Influences Part 2 - Scum And Villainy

Continuing on the last post about Games that are influencing Beacon design.

One of the bigger influences I have had these past years is Blades in the Dark and the Forged in the Dark rule set.  The influence of this game is so much so that I almost decided to start on my own Forged in the Dark skin instead of coming back to Beacon.

I started to hear about Blades in the Dark on podcasts and on google+ (haha) quite a few years ago.  I was really into Ashen Stars at that time and was struggling with some of the downtime mechanics and the reputation economy and ship as a character in that game and the ideas I was hearing about from Blades in the Dark* sounded like they would be interesting ways to address some of those issues. I think that the stress economy and downtime mechanics was the initial big draw.  I really liked the idea that PCs would accumulate stress and need to take non-optimal actions to blow off steam in some way to get it back.  Stress and vice is universal story fodder, just like money being a real world game mechanics everyone is familiar with.  I also was taken by the idea of the PC group as a game entity in its own right.  I saw this idea first in a Warhammer RPG game, and in Ashen Stars there is a ship sheet for the crew but Blades takes this a step further.

But as much as I like the rules for Blades in the Dark, I really wasn't into the setting.  I mean I have nothing against the setting, its a fantastic setting and a lot of people love it, I would probably like playing in it, but I don't have any fire to run it unfortunately.  I like sci-fi games and I like games where there is a code of conduct or some other reign on the PC actions so it does not just devolve into murder-hoboism.  I really wanted to somehow merge the stuff I was hearing about Blades in the Dark with Ashen Stars and see if I could have the best of both.  I tried a few times to either re-skin Blades into a sci-fi, game or tack on the mechanics I liked onto Ashen Stars but nothing really stuck.

Enter Scum and Villainy.

I bought the book when it came out and although it wasn't an exact match for what I wanted, it was close and  I did want to try to run it.  Because I had been thinking of the mechanics so much in the context of the Ashen Stars, I decided to run it as a continuation of that campaign.  I originally wanted use the ideas I had for skinning the system to make it fit the space cops concept, maybe even tack on some Ashen Stars rules, but I decided against that since I wanted to understand how it worked first.  I played it pretty much straight, although I did mash in my own "Ashen Stars" setting material from past games.
If Scum and Villainy had come with a really detailed setting and I had to substantially work it over to play, I probably would have started adding in my own rules.  However S&V is pretty loose by design and with the more narrative system I thought I would be able to make it work pretty much as written.  I started the campaign on a 'lets see' basis and found that I didn't really have to change anything mechanical to make it work and I was even able to incorporate a lot of the setting materials that came with the game, they had a similar iconic feel as the Ashen Stars material.  The only substantial difference between the old game and the new game was that the players were no longer space cops, but bounty hunters.  That's a slight difference, but it did have a big impact and I'll get back to that point later.

I got lucky running it with a good group of players who were willing to put in some sweat because the first few sessions were very rough.  First off the players were not inclined to take any actions because the resolution system seemed too punishing.  Their perception was that so many rolls had consequences or bad outcomes that they didn't ever want to roll the dice and when they did they gamed things so much they had no room for roleplay.  Part of this I believe was based on the player facing system changed the dice mechanics so that bad rolls were very bad and even many of their successes seemed like failures.  This was not the case of course, but it felt that way since I wasn't rolling for the bad guys and their rolls now drove the game opposition.  So although from my perspective there was a net neutral outcome in this new system, and the PCs were actually very competent, from the player perception they were not able to do what they wanted and their characters were doing very poorly.
The second issue was that I had a hard time understanding how to scale things in a system without hit-points and levels and so things were either a cakewalk or devastating.  Either I was pulling my punches and they were breezing by challenges or I was giving out consequences and they players were taking on damage and serious conditions before the missions even got started.  Initially this because of the players not remembering to use their resistance, but it also took time for them to get used to spending stress to resist things, since they guarded their point very jealously.  I find that when ever you have points in a system players will hoard them.
Thirdly I really tripped up on the effect and consequences relationship and we didn't understand the concept of trading position for effect and so I was overusing harm as a consequence.  I didn't initially understand this dynamic so I was ticking off clock segments based entirely on the roll results instead of assigning an effect for an action and allowing the players to negotiate a better position or by using lesser effect as a consequence.

What saved this game was some whining good discussions with the players about what they were not liking and then I really had to go do my homework since we were obviously missing something.  It also really helped to find some good reference material.  By luck I found this great YouTube series Let's Learn Blades in the Dark.    This is a really good series stepping through the core mechanics and very useful for anyone thinking about running a Forged in the Dark system.  Between this and boning up on specific mechanics that seemed wrong, it gave me the insight I needed to understand how the various game systems work together.  The most important thing that our table learned coming from a more traditional roll 20 type background was understanding resistance and understanding how to trading position for effect.  Once we sorted that out there was a lot more flex in the system and players would take lesser effect as a consequence and spend their stress to resist harm more often.  Once we got that we started to appreciate how flexible they resolutions were and how they could model all kinds of conflict.

There is a lot of good stuff in the Forged in the Dark system,  Things like stress, conditions and the downtime mechanics are really interesting to play with and there is some similarities in how Beacon uses hit points and fatigue and the Forged stress mechanic.  There is also a lot of similarity in how the Beacon skill system and the FitD skill system work.  Even with keeping the resolution mechanics very d20, you can still take away the idea that resolving challenges can be more of a conversation and a negation in how to apply their stated actions into a roll.  Beacon already has the idea of matching skills to activities but I like moving away even more from all the incremental +1 -2 type modifiers and making things a little more organic based on the narrative and this is one of the reasons I want to bring in the advantage/disadvantage mechanics from 5e.  Advantage/disadvantage works well to model all sorts of situations, is easy to understand and speeds things up.

The idea of downtime is a bit more of a stretch to incorporate into Beacon without loosing the d20 compatibility although there are a lot of precedents in d20 games for something like this.  In the core game Beacon has built in downtime for stat healing, making potions etc and the times it takes for players to level up.  Conditions and stress are an attractive idea but I don;t know if they should be built in systems.  Also since its roll20 bases you can always add in campaign specific rules as well depending if you are playing a story type game or a hex crawl or a west marches style shared world.  I though about adding in more of these but I'm not sure if they should be in the core rules or just floating around out there.  Lots of these, like these nifty resource ideas I would be stealing from other OSR blogs in any case.






*When mentioning stress as a mechanic I also have to mention Torchbearer here and the amazing and related Darkest Dungeons video game which I was also looking at at the same time.  I don't remember all the details but apparently it was a heady time filled with madness, alcohol and self flagellation...

OPD 2020

I want to make sure that I plug the One Page Dungeon contest for 2020.  This contest has been going on for 10 years(!)  and its one of the great game resources to come out of the blogosphere.  

One page dungeons are cool, they are hip, they are super easy to adapt into your games.  I've used so many of these for inspiration, even dropping some whole on top of my players.  There is something about the format and level of detail that makes these so easily digestible and the competition makes the cream rise.  The reviews are a good read as well.

Influences Part 1 - Ashen Stars

Most of the writing I have done about other games I moved out to my other blog so that it didn't dilute this site, which is supposed to be about Beacon design commentary.  Now that I'm resolved to try to post something on here once a week, I thought it would be good to write about some of the games I've played in the last few years and what influence they've had.  Naturally there is a lot of overlap between what I'm playing and the game design process so I think since its relevant.  I'll try to bring it all back around to how it impacts that crisp hot Beacon brand in any case.

And I guess I should start with Ashen Stars.

Ashen Stars is a gumshoe based space police investigative game.  Players play Lasers who fly their space ship around the crumbling remains of a vast Federation solving crimes, kicking butts in a mostly non-lethal manner.  The game setting is one of the best I have come across, just the right amount of familiarity and the right amount of ambiguity to make good sci-fi stories happen.

I found space cops to be a really good game premise because the players have to follow procedures and maintain their reputations rather than just kicking in doors and shooting people.   Its great fun being able to parade a bad guy around and have him be untouchable because the players don't have the proof to take them down yet.  Players HATE this but it is really the best because they love hating stuff and it takes some time to nurture those relationships.
Also having mechanics that force players to own up to their actions is useful.  Having a reputation mechanic that offers the option for them to take the short cuts but at the risk of loosing future income is delicious.  There are so many good systems in Ashen Stars, the ship combat is simple but fun, the gumshoe investigation mechanics are good, it has the right level of abstraction for tracking items and money.

But.

I did find that some of the mechanics seemed a bit stodgy when the players were resolving physical challenges.  The d6 mechanic does not leave a lot of room point spend systems are are not my favorite.  I am probably not really running gumshoe on all cylinders so my games tend to be too easy and players seem to always have enough points to buy success.  I have tried ramping up the  challenge but once a few ability pools are used up the players want to rest and recoup, this is the 10 minute adventuring day of gumshoe it would seem
But I get the idea that as you use up your resources the narrative gets more tense but in my experience players will be miserly with points and when they run out, they will start feeling the game is against them more than if they had merely failed a roll normally.

I also felt that the game was missing a level of play at the party level.  Ashen Stars has a ship sheet and there is the idea of the crew as a business entity with reputation and shared resources, but I found it wasn't enough to really draw the players together.  The first time I ran the game the players either didn't care about earning money or they didn't have anything to spend their money on and so there was no real fear of loosing their reputation and not finding good jobs or having longer down times between them.  There were some ship modules to buy but for some reason they didn't glom onto these like I expected, maybe they were not as relevant to their PCs regular actions.  Again this might reflect on my GM chops more than the game system itself. 

When I next ran the game I tried to address some of these perceived issues by establishing a corporation for the party with a bank account and I gave them a large Traveller style mortgage on their ship.  I also added in some living expenses and a the concept of financial random encounters all in the effort to give the players something to hunger for and to make the reputation loss mechanics more meaningful.  If I were to run the game again I would incorporate these ideas into the game and pay way more attention for ways to compromise the crew reputation.

I don't want to give the opinion that Ashen Stars is not a great game as written, because it really is a fantastic and classic game.

Since Beacon is designed to be a Old school d20 system and have a high compatibility with other d20 systems there isn't a ton of mechanics that I would try to directly incorporate from Ashen Stars.  I considered adding in some kind of reputation mechanic and know this is done in other d20 games, but I don't think I would add it to the core rules, especially since Beacon is PC focused and not at all party focused mechanically.  I might someday consider some sort of party mechanics outside the core rules, maybe some kind of play supplement or campaign books.  So not much mechanically, however from a 'GM advice' perspective I would definitely take a lot from Ashen Stars, most importantly the gumshoe core concept of giving clues rather than asking for 'notice rolls' and having players get spotlights on collecting information appropriate to their skills and activities.  The Knowledge and Subterfuge skills stand out here but all the skills are easily applied to information gathering.  A player with a high Physical skill would notice an expert swordsman pretending to be a novice, a player with high Communication would naturally draw NPCs out in a conversation etc.

And this is longer than I thought it would be so I'll leave it there.  Would I play this game again - hell yes.  Here's my original thoughts on Ashen Stars from years ago if you are interested;
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

Dungeon Crawl Classics

Dungeon Crawl Classics

I really didn't want to get into Dungeon Crawl Classics for a couple of reasons.  Firstly I just didn't want to deal with another OD&D revamp.  I mean this is the Beacon blog and Beacon is what I thought d20 should look like, I mean that's the whole reason I wrote it right?  I did like what I was seeing from Lamentations of the Flame Princess, I thought that it was good enough that I wanted a copy of the hard cover, especially with the production quality it promises to have.  I also gave Adventurer Conquer King a try because it looked interesting and I'm an open minded kind of guy - always looking for new things to poke around with.  There's some good stuff in ACKS and LotFP, some stuff I might use in a campaign (domain game tables and charts) and some stuff that is very cool take on an idea but but which I probably wouldn't use (the LotFP skill system).  There is also stuff I certainly don't like about these systems and so I would probably use Beacon for any gritty Fantasy game and tack on bits from these others.

However, I stayed away from Dungeon Crawl Classics because I didn't think it had anything to add to the equation.  I flipped though the book and I thought it had too many charts and special rules and I really don't like that kind of game.  My biggest problem with ACKS is the proficiency system and the fiddly classes and DCC looked to take that even further.  It looked like a pile of disassociated mechanics and charts and probably something you'd have to house rule the crap out of to play a decent game with.  If you read this blog you'll recognize Mike (if you read this blog there's 33% chance you are Mike...) from his unreserved praise and zealous adulation - nay near worship - of Beacon, so it was a little surprising when he started toting around the DCC book and talking excitedly about how great it was and getting animated about all these luck rolls and corruption charts.  Really I felt kind of bad for him.

So then I played DCC.  It rocks.

I got roped into playing DCC as a funnel Mike ran for our kids. It was a lot of fun and ha ha it's a funnel and your guy gets killed by a mud man.  It seemed like it was a pretty solid game but I wasn't convinced.  I think people focus on the killing part of the funnel without understanding what the funnel actually does, but I'll get back to that.  It wasn't until we got a couple characters to first level that the game really became interesting to me.  The classes have interesting mechanics, the charts are many and varied but they work well.  The charts which I expected to hate I actually like because they aren't rule mechanic look-up charts you need to reference and memorize, they are modifier charts to make the game go places you wouldn't think of going.  The other big thing people remark on is the special dice and I, like a lot of other people, just thought that was a gimmick - and it is - but it's a good gimmick because dice substitution is a lot more fun than adding up bonuses and to do that right proper you need more granulation in the dice.  So in stead of getting increasing bonuses to hit as your warrior levels up, you get an extra dice and that dice goes from a d3 to d4 to a d5 which is way cooler and less unbalanced than simply adding +1's until you cannot miss.  This concept is used every where and it's consistent enough that once you get it, half the complexity of those tables goes away.  You aren't looking up rules, you are quickly referencing a die roll.

I'm so jealous of that idea.

I like the magic system too.  Push your luck mechanics are interesting and having the ability to cast away until you blow a roll and then pay the price is a greet mood mechanic that you just don't get with spell slots or spell points, or even a simple fumble table.  Teach you to cast that utility spell instead of getting the thief to do it, now you have an anus on your forehead...

As for the funnel - well it's fun to see characters die and all but I think the real value of the funnel is that you don't have folks coming to a campaign with a story already set up in their head.  More importantly you don't have 4-5 special snowflakes coming to the table with incompatible stories and then getting all butt-hurt when those stories don't progress or mesh well.  What you have is a story emerging out of the actions of these random characters who have learned to work together and seen their comrades die in interesting ways that make stories for them to talk about.  Those are some great stories.

I don't know how I'll like DCC once the higher levels kick in, and I don't know if I'll still be liking it as much a year from now or if something will pop up I'm not happy with, but I'm truly enjoying the game we're playing now (and not all due to the system, Mike can take some credit for being a good DM).  I haven't really felt a need to change a rule or disliked any design choice yet which is pretty good coming from me.  If I wasn't picky I'd still be playing AD&D probably.  We've started a DCC campaign now with our regular game group and after playing the kids game and getting a taste of classed characters, I'm really eager to see how this game works with a bunch of cantankerous and clever grown ups.

I'm still going to run my games in Beacon, but I might be willing to run something in DCC if I was filling in for the regular GM or the players already had characters or something.  Or maybe if someone was interested in trying it out - purely to examine comparative mechanics you understand.  Or if I had a good idea for a session...  That's pretty funny because I told Mike back in November that I might consider playing DCC, but I'd never run something with it.

What if

Beacon makes a lot of changes to the basic d&d formulas while trying to stay pretty compatible with d20 materials (and to a large extent the AD&D and OD&D modules and supplements that preceded those).  So although there is point based magic rather than Vancian magic, the spells and levels are pretty similar.  There are Hit points and Armour Class and although Beacon hit points aren't points of damage - they are points to absorb hits - it is still essentially ablative damage. There are two phases in combat, but there is still an initiative each round.  All the weirdness that comes from having a PC absorb sword strikes and lightning bolts still applies, thinly rationalized behind those trusty old mechanics.

I do sometimes wonder what would happen if I had decided to take Beacon off those rails however.  In the beginning I tried to model a system where armor prevented damage and found it less then satisfying (you hit more but it was anti-climatic because - you were doing more rolls, more math and less damage and that was not exciting).  I looked at using 2d10 or some other combination to normalize the dice rolls (more averages meant you succeeded more often at average things but less often at the exciting stuff that mattered).  I thought of only using the stat bonuses and dropping the trusty old 3-18 since Beacon uses on the bonuses usually but again, that made a lot of stuff not work (like gloves +1 DEX) or made stat damage way too nasty.   Most of the interesting changes I tried didn't really fit into the d20 framework and so I scrapped them.

But what kind of game would I go for if I wasn't worried about compatibility?  What would I keep and what would I scrap if I was just going to build a game I thought was interesting and not one I cared about interfacing with the old modules and stuff?  What kind of mechanics would lend themselves to the kind of game I like to run?  More importantly what current mechanics would I drop because I was no longer worried about easy translation of all that sweet source material.

I would probably drop the 'd20 plus modifiers' thing and go with some other success mechanic.  I like the idea of adding/removing dice instead of adding lots of modifiers.  I might use an exploding dice mechanic but likely I wouldn't unless it needed to be added to increase excitement.  I don't like wildly exploding dice, but something like L5R or V6 is OK.  One of the things I really like about Beacon is that the stats are your basic 'presence' in the game but your skills are the way you deal with things.  Your skills let you leverage or overcome your natural advantages.  I'd keep the way the stats and skills work as much as I could.  While figuring this out I'd probably change the range of success as well, make it a bit more focused.  Your characters would start a bit more capable and they'd top out sooner too.

I guess the next biggest thing I would change is the combat system.  There is something just off with d20 combat and I sure would like to wrestle with that.  You want to keep it simple roll against a target and you don't want the damage to be so severe that combat becomes disincentivized however you do want to add some kind of effect of damage.  It's not easy to mess with this - and a lot of people have tried.  I do think I would want to keep hit points, but I would try to totally separate damage from the equation.  I really like how FATE damage works in that you have consequences piling up if you blow out your buffer.    I think I'd make the old hit point pool much smaller and have it replenish much more often.  Starting with a base HP you'd get like one or two points per level.  Weapons would only do a couple points, I might even remove the damage roll.  I really like the simpler damage rolls in Beacon and might want to take that even further.

Anyway, you'd soak up the potential damage you take during a fight with your hit point pool but if you blew out your buffer you would start taking damage.  After the fight your HP would come back really fast - like catching your breath - but the damage wouldn't.  The damage would also have effects on your performance.  That's not hugely different than how Beacon works now at low levels - damage cuts into your STR and that causes your bonuses to drop - but currently it's unwieldy and you have to calculate the changes all the time.  I'd like something where you had like damage boxes and each one added -1 to all your rolls or something easy like that.  Other effects too, I'd certainly keep the critical hit concept around.

As for stats - well I'd keep them but I would just have the bonuses, not the 3-18.  Dino-Pirates of Ninja Island does this in it's d20 inspired system and I think it's a sensible direction to go.   If you are not going to use the stats as a roll under substitute for skills then I don't see the need to keep track of them when all you want is the bonus.  Just roll up the the -4 to +4 bonus or whatever and go with it - it would make spells and items that modify stats a lot more powerful too.  I'd probably change this right now if it didn't really mess with all the d20 material.

I would totally go with your level equals the level of spell you can cast.  Yes I would still keep levels because leveling up is awesome.  I would cap it though because it's too hard to account for unlimited progression.  I would probably only have like 6 or 7 levels or something, maybe an even 10.  I'd reorganize the spells along those lines, and I'd keep the 'spells cost fatigue' kind of mechanic - just adjust it for the different kind of hit point system.  Again I'd want to be dealing with 1 or 2 points instead of 7-8 points at a time for these mechanics.

Ah anyway I'm just woolgathering here.   I still fully intend to keep Beacon on the d20 path and keep polishing it up until it's finished.  If I did decide to play with these ideas, it would be a Beacon variant or some other game and I probably wouldn't throw it up anywhere.  It's not like anyone needs yet another fantasy RPG right?

Epic Space Marines Time

I think that we need to put our collective elbows together and write a pile of free Space Marine games.  Board games with spinners and Space Marines, games about Space Marines using zocchi dice, Space Marine story games, Space Marine games with FATE mechanics, Space Marines using the V6 engine, and of course Space Marines '74 kicking it old school.

Release the floodgates - maybe we can make February the Space Marine month.  Like Shark Week on Discovery Channel but instead with Space Marines... and longer.  And not on TV.  No one entity should own the term Space Marine.

Charging the old batteries

Work has been kicking my butt for the last while and I've been taking a load off and ignoring Beacon while indulging in some other sordid pass-times like Farcry 3, FTL and Legends of Grimrock when I did have some time off.  Ya the old Christmas Steam sales hit me pretty good and I couldn't help but buy too many video games and bouncing between them.  I've also got in two sessions of Diaspora with the regular game group, the initial cluster/character creation and our first real session.  It is going pretty well and I'm enjoying the Sci-fi setting and so far the FATE rules seem pretty interesting.  Good times.

I've been thinking about a couple things to knock away at in Beacon however.  The first thing, I really need to comb through the monster lists and fix all the minor errors.  In the last session I noticed that hobgoblin hitpoint range (I put in the middle and max values so it's very quick to stat up a monster on the fly) didn't match up with their hit dice.  That got me thinking that I really didn't have a standard way of indicating how many attacks a monster had so now I want to clean up all the stat blocks a bit and see if there's a good way to cram more info into them without introducing bloat.  I also was thinking about all the times that character armor was damaged in the game and how often they had it repaired.  That was an unexpected bonus from the critical hit table and I really want to introduce something to highlight weapon and armor repair in the rules - even a simple cost chart would be useful I think.  More on that later.  I'm sure that I'll find a couple other things to tweak and prod at too.  Beacon is getting there though, I no longer fret about it and I know I can pull it out and get the job done.

So I have some work to plonk away at and a couple posts planned in the next month or so, and as always drop me a note if you have any feedback or want to regale me with your Beacon story or express your undying love for the game.

Happy New Year

Hello, Happy New Year and all that.

The final session of the campaign went really well, lots of good spell use and lots of action.  The players were rolling crazy well with many natural 20s (I suspect some infernal bargains were made).  I'll write it all up sometime but for now I'm just chillin and enjoying the piles of snow and booze I've piled up all around my house.

Oh, and I made a submission to Gorgonmilks D12 Sources of Magical Energy thing because it is fun.

How I play Beacon and stuff

Ya, I've been busy lately.

It's not a bad thing.  I owe you a short session writeup and will owe you another couple posts once I run the final game in this current campaign this week.  As for the rules, well they haven't changed in a while (which is a good thing - means they seem to be working OK for level 1-5 anyway) and I'm pretty much wrapping up the current campaign so our game group can move on to something else for a while.  We're going to try some FATE gaming, specifically Diaspora which looks great.  I expect I'll be writing some posts on that game from the player perspective - but likely on my other blog.  I'll get back to writing about Beacon eventually though - especially if I get any feedback from folks out there playing it (that's a hint by the way.)

I didn't include any magic item lists, information on secret societies or political charts and tables with the rules.  Those kind of things should be campaign specific in my opinion and although I have no  problem with books and supplements that write up items, places, wild effects or other stuff (I totally use that kind of material in my games!) I think it doesn't belong in the core rule book.  Anything that I do present here about the Kingdom of the New Men or Milham town and the surrounding areas as mentioned in my play test session reports would come out in a setting supplement way and not in the Beacon rule book.  I'll probably present more of that stuff here in the future, especially if I gear up for another campaign - possibly something on G+ in the new year.  I'm also sure that once I get more high level play testing in there will be the inevitable adjustments to the rules.  Someone will point out that a level 13 dwarf savant is this or that and I'll feel betrayed and sad, and then figure out a way to fix it.  So Beacon as it sits is pretty stable for now but - it's still a draft.

Anyway since I do think that different games work for different types of play I thought it a good idea to mention how I think Beacon works best, or at least how I play it.  I'm sure you can play it a lot differently than I do since it's d20 at it's heart - but knowing how I run it is probably good insight into why the rules came out like they did.

I have a map of a small country.  It's not really detailed, just enough so that when players decide to go somewhere or talk to someone there are town names or directions and are some people or places they will hear about.  NPCs need things to talk about after all.  I don't want to fill in every little village or cave with stuff ahead of time because I want enough room to drop in encounter locations or accommodate random content. I like to use one page dungeons or simple encounter hooks to flesh out things and let the players decide where to go.   I do use random encounters, especially when the PCs are travelling - but I use custom encounter tables and frequencies for each area so that location matters.  I can see someone doing a random generated hex crawl campaign or conversely someone doing a very detailed map with lots of locaitons and NPCs and I think that Beacon would work that way too, but all that is really up to the GM because there are no extra tools in the game for that.  Plug in your campaign tools - be they random encounter tables or story and social kits.

I play a low level and gritty game where the players grow into their story.  Mostly I let them drive and try to keep things moving around them.  I think it's important that the world breathes  - if there was a plague the players couldn't prevent or cure, then it's going to be a situation for a while, with the attendant famine, economics and political fallout.  Never will it be a condition of 'winning' to stop the plague - shit happens and what's interesting to me is how it gets dealt with.  Emergent story over plotted character arcs I guess that is.   I might make up some recurring villains but I really try to stay away from the Evil Overlord/Mad God kind of bad guys.  It's so tempting to do, but I think that you can only get off one or two good save the world stories in a campaign world, so save those guys for special occasions.  It's gritty because a gang of goblins should be problematic and even mid level play should be about getting treasure to buy stuff and counting your arrows - not running a kingdom or wizard guild.  I see a Beacon game topping out at the old retire to the fortress you carved out of the wilderness - not at kill all the elder gods. If you want a more heroic fantasy it's probably not hard to do with Beacon and a few supplemental products but it would certainly be easier to do in D&D proper.  If you want a crazy gonzo game then you will probably find better materials elsewhere as well, DCC springs to mind here.  However if you like the streamlined presentation of Beacon and want to pad it up for those types of games then I say go for it - and then tell me about it.

The Wild Shall Wild Remain!

It was over two and a half years ago I decided that I should stop doodling and jotting rules down in a notebook and start actually composing my own PDF d20 game.  I liked the things I was reading on the game blogs and it seemed that the technology was all in place for weirdo RPGers from all over to create and share their visions.  It was a lot more work than I thought it would be to actually write and lay out Beacon.  It was also a fantastic experience getting it out onto the screen.  I don't have an actual inception date but today is the date I started this blog and so it will do as the Beacon birthday.  Thanks for hanging around these last two years Its been great getting your comments and and hope to see more in the years to come.

It's also the last day for Bob Burden's Flaming Carrot kickstarter which is kind of funny because ol' Flaming carrot was the profile icon I used for the account when I started blogging.  The Flaming Carrot is a modern day Quixote and for me and he's personified the spirit of someone who would take the time to write and blog about a Fantasy Heartbreaker.  He's undoubtedly insane but he is also someone you want to hang around with.  And he has a baloney gun.   If you aren't familiar with Flaming Carrot you owe it to yourself to drop the 15 bucks for a digital version of this comic.


*I wanted to add a note here that this kickstarter was great, I got all my stuff really fast including the signed Mysterymen graphic novel and a bunch of little Gumby cards and bookmark thingies freebies in the mail.  Solid job Mr. Burden.  Kudos also for offering the digital comic in so many formats and without any creepy DRM or stuff.  You can also buy FC stuff at http://bobburdencomics.com/

Mecha

I'd like to keep this blog mainly for discussion about Beacon and all it's wonderfulness, however I do have other interests which may or may not intersect with Beacon or game design in general.  I recently ran a game of Chris Perrin's MECHA RPG and I have a lot to say about that.  I'm going to be doing some posts about that on my other Blog but I thought that some of you folks might be interested.

So you can read about my experiences with MECHA here:

http://sayfurrier.blogspot.ca/2012/09/mecha-beginning.html
http://sayfurrier.blogspot.ca/2012/09/mecha-more-details-on-setup.html
http://sayfurrier.blogspot.ca/2012/09/mecha-episodic.html (links to all 5 episode breakdowns)
http://sayfurrier.blogspot.ca/2012/09/mecha-summing-up.html

Congratulations Reaper

Yeah, I bought in to get a butt-tonne of Reaper Bones miniatures.  It was a stupid good deal and the fact that I don't even need any minis shouldn't enter into it.  I shouldn't dwell on the concept that I HAVEN'T EVEN PAINTED most of the last batch of minis I bought from Reaper yet - and that was a while ago.  I'm not going to lie, I blame society for this.  And they are plastic - I really like that someone is working on high detail plastic miniatures. And you have to support the arts right?  I mean I'd rather see Reaper get a cool 3 million than have it go to a new bailout package to buy larger wallets for bankers.

I did manage to paint some ghouls

And I did need some space marine figures.  And pirates.  And townspeople, you never have enough townspeople.  I really needed to round out my selection of creatures too - if I actually used minis in a game that is.  


If you don't know what I'm talking about go here to view an appalling amount of miniatures.

The darkness

I actually think that Beacon plays better in the dark.  When we were camping, we played at night and it was pretty dark.  In addition to the central Coleman lantern, I just used a little LED reading light clipped onto my GM screen so I could see my notes. The players either used a quick shot from a flash light or leaned a bit into the lantern light to reference or update their character sheets. All their dice were from a shared pool that they rolled in that circle of lantern light.


It totally rocked.

I've played with music or general sound effects and I've played with props like minis and battle mats, and I have to say I think that darkness works better than any of these approaches.  Maybe we're just hard-wired to imagine better while sitting around the fire encircled by darkness?

What we really need for online games

I have played a couple games over Google Plus now and I have to say that it's just great.  In fact the last time I played on G+ was in a Trail of Cthulhu game and we got to use the moustache and top-hat effects which was probably counter productive but was great fun.  I have played where we just rolled dice and trusted each other, and also where we used Twillda whiteboard software to sketch out some combats and 'roll' dice in the shared chat window.  Both worked fine.
So there, I've proved my online chops.  Now I want to say something that's probably going to be unpopular.  We don't need any more damn virtual tabletops.  Seriously I think it's great that people are working on all these dice rollers and virtual tabletops with orc counters and foliage and fog of war and all power to them, but really we don't need any more of that.  We have too much of that stuff already and people are splitting the user base and nothing essential to this new twist in the hobby is getting done here.  Seriously I can't support the development of any more dice rollers and combat hex map layout tools.  I can already figure out how to do the dice or draw the layout of the tavern and my way probably won't involve any prep-time with either XML or a bitmap editor.

What we really need are online character sheets.  Ya ya there are some nice 4th ed character sheets on the iPad that will tell you how much a caltop costs or the amount of treasure you should be getting for next weeks adventure.  What if I change the prices or make home rules for HP and don't want to reprogram the damn things?  On the other hand you can use google docs to track your players stats and you can all share these links which is good if you are playing with laptops but not so good out at the campground.  These current solutions are either pretty or flexible - we need something that is both.  We need beautiful character sheets that we can share electronically, that we can use HTML5 or something to share online and display on tablets and phones offline. Character sheets that look nice and that can be customized easily for whatever game or house rules we're using.  We don't need them to calculate system specifics like weapon damage and item costs or even to calculate hp bonuses by level.  We just need stupid sheets of electronic paper that we can move the widgets around punch in the numbers and that we can scribble on.  We need modern character sheets without worn through hp boxes that have elegant ways to track those things that change often like damage, spell slots and arrows fired, and perhaps maybe link certain fields to a GM dashboard.

Someone Kickstart that.

Flame Princess Conqueror King

I've been reading the Adventurer Conqueror King (ACKS) system I picked up on Drive ThruRPG and I do like it but I have to admit that it is the Lamentations of the Flame Princess that is really drawing my attention of late.  I downloaded the free (sans art) PDF a while ago and I took a quick look at it but I didn't really look at it.  But lately I've been playing in a Labyrinth Lord game which is soon to be re-platformed to an ACKS game and so I've been looking at those systems.  While doing that, I found myself taking another look at the LotFP rules and I have to say that I think it's the best of the three.  I think that if I was going to run a fantasy game and I couldn't run Beacon I'd probably want to run LotFP and not ACKS or Labyrinth Lord.  Why?

• Fighters fight.  If I was less worried about general compatibility with d20 I'd man up and take away leveling attack bonuses from all the non fighter classes in Beacon too.  I won't though since that compatibility is one of the design cornerstones.
• Magic is chaotic.  This is great, re-purposing alignment like this and it revitalizes so many of the cleric spells and provides social consequences of magic.  I missed this bit until I heard Raggi talking about it in an Atomic Array interview.
• The specialization system is great and would be easy to work with.  Assuming any special skill you might need in a game requires a 1 in 6 and then allowing specialists to add pips is very flexible. (the thing I dislike most about ACKS is the long list of proficiencies/skills.  I prefer adding to a short list because a long list will never be long enough or exactly fit your campaign).
• ACKS just has too much going on with core mechanics.  It feels more like AD&D than D&D.
• Labyrinth Lord is great and I love what they've done with the place but I'd have to do some major renovations if I wanted to move in.  Also who puts saving throws halfway through the book and not in the character section.  Really.   

Don't get me wrong, there is a lot in the ACKS book I really like, especially the stuff focusing on building up social institutions as part of the game, but I think that Lamentations has it beat for basic adventuring rules.  The great thing is that additional campaign orientated content is readily applied to any fantasy adventuring rule set and I can see myself mining it for a Beacon campaign just as easily as it could be mined for a Labyrinth Lord or a Flame Princess campaign.  I am totally glad I picked up the Adventurer Conquer King PDF but I would seriously considering picking a LotFP Grindhouse book to keep beside the table just in case.

Beacon: what's in it for you?

I've been posting for a year and a half on this blog and discussing ideas for changes and rules tweaks, thoughts on draft releases and playtest session reports.  I've tried to stick to Beacon as a design topic but I have posted on other topics because things can't exist in a vacuum and a lot of time some idea from a movie or a book will influence game design.  I've noticed a couple traffic spikes when I announced a rules update or mentioned Laser Ponies or some other topic that drew some interest.  Today I was reading a couple blogs and realizing just how hard it is to get a sense of an overall topic in the blog 'rolling posts' format.  Do people coming here read a post and attribute it to Beacon or to gaming in general or to d20?  Do they know what I'm trying to do here?  I do have an 'About' page, but unless you go back to the beginning of the blog and read you might not get a sense of what Beacon is about.  I thought it might be a good idea to make a newer post talking about why someone might want to try out Beacon as opposed to other great games.

So why should you play Beacon?

System specific answer:

Pathfinder/3e:  If you like Pathfinder or 3rd edition D&D but find them a bit heavy with feats and situational rules or if you want something closer to old school D&D but with familiar D20 mechanics then try Beacon.

Microlite:  If you like Microlite but want a bit more class progression and/or more customized content folded into it then try Beacon.

OD&D:  If you like OD&D (or clones like Labyrinth Lord, Castles and Crusades or Swords and Wizardry) but want your characters to start out a bit meatier or would like to try point based spell mechanics then try Beacon.

Gurps Fantasy/Rolemaster/BRP/Palladium/etc.:  If you want to try some d20, maybe run one of the old d&d modules you picked up but never re-statted for your system then try Beacon.  It should be pretty quick to get up and running.

Legend of the Five Rings:  If you want something diverting to play during Winter Court or on the wall between combat drilling and Oni attacks, or if you want to recreate historic tales of the Unicorn clan then try Beacon.

Traveller/Star Frontiers/Star Wars:  Well you're probably not even reading this, or if you are then the sci-fi One Page Dungeon you are looking for is here.

Horror:  Oh my God what's that scratching in the closet!?!

Bullet list answer:

• Beacon is a d20 system, it is pretty much out of the box compatible with other d20 materials and pretty compatible with materials for older versions of d&d (with minor conversion).
• Beacon has races and classes tied into a simple skill system. Player creation is fast and simple so new players can grasp it very quickly
• Players can direct their character progression.  The leveling system includes skill point assignment for players to choose how their characters evolve. 
• Beacon is rules light and narrative driven.  There are rules here for resolving actions with the focus on how you describe the actions.
• Combat is simple but still somewhat tactical.  Group initiative streamlines play.  Combat rounds consist of two phases, missile and melee, and movement can happen in both.  Spells must be prepared and can be interrupted.  There are simple modifiers for terrain.  Minis or tokens can be used but are certainly not required.
• Hit points measure fatigue and physical damage is reflected by stats.
• Spells are more common, magic items less so.  Magic is draining.  There are no daily use limits, however casting spells uses HP which cannot be healed magically.
• Monsters are simple to stat up and run, you really just need to remember their hit dice and any really special abilities.  No need to remember an creature's claw vs bite damage, its all derived from HD so pile them on.
• Your mom wants you to try it.  Seriously, she just called me.

Google Plus

I've wanted to run a Beacon game on Google+ since they announced the hangout feature* but it hasn't happened yet.  I am however going to be playing in my first Google+ game tonight using the lovely Labyrinth Lord rules. It's a Constantcon game and follows the Flailsnails conventions and all that so it will be a good introduction to that community for me. I have to say I enjoyed rolling up the character** and am excited to play, especially since I never ever actually played original D&D. I actually cut my teeth on AD&D even though my first adventure was Keep on the Borderlands.  I figured it would be a good thing to play a few games this way before running one, especially to see how things like character sheets were done.  I can handle having players roll their dice and have no issues about trust in that respect, however character sheets and item management seemed to me to be the really sticky point. 

The GM of the game I'm going to be playing in suggested a site called charactersheet.net along with Google Docs and some other thing I can't recall at the moment, and so I went to the site and was happy to use that service.  It works good, and if it's a bit spartan - well it's clean and free so no complaints from me.  It looks to support multiple games and even has a free form sheet.  It looks to be a suitable solution for G+ and maybe even for regular meat games.  I do worry that it's web only however since I would like the option of playing a game in a spooky shack in the Carpathian mountains, or when the power goes out.  I did want to know what other similar services were out there for managing character sheets, especially for the tablet platform.

I'm going to look into this more because I'd like to have character sheets on my iPad and preferably be able to store multiple characters from multiple games and port them between the Applesphere and desktops or even a hypothetical fancy Android tablet (the Toshiba Excite x10 one looks nice!).  My regular gaming group is starting an L5R campaign and the GM is a real Apple fellow so we have a website/app for the campaign and I really want to electrify my character sheet and do everything but dice rolling on the tablet.  There's no reason why this can't be done these days, even to the extent of having many fields on the sheet flowing back to the GM's dashboard.  I can dream of a day when I have Beacon character sheets, indexed rules and various quick roll tables all packed into one nice little tablet app.

Also speaking of Google+, I did make a Beacon page on there as a ambassador of this blog and a way to co-ordinate activities should I get a game going.  Don't bother checking it out now however since nothing is going on there yet.



* Actually I've wanted to try to run an online game since I found RogerWilco VoIP software back in 1998, but G+ multi-person video was the sauce on the goose.


**I made my daughter validate my rolls 3d6 in order.  I got a Fighter. He could have been a dwarf with his 14 STR but I wanted to go with a two handed sword though.  He has 4hp. I've certainly been thinking of the differences between this and my last post about starting HP.  She also suggested the name: Marlin Densburg - kids are fun.

for beginning GMs

I didn't get a chance to play much Beacon over the holidays, although I did get in some Battlefield 3 and managed to play through ICO on my PS3.  ICO was great by the way, well worth checking out and as a bonus on the same disc you get Shadow of the Colossus which looks great too (you climb up giant monsters and stab them - how sweet is that?!).  During the holidays, one of my daughter's friends came over and they asked me to pull out a book and some character sheets for them to play a game.  So, although no Beacon got played there was RPG in the house -  by popular demand we played Laser Ponies. 

It was a while back when I heard about Laser Ponies and I grabbed a copy from RPGNow because it was a cheap PDF and it was funny.  I thought maybe my girls would enjoy playing it as an silly offset to more serious games.  I ran them through an adventure and they had a great time, my daughter even ran a short game back in July, but soon we were back to playing Beacon.  I thought it was all a lark but didn't think much of it and I didn't hear much about it from them for a while afterwards so I assumed they were done with it.  So I was mildly surprised that they asked to play this specifically, I tried to offer them a game of Beacon but they politely declined*.  I got out the Laser Pony books and started them on a sweet little rescue quest and we played a bit for an hour or so until we had to do something else.

The thing was, they weren't done with it. The girls decided they didn't need me to play Laser Ponies, they could run it themselves.  So they did, they continued playing most of that afternoon.  Wow, I thought this was great!  And it's even greater because this morning my 10 year old daughter asked me for more character sheets because they were going to a sleep over and the girls had decided to roll up characters for their friends.  RPG sleepovers!  Oh yeah!  Man I used to love RPG sleepovers when I was kid - that's when the rubber hit the road for us back in the day.  Many a brave warrior slew mighty dragon over a bowl of chips in those days.  My daughter had maybe three questions about QAGS, the system that Laser Ponies is based on, but mostly she's going to wing it, and she didn't seem too concerned about having to make up things on the fly.  I showed her the D&D and Savage World books and talked about the different game genres like fantasy or super heroes or space opera and she pretended to be interested, but then she said that they could do all that stuff in Laser Ponies if they wanted to.

I assumed that kids starting out playing would need to know a lot about rules and charts and how to build characters and generate stories, but you know what - they don't.  They are better at making up characters and stories than most adults are, and once they cotton to the idea of using a random element like a dice roll to resolve actions - they pile a lot of mileage on the concept.  I'm sure their first games will be as terrible and railroady and broken as my first games were, but I think they will have fun learning to play.   I do not know if this would be the case if I dropped the 4e or the pathfinder box set in their laps.  I did eavesdrop on some of their holiday game, and I heard one of them ask if she could trade in some of her Yum Yums for a new power.  I didn't hear the answer my daughter gave, but I didn't need to either.  There is no wrong answer.

I have to say if you are looking for a good simple game for fantasy RPG you might want to consider Beacon, but really for beginning GMs I think that Laser Ponies is just about perfect.

*Fathers might recognize that particular raised eyebrow look that indicates this.

slight delay

Um yeah, I'm still working on that Beacon update.  I know I projected mid November, but well...  The thing is I'd like to try out the new 2 phase combat a bit and we haven't had a chance to get a session in lately to do it.  Also I still can't think of a real great ritual for 5th level divine magic.  Also I picked up Agricola at Hammercon and I've been fondling the wooden bits and play mats a little and trying to trick my kids into playing a trial game (they just love it when I try to teach them new board games cold from the rulebook).  We've finally got in our first session of Trail of Cthulhu last weekend and that was fun.  So there is still gaming going on, and so I consider that the research portion of research and development - or so I tell my superego anyway.  Also Battlefield 3 came out and my thumbs are sore.  Them jets don't fly themselves you know.

So soon.  Stay tuned.


*update - noodling around on the OSR blogs and I found out that Jeff Dee is a pretty neat guy.  I always liked his D&D illustrations, good to see he's still around and mixing it up.

Going to Hammercon

Give me some of that sweet sweet galactic domination

So by Friday I'll be hanging out in Hamilton Ontario (in Canada) with a bunch of friends and a bunch of beers, and on Saturday afternoon I'll be at Hammercon.  I would like to say I'll be running play tests of Beacon but in fact I'll be using this as an opportunity to do something I rarely ever get to do - playing Twilight Imperium!

If Hammercon was longer and I had more time I might run some Beacon but the opportunity to sit down with 6 folks and slug it out for galactic domination is just too good to pass up.  It's a game that I've only managed to play through twice because its just too hard to get that many like minded folks together for that length of time.  It's like Civilization (the one by Avalon Hill) or Machiavelli in this respect - fantastic game experiences but only when you have a lot of engaged people with a chunk of time to spend.  I used to have a similar problem with the game Titan - the classic monster Slugathon game - but some clever folks managed to make a Java on-line version called Colossus which satisfies that particular itch and is a great way to spend a few hours during an evening.

I'm actually doing a double header to maximize my boardgaming and will be playing another Fantasy Flight game afterwards - A Game of Thrones the board game. This game I have played many times and it's one of my favourites because it is very fun and compelling - but doesn't take as much time as the some of the aforementioned games. It is theme based on the Martin books but pretty much a cross between Machiavelli and a euro game with nice turn mechanics to keep the play from bogging down and some great bid voting and supply mechanics. Both Thrones and Twilight Imperium have a similar feel in this respect which makes sense because they were both designed by the same dude - Christian Petersen.  And even though I've played A Game of Thrones quite a bit, it's not often I get to play a full on 6 player game - so here's hoping.

I would have liked to have some copies of my Beacon 5th draft available to give out at the con, but it's not finished yet.  I hope that I'll be able to hit Hammercon next year and play some Beacon - but then again it would be almost time for another game of Twilight Imperium, or maybe some Civilization - zug zug.