What do you do when a multi-year project hits the crowdfunding stage? We played! Last night Jonathan and I played a celebratory 13th Age game with our Wednesday night group pushed forward to Tuesday. I thought I would GM, but we had quorum for Paul's "Teachers of the Court" campaign, so I got to play my half-elf cleric, Esh.
It was nearly Esh's last dance. Both Esh and Sala, the high-elf bard, ended up with 4 Skulls. If you haven't been playing 13th Age 2E yet, that's one Skull from death, get knocked to 0 hit points again and it's curtains, time to start a new character. It was the closest-run battle we've ever had. I select the monstrous opponents for Paul's game, and if you want a tough synergistic group to throw against four third level heroes as part of a 3-battle arc, here's the roster: one troll, one orc berserker, one wight, one demon-touched ranger dropped a level to 4th.
Of course we also discovered several things we'd left out of the draft, and one of those things matters way more than the others. It's about what happens when an attack that deals ongoing damage scores a critical hit. Here's the text that should have been in the Critical Hits section and in the ongoing damage notes on page 278, and isn't. We tested what's currently in the book and it was too evil, these are the actual rules:
Ongoing damage is also doubled when you crit, but only for the first turn. For example, an attack that deals 5 ongoing damage scores a crit. At the end of the target’s next turn, they’ll take 10 ongoing damage, but if they fail the save, that ongoing damage drops back to 5. Ongoing damage is scary, and even Jonathan thinks that doubling it indefinitely is too much.
As a rule, other conditions and effects of damage are not doubled. GMs are free to break this rule for their favored monsters and make non-damage effects worse on a crit.
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