It’s out! Go get it!

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.

Next steps

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.

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.

The Original Barbarian

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.

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.

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.

The Original

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.

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.

The Original

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.

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.

Resources

• A third resource, Ammo, has been added to Frames. Tension and Ammo are distinguished from each other as follows:
  • You may spend Tension to gain another action on your turn or reroll an attack. Tension is regained from Drops as usual (as well as from certain Build Traits). You can no longer use Tension to reroll Attribute rolls.
  • You may spend Ammo to use an Integral or Modular System. Ammo is not typically regained until the end of the mission.
• Resources on each Frame have been tweaked to account for this.

Attributes

• Attributes no longer govern attack rolls. However, they add to your Frame's maximum resources:
  • Drive adds to maximum Vigor
  • Speed adds to maximum Tension
  • Control adds to maximum Ammo
• For 3/6 kinds of Frame Damage, something that didn't take a roll now takes a specific kind of Attribute roll instead of asking for one in general.
• You can now set your Attributes to 2/2/2.

Traits

• Each Frame now has a Build Trait. In this release, this is either Light Build, Medium Build, or Heavy Build.
  • These tie into Vigor and Tension, further differentiating Heavy, Medium, and Light Frames.

Armaments

• Armaments now have a number of dice listed next to each. This is the number of dice you roll (barring any changes from traits, tags, conditions, etc) when attacking with that Armament.
  • Each Armament and Backup Armament was rebalanced with this (and general variety) in mind.
• Six new Armaments have been added, bringing the total to 18 Armaments.
• Some tags now do different things.

Systems

• Systems now use tags by default.
• Six new Modular Systems have been added, bringing the total to 18 Modular Systems.
• Some existing Modular Systems were altered.

Frame Damage

• Leg, Shoulder, and Core damage now indicate which Attribute gets rolled.
• In addition to the standard Vigor/Tension restoration and +max Tension, you regain 1 Ammo when you gain Frame Damage.

Other

• Changed the example round of combat based on the updated ruleset.
• Advancement has been tweaked slightly (you can now buy into non-random tag advancement earlier).
• Some enemies were tweaked a bit.
• I'm sure I did changed something I forgot to mention here.

Quality of Life

• Both Pages and Spreads are now available.
  • I may experiment with other formats for
• Rearranged where Frame information lives.
  • After descriptions, everything for each stock model Frame is simply listed out in one spread.
  • Traits and Integral Systems are listed in the next few pages.
  • At the end of the book, each Frame has two sheets: one that's a pregen stock model with Attributes pre-assigned and extra Resources pre-calculated (and what every tag/term does listed), and one that's empty (with dotted-line boxes for filling in your maximums based on your Attributes). Both have extra dotted lines on Tension (in a more faded gray) to account for Frame Damage.

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.

Hi there! I'm gonna talk about a lot of the other basics now - Attributes, Skills, and Icon relationships.

Death to Ability Scores

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.

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.

Why 3d6?

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.

Hi there! I want to talk a bit about one of the bigger v0.3 changes: Ammo. That is to say, I'm adding it. If you haven't read my initial 0.3 post  and my Armaments and Dice post please do! But to recap, Tension is being split into Tension and Ammo: Tension handles rerolls and grants extra actions, while Ammo is used to activate Systems. Tension can be regained by Drops (and by another method - we'll get there), while Ammo is either only restored upon return or during some kind of mid-mission supply cache discovery. So that means each Frame has 3 Resources, Vigor/Tension/Ammo, which do very different things.