Version 7.4

I just pushed up version 7.4 of the Beacon rules.  A lot of changes to the layout this time.  Druids are divine again.  I'll post more on the specific changes soon as I think there are some interesting design choices in this one.  Items in RED text are suspect and the stuff in PURPLE is the new bits.

Grab it here.

November update

Still running twice weekly games and having a good time.  Roll20 is working well for this kind of campaign and the sheets are working as is keeping various maps in play for overland travel, dungeon exploration and managing handouts.

In the playtest some players are starting to hit level 4 as they explore and fight their way across the wilds.  I think that the rate of advancement is about perfect, combats are averaging about 3-4 encounters and around 250-300XP per six player session and they are spending a good amount of treasure to top up to next level when they return to town.  It will be interesting to see how this shapes up as they hit the mid levels 5-7 and see if it still seems to track.  

The overland map is expanding outward as they explore and looks like this now:

The northern wilds

Using the VTT features in roll20 is great although I wish I could use a tablet or something to do the live drawing part since using a mouse with their tools is very obtuse.  The players are able to add annotations to the maps and I am using copy/paste to lay out the terrain icons which works well.  In Roll20 the DM needs to manage the map I think although I would love if the players did take on more mapping and notetaking.

I'm currently working on the 7.4 rule update which is a bunch of minor tweaks and fixes more than any big changes.  Still slowly updating the spell descriptions to make them more skill facing and still working on more challenging monsters.  One player bought a bunch of war dogs and we quickly realized that adding 2HD for trained animals was too much, so that buff got scaled back to 1HD.

I'm tightening up the language around combat round actions a bit, each round you get an attack action and a maneuver or two maneuvers.  

Attack actions are: 

• weapon attacks;
• aiming;
• casting spells;
• defense.  

I specifically listed Aim as an attack action since PCs with multiple attacks could then use an attack to take aim if they wanted.  I also called out the Defense action here which makes it more clear how that works to provide AC bonus.   

Maneuver actions are: 

• movement of various kinds;
• manipulating items;
• swapping gear;
• assist;
• or other miscellaneous actions.  

The assist action is new here and I see this as a replacement for things like flanking or other ways to give another player advantage and still leverage the initiative system.  The way announcing actions and movement happens it is too hard for players to rely on combat positions for bonuses so having this action will mitigate that I hope.  It also lets other players set up surprise attacks for rogues which would let them act sooner in the round than if they had to set themselves up.  These are not really changes so much as clarifications to existing mechanics and hopefully its all a lot more clear for those reading the rules now.

I also formalized overland travel and rest around the 4 hour "watch" period, generally rolling for an encounter and giving a travel description for each 4 hour period.  I standardized the journey encounter rolls to a d6 where 1 is an encounter on the relevant table and 6 is a 'character moment' where a PC will give some information about themselves either in a story or in interaction.  I like that idea since it gives some sense of time and getting to know one another on overland treks.  Players were kind of hesitant at first but since they know its coming up they are starting to warm to the idea and prepare things for it.  I like it a lot, especially since its an exploration game and I am discouraging long backstories at character creation.  I also added a petite rest because I noticed when they are resting players fall into the idea of first and second watch pretty quickly but it was a bit hard on PCs who only had minor wounds as they usually got tapped to keep watch.  I decided to give PCs who only rest for 4 hours a small HP recovery equal to their level.  I also want to make sure that PCs who didn't get at least 4 hours rest in a day would have disadvantage until they did.

No firm date on when I push this latest update out, but it will be soon.

Big Scary Monsters

Still running playtests and getting a lot of good feedback from the players.  The fixed weapon damage seems to be going well although I have toyed with having monsters roll damage vs having them do half HD damage on regular hits and full damage on critical hits.  Having the monsters do fixed damage seems to take away some of the excitement but that might be my baggage talking.  When a HD12 skeleton hits with 6 or 12 point of damage every time it really changes the tone of the encounter.

I have been thinking about monsters in general.  A problem in Beacon (and in d20 systems generally) is that big bad monsters are usually not as effective as bunches of smaller monsters.  Players will quickly gang up on a big monster and quickly chip it down with their attacks or lock it up so it can’t attack.  TO deal with this for your big nasty monsters you either have to make them so powerful that if they connect they wreck the PCs, or you have to make them so hard to kill they become a slog.  This isn’t ideal from a narrative perspective.  I've had multiple instances already where the party will take out a Orge or an Ettin with minimal fuss but be totally overwhelmed by 3-4 small creatures with high AC.

For a while now I have used the monster HD for their initiative and one the surface it seems like a good idea, bigger monsters are usually slower and it fits well in many cases.  One place it doesn’t fit is when you want a powerful monster to be fast.  You could make it have a small HD type but with lots of dice, like 5d4.  You could also just override the HD for initiative for that particular monster.  Both those ideas would work I think, but I think there’s another way to do this that might take care of the other problem of players dogpiling your set piece monster.

Why not have monsters with multiple HD?  The idea comes from this post by AngryGM which posits making big monsters with multiple stat blocks so they function more like a group of creatures.  It’s a pretty interesting idea and honestly we were already giving monsters multiple attacks in a round so giving them additional HD associated to that doesn’t seem out of line.  This would also be useful for initiative since you could have a monster with a fast and a slow attack.

You can do this two ways; either have a monster with two HD types use both at the same time, e.g. a creature with a body and a tail attacking each round, or you can have the monster evolve/devolve so that it uses up an initial HD first and when this is gone the second HD kicks in.  The idea of having a big nasty monster with multiple ‘parts’ that can attack and be targeted independently seems to solve a lot of problems.  First it’s tactically interesting if you have a dragon with a head and a tail and claws and the Wizard immobilizes the tail with a web.  Also if the monster has sequential HD and two HP pools you can have it start out quick with small HD initiative then once that pool is gone it becomes slower with larger HD giving bigger damage and slower initiative.  Or reverse that and that a ponderous monster become quicker and more desperate when it’s D12 pool is gone and now it’s rolling D4s.  You can even do the 'Hydra' idea where you lop off a head and the monster grows new ones which increase in HD each turn.  This whole component monster concept bakes in some flavour as well which is very nice.

You might say why even tie HD to so many monster mechanics if your going to do something like this?
Well, the idea of basing all the mechanics off HD still simplifies a lot of things and for most monsters it works well.  All we are doing here is breaking a mighty monster into easily manageable smaller parts.  In fact the rules say monsters shouldn’t just be stat blocks and should be unique monster-y things and so mashing some simple monsters together into a big monster seems to fit that design philosophy.

I think I'm going to winnow down the Beacon monster list and remove the larger and more complex monsters, and putting in  a few examples of these complex monsters instead. Maybe I'll add a short section on designing more interesting larger monsters along with that.  I've also decided to pare down the sections on Poison and Disease and just have a few examples instead.  As with the monsters its better to have an idea of how it could work and how to customize it for your adventure than to have a large list of easily derived items.

Changes to the Rogue and to Spells

Updated beacon rules posted.  This is version 7.3 and has a bunch of changes.

Quick summary of some changes:

• Add reactions,
• Static weapon damage,
• Dwarves get an initiative penalty, 
• Halflings can't use heavy weapons,
• Added some weapon and armour limits directly to the classes,

OK that last one needs some explanation.  Ten years ago I thought it was cool to allow all classes to use all kinds of armour and weapons and then build in complex feedback systems to balance the classes so you didn't have plate mail enchanters running around waving dual great axes.  So one hand gives and the other takes it away.  Now I think its way better to just limit the classes. Its a lite rules game, so there's no time for this kind of backroom shenanigans.  This stuff should be as clear and simple as possible.  So going forward you will see even more of a shift away from some of the old mechanics to use more streamlined stuff.  Keep this in mind when I redo movement and range in the future.  I'll probably do a whole post on how I think its time to relax some of the design that is there just for compatibility with 'standard' D20 material.  There's just so much out there now its not really needed anymore.  

• Merged the Rogue and the Non-class class,

One of my players in the play-test said, "Rogues should have the most skills".  I thought about that and I decided that they were probably right.  Instead of having the unclassed character option, I should just give rogues more skills that they can spend on doing tricky stuff.  Climbing-  physical skill, sneaking - subterfuge, disarm traps - crafting etc.  This solves a long standing problem of what to do with the horrible "non - classed" class which was always needed but never used.  Merging these two classes means you can now be a sneaky merchant or a backstabbing assassin, or even a tricky sage type pretty easily in the game by choosing a rogue class.  In return I've also changed the equally terrible rogue surprise attack mechanic to be a simple "if you have advantage add your subterfuge to the damage", a blend of 5th edition and Microlight mechanics.  Hopefully this works as well as it looks on paper.   Its too bad really because I had finally resolved to rename the non-classed class to "Journeyman".  This does leave room for a third non magic class.  I was thinking of a ranger type but, Druids might become jealous and recently I had the idea some kind of Tinker might be more appropriate.

• Arcane casters get a new spell every level,
• Reworked a lot of the level 1-3 spells.

The other thing I've decided to do is to rework all the spells and bring skill points into a more prominent role for spell effect.  One of the big changes is that many of the spells with scaling effects are based on caster level and I am working on making these rather be skill based instead.  This means there is actually a reason for a cleric to pump points into Communication and for Enchanters to increase their Subterfuge or Knowledge skills.  I will try to base these changes on the nature of the spells themselves but obviously the classes will have more spells that use their 'primary' skills than others.  All arcane casters will benefit from having higher Knowledge, but Druids will benefit from having higher Survival as well.  I think the effect of this will be casters will be more diverse, even within the same class, and it will really add value to the skills.

There's a bunch of other stuff too.  Yes I am changing a lot more than I intended to change at the beginning of this year.  The old game was pretty crap actually... huzzah!

Initiative and Damage Changes

So the play testing has been going very well and the players seem to agree that the new initiative system is very good and makes for some interesting and dynamic combats.  Using the Mike Mearls "Greyhawk" system of declaring actions and using that to roll lowest on different dice creates interesting scenarios where players weigh their need to act faster or take more time to move into advantage.  Having initiative every round makes the combats more dynamic and players are reacting to the events rather than just waiting out their turns.  Monsters have fled battle and been caught fleeing or fled successfully based on their initiative rolls over a couple rounds.  Its all been pretty good.

There are a couple things I want to add to lean into this concept even more.  I want to add a rule that if you are holding your action you can REACT to an opponents attack if they are later in initiative order.  You roll a 3 to cast a spell and the opposing wizard rolls a 6, you can cast your spell and hope to stop them or you can hold your action and try to counter their spell.  This is a more interesting choice I think.  Same as blocking, if your quick enough you can move to intercept an opponents attack and block it, saving the poor halfling rogue from being impaled on the bad guys spear.

The block and counter-spell actions have been in the Beacon rules since the beginning but are rarely used.  I think because they required you state your intention at the start of the round and forgo your attack, players thought they were both less fun and harder to execute.  In any system where you have to choose to attack or try some mitigating action, you are usually going to attack since its the simpler option and it has a net effect of taking out your opponents and ending the combat.  However in a specific instance it may be better to react to mitigate damage and so when you see those situations and can react to them its pretty fun.  You are now PLAYING the game.  I think it much more likely you will choose a block or counter-spell to interrupt an opponents action than it would be to declare that as your action at start of a round.  It also means that blocking or countering a spell cannot happen unless you have initiative, which I think is a good limiter to those actions and so they can be a bit more powerful than they might otherwise be if they were just regular actions.  I might look for other reactions to add as well, things to make the combat flow more fun, it seems to be a natural fit for this initiative system to have these type of reactions.

However not all is sweet in our delicious candy-land.  The other side of this initiative system is that it means that you are rolling three times in combat for every attack and this is causing things to go slower.  Rolling lots of dice is fun but also slows down the game.  Picking out dice and adding up the results is slow and so usually games will try to get rid of as many rolls as possible.  They usually start with initiative and I get that, but I think that's the wrong approach since initiative is such a great tool for modeling combat.  Why get rid of the good and interesting rolls where luck really does play a huge part?  I would rather get rid of the other side of things and get rid of the damage rolls, and in fact that's what I'm going to do.  

Beacon already has simplified damage for weapons, based on if they are light or heavy, and I think its time to go even further and just set the damage for those weapon types.  My initial thought is you would take the middle number and say its 3 points for light weapon and 4 for a heavy weapon and critical hits will always do double that, so 6 and 8 respectively (and +1 for two handed heavy weapons).  This takes out a whole roll and makes things resolve faster, and you still add all the STR and fighter damage bonuses etc. so the numbers will work out the same as they do now.  I'm not sure what to do with monsters at this point, although the obvious thing is to take half their HD type as the base damage amount.  Monsters in combat need some other attention in any case.

I might in the future look at trying some kind of system where I'd lower the amount of set damage and use the value on the to-hit roll to determine how much damage is done.  For example you roll 3 points higher than the target AC so you would do 3 with a light weapon and 3+1 with a heavy weapon (plus all the other damage bonuses).  This might work but it would need some thought to model that out without breaking the game, since you can roll a LOT higher than the required to hit in some cases, and that number goes up the higher the character levels so it would have a real scaling effect.  It would also really impact low AC monsters (and PCs) disproportionately which would be bad.  Also it would be a lot of adding stuff up which is doable, but again takes time.  If you know your hit is going to do 3+2 damage unless you crit that's easy to keep track of.  If you need to ask the GM the specific AC and calculate it multiple times in a fight, or Hermes for-fend, make the poor GM do all the damage calculations for the combat, then obviously not so much joy.

So just the fixed damage for now.

August update

Play testing is still going on and at two games a week I hardly have time to think about posting updates.  I updated the Roll20 character sheet, adding in a calculated encumbrance field and updating the inventory page to make it easier to manage.  I also put in some dedicated slots for food etc.  I wanted it to be more prominent so that it would get used.  Also I named the inventory boxes so if one was so inclined they could use the storage locations for random events or to track when players drop their packs etc.  

The example below shows this character with (10 STR) can carry 7 weight before becoming encumbered.  On the sheet you see rations (1), 7 torches (most of 1 so 1), 1.5 wt of coins (1, noted to be in bag), in the backpack 50' rope (1), and in the sack, a pair of heavy candle holders (1) so 5 on this sheet but also if you add two more light weapons to go with that crowbar and her armour then she's at about 6 'weight'.  That number is beside the can carry number in a box marked 'current' and managed by the player.  If STR drops due to wounds, well then its pretty easy to see when you have disadvantage.  This is still somewhat manual, but its easy enough to eyeball, which is how it needs to be to work.

I did change the base amount of weight that a character with 0 bonus gets to 7.  I wanted characters with low STR to be able to carry at least 3 weight which is actually a lot more stuff than 2 weight given the way small items glob up*.  The next update of the rules will reflect this and also I'll be tweaking weights for some bulk items like rations etc.  I also make reference to the fact that hired help does not generally need to worry about the disadvantage that comes with being over-encumbered so those guys you can load up a lot more.  However if the guy carrying all your food, tools and water is killed you're going to have to make some decisions about your other gear.  Also if you load a poor torch bearer up with coins and treasure, he might just disappear on you.  All these things I think make for interesting play.

It's all opt in of course, but I've been pushing it in play and I think it does make exploration style games much better when you use something to track these resources and even a simple system like this is plenty good to manage it.  

*glob up is a pretty good way to describe grouping different things into abstract categories.

Some bigger changes

Posting another update to the v7 rules.  You can get it on the Get Beacon page using the preview rules link (is stamped version 7.2).  I was trying to get this out to fix some issues with STR bonus for melee weapon damage but I also wound up making some pretty big changes, again based on the on going play-testing.  A bunch of stuff in this one but here is a summary of the changes:

• The 'biggest' change is also the smallest, Clerics will use their CHA bonus for casting divine spells.  I thought that was a really good idea since it makes sense that divine magic comes from personality and not smarts and also CHA was the odd one out with little mechanical effect hanging off it.
• Beastmen will be able to become clerics but they will also get a -2 CHA as a racial modifier.  I think this balances the extra HP but we will see.  I hated having Beastmen so limited to classes that I considered cutting them out, but I think this might work and give some more options while not inadvertently making them the go to race for clerics.  They still can't use arcane magics but everyone should be able to have a spiritual life.
• I added in the encumbrance rules but I dropped the numbers a bit and changed the 'stone' to 'weight' as a custom unit of bulk.  Average PC can carry 6 weight of stuff and not the 10stone/100lb situation I was talking about before.  I also put in a table of common weights which should make it simple to track.  This hopefully will remove any cultural/realism overhead but accomplish the same thing as the stone system.
• Made some additional balance changes to creature ACs, spell descriptions etc.
• Changes to costs of some items, notably hirelings, rations and ammo.
• I changed the way taking damage works.  Now you cannot choose to take STR damage instead of HP.  Casters can  however choose to spend STR instead of HP for spells.

So that last two obviously are obviously pretty big but I think that the system of choosing STR vs hp was not working at all and some players were burning out their STR and others were not and falling unconscious all based on how they saw the situation instead of arising from the situation.  I think this rule was totally destroying the feeling of immediate danger in combat and was forcing players to meta game at exactly the wrong moments.  It also was super confusing to those familiar with other d20 systems and it broke the whole low levels is deadly vibe I want the game to have.  Now you hit 0 and then the damage spills over to STR as you would expect.  

HOWEVER I don't want to entirely give up on the concept of pushing limits that the rule was supposed to foster so I also changed the casting rules allowing casters to choose to use their STR points for spells.  I think this accomplishes the same thing I wanted to have with the old rule but without the other bad effects.  It does give casters more spell power but the price is pretty high.  The new rules for STR damage conditions are still in place so casters using these points pay a high price with long recovery times and conditions.  Also since a critical miss or other situation could zap your STR unexpectedly using it for spells can be pretty dangerous, so this presents an interesting decision mechanic.  I may at some point figure out a feat for fighters to tap into this STR pool somehow for the same reasons.  SO I think that in the original rules the idea was good, but the implementation and the costing was bad.  We will see how this works out.

 

The Encumbrance one

I realized a while ago that if I was going to run a crawl style game I needed to deal with time and resource management.  Now play-testing Beacon and I'm seeing it come up where the players want to rest after each fight, especially if the spell casters are down a few points.  This is understandable from a meta-game/video game perspective, but it plays hell with the whole idea of ratcheting tension.  I do have the player using rations every rest and only allowing partial rests in the wilderness, but they routinely carry around piles of cheap rations so its not effective.  The only way I can think of to deal with this is to limit the amount of supplies.  I remember from all sorts of attempts in the past to limit player inventory that no-one really likes dealing with encumbrance and even if your players are game to try things start to slide and some will keep better track than others.  Finally it falls on the Game master to manage all this and man but do you already have enough to worry about.  So a non-starter right?

Well I want to at least have some rules in Beacon for this even if they are optional rules.  I’m going to try to come up with something to use in my games that I can stick with and hopefully it’s also fun for the players, or at least interesting for them.  It got to be simple so players can follow it and so the GM can keep an eye on it.  I’ve been looking at the question and reading up on some OSR solutions from the past decade.  The two most interesting to me are the Stone system or a slot system like the ‘Anti-hammerspace’ system.  I like both of these and can see using either system, but before going any further with this I need to figure out the problem so I can find out what works design-wise.

The first stop on this quest then is to figure out why even have an encumbrance system.  You can track encumbrance to limit how much treasure players can carry, which is the oldest reason.  Another reason is to track how many items or the kind of armour a PC can equip, this seems to me the reason it’s currently done in D&D now.  Another reason is to track resources for travel, another is for simulation ‘realism’, and there are probably some additional reasons that escape me.

In Beacon the main reason to have encumbrance is to manage resources and provide support for the HP and damage economy.  Beacon spends a lot of effort making HP management important and allowing players to make trade offs with STR and resting.  I think that that’s the answer there the encumbrance system is there in order to provide meaningful choices relating to PCs resting, and to give more weight (sigh) to using STR as a HP buffer.  So I’m not too worried about realism or tracking a PC's armour and weapons, but I am concerned with how much food and water players carry since that will determine how long they can stay out and how often they can afford to rest.  I’m also interested in hauling big items and large amounts of treasure, but not as much as the food and light resources.  So that’s the core of the mechanic I want to build.  How much food/water a group can carry and the PC's STR needs to be relevant to this so that as they get weaker they have more decisions to make.  I’m not designing for realistic item weights or to manage what kinds of armour a PC has although if I can include some nods to it that’s OK.

Now to what I don't want to do.  I don’t want to penalize a player for having a real low STR, it’s already pretty bad for these guys.  STR is the PC damage limit, and is heavily leveraged for combat so if you make it so low STR characters can’t use heavy armour is a double whammy.  I just recently removed minSTR from weapons and armour and don’t want it creeping back in in an encumbrance system.  So a character with 3 STR needs to be able to wear any kind of armour, carry a weapon or two and at least a couple days supplies, that’s my baseline.  I also don't want to have to sort out how many pounds  everything weighs and then have players arguing about how much something weighs in 'real life' or telling me they can carry twice as much because they did it one-time back in scouts.  I only want to deal with item weight for important things and the units should be fairly abstract.  

So far both the 'stone' system and the slot system seem like they will work.  So maybe getting into some details will help.  If I were to use the stone system I can see it working something like this: some base number based on armour type +/- STR bonus.  The worst STR ‘bonus’ is -4 so when wearing heavy armour, that base number needs to be a bit bigger than 4, I’m thinking 6 because that leaves 2 units for the rest of your gear.   In my mind before looking into this at all I was thinking 60lb =/- 10lb per STR bonus which would abstract into 6 ten poundish units or 'stones', so that fits pretty well.  If I make heavy armour about 4 'stone' then the base number for someone wearing no armour would be 10 which is nice and simple to remember.

So 10 stone +/- 1 stone per STR bonus would give PCs a carrying range between 6 and 4 stone and quickly assigning items some values here:

Armour would be 4/3/1 stone for heavy/medium/light.  

Shields and heavy weapons would be 1 stone,

light weapons maybe half a stone or 1/3 stone, 

10 torches in a stone, 50' rope 1 stone and etc

Rations (in this case food and water) would be 2-3 per stone most likely.

Most items are pretty easy to eyeball in this range and smaller items can be ignored or grouped into a bag or a kit of some kind.  For all a players miscellaneous items I would say a bag or a pouch of them would be 1 stone, so all those little mirrors, maps, potions, tools, lock-picks etc would just go in that one bag.   Coins is the next item to consider but since in Beacon I went with lighter coins at 50/pound that would mean ~500 per stone which is pretty nice and round as well.

So pretty simple yea, but how will this fix the stated problem?  Well now its easier to see how much a PC can carry without getting too much detail.  A PC with 12 STR can have medium armour (3), a heavy weapon (1) , a sling and two daggers (1), a bag of misc gear (1), 10 torches (1),  4 days rations(2) would have 2 stone left available to carry 1000 coins, (or say a couple heavy gold candle sticks and a bag of coins) before they are bogged down and encumbered. If that same character takes 3-4 STR damage they are going to have to make some decisions on what to drop when they need that encumbered condition removed.   And if they are encumbered, what happens?  Well encumbered has to mean something like disadvantage which is nice and simple .  Also no dashing, maybe slower movement.  It should have enough of a bite to dissuade players from getting there but not so bad that they can't flirt with it.  

The stone system seems to work pretty well.  One problem I can see is that smaller items are going to fall between the gaps so that one bag or misc items is probably going to have 50 lb of stuff in it.  However I can press the ignore button quite a lot on that, so long as the important stuff gets tracked.  I also see a lot of players chiming in on how this or that should weigh less, but again I think that's manageable. Stone is pretty good since it keeps the basic idea of tracking weights already there but just makes the numbers more manageable.

What about the slot system, or some other way to abstract away items altogether?  I've played some good games that abstract away tracking items with resource dice or item slots but the main problem I have with those is that they wouldn't have the same amount of compatibility with all the legacy d20 systems.  That compatibility (in feel as well as mechanics) is one of the core design goals of Beacon so there would have to be a big advantage to use those systems if they drop those mechanics for something else.  Certainly Beacon is flexible enough you can bolt on any encumbrance system and it would work, but I think I would leave that up to the GM and not try to change the 'default'  Beacon rules too far from home.  For better or worse, d20 has at its core the idea of counting little things like coins and hp so keeping that feel is essential I think.  Any system to abstract that needs to keep that same taste while making it easier to manage.  I'll have to think about that some more.

July Update

Been a little while since the last post, but I'm unrepentant.  The play-tests have been going well and the players seem to be enjoying the game.  They also have flushed out some issues which is fantastic.  I have made corrections in the Roll20 character-sheet and made some additional adjustments to the version 7 draft which I updated and you can get here.

Most of the changes I have been makings are in purple text for now so the play-testers can find them easier, but here's a summary of the bigger things:

Melee weapon damage now includes the full STR bonus and two handed weapons get a +1 to damage.  I changed this from a practicality perspective because calculating half bonus is a pain in the ass and two-handed weapons were probably too powerful compared to one handed ones.  The +1 is good enough I believe.

I put in some conditions for taking various amounts of Stat damage, the system allows you to not use HP and instead take STR damage, and I like that idea since it allows for some decision making trade offs when a character wants to push themselves.  However now that Stat damage heals faster, a lot of players were using their STR as a HP heat sink in fights and then expecting to just heal up in downtime between sessions.  I didn't like this since it makes a HUGE difference for low level characters to soak up damage. So to balance things again I put in some conditions when you take various amounts of STR damage. 

Characters who have taken 2 or more STR damage cannot DASH and can only move once per round or half speed overland. A character taking 4 or more points of STR damage in one round are in Shock until they have had a Rest or proper attention. Characters in Shock are at disadvantage on all rolls. A character having 6 or more points of STR damage are in considerable and debilitating pain. They cannot take any actions unless they make a DC 12 Physical save to overcome the pain.

I have been toying with the idea of making these limits slightly different, perhaps use character level so that the available buffer grows along with HP, but I like this as a test and its a good way to include conditions which is something I wanted to do anyway.

I also formalized the time a little bit and fixed the definitions for turns vs rounds etc.  Some of this is to pave the way for fixing the spell descriptions and to add in a few exploration/resource rules.  Also I added in some rules for the weapon durability and adjusted the critical tables for that.  I like it and its pretty simple to track I believe, we'll see what the players think.

Looking at magic (again)

I have to admit that magic is a bit of a mess.  I've been looking over the spells and see a lot of fixing needed.  Years ago I made a couple passes through the original Microlite and d20 System Resource Document (SRD) spell lists in order to make things work better with HP based casting, but there is still a lot of spells that are either duplicates or sub-par versions of other spells.  There'e also spells that are too weak or powerful for their level/cost, like Fly is the same level as Illusory Script for example.  I don't take all the blame for this since the source material is pretty wonky as well and some of those old D&D spells are unbalanced with some just not great and others are too good.  That approach can work if you have to pick X spells every morning, but not when you can cast any spells you know if you have enough zap left.

In any case a lot of spells have suffered in translation.  I've been whittling away at fixing these again.  I'll give some examples;  Magic Missile is a first level mage spell and so costs 3 points to cast for 5-8 damage, and you have to roll for it.  In game terms this means its about as good as one sword hit but with a HP cost and I can;t see myself using that spell over a dagger if I was playing a mage.  I think it might work better as a level 0 spell costing 1 hp and doing 1d4 damage.  It's more likely to be used at the lower level BUT at the same time its not going to be like 5th edition 'eldritch bolt' kind of laser blast because it does take 1 HP to cast.  A 3rd or 4th level mage is still going to rip a few of these off now I think. 

I'm also looking for spell 'overlaps' to fix, consider the Enchanter spells Stinking Cloud (lvl 3) vs Rainbow Pattern (lvl4).   These are essentially the same thing but Stinking Cloud is probably better mechanically and in line with other 3rd level spells.  However thematically a stinky cloud is more a Druid kind of thing.   I think its probably better to merge these into one spell, like Glitter Cloud and replace the level 4 spell with something more interesting.  I picked up Modify Memory from the SRD which is actually a really nice fit.  I liked the idea of a druid having a stink effect like a skunk so I made a new stinky spell cantrip for them.  There's a lot more tweaks and pokes I've been making as I have been looking through the spell list correcting some of these issues.

I really wish I could get rid of the level 0/cantrip label and just re-number the spell levels 1-7.  That would be a lot more streamlined, but I don't want to do it because I think it would really break a lot of comparability for new Beacon DMs using d20 source material. So I am leaving it as is for now. 

Read Magic

One of the larger changes is I'm considering is to remove Read Magic as a spell.  This spell is so essential to a arcane caster that it should be a class ability.  Who's not going to take Read Magic?  They take it or they won't be able to learn any new spells or use scrolls?  So its a wasted slot in the list.  One benefit to making it a class ability is that you can let other classes do it too, I was thinking of having rogues be able to read magic scrolls at some point or maybe making it something anyone could do with sufficient communication skill or something.  To be clear, not thinking of extending magic use to other classes, just thinking it might be fun letting a non magic character try casting a hella dangerous-scroll.

 

Spellbooks and Learning Spells

Spell books are needed to keep track of what spells arcane casters have learned.  When casters find new spells they can write them into their books and then those new spells are available to be cast.  So spell books are a way to turn magic into treasure that can be discovered, but also a way to give magic users things to spend treasure on, since they don't buy expensive armour or weapons generally.   It costs magic users time and money to write the spells into their books so this is additional cost to level up vs what a fighter or rogue would need to spend but that's an not necessarily a bad thing.  How else can magic users gain spells?  Presumably by training with a teacher or studying.  Both those options line up with other class training costs and downtime so I don't see a problem there. 

Just from a physical perspective, spell books are hard to manage - how big are they? Can they get wet? Can they be lost or destroyed?  Can they be stashed someplace?  I thought about removing spell books and just abstracting this mechanic, but I think that these are interesting questions that can be handled in game so I'm inclined to keep spell books as they are.

Making potions and scrolls (and magic items):

The other thing I've been pulling my hair out over is players making magical things like potions and scrolls.  I really wanted to have this working since players generally like the idea, hell I like the idea, but part of me just wants to remove this from the game entirely.  The v6 rules have some simple ideas for creating potions and scrolls but its not well balanced and I'm concerned that it puts a huge cost burden on magic users since they are going to be torn between spending cash making potions and scrolls vs. leveling up.  I guess the party could all chip in to make potions or scrolls but that makes it now like buying magic items from a shop with extra steps.

I'm leaning towards dropping this entirely.  There are strange forces out there who can make magic stuff but its not the PCs and that's quite OK by me.   Not having to deal with PCs making these items makes treasure easier, it takes away the problem of balancing magic item creation system against other class spending or trying to figure out why the PCs don't just make dozens of scrolls to get past their HP based spell limits. PCs are there to have adventures, if they wanted to make scrolls or potions they could sit in a tower all day and do that instead, that's a different game.  If you want to run an adventure where players make a magic item you can do it as a one off adventure with all sorts of crazy items to collect and strange challenges to overcome.  Its magic, the rituals might not even work a second time.  I think its all around much better for magic in general to be mysterious and part of the world/campaign and not something codified in the rules.  NPC magic users just don't follow the same rules as PCs and that's OK, in fact its better than OK since it makes them interesting opponents instead of half-assed PCs.  Let those NPCs craft all the goodies and the PCs can find them in dusty old libraries and forgotten tombs.

The only reason I am still considering keeping these things in the game would be to have an excuse for the Crafting skill, and that's kind of a crappy design.  If the Crafting skill needs entirely new mechanics to justify it then its not essential or it isn't balanced with the other skills enough.

The bear and the maiden fair

The second play-test went well and there was much excitement to be had.  There were five players this time, two returning players and three new players.  The new players played an elf cleric and two dwarven brothers, a rogue and a fighter.  The new players arrived in the town (also known as The Town) and immediately met up with two of the veterans from the last session, a druid and a craftsman, who were looking for able bodies to venture back into the wilderness.  The new group set out and spend a lovely morning crossing the river ford and venturing up the old trail towards the hilltop lookout they had marked on their map.  A few miles up the path they spotted some carrion birds in the sky and discovered the bodies of a woodsman pierced with crude spears and the body of a small reptilian biped who appeared to have been the remains of a combat some days past.  After investigating, they continued along the trail and came to the base of the hills where they realized that they had come across the territory of a old One eye, a large grizzly bear.  The rogue slunk ahead to see what they were dealing with but botched his sneak and the bear came chasing after him.   I described the large and powerful bear charging towards them and the party chose to stand their their ground eager for a scrap.

The party landed a good number of blows on the bear and had it flanked so they were getting advantage on their attacks, however when the bear landed a hit it was almost always enough to take out a PC. In 4-5 rounds the bear was badly wounded but there were three characters on the ground. At this point the cleric rushed to aid them so they would not bleed out and die and the brave craftsman engaged with the bear chose to lead it away down the path with yells and taunts. He knew he was outmatched but nevertheless he succeeded in luring the bear away form the clearing and managed to last one more round before being mauled to death. While the enraged bear was chewing on the brave hero, the cleric dragged the three unconscious companions into the nearby bear-cave and pulled down the rocks, dirt and branches blocking off the entrance.  Then she ran as fast as she could back to town.

Artist rendition of the beast.

Once back in the town the cleric looked for someone to help her rescue her friends and found a halfling cleric who agreed to return with her to the bear cave in the morning.  She rested in the inn and regained her HP, and in the morning she led her new companion back and they quietly snuck into the clearing and made their way to the cave, avoiding the wounded bear they could still hear off in the woods.  They carefully made an opening and once inside they sealed it off again and then turned to healing their companions.  The reunited party was still quite hurt and decided to spend the rest of the day in the stinky bear cave. They ate and slept listening as the confused animal clawed at the branches and rocks outside.

The next day they quietly moved the rocks and debris blocking them in and went searching for the wounded bear.  While they had managed to recover most of their HP,  two of them were still badly hurt (-3 STR).  They managed to surprise the wounded bear, and after a short but tense battle they felled the beast.  They skinned the bear and then returned to the trail to find the body of their fallen comrade.  They found his remains and proceeded to bury him by the trail side.  Good words were said and then the party divided up his belongings as is the way of the wilds.  The party continued another mile down the path and finally saw the high bluffs of the lookout spot on their map, however they also saw it was crowned with a old stone fort and there were figures moving around it.  They decided they were not ready for another encounter so soon and so returned to town to prepare for a later return.

This was a good session and everyone seemed to have a good time, even with the beatings and the untimely death.  The consensus was that they realized they had bit off more then they could chew but the eventual victory and the heroics were entertaining anyway.  The initiative system seemed to be well received and again players seemed to get the idea right away.  Some of the players had played long ago using the phased combat and they said they remembered it as confusing, so this was a validation that its better now.  Also the skill system seems to be pretty understandable to new players as they quickly picked up which stat and skill combinations might apply to their actions.  I didn't have any incidents where a player didn't think they would be able to attempt an action e.g. investigate the combat scene, hide in the bushes, track a bear... but they did see quickly that they would be more effective at some actions than others so that is really good in my books.  I flushed out a few more places where the new rules are not documented consistently and will be putting up a 7.1 version of the PDF pretty soon to deal with that.

Good fun and can't wait to play again.

Four Against the North

So the first play-test went pretty well and we managed to get characters rolled up and a quick romp into the woods.  I'm choosing to run the game as a West-Marches style campaign where there is a safe town the adventurers sally froth from and there is the wild wilderness full of all manor of encounters to be met and dealt with.  I expect lots of death and seat of the pants escapes.

Rolling up the characters was fairly fast with more time spent getting the book downloaded then actually making the characters.  The rolling was quick and then some time was spent explaining the classes and races but it went pretty quickly. Then we rolled for staring money and players equipped their characters.  It all went off with little issue, although there was some initial confusion about the skills, especially how crafting would work.  I chalk that up to the word being used so much in video games, but it did bring up a good point related to if crafting could be used to make potions.  

I have highlighted Potions as something I wanted to look into in the next release since up till now they were just the Divine version of scrolls, a way to make temporary magic items from spells, and not too thought out.  I am leaning toward the idea of making potions recipe based instead

The town

of spell based which would be another thing crafting could be useful for.  In the past I've really only used a handful of potions, like healing, invisibility, resistance etc and those don't really map directly to any one spell so treating them like a magic item instead of like a liquid scroll seems like a good move.  I would put a few recipes in the rules, made up of monster and rare plant components as well as having spells cast on them and so forth.  I think that would be good fun.

Anyway once characters were made I dumped them into a wagon heading into town (hehe) and had the driver explain that only crazy people came here to make their fortunes.  He also said that there was a river to the north and everything over that river was the wild lands.  They talked to some local people to find out some basic information and then they headed out.  Pretty quickly they had an encounter with 3 wolves (2 HD d6 AC14) and we got to test the new initiative rules.  I thought they worked pretty well, in the first round the wolves attacked first (D6) and the party did not roll very well I was worried that the wolves might have been too powerful for them.  Next round the wolves went last and the Druid managed to get off an entanglement spell that dropped their AC from 14 to 8 and the others got in a few good licks.  Again the wolves rolled poorly for initiative and the party was able to finish them off.  The last round saw a critical hit and a very solid damage roll so the battle ended on a high note although the party was down quite a few HP.  It was getting late and so they returned to town to recover.

I know that a lot of people will get worried about rolling initiative every round and thnk it takes too long, but I really enjoy the dynamic nature of these combats as fortunes do change and players are reacting to that as opposed to knowing which order they will act in for the whole combat.   The extra benefit of using the Mike Mearles idea of action based initiative was people caught on right away instead of the old phased combat approach which was always a bit hard to explain to players.  I did come across an issue of omission that its not always clear if monsters are using heavy or light weapons in melee attacks and I think that I might just have monsters use their HD as their initiative roll, so the larger, more powerful they are the slower they are to react.  I like the idea of a wolf using a d6 but an Ogre using a d10 for their initiative roll.  I'll have to see how that works in practice.

So all in all a good session, looking forward to more to come.

Half a fence

I was going to make a post that talked about all the OSR blog goodies I have been reading lately, some pretty old stuff but also a lot of new ones.  I was going to do that because I was trying to illustrate what kinds of game play there was and so then illustrate what kinds of game play I wanted to focus on for Beacon.  I realized that there was a huge wall of these and there were so many great blog posts all discussing variations and slight degrees of separation in game play that I was never going to get my point across that way.  There is really a butt-load of good usable material out there if you want to tweak your game in just about any direction.  I really wanted to highlight some ideas on exploration style gaming and resource management and encumbrance.  I was going to point out arguments others had made both for and against how to model systems in play and I wanted to see if leveraging online tools changed some of those arguments.

The Fence

Also I have been building a fence and the thing about building a fence is that you need to finish it before its really useful.  I have three very impatient horses giving me reproachful looks every sunny day that fence isn't done.  The horses don't really care what research I've been doing or the day to day aspects of fence building, they just want to get out there.  I also cut the hell out of my hand last week which slowed me down for a few days and is probably an opportunity for a metaphor but screw that.  I'm pretty close to finishing it now and I think its probably better to just power though and let them play-test it.  If the horses wind up down the road then I'll know what to fix.

That's my polite way of saying I'm not sure about resource management design discussions right now but I do want to see how the new character-sheets work if I have the players keep track of items during play, something that is always hit and miss.  I also have read arguments against things like item durability which I need to try before I go any further with.  I have a group of willing play-testers raring to go and so we will play test and see if I need to come up with some clever rules for encumbrance and breaking weapons and for tracking stuff like food, water, and ammunition.  Also I still need to get that design statement hammered out so it has a bit more specificity than "I want the game to be fun and good".  There's a lot of fun good games out there.

Other than this, what have I actually changed recently?

I changed stat healing.  Beacon has a lot of focus on Stat healing because we have made HP a resource to prevent damage, so actual damage is borne in the bones as it were.  Consequently you need pretty formal rules how to deal with healing actual damage and it needs to be a lot more serious than HP recovery.  It used to be that the more damage you had the longer it took to recover each point.  If you were down -4 STR you needed to rest 4 days to get back to -3 then 3 days to -2 etc.  Years ago when I came up with that I thought this was a good way to make damage seem real and consequential, however in practice it just means more abstract non-play down time.  I changed it to a point per day, which is still pretty consequential, but it is much more in line with a week between adventures rather than multiple weeks or months and its also easier to deal with cases when you have to interrupt the healing halfway through.  The other change I made to offset to this is that you can't double up your healing on multiple stats at the same time.  So if you are down 3 STR and 2 MIND you would need to spend 5 days to recover instead of the previous 6 days it used to take, but its easier to interrupt this mid week.

I also updated spell casting costs.  I put in a rule that if you fail your spell casting roll you loose 1 HP in fatigue.  There was no original rule for this so the implication was you either lost all the points you spent or you lost none, and I would assume players would petition for the none option.  I like the idea of loosing some HP when casting even for a failure, as it reinforces the idea that magic is serious business.  I still really dislike the way magic in 4th and 5th edition D&D has become so mundane that you have wizards zapping away eldritch bolts like Tommy-guns and light spells being cheaper than bringing a lantern.  I thought of making it HP equal to the spell level so flubbing a 4th level spell would cost you 4 HP instead of 9, but that seems too high.  Losing one HP seems like a good starting point, and more if you fumble.  Critical misses still apply and I'll likely be making a pass over the critical tables to adjust for spell costs on failures and successes etc. I've been playing DCC which has some fun spell backfire stuff and I've recently been playing in a game using the 5th ed Hardcore rules and it has a pretty fun magical fumble table, both of these makes my spell fumbles seem a bit dull.   I've decided I want to spice that up a bit.

Going Fishing

Ha ha I have tricked you into thinking that I am taking a day off or some kind of vacation when in fact I am going to tell you I am working even harder to provide you quality Beacon content. When you want to go fishing you need to open a can of worms you see. And so I am telling you in a very roundabout way I have opened a can of worms. And yes this belabored metaphor is showing you a bit too much behind the curtain in my mind. Workin hard folks, workin hard.

I haven't posted every week as I had planned to do this spring, but I have been working on Beacon every week.  The new Beacon character-sheet is up on Roll20 and available for you to use in your online games.  I have also poked and prodded and worked on the new rules quite a bit (a preview is posted on the downloads page).  Its pretty interesting to crack open something from so long ago.  I believe the bulk of the game was written in 2010/11 with smaller changes being made up till 2015 (This reminds me that the 10th anniversary of this blog is coming up in September and I better make sure I get myself a nice present).  Revisiting the rules with that time elapsed really lets me see the problems with the game, not just in the rules but from a presentation perspective as well.  I am finding a lot of little things I want to change, and some I really want to but should not change because they support the design goals.  

Making these work better while retaining the initial intent is an interesting thing.  I've spent way too much time thinking about AC and Dexterity bonuses for example.  I'm also simply finding a lot of things that I want to explain better or to clarify because they were not clear, or were taken for granted.  So I'm reading and revising and re-reading and then thinking a lot about the game.  Its great fun but its taking a bit longer than I anticipated to get the rules revised.

So yes, a part of this exercise is trying to remember and keep the design goals of Beacon in mind because certainly I could re-write the whole thing. There are so many good games out there that do particular things, there needs to be a reason for another one.  There are many types of game play and interesting mechanics that I personally like and the temptation is to throw in the lot, and that is a bad idea.  So I've been thinking lot about the purpose of Beacon and what it should do that other games don't do better.  I have the original statement of purpose from the first blog post:

Beacon is a fantasy RPG designed to be fairly rules light and quick to play but still have enough meat to be satisfying and to be highly compatible with the vast amount of d20 based fantasy supplements available.

I think this is pretty good but it doesn't really tell you what kind of game experience Beacon is or what kind of hunger it satisfies.  I need to add a bit to this mission statement. Working on that bit will make it easier for me to focus on the final bits I'm working on and bring the rule book together I think.  When I imagine playing Beacon I see particular types of games like hex and dungeon crawls, deadly situations with character deaths, and having story arise from logistics as well as situations.  The thing that got me fired up to revisit the Beacon rules was the idea of supporting free online d20 games, but also provide a system for the more gritty, dungeon/hex crawl style of game.  This is coming out in my efforts to design the character-sheet so that it allows easier resource tracking, or streamlining character creation so that new characters can rapidly replace the fallen but still be interesting individuals.  So I know generally what kind of game it should be and have been tailoring the rules to this, but I need to articulate this so the design can reinforce that ideal.

Next I'm going to talk about some good blog posts I've read.

Sneak Peek

Hey all true believers,

I only have a quick update this week, I managed to get the Roll20 Beacon character sheet finished and put the pull request in.  I was told that they had reviewed it and liked it, however I had some minor process changes to make to my submission. That's all sorted out now and they will be pushing it out to production soon hopefully so that's really great.  I'll post again when it is live.  

I also have been working on getting the version .7 rules all done, but I have been making some pretty big layout changes and trying to work on cleaning things up and so I still have a way to go with that.  I did however want all the new goodies to be out there for anyone who wanted to use the new sheets online and so I have posted the work in progress revision up as a PDF and you can check it out on the Get Beacon page.  It contains most of the changes I have talked about doing, and some others I will talk about soon.  It should be fairly usable for your games even thought its not pretty yet.  There are some red text that's under review and also some big blank sections needing content or cleanup.  All in all its coming together.

I also updated the paper character sheet since really the only change there was updating the Fabrication skill.  You can use this new sheet with both the old or the new version no problems.

So things are moving along, I'm pretty excited to get into play testing.

Beacon Progress Report

I am pretty happy with the amount of work I've gotten done on Beacon in the last couple months.  I got the Beacon character sheet on Roll20 totally overhauled and have pushed it up to the repository.  I think I need to make a few additional changes to it, but they will require some assets to be uploaded so I needed to push it up before I could test and fix those final layout changes.
 

I'll get hair in your rations!

I have also been making my way thought the Beacon rulebook and have been finding all sorts of old errors and issues to fix as well as the new items I wanted to add.  I have added in the changes for initiative and advantage as well adding a new race to the game, the Beastman who gets a hefty d10 HitDie and +2 to survival but can't use magic.


I've also fallen out of love with some ideas and so have been taking time to work out if I should be changing those or taking them out all together.  One of the things I have been looking cutting out is minimum strength (aka minSTR).  MinSTR was a class protection rule I put into the game to help organically control the use of weapons and armour so that magicians and rogues were not running around in plate mail with two-handed swords.  I thought it was a good idea long ago but revising it now I have a hard time justifying all the headroom it takes up and the fiddling around it takes.  I also think that in a game where I'm asking players to roll 3d6 and take the result, locking some armour and weapons behind a 12 or 14 STR paywall is actually a bad design choice.  As much as I hate to say it I think it would probably be better to ditch this concept and just set some limits in the class descriptions or something.

Along the same line I have also ditched the old rules for dual wielding weapons and the rules for opportunity attacks.  Dual wielding was always a problematic thing in a game where combat is abstracted into hit rolls each turn since it was either just window dressing, or it gave a player an extra attack action outside the leveling rules.  There was a pile to text devoted to limiting this option so it didn't become overpowered. so forget it, its gone.  I've decided that you can simply wield two weapons but you get no special advantage or disadvantage doing so.  You can choose which one you want to use for each attack you are allowed (either from attack bonus or from spells like haste) but that is the extent of it.  Oh and you can still use a second blade like a shield for that +1 AC bonus if you are defending.  I like this since its so much simpler and actually just leverages existing rules.  As for being engaged with foes in combat and risking opportunity attacks when moving, I scrapped that as well.  I recently read a good argument that engagement rules tends to limit the kind of combats you most want to encourage, those swashbuckling, table hopping, branch swinging kind of fights.

Anyway I've worked my way through about 70% of the book now and I'm getting excited to start some play tests with the new rules and the new sheets.  I will probably try to push up a new PDF sooner than later. 

Influences Part 2 - Scum And Villainy

Continuing on the last post about Games that are influencing Beacon design.

One of the bigger influences I have had these past years is Blades in the Dark and the Forged in the Dark rule set.  The influence of this game is so much so that I almost decided to start on my own Forged in the Dark skin instead of coming back to Beacon.

I started to hear about Blades in the Dark on podcasts and on google+ (haha) quite a few years ago.  I was really into Ashen Stars at that time and was struggling with some of the downtime mechanics and the reputation economy and ship as a character in that game and the ideas I was hearing about from Blades in the Dark* sounded like they would be interesting ways to address some of those issues. I think that the stress economy and downtime mechanics was the initial big draw.  I really liked the idea that PCs would accumulate stress and need to take non-optimal actions to blow off steam in some way to get it back.  Stress and vice is universal story fodder, just like money being a real world game mechanics everyone is familiar with.  I also was taken by the idea of the PC group as a game entity in its own right.  I saw this idea first in a Warhammer RPG game, and in Ashen Stars there is a ship sheet for the crew but Blades takes this a step further.

But as much as I like the rules for Blades in the Dark, I really wasn't into the setting.  I mean I have nothing against the setting, its a fantastic setting and a lot of people love it, I would probably like playing in it, but I don't have any fire to run it unfortunately.  I like sci-fi games and I like games where there is a code of conduct or some other reign on the PC actions so it does not just devolve into murder-hoboism.  I really wanted to somehow merge the stuff I was hearing about Blades in the Dark with Ashen Stars and see if I could have the best of both.  I tried a few times to either re-skin Blades into a sci-fi, game or tack on the mechanics I liked onto Ashen Stars but nothing really stuck.

Enter Scum and Villainy.

I bought the book when it came out and although it wasn't an exact match for what I wanted, it was close and  I did want to try to run it.  Because I had been thinking of the mechanics so much in the context of the Ashen Stars, I decided to run it as a continuation of that campaign.  I originally wanted use the ideas I had for skinning the system to make it fit the space cops concept, maybe even tack on some Ashen Stars rules, but I decided against that since I wanted to understand how it worked first.  I played it pretty much straight, although I did mash in my own "Ashen Stars" setting material from past games.
If Scum and Villainy had come with a really detailed setting and I had to substantially work it over to play, I probably would have started adding in my own rules.  However S&V is pretty loose by design and with the more narrative system I thought I would be able to make it work pretty much as written.  I started the campaign on a 'lets see' basis and found that I didn't really have to change anything mechanical to make it work and I was even able to incorporate a lot of the setting materials that came with the game, they had a similar iconic feel as the Ashen Stars material.  The only substantial difference between the old game and the new game was that the players were no longer space cops, but bounty hunters.  That's a slight difference, but it did have a big impact and I'll get back to that point later.

I got lucky running it with a good group of players who were willing to put in some sweat because the first few sessions were very rough.  First off the players were not inclined to take any actions because the resolution system seemed too punishing.  Their perception was that so many rolls had consequences or bad outcomes that they didn't ever want to roll the dice and when they did they gamed things so much they had no room for roleplay.  Part of this I believe was based on the player facing system changed the dice mechanics so that bad rolls were very bad and even many of their successes seemed like failures.  This was not the case of course, but it felt that way since I wasn't rolling for the bad guys and their rolls now drove the game opposition.  So although from my perspective there was a net neutral outcome in this new system, and the PCs were actually very competent, from the player perception they were not able to do what they wanted and their characters were doing very poorly.
The second issue was that I had a hard time understanding how to scale things in a system without hit-points and levels and so things were either a cakewalk or devastating.  Either I was pulling my punches and they were breezing by challenges or I was giving out consequences and they players were taking on damage and serious conditions before the missions even got started.  Initially this because of the players not remembering to use their resistance, but it also took time for them to get used to spending stress to resist things, since they guarded their point very jealously.  I find that when ever you have points in a system players will hoard them.
Thirdly I really tripped up on the effect and consequences relationship and we didn't understand the concept of trading position for effect and so I was overusing harm as a consequence.  I didn't initially understand this dynamic so I was ticking off clock segments based entirely on the roll results instead of assigning an effect for an action and allowing the players to negotiate a better position or by using lesser effect as a consequence.

What saved this game was some whining good discussions with the players about what they were not liking and then I really had to go do my homework since we were obviously missing something.  It also really helped to find some good reference material.  By luck I found this great YouTube series Let's Learn Blades in the Dark.    This is a really good series stepping through the core mechanics and very useful for anyone thinking about running a Forged in the Dark system.  Between this and boning up on specific mechanics that seemed wrong, it gave me the insight I needed to understand how the various game systems work together.  The most important thing that our table learned coming from a more traditional roll 20 type background was understanding resistance and understanding how to trading position for effect.  Once we sorted that out there was a lot more flex in the system and players would take lesser effect as a consequence and spend their stress to resist harm more often.  Once we got that we started to appreciate how flexible they resolutions were and how they could model all kinds of conflict.

There is a lot of good stuff in the Forged in the Dark system,  Things like stress, conditions and the downtime mechanics are really interesting to play with and there is some similarities in how Beacon uses hit points and fatigue and the Forged stress mechanic.  There is also a lot of similarity in how the Beacon skill system and the FitD skill system work.  Even with keeping the resolution mechanics very d20, you can still take away the idea that resolving challenges can be more of a conversation and a negation in how to apply their stated actions into a roll.  Beacon already has the idea of matching skills to activities but I like moving away even more from all the incremental +1 -2 type modifiers and making things a little more organic based on the narrative and this is one of the reasons I want to bring in the advantage/disadvantage mechanics from 5e.  Advantage/disadvantage works well to model all sorts of situations, is easy to understand and speeds things up.

The idea of downtime is a bit more of a stretch to incorporate into Beacon without loosing the d20 compatibility although there are a lot of precedents in d20 games for something like this.  In the core game Beacon has built in downtime for stat healing, making potions etc and the times it takes for players to level up.  Conditions and stress are an attractive idea but I don;t know if they should be built in systems.  Also since its roll20 bases you can always add in campaign specific rules as well depending if you are playing a story type game or a hex crawl or a west marches style shared world.  I though about adding in more of these but I'm not sure if they should be in the core rules or just floating around out there.  Lots of these, like these nifty resource ideas I would be stealing from other OSR blogs in any case.






*When mentioning stress as a mechanic I also have to mention Torchbearer here and the amazing and related Darkest Dungeons video game which I was also looking at at the same time.  I don't remember all the details but apparently it was a heady time filled with madness, alcohol and self flagellation...

Online Character Sheet - part2

Second update on the character sheet.  I still haven't pushed it to Roll20 yet but I've been testing it by making characters and so far I like how it works.
As I was playing with it a bit more, I made some changes to the layout and I cleaned up a lot of the style sheet code I wasn't using.  There's obviously a lot of cut and paste code in these templates, and that's not a bad thing since its exactly how I started figuring out how to build character sheet files.

Trail of Cthulhu

I also decided that I wanted to lock down the base stats so that they didn't get messed up during play.  I was worried about it happening with online sheets as opposed to paper sheets where you could see the erased value if you made a mistake, but I hadn't I really though about fixing it.  The first I noticed this feature while playing the Trail of Cthulhu on Roll20.  You can mess with your skill pools but the max skill remains locked until you press on the little lock icon and then you can add skillpoints as your character advances.  That works really nicely and there is also a button that refreshes the skill pools which is handy for cleanup too.
That's pretty sweet and I wanted to do the same thing, add a lock button by the stats or something, but I looked at the code and it was too much for me to deal with at this time and I gave up on implementing this idea

And then a very short time later I thought of how to do it.  I was building a stone path and it just popped into my head.  I could use the tab feature to create a special update page which would house the stats that you want to lock down. I even had the tab code already in place.  Nice one unconscious brain.  To do this I just needed to move the stat strings to the new page and create some non-editable fields to display those values on the main sheet.  This works really well actually.  You can flip between play mode and update mode very quickly but you won't accidentally change your core HP or Dex mid session now.  Its not as sexy as the in page lock button, but its good enough.  There's a lot of empty space still on this new update tab so I thought I could add some tables showing the level up entitlements, and maybe even a text box for some notes or something.  Eventually I should do some sort of automation since it would not be hard to show leveling info by class, but for now I want to limit the scope creep a bit and just get it up on the site.

I have recently started played a game using the roll 20 official 5th edition sheet and used its 'Charactermancer' feature to both create a character and to level him up and it is pretty impressive.  Charactermancer is a tool that you can call when you first start building the character and it will walk you though the build.  Also when you have enough XP for the next level it adds a 'level up' button for you to walk you through that.   I was able to do almost everything (within the SRD any way) during level up and it was pretty intuitive.  I'm very impressed with that tool considering how many options there are in D&D.  Playing with the sheet was nice as well and they have some have some really good roll templates too.  There is no way I would build something like that but its pretty sweet.
The whole Roll20 5e sheet is pretty nice actually and the level of automation is impressive.  The Roll templates are good and deal with the advantage/disadvantage thing very well by simply displaying your roll as two separate results in two colours.  That's a great way to do that compared with having to have two rollers or some other input mechanism.  You just ignore it when its not relevant.  I like they way they add the damage roll as a button on the result as well.
I am still on not super interested in the rollers but I can see how they can be done well and add to the game play.

Online Character Sheet - part1

I'm working on a new online character sheet for Beacon on Roll20.  The previous character sheet has been up there since around 2015 and although I'm super happy that I had someone build it for me, it's now old and parts of it don't work right anymore.  I needed to update some things anyway and I really had some ideas on how I wanted the sheet to support online play so I decided to update it myself this time.

I looked a a bunch of other Roll20 character sheets and decided that the one closest to what I wanted was the DCC_Tabbed sheet.  The beauty of open sourced code is you can reference it and so I rolled up my sleeves and started ripping the DCC sheet all apart and hacking together my dream character sheet.

Sneak peek of the new Beacon online sheet

The first thing I wanted to do was to remove all the interactive dice rollers embedded in the sheet.  I understand why these are so popular on Roll20 sheets but honestly I think they are more trouble than they are worth since there are so many modifiers to rolls or different circumstances possible having these hard coded seems problematic.  I totally agree with having the sheet calculate as much information as possible for players, however those calculations should just facilitate the players making a roll, not lock them into anything.  If a player knows they have a +3 bonus from stats and whatnot but they want to try for advantage on the roll, then I would rather they had that conversation in game then rolled the using the dice roller app and verbally add the bonuses rather than spend time hunting down which roller to use and which buttons to press.  I also dislike the rollers that announce success or failure since they have no GM input to determine that.  I would not like to have a player roll and get a exciting "Success" to then contradict that because it didn't have all the info.  What a bummer that would be.  I prefer to have the ability to call for rolls without giving out the specific DC or stop the action to have the players plug a bunch of info into various dialogue boxes.  I can say 'this is pretty hard' or 'should be easy' to keep things a bit mysterious, and in combat I really would rather have them figure out that the monster has pretty thick skin by making a few attacks first.  I don't think you an improve a lot on reaching for the dice to be honest, someone needs to invent physical dice that interact with virtual tabletops.

Inventory tab selected

However where online sheets shine I think is they way they can keep track of stuff for you.  Paper sheets keep track of items really well but not so much the stuff that changes a lot.  The new Beacon sheet has all sorts of spots to list your money and items, but it also calculates your stat and skill bonuses, it calculates the number of attacks you get and your base attack and damage bonus based on your level and class so you don't need to look it up.  If you put on some new armour, it sorts out your AC for you.  One of the biggest issues I had in playtesting was having the players deal with HP because they needed to track both HP and spell fatigue.  In the online sheet if you cast a spell or spend HP to avoid damage it shows you your remaining HP automatically and can display that info in different spots.
I like this sort of thing a lot since it means less time fiddling with the sheet and more time role-playing.

Another thing that the sheets do very well is let you add or remove rows of items and I wanted to leverage this.  If you have a lot of weapons and countable resources they you have that area of the sheet expanded by adding more item rows.  The spell book takes up no space until you start adding in spells, and the spell descriptions can be hidden so they don't get in the way.  That dynamic aspect is very appealing.

One thing that struck me about the online sheet that is how responsive it is to some of the stuff that I put into Beacon to make it grittier but was an actual pain at the table, choosing when to recalculate your bonuses was always an issue with the way that damage applies to your stats.  If you are playing at the table and you take stat damage in a fight I generally don't bother to ask a player to modify their bonuses but online this is automatic so the intended mechanic of making true damage really suck actually works better online.  I also have the idea to have conditions impact things in real time which is in exciting idea.  These things can be pretty vicious and can have a kick-me-when-I'm-down vibe however and I will have to see how that play-tests out to understand the impacts.

I estimate I'm about 75% finished on this.  I need some time to find the bugs and there is a lot of temptation to keep adding in stuff.  The Trail of Cthulhu character sheet in Roll20 has a nice feature where you can lock and unlock the core stats when you 'level up' so that they don't get changed by mistake mid-game and another one that lets you reset your pools between sessions.  Those are features I like a lot but I will probably leave them off the table for now.   I need to get this out and then update the Beacon v7 PDF to go with it so I can start play testing.