Wednesday 2 October 2013

Escalation Dice

I'm currently reading through the 13th Age RPG (I hope to do a review for my Youtube channel when i've finished reading it) which is written by some of the people who worked on both 3rd and 4th edition D&D; although I doubt that i'd ever run the game completely (since, although being described as "medium-crunch", the game is still a little rulesy for me) but it does contain some very interesting ideas that i'm planning to take and use in my future games.



One of the most interesting to me at the moment is the escalation dice; this is a mechanic where the players (not monsters and NPCs) receive a bonus that starts at +1 on the 2nd round of a combat and increases by +1 each round ( to a maximum of +6) as the combat progresses. This represents the character increasingly finding ways to take advantage of a combat as it progresses, although the GM can reset the escalation bonus to +0 if the characters are avoiding combat or there is a sufficient.

I love this idea and can see how it would help prevent prolonged combats where the enemies and PCs are just slugging it out; this may be something I look at using in Fate in the future.

2 comments :

  1. that sounds intresting may have a look at 13th age as I have seen a few bits of it that sound intresting.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yes, there's a fair few interesting ideas in 13th Age, some of which i'm planning to nick - I particularly like the icons, archetypal fantasy figures (such as the dwarf king, elven queen, diabolist, etc) that you can swear allegiance to and that take the place of clans and such like in other games (I may do another post about these in future).

      Delete