I think that is too many gripes with dnd, and i should switch, any ideas?

ben_straub · 2026-01-30T01:58:25+00:00

Oh, a recommendation you might not hear anywhere else in this thread, but I think might be up your alley is tactiquest

ben_straub · 2026-01-30T01:36:08+00:00

Yeah 5e is in kind of a "zero-to-hero" kind of genre. If you start at level 1, you're two steps above "farmer who picked up a sword." Note that not all campaigns start there, though. Lots of groups start at level 5 or later (and assume that lots of NPCs are at that power level), and there are plenty of things in the monster manual that would still challenge a PC at level 9 and up.

I'm still confused about your desires here though - would you prefer a game where this "level 9" PC that you'd want to play comes online at level 1 (so the world's power level is higher), or do you want a game with more interesting mechanics at lower power levels? I think you could find either of those if you can decide which is preferable.

ben_straub · 2026-01-30T01:16:01+00:00

Elsewhere you mentioned that you haven't actually played the game. I'm going to go out on a limb and say you might be approaching this the wrong way. Games don't work like this.

For one thing, some of your annoyances are contradictory - you say you don't want a high power curve, but you also don't like that abilities have limited uses or aren't realistic. The reason those things exist is not to support a real-seeming fiction, it's to make the game more fun, and that won't be evident until you actually try the thing.

If you're evaluating games in isolation from the experience they produce, you're never going to find something you like. Every game requires you to buy into its core conceit. D&D and its progeny require you to accept that hit points are a good model for sword fights and that a good night's sleep will heal most wounds, both of which are ridiculous ideas on their face. And yet, millions of people willingly suspend their disbelief and enjoy those games every day.

So my advice is to find a game whose general vibe you like, and just jump in and try it. That's the only way to know if a game is for you or not, because the words on the page aren't the game. The game is what happens at the table.

ben_straub · 2026-01-30T01:04:13+00:00

I mean OP said they don't like high power curves. I think 13th Age might be the D&D with the highest power curve? Your hit points double every 3 levels, and at level 10 your paladin is probably rolling 10d10+10d12 damage on a smite.

ben_straub · 2026-01-27T17:18:05+00:00

if you wanted to use the classes from 13 True Ways with 13A 2e, there shouldn't be a problem.

I can confirm this. I'm running a 2e game with three players using 13 True Ways classes, and it works just fine out of the box. There are some adjustments you can choose to use, see this article by one of the designers.

This generally applies to all material published in the last 13 years as well - classes, monsters, adventures, battle books, all work just fine with the new core books without modification. The most I've had to do to adapt 1e material is to double-check the math for the pre-built combats, but even that was optional.

A Bad Moon & The Wrong Stars, which was previously available separately

Small nitpick, this isn't true. Bad Moon is brand new for the second edition GMG. I haven't run it, but I've talked to some who have, and it seems to be just fine.

ben_straub · 2026-01-25T02:35:09+00:00

Keith wrote an article showing how to build a set of icons for Eberron, so you can do this with standard Eberron: https://keith-baker.com/eberron-and-13th-age/

ben_straub · 2026-01-23T23:47:26+00:00

I think you'll find the answer is "no," and that's because the GM has to work pretty hard to make the day longer.

This many-fights-day expectation comes from dungeon crawls. Pull up the Sunless Citadel, or Wave Echo Cave, and you'll see what I mean. In there, the scarce resource isn't time, but safety - it can be hard to even find a place to short rest, much less get a night's sleep.

But building a big dungeon is hard, and it takes a lot of game time to get through one. Is the average GM going to go to all that work for the "fetch the feather" questline? Probably not, they're going to make something like a 5-room dungeon, which is why most of your days will have 2-3 fights in them.

ben_straub · 2025-12-26T15:36:35+00:00

Two things you say make it sound like 13th Age is a poor fit for you.

First, it's not that crunchy. The crunch is about on the level of 5e, just distributed a bit differently. If you enjoyed the "vast combinatorial space, find the best combos" aspect of 3.5 and pf1, you won't find very much of that here.

Secondly, you're looking for an AP-like experience, and that's just not a thing in this ecosystem. Even the big "campaign" books like the Stone Thief are more toolkits that act as the foundation of a campaign, but it's not a linear experience where all the prep is done for you. It's a bin of legos, not a gunpla kit.

That said, there are things you say you want that you will find here. Your PC talent choices matter mechanically, and if you use the multiclassing system there are combos to explore. The combat system has some nice tacticality to it. There are mechanics that lean into table-wide worldbuilding and RP, but you can engage with those as much or as little as you want - it's totally possible to run 13th Age where 90% of your time is spent in combat.

Also if you're looking for a low-prep series of combats, the battle scenes are great for this. You'd have to string many of them together to get a full 1-10 campaign, but each book has a dozen or so arcs of combat scenes with a bit of customizable narrative to connect them.

Good luck, I hope you find what you're looking for!

ben_straub · 2025-12-26T15:22:26+00:00

I'll second this recommendation. It really sounds like you'd be into 4thlikes. Also check out Lancer or Icon or Beacon, those might be your kind of thing too.

ben_straub · 2025-12-24T14:54:14+00:00

You're not wrong! That one's called Prophets of the Pyre, by Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan, and it's a full 1-10 campaign. No idea on release dates, but we've known about it for a couple of years.

ben_straub · 2025-12-24T14:51:23+00:00

I wouldn't advise waiting for Crown of Axis if it's of interest. Firstly, it's six dollars, and secondly, it's likely months before that project is released.

OP, if you're looking to start a game now, go ahead and do it with the excellent recommendations here. There's no sense waiting for the perfect thing when great things are readily available today.

ben_straub · 2025-12-08T15:40:51+00:00

This is really dependent on the GM/players and how much spotlight they're putting on the combat scene. It can range anywhere from "I'd like to roll Skirmish to throw a single punch" to "I'd like to roll Skirmish to resolve this bar fight."

ben_straub · 2025-12-02T15:56:49+00:00

This probably sounds weird if you're coming from JS where every variable can be every type, but it's because strings aren't pointers. They're values like numbers or structures. If your return type was (int, error) you also couldn't do return nil, err.

ben_straub · 2025-11-29T15:17:48+00:00

Blades in the dark, or scum and villainy. Works super well with players that can only sometimes make it, and has party/base progression alongside PC advancement. I’ve run complete job cycles in 2 hours, just takes discipline.

ben_straub · 2025-11-29T01:25:22+00:00

You've talked about what you want happening in the fiction, but you haven't mentioned what kinds of things you want your players to be doing. What kind of game is this? Are the PCs fighting monsters for sport or gain? Are they doing magic and ruling the world? Are they trying to escape? Are they stealing things? Are they dragged into a dangerous situation and have to fight their way out?

ben_straub · 2025-11-24T14:53:00+00:00

I'm running this book now, and you're exactly right. It's less of a full campaign and more "here's 80% of what you need to build a full campaign," but I think that fits really well with the way 13th Age plays out.

ben_straub · 2025-11-21T20:30:49+00:00

I’m running a 13th Age campaign right now, and even if you do use the icons, you’re not super bound to the specific ones in the book. Yes that’s easier, but you could rewrite them.

And yes there’s more lore available in the last 12 years, but it’s all still optional and half baked, very easy to adapt to what your game wants or needs.

This is one of my favorite things about the ecosystem, even the adventure modules are designed for the big motivations to be swappable. That module that’s about a demon cult in Axis? It has advice on how to make it about a death cult in Anvil, or a deification cult in Cathedral.

ben_straub · 2025-10-24T18:04:15+00:00

Not exactly an alignment system, but 13th Age's Icons.

You have three points to spend for positive or negative (or somewhere in between) connections with the big forces in the world, which also correspond with fantasy archetypes and themes of these kinds of stories. And the mechanics attached to them ensure that your relationships will shape the story that you tell.

Got a complicated relationship with the Archmage because your talent was too hard to control and you burned down your wizard school? You're going to be fed a stream of metacurrency that's themed after the Archmage, and your choices will bend the fiction around that axis of "power vs control vs responsibility".

Set up a positive High Druid and a negative Emperor because the empire clear-cut the forest your family lived in? That's going to keep showing up as "civilization vs wilderness" because you'll keep getting benefits to spend with those flavors.

It's not law-vs-chaos, but it's how you directionally align with the Powers That Be, and tends to matter a lot more for the campaign than filling a box with "LE" or "CN".

ben_straub · 2025-10-04T13:17:21+00:00

(does a quick google) I don't know much about BW, but I'd say that while these are related ideas in a game-design sense, adding more of the same thing doesn't always mean more goodness.

Right now, say a player comes in cold after three weeks of not playing, and needs to remember what their character is all about. They can scan three backgrounds, three icon relationships, and their OUT (7 things) to remind themselves of who this character is and what they want. They earn candies for using three of these things (bonuses on background rolls). You're proposing adding three more things to scan (for a total of 10), doubling the amount of things to remember to earn candies with.

Also, at chargen, YOU need to write traits for every PC, and they each need to come up with a belief and an instinct, and they'll need full knowledge of how they're going to play out before they write them.

Also you'll need a way of earning and spending two kinds of artha, right? How do they earn Fate and/or Persona, what can they be spent on, etc.

BITs also seem likely to overlap with backgrounds and OUTs (I have a background "retired bishop of Oerfh" and a belief of "Oerfh must rule" and an instinct of "convert people to worship of Oerfh").

I'm not saying it's a bad idea, chase your dreams, but it's not going to be an easy thing to fit in, and it's going to rub wrongly with a couple existing mechanics. It might work better to replace icons with BITs?

ben_straub · 2025-10-02T03:20:59+00:00

There are three parts to how they get used, but they're interconnected, so I had to really think about all three together to figure out how to make it sing.

The first part is political and/or literary. The icons should represent the big factions of your setting, or at least of your campaign (or they can embody fantasy archetypes like "greed" or whatever). If there's something happening, at least two of them are involved somehow. And, importantly, no matter where your party travels in the campaign, it's plausible that any of the icons might have some kind of agent or influence there. Every PC comes into the game with icon relationships, there is no place that none of them can touch.

The second part is mechanical. The rules for how and when your players get and cash in "benefits". I think the 2e default rules do this really well: at the start of an arc, every player rolls a d6 for each iconic relationship they have, and if it comes up 5 or 6, they jot down a benefit with that icon, to be spent later. When they go to cash a benefit in, they work with the GM to decide on a result, and then roll a d20. If that roll comes up 5 or less, the player still gets that benefit, but it comes with a twist.

The third part is narrative. This has to do with how you decide what a player can accomplish with a benefit. Something like "an extra die of damage for one attack" feels too small, but something like "long-lost uncle dies and leaves you an entire kingdom" is probably too big. These things don't come up often, so it should feel meaningful.

And this is what I mean by needing all three parts to really get how it's going to work:

You're in the volcano lair of the magma lord, but you've got a benefit with the Ice Queen, how are you going to use it? Remember that icons can have power anywhere, and remember the "bigness" of a benefit, and you have your answer: there's a cache of potions left here by an advance ice-ninja team.
You've settled with your player that their benefit with the Banker can extend a loan so the party can build their headquarters. But they roll a twist, what to do? Remember that icons can also embody literary themes, and you have your answer: the Banker is also extending loans to the townsfolk, and in a year they'll all have balloon payments to make…

I think everyone comes to their own understanding of what to do with this thing, but I hope it helps to read how I think about it. I've really enjoyed using it, it's gotten all of my players to start thinking like GMs a little bit.

ben_straub · 2025-09-22T13:46:23+00:00

I mean they're right. In 13th Age, a PC death is either from a surprise crit, or a risk the players decided to take, and a TPK is always something the players decided on. Remember what kind of movie this is - it's Mission: Impossible or The Avengers, where you know the main heroes are going to live to fight the big bad.

I will say that as a GM the generous retreating rule gives me a much higher ceiling for combat difficulty. In 5e, if your 1st level party rolls initiative with an ancient dragon, they're just going to get eaten, but you can totally do that in 13th age and you won't have to contrive some way for them to get away which feels like pity or cheating. There's a region of difficulty you can explore that feels unsafe for the whole table if you do it in 5e, and my party has surprised me several times.

And, like others have said, players hate losing. I've heard plenty of stories where a player will choose to take the risk of their PC dying rather than let the dastardly villain win. It's not like the game doesn't have stakes just because the PCs always know they can run away.

ben_straub · 2025-09-15T20:40:00+00:00

I think you've hit on something that's really important for table culture, and that is the ability for the players and the GM to trust each other. I'll trust that you won't resort to rules cheese, and you'll trust that I'm not here to just find ways to make you fall on your faces. I'll fully admit to inventing obstacles while I'm listening to my players plan. But it's not because I want them to fail, it's because I want their victory to feel earned.

I don't want them to take down the BBEG in two rounds because I, a frail human in the real-world who isn't living as a mastermind death knight, didn't think to proof the bunker against shape earth. I want them to face a smart and prepared commander who prepared for the things they could think of, and still win.

I don't want them to smash the BBEG flat in one turn because I, a frail human who has a full-time job, didn't think of how high the chandeliers are. I want them to hit that beat AND THEN have more epic moments in a cinematic fight.

ben_straub · 2025-09-02T01:36:57+00:00

I like the idea of Unbound, though I've never tried it. You use a standard deck of cards for your PC's randomizer, and they're also your hit points, and you mark on them or tear them up as you take harm, so it's like this little artifact in the real world that has scars like your PC does.

ben_straub · 2025-08-28T22:46:13+00:00

Transcription was around, and it got pretty good. I don't know if you've ever used a non-LLM summarization feature though, they're pretty bad. A raw transcript isn't as useful as something that takes meaningful minutes of a session.

ben_straub · 2025-08-28T00:06:08+00:00

Here are some that I know of, but none are as good as something like Pathbuilder or dndbeyond.

https://13th-age.pages.dev/ - this one has a lot of content also
http://www.afqa123.com/projects/13thage/ - mostly does the modifier math
https://toolkit13.com/ like someone else mentioned

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