Interest check: 13th Age, no levels experiment

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Feb 21, 2019 7:22 pm
Following a discussion in the GP discord, maybe there's no good reason for levels. This has been tried in a partial way by Epic 6, a D&D variant where you level to 6th, and then stop gaining HP.

So for this experiment, I want to run an entire game without HP creep. You'll still get new abilities, but you won't get more HP unless your character would get it through some other means (like taking the Toughness feat, or increasing your Constitution).

13th Age can handle this, since no fight is ever supposed to take more than 6 or 7 rounds, no matter what the level. I'll down-level the monsters when needed.

Comments, discussion, interest?
Last edited February 21, 2019 7:25 pm
Feb 22, 2019 4:20 am
Curious how you plan to handle the incremental increases and character progression.
Feb 22, 2019 6:48 pm
I'll be offering the incrementals as usual, but with as little limits as possible.

Spells will be the only real problem, and those are easily scalable, so for instance:

Disintegrate is a 9th-level Daily spell that targets one nearby enemy. Spell attacks are pretty straightforward Intelligence + Level vs. PD so they don't generally need to change.

The damage on a hit is huge (4d8 x 10), but divide dice by spell level, you get 4d8.

Disintegrate also makes the target vulnerable (hard save ends, 16+). That's not a problem.

Also, if the target drops to 0 hp from this attack, or drops to 0 hp before it saves against the vulnerable effect of this attack, it is gone, dusted, nothing remaining. This is fluff, except that you can't rez it, so isn't a problem.

Miss damage is half, still easy to do.
There are also some abilities that increase with tier. Usually the bonus is +1/2/4 or +2/3/5. For those that are available only at Champion-tier or above, it's easy enough to lower the bonus to what it would have been had it been a lower tier.
Last edited February 22, 2019 6:51 pm

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