Hi there! I’m just going to go over the general history of this project, where it went, what state it ended up in, and takeaways going forward. This is going to be fairly rambly in parts.

How did we get here?

To put it bluntly, the primary reason this exists is because I tried running Pathfinder 2E in late 2019 and hated it. It’s not the only reason though.

To back up a little, I’d been playing various D&Ds regularly (among other systems) for roughly 9 years prior, and irregularly for longer than that. When running it I was mostly thinking about how much I’d rather be running 13th Age, but also thinking about all the things I disliked about both 13th Age and Pathfinder (chief among them, the use of the d20). The third contributor here is a Fragged Empire, which I’d run for a bit prior to PF2E. (Specifically: I’d made a big Shadowrun conversion of it because I loved the idea of Shadowrun but thinking about the mechanics of the actual game like at all made me queasy.) Fragged Empire uses a 3d6 + bonus vs target system and it works pretty well and feels right. So off the bat I was thinking about 13th Age with the following changes:

• 1d20 -> 3d6. (I did some math and realized 9+/13+ could swap easily for 6+/16+ so a lot of things would theoretically just carry over.)
• Use something kind of like PF2E Focus Spells except a more interesting implementation (and not just for spells).
• Use 5E Advantage/Disadvantage instead of the traditional +/-2 bonus situation. I wasn’t really a fan of 5E when I played it but that’s like the one really notable change.
• No ability scores. PF2E really, really did a great job in souring me on them mechanically because of how the math really assumes you’re going to have a maxed out accuracy stat, but DTAS had been floating around prior to that for many reasons.

I tapped out the Fighter pretty quickly over a couple of days. The existing Fighter is not too different than what I initially put down - it had some weirder ideas like Maneuvers being tied to weapon types like slashing/piercing/etc that got dropped. I really liked how it turned out, so I moved onto Cleric, Wizard, and Rogue. I compiled those 4 with some very basic “how do these roll mechanics work” and some instructions to refer to the 13th Age SRD for things like enemies/etc and we were pretty much on the way.

Afterwards…well, you can read the rest of the devlogs, I laid out the order in which I made everything pretty well I think. Over time I got better and better at figuring out class design, and remade a lot of the classes that were closer to the original 13th Age classes. Design by Ship of Theseus Metaphor is how I think about how it came together: I swapped out one thing, and then another, and then another, and pretty soon only a little bit of the original remained.

What went well?

• It’s fully, eminently playable. And not just by me! In addition to the playtest campaign I ran for my in-person (and soon in 2020, not in-person) group, I pitched it to a friend who was looking for something to run given we had all found ourselves inside in March of 2020 looking for something to do and he subsequently ran it for a group that didn’t include me (admittedly he knew 13A so he had a leg up). Both campaigns ran from level 1 to 10 and barring some lumps from level 1 being a little awkward due to damage only having 1 die, it ran fine. It felt pretty good from the start and only got better as it became more refined.
• It’s VERY reskinnable. From the start I was thinking of this as something to allow for reskinning and built it as such. I’d done this while playing 13th Age with ease, more so than a lot of D&D-likes it really lends itself to it thanks to things like abstract ranges. As mentioned in my last devlog, I watched someone turn the entire thing into a no-magic (admittedly not hard) sci-fi game. One of my original plans for the system was to just make a bunch of settings for it with very little new mechanics except reskinning and maybe like a new class or two and if I’d done that I think it’d have worked great. (I was considering a dark fantasy-ish setting last winter but kind of gave up on the idea as I became less enamored with exactly what the system was. It got recycled into ANOINTED and a future project.)
• All of the changes I made worked pretty well. The switch to 3d6 was a big hit, especially given Escalation matters a lot more as a result. I’m pretty happy with all of the new classes and I feel like I breathed a lot of life into ones that had received less love in the original 13A.
• Making a 200 page game is a great way to get good at writing a lot of stuff fast. When you get to the point where you can make a 5-7 page class in a day or two, you’re well on your way. It’s not quite 10,000 hours or whatever but it’s definitely something! Getting a good grasp on how to structure things is important.

What am I not a fan of?

Big ticket items:

• It’s still basically a modern (3E-onward) D&D. The most important one. I don’t think it’s inherently bad to make fantasy heartbreakers, but much like any other genre, if you aren’t really thinking about what you’re making, you’re going to make a lot of the same mistakes and fall into a lot of the same patterns. Monk and Barbarian are in there named as such - despite me thinking about Barbarian especially and cutting out a lot of the stuff that makes those not great, it’s still what it is. Various kinds of “monstrous” humanoid enemies are in the bestiary too with very D&Dish interpretations and that’s not great either. 13th Age is actually a little better about allowing more kinds of stories because it doesn’t really care about money or experience as such but I still don’t think I really did enough to examine my priors in this regard when writing this. I did some stuff pushing against standard D&Disms that I’m proud of (no ability scores, no mechanical races, etc) but it was definitely an uphill battle and inherently there’s just too much baked in to avoid all of it or really take it into account.
• See above, but mechanically. Even past that, it’s still too much of a D&D - which was the original goal as stated but I underestimated how D&D-shaped 13th Age is because of my experience poking it into slightly less D&Dish shapes. Even after this, there’s just a lot of built in baggage. AC, PD, and MD are all different values and PD/MD are usually lower and that’s just how it works. Why is that? Because it’s One Of These and that’s the way it generally is and if I did something different it’d feel wrong. This is the kind of thing that makes it harder to reskin, you can either make everything generic (in which case nobody cares or reads it, generalized tactical stats are kind of boring) or make it specific (in which case you probably just made D&D or possibly Weird D&D again). No matter what, it’s still a game inherently about an adventuring day in which you use up a set of resources over the course of 3-5 encounters and it doesn’t really work well once you start to deviate from that. You can of course buck this in various ways (like stick to noncombat, etc) but, well, that’s what people who defend D&D also say. It’s a bad argument there and it wouldn’t be a very good argument here either.

More systemic gripes:

• A PC has too many class features, spells, powers, etc. This feels like a weird complaint compared to D&D or a lot of “trad” games because it’s way less complicated than most of those, but that’s less of a positive note in favor of 36W and more of a comment on how a ton in that field falls short compared to more elegant indie designs. Some of the classes have like 7 pages of stuff to remember, and while you’re not going to pick all of it, some of it can get fairly wordy. Remembering all of your stuff can be a lot, and not a lot of it matters all the time. I maintain that if you have enough stuff on your sheet that a character builder actually makes a ton of sense then you probably have too much stuff and as much as 36W isn’t that bad in this regard, a character builder still kind of makes sense. (As always, passive abilities are usually way more of a culprit for overhead than active abilities.)
• There’s too much entangled stuff which it makes it hard to make derivative things from the SRD. Any given class has a fair amount going on. Every talent, ability, etc is pretty distinct and in conversation with every other, which is good from a holistic design perspective but bad if you’re trying to make a basis for further content. There really isn’t a comparison for like, the atomic design unit of a “spell” or whatever. I’m thinking about LUMEN in comparison where the idea was to make something that was intentionally incomplete because that inspires people to “complete” it in the way they see fit - this seems like an absurd problem but things are just too complete for that here and there aren’t enough atomic elements.

And combat gripes in particular.

• Combat is still too slow. A comparison to LUMEN is still absolutely unfair, but I’m not writing this section to be fair, I’m writing it to be honest. Balancing around ~1 enemy per PC means that in a given round one hit’s worth isn’t going to feel terribly consequential even if an ability does a lot of things, and decision paralysis is real. Roll attack, check natural result vs ability stuff, check computed result vs. enemy defense, roll damage, check if damage is higher than the staggered/dead thresholds…it’s a lot of steps and that’s just one action! And this doesn’t account for things like conditions, temporary effects, etc. This is compounded by the fact that…
• All of the numbers are too high. Especially at high levels. I’d committed to making caster/non-caster math a little more equivalent with the 1 die/level system that weapon damage used in 13A but I hadn’t really thought about what that actually feels like to people who aren’t used to the idea of rolling like 10-20 dice or whatever. PCs and NPCs have hundreds of HP (sometimes thousands for some enemies!) and that’s just too much. LUMEN in particular has convinced me that the most HP something should have is like 30-40 if it’s something extremely nasty, in a lot of cases you simply don’t need numbers that high. 100 is too much, and 1000+ is right out. Some people like big numbers for feel and like, sure if that makes you feel better, but please make it easily divisible by like 5-10 because I suspect most people don’t want to do high 2 digit/low 3 digit subtraction regularly.
• Vancian-style spellcasting sucks. Knowing when to use daily/recharge abilities is one of those severe “learning curve” things that’s hard to balance around. It’s not a coincidence that a lot of 13A/4E-derived things get rid of them and move to encounter-only! Daily abilities are especially hard because it’s unclear exactly how hot you should be burning at any given point or whether something makes sense to use right now (and especially if you’re running shorter sessions, a “day” can be several real-life weeks, so who knows when you’ll get access to it again). This is compounded by things like variable adventuring days - a fight-long buff matters more if you know your GM is going to load a day’s worth of fights into 2 encounters as opposed to 4, etc - and exacerbated by players not being terribly experienced with things like resource expenditure and knowing when to burn hard vs. not. (And also just like…wanting to push the button that does fun stuff because it’s fun. Having to hold off on that can be kind of a buzzkill.) The things like Showstopper/Exalt that share a single cooldown for several abilities and the Power-based abilities (Prowess, etc) feel like they’re a little more inexperience-proof and fun.
• HP isn’t terribly interesting. Related to combat being too slow. This is a problem that a lot of D&D’s and the more 3/4/5E descended heartbreakers have and it’s present here: a single hit just doesn’t feel very significant and often that’s all you get (and maybe a condition or ongoing damage or something). Bloodied/Staggered and abilities that key off of that help a little but they’re not that-that common, making them more common would probably be annoying, and penalties-on-sufficient-damage often lead to death spirals. I kind of like static enemy damage for speed purposes but it exacerbates this: if you know how much damage something can do, you know exactly how many hits you can take until it’s an actual problem, which removes a lot of tension. This is mostly fine if HP is low and damage is inevitable, but because of the desire for more tactical stuff like conditions to happen (and to de-emphasize pure alpha strike tactics, which otherwise dominate) survival has to be a little higher and damage needs to be preventable so they matter at all. It’s a tough balance and I don’t think it was met here.
• Recoveries aren’t terribly interesting. In theory, the recovery economy helps to de-emphasize having to have a character that can heal others in the party - you can heal between combats and focus on taking down targets quicker, preventing damage through high defenses/conditions, etc. In practice, it doesn’t really do that because only parties that are truly on the ball can fully prevent squishy characters from getting hit very badly every once in awhile and even then it’s not foolproof, and support characters act as force multipliers because they’re buffing when they’re not healing. If you manage to play in such a way that you have to deal with less healing, the fact of the matter is that you’re leaving daily resources on the table when you could be getting healed and buffed. I tried to compensate for this by giving recoveries other uses (such as Pushing your Limits or specific abilities that drained them) but that’s a band-aid at best when compared to the AEDUish ability economy.

Lessons Learned

So that’s a lot and it sounds like I don’t like what I made! But a lot of that is really digging deep into it. Like I said at first, the game plays well for a D&D, I had a lot of fun making and playing it, and I’d still probably rather run and play it than almost any other D&D-like if I had to choose one. If you dig down on any game you could come up with stuff like this and it’s a good exercise every once in awhile. Here are some more useful takeaways from this.

• Think about what you’re making. Replication of a genre without really thinking about it will usually lead to at least one major headache, thing you’ll regret making, or odd mechanic that doesn’t make much sense anymore. Do your best to consider why things existed in the first place, if they needed to exist, and if they should be carried forward. This applies to structure, mechanics, and content - be intentional with your design.
• Less is more. Drill the atomic values of everything down as much as possible - how many things a class has, the level of complication of a given ability does, etc. If you can make an ability that’s paragraph into a sentence, do it. If you can make a class that’s 7 pages into 2 pages, do it. If you can reduce half of the qualifiers, attributes, etc from an enemy, do it. Get rid of filler.
• Keep it fast! Any steps that reduce unnecessary processing, sorting, etc are good. Get rid of any “keeping track” steps you can. Reduce numbers. Reduce conditions. Reduce anything that would involve lookup of something else. If you can get rid of any step on a process, do it.
• Make sure things are interesting. When something is boring, it’s usually because it doesn’t feel like it matters, and frankly it might not matter. This can be a function of HP vs damage balancing, making abilities count more, less abilities that are punchier, etc. Try to make everything feel like it matters.

I think that covers most of it? I probably missed something and that’s fine. I’ll probably make half of these mistakes again in the future. Let me know what you think if you think I missed anything.

Until next time!