again with the Hit Points

I have more to say about starting Hit Points.  In my recent foray into Labyrinth Lord I rolled up a fighter with 4 HP.  I was mildly disappointed with the roll for a second, but then I realized that I wasn't unhappy about it at all.   I had no expectation that this character would live though his first adventure as even a single dagger blow could kill him.  Instead of feeling like I had bad luck rolling up my character, I felt tense and edgy imagining all the ways this poor bastard could bite it.  I felt good.  It was interesting putting on his shoes and feeling afraid of the world.  Paradoxically he felt alive.

The thrill of playing Beacon!

He did bite it, and in the first round of the first combat actually.  Poor Marlin Densburg - son of accountants, dusty traveler - got bitten by a giant spider and failed his save vs poison.  He did however manage to slay the spider with a mighty blow before he died. Ironically he still had 3 HP left when he expired clutching at his rapidly swelling neck, so this has no bearing on starting Hit Points at all really.  Quickly the other players gathered up his possessions and Marlin's hireling became my new character and joined in trading his morning star for Marlin's grandpa's two handed sword. Life goes on, and pragmatically these adventurers remembered their comrade, gathered everything useful to them, and knew they could be dead next time.  It was fun.  I felt good about it and I want some of that same feeling to built in the Beacon game.

Now Beacon uses STR + 1d6/level for player Hit Points and I really don't want to change the rules so that you don't roll at first level because I don't like unnecessary exceptions, they cause confusion.  I also don't think it's wise to remove the STR component from starting HP because the way magic works.  I'm not looking to make casters pass-out after casting one spell.  I can however do something like start players with half their STR + 1d6.  I could even phrase the rule to make this an option, something like - "for more thrilling games the GM should start players with half STR + 1d6".  I think this will make First Level a bit more dangerous a place and that's a good thing in my mind.

Why do this at all?  I mean this can be left up to the GM anyway so why mess with the rules?  Well I think that it's always easier to boost starting players than it is to nerf them.  Starting the players out at say, level 3 is always a good compromise if you want them to be less likely to die.  Also yes changing the rules and all that is practically expected but this comes back to previous discussions about things like silver vs gold standard and divine rituals - people have the choice of playing many types of games so the Beacon rules should represent some specific game feelings as opposed to catering to the middle ground.  Anyone playing Beacon instead of Pathfinder is going to be capable of tweaking things to their satisfaction in any case.

As for saves vs death, well I'm not as sure about that.  There are no 'death saves' in the rules per/se but certainly you can take enough damage by failing a resist roll to die. I am of two minds on this because I can see a place for deadly things that no amount of HP is going to mitigate but on the other hand, these things tend to either get watered down or abused.  I think I need to think on that some more.

Google Plus

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

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

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

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



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


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

for beginning GMs

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

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

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

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

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

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

Starting Hit Points

So I've been thinking on how the starting game goes in Beacon and how hard a time the characters have at first level when they come up on brigands or goblins or what have you.  All touchy freely campaign stuff, don't expect any solutions today.  

In classic D&D you generally have single digit HP and so do the monsters you generally face up to (as opposed to running away) and even a single goblin (or a house cat) is a pretty big threat.  In Beacon you have a huge boost compared to this initially, but because you only add 1d6 per level this levels off as you level up.   It all works out in the end, it's just some front loading.   I approve of the philosophy, even level 1 PCs should have a decent amount of HP so they can get into more fights and have less downtime resting or hiding from every passing house cat - this makes the adventure move at a brisk clip.  But sometimes I wonder if the characters have a bit too much HP to start.  Maybe a bit of humility is a good thing.

A character's average STR is going to be 8-9 and so the average starting HP is going to be in the 9-17 range.  A goblin has like 1-6 hp, and more importantly they do 2-7 damage in a hit.  What this means is that one goblin is a nuisance and a bunch is a threat.  I have no problem with that.  A human brigand has 2-16 hp and does 3-10 damage, much more a threat to the average starting character, but still slightly weaker.

I wonder if first level characters should just get STR = HP and not the initial +1d6 as well?  That isn't a large change overall but it would make the monsters considerably tougher at the first couple levels.  Goblins would still be weaker but those bandits would be pretty tough even one on one.  It would also drop the number of spells available to magic using classes by one or two, and that might be fun.  Then again it's an exception to a rule, so it's more complicated, and something that folks could easily house rule if they wanted a tougher start anyway.

Surprise Attack

I thought it would be a good thing to talk about the changes I made to beef up the rogue, specifically the surprise attack.  Here's the rule:

Once per combat engagement Rogues may attempt to perform a 'surprise attack' (usually subterfuge or survival+DEX, based on their description of the action). If this is successful, they may either add their Subterfuge skill to the damage of their initial attack or perform an additional attack with a ranged weapon.

So you are a Rogue and you are going to be in a fight - how does this work for you?  Surprise is not a sneak attack, it's no longer a backstab analogue to be used once per combat.  It means when you choose to engage someone in combat, you get a chance to pull some cool move out your ass and trip them up with it.  It might be throwing sand in their eyes and then stabbing them, it might be pulling a dagger out of your boot and flipping it into their face, it might be shouting 'Oh my god is that Flint Fireforge over there?".  It might even mean you slide into a shadow and backstab someone - or take two shots with your bow from the tree you were hiding in.  It's a very big bump in attack power for the Rogue because you can try it once per engagement - so if you are fighting a bunch of guards you might sneak up and dispatch one and then while your fellows are brawling dive under another and stab him in the goolies.  At low levels this attack is on par or better than what a fighter could do but I don't think it unbalances the two classes because you have to make an additional roll to pull off the move, and you only get to try it on the first attack.  Once you are engaged you go back to your regular attacks and can't just run off without being subject to a free attack.  I still think it's cool though, you are the hare to the fighter's tortoise.

Beacon fifth draft

Here is the fifth draft of Beacon.

In this update you will find a bunch of changes which I thought would improve the game after play testing the previous version with a small group of folks. I think the major highlights in this version are the combat split into missile and melee phases, and the changes to the non-magic using classes.

I hope to get long play out of this one and very much hope that I can promote these rule to the first real release version of Beacon if it manages to last through lots more scrutiny and play testing.

Please let me know how it works out for you.

Download the Beacon fifth draft PDF
Download the character sheet

miscellaneous design notes

I love it when the solution to things just fits together based on the infrastructure you have in place.  I'm just going through and tightening up the Beacon book, looking for punctuation, spelling, consistent nomenclature and such, and I'm finding little gaps in the rules which I'm plugging up.
 

Dr. Killenger faces off against Dr. Orpheus

One such gap was spell interruption due to combat.  Now that magic users can't just rip off a spell on their turn, but have to prepare their spells and then wait till the melee phase to cast them, the counterspell is actually usable and useful.  Such was the intent.  There is also now chance that they will get hit with an arrow or have their teeth bashed in before the spell is cast.  I was worried about how to rule this up and was thinking of saving throws and concentration checks but but then it all just made sense this is d20 - just increase the DC when they cast.  I figure a distraction should move the base DC from 10 to 15 (difficult) and an actual attack on the caster would raise it to 20 (hard), or even higher if there was lots of violence going on.  A mage impaled on a spear barely ripping off his teleport spell with some crazy roll comes to mind.  No need for any new stuff here - just the way I likes it.

I also specifically set the definition of a turn which is:

A turn is the amount of time it takes for the players and their opponents to complete a basic round of actions.  This is somewhere around 1 minute, however may be much quicker (in the heat of combat) or a little longer (picking your way through a dark cavern) depending on the situation.  It is certainly less than 10 minutes. 

I want to make it clear to everyone that it's around 1 minute, it's highly mutable, and it's less than 10 minutes.  I don't care how fast you can run in your backyard with a backpack full of pathfinder books.  Anyone at my table that says that six second combat turns are more realistic now gets rocks falling on their character.  All the spells now use this convention so that if they have durations based on turns it says turn (not min.) and units longer than a turn are stated in real time units like hours or days.  Anything less than 10 minutes however is quantum time as far as I'm concerned.

I did end up dropping the spell widening/lengthening rule.  It never saw play in the play test and I'm thinking it really would just make spells harder to balance with not much benefit.  Someone would figure out the edge cases here and game the system I'm sure.

I had written up a little bit on fast melee weapons which would apply to things like daggers and rapiers, and allow you to use them in the missile phase instead of the melee phase of combat.  It seemed like a cool thing on first blush to give some differentiation to the weapons and all that.  But, I started proofreading the rule explaining it, and  like most things that break across simple classifications like (melee and missile combat) it began to seem too messy so that's now gone.

Lets see, what else?  Oh I tweaked the default racial starting abilities to include some skills.  Elves for instance get Survival and Knowledge and +1 Charisma now as an example.  Dwarves get Fabrication.

I'm in the home stretch now, hoping to get this done by next week so The Bane can play it for Christmas.