After fifty-odd sessions of 5e between two different weekly games, I think I've decided that I don't like it very much. Luscan warned us, back in the old clubhouse, but I was still curious.
The thing is, it's not terrible. The classes are varied, there's loads of monsters and spells, combat doesn't get bogged down in maths and bookkeeping, but it's like the tabletop equivalent of Assassin's Creed: there's countless places to go, but when you get there you will be doing the same things you did at the last place. In combat spells, abilities and the action economy are so tightly defined that there's little room for player creativity and surprises. Outside of combat class abilities are either useless or totally remove any challenge. If you have a ranger the group will not get lost, and will always have enough food. If your spellcasters have access to comprehend languages then all that time spent choosing languages was irrelevant. Gold is kinda useless after a bit. One of my groups is done, ready to move on. The other is still having fun at least.
All that in mind I was reading through 13th Age again, and good god it is so much more fun than 5e. Weapon damage scales with level. Everyone only gets one attack, rather than clogging up the turns with multi-attacks. The Barbarian hits stuff hard rather than standing around tanking and stalling the game. Rogues trigger their abilities with momentum instead of silly pantomime hiding every round. Combat is more dynamic with monster damage resistance can be beaten by rolling high enough and disengage being a move action which can fail rather than the "nothing happens" button it is in 5e. There's a Necromancer class. The Sorcerer's magic is actually unpredictable. The Bard sings songs! Monsters don't have spell lists!
Stuff outside of combat is still pretty vague, but here it feels intentional, whereas in 5e it's like they got halfway and decided it was getting to complicated so they just stopped. I do like the 13a backgrounds. The Icon relationships still absolutely baffle me though.
Aniki, if you are reading I'd love to here your thoughts on 13th Age, your game must have been running for a year now.
Aniki, if you are reading I'd love to here your thoughts on 13th Age, your game must have been running for a year now.
Just over a year, I think.
A lot of stuff 13th Age does, I love.
As a GM, the monster rules make it ridiculously easy to throw together a combat encounter really fast if the players decide to get punchy or if you just want to put a threat in their faces to eat up recoveries and powers. You don't have to keep track of too much stuff, because enemy powers are more limited than on 5e creatures, and tend to be custom; the use of the natural d20 roll to add variety is also a nice touch to make them less predictable without being overcomplicated.
For players, the powers have a nice balance of Daily/Encounter/At-Will that's especially useful for getting around limited Spell Slots for casters, who can just end up with nothing left in 5e. Class talents and Feats give you a decent level of flexibility even within classes, without having to wait for several levels before you can specialise.
The backgrounds are a bit of a funny one, though – I like that social and exploration scenes aren't just players looking at their skills list to decide what they're most likely to succeed at and going with that, it encourages more individuality and creativity. But sometimes you just wanna call for a Perception check without having to figure out whether "escaped orc hostage" or "bankrupt noble" is better for the current situation.
And I also took a while to figure out Icons; in my game they tend to represent factions and organisations more than individuals. I've just decided that a 5 or 6 on an icon roll basically gives the player an Inspiration point to spend, to re-roll something when the icon it was for gives some plausible narrative justification for it – like when the rogue fluffs a roll against a bulette, but their Adventurer's Guild relationship implies some training that should give them a tactical advantage.
It's definitely more combat-oriented than I'd like, but it works more often than it doesn't.
That all makes sense, and fits with what I remember from running it a bit a few years ago.
I remember with Backgrounds I would just ask for rolls by saying "I need a Wisdom check to see if you notice something," and if they had a Background which they thought might apply they could say so.
Your method for using Icon Dice sounds good, it's still kind of disconnected though.
It's definitely more combat-oriented than I'd like, but it works more often than it doesn't.
It certainly is, but I'm planning on leaning into that for this game. If I wanted it to be less about the fighting I would be using Whitehack or Genesys or something.
Your method for using Icon Dice sounds good, it's still kind of disconnected though.
Yeah, it's something not many people seem to have figured out. My players aren't running around interacting with the Icons much in the way that the couple of adventures I've read seem to suggest they're supposed to – it feels like, as intended, the party should be running errands for the Icons all the time.
I think I'm more interested in a lower-level, character-driven plot than that. Maybe I've picked the wrong game, but I feel comfortable enough winging the social aspects and having a solid, flexible combat engine for the bits I'm not so capable of arbitrating on the fly.
Yeah, that's the bits that really confuse me, are you really supposed to find a way to include all the icon dice (well a third of them) every session?
I was talking on Twitter the other day about how a light system for the social side of things makes more sense. I usually run combat a lot lighter than 13a or 5e too.
What level has your game reached? we only covered levels 1-3 I think when I played before.
We've got to level 3, but once they reach the next major city I'm planning on bumping them to 4.
Part of me feels like I'm levelling them very slowly, but there aren't as many levels in 13th Age (only 10 to 5e's 20), I'm not constantly giving them a huge amount of combat (a benefit of milestone levelling), and we only play every two weeks so it feels much longer for the number of sessions.
That's the sort of speed I like. I like that 13a has the incremental advancements if you want them.
I now have a rough outline for my 13th Age campaign. A little while back on of my players made a throw away comment which lodged in my brain and won't let go. "What if we play a megadungeon campaign but it has loads of exits on multiple different worlds." So now I'm mashing up the 13th Age megadungeon Eyes of the Stone Thief with the continent spanning psychedelic Oregon Trail pointcrawl Ultraviolet Grasslands (UVG).
I spent a while trying to decide on a system. I didn't want to use Whitehack again. Considered Stars Without Number, but it's a little dry. But EotST is written for 13th Age, and I like 13th Age. But I thought, "Nah, it's too grounded in fantasy. If I used 13th Age it would play like Xena or a fantasy Guardians of the Galaxy."
So 13th Age it is.
Here's the plan:
Tier 1:
Adventurers doing adventures. Maybe Lorn Song/Fever Swamp. Meet the baddies, not sure what maybe some sort of human/underdark alliance. One adventure on another world. One Living Dungeon adventure. The baddies attack, take the capital, kill the king, the princess escapes with the PCs. She Sends them on an EPIC QUEST to save the kingdom. None of them have any idea what that quest might actually involve. Players are then eaten by the worlds biggest megadungeon.
Tier 2:
The group escape the megadungeon and find themselves at the start of UVG. Give them loads of clues for places which might be helpful within the UVG or places which can be reached from the UVG. As they travel the megadungeon (The Stone Thief) will be harassing them, eating towns, trying to kill them. Imagine the Nazgul in LotR but it's a sentient megadungeon the size of a city. The group can travel the UVG, delve into the Thief, explore Gathox Vertical Slum, Hot Springs Planet. The Thief will dump them on different worlds once or twice requiring them to find their way back to UVG. Ultimately they reach the Black City where they find the goal of their quest which I think I can tie into my last campaign, but basically it's the knowledge of how to defeat the Stone Thief.
Tier 3:
Delve into the heart of the Stone Thief, gain control of it then ride that motherfucker back through the multiverse gathering up all the friends they made along the way, arrive back at the kingdom and kick the arse of whoever I decide the baddies are with an army in a living dungeon city.
Fin
After fifty-odd sessions of 5e between two different weekly games, I think I've decided that I don't like it very much. Luscan warned us, back in the old clubhouse, but I was still curious.
Awesome, I will now proceed to be fucking insufferable about tabletop RPG's for the next year. There will be no perceivable change in my behaviour.
13th Age is what 5E would have been if Mearls and Crawford weren't cowards that wanted to get kudos from Zak and Pundit in the OSR crowd.
And that's me finished one of my two 5e campaigns. This is the one for the teenagers. 32 sessions over 13 months. 4 PCs survived. 13PCs died.
The players loved it, even if I didn't really. But that's fine, I run it for them to spend time together because they are mostly at different schools and barely saw each other before Covid.
We played though Lost Mine of Phandelver, Isle of Dread and then wrapped up with a pocket dimension/wizard's tower/TARDIS with a few boss fights in it.
They have chosen Mothership to play next which is certainly a change.
Anyone here played/read Pathfinder? I found the Pathfinder 2 Playtest in a charity shop and, realising that it is already out of date, I decided to grab it for some light reading.
L.O.L.
It's really hard to read. So many terms with very specific definitions. So many feats each of which can be difficult to unpack how it will interact with the rest of the game. It does fix many of my groups issues with 5e (samey characters, action economy), but so does 13th Age and it is way easier to parse and play
Something I realised a little while ago is that after running 5e for a couple of years I have built up all of this knowledge about how those twelve classes act and interact and develop. I've learn tricks and problems with running 5e monsters. When one of my players considers casting Sleep I know at a glance if it's probably too early in the fight to do that.
All of that knowledge is basically useless outside of running more 5e. I wonder if this is one of the reasons why some 5e players are reluctant to try other games. It's not just that they think they will have to learn another game which is just as complicated, it's that they don't want to waste so the crap they've already stuffed into their brains.
Pathfinder 2 looks to be twice as much to learn, but it looks like it might be more rewarding with it. For all the rules in 5e characters are pretty similar. I have a friend who has been playing PF1 (sporadically) since launch and he assures me that it really isn't complicated after you have learned it and that the near endless character customisation options means that there is always more to do with it.
13th Age goes the other way. It's got about half the rules of 5e and about half the stuff to keep track of while playing, but like 5e after a couple of long campaigns you will have seen most of what the game has to offer.
So yeah, Pathfinder. That's a lot of rules.
after a couple of long [5e and 13th Age] campaigns you will have seen most of what the game has to offer.
Mechanically, maybe – but there's a lot more to a successful long-running RPG campaign than the dice you roll.
Absolutely. I was only really thinking of mechanics.
Are there any games where you don't see all of the mechanical stuff in a fairly short space of time? I don't know that I'd want to play something I was still learning the functionality of after months, never mind run it as a GM.
One of the reasons I am still running Whitehack after over a hundred sessions is that we are making up new stuff in it all the time, which isn't quite the same thing but I love that I still don't know what to expect each session. Pathfinder and GURPS have so many bits that you you still be finding new abilitied and new combos after years of play, but for that you really need hundreds of pages of rules.
Last night I ran a fairly crazy 13th Age session/set piece battle. 5PCs (one of which I was running due to an absent player), two NPC allies, six unique opponents, one of which I stated up as an Occultist PC to make them really weird. It was a lot of fun. I think my players found it pretty tense and I managed to slip in some plot revelations, or at least some new questions, while I was at it. We only played for two hours and it was a lot of fun, but I was knackered by the end of it.
