Separate charsheet/card sheet!
November 3, 2021
(Read the original on itch here!)
Hi there! In addition to the PDFs, I added a separate character sheet and card sheet. The former is self-explanatory, the latter provides a template for condition cards and ability cards. (They’re both already in the core book, this is mostly for convenience/having them as a separate smaller file). Enjoy!
(Read the original on itch here!)
At long last, after just under two years of development, 36th Way is live! You can either get it here on itch for PDF/ePub or you can read the entire SRD online at my new site. I’m going to be taking feedback as to minor changes - probably typos/term update errors at this point but who knows - while making APOCALYPSE FRAME updates/the expansion release.It’s out! Go get it!
Next steps
Hi there! I'm going to talk about some of the simplest classes in the original 13th Age - Barbarian, Ranger, and Paladin - and how they changed. Barbarian was one of the most dirt-simple classes possible in the original. You had Rage, which was a Recharge 16+ ability, and aside from that you mostly just did basic attacks. The unique thing it had was tiered talents, which was just that some unlocked at high tiers. It was kind of effective when it popped off, but boring most of the time. So my goal was to make it more interesting on average.The Original Barbarian
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. 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 Original Rogue
Hi there! I'm going to be talking about the Cleric redesign. It's not as much as the Fighter changes so this should be shorter. First, the original Cleric. I love the general setup it has: all Talents represent Domains and it has Spells. Simple, but effective. What's not to love? Well, it was a little too good, mostly. Each Talent gave you a daily ability, and on top of that you got a bunch of very effective spells, and you could easily have similar offensive capability to Fighter/Paladin. It wasn't quite the classic 3.X CoDZilla or anything but it was definitely in that conversation.The Original
Hi there! Today I'm going to talk about classes. Specifically the one that started it all: Fighter. I've always said you can judge One Of These by how good their Fighter is and I think mine's pretty good. So 13th Age Fighter is one of my favorite classes in it! I was always happy to meet it halfway and figure out how to best make one when I was originally playing one. But I'm fully willing to admit that it misses the mark. I loved the concept - Talents as encounter powers/passives, Maneuvers as actives feels good. It's why I kept coming back when I played even when it didn't always pan out the way I wanted it to. I wanted to replicate that "feels-good" quality while picking up where it left off.The Original
Hi there! Last time, I covered the basic stuff that goes into each character. Now, we're going to go over what you need to make a character. There's really not much to it (which is the point!) so this one should be short. In general there are five steps. All but one of them (Class, which we'll dive into last) barely involve mechanics in the Crunchy Game sense - rather they're about defining how you interact with the world.
Hi there! As promised, v0.3 is done! This one was a more extensive change than v0.2. See the devlogs tagged as v0.2 -> v0.3 for more details on why I made any given change. I'm going to be rethinking the ACES HIGH content (at least the Ace-facing equipment stuff) based on these changes, but also I'm focusing on releasing my 36th Way SRD and that's going to happen first, so stay tuned.Resources
Attributes
Traits
Armaments
Systems
Frame Damage
Other
Quality of Life
Hi there! I'm gonna talk about a lot of the other basics now - Attributes, Skills, and Icon relationships. So ability scores in 13th Age and its predecessors are awful. I don't like them, and in 13th Age especially they're basically vestigial. They act mostly as a gate for certain classes, as half of the noncombat calculation (alongside Backgrounds), and a way to screw up chargen. There's a few other things they do for combat, but it's not much of interest. They add to defenses, HP, and some classes do something with a non-main Ability Score every once in awhile. There's no reason these values couldn't be set, say, by class for the most part.Death to Ability Scores
Hi there! I'm going to be writing a bunch of devlogs about everything in 36th Way, in pretty much the order I developed it. This one's about the most basic mechanics of 36th Way: rolls, Advantage, and Disadvantage. 13th Age uses a 1d20 in a fairly typical way for most things: roll it, add your level and maybe 1 or 2 other things, see if it's bigger than something else. I've never liked the d20 in any game. So when I started this project it was the first thing to go. 3d6 has the same average as 1d20 (10.5) so it seemed like a logical choice - and especially because at the time I thought I was just going to change the die, a few mechanics, and the starting 4 classes and keep everything else the same. That didn't last, obviously.Why 3d6?