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.