Hey, I'm fair.  If it's good, it's good.  They have some good ideas.  It pushes the hobby forward.

13th Age is a great game which fucked up its marketing with epic A-grade dumb.

They had a rocking RPG during that dead time when 4e was shelved and 5e hadn't been released and Pathfinder was old news. You could not have asked for a better moment to launch a new fantasy RPG, but that moment demanded vibrant and powerful and active marketing.

But oh no. 13th Age decided to make believe that "build it and they will come" is a business plan.

And now? Is it even a thing anymore in the 5e era?

Such a shame because 13th Age is GREAT fun and has great ideas for players and GMs. It's built on 4e, but the smart parts, and their Org Play campaign is quite good and put tremendous power in the GM's hand to tailor the adventure to your home crew.

If you're not familiar with 13th Age, its HIGH FANTASY for 10 levels, but imagine each level is kinda equal to 2 levels in WotC D&D. It's got all the high fantasy trappings and your PC kicks ass at level 1.

The "One Unique Thing" is great for campaigns. Within reason, you declare something truly unique about your dude in the whole setting. It's a great mechanic for getting your PC concept narrowed down to a sentence.

The "Escalation Die" makes combat move faster. It's a D6 and you start it at 1 and PCs add the number to their attack rolls. Thus, you probably want to try your riskier powers later in the fight, but if you drag out fights, the monsters wail on you.

The 13 "Icons" are generic figures of power in the campaign - The Great Dragon, the Lich King, the Elf Queen, etc. These are the Big Dudes of the world and you get to pick a couple and built positive or negative relationships with them. Based on random rolls each session, your bonds might come into play for weal or woe. There are plenty of variant Icons and you are encouraged to tailor them for your campaign. AKA, if you wanted to run 13th Age Carcosa, the Icons could be the various Mythos beings.

If 5e isn't doing it for you, check out the 13th Age wiki and/or buy the corebook.

13th Age is often not really helped by its fans and sometimes even by the examples given in the books.

It doesn't have to be an over the top narrative game.  It's core is just a very solid version of D20 D&D.

You can dial up or down a lot of it's features to the extent you like.  If you look around the on the web you can get the impressions backgrounds should be things like "Polymorphed Bird + 3" but they can easily be sensible things like "Veteran of the Goblin Wars+3".

This may be one of the marketing issues mentioned above - the book really pushes a particular playstyle - but really the game is pretty flexible.

For example the book tells you that Icons should not be gods.  But they actually work perfectly well if you replace them with gods.  The scene in the Conan movie when Conan appeals to Crom and then the ghost of Valeria appeals briefly to help him in the battle is exactly the sort of thing the icons in 13th Age can model.  The captain of a ship makes a sacrifice to the god of the sea to ensure a safe voyage?  Icon relationship rolls also model this extremely well.

It's monster rules and design are so much better than 5E.

I've read 13th Age some time ago, and I agree it's a very good and incrementally innovative system compared to D&D editions.

I would like to DM it, but the Icons bother me. I fear it may be an hassle to invent circumstances/reasons for their (or their minions) appearing randomly in the plot of my scenarios. Are there some DMs out there who play with 13th Age while downgrading the importance and impact of the whole Icons package ?

You can completely leave out the icons if you like.

They're really not necessary for the game.

There's a few powers that reference them but you can tell the players to choose different powers or just reskin them.

Nothing will break.

Quote from: Spinachcat;108378413th Age is a great game which fucked up its marketing with epic A-grade dumb.

They had a rocking RPG during that dead time when 4e was shelved and 5e hadn't been released and Pathfinder was old news. You could not have asked for a better moment to launch a new fantasy RPG, but that moment demanded vibrant and powerful and active marketing.

But oh no. 13th Age decided to make believe that "build it and they will come" is a business plan.

I agree. The game does not offer enough advantages over D&D for that to work.

Quote from: Spinachcat;1083784The "One Unique Thing" is great for campaigns. Within reason, you declare something truly unique about your dude in the whole setting. It's a great mechanic for getting your PC concept narrowed down to a sentence.

Note how easily this idea can be transferred into your favorite version of D&D. This is not a good unique selling point.

Quote from: Spinachcat;1083784The "Escalation Die" makes combat move faster. It's a D6 and you start it at 1 and PCs add the number to their attack rolls. Thus, you probably want to try your riskier powers later in the fight, but if you drag out fights, the monsters wail on you.

I am very grateful for whoever came up with the idea of an escalation mechanic first (as it clearly is applicable to cinematic combat and I intend to expand my game's rules with an escalation mechanic soon). But again: note how easy it is to just steal the idea for your version of D&D.

Quote from: Spinachcat;1083784The 13 "Icons" are generic figures of power in the campaign - The Great Dragon, the Lich King, the Elf Queen, etc. These are the Big Dudes of the world and you get to pick a couple and built positive or negative relationships with them. Based on random rolls each session, your bonds might come into play for weal or woe. There are plenty of variant Icons and you are encouraged to tailor them for your campaign. AKA, if you wanted to run 13th Age Carcosa, the Icons could be the various Mythos beings.

But then again this makes it non-generic fantasy and so it can only bite partially into D&D. And if you leave the Icons and easily adapted rules out what remains of the 13th Age ruleset to make it your systems of choice for fantasy gaming? Not saying it's a bad game or bad system, nor that it couldn't have done better, but ultimately its range was somewhat limited to begin with.

Quote from: Alexander Kalinowski;1083793But then again this makes it non-generic fantasy and so it can only bite partially into D&D. And if you leave the Icons and easily adapted rules out what remains of the 13th Age ruleset to make it your systems of choice for fantasy gaming? Not saying it's a bad game or bad system, nor that it couldn't have done better, but ultimately its range was somewhat limited to begin with.

1) Backgrounds - they're much looser than skills and make it easier to make the character you want.
They can largely be what you want within reason.  You could take "Knight" as a background and this covers largely all the things you and your GM can agree a Knight should be trained in.  ]
2) Actual support for theatre of the mind.  Squares are not used or referenced at all.  Enemies are "engaged", "nearby" or "far-away".  This may be the only version of D&D to do this?
3) Monster design.  It takes the better ideas from 4E while having much faster combats.  Monsters are much easier to run than 5E (and more interesting) You never have to look up spells.
4) Class design - Too much to go into - but like all versions of D&D it has it's own take on the classic classes plus all the extra ones it introduces.
5) Action economy - no multi-attacks - PCs just do more damage - you don't have to wait for high level fighters to resolve umpteen different attacks.

Obviously many of those elements above will not appeal to everyone - but they are points of differentiation.

Quote from: Alexander Kalinowski;1083793But then again this makes it non-generic fantasy and so it can only bite partially into D&D. And if you leave the Icons and easily adapted rules out what remains of the 13th Age ruleset to make it your systems of choice for fantasy gaming? Not saying it's a bad game or bad system, nor that it couldn't have done better, but ultimately its range was somewhat limited to begin with.

1) Backgrounds - they're much looser than class and make it easier to make the character you want.
They can largely be what you want within reason.  You could take "Knight" as a background and this covers largely all the things you and your GM can agree a Knight should be trained in.  ]
2) Actual support for theatre of the mind.  Squares are not used or referenced at all.  Enemies are "engaged", "nearby" or "far-away".  This may be the only version of D&D to do this?
3) Monster design.  It takes the better ideas from 4E while having much faster combats.  Monsters are much easier to run than 5E (and more interesting) You never have to look up spells.
4) Class design - Too much to go into - but like all versions of D&D it has it's own take on the classic classes plus all the extra one's it introduces.
5) Action economy - no multi-attacks - PCs just do more damage - you don't have to wait for high level fighters to resolve umpteen different attacks.

Obviously many of those elements above will not appeal to everyone - but they are points of differentiation.

13th Age Glorantha replaces icons with runes that function slightly differently. It is a game that is easy to run, but the Glorantha version needs the core books and is not represented in the online SRD so players either have to write out fairly complex class features or pass the book around.
If I used the escalation die in my 5e game it would be for the monsters because the player/monster power level is balanced differently (almost reversed).

I can't get into details of course, my knowledge is cursory at best, but the thing I like most of TJS' list (and which I have been considering for Knights of the Black Lily) is a variant of Backgrounds. And this is again the easiest thing to adapt into any other role-playing game, not just fantasy.

I don't know if it's their marketing or that 5E killed off 13th Age initial push. Yet it seems that 5E at least has not killed interest in a decent amount of the fanbase imo. It also required a good DM with the right players to pull off using the Icons as well.
Note I am not saying it is dead. It just to seems to me at least interest for it has died.

I enjoy it for one-shots...never tried a campaign.
I do use bits from it for my current 5E game...most specifically the magic item stuff (drawbacks, varying power levels, etc.)

I've got the entire run of 13th Age, and there are still new books coming out periodically. It's a very good game, but for me there are two big knocks against it.

First is how the Icons and relationship dice are handled. Right out of the gate, they aren't really explained well. That was fixed somewhat over multiple books and numerous online articles, but I ended up using my own rules, anyway.

The second, and the real problem for me, is the ever-increasing number of damage dice that have to be rolled. 13th Age is fantastic up to level 5 or 6. Beyond that, it starts to get incredibly clunky as dice pools explode in size and the amount of damage that has to be counted up really slows things down if your players suck at math. Even with limiting the number of rolled damage dice using any of the book's suggestions, there's no work-around for that problem.

Quote from: KingofElfland;108380713th Age Glorantha replaces icons with runes that function slightly differently. It is a game that is easy to run, but the Glorantha version needs the core books and is not represented in the online SRD so players either have to write out fairly complex class features or pass the book around.
If I used the escalation die in my 5e game it would be for the monsters because the player/monster power level is balanced differently (almost reversed).

I'd have it add to the player's inspiration rerolls as well.

The metagame mechanics might as well interact with each other.

13th Age received some good video reviews online, and I have come close to ordering the core rulebook a few times without following through....


Maybe they didn't have much money budgeted for advertising?  Perhaps they were expecting it to become a cult classic within RPG circles?