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.  

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.

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.

July Update

Been a little while since the last post, but I'm unrepentant.  The play-tests have been going well and the players seem to be enjoying the game.  They also have flushed out some issues which is fantastic.  I have made corrections in the Roll20 character-sheet and made some additional adjustments to the version 7 draft which I updated and you can get here.

Most of the changes I have been makings are in purple text for now so the play-testers can find them easier, but here's a summary of the bigger things:

Melee weapon damage now includes the full STR bonus and two handed weapons get a +1 to damage.  I changed this from a practicality perspective because calculating half bonus is a pain in the ass and two-handed weapons were probably too powerful compared to one handed ones.  The +1 is good enough I believe.

I put in some conditions for taking various amounts of Stat damage, the system allows you to not use HP and instead take STR damage, and I like that idea since it allows for some decision making trade offs when a character wants to push themselves.  However now that Stat damage heals faster, a lot of players were using their STR as a HP heat sink in fights and then expecting to just heal up in downtime between sessions.  I didn't like this since it makes a HUGE difference for low level characters to soak up damage. So to balance things again I put in some conditions when you take various amounts of STR damage. 

Characters who have taken 2 or more STR damage cannot DASH and can only move once per round or half speed overland. A character taking 4 or more points of STR damage in one round are in Shock until they have had a Rest or proper attention. Characters in Shock are at disadvantage on all rolls. A character having 6 or more points of STR damage are in considerable and debilitating pain. They cannot take any actions unless they make a DC 12 Physical save to overcome the pain.

I have been toying with the idea of making these limits slightly different, perhaps use character level so that the available buffer grows along with HP, but I like this as a test and its a good way to include conditions which is something I wanted to do anyway.

I also formalized the time a little bit and fixed the definitions for turns vs rounds etc.  Some of this is to pave the way for fixing the spell descriptions and to add in a few exploration/resource rules.  Also I added in some rules for the weapon durability and adjusted the critical tables for that.  I like it and its pretty simple to track I believe, we'll see what the players think.

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.

Going Fishing

Ha ha I have tricked you into thinking that I am taking a day off or some kind of vacation when in fact I am going to tell you I am working even harder to provide you quality Beacon content. When you want to go fishing you need to open a can of worms you see. And so I am telling you in a very roundabout way I have opened a can of worms. And yes this belabored metaphor is showing you a bit too much behind the curtain in my mind. Workin hard folks, workin hard.

I haven't posted every week as I had planned to do this spring, but I have been working on Beacon every week.  The new Beacon character-sheet is up on Roll20 and available for you to use in your online games.  I have also poked and prodded and worked on the new rules quite a bit (a preview is posted on the downloads page).  Its pretty interesting to crack open something from so long ago.  I believe the bulk of the game was written in 2010/11 with smaller changes being made up till 2015 (This reminds me that the 10th anniversary of this blog is coming up in September and I better make sure I get myself a nice present).  Revisiting the rules with that time elapsed really lets me see the problems with the game, not just in the rules but from a presentation perspective as well.  I am finding a lot of little things I want to change, and some I really want to but should not change because they support the design goals.  

Making these work better while retaining the initial intent is an interesting thing.  I've spent way too much time thinking about AC and Dexterity bonuses for example.  I'm also simply finding a lot of things that I want to explain better or to clarify because they were not clear, or were taken for granted.  So I'm reading and revising and re-reading and then thinking a lot about the game.  Its great fun but its taking a bit longer than I anticipated to get the rules revised.

So yes, a part of this exercise is trying to remember and keep the design goals of Beacon in mind because certainly I could re-write the whole thing. There are so many good games out there that do particular things, there needs to be a reason for another one.  There are many types of game play and interesting mechanics that I personally like and the temptation is to throw in the lot, and that is a bad idea.  So I've been thinking lot about the purpose of Beacon and what it should do that other games don't do better.  I have the original statement of purpose from the first blog post:

Beacon is a fantasy RPG designed to be fairly rules light and quick to play but still have enough meat to be satisfying and to be highly compatible with the vast amount of d20 based fantasy supplements available.

I think this is pretty good but it doesn't really tell you what kind of game experience Beacon is or what kind of hunger it satisfies.  I need to add a bit to this mission statement. Working on that bit will make it easier for me to focus on the final bits I'm working on and bring the rule book together I think.  When I imagine playing Beacon I see particular types of games like hex and dungeon crawls, deadly situations with character deaths, and having story arise from logistics as well as situations.  The thing that got me fired up to revisit the Beacon rules was the idea of supporting free online d20 games, but also provide a system for the more gritty, dungeon/hex crawl style of game.  This is coming out in my efforts to design the character-sheet so that it allows easier resource tracking, or streamlining character creation so that new characters can rapidly replace the fallen but still be interesting individuals.  So I know generally what kind of game it should be and have been tailoring the rules to this, but I need to articulate this so the design can reinforce that ideal.

Next I'm going to talk about some good blog posts I've read.

Online Character Sheet - part1

I'm working on a new online character sheet for Beacon on Roll20.  The previous character sheet has been up there since around 2015 and although I'm super happy that I had someone build it for me, it's now old and parts of it don't work right anymore.  I needed to update some things anyway and I really had some ideas on how I wanted the sheet to support online play so I decided to update it myself this time.

I looked a a bunch of other Roll20 character sheets and decided that the one closest to what I wanted was the DCC_Tabbed sheet.  The beauty of open sourced code is you can reference it and so I rolled up my sleeves and started ripping the DCC sheet all apart and hacking together my dream character sheet.

Sneak peek of the new Beacon online sheet

The first thing I wanted to do was to remove all the interactive dice rollers embedded in the sheet.  I understand why these are so popular on Roll20 sheets but honestly I think they are more trouble than they are worth since there are so many modifiers to rolls or different circumstances possible having these hard coded seems problematic.  I totally agree with having the sheet calculate as much information as possible for players, however those calculations should just facilitate the players making a roll, not lock them into anything.  If a player knows they have a +3 bonus from stats and whatnot but they want to try for advantage on the roll, then I would rather they had that conversation in game then rolled the using the dice roller app and verbally add the bonuses rather than spend time hunting down which roller to use and which buttons to press.  I also dislike the rollers that announce success or failure since they have no GM input to determine that.  I would not like to have a player roll and get a exciting "Success" to then contradict that because it didn't have all the info.  What a bummer that would be.  I prefer to have the ability to call for rolls without giving out the specific DC or stop the action to have the players plug a bunch of info into various dialogue boxes.  I can say 'this is pretty hard' or 'should be easy' to keep things a bit mysterious, and in combat I really would rather have them figure out that the monster has pretty thick skin by making a few attacks first.  I don't think you an improve a lot on reaching for the dice to be honest, someone needs to invent physical dice that interact with virtual tabletops.

Inventory tab selected

However where online sheets shine I think is they way they can keep track of stuff for you.  Paper sheets keep track of items really well but not so much the stuff that changes a lot.  The new Beacon sheet has all sorts of spots to list your money and items, but it also calculates your stat and skill bonuses, it calculates the number of attacks you get and your base attack and damage bonus based on your level and class so you don't need to look it up.  If you put on some new armour, it sorts out your AC for you.  One of the biggest issues I had in playtesting was having the players deal with HP because they needed to track both HP and spell fatigue.  In the online sheet if you cast a spell or spend HP to avoid damage it shows you your remaining HP automatically and can display that info in different spots.
I like this sort of thing a lot since it means less time fiddling with the sheet and more time role-playing.

Another thing that the sheets do very well is let you add or remove rows of items and I wanted to leverage this.  If you have a lot of weapons and countable resources they you have that area of the sheet expanded by adding more item rows.  The spell book takes up no space until you start adding in spells, and the spell descriptions can be hidden so they don't get in the way.  That dynamic aspect is very appealing.

One thing that struck me about the online sheet that is how responsive it is to some of the stuff that I put into Beacon to make it grittier but was an actual pain at the table, choosing when to recalculate your bonuses was always an issue with the way that damage applies to your stats.  If you are playing at the table and you take stat damage in a fight I generally don't bother to ask a player to modify their bonuses but online this is automatic so the intended mechanic of making true damage really suck actually works better online.  I also have the idea to have conditions impact things in real time which is in exciting idea.  These things can be pretty vicious and can have a kick-me-when-I'm-down vibe however and I will have to see how that play-tests out to understand the impacts.

I estimate I'm about 75% finished on this.  I need some time to find the bugs and there is a lot of temptation to keep adding in stuff.  The Trail of Cthulhu character sheet in Roll20 has a nice feature where you can lock and unlock the core stats when you 'level up' so that they don't get changed by mistake mid-game and another one that lets you reset your pools between sessions.  Those are features I like a lot but I will probably leave them off the table for now.   I need to get this out and then update the Beacon v7 PDF to go with it so I can start play testing.

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.

A lot of d4s

I spent a little bit of time working through the idea to change the static bonuses in Beacon with die rolls.  I won't say that I've given up on the idea but I won't say I'm happy with anything so far either.  One of the problems I'm seeing is how to make a smooth progression without having an arbitrary or obtuse levelling table.  Another problem is how to deal with the rapid escalation of the high end of the dice rolls.  My solution so far has been to use the standard die with the lowest variance, which is the d4.  Last post I showed a table that used d4s for an attack bonus.  I like d4s because the more you add them together the more probable the average result will come up and the highest and lowest results are not so far off as to be unfair or break the game.  A fighter with 4d4 will get a solid +10 average and in rare cases at the very least a +4 and at most a +16.  If you start adding larger dice those variances are a lot larger and you quickly start seeing +30 and +40 coming up as possible outcomes.

They add up fast!  BTW, you can buy these on etsy.

I think I could live with that sort of thing if it were the only case in the game where this kind of mechanic was used.  However it is not.  There are also incremental bonuses in the class skill system, players gain a +1 to any skill every level, and at specific levels they get class specific skill bonuses.  Should I try to substitute d4 for these as well?  I did play around with that idea a little bit and it seems to work pretty well with the level bonuses, e.g. a rogue would get a +1d4 to their subterfuge or survival skill every third level.  That is fine.  Where I'm concerned is the case of the savant class, who get a free skill bonus every second level, and also with the general bonus all PCs get for levelling up.  Those d4s would be adding up fast.

Right away I see the need to change the distribution so that the bonus comes at longer intervals, staggering them out so that you only see an increase every second or even third level. After all you aren't getting a +1 you are getting a +2.5 average.  So instead of +1 per level you would get +d4 every second or third level.  And because they would be staggered I'd want players to get some kind of advancement at each level so I would have to interleave skill bonuses with the magic level advancements and with the combat bonuses.  Nothing worse than gaining a level and getting nothing for it so I would try to avoid dead zones.  Since the skill bonus is pretty much the same as the fighter attack bonus, the progression would look the same, however it would ideally be spread out across the six skills.  You would not likely have many characters with any single skill bonus greater than a 5d4.  However the savant would break that all to hell and without some adjustment I can see characters with huge piles of d4s in a particular skill.  In fact the savant class probably already bends the skill system as they can apply generous bonuses to any skill and there are no restrictions on pumping one skill up very high.  Right now a 12th level savant character could have a +17 to any one skill if they ignored the others, however in a d4 system with the progression rate halved they would probably have a lot more than that since a modest 9d4 averages 22.5.

I'd not like to have arbitrary rules for this but it is possible that I could to make adjustments to limit skill bonuses to prevent problems, perhaps limiting a skill bonus by level number or something.  This would further complicate the advancement to keep the levels balanced and I don't like unnecessary complexity.  And if I have to do all that the question arises,  what does this do to the game and is it worth the complications.  Is having variable bonuses worth the extra effort?  Then again, it might be fun to roll handfulls of 4ds.  I'll have to try it and see.

Twelve

I believe that I'm going to cap the Beacon advancement at level 12. I'm not going to do any drastic changes to the level progression or realign spells to levels or anything else that might really change the game simply because, well, it would really change the game.  I do think that capping the rule book tables and charts at level 12 will simplify everything however.  If people want to run past that level they can figure out the progression and extrapolate but I don't think I would want to play a level 15-16 character in Beacon anyway, I think things tend to break down by that point. I might have liked to make things even simpler with an even 10 levels but there's no real good reason to do that. By level 12 all classes have had a chance to get a couple bumps to their attack bonus, a few class based skill bumps and access to level 6 spells so I think it's the natural place to stop. This way I won't have to consider adding in level 7 or 8 spells, or worry about characters with triple digit hitpoints.

I'm also experimenting with replacing the attack bonus with an attack dice, ala Dungeon Crawl Classics.  I'm not going to go so far as to introduce zocchi dice or anything, however I think that with the basic d4-d12 you can get a pretty decent progression.  I'm mainly looking at how this impacts the fighter at the moment as they get the full range of the bonus and if it works for them, it will be easy to make it work for the other classes.

Here's the current attack bonus chart:

And here's an example of how that progression would map as an attack bonus roll:

	L1	L2	L3	L4	L5	L6
Dice(av)	d2(1.5)	d4(2.5)	d6(3.5)	d8(4.5)	2d4(5)	d12(6.5)
Low-Hi	1-2	1-4	1-6	1-8	2-8	1-12
	L7	L8	L9	L10	L11	L12
Dice(av)	2d6(7)	3d4(7.5)	3d6(10.5)	2d10(11)	2d12(13)	3d8(13.5)
Low-Hi	2-12	3-12	3-18	2-20	2-24	3-24

with magic users topping out at d8 and the other classes topping out at d12 

I tried to keep the average equivalent to existing values, but still the first thing that you will notice is that the high and low values are pretty wild, a possible +3 or +24 to hit at level 12.   I don't think that is a deal breaker, but it is pretty jarring, and I can see players not liking that much randomness.  I really don't like it very much so I've also considered doing this with more smaller dice in order to curb those outliers.  Also there's something cool about rolling a handful of dice and having more dice in that roll would model the reliability that comes from experience.  Doing this would expose more gaps in the progression but it would work out across the 12 levels and I'd have to jigger level 1 and 2 a bit so it would probably* look something like this:

	L1	L2	L4	L6	L8	L10	L12
Dice(av)	+1	d3(2)	d4(2.5)	2d4(5)	3d4(7.5)	4d4(10)	5d4(12.5)
Low-Hi	+1	1-3	1-4	2-8	3-12	4-16	5-20

 In this case magic users would top out at d4 and the other classes at 2d4

That is a lot more reasonable for my taste although the magic users get screwed.  I'd have to adjust that I think.  Also it is a new arbitrary mechanic with a lookup table to reference and it does nothing to address all the other mechanics that rely on incremental bonuses, like skill and magic rolls.  That means it's more complicated than what was there before and I'm not sure it adds a co-responding value to the game.  I'll have to think about this some more.



*yes I know

Still playing the DCC

Been there, it's full of weirdos.

Game design is a slow process.  Or rather it's slow play-testing things when you do it as a hobby.  I haven't done much work on the Beacon rules for a while now, but I am doing some comparison study, mostly with DCC.  Our game group is still playing DCC and it is still quite fun.  Some of the crack are showing, but really there aren't very many cracks and if you run this game correctly it is a very good one.   Not everyone in our group is a fan of the randomness of the magic system (or of 20 in general really) but I think it's charming.  This is not the game for people that want to define and control their character development, but since I prefer making a story out of what happens in game and not what I want to happen, I think its pretty darn good.

What I really like in DCC?

• I really like using dice as a modifier over using fixed bonuses/penalties.  That's brilliant.
• I really like the leveling factor - 1-10 seems the perfect range and there are no padded or empty levels here.

What is an interesting mechanic?

• Mercurial magic is pretty good and it is fun to have these effects in the game.  I wouldn't port it to another game though and it does really have a feedback loop effect.  Daniloth the Elf had a -2 luck modifier (-%20 on the table!) and so he didn't do so well here with most of his spells barely usable - he was fun to play but there was not much chance he'd make it very far in the game with magic.
• All the charts and tables used to resolve actions make things very interesting.  Half of the gaming blogs out there are posting neat effect tables and it's a popular game style.  So here is a shit-ton of them at your fingertips.

What I am not so fond of?

• Luck is very metagamey.  It does work if you really clamp down on players and dish out consequences for low luck scores, but it's not a great design because it relies so much on the in-game implementation.   Also, I don't like bennies in Savage Worlds because players will lean on them instead of playing careful and they dilute the equation of ability vs the random factor of the dice so I don't like luck for the same reason.  I think luck is a bit too important and I can see it spiral out of hand in DCC.  I can see a high level thief being able to do anything they want to with their huge luck reserves.  Now take that with a grain of salt because I haven't even seen level 3 play yet.  Take all this with a grain of salt, this game was play-tested a heck of a lot more than Beacon.
• I don't like the thief skills, they seem bolted on just like in D&D and I'm not a fan of discrete skills in general.
• Mighty Deeds of Arms is way to open to abuse.  I like the bonus attack dice but the double down crit system is a bit loose. Again it can work if you make it work, but not because its a great mechanic.  In our game, even with good players, it is seen immediately as a way to bypass hit points and over-perform on the attack. This means the GM and players have to constantly negotiate to prevent abuse or over compensate, and the mechanic is watered down.  I think this would work much better if it was tightened up and there were a simple set of specific feats to select from like throws, disarms and called shots.  This is especially true considering critical hits are stacked on top.

What would I steal for Beacon?

I would very seriously consider changing many of the progression/bonus mechanics to use dice instead of set modifiers.  I very probably will take some aspects of this and incorporate it into Beacon, at least for multiple attacks and for dual wielding of weapons.  I might also use variable dice instead of set bonuses to drive the class and race abilities to some extent.
I've mentioned before that if I wasn't worried about generic d20 compatibility, I might delve into changing the level progression a bit so there were smaller number of them but they were all bigger jumps.  I'd probably take this a bit further and change the spell levels so that they were 1:1. Having something like 8-10 levels and 8-10 spell levels seems so simple - or I'd do away with spell levels all together leaning more on the HP system to scale the effects.  Changing the level ratio for advancement would be good, especially if I was substituting dice for +'s in some way.

That being said there are a lot of things that I think Beacon does right and that I wouldn't change.  I'm still in love with having racial hit dice instead of basing it on class.  I still like the aspect type skill system and using using hp for magic.  I wouldn't be interested in adding luck or any kind of benefit tokens.  I'm pretty happy with the simplicity of Beacon and I'm in no rush to chase the latest trend or redo it for a specific feel.

If I feel the urge to play something more like DCC, I'll just play DCC.  It's a lot of fun.

Ready weapon

I'm not one to complain when players automagically pull out a potion or other similar item from their backpack in the middle of a fight.  I don't want to make people describe how they stored their potion so it wouldn't break, how they reach around to their back while fending off goblins with their free hand or how they dig the item out of their backpack without unpacking the damn thing.  Its a game and this little fudge keeps things simple and really doesn't hurt the balance of things.  I do however want to make sure that weapons are not handled so automagically since that does impact some in game mechanics.  So In Beacon you have to ready a weapon before you can use it.  I'll let players ready a weapon in advance of combat if they are in a situation where it would be reasonable - like entering a dark cave, or when a wolf howls.  But I don't want players travelling down the forest path to have their weapons always at the ready for hours at a time.

Ready?

Combat in Beacon is broken into two phases - the reason for this is I didn't like the more complicated major/minor/utility action breakdown of a combat round - and I also found the single action combat round to be too open to abuse.  You can read up on why I went with two phases here and here- the point is - I wanted a simple breakdown that had the fewest rules required to achieve a decent level of tactics.  I also wanted to make sure that characters dropping/breaking or switching their weapons in combat would be impacted, but not penalized so heavily that it would be a problem when this happened.  Breaking a weapon and grabbing a replacement needs to add tension and excitement to the combat narrative, but it shouldn't be punitive.

So, assuming you aren't surprised, a consequence of this is that the Missile phase of the first round of combat often has players readying their weapons.  This isn't a real problem for people using melee weapons because they will get to ready their weapon (and move) then attack in the upcoming melee phase.  However folks using ranged weapons are a bit S.O.L in this situation.  If you ready your crossbow you will miss firing it in the missile phase and have to wait out the melee phase.  Well you can move both phases (up to 120 feet/yards if you move in both phases) anyway to get out of the fray and line up a shot.  I don't have a problem with this either I'm certain dedicated bowmen will deal with this as part of their tactics - but I'm pretty sure it will discourage the more casual use of things like throwing daggers, darts and hand axes.

There are two ways to handle this that I can see.

one way to handle it

The first is to make a distinction between ranged weapons like bows and thrown melee weapons like daggers.  In this case I change the Missile Phase to Ranged Phase and indicate which weapons are Ranged.  I somewhat like this idea, but it does introduce the issue of missiles flying in all  the phases and I can see confusion arising from that.  I also can see another problem that if a party is surprised and miss out on the Ranged Phase they will still have to spend a phase readying daggers and darts and won't get to use them until next melee round.

The second, and I believe better, way to do this is to make some weapons available instantly.  No need to ready that dagger - just throw it.  This appeals to my sense of narrative because - hey there's a dagger in your throat - and it would give a good reason for characters to carry certain weapons for these situations.  It also fits with the idea of unarmed combat - there is no way to justify making players miss a round of melee because they didn't ready their fists.  Making the cestus (your basic steel belted or spiked mittens) available for attack without being readied* only makes sense, why not just extend this to daggers, darts, staves and spears** as well.



* when you are wearing them, and you better not try wearing them 24/7 and eating your dinner or hanging out at the bar with them on however.
**well if you are carrying them like a walking stick maybe?

hired help

It just came to me recently that one of the biggest differences in game play between how I ran things when I was young and how the old school games were actually designed involves henchmen.  When I was a pup, I ran adventures where the party was self sufficient, players rarely hired on people except perhaps as a service provider in town or a tracker in the wild.  Everything focused on the players and they didn't need anyone's help.  In the Labyrinth Lord campaign I'm playing in (Zharillia), we have to hire henchmen, it is vitally important that we hire henchmen and if we do not hire henchmen we will not succeed. We are low level adventurers who can be killed in one blow.  We have to hire guys to hold our torches and to fight beside us (not the same guys, and certainly not the same wages!).  This is not a bad thing, on the contrary it gives everything a feeling of accomplishment.  This difference between play styles I've know intellectually, but experiencing it now I've started to think on how I'm doing things in Beacon.

a couple guys to hold the torches

When designing Beacon I wanted to include henchmen.  I knew I wanted to have that element in the game but I hadn't really thought about it much.  I did include a chart on costs for hiring porters and guides and guards and such, and some play testers even took the cue and hired a couple folks to drive wagons and fight for them.  What I didn't do however was write up any hireling management or morale rules.   Aside from outlining the costs, the PC/NPC interactions were implied.  I guess you could lift rules from 3e or AD&D for these things and I'm sure it would work fine.  I'm all good with keeping rules light and having GMs borrow or build house rules to suit, but once again I find that I would like to have a stated mechanic available that fits with the game too.

I really think I need to put in three bits of information; how many hirelings a player can manage, a short word on the basic hireling contract, and a simple morale system.  The Labyrinth Lord and Swords and Wizardry Charisma tables give a range from 1 to 7 retainers and a morale number from 4 to 10.  I can't remember how its handled in AD&D but the OSRIC book gives a spread of 1-20 (the 20 comes at charisma 19).  Not sure I want to put a number on henchmen.  Some people can manage loyal armies or even nations, and some cannot even keep a dog loyal.   If I do place limits on it, I'm thinking that I'd like to say either a character can manage a number of hirelings equal to their charisma score, or go with a fixed number formula like 10 +/- twice their charisma bonus, but again I don't know if that's reasonable.  Money talks and if you can pay people you should be able to hire them.  I guess the argument for very large groups is that a character can only have so many people personally responsible/loyal to them and then those people in turn have others responsible to them.  Anyone outside the hireling limit would be in that second removed category perhaps.

Management of hirelings and morale will naturally be based on DC and Charisma.  In either case for morale and loyalty I'd use DC, starting at 10 and modifying based on situation conditions, the player's charisma bonus, as well as any other factors (like good treatment, high/low pay, hireling disposition) apply to the rolls.  I want to make sure everything sticks to core d20 mechanics established instead of flinging in a new look-up chart or dice mechanic out of the blue.  However this shakes out it, all of this should add no more than a small paragraph to the rules.  Almost all the pieces are there already I just want to make mention of them.

Thoughts on an intro adventure

The Friday game group I'm in has started playing Legend of the Five Rings and specifically started out playing an adventure designed for a purpose - to introduce the game.  I'm not sure if this came with the game or was a  supplement, and I'm not sure how much is in the material and how much is coming from the GM, but it is a very good introduction to the system.  The players choose between the available Clans and have to compete/cooperate in a competition called the Topaz Championship.  The various competitions staged allow the GM to gradually introduce game mechanics as well as setting information and tone in a way that doesn't overwhelm the players (us!).  In L5R it's hard enough to get a handle on the clans, the setting history, and the names of people and things, so this really helps - even though most of us have played many game systems.  I find it fascinating how this was done and I think it's a good idea for any system to try to put out some sort of intro adventure - even if the game is pretty rules light.  The effect of using this adventure to introduce the game and setting has been to really fire me up to play this now that our characters have passed our challenges and are ready to have our gempukku ceremonies and become samurai.  We're gonna kick ass and take names and really clean up this town - just you wait and see.

I found this adventure was different than what's usually given as an introductory adventure - the very basic "oh you read the scroll - you will be a magic-user, you picked up the sword - you will be the fighter".  It was the type of adventure geared towards players who may or may not know how to play in a particular setting or with specific rules, but do not need to be told how to roll a d4 or to "picture in their heads a character from a storybook".  I'm sure there's a need for that other type of introduction to RP gaming - the very basic concepts - however I think most of the time players need setting and system information but not an introduction to the hobby.  You only need to learn that once, and I believe most new gamers will be learning how to play with other established players, and not from a solo adventure in a rulebook.  No-one is likely to pick up and play Beacon cold if they haven't played D&D or been introduced to it via a game group anyway.  I think I am really noticing the difference here because I've been reading Adventures in OZ and the Adventurer Conqueror King PDFs I recently picked up on RPGnow and they spend a lot of page on those real basics.  Maybe L5R does as well but I didn't read that part of the book - just dived right in.   Its one thing to do this in a 600 page rule book, but in a smaller game or PDF maybe that space could be better used.

Just from our small game group and from playing with my kids, I've found that there is little or no practical difference in the ability of our least experienced player to deal with a new game system than the more experienced ones.  Any concepts that might be unfamiliar, like initiative order or attack modifiers, or saving throws is pretty quickly transmitted through play. We have a player in our group who has literally only ever played the games we've run, Beacon, Trail of Cthulhu and this L5R game, and she seems to be just as able as the veterans to pick up the mechanics either by emulation or by intuition.  I don't think a paragraph on how to read a d4 would have been useful to her.

I think you can guess where I'm going with this.  I really liked the L5R adventure and I'm much more interested in writing up a sample adventure to be used with Beacon than I am with beefing up the explanatory text in the rules because I think that there's more bang for the buck to be had this way.  I am torn however because the way I run my game is to basically set up a skeleton of a sandbox and then dump in adventure sites and situations from existing modules.  On a side note I've been a bit antsy because I really wanted to write up some posts about the cool adventures I found and used for the play test, but I don't want to ruin the campaign I was running by posting links and discussing the material when there was a chance the players would see it.  I don't distrust them, and I edit things a lot during a session, but I think it could certainly spoil some of the surprises.

So I can't see doing a simple dungeon crawl or mega-dungeon supplement for this purpose. I would like to design a couple smaller installations (cause it's fun!), but really there are so many good ones already I don't see a lot of value in mapping out yet more shrines, cities and abandoned tombs.  What I can see value in however is some sort of area adventure guide that detailed some setting and NPC information, encounter tables, and contained liberal hooks designed to introduce concepts to players and GMs.  By doing this as a sort of gazetteer instead of an adventure, I could even call out to the modules I used to populate specific sites with notes as to how I used them.  I could even include some small notes on why I chose those adventures for those areas.  I think that that might be even more useful than a prepared adventure.