Quote from: Brand55;1083856The 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.

Yes.  This is a big issue for me as well.  

I've sort of solved if by making a table of all the damage dice.  Players damage is then determined by their D20 Roll - Odd is low damage/ Even is high damage.  So if their damage die is a D10 their damage is 3 on an odd D20 roll and 8 on even rolls.  This speeds things up a lot at higher level and keeps at least a little of the uncertainty of rolling dice.  (Unfortunately at higher level extra dice create a bell curve - hence the need for a table.  Rolling 80 on 10d10 will almost never happen and be very swingy in terms of results, so the numbers need to compress toward the middle the more the dice.  So more like 40/60 on 10D10)

 - Players don't need to look up the table during play they just write the numbers down on their character sheet when they level up.

Quote from: TJS;108378513th Age is often not really helped by its fans and sometimes even by the examples given in the books.

This.

In 13th Age groups, there's always one guy who doesn't take things seriously and uses the setup to canonize goofy bullshit. I wish they devoted many words telling the GM that it's alright to say no and not every idea is appropriate for every campaign.

Quote from: Razor 007;1083862Maybe they didn't have much money budgeted for advertising?  Perhaps they were expecting it to become a cult classic within RPG circles?

Is online advertizing even effective in 2019?

I think what "killed" 13th Age is: It's take to much time to release it's Bestiary and 13 Ways. They come out ONE YEAR later! You can imagine wanting to play a game and almost half of it is missing?

Not sure if this has been mentioned yet, but this is interesting:

Quote from: 13th Age SRD webpageMundane combat equipment is based only on the class of weapon and the class of character using it. For instance, a basic attack with a dagger in the hands of a rogue does the same damage as a basic attack with a longsword in the hands of a fighter.

And this:

QuoteWeapons are rated by how much damage they deal. In the hands of player characters, each weapon attack deals 1 die of damage per character level + ability modifier, notated as WEAPON + [Ability]. Each class has its own version of the weapon chart, showing how well members of the class use weapons of a given damage category.

From a quick glance through the SRD it looks like the weapons go d4/d6/d8/d10, and each class has proficiency with different weapons.

Armour is similar.  A Paladin in Plate will always have the highest AC of any class.

Quote from: DarcyDettmann;1084047I think what "killed" 13th Age is: It's take to much time to release it's Bestiary and 13 Ways. They come out ONE YEAR later! You can imagine wanting to play a game and almost half of it is missing?

Agreed. Also, it was impossible to get their special d12 die with all of the icon symbols on it. A fun game, but at my store they put tables of 13th Age in the same timeslots as D&D Next (pre-5E) and so I had to pick.

If anything killed 13th Age, it's the requirement of an experienced GM. One 13th Age game didn't work out because the GM literally couldn't gel with the improvisation nature of the game but had no difficulty running a SWN game for weeks on end because SWN has all sorts of tools that even a novice GM can hack together a sandbox while 13th Age has diddly squat beyond building battles.

Nothing killed it. It was stillborn, created as it was from anti-5e hype.

Quote from: RPGPundit;1085626Nothing killed it. It was stillborn, created as it was from anti-5e hype.

It was this awesome looking thing, that seemed like it had lots of potential; but I have never seen a copy of its Core Rulebook on any store's shelves.  That prevented it from reaching more people.  Although, i did once see a copy of their Bestiary.

I've just never followed through on making a 13th Age purchase.....

Quote from: Razor 007;1085642It was this awesome looking thing, that seemed like it had lots of potential; but I have never seen a copy of its Core Rulebook on any store's shelves.  That prevented it from reaching more people.  Although, i did once see a copy of their Bestiary.

I've just never followed through on making a 13th Age purchase.....

   My FLGS has several copies and supplements. From everything I've seen and heard, it's a solid midlist game line. It doesn't compete with [strike]the Masonic-Luciferian True Game[/strike] 5E, of course, but what does?

   I was enthusiastic about it for a long time, but soured on Pelgrane as a company, and when I had the chance to play it, I had fun but found it a little too fiddly. Then again, that was a demo game with new players (the DM was experienced and an actual freelancer); it would have flowed more smoothly with a group that had learned it. Still, it's a bit too self-consciously D&Dish and gonzo for my tastes nowadays.

13th Age seems to be ticking along slowly releasing product.  

I really doubt it was ever expected to find any more than a small niche.

It's a tightened up D20 with narrative rules and some degree of ideas from 4E.

If Tweet and Heinsoo were really invested in finding as big an audience as they could they wouldn't have included elements like Icons which limit that audience.

It's possible they expected to gather up more of the 4E crowd then they did, but at the same time, if that was there real intention they could have included a lot more elements from 4E than they did.

It really does feel like they just made a version of D&D which they wanted to play themselves.

If 5E had struggled 13th Age would no doubt have gained a larger audeince but it was never going to be the next Pathfinder (nor does it seem likely it was intended to be).

13th Age is designed to scare off:

*) People who thought it was a 4ed clone.
*) People who take their elfgames seriously.
*) People who want their characters to have loads of spells/feats/etc. usable out of combat.
*) People who don't like big dice pools.
*) People who want a highly detailed stat block is for that monster over there.

And honestly, I'm guilty of at least two of those.

But eventually I realized that instead of treating 13th Age as a D&D variant, I needed to treat it like its own thing.  And then, for me at least, it all kind of clicked.

I'm not sure I'll ever get around to running it or if I'd even want to (but damn the Demonologist class is tempting!), but I still manage to find all sorts of fresh, crazy ideas in just about every book that I -can- use in my games of D&D.  And that's worth something to me.

Quote from: TJS;1085710It's a tightened up D20 with narrative rules and some degree of ideas from 4E.

If 5E had struggled they would 13th Age would no doubt have gained a larger audience but it was never going to be the next Pathfinder (nor does it seem likely it was intended to be).

The thing for me is that I disliked 3E and wanted to like 4E but didn't, and at the time there was no 5E, so there was a clear vacuum in product. I was in a regular 13th Age campaign for around a year and had a blast -- we ran through a bunch of the organized play stuff that Pelgrane put out.

What happened for me is that I've always been a D&D guy and when the "Next" playtest came out I wanted to take that route and the folks running 13th Age would only run it at the store AT THE SAME DAY AND TIME as the store ran D&D. So I had to choose and D&D won, but not because it was "better" than 13th Age. But faced with the choice of 13th Age or 5E, folks picked 5E so the 13th Age game folded.

A year or so ago I ran into the folks that had run 13th Age and asked if they wanted to play again. They said they would like to, but only at the same time slot as the store was doing 5E. I told them that I was hoping for more gaming, not the same choice again, and the campaign never restarted.

Fundamentally 13th Age is an awesome game, even if it has some 4E roots, but it can't compete with 5E and its Adventurer's League in my store.

I don't agree that 13th Age has "narrative" elements because the "one unique thing" and Icon relationships can be vetoed by the GM. In actual play, the players don't demand their Icon relationship to jump on command. It's the GM who weaves the Icon elements into the adventure (or not). Of course, we'd spend 10 pages trying to hash out what everyone means by "narrative elements" and that discussion always goes to good places.

But san dee jota is right that 13th Age is its own thing. It's not 4e even though you can easily see the 4e roots. The other elements of 13th Age really shine in actual play, far more than on the page. There is no reason to use all 12 Icons. You can easily focus on campaign on the interactions of 4-6 and keep things tighter and most importantly, you can (and should) personalize the Icons to your own campaign.

Quote from: TJS;1085710I really doubt it was ever expected to find any more than a small niche.

They thought "build it and they will come" is a real thing. It isn't.

Thus condemned to a small niche.

Quote from: TJS;1085710It really does feel like they just made a version of D&D which they wanted to play themselves.

They certainly marketed the game like a vanity project.