Hi there! I'm gonna talk about a lot of the other basics now - Attributes, Skills, and Icon relationships.

Death to Ability Scores

So ability scores in 13th Age and its predecessors are awful. I don't like them, and in 13th Age especially they're basically vestigial. They act mostly as a gate for certain classes, as half of the noncombat calculation (alongside Backgrounds), and a way to screw up chargen. There's a few other things they do for combat, but it's not much of interest. They add to defenses, HP, and some classes do something with a non-main Ability Score every once in awhile. There's no reason these values couldn't be set, say, by class for the most part.

They're also pretty restrictive and build in gross implications as to the nature of what kind of character you can make in many ways, especially where fantasy races come in. More on that later. The long and the short of it is they add little and take away a lot.

So as alluded, most of those kinds of things are just set by your class now. There's two new Attributes, Volition and Vitality. Volition adds to your level when you're making an attack. Vitality adds to HP/level and recoveries like Constitution did. Everything else is just direct changes to a certain defense, initiative, etc. There's no reason it couldn't have always been this simple! (Well, there are reasons, but they're bad.) But either way, those changes are almost entirely focused on your class choice.

There's a choice between two bonuses to Attributes you can get, and certain Talent/perk/etc options can boost certain ones, but ultimately most of those are static by class. Mechanically, this gives us a lot! For one, you don't have to build in expectations either way of balancing encounters around main attack stat maxed vs. people just picking stuff or rolling for attributes or whatever - your numbers will mostly be what they are, so the main things that matter are more interesting: Beyond class choice, things like talent choice, power choice, perk choice, etc will provide more of a determining factor than "did you do the numbers right" choices.

Skills and Standard Usage

So, ok, we've gotten rid of Attributes, How does out of combat stuff work? Well, I was never the hugest fan of Backgrounds in 13th Age either. In my experience, everyone either had a 4 or 5 in one. Plus usages were tied to those ability scores, which, again, death to them. 

Also the name Background is a) confusing and b) I stole it for something better.

So they're now Skills. To use them normally, when something that could use one comes up, you roll 3d6 + level + your skill bonus (can be +2, +3, or +4). That's it! How do you get them? Well, you have them by default based on big choices you've made.

1. Your class gives you a skill. If you're a Fighter, you can roll +Fighter to do Fighter stuff and so on. (You're encouraged to customize the skill's name/focus as well, like Rogue could be Swashbuckler or Thief.)
2. Your Background - there's no races anymore, this is the closest thing to it and we'll go over it more later - gives you one as well. If you were a city slicker, for instance, or a wasteland bandit, this is where that ties in. (You also get an Encounter power of your choice from your Background, but that's it. No attribute boosts or anything. The sky's the limit - pick whatever makes the most sense for you. It's pretty open.)
3. Your One Unique Thing. Based on whatever it is you came up with, you know/can do something. You can roll +OUT bonus for things where that matters. This ties your OUT into the game mechanics in a way that the original didn't do!

This gives you three dimensions baked into your character - current occupation, previous history, distinguishing characteristic - that let you really sculpt what you want your character to be good at. (Or you can just stick to using 1 or 2 of them and that'll be fine - the game will absolutely still work if you just don't use one of them. But it's there if you want it!)

Special Skill Uses

So I mentioned normal uses earlier. There are two special uses you can do too - Pushing your Limits and Embracing your Flaws.

Pushing your Limits is my answer to 13th Age Rituals, which were a cool freeform thing you could do - if you had spells to burn. If not, well, should have been a caster, shouldn't you? And that sucks. So I baked that into the skill system itself for anyone to use. 
The simple use is that you can spend 1 daily resource - a 5/6 relationship die, a recovery, or a daily/recharge power - to gain 2 Advantage on a skill roll. If it fails anyway, you can spend another one to have it succeed, but you gain a Twist (in 13th Age, a Complication). The complex use is that you can use it to have any skill produce arbitrary effects. The sky's the limit on this - whatever weird thing you can think of that sounds like a stretch for normal usage, this is how you can do it. Same stipulations apply and the DC is high. This lets everyone get in on that fun! It also makes non-combat encounters more interesting - you get to choose whether or not you want to spend resources to ensure certain things happen, and that'll have a tangible effect if and when you get into combat later.

The other half is Embracing your Flaws. When you're doing something you feel like your character shouldn't be as good at for a Skill that covers it, you can Embrace your Flaws. You take 2 Disadvantage on it. If it succeeds anyway, you get a daily resource back! A lesser version of this is used as kind of a player-GM compromise for skills that halfway fit but not quite - you simply take 1 Disadvantage on it. Every 13th Age table I was at had a similar houserule in to speed up GM/player bargaining so I figured I'd build it in.

Relationship Dice

Finally, last thing I want to talk about are relationship dice. Getting them is nearly the same - pick Icons, pick Positive or Negative, roll them at the start of the day.

13th age vets will note I took out Complicated. This is mostly because my experience with it was that players mostly used it to hedge or treated it as Neutral. It's way more interesting to me if you have to declare affirmatively either way for an Icon.

I was never wild about how relationship dice worked in 13th Age - they were a cool idea, but they felt very disconnected from the mechanics of the game itself. If you rolled a 5/6 on these dice at the beginning of the day, something cool happened. If not, better luck next time. If only there were some way to connect them to the mechanics of the game...something to do with d6's. Like the new, non-d20 main mechanic of the game...

Relationship dice now act as a kind of hero/action points, almost. You roll them at the beginning of the day. High ones can be used to replace your dice. Low ones can replace enemies' dice. You're encouraged to find a way to tie the Icon in to the usage when you use it.

The one big difference between Positive and Negative is in how Twists are generated. In the original, it was on any 5, but that's because only 5's and 6's mattered. Now that they all matter we can't do that. So I made it a difference depending on positive vs. negative. If you use a rolled 1 from a Positive Relationship, you generate a Twist. If you use a rolled 6 from a Negative Relationship, you generate one too. This lets them feel a bit different in addition to their narrative differences - for Negative it leans more towards making your enemies worse, while for Positive it leans more towards making you better.

And that's all! Until next time, when I talk about chargen and maybe dip into classes or something!