TTRPG Modernism Versus the Fake Machismo of The Old School

I try not to write negative pieces in this space.  There is already so much negativity on the Internet that i don't really like to add to it, and there is also so much positive stuff that I prefer to focus on it those things.  But there is a difference between a negative reaction that is merely negative, and a negative reaction that provides a vehicle for refining one's own positive position on something.  It's not just negativity for the sake of negativity, but negativity toward something.

It is in the later category that I place Episode 17 of the "Reading D&D Aloud" Podcast, released on July 14th of this year.  The podcast is co-hosted by Ben Riggs, author of Slaying the Dragon, a history of late-stage TSR, and Scott Bruner, an academic studying ttrpgs.  For what it is worth, I really enjoyed Slaying the Dragon and generally liked Riggs's previous podcast Plot Points, though I thought his rending of garments over the end of 5e's dominance over the hobby a few months back was silly and wrong-headed.  This podcast, though, was bad.  Maybe the wildest part was Bruner stating that 5e is "perfectly balanced," which is an absolutely buck-wild statement--5e has virtues, but its "balance" is not remotely one of them.   

But mostly it was bad in the now predictable way in the ttrpg space--it was over a half-hour of nostalgia-wank for older versions of D&D.  In listening to this, I came to the realization that I am a thorough-going ttrpg modernist.  I've been playing these games since 1989, but I hold basically no nostalgia for any of the old games as games (separate and apart from the experiences of playing those games).  Modern games are better games, in basically every dimension, so much so that I truly don't understand the appeal of the OSR and OSR-adjacent games that insist on using those old mechanics and systems.  Absolutely anything that you might want to do, including all of the things that are seen as characteristic of those older games, can be done, and better, with newer (better) systems.  Moreover, much of the argument and rhetoric on the other side is really about a combination of straw men of various kinds and bad faith posturing, trying to pass off nostalgia as Boomer-esque "the Kids These Days" complaints. 

The specific example that shows this off from the podcast was an extended discussion of the purported dichotomy between "combat as war" and "combat as sport."  Combat as war, which is said to characterize older versions of D&D, was far more serious because it was much more challenging, unpredictable, and  with higher lethality, which required out-of-the-box thinking and problem solving.  Modern combat as sport, by contrast, is consequence-free and non-substantial because the lethality is reduced.  As I previewed, I think this is a completely false dichotomy.  More specifically, I think combat as war is not a real thing.  The people who say they are doing "combat as war" are either (1) playing a sport with different rules; or (2) playing a bad sport; or (3) both.

Since we are talking about "combat as sport," let's talk about sports, specifically baseball.  Ted Williams, arguably the greatest hitter in history, famously said that "hitting a baseball is the hardest thing to do in sports."  To that end, Williams had one full season, 1941, in which he had a batting average over .400 (technically his season average in '52 and '53 was over .400, but he only played a couple of games those seasons, on account of the fact that he was doing his other job--being a fighter pilot and fighting in the Korean War).  Batting average is a bit of a complicated metric, but if you want to simplify it down, this more or less means there was only one season in which the greatest hitter in history failed to do the thing he was trying to do fewer than 6 times out of 10.  And the scope of this achievement is demonstrated by the fact that no one in the major leagues has hit over .400 since Williams in 1941 (Tony Gwynn hit .393 in 1994; George Brett hit .389 in 1980).  Coming down from the truly exceptional results to more normal ones, failing only 7 times out of 10 in a given season--hitting .300--is a standard benchmark for being a really skilled and productive hitter.  Baseball is a game in which the rules and structures of play are stacked in favor of the pitcher and against the hitter to a very significant degree.  

By contrast, if you turn to football (American), the league leader in completion percentage for quarterbacks over a season in the NFL hovers around 70%.  On the other end of the spectrum, and at the risk of kicking someone who is down, Bryce Young--the 1st Overall draft pick in 2023--had a completion percentage of 59.8%, a number low enough to raise questions about his viability as a starting NFL quarterback.  Ted Williams fails 6 out of 10 times and he is the GOAT; Bryce Young succeeds 6 out out 10 times and he might be a bust.

If you talk to people who are really into either baseball or football, you will get opinions about the tuning of batting versus pitching and the passing game versus pass defense.  But in a big picture sense, baseball is built around the idea that hitting is really hard and mostly unsuccessful, while football is tuned around the idea that passing is usually going to work.  If you changed the difficulty scale of either element, you would radically change the play experience.  In the baseball example, if you made hitting much easier, baseball scores would be in the hundreds and games would take days--and we know this because cricket batting is much easier, and scores are in the hundreds and matches take multiple days.

The point is that difficulty is not good or bad; difficulty is a game play element that needs to be integrated into and coordinated with the goals of the game as a whole.  Turning back to ttrpgs, there is nothing whatsoever wrong with making combats very difficult.  If the goal of the exercise is to stack the deck against the players and require them to use tricks or out of the box thinking in order not to have PCs die like flies, then that can and should be built into the structures of the game.  Pathfinder 2e, for example, is known for its challenging combats that require players to exercise tactical skills.  But that level of challenge is always within the context of the game as it is designed.  Hard fights with high danger that require outside the box thinking are still a sport; they are just hitting a baseball as opposed to throwing a football.  They are not "war," they are just tuned differently.

Because the real problem with all of this "combat as war" talk is that it is immediately followed (as it was in the podcast) with the idea that "combat as sport is for entitled soyboy players these days who can't handle losing, whereas the Real Men of the past embraced combat as war."  And that's exactly the same as saying that quarterbacks are soy because they succeed most of the time, while baseball hitters are tough and macho because they mostly fail.  That's nonsensical in the sports context and equally dumb in the ttrpg context.  Difficulty is a motivated game design choice to create a particular sort of play experience.  It has nothing to do with how macho you are.

Or, at least, it should be a motivated game design choice.  The other problem with this silly rhetoric about how macho the old school games are is that it is often deployed to cover up or excuse bad game mechanics and bad design.  And nowhere is this more true than when talking about 5e and its CR system.  First off, it has become fashionable in these sorts of discussions (as Bruner did on the podcast) to decry the very idea of CR or any similar system as a new imposition of soy notions of a "balanced encounter" onto the purity of the D&D experience.  Nonsense.  Going all the way back to OD&D, monsters were organized by Hit Dice into a hierarchical power system, which was tied to the idea of "dungeon level" and a similar progressive power increase.  The fact that Hit Dice is not a very good encounter balancing system doesn't change the fact that it was an encounter balancing system.

Like Hit Dice, the purpose of systems like CR is to give the DM the ability to assess the difficulty of an encounter when deployed against a party of PCs of a particular level.  These systems are good or bad insofar as this communication of information is accurate.  What the DM does with this information is always a separate question.  If I want to throw a really hard combat challenge at the players, I am free to do that in OD&D or 5e or Pathfinder 2e or 13th Age (or 4e).  The difference is that in Pathfinder 2e and 13th Age and 4e--games with good encounter balancing structures--I as the DM am much more likely to know exactly how hard the fight is going to be, and in fact be sure the it will indeed be a very hard fight in play.  Whereas with 5e or OD&D--games with bad encounter balancing structures--I am guessing in both cases.  If you as the DM for whatever set of reasons don't want to know how tough a particular fight is going to be, then you are free to ignore this information.  But there is no utility at all to having bad mechanics in this space, which is what 5e and older editions of D&D have.  And it certainly isn't a virtue.

But it is not just the CR system that gets covered up by this weird machismo.  At some point during the podcast, there was a discussion of the MCDM RPG, and the fact that PCs do some damage on every attack.  This was, again, portrayed as giving everyone a participation trophy and not being sufficiently manly.  That completely misses the point of what MCDM RPG is trying to do.  MCDM RPG, like several recent games that use 5e as both a jumping off point and a set of problems to fix, recognizes that a turn where you make your attack, miss, and thus do nothing (which happens a lot in D&D) is a bad play experience.  It's not that players have some sort of ontological entitlement to making the HP number of the monster go down, it's that in a game where the only real result of combat is to make the numbers go down, not doing that means you have effectively done nothing.  "Lose a turn" is always the least enjoyable possible game mechanic because you basically don't get to play, and the player is here to play the game. Now, there are a variety of different solutions to this problem.  One is to make failure interesting, with a diverse set of narrative consequences--Daggerheart, drawing on the fiction-forward tradition, goes in that direction.  One is the MCDM RPG approach.  But framing objections to missing in combat as players being soft covers over and excuses the very real design problem (especially when you pair it with the cyclic initiative model of D&D, so the player might not get to do anything for a while) within D&D and derived games.

Or consider another rant in the podcast about how 5e conditions are weak because they don't embody save or die effects.  Unless you are playing a DCC/Shadowdark funnel where each player is running multiple characters, character death means that the player doesn't get to play anymore.  And, again, the player showed up at the table to play D&D, and so you are taking that out of their hands. It's one thing if a character dies as a result of some sort of satisfying story element or lengthy, dramatic fight.  But having your character get bitten by a giant spider and failing a saving throw during encounter #1 and thus having to sit out the rest of the session is a bad play experience.  Losing weeks or months of character progression via old-school energy drain is a bad play experience.  Getting rid of these sorts of things made the game better.  And this goes both ways, as well--for every save or die effect that could be directed at the player, there was a similar effect that could be pointed at the DM's monsters.  And whether you like 5e's concept of Legendary Resistances or not (spoiler: I don't), it is at least a nod to the idea that the DM should be allowed to have fun letting his or her Big Bad Boss Monster run amuck for a bit.  

The thing is, I do think the scales are tipped too far in favor of the players in the context of 5e, and everything we have seen about the 2024 books suggests that it is about to get worse.  I don't think 5e provides a good play experience for the DM at all, and worse seems completely unconcerned with the DM's play experience (Sly Flourish a/k/a Mike Shea has a good discussion of this on a recent podcast of his).  But the solution to this problem is not to throw super-challenging, un-calibrated, un-fun encounters at players and kill off their characters left and right, and then beat your chest about how macho the whole thing is.  That's not fun for anyone except a DM who is a bit of a sadist.  The fact that this sort of thing used to happen on the regular in D&D, whether the DM and players wanted it or not, was a design problem that later editions appropriately and at least somewhat successfully addressed.  This is a move in the right direction.

At the end of the day, D&D is a game.  Games are supported to be enjoyable and engaging for the people playing them.  It is not an exercise in enduring tedium and bad outcomes in the name of "building character" or to advance some purported virtues.  Challenge and creative problem solving and immersion (which is another can of worms--looking at you, Black Lodge Podcast) are instrumentals that can add to the fun, but they are not goals in and of themselves.  So much of the discussion in the ttrpg space, especially coming out of this nostalgic well, seems willfully ignorant of the fact that these are games. Players and GMs are, in fact, entitled to an enjoyable play experience.  The experience of playing this game has to be fun, and if it is not fun then you should be doing something else with your precious free time.  Why play a game that isn't fun?  Why are you here?  Let's just acknowledge that, and not pretend this is about something else.

The Once and Future King: 13th Age (2nd Edition) Preview

As we sit here in the summer of 2024, there are a ton of high fantasy ttrpgs.  Many of them are built around the d20 dice rolling mechanic pioneered by Dungeons and Dragons 3rd Edition.  And while I will never criticize anyone for digging deep into the nuances of each particular d20 fantasy game and debating their respective merits, the overwhelming majority of these games are great.  Even the forthcoming 2024 WotC D&D revisions, which I am very likely not to jump into for a variety of reasons and notwithstanding the criticisms of the previews we have seen, is going to be a very fun game that lots of people are going to get enormous value out of.  We are truly spoiled for choice as ttrpg players and GMs.

And yet, even with all of these excellent options out there, I think there is one game that stands out from the rest, and has done so consistently since its introduction almost twelve years ago--13th Age by Rob Heinsoo and Jonathan Tweet, published by Pelgrane Press.  I have written about 13th Age several times--a general review, a discussion of 13th Age Glorantha, and a discussion of the Quickstart from a few years back.  I think it has the best writing of any ttrpg product line (both in the core materials and in the supplements)--clear, enjoyable to read, useful, often very funny.  It has a keen eye for evaluating all the pieces of the d20/D&D experience, finding the fun parts, and leaving the rest behind.  It brings into the basic D&D experience ideas from more narrative focused games in a way that highlights the strengths of both (in fact, Daggerheart, which I also love, is in many ways the mirror image of 13th Age, starting from the narrative world and adding back the fun parts of D&D).  It is, IME, far, far easier to GM than 5e, in large measure because it puts thought and effort into what makes GMing clean and fun (and, as I will get into in a bit, 13th Age is about to remove one of the biggest pain points to GMing the game).

About a month ago, 13th Age completed their Kickstarter for a 2nd Edition of the game.  Since the meaning of "edition" has become a contested space in the ttrpg discourse, it is worth talking about the scope of this project.  In essence, 13th Age 2nd Edition promises to be to 1st Edition what the 2024 "don't call it a new edition" D&D books promise as to the 2014 5e books.  In other words, all of the supplemental materials like adventures and monsters from the 13th Age line will still be usable as is.  As a Kickstarter backer (and playtester of 13th Age 2nd Edition for a while now), I've looked at what we are going to be getting for 2nd Edition, and I can tell you that the new material is going to work pretty seamlessly with the old material.  In fact, because classes in 13th Age are more self-contained than in 5e, I predict intermixing old and new material in 13th Age is going to be far easier than in 5e.

For this reason, if you are interested in getting into 13th Age, there is no reason to wait until the new materials are fully available (likely next year).  All of the current material is going to work with the new stuff, so none of your money will be wasted.  Still, in reviewing the new playtest material, I am very, very excited about the 2nd Edition material.  The recently released "Gamma" playtest (which is a draft text of the entire 2nd Edition core books) keeps all the stuff that made 13th Age great before and brings with it significant improvements. 

The biggest change, and the element that I think is an absolute home run that will improve the experience of playing 13th Age immeasurably, is the new Icon Relationships chapter.  The core concept is the same--each PC has a connection to one or more of the Icons, major archetypical NPCs ("The Archmage," "The Emperor," "The Elf Queen," etc.), and their associated faction.  At the beginning of each session, each PC rolls a d6 for each connection, and for each 5 or 6 that comes up, a resource that can be used during the session to generate a boon related to the Icon is generated.

As the designers have noted, while this structure has been consistent across the life span of 13th Age, the explanation for what GMs and players should do with those Icon rolls has varied wildly from book to book.  In the original 13th Age core book, at least as I interpreted it, it was up to the GM to work the Icon rolls into the story.  And, IME, this was a pain point for 13th Age GMs, since it represented an element of the game that was on the player's character sheet (so to speak) that the GM had to keep track of and keep in mind as he or she was running the game.  It was very easy to simply forget about a player's Icon rolls.  Later advice pushed the idea that Icon rolls were supposed to be a collaborative process between the player and the GM, without providing a great deal of concrete guidance for how to do that.  In addition, Icon results were presented as narrative elements, so while it made sense to place the responsibility for handling them on the GM it increased GM task loading in a way that ran counter to the general thrust of 13th Age.  The final element was that a roll of 5 on the Icon die resulted in a complication, which flagged ahead of time that a particular Icon point was going to have a trap. My experience is that there are some ttrpg players who simply will not self-impose a penalty on their character, and if you put spending complicated Icon rolls on the player, they will never spend them. 

For 2nd Edition, the core change is that Icon relationship points are now explicitly a player resource, which players can now spend in two ways.  First, the player can generate narrative outcomes, in a manner similar to the previous implementation, with a lengthy descriptions and examples for each Icon.  So, the lift of dealing with Icon relations is off the shoulders of the GM, and put in the hands of the players in a way that they can actually use.  The other option is to use Icon rolls in combat to give the player 5e-style Advantage on a roll (in essence, it works like pre-2024 Inspiration).  This is a much simpler implementation, albeit less interesting, but I think this has an important place in the game because it provides a backstop if the players are struggling to come up with a good narrative use for their rolls.  But, in order to push players toward the narrative option, the combat option is twice as likely to generate a "twist," the equivalent of the 5 on the Icon die from the 2012 Corebook.  This works because now the player checks for a twist after spending the Icon die, so the sort of player who would be inclined to skip complicated Icon dice can't do so anymore.  

The bottom line is that I think this is going to run far, far better than the previous version, without changing the fundamentals of what the Icon system does in the context of 13th Age campaigns.  It delivers on what the Icon system promises, in a way that hasn't fully come to the fore yet.

The other major change is the reworking of the eight classes that were in the 2012 Corebook (Barbarian, Bard, Cleric, Fighter, Paladin, Ranger, Rogue, Sorcerer, and Wizard).  Some of the changes are "quality of life" improvements that make the classes easier to understand and use.  For example, all spells are now cast automatically at your character level, greatly simplifying the learning curve.  Another smaller change is to beef up the some classes, especially the Paladin, that were designed to be easy to play but also tended to be underpowered and, more importantly, uninteresting at higher levels. There are also new and more interesting spell choices, as well as an editing pass on all of the Class Talents.  But some classes--the Fighter, the Ranger, and the Bard--got complete rebuilds.  The new Ranger is now structurally similar to the Demonologist class from The Book of Demons, in that Class Talents are divided into three pools (Hunter, Warrior and Magician), with abilities keying off of how many Talents are taken from the Hunter or Warrior pool.  This allows for the Ranger to encompass the many different "versions" of the Ranger that have existed in d20 games throughout time.  

But the star of the show for me is the new Bard.  Bard has become something of a meme class, in part because of the unique flavor and part because 5e Bards have full access to 5e spellcasting, making them very powerful.  The 2012 13th Age Bard was probably one of the most complicated classes, with a wide variety of somewhat disparate abilities.  The new 13th Age Bard leans hard on the flavor piece, setting up Class Talents based on which instruments or forms of art the Bard practices, which in turn provide a suite of abilities.  Likewise, the spells are laser focused on the Bard flavor--there is a spell that forces all combatants to take a full round of combat to talk about why they are fighting, with no attacks allowed.  It looks effective as a class, without being overpowered, but most importantly it feels incredibly fun.  And that's what you want in general, but especially for a Bard.  Rob Heinsoo says the new Bard is his favorite part of the new edition, and I see why.

Two other global changes are on the GM side, with monsters and magic items.  Heinsoo and Tweet have been candid that they really hit their stride with 13th Age monster design in the first Bestiary, leaving the core monsters in the original Corebook both a little weak and a little boring compared to later-designed creatures.  One thing I noticed with the new designs (and something I hear Rob Heinsoo mention in an interview) is a move away from what was one of the most distinct elements of 13th Age, having monster powers trigger based on whether the d20 roll was odd or even (i.e., if the d20 is an even number and it hits, the attack inflicts ongoing damage on top of the normal damage, while an odd hit does not).  Now, many of those abilities simply inflict the rider unless the PC makes a save.  Since the default save is 50/50, it ends up being the same outcome, and I think the idea here is that it makes the players stay active during monster turns.  To be honest, this is the one change I don't love--what I really liked about the odd/even mechanic is that it makes a single roll drive a lot of play, which speeds up combat.  But the odd/even mechanic is not gone, just de-emphasized in a couple of places, and if it proves to slow down play it is trivially easy to ditch the save and go back to odd/even.

On the magic item front, the new idea is permanent magic items now have abilities that upgrade as the character advances in level.  This pairs well with the 13th Age concept that all permanent magic items are intelligent and form a bond with their user--the longer that pairing goes on, the more that pairing results in greater mechanical effects.  From a game perspective, it avoids the problem of what to do with lower powered magic items--throwing them away or selling them pushes the game toward a commoditized approach to magic items, which is not how many campaigns want to present magic.  This puts it 13th Age in a middle place between 3e and 4e (as well as Pathfinder) and the commoditized magic item model and 5e which really doesn't know what it wants to do with permanent magic items. 

The bottom line is this--in a world of ttrpgs that has many, many wonderful options, if you told me I could only play one d20 fantasy rpg, there is no question in my mind that I am going with 13th Age.  If you told me I could only play one fantasy rpg period, the only other game that would compete with 13th Age for my choice is Daggerheart.   It is an outstanding game, criminally underrated and underappreciated, and if you are a person who finds himself or herself looking around for options at this point in time, 13th Age should be one of the options you consider.  If for nothing else, you will enjoy the process of reading the books and having a conversation with Rob and Jonathan about fantasy games.