Beacon is... a rules-lite fantasy game.

I prefer to spell this as "rules-lite" and not "rules-light" since using lite indicates this is a simpler variation of another object - in this case the standard d20 SRD.  Lite indicates something lacking a substance usually present like salt or fat, or in this case rules.  Rules-lite is tougher to define, it could mean that there are few rules, and some RPGs do go in that direction.  It can also mean that there are a few simple rules that can be applied in a common way across game concepts, and this is more the definition I have applied.  I use it also because Beacon is a derivation of Microlite so there is lineage implied in the term.  The Microlite system was an eye opener as it managed to boil down the basic d20 rules and present them in an incredibly compact way.  By adding skills to emulate most class based abilities a huge amount of class and level rules were condensed into a tiny rules space.  Much of the material I've added to Beacon is based on this one concept as I've tried to extrapolate the whole system out from that base.  

There are now currently a whole set of Microlite variations to emulate different styles of game from Microlite74 which emulates the original D&D, Microlite81 which mimics B/X and even M20 Fifth which tries to emulate 5th edition.  My first D&D was AD&D so that level of complexity is the pinned expectation I have for fantasy gaming.   So its not a surprise that the development of Beacon is my personal attempt to redevelop a level of rules similar in scope to first edition AD&D from the core Microlite rules, but not to mimic AD&D.  Like other Microlite variations I've tried to model a style of play by adding features or modifications to the core system while trying to keep that system consistent.  The main areas of customization in Beacon are:

• Finding formulas for game mechanics like penalties/bonuses, leveling costs and class abilities instead of relying on charts;
• Defining race and class abilities as Stat and Skill bonuses with fewer special rules;
• Simplifying base damage and damage bonuses to prevent monster hp inflation and long combats;
• dealing with spell effects vs spell casting costs in a point based system.

When 5th edition came out the bar moved slightly since it was a very good game and introduced many good ideas to streamline rules such as the Advantage mechanic.  Adopting the Advantage mechanic allowed for a lot of simplification for situational modifiers that were in the earlier rules.  Other popular modern d20 ideas like inspiration, talents and feats I didn't incorporate since in my opinion they didn't streamline the core rules but rather added additional tangential systems.

Not all the design has been towards simplified core mechanics, in some cases I have actually added complexity where I though it added value.  The removal of level based dice bonuses found in Microlite have been slowly phased out in favor of skill choices in order to add weight to the skill system.  You can see this in how physical skill now determines combat bonuses or in how some spells are more powerful if you have the appropriate skills.  Anytime I can add in interesting choices for player builds while keeping a simple rule I tried to do that.  There are also rules that were added that are more complex than their traditional equivalents, the initiative and morale systems are cases in point.  These systems I've made more complex than typical rules lite mechanics because I wanted to bring some additional tactical choices into the game for combat and also include a type of death spiral for NPC relationships.  Initial versions of Beacon opted for a stage or phase based approach to initiative while the current rules incorporate even more complexity by focusing on PC actions.

The other aspect of rules-lite is determining what you need the rules for.  Some RPG have rules for every situation that might come up, and others barely have more than a pass/fail rule.  There are some really great games available that have super streamlined rules that will let you quickly resolve anything that might come up in an RPG.  I really admire a lot of the rules-lite Old School games for their simplified and interesting take on the game but find that most of them leave out a lot of things I like to see in my games, particularly in the areas of level advancement and spells.  I tried to include rules that  codified aspects of the game so that players can make informed decisions or interesting choices.  I like to have players choose which skill to invest in based on how it will impact their melee combat bonus vs. how it will impact particular spells, or how many companions they can manage at one time.  That adds interest and customization without requiring a whole feat system.  Also I wanted to reinforce some types of game activity over others by including rules for those activities, so I added in rules for encumbrance, travel, exploration and learning spells.

But this leads into the next design statement:

Beacon is..  an Old School fantasy game.

But I will leave that for next time.

Beacon is... a d20 fantasy game.

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.

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.  

Beacon 7.5

I've updated the current PDF of the Beacon rules, it's the 7.5 draft now.  This version of the rules lines up with the changes I made to the Roll20 character sheet in February.  As always I wanted to fix more things then I had time for and I had to weigh the need to have the new rules available against fixing unfinished items or formatting.  You will see some stuff in red that is under revision along side the stuff in purple which is highlighting new content or changes.  The Pdf isn't as pretty as I'd like, but its usable.

This version of Beacon has a lot of changes and includes new rules or tools that I've been using for some time in my playtesting.  This release is really the 'Skill' release and many changes involve the skill system.  During playtesting I noticed that the power creep was starting to become very noticeable around levels 6 and 7.  I tried to address this by halving the dice bonus from skills.  At the same time I was able to make skills more important in all aspects of the game.  In most cases I am trying to give players choices in how they can progress their character builds by choosing where to put their skill points.  I also had noticed a problem with the way spending coin to add experience points was causing some players to outpace others as well as generally making leveling up too rapid.  Changing the level requirements from instead of "XP plus treasure equals the level target" to "XP and treasure both equal the level target" allows for a lot more treasure in the game in general, and doing this means that I don't need to put any arbitrary limits on how much a player spends on their advancement.

Other important tweaks to the game were reworking the attack bonuses to utilize the physical skill, adding the rogue's ability to have a 'special' skill and changing the hunter environment bonus to apply to any non-combat skill checks instead of just survival rolls.  Any place I could take out a lookup table or special class rule related to a particular skill I tried to do that.  I did wind up making a new class of 'small' weapons which are the same as light weapons but have less encumbrance.  This change primarily serves the character sheet, but is necessary in the game because of the way weapons are abstracted.  I balanced this out somewhat by removing the special rules for two-handed heavy weapons and codifying how bonuses are applied to these (now three) categories of weapon.  Small weapons get no bonus for STR, light weapons get an attack bonus and heavy weapons get an attack and a damage bonus.  I do like having weapon damage being set instead of rolled but at the same time I've added back in some complexity like weapon damage types blunt, slashing and piercing.  Damage types are good fun in combat I think and give reasons for PCs to carry specific weapons again.  

I've removed the monster section for now, I plan on replacing it with more of a 'monster builder' section instead.  I still use the basic idea of 'everything based on hit dice' when running monsters, but I have found that having large monsters always using large dice for initiative does take away from combat.  I still rely heavily on number and type of HD for coming up with monster stats, but I've gravitated toward having monsters with multiple HD types per attack and special abilities which I want to reflect in the rules.

The direction of Beacon for a while has been to abstract many of the game processes while still retaining meaningful resource management to support the expedition style play I want to encourage.  This release finally has the table for making camp while on an expedition, and lifestyle chart for cost of living between adventures.    The goal of these changes was to make the fun bits more fun and the bookkeeping more streamlined.

Finally I am still working on fixing the spells, something that is taking longer than I ever imagined.  I like a lot of the newer spells I've put up which are more quirky and less generic than the original spells I brought over from the d20 SRD.  There are still a lot of spells that are not suited for point spend still, but that number is dropping.  Next release I hope to have most of the spells out of the red and adapted for microlite style magic.

Introducing the Skill Bonus

I wrote this post a while back but got caught up in other things and didn't post it.  Since this I've gone and made a bunch of changes to Beacon and the Roll20 sheet.  Consider this post #1 of the new changes for the next release*.

Skill Bonuses vs Skill Points

I've been doing lots of hemming and hawing over skill points and damage etc.  The basic Microlite mechanic is to add skill and your attribute bonus to your d20 roll and classes are defined by which skill they can use, and which ones they advance in.  Its a great mechanic and gets rid of so many special rules.  Coming up with  simple but robust skill advancement for longer campaigns is what started me writing Beacon.  However as I am playtesting higher level play I am starting to see some issues with Beacon and how it plays.

Playtesting is a big deal, especially when you start to see the trends to the way a game changes as players get more skills and abilities.  Elegant rules at low levels can start to really change as the players progress.

The problem I am seeing is I don't like seeing +10 bonuses to dice rolls before magic or other effects at mid level.  Mid level players getting that much of a dice bonus seems fun to them now, but sets of warning bells in my mind when I extrapolate that trend to the second half of the level ladder.  Given the current rules, its very likely players at the highest levels would be getting +15 or even +20 to their dice rolls at which point so many of the other rules become irrelevant or washed out by that one calculation.  Magic swords need to be +5 or more to make any noticeable difference at that level.  Since armour does not scale to match all those high numbers become wasted unless you start ramping up the opponents.  You can just keep scaling up the monsters, but then you have inflated the numbers to no purpose.

Also I don't like seeing higher damage bonuses flatten out all the differences between weapon types and attribute bonuses.  There is already a problem where clerics and magic users do such low damage in comparison to the martial classes that they cannot participate in combat.  This is by design when the certain classes are doing two or three times the baseline damage of others, but when it becomes 4 or 6 times greater, then its a problem.  The root issue is the core mechanic of adding skill number to the dice roll.  Having such a big component of the bonus come from skills flattens out the dice rolls and either washes out or causes inflation to everything else. 

I tooled around with making it harder to get skills, like one every couple levels or limiting how much a skill could be raised per level etc.  However this just makes it harder to level up, and less fun.  Skill is such a core differentiator to class in the system that it made progression more complex and harder to manage.  You really do need to give a new skill point each level and the classes getting extra additional skill at different levels helps balance and define their progression.  Also I found any time I limited total skill points it caused issues somewhere, either there was not enough of an effect or there was too much effect from the skill, in and I was fiddling around with each case.

I think I have the answer though.  Making the skill BONUS equal to half the skill number.  This is the same as how stats work where every second point gives a point (except skills have no negative mods).  It also has the effect of letting skills operate on two scales, the skill Bonus can be used for die rolls and the skill NUMBER can be used for other things.

This seems to me that it may resolve the issue and a downstream of this change is that I can simplify a lot of other calculates to use skills.  I can change base attack bonuses calculation from a table to use the physical skill bonus.  I can give fighters a damage bonus based on physical as well and also the sneak attack and hunter damage now will be seen to work in a similar manner.  Casters would use knowledge or commune BONUS instead of caster level which makes sense however the spell effects can still use the skill NUMBER.

 It also makes leveling up more interesting since you have to balance long term point gain vs immediate effects and I can also do away with the hard to track level caps on skills.

*Actually a Morale system would be the first change I made to the sheet and the rules, so it should be post #1.  Consider it Bonus Content.

How to Play - Create a character

Creating a character in Beacon is a quick process whether you use the Roll20 character sheet or use paper sheets for tabletop games.  The basics are pretty simple and the same for both online and at table.  The online sheet will summarize many of the starting skills and bonuses for the different races and classes you can choose from, but the character creation section in the rulebook is still essential as it contains more this information in detail and also has some helpful tables for reference.  It also contains all the items and equipment.

Creating a Character:

First roll for your character's core abilities/statistics.

• Roll and total 3 six sided dice to determine your character's Strength (STR)
• Strength is important as it effects how much damage you can withstand and gives bonuses for melee combat.
• Roll and total 3 six sided dice to determine your character's Dexterity (DEX)
• Dexterity is important as it can make you harder to hit and gives bonuses for missile attacks and challenges requiring accuracy.
• Roll and total 3 six sided dice to determine your character's Mind (MIND)
• Mind is important as it is the gives bonuses for arcane magic and intellectual challenges.
• Roll and total 3 six sided dice to determine your character's Charisma (CHA)
• Charisma is important as it gives bonuses for divine magic and personality challenges.

Next based on your rolls, examine the class and race modifiers and determine what kind of class and character race you might want to play.  

Its helpful to get an idea of a class and then choose a race that will compliment that class by adding additional points to your starting abilities and skills.  

• Fighters do well with high STR as they will be able to take and deal more damage.
• Rogues do well with good DEX score as it is compliments their combat ability and is useful for many skill challenges.
• Hunters do well with high DEX as it compliments their special combat abilities.
• Mages and Enchanters do well with a good MIND skill.
• Clerics and Druids do well with higher CHA.

Skills represent the learning and training your character has, your starting skills come from your character race and the class you choose but you will also get more skills every level.  Skills are used to modify your rolls in challenges and also can be requirements for certain actions  The skills are:

• Physical
• Physical skill helps with physical challenges like jumping or climbing.  This skill also determined if you can use heavier weapons and armours.  Good for fighters, clerics and hunters.
• Subterfuge
• Subterfuge skill helps with being sneaky, tricky and things like hiding.  Rogues and other sneaky people.
• Knowledge
• Knowledge skill helps with research, lore, and similar challenges.  It's also very useful for reading scrolls and impacts many spells.  Important for mages and enchanters but also good for rogues.
• Communication
• Communication skill helps with understanding or persuading challenges.  This skill impacts managing your hirelings or companions.  Clerics and druids leverage this but it is helpful for others too.
• Survival
• Survival skills are things like tracking, finding resources etc.  The hunter, druid and the rogue benefit most from this skill.
• Crafting
• Crafting skills are used to assess, repair or build things.  Higher crafting allows for repairing heavier armour and weapons.  Fighters, mages and rogues will find this useful.

You can also just choose your character race and class based on what you want to play instead of looking for the most optimal choices.  Beacon is designed to be focused on player actions and character progression, and in the longer term the skills you choose and the class benefits will outweigh the initial character bonuses.  Also it can be fun to play a clumsy but clever rogue or a un-personable druid with great physical strength.  Your character will be your in game persona so think about more than just how many points of damage you can do and choose something you will enjoy playing.

Your starting hit points will be the maximum hit die for your character race.  Elves and Halflings start with 6 hp, Humans and Dwarves 8hp, and Beastmen start with 10hp.  Remember fighters get a bonus of 1hp per level.

Once you have chosen a race and class apply the appropriate bonuses and starting skills to your character sheet.  The Roll 20 sheet will calculate many of the class and level bonuses for you, otherwise figure out your starting to hit and damage bonuses etc.

Lastly you need to roll your starting money so you can buy equipment.  Roll 2 six sided dice and that is how many gold coins you start with.   1 gold coin is worth 10 silver pennies and most common goods are priced in silver at the shops.

The most important purchases will be weapons, armour and a little food.  If your using the online sheet your armour class, weapon statistics etc. will be calculated for you as you add them.  Otherwise update your character sheet with your armour class and the weapon information from the rule book.  Don't forget to calculate you encumbrance based on how much you are carrying.

The roll20 character sheet has two modes, play mode and update mode.  The update mode is where you will set your skills and character base stats, choose you race and class and set your hit points.  While play mode is where you will track your current status, your experience points, log weapons and armour and where you will keep your inventory.

update mode

play mode (tabbed)

Creating higher level characters:

To start with a higher level character you do the above as well as add an additional skill point for each level as well as any skills for that class at the desired level.  E.g. a third level fighter would get two skill points to add as they wish as well as 1 additional Physical. 

Roll your race specific hit die (e.g. D6, D8) for each level and add this to your HP total.  Remember again fighters get a bonus of 1hp per level.

Roll 1d6 of additional starting gold coins per level.

November update

Still running twice weekly games and having a good time.  Roll20 is working well for this kind of campaign and the sheets are working as is keeping various maps in play for overland travel, dungeon exploration and managing handouts.

In the playtest some players are starting to hit level 4 as they explore and fight their way across the wilds.  I think that the rate of advancement is about perfect, combats are averaging about 3-4 encounters and around 250-300XP per six player session and they are spending a good amount of treasure to top up to next level when they return to town.  It will be interesting to see how this shapes up as they hit the mid levels 5-7 and see if it still seems to track.  

The overland map is expanding outward as they explore and looks like this now:

The northern wilds

Using the VTT features in roll20 is great although I wish I could use a tablet or something to do the live drawing part since using a mouse with their tools is very obtuse.  The players are able to add annotations to the maps and I am using copy/paste to lay out the terrain icons which works well.  In Roll20 the DM needs to manage the map I think although I would love if the players did take on more mapping and notetaking.

I'm currently working on the 7.4 rule update which is a bunch of minor tweaks and fixes more than any big changes.  Still slowly updating the spell descriptions to make them more skill facing and still working on more challenging monsters.  One player bought a bunch of war dogs and we quickly realized that adding 2HD for trained animals was too much, so that buff got scaled back to 1HD.

I'm tightening up the language around combat round actions a bit, each round you get an attack action and a maneuver or two maneuvers.  

Attack actions are: 

• weapon attacks;
• aiming;
• casting spells;
• defense.  

I specifically listed Aim as an attack action since PCs with multiple attacks could then use an attack to take aim if they wanted.  I also called out the Defense action here which makes it more clear how that works to provide AC bonus.   

Maneuver actions are: 

• movement of various kinds;
• manipulating items;
• swapping gear;
• assist;
• or other miscellaneous actions.  

The assist action is new here and I see this as a replacement for things like flanking or other ways to give another player advantage and still leverage the initiative system.  The way announcing actions and movement happens it is too hard for players to rely on combat positions for bonuses so having this action will mitigate that I hope.  It also lets other players set up surprise attacks for rogues which would let them act sooner in the round than if they had to set themselves up.  These are not really changes so much as clarifications to existing mechanics and hopefully its all a lot more clear for those reading the rules now.

I also formalized overland travel and rest around the 4 hour "watch" period, generally rolling for an encounter and giving a travel description for each 4 hour period.  I standardized the journey encounter rolls to a d6 where 1 is an encounter on the relevant table and 6 is a 'character moment' where a PC will give some information about themselves either in a story or in interaction.  I like that idea since it gives some sense of time and getting to know one another on overland treks.  Players were kind of hesitant at first but since they know its coming up they are starting to warm to the idea and prepare things for it.  I like it a lot, especially since its an exploration game and I am discouraging long backstories at character creation.  I also added a petite rest because I noticed when they are resting players fall into the idea of first and second watch pretty quickly but it was a bit hard on PCs who only had minor wounds as they usually got tapped to keep watch.  I decided to give PCs who only rest for 4 hours a small HP recovery equal to their level.  I also want to make sure that PCs who didn't get at least 4 hours rest in a day would have disadvantage until they did.

No firm date on when I push this latest update out, but it will be soon.

Changes to the Rogue and to Spells

Updated beacon rules posted.  This is version 7.3 and has a bunch of changes.

Quick summary of some changes:

• Add reactions,
• Static weapon damage,
• Dwarves get an initiative penalty, 
• Halflings can't use heavy weapons,
• Added some weapon and armour limits directly to the classes,

OK that last one needs some explanation.  Ten years ago I thought it was cool to allow all classes to use all kinds of armour and weapons and then build in complex feedback systems to balance the classes so you didn't have plate mail enchanters running around waving dual great axes.  So one hand gives and the other takes it away.  Now I think its way better to just limit the classes. Its a lite rules game, so there's no time for this kind of backroom shenanigans.  This stuff should be as clear and simple as possible.  So going forward you will see even more of a shift away from some of the old mechanics to use more streamlined stuff.  Keep this in mind when I redo movement and range in the future.  I'll probably do a whole post on how I think its time to relax some of the design that is there just for compatibility with 'standard' D20 material.  There's just so much out there now its not really needed anymore.  

• Merged the Rogue and the Non-class class,

One of my players in the play-test said, "Rogues should have the most skills".  I thought about that and I decided that they were probably right.  Instead of having the unclassed character option, I should just give rogues more skills that they can spend on doing tricky stuff.  Climbing-  physical skill, sneaking - subterfuge, disarm traps - crafting etc.  This solves a long standing problem of what to do with the horrible "non - classed" class which was always needed but never used.  Merging these two classes means you can now be a sneaky merchant or a backstabbing assassin, or even a tricky sage type pretty easily in the game by choosing a rogue class.  In return I've also changed the equally terrible rogue surprise attack mechanic to be a simple "if you have advantage add your subterfuge to the damage", a blend of 5th edition and Microlight mechanics.  Hopefully this works as well as it looks on paper.   Its too bad really because I had finally resolved to rename the non-classed class to "Journeyman".  This does leave room for a third non magic class.  I was thinking of a ranger type but, Druids might become jealous and recently I had the idea some kind of Tinker might be more appropriate.

• Arcane casters get a new spell every level,
• Reworked a lot of the level 1-3 spells.

The other thing I've decided to do is to rework all the spells and bring skill points into a more prominent role for spell effect.  One of the big changes is that many of the spells with scaling effects are based on caster level and I am working on making these rather be skill based instead.  This means there is actually a reason for a cleric to pump points into Communication and for Enchanters to increase their Subterfuge or Knowledge skills.  I will try to base these changes on the nature of the spells themselves but obviously the classes will have more spells that use their 'primary' skills than others.  All arcane casters will benefit from having higher Knowledge, but Druids will benefit from having higher Survival as well.  I think the effect of this will be casters will be more diverse, even within the same class, and it will really add value to the skills.

There's a bunch of other stuff too.  Yes I am changing a lot more than I intended to change at the beginning of this year.  The old game was pretty crap actually... huzzah!

Initiative and Damage Changes

So the play testing has been going very well and the players seem to agree that the new initiative system is very good and makes for some interesting and dynamic combats.  Using the Mike Mearls "Greyhawk" system of declaring actions and using that to roll lowest on different dice creates interesting scenarios where players weigh their need to act faster or take more time to move into advantage.  Having initiative every round makes the combats more dynamic and players are reacting to the events rather than just waiting out their turns.  Monsters have fled battle and been caught fleeing or fled successfully based on their initiative rolls over a couple rounds.  Its all been pretty good.

There are a couple things I want to add to lean into this concept even more.  I want to add a rule that if you are holding your action you can REACT to an opponents attack if they are later in initiative order.  You roll a 3 to cast a spell and the opposing wizard rolls a 6, you can cast your spell and hope to stop them or you can hold your action and try to counter their spell.  This is a more interesting choice I think.  Same as blocking, if your quick enough you can move to intercept an opponents attack and block it, saving the poor halfling rogue from being impaled on the bad guys spear.

The block and counter-spell actions have been in the Beacon rules since the beginning but are rarely used.  I think because they required you state your intention at the start of the round and forgo your attack, players thought they were both less fun and harder to execute.  In any system where you have to choose to attack or try some mitigating action, you are usually going to attack since its the simpler option and it has a net effect of taking out your opponents and ending the combat.  However in a specific instance it may be better to react to mitigate damage and so when you see those situations and can react to them its pretty fun.  You are now PLAYING the game.  I think it much more likely you will choose a block or counter-spell to interrupt an opponents action than it would be to declare that as your action at start of a round.  It also means that blocking or countering a spell cannot happen unless you have initiative, which I think is a good limiter to those actions and so they can be a bit more powerful than they might otherwise be if they were just regular actions.  I might look for other reactions to add as well, things to make the combat flow more fun, it seems to be a natural fit for this initiative system to have these type of reactions.

However not all is sweet in our delicious candy-land.  The other side of this initiative system is that it means that you are rolling three times in combat for every attack and this is causing things to go slower.  Rolling lots of dice is fun but also slows down the game.  Picking out dice and adding up the results is slow and so usually games will try to get rid of as many rolls as possible.  They usually start with initiative and I get that, but I think that's the wrong approach since initiative is such a great tool for modeling combat.  Why get rid of the good and interesting rolls where luck really does play a huge part?  I would rather get rid of the other side of things and get rid of the damage rolls, and in fact that's what I'm going to do.  

Beacon already has simplified damage for weapons, based on if they are light or heavy, and I think its time to go even further and just set the damage for those weapon types.  My initial thought is you would take the middle number and say its 3 points for light weapon and 4 for a heavy weapon and critical hits will always do double that, so 6 and 8 respectively (and +1 for two handed heavy weapons).  This takes out a whole roll and makes things resolve faster, and you still add all the STR and fighter damage bonuses etc. so the numbers will work out the same as they do now.  I'm not sure what to do with monsters at this point, although the obvious thing is to take half their HD type as the base damage amount.  Monsters in combat need some other attention in any case.

I might in the future look at trying some kind of system where I'd lower the amount of set damage and use the value on the to-hit roll to determine how much damage is done.  For example you roll 3 points higher than the target AC so you would do 3 with a light weapon and 3+1 with a heavy weapon (plus all the other damage bonuses).  This might work but it would need some thought to model that out without breaking the game, since you can roll a LOT higher than the required to hit in some cases, and that number goes up the higher the character levels so it would have a real scaling effect.  It would also really impact low AC monsters (and PCs) disproportionately which would be bad.  Also it would be a lot of adding stuff up which is doable, but again takes time.  If you know your hit is going to do 3+2 damage unless you crit that's easy to keep track of.  If you need to ask the GM the specific AC and calculate it multiple times in a fight, or Hermes for-fend, make the poor GM do all the damage calculations for the combat, then obviously not so much joy.

So just the fixed damage for now.

August update

Play testing is still going on and at two games a week I hardly have time to think about posting updates.  I updated the Roll20 character sheet, adding in a calculated encumbrance field and updating the inventory page to make it easier to manage.  I also put in some dedicated slots for food etc.  I wanted it to be more prominent so that it would get used.  Also I named the inventory boxes so if one was so inclined they could use the storage locations for random events or to track when players drop their packs etc.  

The example below shows this character with (10 STR) can carry 7 weight before becoming encumbered.  On the sheet you see rations (1), 7 torches (most of 1 so 1), 1.5 wt of coins (1, noted to be in bag), in the backpack 50' rope (1), and in the sack, a pair of heavy candle holders (1) so 5 on this sheet but also if you add two more light weapons to go with that crowbar and her armour then she's at about 6 'weight'.  That number is beside the can carry number in a box marked 'current' and managed by the player.  If STR drops due to wounds, well then its pretty easy to see when you have disadvantage.  This is still somewhat manual, but its easy enough to eyeball, which is how it needs to be to work.

I did change the base amount of weight that a character with 0 bonus gets to 7.  I wanted characters with low STR to be able to carry at least 3 weight which is actually a lot more stuff than 2 weight given the way small items glob up*.  The next update of the rules will reflect this and also I'll be tweaking weights for some bulk items like rations etc.  I also make reference to the fact that hired help does not generally need to worry about the disadvantage that comes with being over-encumbered so those guys you can load up a lot more.  However if the guy carrying all your food, tools and water is killed you're going to have to make some decisions about your other gear.  Also if you load a poor torch bearer up with coins and treasure, he might just disappear on you.  All these things I think make for interesting play.

It's all opt in of course, but I've been pushing it in play and I think it does make exploration style games much better when you use something to track these resources and even a simple system like this is plenty good to manage it.  

*glob up is a pretty good way to describe grouping different things into abstract categories.

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.

 

The Encumbrance one

I realized a while ago that if I was going to run a crawl style game I needed to deal with time and resource management.  Now play-testing Beacon and I'm seeing it come up where the players want to rest after each fight, especially if the spell casters are down a few points.  This is understandable from a meta-game/video game perspective, but it plays hell with the whole idea of ratcheting tension.  I do have the player using rations every rest and only allowing partial rests in the wilderness, but they routinely carry around piles of cheap rations so its not effective.  The only way I can think of to deal with this is to limit the amount of supplies.  I remember from all sorts of attempts in the past to limit player inventory that no-one really likes dealing with encumbrance and even if your players are game to try things start to slide and some will keep better track than others.  Finally it falls on the Game master to manage all this and man but do you already have enough to worry about.  So a non-starter right?

Well I want to at least have some rules in Beacon for this even if they are optional rules.  I’m going to try to come up with something to use in my games that I can stick with and hopefully it’s also fun for the players, or at least interesting for them.  It got to be simple so players can follow it and so the GM can keep an eye on it.  I’ve been looking at the question and reading up on some OSR solutions from the past decade.  The two most interesting to me are the Stone system or a slot system like the ‘Anti-hammerspace’ system.  I like both of these and can see using either system, but before going any further with this I need to figure out the problem so I can find out what works design-wise.

The first stop on this quest then is to figure out why even have an encumbrance system.  You can track encumbrance to limit how much treasure players can carry, which is the oldest reason.  Another reason is to track how many items or the kind of armour a PC can equip, this seems to me the reason it’s currently done in D&D now.  Another reason is to track resources for travel, another is for simulation ‘realism’, and there are probably some additional reasons that escape me.

In Beacon the main reason to have encumbrance is to manage resources and provide support for the HP and damage economy.  Beacon spends a lot of effort making HP management important and allowing players to make trade offs with STR and resting.  I think that that’s the answer there the encumbrance system is there in order to provide meaningful choices relating to PCs resting, and to give more weight (sigh) to using STR as a HP buffer.  So I’m not too worried about realism or tracking a PC's armour and weapons, but I am concerned with how much food and water players carry since that will determine how long they can stay out and how often they can afford to rest.  I’m also interested in hauling big items and large amounts of treasure, but not as much as the food and light resources.  So that’s the core of the mechanic I want to build.  How much food/water a group can carry and the PC's STR needs to be relevant to this so that as they get weaker they have more decisions to make.  I’m not designing for realistic item weights or to manage what kinds of armour a PC has although if I can include some nods to it that’s OK.

Now to what I don't want to do.  I don’t want to penalize a player for having a real low STR, it’s already pretty bad for these guys.  STR is the PC damage limit, and is heavily leveraged for combat so if you make it so low STR characters can’t use heavy armour is a double whammy.  I just recently removed minSTR from weapons and armour and don’t want it creeping back in in an encumbrance system.  So a character with 3 STR needs to be able to wear any kind of armour, carry a weapon or two and at least a couple days supplies, that’s my baseline.  I also don't want to have to sort out how many pounds  everything weighs and then have players arguing about how much something weighs in 'real life' or telling me they can carry twice as much because they did it one-time back in scouts.  I only want to deal with item weight for important things and the units should be fairly abstract.  

So far both the 'stone' system and the slot system seem like they will work.  So maybe getting into some details will help.  If I were to use the stone system I can see it working something like this: some base number based on armour type +/- STR bonus.  The worst STR ‘bonus’ is -4 so when wearing heavy armour, that base number needs to be a bit bigger than 4, I’m thinking 6 because that leaves 2 units for the rest of your gear.   In my mind before looking into this at all I was thinking 60lb =/- 10lb per STR bonus which would abstract into 6 ten poundish units or 'stones', so that fits pretty well.  If I make heavy armour about 4 'stone' then the base number for someone wearing no armour would be 10 which is nice and simple to remember.

So 10 stone +/- 1 stone per STR bonus would give PCs a carrying range between 6 and 4 stone and quickly assigning items some values here:

Armour would be 4/3/1 stone for heavy/medium/light.  

Shields and heavy weapons would be 1 stone,

light weapons maybe half a stone or 1/3 stone, 

10 torches in a stone, 50' rope 1 stone and etc

Rations (in this case food and water) would be 2-3 per stone most likely.

Most items are pretty easy to eyeball in this range and smaller items can be ignored or grouped into a bag or a kit of some kind.  For all a players miscellaneous items I would say a bag or a pouch of them would be 1 stone, so all those little mirrors, maps, potions, tools, lock-picks etc would just go in that one bag.   Coins is the next item to consider but since in Beacon I went with lighter coins at 50/pound that would mean ~500 per stone which is pretty nice and round as well.

So pretty simple yea, but how will this fix the stated problem?  Well now its easier to see how much a PC can carry without getting too much detail.  A PC with 12 STR can have medium armour (3), a heavy weapon (1) , a sling and two daggers (1), a bag of misc gear (1), 10 torches (1),  4 days rations(2) would have 2 stone left available to carry 1000 coins, (or say a couple heavy gold candle sticks and a bag of coins) before they are bogged down and encumbered. If that same character takes 3-4 STR damage they are going to have to make some decisions on what to drop when they need that encumbered condition removed.   And if they are encumbered, what happens?  Well encumbered has to mean something like disadvantage which is nice and simple .  Also no dashing, maybe slower movement.  It should have enough of a bite to dissuade players from getting there but not so bad that they can't flirt with it.  

The stone system seems to work pretty well.  One problem I can see is that smaller items are going to fall between the gaps so that one bag or misc items is probably going to have 50 lb of stuff in it.  However I can press the ignore button quite a lot on that, so long as the important stuff gets tracked.  I also see a lot of players chiming in on how this or that should weigh less, but again I think that's manageable. Stone is pretty good since it keeps the basic idea of tracking weights already there but just makes the numbers more manageable.

What about the slot system, or some other way to abstract away items altogether?  I've played some good games that abstract away tracking items with resource dice or item slots but the main problem I have with those is that they wouldn't have the same amount of compatibility with all the legacy d20 systems.  That compatibility (in feel as well as mechanics) is one of the core design goals of Beacon so there would have to be a big advantage to use those systems if they drop those mechanics for something else.  Certainly Beacon is flexible enough you can bolt on any encumbrance system and it would work, but I think I would leave that up to the GM and not try to change the 'default'  Beacon rules too far from home.  For better or worse, d20 has at its core the idea of counting little things like coins and hp so keeping that feel is essential I think.  Any system to abstract that needs to keep that same taste while making it easier to manage.  I'll have to think about that some more.

Looking at magic (again)

I have to admit that magic is a bit of a mess.  I've been looking over the spells and see a lot of fixing needed.  Years ago I made a couple passes through the original Microlite and d20 System Resource Document (SRD) spell lists in order to make things work better with HP based casting, but there is still a lot of spells that are either duplicates or sub-par versions of other spells.  There'e also spells that are too weak or powerful for their level/cost, like Fly is the same level as Illusory Script for example.  I don't take all the blame for this since the source material is pretty wonky as well and some of those old D&D spells are unbalanced with some just not great and others are too good.  That approach can work if you have to pick X spells every morning, but not when you can cast any spells you know if you have enough zap left.

In any case a lot of spells have suffered in translation.  I've been whittling away at fixing these again.  I'll give some examples;  Magic Missile is a first level mage spell and so costs 3 points to cast for 5-8 damage, and you have to roll for it.  In game terms this means its about as good as one sword hit but with a HP cost and I can;t see myself using that spell over a dagger if I was playing a mage.  I think it might work better as a level 0 spell costing 1 hp and doing 1d4 damage.  It's more likely to be used at the lower level BUT at the same time its not going to be like 5th edition 'eldritch bolt' kind of laser blast because it does take 1 HP to cast.  A 3rd or 4th level mage is still going to rip a few of these off now I think. 

I'm also looking for spell 'overlaps' to fix, consider the Enchanter spells Stinking Cloud (lvl 3) vs Rainbow Pattern (lvl4).   These are essentially the same thing but Stinking Cloud is probably better mechanically and in line with other 3rd level spells.  However thematically a stinky cloud is more a Druid kind of thing.   I think its probably better to merge these into one spell, like Glitter Cloud and replace the level 4 spell with something more interesting.  I picked up Modify Memory from the SRD which is actually a really nice fit.  I liked the idea of a druid having a stink effect like a skunk so I made a new stinky spell cantrip for them.  There's a lot more tweaks and pokes I've been making as I have been looking through the spell list correcting some of these issues.

I really wish I could get rid of the level 0/cantrip label and just re-number the spell levels 1-7.  That would be a lot more streamlined, but I don't want to do it because I think it would really break a lot of comparability for new Beacon DMs using d20 source material. So I am leaving it as is for now. 

Read Magic

One of the larger changes is I'm considering is to remove Read Magic as a spell.  This spell is so essential to a arcane caster that it should be a class ability.  Who's not going to take Read Magic?  They take it or they won't be able to learn any new spells or use scrolls?  So its a wasted slot in the list.  One benefit to making it a class ability is that you can let other classes do it too, I was thinking of having rogues be able to read magic scrolls at some point or maybe making it something anyone could do with sufficient communication skill or something.  To be clear, not thinking of extending magic use to other classes, just thinking it might be fun letting a non magic character try casting a hella dangerous-scroll.

 

Spellbooks and Learning Spells

Spell books are needed to keep track of what spells arcane casters have learned.  When casters find new spells they can write them into their books and then those new spells are available to be cast.  So spell books are a way to turn magic into treasure that can be discovered, but also a way to give magic users things to spend treasure on, since they don't buy expensive armour or weapons generally.   It costs magic users time and money to write the spells into their books so this is additional cost to level up vs what a fighter or rogue would need to spend but that's an not necessarily a bad thing.  How else can magic users gain spells?  Presumably by training with a teacher or studying.  Both those options line up with other class training costs and downtime so I don't see a problem there. 

Just from a physical perspective, spell books are hard to manage - how big are they? Can they get wet? Can they be lost or destroyed?  Can they be stashed someplace?  I thought about removing spell books and just abstracting this mechanic, but I think that these are interesting questions that can be handled in game so I'm inclined to keep spell books as they are.

Making potions and scrolls (and magic items):

The other thing I've been pulling my hair out over is players making magical things like potions and scrolls.  I really wanted to have this working since players generally like the idea, hell I like the idea, but part of me just wants to remove this from the game entirely.  The v6 rules have some simple ideas for creating potions and scrolls but its not well balanced and I'm concerned that it puts a huge cost burden on magic users since they are going to be torn between spending cash making potions and scrolls vs. leveling up.  I guess the party could all chip in to make potions or scrolls but that makes it now like buying magic items from a shop with extra steps.

I'm leaning towards dropping this entirely.  There are strange forces out there who can make magic stuff but its not the PCs and that's quite OK by me.   Not having to deal with PCs making these items makes treasure easier, it takes away the problem of balancing magic item creation system against other class spending or trying to figure out why the PCs don't just make dozens of scrolls to get past their HP based spell limits. PCs are there to have adventures, if they wanted to make scrolls or potions they could sit in a tower all day and do that instead, that's a different game.  If you want to run an adventure where players make a magic item you can do it as a one off adventure with all sorts of crazy items to collect and strange challenges to overcome.  Its magic, the rituals might not even work a second time.  I think its all around much better for magic in general to be mysterious and part of the world/campaign and not something codified in the rules.  NPC magic users just don't follow the same rules as PCs and that's OK, in fact its better than OK since it makes them interesting opponents instead of half-assed PCs.  Let those NPCs craft all the goodies and the PCs can find them in dusty old libraries and forgotten tombs.

The only reason I am still considering keeping these things in the game would be to have an excuse for the Crafting skill, and that's kind of a crappy design.  If the Crafting skill needs entirely new mechanics to justify it then its not essential or it isn't balanced with the other skills enough.

Four Against the North

So the first play-test went pretty well and we managed to get characters rolled up and a quick romp into the woods.  I'm choosing to run the game as a West-Marches style campaign where there is a safe town the adventurers sally froth from and there is the wild wilderness full of all manor of encounters to be met and dealt with.  I expect lots of death and seat of the pants escapes.

Rolling up the characters was fairly fast with more time spent getting the book downloaded then actually making the characters.  The rolling was quick and then some time was spent explaining the classes and races but it went pretty quickly. Then we rolled for staring money and players equipped their characters.  It all went off with little issue, although there was some initial confusion about the skills, especially how crafting would work.  I chalk that up to the word being used so much in video games, but it did bring up a good point related to if crafting could be used to make potions.  

I have highlighted Potions as something I wanted to look into in the next release since up till now they were just the Divine version of scrolls, a way to make temporary magic items from spells, and not too thought out.  I am leaning toward the idea of making potions recipe based instead

The town

of spell based which would be another thing crafting could be useful for.  In the past I've really only used a handful of potions, like healing, invisibility, resistance etc and those don't really map directly to any one spell so treating them like a magic item instead of like a liquid scroll seems like a good move.  I would put a few recipes in the rules, made up of monster and rare plant components as well as having spells cast on them and so forth.  I think that would be good fun.

Anyway once characters were made I dumped them into a wagon heading into town (hehe) and had the driver explain that only crazy people came here to make their fortunes.  He also said that there was a river to the north and everything over that river was the wild lands.  They talked to some local people to find out some basic information and then they headed out.  Pretty quickly they had an encounter with 3 wolves (2 HD d6 AC14) and we got to test the new initiative rules.  I thought they worked pretty well, in the first round the wolves attacked first (D6) and the party did not roll very well I was worried that the wolves might have been too powerful for them.  Next round the wolves went last and the Druid managed to get off an entanglement spell that dropped their AC from 14 to 8 and the others got in a few good licks.  Again the wolves rolled poorly for initiative and the party was able to finish them off.  The last round saw a critical hit and a very solid damage roll so the battle ended on a high note although the party was down quite a few HP.  It was getting late and so they returned to town to recover.

I know that a lot of people will get worried about rolling initiative every round and thnk it takes too long, but I really enjoy the dynamic nature of these combats as fortunes do change and players are reacting to that as opposed to knowing which order they will act in for the whole combat.   The extra benefit of using the Mike Mearles idea of action based initiative was people caught on right away instead of the old phased combat approach which was always a bit hard to explain to players.  I did come across an issue of omission that its not always clear if monsters are using heavy or light weapons in melee attacks and I think that I might just have monsters use their HD as their initiative roll, so the larger, more powerful they are the slower they are to react.  I like the idea of a wolf using a d6 but an Ogre using a d10 for their initiative roll.  I'll have to see how that works in practice.

So all in all a good session, looking forward to more to come.

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.

Crafting and durability

The initial idea behind a Fabrication skill was to compliment the Subterfuge skill for rogues and stand in as an alternate skill for managing mechanisms and traps.  Having two skills meant you could have some options for allocating those skill points as opposed to having rogues just tossing everything into Subterfuge.  It was also to give players an additional skill they could bump to become more proficient at generally building stuff or repairing things, a shop class sort of thing and something for dwarves to be touchy about.  However, now I have lived with it a while, Fabrication is a crap name for a skill.  Its not thematic to the genre, it is a fancy word in a gritty game.  I suppose that Subterfuge is just as bad really, but that skill is a hold over from Microlite and I am loathe to change it.  Also, the Fabrication description kind of suggested that it applied to making up stories and so made it hard to tell if lying or entertaining people with tales was Communication, Fabrication or Subterfuge.  I added Fabrication for what I thought were good reasons and I do think the skill has a place in the game, but the name and definition are just off. 

Crafting is better I think.  

Crafting accomplishes what I wanted for Fabrication, the skill for building, repairing, working things.  That's pretty easy to explain from a dead stop and fits the theme better.  Also no dwarf would be ashamed of putting Crafting on their resume, while Fabrication is clearly something elves get up to.  Along with changing the name of the skill I also want to beef up some mechanics that will leverage it.  There are the obvious creation rolls where players knock together things and the obvious dismantling of things like traps, but there is some room to have more maintenance type things.  What I would like to do is alter the item damage/durability mechanics slightly so that weapons break down and there is repairing that needs to be done.  My goal for this is to add a bit more crunch to the system to support the hex-crawl and West Marches styles of play I want the game to focus on.

Currently on the critical hit/fumble table it is possible for you to break or damage to your weapons and armour, and there are also sunder mechanics for breaking shields which you need to then have replaced or repaired.  I want to expand on this a bit so it also address some of the comments about weapon pricing that were brought up on another blog about the wide range of weapon costs for items that do essentially the same damage.  What I am thinking of is a durability rating for weapons and armour that is based on their quality/price and this rating would go down when a player rolls that fumble instead of flat out breaking.  Where a cheap weapon with low durability would break, a better weapon with more durability would loose a point and could be repaired.  If an item's durability is all gone then it is not repairable.  I think this is a better solution for Provinto's issue about players cheaping out on their weapons without mucking around with the light and heavy weapon damage rolls.  I think Beacon has too many damage modifiers already and I think its better to have a new weapon attribute than it is to make damage calculation more complex.  I also think that this is another good lever for loot and treasure, as crappy old goblin knives would probably have a durability of 1 while that super fancy  sword and shield from the treasure room might have unheard of durability of lets say 5.

That being said, I'll likely have to play test this a bit since it could run a bit boring in practice.  It needs simple bookkeeping or it will be hard to manage or leech away fun.  There's a fine line where resource tracking becomes nickle and dime mechanics and I certainly don't want to have players grinding away on item management instead of beating on monsters.  It does have appeal however as I see Beacon supporting a grittier play style with short episodes of adventure which are punctuating periods of downtime for healing and training and spending loot.   Also, I want more mechanics that support West Marches style games, so I like the concept of having a character sit out an adventure working away on repairing her sword while others go on an expedition and I think that fits right in with the cleric making a healing potion, or a rogue spending a couple weeks training for level 3.

Beacon News

I think I want to put out a new release of Beacon.

Well something like that.

Years ago I was working on a version 7 release that had some minor layout and mechanic fixes but then I got busy and it languished on the vine.  I didn't intent to drop it, but it got set aside and I just didn't pick it back up.   I could say the reason is because I got busy with work, or I was busy with moving, or some other excuse, but those are not really the reasons.  I was still playing lots of games and I still had time to work on the game.  To be honest Beacon had been kind of slowing down even before all that stuff anyway.  I remember I was running a Ashen Stars online game and being obsessed with early reports of Blades in the Dark rules and trying to figure out how to merge these ideas with the Ashen Stars setting.  I think that if I had still been as fired up over Beacon I could have still found time to tinker with it.  I think I didn't finish up the v7 release because I couldn't make it necessary.   There wasn't a solid real problem I could identify that needed fixing, just a general looseness that I was trying to resolve.

I had other games to play too.  When I first started working on Beacon I was simply looking for a d20 game that I wanted to run.  This was during the 4e/pathfinder era and what was out there at that time was just not my style of game, there was so many stat blocks and skill trees and just so many fiddly rules.   I worked on Beacon and read all the wonderful home-brews and OSR blogs it revitalized my interest in in the system.  Then a funny thing happened, D&D 5th edition dropped and it actually wasn't that bad, and at the same time all those OSR inspired games like Adventurer, Conquer, King, Lamentations of the Flame Princess and Dungeon Crawl Classics came out as polished books and there was a ton of good stuff to play with and everyone was fired up to try them out.  The final straw I think was that Blades in the Dark arrived like Aphrodite stepping out of the foam.  I really really liked the ideas in Blades and I have to say that running it (via Scum and Villainy) was excellent fun and a real learning experience for me.  In any case suddenly there were too many good games out there I wanted play and to run, and a lot of new ideas I hadn't even thought of.  So I left Beacon alone, it was good enough and there was not really any direction to take it.

So why come back now?  The only good reason really; I want to run it again.

I have been running other games for a while now, and I think that I can step back into playing Beacon with some fresh perspective.  I also have some particular ideas gleaned from the last couple years, specifically from online play.  I think I want to run a game on Roll20 and use an updated version of the Beacon character sheets since I really want Beacon to support that style of play.  For online play my sweet spot seems to be a simple shared display for maps/whiteboard, an integrated dice roller, and very importantly online character sheets.  When I ran Ashen Stars on D20 it was good and I really enjoyed displaying files and marking up maps, however we didn't have the character sheets integrated in the session, and had to use google docs which became somewhat of an impediment.  It worked and it was a very fun game, but I think it would have been better with some additional IT support.  So I would like to revise the existing Beacon Roll20 sheets to remove the integrated dice rollers and add more features for tracking consumables and ideally links to an online rules compendium.  I got a Pro subscription for Roll20 so that I can work on these things.  I also think I would like to run a game in the style of Ben Robbins' West Marches campaign since I believe that Beacon is suited for that style of play.  The original Beacon world maps were directly inspired by the West Marches posts and although I incorporated a lot of those ideas into subsequent games I've run, I haven't actually run a true player driven sandbox style game.  So maybe its time for that.  I also have an idea to leverage Discord for this.

As soon as I thought about running the game I started to get ideas of what changes I wanted to work on.  Lots of ideas, too many ideas really.  I had to clamp down those and remind myself of the core purpose of the game and then the purpose of the update.  I want to focus on a few aspects of the rules to streamline play, but more than that I want to update the presentation and work of assets to support this concept.  A lot of other ideas I had would change the narrative focus, or would take Beacon further from its compatibility with other d20 systems, so I am going to leave those things out.
I thought that this might be a lot easier to get motivated if I had a plan for what I want to put into this version, so here it is:

1. Incorporate advantage/disadvantage mechanics to streamline most roll modifiers;
2. Change the horribly named Fabrication skill into a more meaningful Crafting skill and add some additional rules to support this concept;
3. Work a bit on conditions, fatigue and permanent injury;
4. Better Focus the game to support the West Marches style play and online play in general;
5. Possibly finish and release seventh level spells;
6. In addition to an updated PDF, release the new rules as a Roll20 compendium and update the Roll20 character sheet;
7. Look into re-implementing combat initiative using an idea Mike Mearles posted for D&D.
8. Generally clean and polish and tweek the game so it is robust and light.

So since this is the Beacon design blog,  I'm going to do some posts discussing these and other things and hopefully document some play-testing while I'm at it.  So stay tuned.

Sayonara to the Savant

I believe I'm renaming the Savant class to Skilled.  Savant has bothered me since I added it, but the class is nether a generalist or a specialist or a sage or a trader which were some of the other terms I considered so it was the least evil choice I thought.  The class is about skills - someone with a lot of good skills or fewer but really exceptional skills, so saying that they are Skilled seems reasonable.  I also considered dropping the class all together but I hate to do it because this class is my concession to the part of me that played MERP* way back in high school.

I don't think I could go back to using the Rolemaster system but I do admire the way it let you build characters with strange skill combinations.  I think having a way to model a character who is just really good at cheese making and has a deep understanding of the cheese trade and who can go on adventures where those skills win the day is a desirable feature.









*Well made MERP characters anyway, we never got an actual game together.  Great books though.

a short one

Yes I am updating the book.  No I'm not done yet, thanks for asking.  I'm only on page 6 or something but since it's only a 44 page book its a happen as the kids say. No big changes as yet, I've tried to clear up some of the wording on starting Hit Points as well as a slightly better explanation of how to assign stat and skill bonuses and difficulty.  The real changes in this draft are going to be the damage modifiers for stats and making weapon ranges simpler to handle with a quick short/medium/long range modifier instead of all this increment stuff.  I was also toying with the idea of getting rid of dual wielding all together since it takes up so much mechanical space and there isn't much return on it but I'm not sure I want to revise all that this late in the game.  Someone out there probably wants to duel wield claymores I'm sure.

I also wanted to give a shout out to Stork at Happy Jacks RPG podcast.  I was listening to their last podcast* on my way to Hamilton and heard him mention Beacon in a non-derogatory way.  I always like that.  Stork has often said kind things about Beacon - so my thanks to him and all the Happy Jackers.  One point I'd like to clear up however: Stork did happen to say that Beacon was an AD&D clone and it isn't.  Beacon is based on Microlite M20 and both are derived from the d20 OGL so its closer to 3rd edition or Pathfinder in it's core mechanics than AD&D.   That means rolling d20 vs Difficulty Class as a unifying concept instead of just one of many resolution mechanics.  This makes it pretty easy to convert d20 materials into Beacon use.  It also happens to be a rather close to 5th edition D&D although that wasn't around when I was designing Beacon (and no I didn't check out the play-test material - I had low expectations of D&D Next which I am happy to have been proved wrong about).

Beacon does have a lot of modern game mechanics but it is definitely an old school inspired application of those mechanics.  So if you came here looking for AD&D you should go check out OSRIC or the Labyrinth Lord Advanced rules.  However, if you came looking for a light and fun free D20 system you could do a lot worse than trying Beacon.

OK, my nerdish diatribe is over.  I do have one last update however. The Roll20 character sheet for Beacon is looking pretty good.  I hope to put it through some paces and see it roll out soon.




*it was the Swords & Wizardry Day episode I believe.