Legit

So I was logging in to do a little post on my other blog about the director's cut of the Watchmen movie and I naturally checked my blog stats because of narcissism and stuff, and anyway (get to the point) I noticed a link-back from the RPGGeek site.  So I followed it.  So hey, Beacon has a page on the RPG geek site!  I mean it's not a super awesome picture page with tons of reviews on it and confetti and everything, but someone took the time to load it up and even enter the basic lowdown of the game details.  Thank you that someone!  So now I guess I need to get on the stick and fix those monster stats and write up a Milham supplement and all those good things that I kind of want to do but that mean I have to stop being lazy.

So now also I need to go find my password for Boardgamegeek and all that so I can respond to and embrace all my fans and admirers and engage in many flamewars.  Funny story, I was pretty active on this site like 10 years ago and posted a lot of game pictures up back when there weren't so many as there are today.  In fact think I was the one who posted the first actual pics of such games as 4000AD and Alien Contact (dude I entered Alien Contact into their database where it has languished for years).

Alien Contact on my freezer

4000 AD - recognize any appliances here?

Enough tooting my own horn.  It sure is nice to see someone took the time to enter my little heart-breaker on the geek.

Beacon Plus

I had a Google Plus page for Beacon but now they gone and integrated Google Plus and Blogger so I hooked it all up and am curious to see what happens.  Hopefully good things.  Hopefully I won't loose all my posts or spam everyone on G+ with messages.  Hopefully it will let them of you out there who are keen on Beacon keep track of things easier and keep them who aren't interested in Beacon out in the cold dark depths where they belong.  Also that it lets more folks know about Beacon because it's my special little snowflake.

Beacon fifth draft

Here is the fifth draft of Beacon.

In this update you will find a bunch of changes which I thought would improve the game after play testing the previous version with a small group of folks. I think the major highlights in this version are the combat split into missile and melee phases, and the changes to the non-magic using classes.

I hope to get long play out of this one and very much hope that I can promote these rule to the first real release version of Beacon if it manages to last through lots more scrutiny and play testing.

Please let me know how it works out for you.

Download the Beacon fifth draft PDF
Download the character sheet

Objects in mirror

48!?  Who's been touching my lucky dice?

Well it's been almost a year since I started this design blog for Beacon and I just noticed I just posted my 100th post on September 1st.  Last September I was busily working away on my own little fantasy heartbreaker and I had just gone from reading blogs about role playing and playing Microlite with the kids to starting this blog and signing up with a local game group, getting ready to play some real grownup RPG.  Since then I've been introduced to Savage Worlds, Atomic Highway, and Hero system.  I've also had the chance to run a good play test of my Beacon d20 rules.  Ya 100 posts in a year isn't a lot really but then again I tried to keep this about Beacon and not so much about all the other things I like.  Maybe if I could come up with a good name I'd start an alternate blog and post about books and video games and other things.  Maybe that would be too much work.

Next Friday will be the first anniversary of the Beacon site and serendipitously it will also be the last in this series of Beacon play tests.  Now we're going to play some other games and even though I have really enjoyed the DMs chair again, I'm excited to get back into the player seat for a bit.  We will have played 7 sessions and all the characters will have made level 3 or be near enough that it makes no matter.  I am hopeful that we will return to Beacon again later on to continue the fun testing, either with the existing characters or new ones starting out at level 3 - or some mix of the two.  I also hope to release the 5th draft of Beacon this fall and incorporate the lessons learned from this play test.  A lot of the work I have been putting in this summer has been in the setting of this play test and even though much of it is sandbox, I've grown fond of it.  I believe I am going to try to put together something in the vein of a sandbox guide to the world appropriate for use with Beacon and hopefully easily adaptable for any low level d&d based campaign.  I don't expect it will be a hefty grimoire in the vein of THE WORLD OF BEACON! but it might be a nice PDF.  I really enjoy the sandbox full of plot nuggets campaign approach (for some reason I'm thinking of a catbox now...ugg) but I'm not partial to the pure hexcrawl.  I find that unless I have a general knowledge of the area the players are running about in, it's hard for me to run a decent game.  Maybe putting together some short world overviews and a couple maps will appeal to those of a similar bent.

Play test: On Skills

The play test is still going and it's a lot of fun for me (hopefully fun for the players as well - he he) as I'm getting the old kinks worked out and trying to find my GM voice again.  The party is still all first level after three sessions but I don't think that's necessarily bad since it is a gritty game I'm running and I'm getting a good vibe from the experience calculator as written.*  The party has encountered a small gang of bandits, slain a handful of hobgoblins, been attacked by some huge scorpions and smashed up a dozen or so goblins and they are getting close to second level.  Aside from the issues of the first session the rules as written seem to be working out pretty well and I'm also enjoying the simple random encounter tables I whipped up for travel in the forest, swamp, hills and road around Milham.  I do have some thoughts about playing however, or more specifically notes about how skills are being played.

I have here a bunch of guys who have played a lot of games.  These guys have played a lot of d&d of various types and a lot of other systems as well.  They are good at following not just the rules, but the spirit of the rules and aren't trying to 'game' the system over a typo.  Which is why I am having such a dilemma when they are telling me stuff like "I use my survival skill to sneak up on the goblin" and "I'm going to use knowledge to try to find the hidden entrance".  I probably will tell them to use those skills in those situations (as opposed to subterfuge, because of the context they are giving), but I know that if they are doing this then some people will probably be doing it EVEN MORE.  Especially those coming from more modern D&D.

It's a natural tendency for players to want to use the skills they are good at and that's all well and good but I think it does lead down a road where you have people trying to justify using their best skills for everything - and that will probably break the system.  As a GM you can't just say no all the time because that will also break the system.  The Beacon/Microlite skills are purposefully vague so that they can be combined in interesting and entertaining ways and the last thing I want to do is get into the situation where someone says "I can't tie the rope, I don't have that skill".  That is the real enemy right there, that way of thinking.  Meditating on this for a while now and what I think must be done is to crack down on this in the rules by very explicitly stating the following:

Players describe their actions without using any skill or stat references, then the GM assigns the DC and the skills/stats to use.  

I think this is one of those rare play-style rules that can't just be mentioned, it needs to be emphasized and entrenched in the system as a procedure. Sure you can appeal the GM's decision and make your case and all that if you think you are getting the shaft because you wanted to use your 7 knowledge to punch someone**, but that has to be after the fact because otherwise it is just too easy for players to fall into the old way of thinking a skill for an action as opposed to DESCRIBING THEIR ACTIONS and thus metagaming their way out of a lot of fun.  Also if the GM is shafting people or the players are arguing skill checks all the time then you probably need a more structured game than Beacon anyway.  Ya play your game your way and all that, but sometimes rules really set a tone.  It kind of reminds me of the suggestion in the card game Dominion to verbalize your action and buy status as you play your cards - following that style simply makes the game better for everyone.



*basic rate = (HD type * HD number )*10, for example a goblin with 1d6 would be worth 60xp, where a 4d8 monster would be worth 320.  Add some extra for special abilities.

** "But I have studied anatomy tomes and I know where to punch them better!"

Analytics

I realize that I'm not a big playa on the blog circuit.  I don't generally post about stuff unless it directly references Beacon development (mostly).  I am not in this so I can quit my day job.  I am a curious wide eyed doe however, and I do like to see how many folks are stopping by and love it when I get new followers.  Anyway for a little while now I've been curious as to how many people outside my game group have downloaded and tried Beacon.  Blogger gives you some statistics as to how many folks are reading your posts and stuff but it is more a guess than a measure I believe, I mean how else would you see 14 page views listed in the overview but only two listed in the page view breakdown section and six on that little world map?

Anyway la-de-da, I've set up Google analytics in Google docs so I can track how many times people are viewing the Beacon PDF because that's what I really want to know.  It's pretty neat and they have made it easy to do, however I have no idea if it works because I haven't seen any results pop up yet.  You do know about the PDF right?  It's just over there in the corner, waiting for you to give it a look.

Now I know it's only been a day but dammit I want my monkey men analytics!

Look at you, all covered in blood.

A friend of mine was telling me about Dragon Age and how in the game after a combat when you are talking to NPCs you are still shown as being covered in blood.  I think this is great, however I bet those NPCs don't react to this in any way (although computer NPCs generally let you walk around behind them and loot their houses/stores while they stare at the wall).  Anyway the point is that combat would make you filthy.  Me, I can't even get my bike out of the shed without getting all dirty.

I would like to pull this card out in a tabletop game however.  Imagine the characters have been invoved in even a small skirmish on the road and a couple days later they come to a town.  The town watch would ask them where they were coming from and how they found the roads and then specifically ask about the bloodstains on their cloaks.  It's not like they have changed or stopped at the river to wash.

"Why officer we are a band of minstrels coming to town to participate in the autumn festival. Blood?  What? You want to look in the saddlebags?"

Also blood (not to mention sword and arrow tears, scorch marks and all the other things you might come across in a fantasy world combat) would probably be pretty hard to wash out.  I would imagine the party looks pretty messy, and in a dangerous way that would get you reported to the neighborhood watch if you were walking around civilized folks.  Yes everyone is dirty but they are mostly covered in shit, not blood and brains. If they are actually coming back from a dungeon then it would be like 50 times worse - they should be lucky if they even have clothes.  Try playing out a scene where the characters slip off to an underground lair and then have to pop in for tea at the magistrates house.

Why "Beacon"?

Why am I calling it Beacon?  When I play Microlite with the kids we just call it d&d (notice the lowercase) and in my opinion this is just like we use band-aid or frisbee.  My kids don't ask for a Band-Aid brand wound binding (or even for a bandage) or a Frisbee Disc, they ask for a princess band-aid or the blue frisbee.  They don't ask to play Microlite - they ask to play d&d.  I would bet that "d&d" has passed any reasonable test for genericized trademark by now.

Anyway I was thinking of all the "Blank & Blank" names used for rpgs and I knew that another one wouldn't really stand out in peoples minds, I wanted to go with something that would.  I don't want to compete with the likes of Tunnels & Trolls or Castles & Crusades or Swords & Wizardry.  I like Labyrinth Lord because it kind of avoids that problem while still sounding similar.  Also I am not working on a retro-clone - Microlite is firmly in the d20 camp even though it is trying to capture the pre-skill old skool play style.  "Swine-men and Scimitars" wasn't going to cut it.

I considered a Microlite style name or adding a M20 to something, say "MicroPillager" or "Caverns M20" but I didn't want it to appear to be a programming language and I really wanted to represent something 'lite' not something super or micro-lite.

Lite... Light.  Hmmm, maybe "Light Quest" or "Light Spell".  Maybe "Torch Bearer" (yuck).  Maybe Beacon.   Yea...  Beacon.  A shining light in the dark.  A warning of trouble.  I liked that a lot.

As a bonus when I searched to see if it was already being used and went to beacon on Wikipedia there was an awesome illustration by Karl Dahl called Vardetenning* AND it was in the public domain.  Wow. that name and that image seemed to really sum up what I thought the feel of this system should be. I think was a sign that the RPG gods were smiling on me.

But I know that when we play it will still be d&d.


*if you didn't put it together yet it's the illo used for the blog header and on the cover of the Beacon PDF.

Why (not) Microlite?

That's a very good question.
I started playing with AD&D first edition a long time ago and when AD&D 2nd edition came out I tried to like it but quickly came to the conclusion that things just weren't holding together well (not to mention that horrible Monster Manual binder thingy).  There were too many tables to check and every game mechanic was on a different chart.  Not a game went by without something to argue about or something to look up.  I tried to play Role Master and it was great stuff but much too cumbersome for my style of play (loved those critical tables though!).  I eventually built my own system based on percentile dice and a power ranking system somewhat like the Marvel superheroes system "Universal Results Table".  That worked well for a couple years but the largest issue was that i had to convert every thing into this system; every game supplement, every published module, every damn Lizardman.  I played some other games and eventually stopped playing as life intruded and people lost touch.  No more role playing, it was all I could do to get a board game in every now and then.  I did look at 3rd edition when it came out and heard about the OGL and heard about the screwage and the bloat and just shrugged and played me some Puerto Rico.

Well now there's blogs and there's people posting things up that are interesting and fun.  Now I hate me some blogs (I was a WIKI and forum-man from way back and I don't want to hear about your cousin's soup recipe) but dammit I liked reading some of them ones about gaming.

About a year ago I ran across the Microlite site put up by greywulf and I really really liked what he had done.  Here was the core of a system that you could fit on a couple pages and still manage to run a comprehensive game.  And the best part was that it was really simple to modify a whole swath of d20 material to use in the system.  You could do it on the fly!  Well I had missed the d20 train but I hadn't missed the fact that there was a metric fuckton of modules and supplements out there using it.  I printed off a copy and started a game with my kids and it was just great.  I'm still running that game and it's still great.


But maybe it could be greater...

• Microlite changes magic to a point based system and I really like that, however it means if you simply pull spells from the SRD you are going to run into some problems because those lists are based on an interval system and not a points system.
• Microlite has pretty loose combat rounds, I think I'd enjoy a touch more structure.
• Microlite classes are basically the same as SRD classes without skills or feats and with very stripped down mechanics, I think they could be a bit more defined for the system.
• I like a critical table (blame Role Master) but just a little one (blame Role Master).
• Dammit druids should be hedge magey magic users and not clerics!

So that's why I am modding the Microlite even though I think it's great.

Welcome to the Beacon Blog

Hello, this is a new blog created for the development of the Beacon fantasy role playing rules.
Beacon is a fantasy RPG designed to be fairly rules light and quick to play but still have enough meat to be satisfying and to be highly compatible with the vast amount of d20 based fantasy supplements available.
Beacon is largely based on the Microlite d20 system.