Some bigger changes

Posting another update to the v7 rules.  You can get it on the Get Beacon page using the preview rules link (is stamped version 7.2).  I was trying to get this out to fix some issues with STR bonus for melee weapon damage but I also wound up making some pretty big changes, again based on the on going play-testing.  A bunch of stuff in this one but here is a summary of the changes:

• The 'biggest' change is also the smallest, Clerics will use their CHA bonus for casting divine spells.  I thought that was a really good idea since it makes sense that divine magic comes from personality and not smarts and also CHA was the odd one out with little mechanical effect hanging off it.
• Beastmen will be able to become clerics but they will also get a -2 CHA as a racial modifier.  I think this balances the extra HP but we will see.  I hated having Beastmen so limited to classes that I considered cutting them out, but I think this might work and give some more options while not inadvertently making them the go to race for clerics.  They still can't use arcane magics but everyone should be able to have a spiritual life.
• I added in the encumbrance rules but I dropped the numbers a bit and changed the 'stone' to 'weight' as a custom unit of bulk.  Average PC can carry 6 weight of stuff and not the 10stone/100lb situation I was talking about before.  I also put in a table of common weights which should make it simple to track.  This hopefully will remove any cultural/realism overhead but accomplish the same thing as the stone system.
• Made some additional balance changes to creature ACs, spell descriptions etc.
• Changes to costs of some items, notably hirelings, rations and ammo.
• I changed the way taking damage works.  Now you cannot choose to take STR damage instead of HP.  Casters can  however choose to spend STR instead of HP for spells.

So that last two obviously are obviously pretty big but I think that the system of choosing STR vs hp was not working at all and some players were burning out their STR and others were not and falling unconscious all based on how they saw the situation instead of arising from the situation.  I think this rule was totally destroying the feeling of immediate danger in combat and was forcing players to meta game at exactly the wrong moments.  It also was super confusing to those familiar with other d20 systems and it broke the whole low levels is deadly vibe I want the game to have.  Now you hit 0 and then the damage spills over to STR as you would expect.  

HOWEVER I don't want to entirely give up on the concept of pushing limits that the rule was supposed to foster so I also changed the casting rules allowing casters to choose to use their STR points for spells.  I think this accomplishes the same thing I wanted to have with the old rule but without the other bad effects.  It does give casters more spell power but the price is pretty high.  The new rules for STR damage conditions are still in place so casters using these points pay a high price with long recovery times and conditions.  Also since a critical miss or other situation could zap your STR unexpectedly using it for spells can be pretty dangerous, so this presents an interesting decision mechanic.  I may at some point figure out a feat for fighters to tap into this STR pool somehow for the same reasons.  SO I think that in the original rules the idea was good, but the implementation and the costing was bad.  We will see how this works out.

 

Half a fence

I was going to make a post that talked about all the OSR blog goodies I have been reading lately, some pretty old stuff but also a lot of new ones.  I was going to do that because I was trying to illustrate what kinds of game play there was and so then illustrate what kinds of game play I wanted to focus on for Beacon.  I realized that there was a huge wall of these and there were so many great blog posts all discussing variations and slight degrees of separation in game play that I was never going to get my point across that way.  There is really a butt-load of good usable material out there if you want to tweak your game in just about any direction.  I really wanted to highlight some ideas on exploration style gaming and resource management and encumbrance.  I was going to point out arguments others had made both for and against how to model systems in play and I wanted to see if leveraging online tools changed some of those arguments.

The Fence

Also I have been building a fence and the thing about building a fence is that you need to finish it before its really useful.  I have three very impatient horses giving me reproachful looks every sunny day that fence isn't done.  The horses don't really care what research I've been doing or the day to day aspects of fence building, they just want to get out there.  I also cut the hell out of my hand last week which slowed me down for a few days and is probably an opportunity for a metaphor but screw that.  I'm pretty close to finishing it now and I think its probably better to just power though and let them play-test it.  If the horses wind up down the road then I'll know what to fix.

That's my polite way of saying I'm not sure about resource management design discussions right now but I do want to see how the new character-sheets work if I have the players keep track of items during play, something that is always hit and miss.  I also have read arguments against things like item durability which I need to try before I go any further with.  I have a group of willing play-testers raring to go and so we will play test and see if I need to come up with some clever rules for encumbrance and breaking weapons and for tracking stuff like food, water, and ammunition.  Also I still need to get that design statement hammered out so it has a bit more specificity than "I want the game to be fun and good".  There's a lot of fun good games out there.

Other than this, what have I actually changed recently?

I changed stat healing.  Beacon has a lot of focus on Stat healing because we have made HP a resource to prevent damage, so actual damage is borne in the bones as it were.  Consequently you need pretty formal rules how to deal with healing actual damage and it needs to be a lot more serious than HP recovery.  It used to be that the more damage you had the longer it took to recover each point.  If you were down -4 STR you needed to rest 4 days to get back to -3 then 3 days to -2 etc.  Years ago when I came up with that I thought this was a good way to make damage seem real and consequential, however in practice it just means more abstract non-play down time.  I changed it to a point per day, which is still pretty consequential, but it is much more in line with a week between adventures rather than multiple weeks or months and its also easier to deal with cases when you have to interrupt the healing halfway through.  The other change I made to offset to this is that you can't double up your healing on multiple stats at the same time.  So if you are down 3 STR and 2 MIND you would need to spend 5 days to recover instead of the previous 6 days it used to take, but its easier to interrupt this mid week.

I also updated spell casting costs.  I put in a rule that if you fail your spell casting roll you loose 1 HP in fatigue.  There was no original rule for this so the implication was you either lost all the points you spent or you lost none, and I would assume players would petition for the none option.  I like the idea of loosing some HP when casting even for a failure, as it reinforces the idea that magic is serious business.  I still really dislike the way magic in 4th and 5th edition D&D has become so mundane that you have wizards zapping away eldritch bolts like Tommy-guns and light spells being cheaper than bringing a lantern.  I thought of making it HP equal to the spell level so flubbing a 4th level spell would cost you 4 HP instead of 9, but that seems too high.  Losing one HP seems like a good starting point, and more if you fumble.  Critical misses still apply and I'll likely be making a pass over the critical tables to adjust for spell costs on failures and successes etc. I've been playing DCC which has some fun spell backfire stuff and I've recently been playing in a game using the 5th ed Hardcore rules and it has a pretty fun magical fumble table, both of these makes my spell fumbles seem a bit dull.   I've decided I want to spice that up a bit.

PC Hit Dice

Since I am updating starting HP I was looking at using d6 for hit points.  Using a d6 for Player Character advancement essentially makes players d6 HD monsters.  I was considering maybe swapping this up to a d8 to give player character hit-points a little boost (mostly concerned about magic use here) but then it occurred to me that I should make PC hit dice variable again.  Not a class based variable however - that's not the direction I wanted to go in even though it's traditional.  No I took a quick look at the monster lists and realized that this should be a race based variable.  Basically if a player chooses a dwarf then they should get the dwarf's hit die (d8).  In Beacon humans and dwarves have d8 and elves and halflings(also goblins) have d6.  I think this works splendidly and has the benefit of consistency and extrapolation since HD is being used as an indicator of physical toughness for monsters.  If you want to make a new playable race like orcs, kolbolds or gnolls- then you have their HD already.
I do worry that this will make dwarves much more popular race with a STR bonus coupled with d8 HD, especially for magic classes since their HP bonuses could be substantial - but I think that tweaking the race builds a bit will resolve that.  I'll look at the starting skill points and stuff. I also don't mind if Dwarves become more magical in Beacon campaigns, it will make them different than the beer swilling hammer-chuckers they so commonly get relegated to.  Fairy tale dwarves were great with magic.  This whole thing is becoming a bit more change to the game than I anticipated however.  More play testing required.

I also got in the wording for how hitpoints work, hopefully it's not too confusing for new players.

Hit Points (HP) are a measure of the character’s life force, luck, energy and/or fatigue and are used by players to avoid having their characters take actual damage.  When a character is in a situation where they are going to take damage (from a weapon hit or any other non-specific damage) they can choose to instead spend HP to avoid taking some of all of that damage.  HP reduce the damage taken on a point for point basis.  Some damage cannot be avoided this way, for example poisons or spells and effects that target specific stats. As HP are recovered much faster than damage, using HP to avoid damage is usually a good idea.  However there are some considerations when spending HP.
 ·         Players with less HP than their current level are fatigued and have -1 to all reaction rolls and can only move half their normal speed.
·         If a character’s HP reaches 0, they are uncon­scious and unable to stay awake if roused. 

I'm thinking that I should allow players to burn MIND and CHA to cast spells if they want to save some hit points - just the same as players can take damage to stay in the fight.  I really like the idea of choosing to take real damage to conserve HP and stay awake and I think it would be cool to extend this to casters too.  Having Merle the Mad Wizard lobbing off a emergency feather fall spell but loosing 3 points of MIND and taking days to recover seems awesome.  I just have to make sure that there isn't some sort of exploit here with restoration spells or something.  Of course, simply being able to do magic is pretty cool already so maybe this is too much.

An echo from the past

Way back in December I was talking about lowering starting hit points in order to bring first level characters more in line with the general level of monsters (that's both stuff you'd find in modules and the monsters in Beacon).  I was thinking that starting players with hp equal to STR + bonus +1d6  seemed more like 3-4th level in toughness and would have an easy time with the standard orcs and goblins.  I noticed during the playtest that I had to really pile on the goblins and hobgoblins for a challenge, and even then the players were pretty safe unless they rushed blindly into fights.  I don't want to inflate the monsters so I thought about lowering the starting HP to something more like 1/2 STR + bonus + 1d6.   I posted about this and The Bane commented:

The same thought had crossed my mind. But, since I am strongly considering a HP fueled Feat system I think I will stick with RAW. I had thought of giving the monsters the Strength starting HPs as an option.
Who wants a 15hp Goblin though. I think it would make combats more complicated. I don't know though.
In my interpretation, only 1d6 are actually "hp"s anyway. Hit Points won't be physical damage. Once those first 1d6 are gone then you are doing physical, mental, mobility, or social damage to the Player. 
HPs will recover quickly, Attribute damage will not...

I wasn't on the ball to realize just what he was saying back then but the dude was obviously rocking the Spice. If you follow my posts you can see over the last couple months as I slowly mulled this over independently I believe that I've hit on almost all of the same points he made way back then.  It was even suggested  in the last post to allow players to burn HP for 'feats' which I thought was an interesting direction to take.  Ha!  I originally dismissed the idea as too complicated!  I still don't know if I'd go as far as writing up feats but I have been considering other ways to spend HP that would be organic and allow other classes to benefit from the concept.

I never really liked using half STR for starting HP - that's not elegant. I also didn't like the idea using just STR + STR bonus and not rolling d6 for HP  That seems to be a double reward for high STR and the amount of HP is still way to high.  You also can't just remove the STR bonus to HP or the d6 because if you change the formula  the you are making an exception to the mechanic and I don't like exceptions.

What I believe now is that players should start with 6HP + STR bonus.  The d6 is represented here in giving players a best possible roll (they are heroes after all) as is the bonus from having a high STR.  What's not there is the initial HP boost from the STR stat and I think that that is fine.  In fact that's what was overloading the system and making the monsters too weak.  Characters still benefit from having a high STR because they become unconscious at 0 hp but they die at 0 STR.  What changed my mind on this was the recent thought that HP should be spent to avoid damage and not just automatically have damage lower HP - this means that players could use their STR as a buffer to take damage but still be able to stay in the game - take 3-4 points actual damage in order to have enough HP to go another round or cast one more spell.  Poison and spells or effects that directly target stats would not be impacted since only generic damage could be soaked this way.

Removing the STR component to HP will drastically drop the starting power of characters, and will be felt a lot by magic using characters but I don't think that's a huge issue because it balances all the characters back to a more reasonable start level which matches the strength of the monsters and NPCs.  I think that magic using characters were overpowered at the low levels compared to the other classes anyway.  Also you don't have to start at level 1 - that's just the lowest level available.  In fact starting at level 3 or 4 should be a very reasonable and common thing if you want to start your campaign with more capable characters and a bit more monsters and  magic going on.  Clawing back the level 1 HP simply allows a lower baseline for the sort of 'farmhands in the forest' campaigns that people like to run as well.

So I think that's the model I believe I'm going to go with -  characters at first level start with 6 + their STR bonus in HP, general damage does not automatically lower HP, but instead hit points are used to avoid STR damage.   Stat damage and stat recovery stays the same and 0 STR is what gets you dead.

I know I owe you an update, but I want it to be a good and proper update.

Hit Points, again

Ya so I still haven't committed rule to paper about the whole starting HP thing.  I am even less certain about the whole taking stat damage when you have no agency.  I like the ideas but I see them taking the game away from a d20 realm and into other directions.  I mean hit point in D20 are pretty flexible and can take a lot of abuse - point being that you can play around with player hit point progression wildly and still recognize the system (although as D&D went along it did become noticeable that something was happening here.)  Still I think having HP bypassed so easily could be easily abused or misused.

I did have a thought this morning on the HP topic from another angle.  What if all 'damage was stat damage?Spell casters in Beacon use HP to cast spells, perhaps all character types should be given the choice to use HP to avoid taking stat damage when they get hit.  This wouldn't really change things because most players would choose to take the HP loss over the stat damage so it would work mostly the same way.  It wouldn't be likely that a player would choose their character take stat damage over losing HP because stat damage is so hard to regain.   It wouldn't change healing magic which remains for restoring HP spent on damage avoidance (and not spells) - but it would align the two experiences of magic use and damage avoidance and clarify how HP work in Beacon - as a pool of fatigue/luck/skill/will - and it would be interesting if/when someone actually decided to choose to take a hit on their stats in order to stay conscious and achieve a task.

I hope I can get in some play-testing again soon because I think these ideas really need to be worked through in the field and run by some players instead of just percolating on the blog.

While you were sleeping

I want to add something to the HP rules because it makes sense and is a logical extension of my HP rules.  However I'm worried it might have unintended repercussions to game play.  The HP rules state that if a character's HP drops to 0 they are unconscious and all further damage applies directly to their stats.  When any stat falls to 0 they are in an unresponsive coma and if their STR stat falls to 0 they are dead.  The line I want to change in here is this:

If a character's HP drops to 0 they are unconscious.  When a character is unconscious, sleeping or otherwise unable to react, all damage taken applies directly to their stats.

Your HP are your ability to avoid damage and you can't avoid damage when you are unconscious or unable to react. This doesn't mean just being tied up because you can move and struggle and be tricky even when tied up. In the same vein it wouldn't mean most forms of magical holding or charm because you should be able to resist that. This also wouldn't apply to surprise or things you don't know about, as in a surprise missile attack which you might somehow sense just before it occurs.  But if you are actually unable to react (including mentally cause, hey magic hero fate here!) you maybe shouldn't have hit points apply to the damage.

I think this makes total sense and would avoid the temptation for any weird coup de grâce rules tacked onto the game via in house rules or à la the SRD.  I'm sure someone will use this to beat me over the head with at some point however.

again with the Hit Points

I have more to say about starting Hit Points.  In my recent foray into Labyrinth Lord I rolled up a fighter with 4 HP.  I was mildly disappointed with the roll for a second, but then I realized that I wasn't unhappy about it at all.   I had no expectation that this character would live though his first adventure as even a single dagger blow could kill him.  Instead of feeling like I had bad luck rolling up my character, I felt tense and edgy imagining all the ways this poor bastard could bite it.  I felt good.  It was interesting putting on his shoes and feeling afraid of the world.  Paradoxically he felt alive.

The thrill of playing Beacon!

He did bite it, and in the first round of the first combat actually.  Poor Marlin Densburg - son of accountants, dusty traveler - got bitten by a giant spider and failed his save vs poison.  He did however manage to slay the spider with a mighty blow before he died. Ironically he still had 3 HP left when he expired clutching at his rapidly swelling neck, so this has no bearing on starting Hit Points at all really.  Quickly the other players gathered up his possessions and Marlin's hireling became my new character and joined in trading his morning star for Marlin's grandpa's two handed sword. Life goes on, and pragmatically these adventurers remembered their comrade, gathered everything useful to them, and knew they could be dead next time.  It was fun.  I felt good about it and I want some of that same feeling to built in the Beacon game.

Now Beacon uses STR + 1d6/level for player Hit Points and I really don't want to change the rules so that you don't roll at first level because I don't like unnecessary exceptions, they cause confusion.  I also don't think it's wise to remove the STR component from starting HP because the way magic works.  I'm not looking to make casters pass-out after casting one spell.  I can however do something like start players with half their STR + 1d6.  I could even phrase the rule to make this an option, something like - "for more thrilling games the GM should start players with half STR + 1d6".  I think this will make First Level a bit more dangerous a place and that's a good thing in my mind.

Why do this at all?  I mean this can be left up to the GM anyway so why mess with the rules?  Well I think that it's always easier to boost starting players than it is to nerf them.  Starting the players out at say, level 3 is always a good compromise if you want them to be less likely to die.  Also yes changing the rules and all that is practically expected but this comes back to previous discussions about things like silver vs gold standard and divine rituals - people have the choice of playing many types of games so the Beacon rules should represent some specific game feelings as opposed to catering to the middle ground.  Anyone playing Beacon instead of Pathfinder is going to be capable of tweaking things to their satisfaction in any case.

As for saves vs death, well I'm not as sure about that.  There are no 'death saves' in the rules per/se but certainly you can take enough damage by failing a resist roll to die. I am of two minds on this because I can see a place for deadly things that no amount of HP is going to mitigate but on the other hand, these things tend to either get watered down or abused.  I think I need to think on that some more.

Starting Hit Points

So I've been thinking on how the starting game goes in Beacon and how hard a time the characters have at first level when they come up on brigands or goblins or what have you.  All touchy freely campaign stuff, don't expect any solutions today.  

In classic D&D you generally have single digit HP and so do the monsters you generally face up to (as opposed to running away) and even a single goblin (or a house cat) is a pretty big threat.  In Beacon you have a huge boost compared to this initially, but because you only add 1d6 per level this levels off as you level up.   It all works out in the end, it's just some front loading.   I approve of the philosophy, even level 1 PCs should have a decent amount of HP so they can get into more fights and have less downtime resting or hiding from every passing house cat - this makes the adventure move at a brisk clip.  But sometimes I wonder if the characters have a bit too much HP to start.  Maybe a bit of humility is a good thing.

A character's average STR is going to be 8-9 and so the average starting HP is going to be in the 9-17 range.  A goblin has like 1-6 hp, and more importantly they do 2-7 damage in a hit.  What this means is that one goblin is a nuisance and a bunch is a threat.  I have no problem with that.  A human brigand has 2-16 hp and does 3-10 damage, much more a threat to the average starting character, but still slightly weaker.

I wonder if first level characters should just get STR = HP and not the initial +1d6 as well?  That isn't a large change overall but it would make the monsters considerably tougher at the first couple levels.  Goblins would still be weaker but those bandits would be pretty tough even one on one.  It would also drop the number of spells available to magic using classes by one or two, and that might be fun.  Then again it's an exception to a rule, so it's more complicated, and something that folks could easily house rule if they wanted a tougher start anyway.

Level 1

Ya, lots of chatting in the blogs about how level 1 D&D magic users are hard to play and how it's all a meat grinder.  I have no problem with that, I've run monty haul campaigns and cakewalks and they are no fun.  No stakes.  I'd happily play a level 1 magic user as long as the game was fun and the DM was good.  Now since I support this opinion it's impossible for me to act in any other way because this is the internet and everyone has to pick a side.  Well screw that.  Just because I see this as a good thing in OD&D, I don't have to think that that's the only way to play the game.

In Beacon, level 1 isn't nearly as 'hard' as it is in OD&D.  Firstly you get a pile more hit points - Strength score + 1d6 HP to start. Even the weakest possible PC would have 4 hp to start, and the toughest possible dwarven fighter would have 27!  Maybe that's too much, but it sure makes it easier for the players starting out and it means you are most likely going to survive first level unless you are very unlucky or you charge ahead blindly all the time.  And it's not like I didn't kill some PCs in the play test either.  First level Beacon isn't hard, but it's not a cakewalk.

But it's not all about surviving at low levels, it's about getting to do things.  In Beacon you can usually get into a couple fights before you need to flee or heal.  This is by design.  Since fights are quick you can get through a couple fights pretty fast, and you can get into a lot of them in the course of an evening.  Having to stop and rest after each skirmish would slow things down.  Also magic burns hit points.  Forget about casting one spell a day in Beacon, you can cast 4 or 5 pretty handily - you don't even need to pick them out ahead of time.  However even though a first level Beacon 'magic user' can cast way more spells than a D&D magic user, they can also use crossbows or short swords.  Ol' Thedric sure finds his crossbow in a hurry when the goblins come a running.  What I find the most interesting about using HP as spell juice is that players ration their spells, they don't want to be down to 3 or 4 hp - even if that is all they would have in peek condition in D&D.  It's a visceral thing but it works well - it's a metagamey reaction that simulates character tension/motivation, kind of like the fear players get from level stealing undead.

So I'm of the opinion that this Beacon low level game is working - working for me anyway.  The play test we've been running has characters up to level 3 now and despite a couple little grumbles, I think that the characters are pretty capable but not overpowered.  Really it comes down to what you throw at them at first level, and I'd have no problem throwing a half dozen goblins or a couple of giant frogs at them.  I think it's working for the players too, they seem to have enough to do that they aren't pulling 15 minute adventure days - but have also learned that if they don't ration their resources they are not immune to loosing half the party or flirting with a TPK.

So does this mean I'm not old sckool?  Well I think a lot of my game preferences are OSR certified even if I run a d20 system.  I like descriptive actions, random encounters, unbalanced encounters and resource management.  I'll kill your PC, I'll kill them dead.  I just hope I don't loose any readers because I didn't make everything into charts or subscribe to the meat-grinder chargen philosophy.