Beacon was designed to be light and simple while still feeling like D&D and to remain essentially compatible with (in 2010) modern d20 materials. There are lots of interesting fantasy games, that use other systems or even rebuild classic D&D. Some use dice pools, point economies or player and GM playbooks. Tempting as it can be to play with these however, the core design of Beacon is the d20 system.
Using the standard D20 mechanics you resolve most challenges using a DC or difficulty class. The DC is assigned by the game master is determined by how hard the described action is vs the method used to attempt it. A DC of 5 is for simple things, 10 for normal risk, 15 for hard stuff and 20 for really challenging things. You can even go higher; DCs like 25 or 30 should be used for truly heroic tasks. There are additional rules but unlike older versions of D&D, with their many tables and charts, d20 really does try to standardize challenge resolution on this simple mechanic. Even combat uses armour class (AC) as a special version of DC with its associated combat modifiers.
The best reason to use d20 is the amount of material that is available for it. With very little effort you can adjust materials on the fly between sources. I do remember the days when the most interesting modules were written for fantasy systems MERP or Role Master and converting these on the fly to d20 took some effort. Years later, when the d20 Open Game License, came out it seemed that this was going to become the standard for a vast library of sourcebooks and games. Now there are always going to be published materials that need tweaking for your campaign, adjustments to monsters, treasure, spells, the desired tone etc., however I wanted people to be able to use as much of the existing d20 material in Beacon with as little work as possible.
After 12 years has this paid off?
Well yes and no. Using a simple d20 system has been great for running games and for tweaking rules. Its a great baseline. As for using other material, its not come up as much as I expected and to be honest most of the material I personally use for games is scaled and compatible with the older pre-d20 rules and so needs a lot of adjustment anyway. The d20 materials I have read don't fit the tone I like, although the power levels are closer to Beacon (up to the point where they aren't).
I have had a constant tug of war trying to find that balance to maintain compatibility between the low values often seen in old AD&D style games and the higher values seen in modern D&D. My preference for campaign materials seems to land in the older material - mostly the pre-d20 or more modern OSR stuff, however I am first to admin that Beacon which has d20 in its core tracks much closer to d20 monster manuals than it does to the old school monster stats I enjoy. I have a simple monster stat system in the rules, but you can still easily pull 5th edition monsters right into your Beacon game for use at their intended threat level, where say Labyrinth Lord monsters would generally be too low powered and take a bit of adjustment. I have mostly relied on generating simplified Beacon monster stats based on creature HD; type x number, and then adding special abilities from the source material.
I have many times lamented this and thought about making changes to down-shift this towards the old materials, but it would come at the expense of this initial design statement. Twelve years ago that seemed like crazy talk to throw away d20 sources, but today with so many niche d20 experiences its not as wild a prospect. The market keeps changing however, especially with digital VTT products coming out. To be useful Beacon needs to be usable and so maybe its not so bad a novice GM can drop in their favorite 5e dungeons and monsters while still benefiting from the other streamlined features in Beacon. As for my preferences, I can always adjust my favorite adventures on the fly.
As I was writing this post, The Alexandrian posted a thing about the difference in skill resolution between different editions of D&D which is a pretty good read and very relevant to this topic. Beacon ties skills to leveling and already bounds 20 and 1 rolls with a critical hits and fumbles but that bounded accuracy does not apply to rolls outside of combat. Its possible to roll a natural 20 and succeed a non-combat challenge but roll a 19+3 and fail one. He does have some good discussion in that article why the different versions feel so different power wise.
The next design choice I want to talk about is related to how these d20 core mechanics are leveraged.
Beacon is... a rules-lite fantasy game.
So that's next time.
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