13th Age RPG 2E

[UnplayedRanger]

I'm not sure what monster this is. Do you remember by chance?

I’m pretty sure it’s the Owlbear, because my group still talks about the Paladin losing his arm to an Owlbear’s Nat 20. So yeah, that actually was a pretty cool moment.

 

[Raleel]

I’m pretty sure it’s the Owlbear, because my group still talks about the Paladin losing his arm to an Owlbear’s Nat 20. So yeah, that actually was a pretty cool moment.

You probably are correct



I'll note that this requires two hits in a row to pull off (no pun intended), and the second must be a crit, and all on the same person. I'll also note that limbs are not called out pretty much anywhere but there in the book, and no explicit healing mechanism, so I would call that flavor text and limb removal is healable maybe view it as a... disarm.

There is a helpful reminder there that you can use a healing ritual to make the character whole again, and that takes at most 4 hours, some components, and a skill roll. 13A is not a permanent fuck with your character sort of game.

 

[Mankcam]

Yeah, given that there's only 10 levels, I'd expect 1st level to be at around 3rd level already, but I was surprised to know it's starting a lot higher than that.

Well I guess you could use D&D 5E L3 as an indicator, but given the flavour of 13th Age characters, I'ld perhaps use D&D 5E Level 6 as a more likely indicator.

The 13th Age Level jumps are quite significant - everyone does damage dice equal to their Level, so an Adventurer who began play dealing 1D8+STR for their medium weapon damage does 3D8+STR with that same weapon at Level 3. They also recieve a +1 bonus per Level for all significant rolls (including attack rolls), so all Level 3 characters receive a +3 Attack as well. I only grant the Level Bonus if the PC gives a good explanation however, so this encourages colourful narrative descriptions from the players.

In any case the 13th Age characters do start feeling quite epic very early on.

 

[Vargold]

I mean, at first level, my gnome ranger was fighting from the back of her woolly rhino companion, and that was a completely legit set-up.

 

[Imaginos]

From Pelgrane Press direct:

In 13th Age, a character's power grows steeply from level to level. 13th Age only has ten levels but each level feels like two levels of growth in D&D. A 10th level character in 13th Age is roughly equivalent to a 20th level character in D&D 5e

Source: https://pelgranepress.com/2017/10/30/a-5th-edition-dd-players-guide-to-13th-age/#:~:text=In%2013th%20Age%2C%20a%20character's,level%20character%20in%20D%26D%205e.

 

[Mankcam]

You probably are correct

View attachment 81864

I'll note that this requires two hits in a row to pull off (no pun intended), and the second must be a crit, and all on the same person. I'll also note that limbs are not called out pretty much anywhere but there in the book, and no explicit healing mechanism, so I would call that flavor text and limb removal is healable maybe view it as a... disarm.

There is a helpful reminder there that you can use a healing ritual to make the character whole again, and that takes at most 4 hours, some components, and a skill roll. 13A is not a permanent fuck with your character sort of game.

 

[Mankcam]

From Pelgrane Press direct:

In 13th Age, a character's power grows steeply from level to level. 13th Age only has ten levels but each level feels like two levels of growth in D&D. A 10th level character in 13th Age is roughly equivalent to a 20th level character in D&D 5e

Source: https://pelgranepress.com/2017/10/30/a-5th-edition-dd-players-guide-to-13th-age/#:~:text=In%2013th%20Age%2C%20a%20character's,level%20character%20in%20D%26D%205e.

Yeah Level 10 13th Age characters would be equivalent of Level 20 D&D 5E characters, even higher.

At that stage the PCs are the equivalent of Mythic Greek or Vedic demigods

Whoever came up with 'The Fantasy MCU' analogy as a reference was spot on

I still feel that the 13th Age characters feel much more powerful at the lower levels than their D&D 5E counterparts.

There is a wide range for what constitutes as 0-Level threats as well, which covers anything from total newbies up to proficient commoners. Basically the entire non-heroic background canvas of cast characters.

To put it in context, 0-Level threats have Attacks ranging up to +5, you sustain up to Damage 4 from them, their combat defence can range up to AC 15, and their Hit Points can range up to 20 HP (although you can also portray them as Mooks, giving them Damage 3 and 5 HP)

Given these stats for 0-Level characters, you can see that the heavier end of this range isn't typical D&D newbie 0-Levelers.

At a stretch I could envison Level 4 D&D 5E characters being Level 1 characters in 13th Age, perhaps a touch higher.
I guess using Backgrounds may make things feel more seasoned as well.

But that quote from Mike Shea (Sly Florish) is on the Pelgrane Press website, so it's more or less gospel for the unintiated.

 

[Vargold]

I had the pleasure of GMing an owl bear amputation once in a 13th Age game ...

 

[Imaginos]

But that quote from Mike Shea (Sly Florish) is on the Pelgrane Press website, so it's more or less gospel for the unintiated.

I didn’t notice the articles author, but I’d expect the publisher’s post to be mostly accurate even if written by a third party.

I noticed that the lower levels did feel more powerful as well.

 

[FreeGamer]

I'm not sure what monster this is. Do you remember by chance?

this is what I did for my Norse version. I made pretty heavy alterations to the icon rules as a whole. I also made them represented by runes and had them drawn from a bag instead of rolled and got them one shot magic items.

As others have pointed out, it was the Owlbear. After seeing the write-up, I was sure of it. Prior to that, I was leaning towards it, but it's been so long i didn't trust my memory enough to say for sure so I left it vague. Seeing the write-up, it's not quite as punishing(or permanent) as I had believed it to be, especially when you add in other reasons also already given here by others(like being able to heal it pretty easily). I believe Owlbear was one of the sample creatures used by the company to show how their monsters worked in preview material, since I don't think I ever read through any of the actual in-book bestiary section when I was playing. That whole "lose a limb" thing just really stood out to me. Still, nice to see that it's not as drastic as I was thinking.

As for the more local Icons, I should have figured that someone with more(likely much more) 13A experience than me had already come across that advice or thought of it on their own. And both the runes for flavor and the random drawing are really cool ideas. I might have to poach one(or both) of them sometime.

 

[TJS]

Yeah, given that there's only 10 levels, I'd expect 1st level to be at around 3rd level already, but I was surprised to know it's starting a lot higher than that.

I think it's all very subjective really.

The way that 13th Age scales you can almost make any level feel like anything just by scaling the opposition mathematically.

A 1st level character basically has 3 hit dice and a 10th level character has 24. So you could argue that it goes from level 3 to 24 in D&D terms while skipping a bunch of levels in between.

A 1st level 13th Age character does more damage and has more hitpoints that 3rd level D&D character, so that may be what gives rise to the feeling that they are more powerful than D&D characters. But as I said above, I feel that's more about scaling than anything.

 

[TJS]

From Pelgrane Press direct:

In 13th Age, a character's power grows steeply from level to level. 13th Age only has ten levels but each level feels like two levels of growth in D&D. A 10th level character in 13th Age is roughly equivalent to a 20th level character in D&D 5e

Source: https://pelgranepress.com/2017/10/30/a-5th-edition-dd-players-guide-to-13th-age/#:~:text=In%2013th%20Age%2C%20a%20character's,level%20character%20in%20D%26D%205e.

13th Age characters double in power every 3 levels by design. And so do monsters (You can literally level up or down a monster by 3 levels by halving or doubling hit points and damage and adjusting defenses and attacks by 3.) They also increase in power by 1.25 per level (if those two things don't seem to match its basically rounding that gets them to doubling after 3.

This means it really doesn't scale like D&D at all. For example there's never diminishing returns in terms of hit points. At higher levels the amount of hit points you get keeps getting higher at each tier to keep the scaling consistent.

So when a level 19 D&D Fighter gets another D10 hit die + Con, when they level up the 9th level 13th Age character gets 4*(Hit Die+Con).

You could make it feel somewhat more like regular D&D by basically adding back in the levels that get skipped. (Although unless you adjust the progression some more that would mean a lot of levels where you were getting nothing but hit points).

 

[Red Tuxedo]

I backed. While I mostly lean towards OSR-ish D&D-type things nowadays, 13th Age is my favorite example of the other type. The couple to times I’ve run it, we’ve had a blast. I actually think the setting is one of the most interesting on the market, even though it looks rather broad-strokes and generic at first glance.

Maybe I’ll be able to get a band together to finally do Eyes of the Stone Thief.

 

[Vargold]

I think the broad strokes is genius, though. Lets you have a bunch of different personalized Dragon Empires that remain somewhat intelligible to one another in conversation without bogging anyone down in lore ("that's not possible in the Obliviated Kingdoms").

 

[Zimzerveran]

The new edition looks great. And yet, I'm passing on it.

There's about zero chance of it hitting the table. The physical edition price point is too high for me to justify adding another dust collector to my bookshelves.

I might grab the PDFs down the road, but I can't justify the Kickstarter at this point.

 

[Imaginos]

Despite being a fan, I was kind of wondering the same, and I’m even in on the early bird discount for the two books. May be my recent questioning of whether I’ll sell almost my entire collection speaking.

 

[Pendraig]

I was on the fence about backing this one. I tend towards OSR and I have the core books for the previous edition but they've never seen play. I like the premise but I'm more excited about Adventures Dark & Deep.

 

[Tommy Brownell]

Given that my weekly group has played about four times this year, I'm seriously reconsidering all of my current crowdfunding backings, including this one.