Beacon is... 12 years old

Where does the time go?  It was September 2010 when I started posting about Beacon.  There have been big stops and starts in that time, but I have been pushing my thoughts for my fantasy heartbreaker RPG out onto these pages for quite some time.  

I'll be the first to admin that this blog is not a very good ambassador for fantasy role playing, or OSR games, or even for Beacon.  I post rarely and when I do its usually a rambling kind of post that references rules and obscure details.  The Beacon blog seems to be more of a navel gaze and not a really a repository of comprehensive ideas.  The purpose of this blog is to represent the game and document the design choices I make.  That said, the most useful thing a general audience will find on this site is the page where you can download the rules and maybe a notification of a new or upcoming update.  I did write a 'sticky' page to help players navigate character generation.  I should do more of that kind of thing.  I find that when I have time to work on the game its generally fixing rules that are not working and trying to do layout changes to the PDF or updates to the Roll20 character sheet.  That's important stuff certainly, but I think it may all be for nothing if I don't occasionally communicate what Beacon is about and why you might want to play it.  

So what the hell is Beacon anyway?

Beacon is my take on the Dungeons and Dragons game by way of D20, Microlite and OSR content.  

I realized I haven't come back to the Beacon mission statement in quite a while. Over two years ago I laid out a bunch of changes I wanted to make to the game, and I've made most of those changes.  Then I went on to make many more changes based on running the game over a longer period of time. Once that rabbit hole was opened I've dived right in and I have been updating and playtesting and re-updating the rules.   I've pushed past the fairly minor tweaks and polish and have been really making a lot of additional changes I didn't foresee.  Part of this is just catching up with ideas in gaming over the last 5-6 years, but there have been some bigger changes as well.  Playtesting has been a real boon and I'm lucky I have some players who are pushing the rules and making me think about the how and why of Beacon vs other systems and/or their expectations of how the rules should work, what works online and what suits the kind of games I like to run.  

I think that the game has been improved tremendously over the years, the last 3 years especially.  In my opinion it is just overall cleaner, simpler, and better designed for the kind of play I want to be doing.  But, as I've alluded to already, my thoughts lately are trying to sort out if its all just a stack of home rules or if Beacon is its own game and following an actual design. Certainly I have an internal idea - more of a feeling - of what rules I want in the game.  I've had many discussions with players on why a rule works a particular way in Beacon as opposed to other d20 systems.  I think I have a design, but I'm not sure I've communicated it out.  Also Beacon has some rules or systems that are clunky or that seem inelegant but have been kept for compatibility with other d20 games and I have done a lot of back and forth over if I should 'fix' these or leave them.  I've had some large back and forth swings on how to deal with some aspects of the game over the years.  For these situations sometimes I need to swoop out and look at the bigger picture of what the game is supposed to be doing.

So what is the mission statement - the design?  What separates Beacon from basic D20 (and the hundreds of other fantasy RPGs)?  

Next post I'll start with the first one:

Beacon is... a d20 fantasy game.