My Background in Tabletop Gaming: Part 3

My regular online Pathfinder group includes a guy whose handle is Volin, and he's responsible for getting me into 13th Age. I wasn't intending on jumping straight to 13th Age but I'm just that excited about it all the time, so there you are. 13th Age is a table-top fantasy RPG created by the Lead Designers of two past incarnations of D&D: Jonathan Tweet of 3rd Edition and Rob Heinsoo of 4th. If you've ever wondered what a 50/50 amalgamation of those two games would look like, it's Star Wars Saga Edition. But if you wanted to know what a fantasy d20 system with heavy influences from those games but eschews the clunk and adds new narrativist mechanics which themselves work just as well within this system or as houserules to whatever d20 system you're using...then you are clearly already very much familiar with 13th Age and just sort of leading us all on.

Now I don't intend this to be a review of 13th Age but, again, love at first sight, so let me quickly tell you why Backgrounds are the best mechanic. With 3rd, 4th, and 5th you resolved attempts at doing tasks outside of combat with skill checks. You have a number called a skill modifier which is drawn from your Ability Scores (like Acrobatics being affected by your Dexterity), so you roll a d20 and add together the die roll and your modifier. If your number is higher than the DC (Difficulty Class) that the DM decides this task has, then you succeed.

With 13th Age you don't have a standardized list of skills. You have 8 Background Points, and you can assign as many as 5 to any background you come up with. Are you a dashing Troubadour who loves to relax in his off time fishing? Well then you'd assign more points to the Troubadour background you decide on than the fishing one; maybe 5 in one and 3 in the other. But you don't just make "Troubadour" and "Fisher" your backgrounds, because that's boring. These are yours to come up with, so you fashion a quick little anecdote which is clearly related but sounds like part of a much bigger and very interesting story. So instead you have 5 points in "My Trobar leu's bring all the girls to the yard...though half of them have weapons." And during play you decide you want to recite a saucy bit of poetry at the festival. First you roll your d20 and then you convince your DM that you have a Background that's relevant. In this case, obviously your 5 point Background should apply so you add 5 to the roll.

The thing is, that's just the simplest way of utilizing Backgrounds. The real fun comes when you try and use them in less obvious situations, like trying to help a Duke write up a response to allegations that he's had a string of affairs. You turn to your DM and say "Look I write for a living. I can help him," but your DM isn't convinced. He says lyrical poetry and political proclamations are too different for you to be much help. But if you'd phrased it like, "I've caused plenty of political scandals with my satires. I should at least be able to point out anything likely to raise ire." Maybe that sounds more convincing and you get your bonus to the roll. +Ash Law lays this out really well in his 13th Age Organized play documents.

With Skills you're dealing with pure mechanics. The lists are long and kind of vague in the hopes of covering anything a character would try to do. Lying about your religious affiliation? Bluff. Overemphasizing the martial prowess of your buddy? Bluff. Roll the die and add a number. Meet the DC. There's no inherent creativity in that subsystem. Backgrounds though? You create your list, you create the justification that allows you to use it to influence your roll, and then you add a number to a number to meet a DC. You arrive at the same endpoint, but you got to use your imagination along the way.

I've been collect the books throughout this past year and I'm looking forward to running it next year here at the college campus. If 13th Age sounds neat to you, look into ordering it at the Pelgrane Press Store. If you'd rather look at the system before committing cash then the Archmage Engine is an SRD you'll want to check.

I'll be wrapping up this look at my past as I talk about my experience with D&D 5e in the next post, and from there I'll do a writeup on the live session I ran at the college community center.

My Background in Tabletop Gaming Part 2

I was first made aware of Pathfinder on the traditional gaming board of 4chan, /tg/ in 2009. By this time I'd played and ran D&D 4e and had looked at 3.5 a good bit, and I could tell that a big problem with 3.5's design was what are known as "dead levels." Now any level based game puts a lot of focus on the accomplishment you feel when you gain a level. In D&D typically it meant you'd gain some hit points and greater accuracy with your attacks. If you were a spellcaster you could learn new spells, or perhaps be able to prepare and cast more the spells you knew.

Starting in 3rd Edition, every other level you were guaranteed a feat, and depending on your class you could gain bonus feats at specific levels. 3rd also made the decision to spread out the class features you gain from your character class, but only for the first 10 or 12 levels. Past that you really didn't gain any specific benefit from taking those levels in one class or another. This was in all likelihood done to promote the usage of Prestige Classes (thematically focused classes with a list of requirements for you to take levels in, such as a certain focus in a few select skills and a number of levels, usually 7, in a given base class).

Various issues arose from this decision, however. 3rd Edition was designed with the intent that not all character options be equal and that some feats, spells, and classes were simply better overall than others. This coupled with a relative lack of incentive to progress in your base class once you had all of your class features meant that any class that didn't have spells would find themselves well behind the curve if they didn't begin multi-classing.

When you add those factors up together, they become one of the major problems I have with 3rd Edition. Pathfinder (which is the same system as D&D 3.5 with tweaks and fixes published by a different company) addressed that issue by minimizing the amount of dead levels for all classes. Even up into the higher levels you would gain new class features and, at 20th level, a Capstone ability. These are very powerful features; as an example the Rogue, a class to represent tricksters, thieves, and cutthroats, from first level have a class feature called Sneak Attack which allows them to deal extra damage to a surprised enemy. The Rogue Capstone, Master Strike, states that when a Rogue deals sneak attack damage they can additionally put the target to sleep for 1-4 hours, daze them for 1-6 rounds, or kill them outright. Capstones provided a major incentive to stick to one class for a campaign, and that intrigued me.

After joining a Skype group dedicated to playing tabletop games I found myself with plenty of Pathfinder to play. While initially Pathfinder seemed a considerable improvement over 3.5, after three years of regular play it has revealed itself as deeply flawed, oftentimes more than its predecessor in the same problem areas. Pathfinder's real strength today is the robust line of printed adventures it boasts, complimented by the wealth of adventures available from smaller independent publishers online. The system itself though has grated on me for too long now for me to have much interest in it outside of those adventure paths.

Next we'll look at the new d20 games I've had experience with, 13th Age and D&D 5th Edition.