd moves on?

I think I glanced at the playtest files before the game was finished, but I don't remember much. The one thing that sort of interests me is the Icons. I get they are powerful NPCs. How do they work?

Icons work like influence over those npcs, or using that relationship to influence others.  Say you went with cleric whose domain is love and you got two points in favorable with the Emperor for being his mistress.  Guards are blocking people from a town of sick people to stop a plague.  You roll 2d6 and on success the guards let you through because they don't want to piss off the Emperor's mistress.

That is how I took it.

Quote from: Arminius;860406I think I glanced at the playtest files before the game was finished, but I don't remember much. The one thing that sort of interests me is the Icons. I get they are powerful NPCs. How do they work?

http://www.therpgsite.com/showthread.php?t=30153

QuoteThis chapter (2) also goes over the mechanics on a character's icon relationships. At 1st level each character gets 3 relationship points (which will increase at certain levels). For a given icon you can choose to have a positive, negative or "conflicted" relationship. The number of points you spend on a given icon determines how close and/or how positive the relationship is. (The game assumes generally heroic characters, and normally doesn't let you have 3-point relationships with villains like the Lich King; at best you could get a 1-point connection that gives you some allies in the villainous camp but can also be a liability when dealing with heroic types who question that character's associations). In mechanical terms, each point gives a 6-sided die that is rolled in certain circumstances, where a 6 equals success on the roll and a 5 is something that draws the icon's attention but can also complicate the PC's life. Exactly HOW all this works is not made clear here- the reader is referred to the "running the game" section at page 179.

Thanks, I found your review yesterday, and it gave me a pretty good picture. Although I appreciate the concept, I have to say I'm not particularly impressed with the execution at least as described. In fact, it doesn't really seem to offer much of anything that (for example) various GURPS Advantages and Disadvantages do.

I really enjoy 13th Age and its a great fantasy RPG. The whole "feels like D&D" is subjective to each player and I believe is deeply tied to which edition you played first. For me, 5e doesn't "feel" like D&D, but who cares?

BTW, 13th Age has a great organized play campaign available free online. Loads of some really fun adventures. What I like about 13th Age vs. Living RPGA is the GM is empowered to alter / customize / enhance the 13th Age events AND the events change based on the Icon relationships by the PCs at the table and their One Unique Things as well.

"(The popular edition of D&D) ...doesn't seemed tuned for the serious play that my group engages in."

LOL.

How 1982.

I played in a 13th Age campaign for around a year and a half, starting off with some playtest and then running through the eventual publication of the game.

I like 13th Age. It seems a lot like a 4E/5E blend but I like it a lot better than 4E. The problem we had was that (1) 13th Age didn't put out much product for a long time, and (2) the local game store wanted to support 5E and no longer allowed non-5E games to be run in-store. We played a couple of times at someone's house, but effectively the campaign died with 5E came out. There are some elements of 13th Age that I like better than 5E. The escalation die was pretty neat and some of the classes seemed cooler than their 5E equivalent. Plus, they made some awesome adventures which they gave out for free and I think were much better written than the 5E hardbacks that the store sells.

I really wish they had created more product to sell faster because they might have "scooped" 5E since 13th Age came out 6 months or so before 5E. They had an opportunity to steal the market but dropped the ball. Now 5E rules all again. I really miss the old 13th Age campaign.

13th age looks pretty cool, but it's just weird that there's no rules for vision.

Quote from: finarvyn;860762I played in a 13th Age campaign for around a year and a half, starting off with some playtest and then running through the eventual publication of the game.

I like 13th Age. It seems a lot like a 4E/5E blend but I like it a lot better than 4E. The problem we had was that (1) 13th Age didn't put out much product for a long time, and (2) the local game store wanted to support 5E and no longer allowed non-5E games to be run in-store.

Really?
If there is a faster way to get me to swear off a game, it's probably not within the abilities of any of the local stores.

And while I understand his opinion on 2e, I'll join the group that says that what feels like D&D depends strongly on the players.