[13th Age] Convention Play

[UndertakerSheep]

Last Friday night I ran my first session of the 13th Age RPG. I ran the introduction adventure, called Blood & Lightning, that comes with the book. I like the system so much that I want to run it for my country's national Roleplaying Guild, who come together once a month to play RPGs. Yup, my country is small enough to have a national guild meet up once every month.

But there's one thing I'm not sure of: how to make pre-generated characters for convention play? One of the most fun parts of 13th Age is coming up with ideas for playing your own character, with your own unique thing and your own icon relationships, but I fear that takes way too much time for convention play.

I'm thinking of rolling up characters with stats only (abilities, race, class, talents, feats and powers) and letting the player's fill in the rest (backgrounds, icon relationship and one unique thing) if they want to. I'll supply each pre-generated character with a sheet of recommended/standard backgrounds, icon relationships and a one unique thing, so the players have a list to pick from if they can't think of anything.

I'm wondering if that would take too much time. We have about 4.5 hours to play. Anyone have any idea?

[Pilo]

Well, I have only done two one shot of this game.
Both times we had to choose our relations.
The first one, to save time, we (the players) choose randomly 5 Icons and have to choose our relations between them.

The second time, the DM offer us the relation regarding the character with one friend, one enemy and one both, then we had to dispatch the points.

I find the second one better, because we don't have to read all the entities, only the three ones we had.

We also find the cleric a bit useless in low levels (1-2) we hadn't play higher levels.

[Kiero]

If you're going to do pregens, make sure you have more options than you're expecting players. Perhaps as many as twice as many choices as slots.

Oh, and if you're going to randomise stats, don't have random stats for each and every option, roll one set to use as an array. Nothing worse than getting stiffed with the pregen who got the bad rolls.

[CarpeGuitarrem]

I think you could do just fine letting players customize a pregen with a OUT, Backgrounds, and Icon Relationships. Out of those, the Icon Relationships are the most likely to take up unnecessary time simply because players aren't familiar with the Icons.

So if I wanted to save time there, I'd have Icon "loadouts": pre-picked thematic bundles of relationships. You pick one, and you're done! Just pick a mix of loadouts that are thematically interesting, and keep them varied.

Your ideas seem like they'd work perfectly; lists are good!

[UndertakerSheep]

@Pilo: The second idea does sound best. Thanks!

@Kiero: Don't worry, I will use the same point buy for each character and take the talents that best fit the adventure. I learned the hard way it's a good thing to have twice as many characters than players.

@CapeGuitairrem: The icon "loadouts" sound perfect! I will definitely use that. That way I can make sure every character has some ties to the adventure's main theme: the return of the White! Thanks!

[CreganTur]

A friend of my runs convention games and he created pre-gens for us to use in our first run through of this system. He filled out everything but the backgrounds. He left that up to us, after explaining what they were.

This system is, in many respects, similar enough to standard D20 that you can really get away with prepping anything up front- just leave the backgrounds for the players as they are the real mechanic for defining the character they want to play.

[jomac2k]

Pelgrane has some premade characters on their resource website.

http://www.pelgranepress.com/?p=8764

They leave icons, OUT and backgrounds blank. Rest is filled in.