13th Age (Pelgrane Press, 2013) | Rules Breakdown

13th Age combines the best parts of traditional d20-rolling fantasy gaming with new story-focused rules, designed so you can run the kind of game you most want to play with your group. Created by Rob Heinsoo and Jonathan Tweet, 13th Age gives you all the tools you need to make unique characters who are immediately embedded in the setting in important ways; quickly prepare adventures based on the PCs’ backgrounds and goals; create your own monsters; fight exciting battles; and focus on what’s always been cool and fun about fantasy adventure gaming:
Icon relationships and One Unique Things offer exciting storytelling possibilities
Backgrounds provide a simple, flexible skill system drawn from characters’ personal histories
Escalation dice enable fun, fast-moving d20 combat.
Owlbears will rip PC’s limbs off to feed their young.
In the 13th Age of the world, adventurers seek their fortunes in the Dragon Empire while powerful individuals known as Icons pursue goals that may preserve the empire from chaos, or send it over the edge.
Players decide which Icons their characters ally with, and which ones they oppose. These relationships, along with a personal history and a unique trait chosen during character creation, help define an adventurer’s place in the world of 13th Age and lay the groundwork for epic stories that emerge through play.
There are also fun new rules for hitting orcs and making them go splat.
#rpg #13thage
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[@Nezzeraj]

I'm so happy you enjoyed the game! It's great one of your players has also taken an interest. 13th Age deserves more attention than it gets so hopefully this will help it out. I backed the Kickstarter for 2e and got a copy of the current beta rules. The designers have done a great job making improvements to the game.

[@RPGGamer]

There's a lot to like in it, while I have my problems with the Backgrounds/Skills system as I've had bad experiences with similar, there's so much else I do like.

[@allluckyseven]

What sort of changes did they make so far?

[@krinkrin5982]

I'm on the fence about the power escalation here. On one hand you roll more dice with every level, meaning martials can keep with the mages in damage output, on the other hand, adding level to everything increases the values really quickly, to the point of having to use dynamic DC values to semi-compensate. This smells similar to the scaling difficulty of Oblivion, which resulted in your character feeling as powerful (or even more squishy) at lvl 20 as they felt at lvl 2. Hopefully that's not the case here.

[@RPGGamer]

I think what they were trying to do was deal with the power escalation by just having larger numbers, Dragons with thousands of hit points, makes players really feel they're doing some major heroics when they're dealing hundreds of hit points damage.
It isn't a perfect solution, but it does help make high level characters feel powerful, even if I'm not sure if it solves the problem. I definitely see 13th age as more of a toolkit to enhance D&D by picking things from it, rather than using it all as I find some of the rules to be reactions to problems they've created (Eg. Choosing your fighters attack after rolling the dice slows combat, so they add the escalation dice to shorten combats).

[@allluckyseven]

I've basically decided that this game isn't for me, buuut... I sort of liked that one Staggered rule. As in, it's interesting that at a certain point a character may become targeted by monsters, or certain other things may happen, so that the combat doesn't get samey from beginning to end. And overall it looks like the battles would be more colorful than regular D&D battles.
I hope you can play it and have fun with it, and then come back to do a "battle report"... Here or on the Discord.

[@RPGGamer]

If we get around to playing it, I may very well come back and report, but 13th Age is now on our rotation of games, and we've got a few to get through before we reach it, so it might be beyond the end of the year before we get to it.