Hi there! Today, I'm talking Rogue and Wizard. I'm going to stop promising any of these will be short, but Rogue was, so I just kept going to round out the initial 4.

The Original Rogue

Rogue has always had a weird vibe. It's one of the few 13th Age classes to have a "spell list" as a non-spellcaster. (And you'll note that they don't do the weird spell slot thing. Almost like it could have been that way all along...) It's got Momentum, which is a fun idea - it's an on/off switch where if you hit an enemy you get it and if you get hit you lose it, but while you have it you can use powers that key off of it. One problem I ran into with this was that if your rogue never hits, you don't gain it. Also there's only so much they can do with low defenses to keep it, even with their various powers. So my initial step was to reorient how Momentum works.

The Remade Rogue

Rogue's version of Prowess/Focus is Guile. Momentum acts like extra Guile. You gain 1 every time you hit or succeed at a Dicey Move, and you lose all of your Momentum when you're hit or fail at a Dicey Move. So even if you can't hit, you can still use stuff by spending Guile.

To avoid this, Rogue's got a few things built in. They have low AC, but they're a little better at avoiding harm by active play. Evasive Strike is now one of their two at-wills (next to Sneak Attack), on a hit it allows a pop-off that prevents re-engagement. Uncanny Dodge is a new (well, old, but new again) feature they get: when they're unengaged or have 1+ Momentum, ranged attacks against them gain 1 Disadvantage. (I noticed that there was basically nothing their engagement stuff could do to avoid this, it's a direct response). They've also got a few Interrupt Tricks that help a bit with that.

For most other classes, I've separated Daily/At-Will choice. But with Rogue it's never been as much of a problem, probably because its various class features cover a multitude of sins. Related, Rogue kind of fails my "everyone has pacing abilities" rule. I think I'm fine with that, because their Momentum stuff is a lot already and I don't want to overload characters. In testing it's never been a problem so that's fine by me.

Aside from that, the main thing I did was adding a secondary focus for them - debuffing. They have more powers that add conditions, and Cunning now makes various conditions last past 1 round. This allows for a kind of Rogue that doesn't strictly revolve around Sneak Attack.

Like I said, shorter than usual. So let's talk about Wizard.

The Original Wizard

Original 13th Age Wizard was very powerful for a lot of reasons, but especially because the math in the original had some major problems re: caster attacks vs various defenses in general. I wanted Wizard to feel like the people who really Get How Magic Works while not being OP. It also had both Cantrips and Utility Spells, which...well, that had to go. Trying to move away from that.

The Remade Wizard, version 1

The first remake had a few things going on. On the combat side, they have Cyclic Spells (the idea was stolen from the 13A ability of the same name but it's mostly different). They get an Escalation-like counter (Cycle) that starts at a random 1d6 and ticks up every round. When it hits a multiple of 6, spells you cast on that turn get a bonus. Overworld Advantage is now Arcane Proximity, when they're close to something very magical their dailies become recharge and Cycle increases by 1d3 instead of 1 (so it's faster but can skip). They also have Cantrips. These aren't secondary, but are fully baked into the class as a feature and are tied to every Talent. These basically just extend the Wizard Skill (and this approach would be applied to other classes later). The original Talent/Spell setup was not too far off from the original. They had various talents that augmented various things and spells were some combination of at-will, at-will/spend Focus, and Daily.

The Remade Wizard, current version

But I was never 100% satisfied with this. It failed a major test, which is that you can very easily build a useless/boring Wizard initially. Plus it just doesn't feel very wizardy, y'know? Hard to pin it down. I wanted it to feel more academic than it did. So I went back to the drawing board later after designing some other classes and approached it from Talents, like Cleric did. It's a good design pattern for classes that have specialized domains (and for Wizard, I was thinking of Specialist Schools in that way). I also approached it with an idea that was tried in 13A (in my opinion quite unsuccessfully, we'll get to it later) with Druid: tiered talents. Each talent is broken up into two talents, Initiate and Specialist. This means that you can either take half of three of them or one full and one half. You can't take the latter without the former. So you can have 3 Initiate Talents or two Initiates and a Specialist.

Each Initiate Talent gives one of two cantrips associated with that school and an At-Will/Spend 1 Focus ability. (Wizard has no unqualified At-Will abilities as of this version other than Cycle Advance, which just bumps the Cycle by 1 and gives a little secondary thing). Each Specialist talent improves that At-Will/Spend 1 ability, gives the other cantrip, and gives some major bonus when casting a certain kind of spell (like buffs, or attacks vs MD/PD). So the generalist gains more options for at-will spells but has less depth towards a certain kind of spell, while the specialist ends up being biased towards certain specific things but they're a little better. And either way they all gain access to the Wizard spell list, which is now all Daily/Recharge. 

And that's the core 4! That's what I started the design with - those 4 classes. I was satisfied with them enough to keep going, so next I designed the next 4: Paladin, Ranger, Barbarian, and Bard. 

Until next time!