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It's once per round, and free. If you could do it more than half the time, you'd be rocketing around the board like an ADHD pinball. I'm of two minds about this thread existing. On the one hand, they seemed to want insulated readings / rulings to gauge feedback. On the other hand, gently caress this is awesome I want to share every part of it with everybody.
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Mar 21, 2012 00:14
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I was actually looking for a no-frills class to just run through combat a few times to get the jist of it. (I didn't get to the barbarian yet, so I'm trusting you guys on this.) It's thematically appropriate (and a little clever) to have a straightforward barbarian, complicated rogue. The experience of playing the class is tied to its nature, and that's pretty OK. I wouldn't mind a harder-to-play barbarian, but their schtick has always been Naked Fighter + Incredible Hulk. The real question is are they literate?
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Mar 22, 2012 00:12
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Locus Cosecant posted:This sounds really interesting, but I gotta say I'm worried about how much storygaming nonsense is going to end up in it. So far it looks like the "indie sensibilities" refers to treating the players like humans interested in having a good time instead of coding for computers running Tabletop Dungeon Simulation vX.5. Also gently caress YES dice gimmicks. These are two things that you really only enjoy at a sit-down tabletop, and I am completely pumped to see this happen. Has there been any official feedback on just how much we can discuss yet?
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Mar 22, 2012 00:54
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The elevator pitch is pretty bad. There's something in it to to turn everybody off of 13A, sight unseen. I'm going to completely shut up about the game. If the thread goes into related territory (previous Heinsoo & Tweet projects, Pellgrane press news, etc.) that would be a good thing for everybody. Is it true they did Dreamblade? I know nothing about that one.
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Mar 22, 2012 15:09
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It's been harder to recruit a playtest group than I expected, but I finally have enough to go. I linked people to the blurb on the site, and unless you know exactly who those people are and why they're awesome, it reads like Another loving D20 OGL Fantasy (which everybody's been sick of for 4+ years). Then the D20 people I know (mostly Pathfinder now) get turned-off by "indie game", and the indie gamers are too good for a D20 game. And now the NDA says not to tell people why they should care about this.  If you're trying to minimize interest in a game, calling it an old-school indie OGL title is a great start. e: I am enjoying this playtest. moths fucked around with this message at 23:37 on Mar 24, 2012 |
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Mar 24, 2012 23:35
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Korwin posted:You do know, that whoever does download it could you know, do something with it... like play it. Or they could trash an unfinished product online with the same vitriol they applied to 4e. Which (if you look at that RPGnet thread) already happened. Now give those assholes a file full of half-finished soundbites and missing sacred cows to remove from context, and just try to give 13A a fair shot. Why doesn't Fireball do 6D6 damage? Because Heinsoo wasn't done raping Gary's dreams. Alternative, they could love the game. So much that they rush a knockoff PDF out the door and when 13A launches out everyone talks about how badly it ripped off indie There's more reasons to actually adhere to the NDA than not.
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Mar 25, 2012 21:57
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I'm convinced the Escalation Die (at least) is going to be A Thing before 13th Age launches, and everyone will be all "Oh it uses the Escalation Die from Age of Assholes"
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Mar 25, 2012 22:13
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Oh, absolutely. I did a 90's fist-pump (for the first time in my life) reading the Fighter section when I remembered how disappointed I was with that 5e design blog about "How lame are dice gimmicks? So lame, right? gently caress those." e: To clarify, I think we're going to see some of 13th Age's awesome mechanics stolen and implemented in mediocre poo poo. Especially the escalation die. moths fucked around with this message at 22:25 on Mar 25, 2012 |
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Mar 25, 2012 22:23
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The informal tone in Burning Wheel made me hate it. I seriously couldn't get past the part where he waxing about the "comical" voices in his head that comes across like he's trying to sell you homeopathic remedies at a ren faire. Sometimes it's just self-indulgent and loving horrible. 13th Age reads like a quick email from your cool rear end game-designer friend.
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Mar 26, 2012 05:32
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So why does Pelgraine maintain a forums presence on RPGnet instead of, say, here?
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Mar 27, 2012 20:38
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I guess that makes sense, even if it's somewhat discouraging. This loving hobby.
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Mar 27, 2012 20:54
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Evil Mastermind posted:I ran my first playtest game last night and I think it went pretty well. What kind of stuff did you cover in a first session? Ours is tonight and I was hoping to at least generate characters, talk icons, and maybe touch on skills and fighting. Does that seem reasonable for a two hour block?
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Mar 29, 2012 19:58
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So we barely made it through rolling characters! This is probably why they want actual rubber-meets-road play instead of looking at the books and speculating. Anyway, I took notes that I'll add as a preamble to our first report. We have a pretty wide range of experience (newest player has been to three sessions of anything ever, most veteran has played since AD&D) so there's that. Next week's game should go a lot smoother, assuming we jump right in.
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Mar 30, 2012 11:46
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We are enjoying this playtest. Are we supposed to be giving feedback on a session-by-session basis or do they just want that survey at the end of the month? Guidance on this is a little sketchy. moths fucked around with this message at 18:51 on Apr 6, 2012 |
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Apr 6, 2012 15:02
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Yeah, i have been keeping some pretty good notes, and so far we're making a pretty good number of observations where bugs happen. I just worry that I'm going to gently caress this up and make my friends have to wait a year before we see where this goes.
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Apr 6, 2012 15:55
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E:I I am just going to wait until next month to have any public opinions.
moths fucked around with this message at 18:51 on Apr 6, 2012 |
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Apr 6, 2012 18:39
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I'm not bonkers over the art, but thank god I finally have something NDA-free to show people beyond "It's every edition war PTSD trigger word... at once"
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Apr 11, 2012 15:50
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I think they want to beat 5e to the punch, since it seems to already have mechanisms in place that actually deliver on the outlandish promises coming out of WotC.
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Apr 12, 2012 14:34
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I didn't think businesses announced anything around 20% since that's just inviting disappointment and frustrated impatience. Of course, that's assuming they aren't counting previous edition cut-n-paste as "finished" content. In that Iron Kingdoms video, combat looked like a minigame of Warmahordes. Which is still going to be an improvement over the last version of the IK RPG, but not what I was hoping to see.
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Apr 12, 2012 15:30
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That's a bit of an over-reaction. Take 4e, strip out nearly all of the 3x holdover stuff, then pepper what was left with some fun ideas from Basic through AD&D (but well designed). It's not really a retroclone or a heartbreaker or whatever. There's a lot of people who want this to be 4e's Pathfinder for different reasons, but this was in the works before Next was A Thing.
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Apr 16, 2012 04:49
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I kind of wish the Lich King had a good side that made him morally unfathomable. Zombie-skeletons will enforce his brutal tyranny, but it's a compassionate tyranny where everyone prospers and has a full, long, wonderful life. Then they join the Lich King's army and spread the utopia at spear-point. He's waited like 12 ages for his master plan - to him, a peasant's lifespan is like you or I waiting for a microwave burrito. Actually that just makes him a wonderful guy.
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Apr 29, 2012 04:25
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Captain Bravo posted:Don't forget, that just because the Lich King might treat people nice in your game, that doesn't necessarily mean he's a good guy. He might prevent them from reproducing, meaning they live out a long, peaceful life, and then in 100 years everybody is dead and turned into a zombie. Sure, things are pleasant under his rule, but if you want any chance of there being a future for the living, you've gotta fight back. I really like the idea of the Lich King being behind the childfree movement, or China's one child policy. As a society, you're trading your future for comfortable prosperity, and it also makes him less Vecna and more Fallout's Master. Someone else mentioned the idea of him also being a conservative force for stagnation, and I thought it would be great for learning about the other 12 Ages. For example, he'd enforce some byzantine dress code from the 3rd Age where men couldn't grow beards, women couldn't show elbows, and no one could wear orange. I'm finishing up my playtest.doc tonight after this afternoon's game, and I'll remember to note this stuff. The Icons aren't really playtest material now that they are out there, but I'm sure next week will be pretty awesome when the gags come off. And if Twitter is any indication, they already know how I feel about the Lich King. 
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Apr 29, 2012 13:05
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Man, I really want to talk about this when it's OK, but I also want to honor the "please don't talk about it" email. gently caress. E: On closer reading, we can post about it but reading about it is discouraged. So people outside the playtest can ask questions, and playtesters can answer them but shouln't read each other's answers. So Q and spoiler tagged A, right? Is that a sane reading of the email? moths fucked around with this message at 14:25 on Apr 30, 2012 |
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Apr 30, 2012 13:59
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Ok I mailed in already so this should be ok talk. It's also not directly pertaining to the playtest, so I probably don't even need this caveat. I wasn't bothered by the D20 elements, and this is coming from someone who cannot stand D20 system. I expect that it'll face criticism for being D20INO, since it doesn't drown you in generic for-anyone feats, prestige classes, broken multiclassing, hilarious anti-balance, an awful skill system, square-counting, or any of the hundred other hallmarks of D20 that led me to discover better games. One good thing about SRD is that you can D&D it up directly, and I think that may have been a factor in going that direction. You get Orcs instead of Orykes, Kobolds instead of Draconiclings, and for a lot of people that's a Big Deal. Like it or know better, SRD games are still popular, and people mostly already know how to play it. I know people who don't play anything BUT D20 games. D20 on the cover (unfortunately) still gets a game more attention than talking up its innovation. It's like sugar-coating better sugar.
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Apr 30, 2012 23:25
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I didn't notice anybody getting mad about missing and dead turns. This may have been because it didn't automatically mean a 37 minute wait until they could roll dice again.
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May 1, 2012 00:20
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MonsterUnderYourBed posted:Tell me about icons The icons are the world's big-rear end NPCs. They're the Elminsters, Jaina Proudmoores, Kruschevs, Kenendys, Reagans and Ravnos Antediluvians. It's a great way to handle epic, globe-spanning campaign arcs. It's also a bit forced at intro levels where the adventure hook is "Hey man, maybe I left my keys over at Goblin Beach."
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May 1, 2012 03:39
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But if you roll a 5 he's actually got a huge SUV with single-digit MPG and misogynist bumper-stickers.
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May 1, 2012 03:50
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fosborb posted:This is where it's important to remember that your relationship is not necessarily to the world shaking NPC. The rules suggest players should get to meet their strongest relationships at least once in a campaign, but everything before that should be dealing with lesser levels of their vast and powerful networks. True, but the icons have a huge footprint in the design-space, and it's been a major axis of the 13A pitch so far. The implication is that they're a big part of the game, but we haven't found a good level of involvement for them yet. I'm excited to hear that they're getting re-worked; the idea has tons of potential. fosborb posted:PCs and monsters are either far away (requiring more than a move to reach), nearby (requiring 1 move to reach), or engaged. Far away and nearby is good for ranged attacks; for melee you need to engage an enemy. Is this actually spelled out anywhere? I sent one of my players this video after a lengthy discussion on the subject, and we never spoke about it again. 13A would excel as a hyper-efficient old-school engine. I've had a stack of classic modules collecting dust since the 80's, and I feel like we could blast through any one of them in a single session. That's exciting to me.
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May 1, 2012 04:37
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The site said final feedback from Phase 1 is the end of May, but it looks like that's old information now. So is everything just on hold until Phase 2 documents go out?
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May 1, 2012 20:22
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Ok we'll probably push on until we're told that we're bad playtesters. This thread has been really interesting lately, and it was definitely a good idea to discourage in-talk among groups. We've never playtested anything before, and if I'd read others' experiences early I'm sure we would have spent a more time under the hood than playing with the seats and radio, so to speak.
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May 1, 2012 20:54
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As implemented in the last playtest, it's clumsiness was really jarring as part of the character generation after backgrounds and one unique thing. E: A more consistent approach would be to pick one Icon you'd want to kiss, one you'd want to marry, and one you'd like to kill. moths fucked around with this message at 16:28 on May 4, 2012 |
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May 4, 2012 16:22
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We spent more time discussing how an "It's complicated" Facebook status with the Orc Lord would manifest in game than actually rolling them. Like, take a conflicted relationship with an ambiguous icon. Conceptually that's the most versatile arrangement because it could break any direction, but it's also double-vague. Or maybe it just didn't click with us. Either way, I'm excited to see what replaces it. E: (And then roll a mixed result on the conflicted relationship with that ambiguous Icon!) moths fucked around with this message at 17:05 on May 4, 2012 |
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May 4, 2012 17:02
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We eventually got what was going on mechanically, it just seemed superfluous and nobody wanted to bother with it. I imagine it would be a great campaign tool, but I guess my group was either too self-reliant or didn't get enough into the setting to want to use them. E: They are fun to talk about and make up examples for! We did that a bit and enjoyed it. But for all the fun we had spitballing how they could work, when the rubber hit the pavement they never actually needed to come up. moths fucked around with this message at 17:41 on May 4, 2012 |
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May 4, 2012 17:37
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Transient People posted:That's crazy talk. I wonder if they didn't have that in the alpha and everybody just dumped their points into being BFFs with The Good Guys. Which would get boring quick, but seems predictably likely. A better alternative would be just not having any clear Good Guys, and give all the icons a murky moral compass. Position the icons as the heads of institutions much the same way V:tR themed their Covenants along a weird Faith v Science, Church v State, Progress v Tradition six-axis hexagraph. There's a little bit of this, (Natural life v Undeath, Demons vs That One Big Dragon and The Crusader, etc) but the presented institutions aren't remotely as universal as the Convenants's unstated themes, so you're left with fewer places they can feel organic.
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May 5, 2012 05:11
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I'm going to put this out again, but clouding up the all-good icons will fix everything stemming from having purely good icons. Maybe the Emperor is prone to murderous eccentrics. The big Gold Dragon is pro-torture and doesn't believe in due process. Tornadoes eliminated that village because the High Druid doesn't like the way it crowded up the view. The Dwarf King is a racist. For the most part 13A got rid of cartoon vilany, but retained the white hat sherrifs. Some players prefer the goodest good guy, and that's nothing wrong with that, but relationships shouldn't function mechanically differently based on how many puppies the Icon kicks in a year. Probably the simplest fix is to eliminate the good, ambiguous, and evil verbiage entirely. Decades of D&D has irreversably loaded those terms. Present each Icon and let the player decide if that sounds like someone they want to know better, but keep the alignments out of it. This way you can keep the good guys shining armor shining, and be as tight as you want with them. (I realize this goes counter to what I was saying before about all ambiguous Icons, but it's probably got a broader appeal and won't result in Warhammer's "every faction is jerks in different ways" world without good guys.)
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May 6, 2012 15:51
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No, you got it right. There are Good and Evil Icons, and their alignment directly affects how much relationships with them cost. Additionally, you can't start the game having a strong positive relationship with a Good icon. It's a little dumb spot of legacy in an otherwise interesting system.
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May 6, 2012 17:12
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Exactly. There is a lot of room to play in between the antique 9-alignment axis and Warhammer's blood-soaked shades of grey. 13A could own that space simply by changing the (keyword) Good guys into good guys.
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May 6, 2012 18:30
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The 3x3 alignment is offered as a option for people who want to use it, but you're right that there's no mechanical tie-ins and that's really good. Morality and mechanics meet at such a dangerous intersection, but it's like RPG design GPS routes everyone through it at some point. It doesn't need to be there. Good and Evil are such subjective, quantifiable concepts that point values and keywords would be laughed at anywhere outside of this hobby. (If anyone were so presumptuous as to try assigning them.) I mean, philosophers have been trying to nail this down for the entirety of recorded human history; You're not going to get it right in the design cycle of a table-top RPG. Allegiances to the icons work fine without them, why shoehorn it in?
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May 7, 2012 02:48
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Mystic Mongol posted:In the pdf, one of the sample adventures, for a level one party, is, "A township has decided to recognize the heroism and years of service of one of the PCs. Choose one, he or she has been promised a week long festival and the present of a magic item of historical significance." Was there another pdf? My two adventures were a goblinicide and a rail-tour of a mage tower and some ruins. That quoted text doesn't appear anywhere in my pdf.
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May 7, 2012 13:33
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Oh, ok. Our Glazentorg was an heirloom axe left for appraisal over at mage tower. I thought they may have been sneaky clever and sent out different playtests like the theatrical release of Clue. That's why they didn't want us talking! (Of course, I was totally wrong.)
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May 7, 2012 13:55
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