Last year I resolved to take Beacon out and polish it up a bit. I think I managed to do that and I'm pretty happy with what I managed to get done. Initially I was hoping to fix some outstanding things and build the game out a bit for online play. Over the year I ran two playtesting groups through numerous wilderness and dungeon crawls taking them from level 1 up to around level 4. I took some notes and get player feedback on what they did and didn't like. I wound up making a lot more changes than I expected but I think that these changes were pretty good and took the game up a notch. With the direction I got from this experiment I have a better idea of what works and what does not and for 2021 I want to double down on this direction and really polish the game up. I'm still running games weekly and I even added a new biweekly group for a short term playtest and I'm hoping to get even more feedback.
There are still a lot of things to do and the main groups are now coming into the middle levels 5-8 which will expose more issues and illuminate more interesting designs to keep play fast and fun. I got pretty busy at the tail end of 2020 and wasn't able to keep the blog up to date or push out many rules updates in the last couple months. I do want to keep track of how the design has evolved, so here is a brief synopsis of the some of the things I figured out from the 2020 playtesting:
Character death and HP economy:
There were some character deaths but not a large number. Initially there was a problem where using STR points to soak damage and low level players had way too much tanking ability - even more than 5e. This skewed the game difficulty way down. This was solved by taking out that option and adding condition penalties for loosing too many STR points in one shot. PCs still have a bigger life buffer than in systems like OSE or Labyrinth Lord but its now more comparable with 5th edition if you consider that systems taking HD and the death saves. Moving caster emergency spending away from STR and into their primary Stat also cleaned that up a bit. The feedback I got on this topic was that players liked the way STR damage became the resource governing how long they could continue exploring.
Spell casting:
Players most always don't like the HP spend to cast spells even when its pointed out that Beacon casters get more HP to start and spell use is more available at lower levels than in most OSR systems (not even going to argue about 5th edition's overpowered cantrips). One of the big positive changes to spells was adding way more skill influence to spell effects and beefing up many spells that work under a Vancian magic system but not when using spell points. I also removed HP loss when a spell fails (except for fumbles) which I think helped balance things a lot more. Players requested I lower the cost of transcribing spells from 50gp to 10gp and that seems to have been good move, incentivizing that activity. Spell casters generally seem to play very conservative on casting and I do want to keep that feeling of magic being risky, although I also want them to take on the additional risk when its warranted. I believe originally there was a big double dip effect where casters would feel it too risky to burn STR points for emergency spell casting but changing this to use the casters primary Stat I think solves this problem. Hopefully this bears out, but the players really haven't used this option yet, possibly since so few are playing spell casters. Aside from this I'm interested in watching and fixing the middle level game for spell casters. I have a number of players playing clerics but I think I need more play testing of spell casters, especially at these higher levels.
Encumbrance:
This is never popular but having players truck 3 suits of armor, 5 swords, 30 days of rations and 15 flasks of oil into the field really does make the game suffer. In exploration games you need to have resource management to force players to problem solve, take risks and interact with the environment. I put in a simple tally system to track items and it was not popular even with players who agreed it was desirable. I think some players are coming around but I need to fine tune this, likely by increasing the base carry amount slightly and adding better tools in the character sheet. I want to expand the inventory page so that players can label and equip containers and note the weight of items in the containers. I don't want to totally automate it because it would be near impossible, but I can facilitate it better.
