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.