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I had a conversation with one of my players who has the Cook background because he thought that'd be fun. (Apparently he was a cook before he became a Paladin.) He asked if we could work out some system where he could cook the party meals to give them short-term buffs. I thought that sounded pretty fun, so I whipped up this little mini-system. Could anyone tell me if any of these effects are going to be much more powerful than I anticipate? Basically, I want these to be a little leg up for the next encounter provided Luke, the Paladin in question, has the time and ingredients to make a meal for the group. I'm going to be pretty strict about that time requirement, too. Chances are he'll only be able to safely do this when the party is staying at an inn in town or is traveling for several days in the wilderness; taking an hour to cook a meal in a dungeon is probably going to lead to some unforeseen consequences. (I'm also working out a simple "item crafting" system for the players where they can turn monster pieces into equipment by giving them, and some money, to a friendly NPC and then waiting a session or two.) Anything with three values listed is for adventurer/champion/epic tier. Hearty: 10/20/30 temporary HP Light: +2 or 3 to disengage checks for the next encounter Nutritious: gain 1 recovery; can go above maximum if you're already at full recoveries Junk Food: recharge one Daily or Recharge power immediately Sweet: +2 to save rolls for an encounter Spicy: +2/+4/+6 to damage rolls for the next encounter Sour: Bitter: +1/+2/+3 to all defenses for the next encounter Savory: If Luke rolls a success, the food has one of the above benefits. If he gets a super-success (probably 5 above the target), the food gets two benefits. Benefits that contradict (specifically Light and Hearty or Nutritious and Junk Food) require exotic ingredients to pull off. Luke needs at least one uninterrupted hour to cook a meal. We'll assume he has the equipment to cook on the road if he has to. It also uses 1 use of the party's food supplies if they're not in town, or costs a certain amount of money for the ingredients if they are. Luke can risk including monster ingredients in the meal. He'll have to roll a separate check to see if he can do it safely unless someone in the party who knows a lot about monster anatomy can help him (in which case, they roll the check at a bigger bonus than Luke would get). Some monsters are inedible, but others might confer strange benefits, like elemental resistance or something. Harrow fucked around with this message at 01:15 on Jul 3, 2015 |
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Jul 2, 2015 23:36
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two separate effects that give back dailies is a little bonkers, and also if those are applied to the whole party they are all pretty strong. a +2 to all attacks for the whole party for an encounter is really, really good. I'd have to check but I don't think any of the clerics buffs stack up to that in the slightest
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Jul 3, 2015 00:27
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Yeah, the attack bonus one if the one I'm most concerned about. Also, I meant to only have one Daily/Recharge power one. It was originally Sour but I moved it to Junk Food and forgot to come up with a new one for Sour.' They're all intended for the whole party. Which ones would be the most necessary to tone down (except for the Savory attack bonus, which I'll probably change to something else)? It helps that we don't have a Cleric in the party, or any other classes with particularly good buffs, so this won't step on too many toes. Harrow fucked around with this message at 01:21 on Jul 3, 2015 |
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Jul 3, 2015 01:14
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You definitely don't need to scale up bonuses that add to or oppose d20 rolls, +3 to all defenses is very strong, much less +1. Daily/Recharge additives are pretty strong too if you've got a daily-heavy offensive class like wizard/sorcerer/necromancer to give it to.
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Jul 3, 2015 03:56
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So after farting around for a year I might finally have a group to try out 13th Age with over Roll20. Some of use have been playing 5e DnD for a bit, so I offered to run 13th Age as a counterpoint to see what we thought it did better and worse (I'm fully expecting it to be good, and the others are interested just to try Roll20). I wanted to run it mostly 'by-the-books', but I'm willing to let players try out the more interesting homebrew classes in the Vault - are there any that I should Super Definitely look at or recommend? Likewise, are there any big 13th Age problems I should avoid? I looked at the OP, but that hasn't been updated in almost a year.
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Jul 3, 2015 05:47
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Looking at the Commander it seems a great multiclass for any melee character with charisma; take the multiclass commander feat, grab a fair number of points in your first attack (or spend the first around grabbing some without attacking to get that Escalation Die up), then just be that class but with optional interrupts and quick actions. Are there any charisma classes it works poorly with? Paladin|Commander is of course fantastic, but what about Rogue|Commander?
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Jul 3, 2015 08:19
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All right, rebalancing the food effects to account for them affecting the whole party. How about : 1. Hearty. Gain 10/20/30 temporary HP. 2. Light. Gain +3 to your initiative roll at the start of the next encounter. 3. Nutritious. Gain 1 recovery. This can exceed your maximum if you're already at full recoveries. 4. Junk Food. You can use one Encounter power twice in the next encounter. Should this include Rally? Is this too powerful already? 5. Sweet. Gain +3 to one save roll you make in the next encounter. 6. Spicy. Deal an extra 1d4/2d4/3d4 damage on one attack in the next encounter. 7. Sour. Gain +2 to one attack roll you make in the next encounter. 8. Bitter. Gain +2 to all defenses for the first round of the next encounter. Any of the "gain a bonus to one roll you make" effects can be applied to one roll of your choice. Think of them like "bonus tokens" that expire at the end of the encounter. When the cook succeeds on a cooking roll, he rolls 1d8 to determine the effect of the food he made. If he exceeds the target number by a certain amount (or maybe if he rolls a natural 20), he rolls 1d8 to determine the first effect, then chooses the second effect. Effects that contradict (Hearty/Light and Nutritious/Junk Food) can't be taken together without the use of exotic or magical ingredients. Flavors (Sweet, Spicy, Sour, and Bitter) never contradict. If the cook uses monster ingredients, like wyvern meat or basilisk eyes, he needs to roll a separate check to determine if he can use them safely, or have someone else help him with that part. If the monster ingredients are used safely, they can add some pretty strange effects, like temporary elemental resistance, depending on the monster used. (No, you can't use humanoid monsters for this, and yes, this player will definitely ask.)
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Jul 3, 2015 13:12
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The cook stuff is flavorful (haha) and the effects are getting close to being balanced with each other. Looks like it could be a lot of fun. I might simply make this a talent called "Master Cook" with the special meal preparation having a daily (in game terms) usage. There could be feats that might allow a quick meal for one or the use of special ingrediants. Consider: even the weaker of these effects translate into one party member getting missed when they would have been hit, or vice versa, or saving when they would have failed, etc. Also, the chance of meal failure is mitigated by the chance of multiple benefits. If you want to reduce this to the level of taking a feat, I would suggest reducing the THP option long with the recovery one. Right now both look like they would allow most party members to shrug off one enemy attack that battle. The encounter-power-duplicating one also seems, as you suggested, overpowered but on the offensive side.
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Jul 3, 2015 14:36
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Earthorn posted:The cook stuff is flavorful (haha) and the effects are getting close to being balanced with each other. Looks like it could be a lot of fun. Interestingly, the Encounter power one is probably weaker for my group than most, because I'm not sure if anyone in the group actually has any offensive Encounter powers. We have a Necromancer (mostly At Wills and Dailies, except Channel Life), a Paladin/Commander (talents and At Wills/Recharges), a Sorcerer (At Wills, Recharges, Dailies), a Rogue (almost exclusively At Wills), a Ranger (talents), and a Dilettante (the only one with once per battle abilities that he almost never uses). I'm considering scrapping that one not because it's powerful, but because it's useless to just about everyone in our group. I think reducing it to the level of a feat is probably a good idea. This is a player using a Background he took at character creation, so treating it like a feat (essentially Further Backgrounding) is probably the right thing to do. Maybe 5/10/15 temporary HP? And I can try to replace the recovery one with something else. I wonder if I can find similarly cool things for my other players to do with their backgrounds. One of them is an expert in war technology, for example. I should let him craft something with that at some point. Harrow fucked around with this message at 15:24 on Jul 3, 2015 |
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Jul 3, 2015 15:09
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Harrow posted:Interestingly, the Encounter power one is probably weaker for my group than most, because I'm not sure if anyone in the group actually has any offensive Encounter powers. We have a Necromancer (mostly At Wills and Dailies, except Channel Life), a Paladin/Commander (talents and At Wills/Recharges), a Sorcerer (At Wills, Recharges, Dailies), a Rogue (almost exclusively At Wills), a Ranger (talents), and a Dilettante (the only one with once per battle abilities that he almost never uses). I'm considering scrapping that one not because it's powerful, but because it's useless to just about everyone in our group. Maybe switch encounter power to racial (again, powerful-- but at least useful to most. Maybe give it a chance of triggering-- ditto on recovery)? Keep up the creativity!
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Jul 3, 2015 16:00
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Earthorn posted:Maybe switch encounter power to racial (again, powerful-- but at least useful to most. Maybe give it a chance of triggering-- ditto on recovery)? Maybe: 3. Nutritious. Roll a normal save the next time you use a recovery. If you succeed, the recovery is not expended. 4. Junk Food. Roll a normal save when you use a once per battle ability in your next encounter. If you succeed, you can use that ability one more time in that encounter.
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Jul 3, 2015 16:08
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ProfessorCirno posted:Looking at the Commander it seems a great multiclass for any melee character with charisma; take the multiclass commander feat, grab a fair number of points in your first attack (or spend the first around grabbing some without attacking to get that Escalation Die up), then just be that class but with optional interrupts and quick actions. Are there any charisma classes it works poorly with? Paladin|Commander is of course fantastic, but what about Rogue|Commander? The main advantage to paladin/commander vs. many of the other combinations is that you don't delay power progression on the Paladin side except at levels 5 and 8, and smite adds a major attack bonus that makes it easier to grab those command points. With rogue you're a level behind on powers every other level, which isn't a major issue because the early ones stay fairly useful, but it's worth mentioning. In spite of that it'd still be pretty alright, though a touch squishier than normal rogue because you can't pump your HP/AC as much as you normally might. This isn't a charisma class, but ranger/commander is pretty good, in the sense that nearly every ranger+melee multiclass can be pretty good, they have the paladin's advantage where there are two levels in which they're behind, and you can recharge on command points pretty readily. Ranger has good enough defenses that they won't feel as disadvantaged by being saddled to charisma as a main ability score.
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Jul 3, 2015 16:45
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Harrow posted:All right, rebalancing the food effects to account for them affecting the whole party. How about : Looks better. Junk Food including Rally isn't overpowered because Rally is usually not a very good idea unless you can sneak it in without using your standard action to do it, and you have a 50/50 shot of being able to do it every round after you've used it anyway. Maybe put some sort of limit on Nutritious, being able to recharge recoveries has a pretty noticeable effect.
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Jul 3, 2015 16:48
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I would ask him to spend a Recovery during downtime to make delicious effects. He's literally using his downtime to cook (instead of catch his breath), so it makes sense. If someone else helps, they can describe what they're doing and spend a recovery in his stead.
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Jul 3, 2015 18:06
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Oh, that's interesting. I wonder if he'd go for that. He's a Paladin/Commander and the party's tank, so he's already spending a lot of recoveries on the party's behalf (Lay on Hands, for example). I agree that it needs to have some cost, though. Part of why I came up with this was because this same player said he wishes they had more things to spend money on, so I want to let him buy ingredients for fancy meals. Spending a recovery makes sense because they're some good effects, but I'm afraid that'd push it over the edge into "not worth it" for him. Money's kind of a softball cost, though, so it does need to be something a little more substantial. Another way I'm giving the party to spend money is by having an NPC enchanter follow them around who can, for a fee, transfer an enchantment from a magic item to another item (overwriting the enchantment if the target item is already magical--only one enchantment a time), or turn monster parts into magic items (which is just going to be a new way that I can give them cool loot and also charge them for it).
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Jul 3, 2015 18:41
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Harrow posted:Oh, that's interesting. I wonder if he'd go for that. He's a Paladin/Commander and the party's tank, so he's already spending a lot of recoveries on the party's behalf (Lay on Hands, for example). If Healing potions have any scarcity (but still see use), you can force them to use a Healing Potion as the magic ingredient that elevates his food into something combat useful.
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Jul 3, 2015 19:20
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I've decided to make a few houserules for 13th Age which could use some critiques. One is an attempt to balance out caster-caster multiclassing, specifically Sorcerer|Wizard and the other is trying to play around with proficiencies bonuses, specifically trying to balance out AC and PD/MD a bit. Any comments or critiques are appreciated.
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Jul 5, 2015 04:29
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If you're not part of the organized play, Pelgrane just released The Archmage's Orrery publicly for free since it's up for an Ennie. The PDF has a link to the full collection of adventures, but this one is the most fun.
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Jul 7, 2015 22:20
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So, healing potions. How important is the limit on healing from them? Y'know, how like adventurer-tier potions can only ever heal you up to 30 HP. I kind of did away with that after a while because my group found it super confusing and frustrating, but I'd hate to have upset something balance-wise in the process.
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Jul 7, 2015 22:25
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It's primarily an incentive to ditch lower-tier potions in favor of higher-tier ones, because 1d8 extra healing isn't really significant enough at any level where you care about tier differences.
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Jul 7, 2015 22:39
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Hm, okay. It's probably not a huge deal given that I'm generally not making healing potions available for purchase en masse and instead only offering limited amounts of them for sale at specific times. I can pretty easily just trade them up to the higher tier ones eventually just by only offering those. Either that, or I might just reintroduce them and hope my players don't rebel.
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Jul 7, 2015 22:42
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I forgot to mention that I returned back from my study abroad trip to find a veritable warchest of kickstarter rewards, including my 13ttrueways stuff.  After playing with my new dice set, adorning my bedroom door frame with all the icon postcards, and spinning my snazzy golden icon ring to determine who is REALLY behind it all, I discovered another Pelgrane Press parcel. I knew not what wonders I was about to unleash...  Happy July Jamboree everyone.
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Jul 10, 2015 05:49
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Someone start a group so I can play this game TIA.
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Jul 14, 2015 00:10
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Heads up that Deep Magic 13th Age edition is DriveThruRPG Deal of the Day. For $6 you get a truckload of spells, new class talents designed by ASH LAW and developed by Rob Heinsoo that give any class a little bit of wizard magic to play with, rules for creating schools of magic with a bunch of examples, and several outlines for magic-themed campaigns. I haven't yet decided whether to give my players access to it, but it's a great inspiration for monster and magic item powers. At six bucks it's a steal. http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/140003/Deep-Magic-13th-Age-Compatible-Edition/
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Jul 19, 2015 02:15
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waderockett posted:Heads up that Deep Magic 13th Age edition is DriveThruRPG Deal of the Day. For $6 you get a truckload of spells, new class talents designed by ASH LAW and developed by Rob Heinsoo that give any class a little bit of wizard magic to play with, rules for creating schools of magic with a bunch of examples, and several outlines for magic-themed campaigns. I haven't yet decided whether to give my players access to it, but it's a great inspiration for monster and magic item powers. At six bucks it's a steal. http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/140003/Deep-Magic-13th-Age-Compatible-Edition/ Thanks for the heads up! Its been on my list to check out, but the $40 price tag kept me away, especially since no one was talking about it. At $6, I'm sure I'll get a lot more use/dollar than I did out of Primeval Thule.
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Jul 19, 2015 07:21
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That's definitely some steep savings, thanks for the heads up.
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Jul 19, 2015 07:43
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The first thing that comes to mind reading Deep Magic: A Chaos mage with Touch of Wizardry would, in the traditional sense of picking a spell randomly, roll a die with over 500 sides to determine which wizard spell they had access to. Alternatively, they may write the name of every spell on individual slips of paper and pull one out of a hat every full heal up. Second: I fully endorse using this book in any campaign that does not contain PC wizards
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Jul 19, 2015 18:12
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I really don't get why ASH didn't at least try to redo some of the spells as powers for other classes.
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Jul 19, 2015 19:43
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Illvillainy posted:I really don't get why ASH didn't at least try to redo some of the spells as powers for other classes. I would have loved to see a book like that, but I think it was a matter of resources and deadlines. Deep Magic for Pathfinder was a $126k Kickstarter project, enabling Kobold to bring in people like Jason Bulhman, Stephen Radney-McFarland, Owen Stephens and many others to work on individual pieces. Deep Magic for 13th Age just had ASH, with me as editor. After a while I had to yell for help, so Wolfgang brought Cal Moore in to take a single editing pass. Rob stepped in purely as a favor to help balance the talents. (To answer the obvious next question, I don't think a Deep Magic 13A Kickstarter would have made a difference: there was no pool of experienced 13th Age designers to draw from.)
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Jul 19, 2015 21:29
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waderockett posted:I would have loved to see a book like that, but I think it was a matter of resources and deadlines. Deep Magic for Pathfinder was a $126k Kickstarter project, enabling Kobold to bring in people like Jason Bulhman, Stephen Radney-McFarland, Owen Stephens and many others to work on individual pieces. Deep Magic for 13th Age just had ASH, with me as editor. After a while I had to yell for help, so Wolfgang brought Cal Moore in to take a single editing pass. Rob stepped in purely as a favor to help balance the talents. I want to take the time to say that the hard work is appreciated, and I hope it opens the doors for some cool 3rd party 13th Age books in the future. All that said, I'm purely confounded by the fact that adept caster scales in talent cost based on how many talents the class gets. It's a weird thing to ask a Barbarian who wants to fling axes from the sky on the reg to invest all but one of his talents in being a wizard.
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Jul 19, 2015 22:13
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Nice spells in that book. Wonder if my GM will let me use any of them.
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Jul 20, 2015 02:45
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I'm starting a new campaign and two of my players are interested in the Occultist - is the "only one ever" sidebar meant for fluff or balance reasons? Also it looks like the party is pretty squishy overall with some limited healing; I know that's less of a problem than in 4e but I should probably take a closer look at encounter building, yeah? e: Finally one of the players is looking at Druids, I remember them having problems - is there a solution beyond "give them an extra talent"? FROOOOOOOOG fucked around with this message at 03:49 on Jul 21, 2015 |
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Jul 21, 2015 03:40
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The "only one ever" fluff is for table sanity reasons. You just don't want to be dealing with double the interrupts and conditionals and other bullshit.
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Jul 21, 2015 03:59
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Ettin occultist. You know you want to.
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Jul 21, 2015 06:47
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Alternatively: One head is an occultist, the other is a chaos mage. Argue constantly about who is responsible for any given magical effect.
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Jul 21, 2015 06:56
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My group finally finished our 13th Age campaign last week. We've played every Tuesday night since sometime in early winter. We ran all the way to level 10, but only had one session at 10 because of the story arc completing. Below are our feelings about the system. For full disclosure, we have an over-large proportion of the special edition handbooks. We had four(!) of them at our table. What a gorgeous book! 13th Age has some great revolutionary stuff that we all absolutely loved (Icons and the OUT especially, which we'll be porting to other games in some form.) They really gave an awesome feel and support to both the system and the story. They're invaluable when getting the world set up to begin with. Absolutely A+ there. That said, the system suffered from "Looks great but plays rough." It definitely feels like a first edition. The main complaints were that everyone was a glass cannon in some form--we almost never got the escalation die above 2 (I think it only happened 3 or 4 times, ever), and when we did, the encounter that was required to do so seriously threatened to kill one or more members of the party; sometimes outright from full health. We felt like all of the different "on an odd miss do this, but on an even hit do this instead" fuckery was too much. They should have added a surge die mechanic if they wanted less reliable abilities. Further, they should have had the cool stuff on abilities always proc with the higher damage being less reliable, rather than the other way around. It felt bad to have something like this happen: "I hit! So I do some damage, and maybe kill the monster... but that awesome thing I wanted to combo doesn't happen because I rolled an 18 instead of a 17. Oh well." There was only one thing in the game where we really felt like the system broke on us--when we were like, "welp, I have no idea what to do, here, so I'm just gonna make a call. Roll with it." That's pretty awesome. Usually, even in the 3rd or later edition of established properties, you usually have a lot of "What the gently caress were they thinking on this power/monster/etc?" Not so here. The Hampered effect, though, was unusable. We had the hardest time arbitrating it. It's the only thing that lead to a fight in the entire campaign. Eventually the players and I decided on an armistice. They would retrain any of their powers that used it if I replaced it on monster abilities with some other appropriate effect. After that, it was smooth sailing. The main issue with it was how spotty it was at being useful (the wizard is hosed but the ranger is nearly unaffected) and the fact that monster stat blocks never break out what is- and is-not a basic attack and what is- or is-not "frills". In summary, we all felt that it was great for a 1st edition of a new system. If they come out with a second edition in a few years, we'd all be up for trying it. Blasphemeral fucked around with this message at 21:43 on Jul 21, 2015 |
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Jul 21, 2015 16:43
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I got an email that they're starting up season 2 of Organized play. Cool, maybe I can actually get into it this time.
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Jul 21, 2015 19:38
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If any of you nerds are gonna be at Gencon, myself and Ryven Cedrylle are gonna be there. We'll HOPEFULLY have a demo module of a game we're working on using the Archmage Engine. The game is tentatively titled "VHS Fansub: Anime we liked as kids the game". If the module is ready by then we'll have 4 classes playable. If any of this sounds fun to you guys let me know here or hit me up on Twitter at BirdTypeGaming The Shounen, a Superstrong punchman with a variety of mystical ki abilities. Based off shows like DBZ, Inuyasha, and Naruto with The Shojo, a magical healer with a repertoire of powers that change based on their costume changing mechanic and a deck of magical card based powers. Based off Sailor Moon, Card Captor Sakura, etc. The Trainer, a class where the person takes the back seat in combat by letting his Monster Partner take the reigns. In combat the Monster Partner and the Trainer build Connection to unlock powerful aspects of the Monster's "Monster Features". Based off Pokémon and that's pretty much it. Don't judge me. Last one is the Covert (final name pending). A clever infiltrator and conman at home with a grin, a bag of tools, and a pistol. He has the unique ability to say "I planned for just such an event". Inspired by Lupin the Third and Lucca from Chrono Trigger. If you're not familiar with anime, think Ocean's Eleven only more over the top.
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Jul 21, 2015 20:29
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I feel like 13th Age's role is 'when you want to play D&D without all the tedious bullshit of D&D.' Like, you want to run a Heroic Fantasy game, but you want to do it in a system designed to be a bit faster and less map heavy and that's a bit more focused on the Heroic part. It's streamlined enough not to get in the way. The default setting is eh, OUTs are just Melodramatic Hooks and aren't really a big innovation, and Icons are barely mechanically represented (but are genuinely a great idea and even just building your PC's Icon Relationships at the beginning is a great start to who you are and what you want), but the system is basically what I want in a lighter D&D replacement. I definitely agree it's a system where I'll be really eager to see its eventual second edition, if it gets one.
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Jul 21, 2015 22:26
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If they come out with a second edition, I'd really hope it'd be purely helmed by Rob Heinsoo. I like 13th Age, it's my preferred Dungeon Crawl game, but there are just some bits and pieces that could be hemmed out and I feel those aspects were mostly defended by John.
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Jul 21, 2015 22:33
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