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! 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.