Reflections on Running 13th Age Online

I've learned a bit from running 13th Age. This is a bit of a grab-bag summary, but I wanted to write up some thoughts while they're fresh(er) in my brainpan.

You can do a lot with minimal prep. I ran a couple 13th Age modules/adventures, the first from the basic book and I steamrolled my players through good portions of Crown of the Lich King (a 13th Age organized play adventure). Now, the Crown stuff was a bit odd in that the thing was organized into 2 hour play chunks, and I totally skipped one completely, but it all worked out fairly well. A few skeletons of encounters, with notes on how many creatures and which creatures to shove at the players worked wonders, and the simple stat-block format of the monsters really helped that. When I was running 4e, I could actually construct or modify the next encounter from the printouts I had during the downtime in players' turns, but this was a bit nicer.

I could have prepped a bit more. There were some things I should have expected to happen, and prepped those. Magic items are one example. When the modules recommended magic items, they also recommended rolling relationship dice and whoever gets the highest roll gets an item, or whichever icon comes up highest per player gets an appropriate item. With only 6 icons in play between the 2 players, it would have been easy to decide in advance 1-2 items for each icon, and to have the text ready to give to the players.

Montage scenes can be good ways to speed a few things up. I recall doing this explicitly with some Fading Suns games long ago (even describing the star-wipes), but a montage scene can be a good way to help keep the players involved and also move past some parts that could be a bit cumbersome. Obviously more important in story-based games. When I plowed through the last 3-4 portions of Crown on Sunday, we hit the montage button a couple times though, and it definitely got to be a bit much. So a montage once in a while seems reasonable to me, but not every game. Despite the fact that the collaborative montages came out of the Crown adventure, they seemed like they could have been in the 13th Age main book. Ultimately I did end up doing a bit of montaging (there were some odd trap sections of Crown that I'm not sure I understood) with dice rolls, and that worked out fine. It made the montage a bit less focused on heroic awesomeness, but I got the sense the the PCs were spending resources based on how they handled obstacles.

Tell your players the numbers they need. If players are rolling dice, why hide the difficulty? I think this goes hand-in-hand with not require superfluous rolls. But towards the end of my 13th Age time, I realized it was just easier to tell people what they need to hit. I think this notion mostly came out of my last session where I found myself spilling the beans on the DCs more. Even if its general "Nothing under a 18 will hit these guys" or whatnot. And for skill checks too. I tried to follow some of the difficulties recommended in the books/adventures, but if they need a 20 or even 25 to succeed, why not tell them? I think it gives a bit more suspense to the roll. Fail forward can really help here. Telling the player the difficulty of an action also lets them judge for their character how difficult an action is going to be. That said, if you don't want players to know how well they did, make the roll for them or just use an average roll (like the "passive" perception of later edition D&D).

For the love of all that's holy, make rolls important (or at least not trivial). If the players are willing to spend a resource on overcoming an obstacle, they probably don't need to make rolls. I let the PCs scale a cliff and bypass some crazy undead magic obelisks because the sorcerer said he'd just use a flight spell to get himself plus a rope up. No need to make the pretty athletic thief roll a DC 5 or even 15 check to climb that rope. No dramatic tension, resource already expended, no real need for a roll. I'da probably asked for a roll if they were tossing the rope up just to see if they ended up taking a little damage (or, more likely, losing a recovery) if their gamble didn't work out. But all sorts of knowledge rolls or perception checks... generally unneeded. Also, don't let the PCs re-try things too many times. You failed the check to figure out how to open the secret door, you're going to need things to dramatically change (or maybe come at it with another skill) before you get another roll. But I also know that because there were multiple routes: the PCs didn't need to get that secret door open in order to make progress.

13th Age style backgrounds rock. I really like the notion that you should put a few skills into sentence form. One idea I'm floating for a 5e game is that simply for each skill you have, you need to put it into a sentence form to solidify how your character acquired the skill and what it really means. That's a bit of a different middle-ground, but I think I might really like that. A couple times it wasn't always clear why a players' background should have benefited a roll, but I think I only disallowed a couple. I could have put some more pressure on the players to be creative though: "What crimes did you commit as Heir to the Prince of Shadows that were similar to sneaking into a Lich Baron's house?" Or: "How did your blue dragon tutor teach you about necromantic magic?"

Online tabletops are odd. Roll20 worked fairly well, we didn't have too many audio problems after the second and third sessions. If I'm going to keep doing that I'd like to figure out some of the bells and whistles to get creatures into the system easier, and organize my play spaces. But overall it worked better than I had expected. I can imagine doing some other games with it, though because all you have to work with are the little map and tiny head-shots of the players, I think it might be a bit more suited to actually using gridded combat. The abstract distances were occasionally a bit hard to judge when we do have all the little tokens on the board. But, it wasn't a real problem.

Story games can be fun despite the railroad. I didn't feel like I necessarily left my players a lot of choices, but because I was adapting some of what I did to what they were doing, I think they got the impression that their choices mattered. Obviously I was going to use the Crown adventure regardless of which deceased icon they were trying to steal/resurrect, so it wasn't hard to reskin it for the Leviathon instead of the White [dragon]. I even reskinned the Lich King's vaults as Baron Voth's mansion because I didn't take enough notes and that's where the players thought they were going. No problem though. I think this is a real difference between story games and old-school sandbox games: in one the players choices are a bit illusory and the journey is more important. In the other, the players choices matter, but there's so much to explore its often quite moot.

Take notes. I liked starting each session off with a recap, rolling relationship dice, and having a few notes on things to try to add in (even if I didn't really get around to adding in graffiti much or describing lots of non-visual sensory info). But, damn, having a couple weeks (or months!) between sessions means I should have kept better notes. Notes of all the items I gave out, where players were going and why... All would have been useful. Reminds me a bit, however, of the journals I tried to have players do for an old Fading Suns game. We didn't keep those reliably, but its cool to go back and look through what we did do. And I think they did help keep people more aware of what had happened before and what their plans were for their characters.

Non-tactical combats are fairly fast. While I actually did enjoy the tactical combats of 4e (best part of the system, right?) they did start to grind on. Most 13th Age combats were pretty quick (though it was only 2-3 players). 5e combats can be similarly quick. I wonder about higher-level 13th age combats though. The virual dice took us a while to get used to, but they mathed everything out for us and it didn't take a minute for someone to collect enough dice, shake them an unreasonably long time, then roll and count. And you still got to see the dice explode on the virtual tabletop (like 15d6 on an empowered critical hit). Add to that the 13th Age "articifial intelligence" of monsters (their tactics are largely based on dice rolls, so the DM choices are easy to make. So a smaller number of players, the electronic dice, and 13th Age monster tactics might have really helped speed up combat, but I don't think it was just that. Tracking conditions definitely slowed me down as I was using the table top too. But its a refreshing change of pace from some previous editions still. And even small/quick combats have a chance to go awry or eat up the players' resources.

I'm not sure if we'll get a chance to return to the 13th Age in the near future or not. Even if the guys and I can find a time for another game here and there, we might switch to something else. But its been a good experience, that's for sure.