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?
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.
The game's just like 4E, Feng Shui, and Rule of Cool's Legend in the sense that there's a lot of minutiae for combat and pretty light everywhere else; which is a fine paradigm for fantasy dust ups but, just like those, I would condense the game even further (mostly because the high end/level complexity just isn't worth it).
Quote from: Spinachcat;1086093I 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.
They thought "build it and they will come" is a real thing. It isn't.
Thus condemned to a small niche.
They certainly marketed the game like a vanity project.
Yes, I got that Vanity Game vibe too; but I believe they thought the disgruntled 4E fans would buy into it in droves.
It turns out; the Core book is now pretty inexpensive used, on Amazon.
Quote from: Spinachcat;1086093I 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.
This is true. But those elements
are in the game. And they're woven into some of the class descriptions and powers. They're not presented as an optional add on.
Now they can be dumped. But they really didn't make it that clear. I've seen a lot of people asking on the net "can I run this game without the icons?" so clearly it's not obvious to everyone how easily they can be excised.
I don't really care whether they're true narrative mechanics or not. The point is these elements are likely to have scared off some of the potential audience of the game. And Tweet and Heinsoo must have known that they might. If their main concern was just maximising the audience they would have held them back for a GMs' supplement or the like
Quote from: Razor 007;1086106Yes, I got that Vanity Game vibe too; but I believe they thought the disgruntled 4E fans would buy into it in droves.
Maybe. It's missing a lot of key tactical elements of 4E however. But maybe they confused the 4E audience with the 4e web presence.
Most of 4E's audience only pops up to discuss distributing/setting up/configuring the tools and then they fuck off. The more vocal elements intrude on what could be normal 4E discussions to blab off character optimization to the point where 4E isn't better off than 3.5E in terms of game balance and also kills what could be a compelling discussion (that grows the 4E player base).
13th Age isn't a tactical RPG. I enjoy 4e for the tactical aspect (which is better far done in the 4e Gamma World box set), but 13th Age is aimed at abstract play - either theater of the mind or using minis without grid consideration.
Quote from: TJS;1086113I've seen a lot of people asking on the net "can I run this game without the icons?" so clearly it's not obvious to everyone how easily they can be excised.
You can run 13th Age without Icons. You can also run OD&D without clerics, but you're chopping out a key component of what makes that game work.
At their core, Icons are just Major NPCs, and regardless of the campaign, you will probably have some Major NPCs. What makes Icons work is how easily you can dump the ones in the book for whatever "Icons" you want for your campaign.
I converted my OD&D campaign to 13th Age and the transformation of my NPCs into Icons was almost effortless.
I don't know why you're telling me these things. They seem pretty obvious and I certainly never made any claims to the contrary.
I agree they're pretty obvious, but I've been in several 13th Age discussions where GMs didn't want to run the default campaign concept with their default Icons and weren't sure if the game was playable if they went beyond the canon. The most common concern was whether the Icons needed to be spread out among all their players or whether they could just use the Icons chosen by their players or whether the GM had any say in Icon choice for their campaign.
Not much different than threads where people are confused about Traveller campaigns without Jump drives. Plenty of gamers out there aren't comfortable with customization beyond the RAW and need some assistance.
Quote from: Spinachcat;108619113th Age isn't a tactical RPG. I enjoy 4e for the tactical aspect (which is better far done in the 4e Gamma World box set), but 13th Age is aimed at abstract play - either theater of the mind or using minis without grid consideration.
Yeah, I'm not getting much of a 4E vibe from reading the SRD. Maybe I just haven't come to it yet. Instead, 13th Age seems very New School to me. The Icons scream out "GM has a story! How does your character fit in?" rather than the Old School idea of "story is what happened."
Also, the pages on One Individual Thing border on collaborative world-building. There are all sorts of examples with stuff like "My character was the greatest double-mace fighter of the Red Suns guild before it was wiped out" and it goes down the quantum road of "Now there are double maces, when previously they did not exist" and "Now there is a Red Suns guild: who were they, and how were they wiped out?"
Not that any of that is bad, per se, rather I don't see the 4E influence. More like Fate, actually.
Quote from: Aglondir;1086273Yeah, I'm not getting much of a 4E vibe from reading the SRD. Maybe I just haven't come to it yet. Instead, 13th Age seems very New School to me. The Icons scream out "GM has a story! How does your character fit in?" rather than the Old School idea of "story is what happened."
It's really neither of those things. The whole point of the Icons is to limit the ability of the GM to have a story. They force the GM to improvise to fit them in. Or at least they do in at least one of the ways they're written in the book. In other places they don't really, because they can never make up their mind in the book itself about how much they want to push them.
But if you're using the icons the main way they seem to intend them to be used then any pre-existing plot is going to be vague. For example I might have an idea that there's a villain in the next session and he's going to do a certain action, but not who the villain is or what his actual motivations are because that will come when the Icon dice are rolled at the start of the session.
The way it's presented is all quite vague and confusing really. It seems to be empowering the players somewhat by taking some of the powers out of the hands of the GM, but really it's empowering the dice. It could be seen as empowering the players because they chose their particular relationships with the icons, therefore if the dice roll up an obligation and a benefit from the Great Gold Wyrm then it feels less like a railroad if they give you a mission...maybe. (This assumes the player was particularly interested in any of the icons and didn't just pick the relationships because the game says you need to have them - there's a bit of "you can have any colour you like here as long as it's black" here.)
On the other hand they do have some of the fun of rolling on a table except on a larger scale. As a GM being forced to improvise is a lot of fun.
But basically the designers seem to feel that in the Icons they have a killer solution. It's just that they don't seem to be all that clear about what the problem is.
Quote from: Aglondir;1086273Yeah, I'm not getting much of a 4E vibe from reading the SRD. Maybe I just haven't come to it yet.
For me, the 4e vibe is with the character classes and how their powers work. And I just looked at the SRD and I get why it would be more obvious from the presentation in the book vs. how the SRD is laid out.
Quote from: Aglondir;1086273Instead, 13th Age seems very New School to me. The Icons scream out "GM has a story! How does your character fit in?" rather than the Old School idea of "story is what happened."
I'm an Old Skool GM and the Icons never got in my way. Like TJS said, the Icon rules do cause GMs to improvise on the fly. AKA, the random rolls determine if a particular Icon may intervene in some unspecified manner with a particular character in this adventure. If anything, the Icon random appearance would throw off prepared story.
For instance, I had planned the "innocent merchant attacked on the road by evil bandits" scene, but in reality the merchants had poisoned a village, and the "bandits" were the survivors coming for revenge. After the Icon rolls, I needed to incorporate 2 Icons into the adventure. One of the PCs was a loyal retainer of the Dwarf King, but who was framed for treason and now was on the run seeking to clear his name. The other PC with the Icon roll for the adventure was the Crusader, who is the warlord of evil gods who fights daemons. So I made the merchant a Dwarf flying the banner of the Dwarf King and the angry villagers had sworn themselves to the Crusader and were given the tools of war to take revenge. None of the decisions were made by the players. The dice rolled and I adjudicated.
Quote from: Aglondir;1086273Also, the pages on One Individual Thing border on collaborative world-building. There are all sorts of examples with stuff like "My character was the greatest double-mace fighter of the Red Suns guild before it was wiped out" and it goes down the quantum road of "Now there are double maces, when previously they did not exist" and "Now there is a Red Suns guild: who were they, and how were they wiped out?"
Collaborative world-building was discussed in the Dragon during the TSR days. It's not a new idea, but "New School" games bake it into the rules. We did it all the time back in the 70s in junior high and beyond. "My wizard always wears a sword. It's got his soul in it." or "My dwarf comes from a fortress like Moria where they have to fight demons coming from the dungeon underneath and orcs at the top gates."
But you're right that "One Unique Thing" does often cause cascading ripples throughout a campaign. That's why its important for GM's to use their veto, or better, suggest changes to the concept so it doesn't throw your campaign out of whack. My problem with the concept would be "greatest double mace fighter" which assumes mechanical benefits. I would go with "My character was destined to be...." and then its up to the PC to pursue (or not) becoming the badass double mace dude. I'd attach the Red Suns somehow to the PC's Icon choices and go from there.
Quote from: TJS;1086299But if you're using the icons the main way they seem to intend them to be used then any pre-existing plot is going to be vague. For example I might have an idea that there's a villain in the next session and he's going to do a certain action, but not who the villain is or what his actual motivations are because that will come when the Icon dice are rolled at the start of the session.
I prefer to have the PCs roll their dice at the END of this session so I can weave their Icon stuff into the next game. Also, it was fun way to "foreshadow" who might be important for next week's episode.
Improvising is fun, but I don't want to start the game, roll dice, stop the game for 15 minutes while I tailor stuff, then begin the game.
Quote from: Aglondir;1086273But basically the designers seem to feel that in the Icons they have a killer solution. It's just that they don't seem to be all that clear about what the problem is.
Agreed.
I suspect "the problem" they sought to solve was how RPG settings are full of major NPCs, but the PCs often have no relationships to them, especially at chargen. Also, for their published adventures, the Icons add a layer of "personalizing" the events to the PCs at the table. I also suspect its based on complaints from the RPGA and Living Forgotten Realms community about their PC's action not feeling "important" to the overall storyline. The Icons "fix" that somewhat.
Quote from: TJS;1086299...because that will come when the Icon dice are rolled at the start of the session.
I missed the part about rolling dice, which changes a lot. I need to read through a copy of this. Interesting ideas + 4E's mechanical soundness could be a good mix.
Quote from: SpinachcatI prefer to have the PCs roll their dice at the END of this session so I can weave their Icon stuff into the next game.
A much better idea. If I ever run it, I'm going to steal that.
Quote from: Aglondir;1086336A much better idea. If I ever run it, I'm going to steal that.
It's actually buried somewhere in the core book as an option.
I actually prefer not to use it - because I find if I don't know what the Icon rolls are going to be it forces my to make my prep a lot more open with a focus on location and structure rather than plot.
Plus I lose the fun of the unexpected.
One interesting way to approach icons, if homebrewing, is to set up icons that are all potentially ambiguous and then let the players swing them one way or another depending on how they create their characters and choose their relationships.
For example: say one of the icons is the High Inquisitor, I can leave it undetermined exactly what this says about the inquisition. The inquisition could be a bunch of bloodthirsty fanatics who burn innocents at the merest mention of sorcery. But they could also me a much mistrusted group of people who really are dedicated in hunting down a genuine demonic threat and generally investigate thoroughly before taking action.
TJS, how did you deal with converting NPCs and even related monsters? That's the part of the improv that didn't work nicely for me and why I preferred to know the Icon rolls the previous week so I could tailor the adventure more specifically to the Icons and character relationships involved. AKA, my NPC choices are different if the Lich King vs. the Elf Queen or the 3 Dragons show up to cause a ruckus.
But I agree there's a certain fun to at-the-table improv when the Icon dice fly.