Beacon 7.5

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

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

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

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

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

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

Introducing the Skill Bonus

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

Skill Bonuses vs Skill Points

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Summer Update

I'm not positng much but I am running games and am still working on the 7.5 version of the Beacon rules and feel like I'm in the home stretch.  I've felt that before though and soon found out some big issue that needed to be sorted out.  So hopefully I'm in some kind of stretch anyway. The players in my weekly game are at level 7 and starting to use 4th level spells and also needing more complicated monsters and situations to keep things interesting.  The longer we play, the more the rules get tested so its been a much more productive process than I had in the past when I was running short one offs or just thinking about the game.

I'm mostly working on fixing the spells from levels 4-6, some of which I haven't touched since I originally put them in the book.  I did clean up the level 1-3 spells quite a bit, but the have not really worked over the higher level ones.  Some of these spells are not worth the casting cost, others are overpowered.   There are even references to systems and terms that don't exist in the game any longer.  I have decided that I want to do more to 'fix' or pin the spell effects and get rid of effects that get bigger based on caster level.  This is all to make it easier to understand the cost/value when you make the change from slot based to point based magic.  Slot based magic you can have powerful spells limited by per day use or just toss out some special effect as a novelty, but hit point based casting needs to be more balanced vs the cost in player survivability.   If you can cast fireball for 7 points a pop, it does not need to scale with your level, the scaling comes with the additional hit points you get.

The rate of character advancement seems very on point to me and the characters in the weekly game have gone from level 1 to level 7 in about a year of playing, although I am starting to see some issues with the amount of treasure they are accumulating and how much they can spend on equipment and leveling up.  I really need to add more big ticket items to the game since once you have plate mail or a couple hundred gold for transcribing spells there is little else to spend on except leveling up.  Beacon XP requirements to level are pretty simple line plots compared to the class based tables of BX/OSE or the sliding tiers of 5th edition.

My original thought on was two fold; to keep the formula dead simple so you always knew what was needed for the next level, and every level should take a little bit longer to get to than the last one.  I think that gives things a certain gravity and lets players get used to each step up in the game.  I am not sure the effort should be doubling,  but certainly a few more adventures than the last time.  I don't think this is happening even factoring in each level is 1000XP more than the last, its a pretty shallow rise.  Also it seems that by spending treasure and carrying over treasure from the last level, players are leveling up at a constant pace, or even having the level up rate accelerate as they run out of things to spend silver on.  

I've also noticed that I have to be very careful about how much treasure I am giving out even though the amount is already very low compared to most D20 fantasy campaigns.  As an example, in an adventure that took three sessions, the party rescued a bunch of dwarves and were rewarded 10,000sp (split 6 ways) by the King, which would be a laughable amount of treasure in 5th edition or even OSE, even accounting for the comparatively higher value of silver and gold in Beacon.  It would be nice to have some more things to buy and mechanisms to handle players with more inspiring amounts of treasure without breaking the game economy.

One thought on this was instead of spending silver to buy XP, I could separate the level experience point and silver piece requirements so that players would need to have the required 1000XP/level to advance and also spend silver equal to 1000 x their current level.  This would would increase the leveling curve from a 1/2/3/4... to a 2/4/6/8... and it would also make sure players couldn't just buy a level with silver they had lying around.  I like the idea and especially having the PC collect enough coin to level up making it an even bigger deal.   Right now PCs will toss a few coins at their XP like an investment account, or use them to top up after an adventure.  If they had to save up the cash and then drop it all on their next level, then its more memorable.   Narratively it is as if the PC was training and carousing, researching and otherwise spending money on improving their adventuring life.  I also think that having it split this way it would let GMs have two levers to control the leveling speed instead of just one.  You can adjust treasure and encounters to suit the pace you want to keep.

Other than this I am still tinkering with the rogue sneak attacks and trying to sort out how to make combat have interesting choices while streaming the crap out of it where I can.  I don't think anyone is really missing the rolls for damage and the Cinematic Advantage works really well.  I would like to lean into the initiative system so that Rogues and Hunters leverage a maneuver roll for their special attacks.  I like the idea of Rogues using a d6 for sneak attack and having a one round cool down, the choice here when to use this and when to try for Cinematic Advantage seems interesting to me and, more balanced than either making them roll to hide or giving them additional damage every round.  I would like to give the Hunter an option to roll a d10 maneuver which would let them choose between aiming (for automatic advantage), or doing a double shot which would give them double the weapon damage (and use up ammo twice as fast).

I'll try to get all this in to a usable state soon and push out the update this fall.  I did notice that the 2020 Microlite omnibus still has the version 6 rules for Beacon which seem so clunky now compared to what's been changed this last year and a half.  It would be good to get to a point where I would be happy to get them to go with the newer one.

Roll20 Sheet updated

The new version of the Roll20 character sheet is up, I pushed the code to github and thought it might take a couple weeks but they pushed it right away and so I haven't had a lot of time to write up a good blog post on the subject.  My idea to publish something on the Beacon Blog weekly is not going to happen and although I am hoping to meet a monthly schedule, honestly I'm pretty happy with the pace of the playtesting and the recent changes to the sheet.  No reason to complain about that.

The new sheet has a bunch of changes.  It looks prettier with a less crowded layout and more colour.  I incorporated the Beacon logo colours into the page headers and the repeating list controls.  I cleaned up the fonts, added a new Notes tab and moved spellboox to the end of the sheet. I put in a minimum and maximum width for the sheet so it doesn't compress or expand and throw off the labeling. 

I added in a lot more fields for notes. I found personally that one or two large text boxes on a roll20 sheet does not work like a paper sheet where you can write little notes everywhere.  Having more smaller boxes lets you organize better and keep smaller bits of info easier to read.  I also put in some boxes for tracking conditions like a sickness or if your character is encumbered.

Aside from those cosmetic type changes I fixed an issue where chainmail was not the right AC and where wearing heavy armour would remove dexterity penalties and not just dexterity bonuses.  I also fixed some of the weapon damage calculations and separated out attack bonuses and damage bonuses so you could model a spear that gives damage bonus but actually have an attack penalty.  This makes customizing weapons much more flexible.  I moved a lot of the weapons and armour detail into expandable sections that players can hide away most of the time, and I added note fields.  I also fixed the maximum range calculations on ranged weapons so they display now.  I also added in a repeating section for companions and henchmen where players can note many common attributes for a hired hand or their apprentice or animal companion.  I also rebranded/recalculated the coin totals to be in silver as well as companion wages.  Beacon is a Silver standard game so that fits better with the theme and reminds everyone to scale down appropriately.

The biggest change was adding encumbrance/inventory system.  The encumbrance system was hard to sort out because it has to be both simple and flexible but also contain a good amount of automation or it will never get used.  The last version of the sheet had a simple spot for players to keep track of their carried load and did the strength calculation for them.  This NEVER got used.  Players just won't use a system that requires even this level of manual bookkeeping and I get that.  Either its just not their thing or they do like to do it but get caught up in something else and then the tally gets messed up over time anyway.  I decided what I would try was to do as much as possible in the sheet, but not sweat the small stuff which resulted in a hybrid system where I automated as much as I could but added in namable 'container' items with a load value that would store all the odds and ends.

What that resulted in was four interworking systems to track encumbrance: consumables, combat, coins and item/containers. Encumbrance for weapons and armour is calculated from equipped types, as are the most common consumables like rations and torches, tracking coin weights was already implemented, and finally these large items/containers would manage everything else.  My view of this is that the more opt-in you automate the more likely the system will get used so having players just focused on keeping track of large items and packs and sacks in a little widget was the perfect level of interaction.  You can always ignore the whole encumbrance system but I'm finding more and more that it powers that exploration vibe I like. 

The weapons and armour opt-in to the encumbrance system by default when you add the item row and you can uncheck them if you need to drop them.  Armour has different encumbrance if its work vs carried and the sheet can track that.  You can add as many items and containers as you like and they have both inventory and note text boxes as well as a checkbox if you decide to drop one somewhere.  The rows of small item trackers have a location field so you can list what container they are in etc.  All in all I think it adds a lot to the game having this in the sheet.

I'm pretty excited to see how this will work in game, it seems like the right handshake between automation and player participation in the system.  Its also a lot prettier than it was before.

Version 7.4

I just pushed up version 7.4 of the Beacon rules.  A lot of changes to the layout this time.  Druids are divine again.  I'll post more on the specific changes soon as I think there are some interesting design choices in this one.  Items in RED text are suspect and the stuff in PURPLE is the new bits.

Grab it here.

November update

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

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

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

The northern wilds

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

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

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

Attack actions are: 

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

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

Maneuver actions are: 

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

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

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

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

Changes to the Rogue and to Spells

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

Quick summary of some changes:

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

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

• Merged the Rogue and the Non-class class,

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

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

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

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

Initiative and Damage Changes

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

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

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

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

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

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

So just the fixed damage for now.

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.

Beacon News

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

Well something like that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hot and fresh post for a new decade

Just like people, I suppose a lot of hibernating blogs get a sentimental poke right around the new year.  Well although I've not posted in a hell of a long time I have checked in now and again.  I've even started some posts on occasion so that people would know I'm out there and still playing games and stuff and I do think about Beacon now and then.


I made the Beacon Blog for the specific purpose of chronicling the design and play of Beacon d20 and so I don't feel its the right place to be posting about other games I'm running/writing/playing or writing about other topics.  I did make some other blogs for other writing and for posting about other games, but since I am not actively working on Beacon, I'm not taking making the time to write in general.  I have still been playing/running games pretty regular and been very busy working and doing the usual things we do to get by.

So why post now?

Someone is playing my game!  I was poking around the Internet and I ran across a blog called Provinto RPG that mentioned they had not only read Beacon but played it a bit, and even seemed to have liked it.  I am certainly very flattered by the review of the system and more flattered by the criticism/house ruling of the weapon system and posting a conversion of an old adventure. It means a lot to have someone read, play and get the system enough to push out elegant additions like this and man oh man converting a module is pure gold.  So thanks Provinto, you certainly made my day.  I'll be reading more of your blog for sure.

I also was trying to catch up on pod casts and hit a cryptic reference to Beacon on Happy Jacks from their 2017 season and it reminded me of days gone by.  Good Ol Stork may not remember the name of the system or anything about it, but he remembers quality.

I'm not sure what I'm going to do with Beacon.  I mean I will keep the posts up and keep the rules up there for anyone who is interested in playing it, but will I ever update it again is something I haven't decided.  When I started working on Beacon there was a reaction happening online to the D&D 4e/Pathfinder game style and a lot of OSR blogs out and I had strong interest in getting back to a simple play style but with polish and new ideas.  It was a very successful movement.  Since that time a lot of changes have happened and some really good d20 based systems and material have been published, both independently and from the big guys.  D&D 5e was a solid revision and introduced a lot of really good changes to the franchise and systems like Dungeon Crawl Classics introduced a wealth of material of that style of game. In addition to that there have been so many new games put out, and game systems begging for tinkering with.  Since I started working on Beacon I have run/played campaigns in Gumshoe (Trail of Cthulhu and Ashen Stars), Mutant Year Zero, Dungeon Crawl Classics, D&D5e, Call of Cthulhu 7ed, Forged in the Dark (Scum and Villainy).  I've run one shots of Mecha, Mythender and Fiasco.  I've read a whole pile of amazing work and listened to a lot of great pod casts.  If I was to revisit Beacon I would be bringing a very different measuring tape to the genre.

And yet I still like the simplicity of Beacon and think there's a place for a super simple but comprehensive d20 system.  A number of years ago when I was running Ashen Stars on Roll20 I worked with a guy who helped my put a Beacon character sheet up on on that platform and I thought it was great to have a free and simple option for online play.  I think that Beacon stands up to that idea so maybe it would be good to take another pass at it, add some modern tweaks and polish up some of the rough bits.

Like School On Saturday

"Skilled" it turns out is an even worse idea than "Savant" for a class name.  My wife who has played maybe three RPG sessions in her life and doesn't even understand why I bother messing around with this stuff told me that it was a stupid name.  At game night I was told it was a bad change to a bad idea in the first place.

So time to cut the Gordian knot.  I am going to suggest giving the option to not choose a class during character creation and instead get additional skills every second level.  Do you see what I did there?

Sayonara to the Savant

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

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









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

a short one

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

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

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

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




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

Some love for the magic guys

Magic characters (Mage, Enchanter, Druid and the Cleric) will get a skill bump every 4th level, so at 4, 8 and 12.  This ties in better with a 12 level system and really they were not getting much in the way of class skills anyway.  This is also because they get new spell levels on odd levels so this gives them something nice for the even ones.

I'm revising the rule book (and the gm screen) to deal with the level 12 cap and fix some of the text issues and typos.  No crazy dice for bonuses or adding in laser shotguns for now.  I'm going to post that as an update with no major changes.  Hopefully I'll get that out before Nov 1, just in time for Hammercon.

Update to the update

So yea, there were some wee tiny errors in the last update and I fixed those and I also fixed the section in the poison rules where a penalty to your rolls based on how badly you missed your save was being applied.  I hadn't noticed that before, but I noticed it now, and since stat loss from poison effects would also cause a penalty to the roll I think that rule is redundant.  I also took away the secondary effect column from the poison table because what the heck was that about anyway.  SO if it all just sucks now please let me know.

I updated it in place and so all the links should resolve now to the new file.

Beacon 5.2 update

This is a minor update with the changes I made to the Rogue sneak attack, some layout adjustments and some minor rules clarifications and prices for hats (The people I play with often want to buy hats).  It's not a big release and I didn't comb through it.  I also dropped the light crossbow because I didn't like having it as a light weapon (will all that implies rules wise) and there was no real need for two crossbows in the heavy weapon section.

This is basically state of the art Beacon until I get the document proofed by someone other than myself - that will either be a 6th draft or Beacon 1.0 - the good version.

Download Beacon 5.2.

Beacon busting out all over

While making some minor updates to the text I finally hit the limit as to what I can squeeze onto 42 pages and so the next cut of the Beacon book will have more.  Right now it's 44 pages because of the way I wanted to lay things out without making it unattractive by changing fonts or squeezing stuff in where it logically didn't belong.  A terrain effects in combat chart should be in the combat section and not tacked onto the blank half page in the Druid spell section.  There is now a bit of white space with the extra pages to move things around and that I can use to include some additional charts - I'm thinking of a skill point by class chart - something that you could figure out easily enough, but having a chart might make it easier.  I might even put a picture in somewhere.

I really do want to make the content fight for that real-estate however.  I'm going to draw a line in the sand right now to avoid ever going over 50 pages.  I'm not in the business to teach people how to role play or explain how a 4 sided die works.

And yes the title is just about the page count. I haven't heard any stories of someone busting out Beacon at a convention or on a G+ game - however I would LOVE to hear about it if it did happen.

And yes should have made a joke about giving it some Deep Thought.  But I didn't.