Exploring Other Systems

About a month ago, after suggesting 13^th Age during a discussion about carrying more than just D&D and Pathfinder products at our FLGS, I got nominated to run it in the store... Now, as a DM I usually don't run games in the fantasy genre. It's not that I don't like fantasy, but if anything could be considered the 'default genre' for RPGs, it's fantasy. There's a lot of it out there. The same goes for D&D and systems derived from D&D, they generally don't need my help. Luckily, I enjoy world-building and seeing how different systems work, and that should keep me engaged enough.

Since this is an in-store open-table type of game, I want to showcase the cool things that make the system different. According to the rulebook, these are the “one unique thing, icon relationships, and background mechanics”.

The 'one unique thing' is one of the ideas that 13^th Age has cribbed from shared-narrative style systems à la FATE. It's cool I guess, but where 'aspects' are integral and mechanical in FATE, here it's explicitly stated that there should be no mechanical benefit. It's mainly intended to help the DM come up with plots related to the PCs' backstories. As a general rule, I tailor my whole campaign to the characters involved and this feature would be somewhat redundant for me, but since this is an open table and I don't want to be too myopic in scope, I'll probably use the one unique thing more than I might under other circumstances. That said, it's a good tool for getting backstory from players who aren't interested in doing homework, and it's certainly nice to have a concise statement from the ones who love to write a ton.

One of the things that I wanted to see in action was 13^th Age's icon system. Basically, they are the most important NPCs in the setting (think Elminster in Forgotten Realms), NPCs whose absence would cause a major shift in the power balance of the setting. Players assign relationship points to these icons and roll that number of d6s at the beginning of each session to see if they can leverage the connection. The icon system itself can be dialed up or down to work with everything from the village elders to a pantheon of gods.

The icons as presented in the rules are based on classic fantasy tropes, and as such they are fairly bland. The good news is that the writers “expect each GM to tinker with the icon identities to suit the campaign’s story”. Now I feel completely justified in doing a complete overhaul of the icons. I'll post write-ups of the icons as they appear in my campaign in a subsequent entry.

The background mechanic is a nice simple way to do skills, but it's basically a beefed-up version of secondary skills from AD&D with the players making up their own instead of choosing/rolling on a table. This is also intended to provide fluff for the DM to incorporate into the game, though it seems to be a mixed bag. Even when prompted to embellish their backgrounds, most of my players are hewing towards fairly skill list-ish ones rather than going big with the fluff.

The best use I've found for the backgrounds so far is as an easy way to tailor the base classes. One player wanted to be an Arcane Archer, and rather than find/make a homebrew class, it was much easier to just have the player take enough points in Arcane Archer to offset the negatives to-hit that a Sorcerer has when using a longbow.

Next time I'll discuss my setting more, and especially how the stock icons have been changed to suit it.