Stat damage and critical hits

One thing that arose from the play testing I did that I like very much is how the critical hit table drove the mechanics of weapon and armour maintenance.  In the beginning of Beacon I thought that it would be good to have weapons and armour be destructible, for armour to be very expensive and for things like disarms or broken weapons to happen, because at the level of grittiness I wanted in a game, it was interesting having to deal with these things.  It's good to have to get your expensive chain mail repaired, it gives you a reason to spend money and visit the armorer.  I think you will value armor more if it feels like a maintainable resource instead of just an AC value.  Dropping a weapon or having it break creates an interesting complication in a otherwise mundane series of rolls to hit.  Unfortunately the mechanics of keeping track of this kind of thing tend to be terrible.  I think there is a need for record keeping in a gritty game, counting ammo, counting torches, counting money is all a part of the attrition and resource management that I find interesting.   For that to work however, for players to be willing to do that record-keeping, you have to make sure that you limit record-keeping as much as possible.  I hadn't planned on armour and weapons breaking down over time and I certainly didn't want to keep track of material durability or item fatigue, so it was a great joy to me that a couple throw away lines in the critical hit/fumble table to spice up combat wound up frequently sending players off to the smithy to get things fixed.  Having to replace and repair weapons and armour tended to make the players more aware of these items and they actually spent some time on customizing and talking about their gear where in other games the gear was just a means to a number on the character sheet.

That was unexpected synergy.  Everyone loves unexpected synergies and and they also makes you look good when it happens.  I think that I would like to try to utilize that same kind of strategy to deal with stat damage.  That would be anticipated synergy.  There is a shade of difference between these approaches so I've included a graphic to illustrate it.

Unexpected Synergy

Anticipated Synergy

So the problem I have is that a majority of the time when players take stat damage they are taking STR damage either by falling below 0 HP or by choosing to take some damage instead of using HP to soak it up.  The other main source of damage is potions, again most of which impact the Strength stat.  Although the intention (and implementation) was to have some monster special attacks and a few poisons and disease effects doing damage to the other stats there is still a majority of that attrition that impacts STR.  And in Beacon loss of STR is how you die.  From the player feedback there was a feeling around the table that tying death and damage so much to the loss of STR points was a little unfair to the fighter class who rely on a high STR score the most and are the most likely to loose it.  Magic classes generally use MIND for their spell bonus and rogues use DEX for many of their bonuses and so it did seem like a wounded fighter was getting more disadvantage than those classes since having some STR damage didn't impair their performance as much.  There were some suggestions made to address this, most notable having damage apply to all stats or a random stat, having death come at the loss of any stat - or all stats.  I had problems with all those approaches.

Now I believe that the way to deal with this is to once again leverage the critical chart.  I'm going to rework the critical hits and I'm going to remove all the STR damage effects and load it up with additional effects that impact other stats.  Critical hits are supposed to be exceptional and there is nothing exceptional about taking STR damage.  This was already being done where the Brain Burn had casters loosing 1d6 MIND points or a Disable arm/hand crit did 1d4 STR/DEX which would have to be slowly healed over time.  I'm going to have more crits that impair DEX or MIND or even CHA.  I'll also try to mix up the poison and disease effects so that they do a little more heterogeneous stat damage.  Monster, item and spell damage that impact other stats, like vampires draining CHA or Feebleminded spell dropping the target's MIND to 1, can be managed on a case per basis, there's no need to have a comprehensive list of these since GMs make it their bread and butter imaging new ones.  I might comb through and look for improvements to what 's there now however.   Lastly I'm going to consider new mechanics that deal with stat loss.  As always less is more when it comes to the mechanics.

Legit

So I was logging in to do a little post on my other blog about the director's cut of the Watchmen movie and I naturally checked my blog stats because of narcissism and stuff, and anyway (get to the point) I noticed a link-back from the RPGGeek site.  So I followed it.  So hey, Beacon has a page on the RPG geek site!  I mean it's not a super awesome picture page with tons of reviews on it and confetti and everything, but someone took the time to load it up and even enter the basic lowdown of the game details.  Thank you that someone!  So now I guess I need to get on the stick and fix those monster stats and write up a Milham supplement and all those good things that I kind of want to do but that mean I have to stop being lazy.

So now also I need to go find my password for Boardgamegeek and all that so I can respond to and embrace all my fans and admirers and engage in many flamewars.  Funny story, I was pretty active on this site like 10 years ago and posted a lot of game pictures up back when there weren't so many as there are today.  In fact think I was the one who posted the first actual pics of such games as 4000AD and Alien Contact (dude I entered Alien Contact into their database where it has languished for years).

Alien Contact on my freezer

4000 AD - recognize any appliances here?

Enough tooting my own horn.  It sure is nice to see someone took the time to enter my little heart-breaker on the geek.

What if

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Epic Space Marines Time

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

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

Charging the old batteries

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

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

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

Wrapping up the campaign (for now)

Dungeon Crawling by lightningtumble

The second last session we played was a short handed with only three PCs who could make it.  I try to end the sessions in a town or at least in a camp so that when the inevitable cancellations happen they don't impact the game too much.  I would like sometime to take that practice a step further and run a game where the PCs are drawn from a larger pool of players and each adventure is an outing of PCs from the local meeting place - taking a page from the West Marches sandbox play book.  I don't see that working with meatspace group as much since it would require a large pool of players and some way to queue folks up and turn others down each session - something I wouldn't think I could be good at - but maybe I can try it out if I run something on G+.

Anyway three players and I prepared something light based on their existing goals.  I thought that the players would want to do a light crawl for treasure since the monastery they had been exploring might be too dangerous for such a small group (their perception not mine).  I figured they would try to recover the remains of Kane's brother or at least go out into the hills to try to find another dwarven ruin to loot.  They did neither.  They decided to look at the map they had that showed a ton of interesting known places, and pick a totally uninteresting island out in the middle of the lake instead.  They even asked around in Milham about that island and everyone told them that they had never heard of anything interesting out on there.  They went there anyway.  My only explanation for this is I think they thought everyone was lying to them or they were metagaming and thought I would have to make something up.  I did make something up but it wasn't a secret tower of adventure, it was a crappy little village full of weird inbred NPCs.

It actually was quite fun and I got a chance to verbally abuse the PCs and  inject some weird historical info that otherwise might not have come out in game, but it wasn't a Hidden Tower of Adventure by any stretch. The most (only) exciting thing was a couple spiders.  I could have dropped in a one page dungeon - in fact if it had been a full house I would have felt obligated to insert some kind of adventure or at least a set-piece encounter.  I also wasn't going to cave in and justify the expectation that the world revolved around a wandering pack of three murder hobos; five murder hobos maybe, but not three.  Also with only three players I felt freer to play a lot of NPCs and converse with them more without excluding anyone from the interaction, which made it less boring for them than it might have been.  It worked out and we had a decent time playing off one another, dropping in jokes and conversing about things the PCs normally wouldn't care about, like the weird name of their home town or how rude it was to just walk up and case out someone's yard looking for clues.  It was a shorter session too which saved it from itself.

The last session was a blockbuster however.  We had everyone geared up to play and the party had decided ahead of time that they wanted to go back to the monastery and seek out the artifact that they were pretty sure lie in it's depths.  SO they travelled south, explored the empty upper caves and came to the conclusion that soldiers from Red Towers had been exploring here in the interim.  They figured that out by coming across soldier bodies and scenes of slaughter.  That got them fired up to get active in their treasure hunting and it also let me clean up a bunch of the lower level monsters that they hadn't encountered but who were no challenge to the party anymore.  The first few levels of the dungeon was kind of statted for level 1-3 and the party was now level 3-4 and there were five of them so when they did meet monsters they managed to beat them fairly easily.  However it wasn't a cake walk and there were a lot of fights they did have, and the creatures below were pretty nasty.  They would have had a pretty tough time, but they were playing well and they were rolling like demons.  Kane's web spell made a huge difference as more than once they used it to avoid combat against a mob of creatures by tangling the whole passage up.  They won almost every initiative, and I haven't seen so many natural 20s rolled in one session ever I think.  Also I'm a believer that adventures shouldn't be scaled on the fly.   If you meet a dragon I'm not going to scale back his stats - so you should run away.  But if you are webbing up kobolds and rolling great against ghouls, I'm not going to scale up their stats to make it harder either.  A card laid is a card played.

So the group was smashing their way though the dungeon and they were also finding a lot of treasure  - most of it treasure they was there before but they had missed because they had run away or had to retreat for healing.  I don't generally give wandering goblins treasure to carry around but I do think that if you beat the goblin general in his lair you'll see all the loot he's extracted from his little mob.   But they were finding those lairs and since they had found so little treasure before, now it seemed like a windfall.  The poor wandering troupe was getting some serious loot and you could tell that they were liking this smash and grab lifestyle.  They finally made it to the manticiore lair (where they had run away from before) and this time they managed to kill the remaining beasts and get the treasure, including the Gauntlet of Ulthur that they had been seeking.  There were still rooms more and mysteries below, but we decided to wrap it up there.

I think it was the best session of the campaign since they threw themselves into the crawl aspect and managed to accomplish a lot.  This is probably because it was the last session and they were less worried about consequences. I think that if they had done more of this kind of derring do earlier on they would have seen how the game was geared more towards a dungeon crawl and less on intrigue and pre-defined story.  They probably would have lost more characters along the way too.  I think there were a lot of times where the party might have spent too much time looking for the story hook when they should have just gone back to a ruin and hauled out some loot - and that's my fault for not explaining it well (for fear of railroading their decisions as much as anything). But all in all I had a really good time running the game and I would never have developed out so many NPCs and locations if they had just tucked in and cleared out one or two old ruins instead of wandering all over poking into things.  There were also some definite signs of wanting to pick up Beacon again sometime in the future, and even some of the same characters, and that is OK by me as it would be nice to see how level 4-7 plays and it would also be nice to return to the Milham setting which I've grown quite fond of.

Happy New Year

Hello, Happy New Year and all that.

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

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