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.

OPD 2020

I want to make sure that I plug the One Page Dungeon contest for 2020.  This contest has been going on for 10 years(!)  and its one of the great game resources to come out of the blogosphere.  

One page dungeons are cool, they are hip, they are super easy to adapt into your games.  I've used so many of these for inspiration, even dropping some whole on top of my players.  There is something about the format and level of detail that makes these so easily digestible and the competition makes the cream rise.  The reviews are a good read as well.