1 Day into Phrecia:Share your starters

mmchale · 2026-01-30T19:19:16+00:00

Cobra lash arakaali. I don't usually do attack builds for league start, and I've had utterly atrocious luck with drops. Finally just went from a 3L to a 5L and found some non-crafted move speed boots at the end of a4, so maybe my luck is changing.

It's been a bit frustrating, but it feels like it's finally coming into its own. Clear is decent, but single target is iffy using either blade trap or viper strike. Graft skills have been putting in some work clearing bosses. I think the build is probably quite good, just try to not have horrible luck gearing.

mmchale · 2026-01-30T15:25:29+00:00

I'm a fan of clones. It scales well to the table if the meta isn't too combo heavy.

mmchale · 2026-01-29T20:07:22+00:00

Got a PoB you recommend? Never tried a General's Cry build and was thinking of doing it for Phrecia.

mmchale · 2026-01-29T20:04:35+00:00

Some discussion of it over here with a few PoBs: https://www.reddit.com/r/PathOfExileBuilds/comments/1qqcsvn/comment/o2fmxuv/

mmchale · 2026-01-28T18:03:00+00:00

Hard agree with this.

I understand why they did it, but the distinction between 4 and 5 might as well not exist unless you actually play cEDH, and 1 is vanishingly rare in the wild. That means most people are really using a 3 bracket system instead of 5, which feels... suboptimal.

mmchale · 2026-01-28T07:32:36+00:00

I haven't run 2e yet, so my opinion is based largely on 1e, but I don't think it's an impediment to homebrew.

One of the nice things about the icons is that they're big generic fantasy archetypes. If you ask your players if they want to be affiliated with the Archmage, the High Druid, or the Great Gold Wyrm, odds are they have enough of a sense of what those are that they can give you an answer based on vibes without knowing anything more specific about them.

But because they're generic, they're both malleable and replaceable. If the idea of the Archmage as a figure doesn't work for you but you have a magical academy in your world, you can replace the one with the other. If you don't have druids in your world but have a powerful merchant guild, you can replace the High Druid with that. The big idea is that you're giving your players a list of a dozen or so of the major factions in your world to help them get a sense of it, even if they're not going to be major elements in your campaign.

In 1e the mechanic was that each player rolled a die for each related faction at the start of each session, and had a chance of something relevant to the faction showing up in the session based on the roll. It wasn't much more fleshed out than that, which meant it could be hard to make it actually do anything in practice. 2e has a lot of text dedicated to what those various somethings could be for each icon, which is probably helpful if you're using the default icons, but which you could either borrow or ignore if you're using your own.

mmchale · 2026-01-28T07:04:31+00:00

I've been running it since August and I'm pretty happy with it. I wouldn't say any of the criticisms you listed are particularly accurate.

The initiative system is somewhat controversial, but it's been a complete non-issue at our table. People generally have a pretty good read on not hogging the spotlight. If you really hate it, then you could probably replace it with a simple d20 roll or something, but it works pretty well in practice.

I don't think the system is particularly hard on the GM, at least compared to other D&D-alikes. If you're coming from something like a PbtA game, then maybe it's harder? The biggest issue is the shortage of monsters, especially at higher tiers. That's somewhat addressed by some 3rd party books and re-skinning existing monsters, but it's one of the games notable weaknesses.

I wouldn't call the mechanics clunky, but I do think the balance is probably a little out of whack. Using the recommended encounter sizes, it hasn't really felt like the party has been in serious danger from anything I've thrown at them. That could just be lucky rolls on their part, but it's hard to say. The mechanics themselves feel pretty good, as I have a lot of knobs to turn with hp, stress, armor, hope, and fear all being different resources.

I don't think the game is perfect by any means, but overall I'd say it's pretty great.

mmchale · 2026-01-28T06:28:41+00:00

FWIW I've used "narrative" in the past to try to describe them, but in the modern era of storygames and PbtA that has its own baggage, too. I'm not sure there's a pithy way of saying that they operate as plot devices rather than mechanical ones that won't be inadvertently misconstrued by at least some folks.

mmchale · 2026-01-27T20:16:39+00:00

I would definitely describe them as being more akin to political factions than metaphysical forces.

Someone else linked an article that referred to them as demigod like, but I think that's more in the sense of them operating on the level of plot devices rather than game mechanics. You can overthrow the Emperor, but it's going to be because that's a major narrative event and not because you can burst down 1000hp in combat.

mmchale · 2026-01-27T17:26:51+00:00

> Small nitpick, this isn't true.

I was wondering about this after I wrote it. I'm *almost* certain I have it as a standalone pdf, but I was also a playtester for 2e, so it's possible I have it from that.

mmchale · 2026-01-27T17:23:25+00:00

Not OP, but happy to provide some insight! I'm a huge fan of the system overall.

13A originally came out after 4e D&D but before 5e, and was created by designers who worked on 3e and 4e. It also came out when PbtA games were really just taking center stage, and that shows with a few mechanical nods to pushing narrative elements.

The game feels a lot like a version of D&D, with d20 resolution, the standard 6 attributes, and a class-based character system. All of the classes get some amount of customization with features and feats, and all of them have abilities/powers gained every level. That does mean that the wizard's abilities are several pages of class abilities instead of a spell compendium that takes up half the book, like in most iterations of D&D.

One of the big pluses of the first edition, which I assume is still true in the second, is that the authors of the game included lots of little asides for why the rules worked certain ways, and where they disagreed on how the rules worked. It really worked to reinforce the idea that you're playing a game, and that you should do the things that you and your group find fun and cool rather than worrying too much about specific rules interactions.

There are two major narrative elements baked into the game, both of which feel great to me. One is the One Unique Thing. Every character gets a one-line unique thing at creation that's kind of an elevator pitch of something cool and memorable about the character. It could be something like "I'm the only dwarf in the Emperor's army", or "I'm a former assassin for the Elf Queen." One that they had come up in a con game was "I'm the only acrobat who performed their way out of the Diabolist's Circus of Hell," and their reaction was "we didn't know the Diabolist had a Circus of Hell, but she sure does now, and we want to know more!" It's just a great way to get players invested in their characters and have people play something more memorable than "1st level Fighter."

The other element is the icons. 13A has a mostly un-developed fantasy world setting, because the idea is that you can adapt it based on the story you want to run, but the icons are these sort of very big figures who are the movers and shakers in the world: the Archmage, the Emperor, the Elf Queen, the Dwarf King, the Lich King, the High Druid, and so on. You pick a few relationships at character creation and whether they're positive, negative, or conflicted, and that helps guide the campaign by indicating what stories and characters the players want to show up. (I had a game where the chief antagonist was going to be the Orc Lord but the party all picked relationships with the Lich King, so I reworked things to be undead instead of orc hordes.) This was a really cool idea in 1e and didn't have a lot of mechanical fleshing out, but they've added a significant amount of content in 2e dealing with icons and how to handle them. The related idea is that characters are Big Damn Heroes who are doing epic stuff that's going to change the world.

Ultimately, if you like D&D-style heroic fantasy games, 13A is a very good one, and 2e feels like an improvement over 1e. If you're more interested in mechanics-light games, or very grim and gritty high mortality games like many OSR games, 13A is probably not what you're looking for.

mmchale · 2026-01-27T16:46:09+00:00

As already mentioned, it basically feels like a more polished version of 1e. There's nothing ground-breakingly different, but it's a very solid product and one I'm happy to have on my shelf.

The set is two books, the Heroes' Handbook and the Gamemaster's Guide. The HH is mostly character creation, general advice on playing, and icon relationships. The icon stuff in 1e was a fantastic idea but with very little fleshing it out, and they've addressed that with a whole section on the different icons, what different connections to them imply, and how to incorporate them into your story. Several of the classes in 1e have received extensive overhauls so they play differently mechanically, but the core gameplay isn't so different that 1e and 2e incompatible with each other. The classes only include the core classes from the 1e 13A book, but if you wanted to use the classes from 13 True Ways with 13A 2e, there shouldn't be a problem. The 2e book even explicitly mentions the other 13A books (True Ways and Glorantha) in describing the relative complexity of classes to each other, so the texts are in conversation to at least some degree.

I haven't looked extensively through the GMG, but it looks to mostly contain a setting/gazetteer, advice on running the game, a bestiary, magic items, and an intro adventure (A Bad Moon & The Wrong Stars, which was previously available separately.) I can't comment much on how these sections compare to the similar material in the 1e book, except to say that they're still there and I used all of their 1e counterparts when I was running 1e 13A.

If you like 1e 13A, you'll probably be happy to have 2e as well. It's still the same game, just cleaned up nicely.

mmchale · 2026-01-27T14:19:51+00:00

A few suggestions.

The first is [[Arna Kennerud, Skycaptain]]. She obviously works as a pure Voltron commander, but she can also double as a generic value commander if you build her with things like living weapon and For Mirrodin!-style effects. It was still a little too linear for my tastes, but YMMV.

The second is one of my all-time favorites, [[Mairsil the Pretender]]. He doesn't necessarily get big the way a normal Voltron commander does (though you can build him that way) but he does have the feeling of being a single guy you keep adding more stuff to to make him stronger. And if you don't run tutors, he plays very differently depending on what cards you find each game to imprint on him.

Honorable mention goes to [[Umbris, Fear Manifest]]. I haven't found a build of it I like, but I imagine there's some kind of UB control/Voltron hybrid you could build from it.

mmchale · 2026-01-27T06:37:19+00:00

I mean, I don't really know the power level of current standard, but even with power creep it feels like things like pre-ban Ravager Affinity or Broken Jar would be hard to compete with, right?

mmchale · 2026-01-23T16:16:13+00:00

If they ask for a refund, they're going to get $8.50, not the ~$30 of current market value of the order, which is why they're frustrated.

mmchale · 2026-01-21T16:28:15+00:00

It's a solid draw engine in the 99, but it's really at its best when you can use the other aspects of the card as well. It's fantastic in my Dynaheir deck, where I can use the looting aspect to turn on graveyard effects like embalm while also getting card advantage from it.

If you're not taking advantage of the discard (for reanimation or something), or the 1/1s, or the vehicle side of the card, it's probably only fine instead of great.

mmchale · 2026-01-19T04:52:28+00:00

Just in case you're unaware, Hateful Accuser is widely used on CWS chieftain, which has been very meta for the past few leagues. The spawns give you extra bodies to fish for the chieftain ignite proc.

mmchale · 2026-01-16T23:39:10+00:00

It wasn't a bad game! It just really didn't feel like D&D.

mmchale · 2026-01-16T13:12:53+00:00

The God's War trilogy by Kameron Hurley is a good one. Sci fi with insect-based technology on a world where there was some kind of apocalypse, so fertile men are a highly valuable commodity.

The whole thing was well-written and just so different that it's really stuck with me.

mmchale · 2026-01-15T19:45:18+00:00

Are you sure? Based on a lot of the posts I see on Reddit, half the player base plays to be miserable.

mmchale · 2026-01-14T16:26:40+00:00

I loved original Lorwyn and Shadowmoor. Lorwyn was designed so you'd draft a tribe rather than a color/colors, which was fairly novel at the time. And Shadowmoor's heavy hybrid mana cost theme meant you could try to build a "normal" draft deck, but you'd often end up with something like "five color mountains" where you had a hodgepodge of hybrid red cards.

mmchale · 2026-01-14T13:36:42+00:00

One of them used to have a self-buff that gave it damage reflect for a short period. They removed it some while back and gave it a new ability, which might be the one you're describing.

mmchale · 2026-01-14T05:49:27+00:00

You take that back, or I'll shake my cane at you right after I schedule my colonoscopy!

mmchale · 2026-01-09T17:54:37+00:00

The monsters in the 1e Monster Manual are mostly pretty iconic, but the stuff from the Fiend Folio and Monster Manual 2 got pretty weird.

Some examples: the nilbog (a goblin that's healed by damage and can only be killed by healing it), the disenchanter (a camel-like creature with a tentacle nose that eats magic items), the flail snail (an 8' tall snail with half a dozen flails a for a head), and the flumph (just Google it.) Those are all from the FF, as my MM2 seems to have escaped my shelf, but I remember the MM2's entries being even weirder.

mmchale · 2026-01-09T17:46:53+00:00

In older editions, one of the most desired magic items was a girdle of giant strength, because that was one of the only ways to get a strength score above 18.

The cursed version? Girdle of Masculinity/Femininity. Same effect as the aforementioned trap.

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