Rolling up some characters

I'm getting pretty pumped up to run the gaming group I'm in through some adventures using the Beacon rules.  The other day by happenstance we were doing a board game night and while setting up Betrayal at the House on the Hill a couple folks started rolling up characters.  Something about rolling up characters really triggers the keeping up with the Joneses syndrome in gamers, and so then everyone wanted a character sheet and started to roll up some stats.  I outlined the choices in the rules - either roll 3d6 and you can swap one pair of stats, or roll 4d6 and drop the lowest.  I think it was a 2/3 split for those options in that order in fact.  We also played the Castle Ravenloft  board game which was is fun in small doses.

And I was getting real excited as they made their character choices, as unlike playing with my kids these folks have played a good number of games and will really give a good workout to the rules.  A good example being I was asked about tower shields giving full coverage*, which is a level of detail I hadn't gone into at this point.  It's also the first time in many years I will get to really flex my game master chops and I found that just having a stack of half generated characters (just stats, classes and a couple names for now) fired up the mental boiler.  On the way home that night my mind was steaming and the few little do-dads and neat adventure hooks I had been working on before all pushed themselves into my head and demanded attention.

Actually running a game now, one thing I'd like to be able to do is to beef up the second portion of this blog, which would be the "Beacon Companion", or the setting document.  I think that every system should have at least one default setting, even if it's not going to be used.  It gives people something to run with right out of the gate before they have to know all the rules or start tweaking and creating things for their own game.  So I'm going to start worrying a little less about the rules (once the 4th draft is finished this month naturally) and start putting together some more posts on setting and fluff stuff.  And since my players might be reading this I won't be posting anything relating to plots or maps or other stuff they haven't figured out or shouldn't know yet until after they run into it.  Also since it's play testing and summer is coming up I don't know how in depth the campaign will be able to get, I can optimistically hope for 3-4 sessions at most I think, but maybe that will lay some groundwork for a longer campaign next year.

*I don't want to get into real stimulation type combat, but I say they could be full cover if you plant them down and hide behind them and are not attacking or moving.