13th Age characters are tough as hell!

We’ve been playing 13th Age for over a year now and I’ve been following the balanced encounter advice in the main book (with an excel sheet some dude made to back it up).   Most of the time they’ve been fighting humans, which are easy to make on the fly, but a few times I generated a monster with Raggi’s RANDOM ESOTERIC CREATURE GENERATOR FOR CLASSIC FANTASY ROLE-PLAYING GAMES AND THEIR MODERN SIMULACRA and slapped the 13th Age stats on them (and triggered powers, gotta love those).  The system makes it fairly easy to create battles that won’t totally fuck the characters, but I’m finding now that maybe as published the advice leans a wee bit on the easy side and by wee bit, I mean a lot. Most of the stuff I’ve thrown at them is pretty much in line with what the characters, now at level 2, supposedly can take on, but last night I threw the kitchen sink at them, and no characters dropped!  The battle was tense, and the characters got messed up, but I went for the (planned) dues ex machina without them really needing it.

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Basic math suggestion is that with 4 characters at level 1, you should have 4 (normal sized) monsters of level 1 for an even fight (or equivalent).  This changes with tiers to be finally about 2-1 at Epic tier, but if I was to give advice to start the calculation, I would say # of creatures at the party’s level +1.  So five first level characters vs 6 first level orcs should be a balanced encounter.

I had a prepped battle ready for about 6 months to pull out when needed (wasn’t sure where it would take place, but I knew what was coming) and I tweaked it from time to time to make sure it wasn’t too hard, yet it was supposed to be a hard fight, the capstone of part of the campaign if you will.  It ended up being a 2-session battle and even without the Barbarian in the first session, they mopped the floor with the bad guys including a nasty Hungry Star.

How did they do it?

  • Paladin (with the apt nickname “the dauntless”) has a ridiculous AC as the escalation die goes up due to a magic shield.  By round 4, she was nearly unhittable by the mooks, and one of the bigbads couldn’t manage to hit her.
  • Bard had a power to give 2 free recoveries out during the fight.  This saved a couple character’s asses and is very powerful.  The bard’s song also helped quite a bit.
  • Doling out huge damage from the ranger, including special effects.  The ranger class can stunt to get bonuses/effects and there was incredible rolling. He rolled at least two 30’s during the combat– enough to hit anything that exists!
  • And, as always, the Barbarian in session 2 of the fight, even without being able to Rage this battle, was destroying everything nearby with nearly comically high dice rolling.
  • The sorceress can and will be a mega-damage dealer as long as she doesn’t get attacked by enemies too often and dropped.

Now they get their first long rest (unless they do something… stupid) after about 6 sessions and the recovery gas tanks will be filled to the brim.

Gencon events, what a chore!

Why do I still go to Gencon?  I’m thinking the smaller cons (especially around here) are going to fit the bill better than the 60K attendance monstrosity.  Having everyone ready for 11 AM today was a bitch, people got together as if it was some sort of business meeting.  Fucksake, this is what you have to go through to get events? Madness.   Despite the craziness, the online system is pretty amazing.  While confusing at times, it parses a shocking amount of information in a fairly short amount of time.   Coordination is the fucking thing.  If we weren’t trying to get into games together, it would be a lot easier, but half the fun is playing with part strangers, part amigos.

I got all my Runequest requests, but nothing else.  I ain’t complaining.  The only game I really wanted other than that was Feng Shui 2 and, though there were no games, Shinobigami Modern Ninja Battle Game.

And I’m running a Lamentations of the Flame Princess game.  First event I’ve ever run there after all these decades of going.   I was thinking either that, Into the Odd or Feng Shui 2 and LotFP won out.  I’m going to run an entrant (randomly from a set of 10 good ones) from the one page dungeon contest.

May: DOOM and Total War Warhammer

May 2016 is shaping up to be a very important month for PC gaming. Two absolutely critical titles are hitting the streets in the next couple weeks and it looks like i’m going to have to take a few days off to cope with it physically and emotionally.

First up is DOOM. While watching some of the gameplay videos, one should not that this is not a speedy game like the original, it is dead slow in comparison. That said, it does not go the route of horror FPS that Doom 3 does, more like a slow moving Serious Sam with awesome looking kill shots and death animations. While the slowness, especially for the Doom franchise, is sad, I am very excited for the game. I even pre–ordered it due to getting Wolfenstein for free.

Second will be the biggest times suck for me of 2016 outside of Master of Orion– Warhammer Total War. Set in the new destroyed Old World that many of us hold dear from our youths playing WFRP and Mordheim, there’s not a Sigmarine to be seen anywhere, which is a great thing. CA took more time to develop the game after what looked like a Fall 2015 launch, and if Rome 2’s launch and fix cycle is any indication, this is a good thing. While I expect there to be bugs, it should be nothing like the catastrophic launch of Rome 2 (which, while it took them a year, they finally fixed to create an amazing game in the end). The main thing here is that CA is doing things they’ve never, ever done with the TW game (see below).

So yeah, if I don’t show up for stuff in the next couple months, you know what I’m doing!

Mythras- Classic Fantasy is out

alexandriaWhat is it? Classic Fantasy is a mod of Mythras (formerly Runequest 6) focusing on old school dungeon crawls with miniature-based combat.  So you have your solid Runequest 6 combat with special effects and weapon builds that actually mean something in battle with the added framework to play crawls, another magic system (akin to Olde schoole D&D) and the monsters to go with it.

Some differences:

  • RQ is not a dungeon crawl fight to fight to fight game, so Classic Fantasy has allowances for healing up between fights easier (and spells for that to boot)
  • Use of mini’s is a big change.  RQ likely works fine with miniatures (I’ve never played it that way) but this has rules for movement, hexes and squares, etc.
  • Race and class character creation a bit more streamlined than the concept, culture, class style of normal RQ.  All the race and class stuff is what you’d expect from D&D.

This marks the first Mythras branded product from Design Mechanism (the RQ6 guys) and it’s pretty great.  Granted, it’s more complex than D&D, but anyone that has played any D20 recently and remembers the long, drawn out fights with attacks to no specific location (I was in one such fight today in 5E) may want to look a this as a salve for that type of combatboredom.  In addition, having a new magic system for RQ is nothing to sneeze at either.

This has a better run down of the system than I can do (I have real problems reading PDF’s– I need a physical book or I just can’t plow into a text and that ain’t here yet).

Some 5E thoughts while stroking the variant human dongle

I am in a Strahd game with Matt and others and we made characters from scratch and dared each other to roll (which happened) rather than points buy. Since it’s 4d6 out of order and pick the best, you are going to get some good rolls, and fuck yeah I did.

I made a fighter, rolled 18 str, great weapon combat style and great weapon master feat via the Human variant (+1 to two stats, +1 skill, +1 feat).  It turned out every player went Human variant, and we all have extremely different characters.    I can’t see a reason why anyone would play anything other than this.  You want to make a fantastic assassin?  Variant Human.  Awesome sorcerer?  Variant Human.  Basically a two-hander rivaling GUTS? Variant Human.  This is at 1st level.

I think this is by design.  My limited exposure to 4E, 3rd edition and Pathfinder lead me to believe no one ever chose humans because those games are games solely of ‘testing your stats’ optimization, and the other fantasy races did this better.  Optimization matters quite a bit less in 5E because it’s not trying to be the beardy twink game that 3E is.  What’s attractive about the variant humans in 5E is specialization.  You could (should?) play a game only with human PC’s and you could have a ton of very different characters, even at first level and it would be great.  By design? Remember, as a human, you are unique, just like everyone else.

Secondly, while 5E isn’t explicitly a miniatures game, they will get busted out from time to time.  I ain’t playing with these shit assed Pathfinder/D&D pre-paints. They are terrible. Reaper bones are a slight level up, but still not great.  Given that, and the fact that my brother will do the same thing, I’ve upped the aesthetic a bit and built a couple guys tonight for this weekend’s game from a company that actually knows how to make miniatures.

5egame

Yes, they are not painted yet, yes they are still drying from being glued, and they need flash removed, but look at those badass landsknecht motherfuckers, compared to this shytte:

shytte

Next I’m looking at either Frostgrave or some of the Perry Twin’s foot knights box sets if I’m feeling a bit more 15th Century.