hello world
I am still playing Beacon, I have a weekly game that's been running a number of years now and have had a chance to playtest things quite a bit. It's not a proper playtest since I'm also trying to keep the players entertained and some rules I would like to change (and test), I have not since it would impact choices they have made. Its been a great help running a long campaign and the rules are holding up mostly, some creaking as the levels approach double digits and also as the play shifts from delving to more heroic adventures.
I haven't posted much in the last few years but I'm still working things out and exploring the limits of d20 within my preferred styles of play. I've also been playing and running other games, notably Old School Essentials and Blades in the Dark, both great games.
I think you can play Beacon as it is and it works for long term campaigns. There is not a lot of support here for adventure material but you should be able to pull most D20 material into your game with a few tweaks. I think you would be pretty safe with d20 materials for most characters up to 7-8th level but then I think the general power level of the game diverges from the 'baseline' d20s. I think that's actually good for my personal requirements and I prefer Beacon advancement caps out at level 12. I'm more interested in focusing the game to that older 'OSR' level 1-10ish range than adding more 'oomph' to make Beacon cover those d20's later stages. With that in mind, I still do need to beef up the rules to smooth out that progression curve and to provide some good spells and game features for the final levels of the game. My eye now is on those 'domain level' rules, however like all the other changes I want try to thread a needle between detailed accounting and total abstraction.
There are a bunch of things I have changed since the last published update. I think I will wait a bit before doing another update however, I'd like to finish out this current campaign and do some reflection. I can say that I want to move the needles even more into the direction of Old School play and do away with more fiddly mechanics, in particular how the movement/combat actions work and having so many subtypes of shield and armour. I do want to continue to deflate the combat numbers, in this case on the AC side. I think it would be much better overall to just have light/medium/heavy armour which would line up with leather/chain/plate but leave some space for custom and magic armors in the betweens. That's an easy adjustment I think, although updating the roll20 sheets is its own concern. I would like to know if anyone is using it so I don't disrupt their game(s). I don't feel there is a lot of value in keeping the old version intact however.
I also want to work out a way to keep the current henchmen/hireling rules but not have it bog down play so much. In my current game I have about half the players have a companion, and one often has a whole whack of hired men/trained animals. I like this approach, however it really sidelines the player who only want to play their one PC. Its a tricky issue because even if you sort out the impact of having some players with way more actions because of their NPC adjuncts, there is still a table focus issue to consider. Players will want to leverage their many hands and sorting through that means other players do not have as much to do. Also the problem is that simply so much time is taken up by players with lots of character 'agents', even if they are doing simple tasks, that the turns and rounds get longer. As the levels go up there seems to be more expectation of hiring large groups of guards or even small armies. I want to encourage that but also keep it from impacting table time and stretching out encounters. I know you can always do custom solutions for this based on your players but I would like to provide some mechanics mitigate or solve this issue and to make this an interesting part of the play. Ideally I would like to include mechanics that reward character choices for this kind of play without forcing it on other the players to stay invested or stretching the time required to manage it.
That's about it till next update. If you play Beacon and/or use the roll20 character sheet let me know, I'm pretty interested in anyone's experiences as I consider what to do to cap this game off. Its been a really long process working on these rules and a lots changed in that time. I'll keep plugin away but I'm also interested in other stuff. There are a ton of great options for this kind of RPG these days but I still find myself coming back to the simplicity of Beacon and am happy to share my experiences with these rules.
