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.

Rolling for XP

Lately I've heard a lot of talking about 'bennies' in RPGs.    Mostly this is in the context of how wonderful bennies are and how they enable the players, and also how they can be used to drive 'roleplay'.  I don't hate this mechanic but I don't like it either and I certainly don't think it's all that, like people are making it out to be.  I generally dislike luck points, bennies, fate points, or to a lesser degree, point spending in Gumshoe because I think that they often mix poorly with dice roll mechanics and they cause people to horde the points to use either for re-rolls or to buy victory.  Buying a victory or a reroll is not bad in itself, however usually the economies used to pay for these points are a bit borked.  Generally you get bennies for doing something interesting or funny and then you use them to take the edge off those situations where a poor dice roll would be very... well interesting or funny. I'm not saying that I'm right about this, it's just my perception of these mechanics that they let the player earn and buy security.  I can see why this is popular, everyone wants to control their destiny and having a good idea get blocked by poor rolls is a bit of a bummer.  I think that in a dice based game the best way to mitigate risk is to avoid rolling the dice in the first place.

As for XP, people seem to think that you should award XP for fighting (fine), treasure (ok if done right), and for roleplaying (good in theory).  The idea here is that the game play will be shaped by the reward mechanic and unless you want a game all about fighting and money you should reward roleplay.  However it's hard to reward roleplay because it does seem to be very subjective.  I would much rather award XP for goals completed than for staying in character or clever roleplay.  Also if you do award XP for goals be sure to indicate the kind of goals and the payoffs upfront in your campaign or it risks becoming capricious.

All the commentary I have heard discussing this subject seem to reinforce that rewarding roleplay works if you have a good GM but otherwise not so much.  I'd say it isn't the caliber of the GM as much as it is having a GM that wants to track all your RP and special snowflake moments.  Lots of good GMs are not interested in tracking all that stuff.  I've always been intrigued by the notion of awarding Experience for Damage as outlined by Alexis S. in  Experience Solved.  This system awards XP every time the PC takes or deals damage and it is a great idea.  I certainly like the objective way that the XP get handed out in that kind of system and the only reason I haven't tried this out myself is that I don't like the idea of tracking things so much.  Lots of work keeping track of things.

Anyway the long and the short of all this is that the other day I had the thought that you should just award XP every time the player rolls the dice.  This is an interesting idea for me because it covers the idea that player mitigate risk through managing to avoid rolling dice, so mitigating their risk mitigation by awarding XP when they do the roll dice is a cool response.  You are effectively saying - hey its all good to be clever and cautious because the world is dangerous and you were right to narrate how you check all the stairs with your 10' pole, but you are going to be rewarded for taking risks too, and I'll leave it up to you guys.  On the one hand you survive longer playing carefully, on the other you 'learn' more when you take a gamble.  You would not do this in a game where you roll dice to use rope or cross a bridge.  You would do this in a game where you are following the rule that you only roll dice when it matters that you fail.

This dovetails in with the idea using a mechanic to reinforce good game play by rewarding characters taking actual chances instead of pretending to take chances.  In this case however it isn't handing out bennies or fate points for players acting, but rewarding player action - having the players rolling dice instead of playing it safe and avoiding the dice roll.

Skill advancement

Spell Casters in Beacon don't get many skill points - we assume they spend the majority of their time on magic.  They will get their 3 skill points to start in their area of expertise (clerics - communication, mages - knowledge, etc...).  They get one free skill point to assign per level but their prime skills only get points every 5th level.  By level 15, a magic character gets 17 more skill points (14 of these freely assignable). The non-magic classes get more skills, primarily in their  skill bumps every 3 levels in addition to their one per level.  By level 15 they will have 19 points (still only 14 freely assignable).  I wanted to give the Rogue more skill points   What I have been thinking as an alternative is to give the Rogue one skill point per level as before and give them one additional freely assignable skill point every second level.  This will give them 21 skill points by level 15, and all 21 would be freely assignable.  That's a lot of points, but I think it's a good compromise for having lower combat and magic ability.

A short aside here: I worry sometimes about players deciding to pour all their skill points into one skill, it seems to me that some people would do this and I wonder how it would break the game.  Then I remember that in Microlite you get to add your level to all your rolls and I relax a bit.  Also those people would be prime candidates for getting hosed by a wandering reactive skill check (surprise - 2d4 hypno weasels).

I have also still been having strange thoughts about merging the Rogue and the Hunter into one class.  It's just that the Hunter and the Rogue are too similar as archetypes.  What I would do in this case would be to remove the Hunter class all together, and then give the Rogue a second attack with ranged weapons.  This would give Rogues more combat prowess and it would be heavily weighted towards DEX.  I like this because it gives them more teeth but they would not get the to hit and damage bonuses of the Fighter that the Hunter enjoyed.  That combat/damage bonus was problematic for me since it undermined the Fighter's uniqueness and was the main reason I disliked the Hunter.  Maybe I'd give them 2 points in subterfuge and 1 point in survival to start and let them choose which to bump every third level.  This would give you the ability to develop into either the 'sneaky hood', or the'robin hood' Rogue depending on your whims.

The Hunter class I'd replace with a new non-magic class who get no special combat abilities* but get 4-5 skills points to spend at level 1 and and additional free skill every second level (in addition to the one everyone gets each level).  You could make a really good thief by socking points into subterfuge and communication (and/or fabrication) - you could easily be a better thief than the Rogue class.  You could also be an acrobat (physical) or a sage (knowledge) or a real wood craft specialist (survival), or even a jack of all trades, fairly good at all the skills.
I don't know if it would be a viable class - namely if anyone would want to play it - but its something that stuck in my mind as an option I'm kicking around anyway.









* they get +1 to hit every 2 levels like the current non-magic, non-fighter classes

On the Hunter and the Rogue

Coming to the end of this play test and I'm still reflecting on what I've seen and learned.  Admittedly we really only ran the gamut of levels 1-3, but those are important levels for a fantasy heart-breaker because they introduce the system and because most game mechanics are at least touched on.  In the future I will be happy to get into lessons from mid-level play but for now it's enough to process.  I think that the fighter class is pretty good and them fighters seem to be able to do some smash and bash.  The magic classes are pretty good I think - I do need to do more work on their spells but I think the classes themselves are mostly good.  I do know that I had some fundamental problems with the Hunter and the Rogue classes however.

Hunter

The Hunter class worked pretty good related to the Survival skill, but I have a problem with the combat bonuses. I think that without the second ranged attack it would not have worked at all but I can't help thinking that the hunter is too powerful if allowed to use a ranged weapon all the time in combat.  I'm seriously thinking of either removing the attack bonus perk for ranged weapons.  Barring that I have to figure out some way to limit the use of ranged weapons in combat because otherwise hunters will only ever use ranged weapons and so get all the benefits of a fighter in combat.  The problem is; without some sort of engagement and/or attack of opportunity rule it is hard to keep characters engaged in a melee and they can simply dance around the room each turn using ranged attacks.  I can try to discourage this or I can ignore it and simply give hunters two attacks but remove the attack bonus for ranged weapons - leaving them with the same attack bonus as a Cleric or a Rogue.  Simpler is usually better but I want to meditate on it some more anyway, maybe get some input from the players.

Rogue

As for the Rogue - they simply don't seem to have enough...something.  Of all the classes they get the least perks - the advantage of using DEX for any weapon is offset by the fact that most players will use a weapon suited to their bonuses anyway.  I even thought of merging the Rogue and Hunter class but I really want to avoid this.  I thought of a couple things I could try to make the Rogue work, one was to give the rogue more free skill points on advancement - this would reinforce the Jack-of-all-trades feel and lead to some interesting builds.  For example, instead of giving them one  skill point per level and a subterfuge bump every three levels, just give them 2 skill points to spend every level.  Rogue could be the super class for all the would be sages, the con-men, the merchants and the thieves.  They would be the most customizable class in any case as you would be able to sock points into any of the skills you wanted to bump.  Rogues would likely be the kings of the non-combat sphere, but that might not be bad.  The other idea would be to figure out another class ability like the sneak attack.  This one is more traditional (the old thieves skills bit) so would probably be easy to implement, but it doesn't fit with the design principle of streamline as much as the skill point idea, however it does fit with the other design principle of interesting .

Meanwhile, back at the ruined keep

We had the whole gang together for this one and it was another good session. Since the party had been split due to scheduling issues in the last two games I was at a loss initially at how I was going to get everyone's favorite halfling (Anistania) out of Milham and into the basement of the ruined keep deep in the forest without breaking all the laws of time and space. The simple answer is I didn't and we all agreed that Thedric had left a trail of marks on the rocks and trees which enabled her to get caught up with them just in time. I think it's for the best really and certainly in the spirit of the game BECAUSE IT IS SUPPOSED TO BE FUN.

Anyway it was fun. Right off the bat they realized that they might be biting off more than they could chew if they simply charged up the stairs into the ruined tower. They were certainty happy to see Ann the rogue and they immediately sent her into grave danger sneaking up the stairs to see what was up there. She saw this was the courtyard area at night and there were some hobgoblin guards standing about and another gang of hobs betting on a hob with a knife vs. wild boar fight.  Henril (a fighter) was all for rushing the hobgoblins but the others were a tad concerned, especially Ann who had fresh memories of her last brush with two to one odds.  After some discussions it was decided that Colin and Ann would scatter the steel shot from their slings on a couple key stairs and they would cause a disturbance and then wait at the bottom.  It was the old battle of Thermopylae ploy.  While a discussion broke out over who would go up and cause the disturbance, Henril decided to run up the stairs and toss a hobgoblin head out into the courtyard.  Things got quiet and then hobgoblins began rushing down the stairs - where many fell on the steel shot and/or were kneecapped by Colin and Henril at the bottom of the stairs.  There were three waves of hobgoblins as first the nearby guards, then the gamblers, and finally the remaining guards came running down the stairs.  By the end all the steel shot was scattered and the guards were climbing over the bodies of their comrades.  By the time things quieted down the gang had managed to kill 15 hobgoblins and although they were pretty beat up, Henril and Colin ran up the stairs to finish off any remaining foes.  Suddenly they were gripped by an unreasoning terror.  Colin managed to shrug it off but Henril started running for his life back down the stairs and down into the passages below the tower.  The party broke and ran - following Henril down into the caves.

I'd demolish some of these hobs about now...

That fear spell probably saved them since by they time they caught up with Henril he had almost ran back to the room with the rusted portcullis and the pool of leaches.  They took stock and realized that they were very badly worn and needed rest so they rested for 4 hours and gained back 1/4 hp.  Henril was the one who now needed to be convinced to return as he didn't feel they would fare well against 'the wizard in his lair'.  It turns out that there were only a handful of hobgoblins left in the keep, including a hobgoblin shaman.  The party returned to the courtyard and once again fell victim to fear.  Thedric and Henril managed to shake it off and began to fight the guards on the stairs up to the keep wall when the shaman cast a darkness spell and they were fighting blind.  I realized I didn't have rules for blind fighting so I set a -6 modifier and they whacked away at each other - Henril breaking his weapon with a critical fumble.  The rest of the party, Ann, Tom and Colin came to their senses and returned to the courtyard.  They decided to come up the stairs on the other side of the courtyard and burst in the door where the shaman was.  Colin continued his charge - smashing the shaman into little bits.  The darkness winked out and Henril and Thedric dispatched the guards.

And there was much rejoicing.  They searched the tower and found lots of loot - table wear, linens, food and weapons - much of it obviously bandit plunder from around the Milham area.  The keep appeared to have been in the process of the latest in the line of many renovations by the wizard Criel when it was captured by hobgoblins.  There was evidence of a fight and many of the rooms had been destroyed and sacked. They found the mage's secret study and a couple of scrolls and some funky candles.  They ate the wild boar and dined on the finest tidbits in the pile and rested for the whole day.  The next day, worried that more hobgoblin raiding parties would be returning, they hitched up the six horses and three wagons in the courtyard, and loaded up as much of the loot as they could carry.  By their calculations they were just south of the town of Foxhollow and so they followed a rough wagon trail north (the other lead off to the south east).  They had a run in with some big spiders and another woodcutter (who Henril scared off with the worst ever attempt to act as an inconspicuous traveller and not a bandit).  They finally made it to Foxhollow and found an inn for the night.

Now the whole time this was happening, Thedric was acting very strange.  He had started to let his beard grow out and he was suspicious of everyone and constantly muttering about 'interlopers'.  He also would not remove the strange helmet and when it was removed by force, he stared having convulsions.  By the time they arrived at Foxhollow he was in a bad way.  There was some debate over the best way to deal with this, ranging from finding a poor peasant and paying them to put on the helm, to having the village Clerics attempt to find a cure.  In the end goodness won out over evilness (mostly) and Tom, who was from Foxhollow, went to see his brother Tim* who just happened to be a cleric and who was active in the local church.  Tim managed to arrange a discounted rate for Thedric to get his helmet removed (more on this another time) and although the price was dear, the head cleric managed to remove the spirit from the helmet and remove it safely.  Therdic awoke - with no memory of the events since he had put on the helmet.  Then it was all experience points and laughter with half the group leveling up to 3 and the others much of the way there as well.  Tom decided to take his share of the treasure and retire for a while, allowing his brother Tim to seek his fortune with his associates - much to the consternation of the head cleric of Foxhollow.

I'm finding I'm pretty happy with the way I'm doing experience (10*HD type * HD value so a hobgoblin shaman that is 3 d6 would be worth 60*3 or 180) and the advancement pace seems to be pretty good.  Being only up to level 3, and with no really weird monsters having been defeated it's still hard to tell however.

The one page dungeon I used for the bottom of the keep/tower was Under Oak Hill by G. Neuner.  It was a perfect fit, especially since I didn't have anything prepared for this 'lets go find the wizard tower' adventure hook.  The random encounters I rolled up (hobgoblins and bears) worked perfectly with the module and I really liked the theme of an old old tower that had been rebuild by various factions in the last thousand years, finally being renovated by a wizard and then taken over by hobgoblin bandits.  I whipped up a top floor for it with a couple additional rooms for second session, but the OPD saved my bacon.



*Having three fighters and no other magic support aside from the Enchanter had been weighing on the group and they had previously expressed a desire to swap out some of the characters to re-balance things.  I had no problem with this and was as delighted to find out that Tom had a brother as everyone else.

Preparing for Adventure

Well if you have been watching closely you've noticed that I've had a preview of the 4th draft of Beacon up for a few weeks now and you also probably noticed that it's been updated about 5 times in that space.  Well I had to keep it up there so it was available for character generation, but at the same time I had a lot of changes to make - way more than I thought I did.  I think I'm mostly finished with that now and even if it's not necessarily done, I think it's in pretty good shape.  Some of the things I ended up fixing were:

• the price of whiskey (1000 bucks a cask- crazy!  I changed that trade item to horses instead.)
• and armour ( I made all the 'fitted' armours much more expensive.)
• more pole arm rules (pole arms are used at range (at least 5') and suffer a -4 when used point blank) 
• fixing armour and shield effects on dexterity (it now impacts DEX instead of DEX bonus which allows it to be much more granular so I adjusted the shield AC bonus as well since I hated having to have +4 to AC to compensate for a -3 DEX bonus)
• and lots more small rule, explanations and example wording tweaks on races, skills, monster abilities, combat.
• Made monster damage into HD type+HD number which would mean a bugbear would do d8+3 damage with his weapons instead of just d8.  This is still easy to derive but lets the elite versions of monsters do more damage than their same sized but less skillful counterparts (in addition to the attack bonus).

A few of these items were pointed out to me by players, but most were me just re-reading things and preparing for the ADVENTURE*.

woo woo, bring it on!

And as to that adventure.  I have written up short backgrounds for each of the players which I hope will give them a sense of place in the setting without being too heavy handed as to their motivation or personalities.  I'll post these once I have actually sent them out and gotten feedback just in case someone hates what I've come up with.  The players rolled up a party consisting of an Elf Druid, a Human Hunter, a Human Fighter, a Dwarf Cleric and a Dwarf Enchanter.    I like the party composition, it's a bit different and I think we can spin out something entertaining from this.

I am a bit vexed about how to do the XP though.  As part of the update, I've adjusted XP to account for the change to monster HD so instead of a simple 100*HD number it is now (10*HD type)*HD number.  I don't know if I want to test this at this time however since I am of a mind to do things one of two alternate ways.  I could try to do XP based on damage to see how it will work; or I could simply do level progression by play session in order to get a wider range of levels for play testing in.  If I level the characters up each session it would be good for testing many parts of the game but it might not be as fun to run or to play.

*This is real awesome - you can play that old Atari 2600 Adventure in your browser.  Next thing you know we'll all be flying about in air cars!

eXPerience

I get where the Microlite experience system is coming from - counting up encounter levels (EL) is simple and easy to work with, but for my mind I need to have wiggle room to add or subtract the amount of experience based on game play and for that I wanted more granular units.  I could have worked with EL if I hadn't wanted to give XP for spent treasure or hand out little XP perks for good game moments.  As it is I went with a general goal of 100XP per HD so that I could throw in 25 or 30 XP here and there.  Going with this makes it easy to put the level requirements at multiples of 1000 so level 1 is 1000XP, level 2 would be 2000, level 11 would be 11000.   I also like handing out 25 and 50 XP bonuses for little game play things like figuring out the magic lever or babysitting the kolbolds.  If I were to be running on a level *100 system I would be worried about handing out too much or seeming miserly handing our 1 or 2 XP.  I did like the mechanic in Microlite of once you level you wipe out your XP and start counting again - for no particular reason except simplified record keeping.

Now when I say a 1HD monster is worth 100 XP that doesn't mean that all 1 HD monsters are worth 100 XP.  A little 3hp goblin is not worth 100 XP, a crazed dwarf with his torch over a pool of oil probably is.  I like to mix it up a little when handing out XP but you could follow the basic system and assign a straight 100/HD and it should work out.  You can even go with a variant with 50/HD or 200/HD depending on how long you want to play out each level and it should work well since level * 1000 is pretty simple to work with. 

I'm not worried that it doesn't average out with or track with experience point tables in d&d or other d20 style game in particular.  I think that the with difference in game styles and difficulties and amounts of treasure in d20 fantasy systems already out there you can get away with this and still track pretty well with the modules and supplements at each level no matter how you got there.  Some games are tough and some are Monty Haul and a  level 4 cleric is probably going to be pretty much the same mechanically whether you got there in one adventure or in six.

As for experience for spending treasure - well I think this is a great idea to get dragged out of the old school systems.  Giving XP for spending treasure does two things - it rewards lots of adventuring things aside from combat and it gets rid of treasure so that players need to get more.  Also having to spend it on 'tithes and training' makes sure it gets spent and not just converted to some other kind of swag.  The 10 to 1 rate of exchange is a guesstimate based on what I consider my treasure levels will be.  I wanted to make the treasure component less than 1/3 of the XP so I pegged it to 10gp.   I can see a good adventurer at level 8 accumulating 25,000gp to spend on training and charity somehow. And if they are not wanting to part with their money, well they'll be out there fighting it up then.