What we really need for online games

I have played a couple games over Google Plus now and I have to say that it's just great.  In fact the last time I played on G+ was in a Trail of Cthulhu game and we got to use the moustache and top-hat effects which was probably counter productive but was great fun.  I have played where we just rolled dice and trusted each other, and also where we used Twillda whiteboard software to sketch out some combats and 'roll' dice in the shared chat window.  Both worked fine.
So there, I've proved my online chops.  Now I want to say something that's probably going to be unpopular.  We don't need any more damn virtual tabletops.  Seriously I think it's great that people are working on all these dice rollers and virtual tabletops with orc counters and foliage and fog of war and all power to them, but really we don't need any more of that.  We have too much of that stuff already and people are splitting the user base and nothing essential to this new twist in the hobby is getting done here.  Seriously I can't support the development of any more dice rollers and combat hex map layout tools.  I can already figure out how to do the dice or draw the layout of the tavern and my way probably won't involve any prep-time with either XML or a bitmap editor.

What we really need are online character sheets.  Ya ya there are some nice 4th ed character sheets on the iPad that will tell you how much a caltop costs or the amount of treasure you should be getting for next weeks adventure.  What if I change the prices or make home rules for HP and don't want to reprogram the damn things?  On the other hand you can use google docs to track your players stats and you can all share these links which is good if you are playing with laptops but not so good out at the campground.  These current solutions are either pretty or flexible - we need something that is both.  We need beautiful character sheets that we can share electronically, that we can use HTML5 or something to share online and display on tablets and phones offline. Character sheets that look nice and that can be customized easily for whatever game or house rules we're using.  We don't need them to calculate system specifics like weapon damage and item costs or even to calculate hp bonuses by level.  We just need stupid sheets of electronic paper that we can move the widgets around punch in the numbers and that we can scribble on.  We need modern character sheets without worn through hp boxes that have elegant ways to track those things that change often like damage, spell slots and arrows fired, and perhaps maybe link certain fields to a GM dashboard.

Someone Kickstart that.

Beacon 5.1

I updated the PDF so get your new copy.  The changes are mostly dealing with better electronic navigation via a proper PDF outline and changes to how HP work and the amount you get to start.  Also some layout changes to fit revised text.  Let me know if you find any weird complicated paragraphs or any other comments you might have.

Small changes to the rules (which is why it's 5.1 draft) but maybe some big impacts - especially to starting character power levels.  You farmboys won't be wading into a gang of goblins with impunity any more.

Aside from playtesting I think this baby is almost done.  I look forward to doing the playtests fixing whats broke and then making a real Beacon release 1 (no more draft versions!) and moving on to work on other game stuff.  Maybe that setting material...



Note: I noticed that ACKS also recently added an outline to their PDF - probably not because I called them on it back in this post but maybe.  Really people, if you do a PDF - do an outline - it's easy to do and sooooo much nicer for people using tablets and phones.


Additional Note:  If you do print it out and have a decent duplex printer, try printing it booklet mode on legal paper - that's my favourite format and fits nice in the hands.

PC Hit Dice

Since I am updating starting HP I was looking at using d6 for hit points.  Using a d6 for Player Character advancement essentially makes players d6 HD monsters.  I was considering maybe swapping this up to a d8 to give player character hit-points a little boost (mostly concerned about magic use here) but then it occurred to me that I should make PC hit dice variable again.  Not a class based variable however - that's not the direction I wanted to go in even though it's traditional.  No I took a quick look at the monster lists and realized that this should be a race based variable.  Basically if a player chooses a dwarf then they should get the dwarf's hit die (d8).  In Beacon humans and dwarves have d8 and elves and halflings(also goblins) have d6.  I think this works splendidly and has the benefit of consistency and extrapolation since HD is being used as an indicator of physical toughness for monsters.  If you want to make a new playable race like orcs, kolbolds or gnolls- then you have their HD already.
I do worry that this will make dwarves much more popular race with a STR bonus coupled with d8 HD, especially for magic classes since their HP bonuses could be substantial - but I think that tweaking the race builds a bit will resolve that.  I'll look at the starting skill points and stuff. I also don't mind if Dwarves become more magical in Beacon campaigns, it will make them different than the beer swilling hammer-chuckers they so commonly get relegated to.  Fairy tale dwarves were great with magic.  This whole thing is becoming a bit more change to the game than I anticipated however.  More play testing required.

I also got in the wording for how hitpoints work, hopefully it's not too confusing for new players.

Hit Points (HP) are a measure of the character’s life force, luck, energy and/or fatigue and are used by players to avoid having their characters take actual damage.  When a character is in a situation where they are going to take damage (from a weapon hit or any other non-specific damage) they can choose to instead spend HP to avoid taking some of all of that damage.  HP reduce the damage taken on a point for point basis.  Some damage cannot be avoided this way, for example poisons or spells and effects that target specific stats. As HP are recovered much faster than damage, using HP to avoid damage is usually a good idea.  However there are some considerations when spending HP.
 ·         Players with less HP than their current level are fatigued and have -1 to all reaction rolls and can only move half their normal speed.
·         If a character’s HP reaches 0, they are uncon­scious and unable to stay awake if roused. 

I'm thinking that I should allow players to burn MIND and CHA to cast spells if they want to save some hit points - just the same as players can take damage to stay in the fight.  I really like the idea of choosing to take real damage to conserve HP and stay awake and I think it would be cool to extend this to casters too.  Having Merle the Mad Wizard lobbing off a emergency feather fall spell but loosing 3 points of MIND and taking days to recover seems awesome.  I just have to make sure that there isn't some sort of exploit here with restoration spells or something.  Of course, simply being able to do magic is pretty cool already so maybe this is too much.

LotFP hardcover is a go

Yes the Lamentations of the Flame Princess hardcover is a lock now and so I'm going to get my book and that's awesome.  If you were worried to support it because you didn't think it would get funded before, you can revisit the indiegogo campaign with confidence that this will happen and you can get you yourself a copy.  Plus if you want any of the nifty adventures he's offering at higher funding tiers you should start coughing up for them.  And if you haven't checked it out then you should - there's a new Frank Mentzer module on the list for god sake.

An echo from the past

Way back in December I was talking about lowering starting hit points in order to bring first level characters more in line with the general level of monsters (that's both stuff you'd find in modules and the monsters in Beacon).  I was thinking that starting players with hp equal to STR + bonus +1d6  seemed more like 3-4th level in toughness and would have an easy time with the standard orcs and goblins.  I noticed during the playtest that I had to really pile on the goblins and hobgoblins for a challenge, and even then the players were pretty safe unless they rushed blindly into fights.  I don't want to inflate the monsters so I thought about lowering the starting HP to something more like 1/2 STR + bonus + 1d6.   I posted about this and The Bane commented:

The same thought had crossed my mind. But, since I am strongly considering a HP fueled Feat system I think I will stick with RAW. I had thought of giving the monsters the Strength starting HPs as an option.
Who wants a 15hp Goblin though. I think it would make combats more complicated. I don't know though.
In my interpretation, only 1d6 are actually "hp"s anyway. Hit Points won't be physical damage. Once those first 1d6 are gone then you are doing physical, mental, mobility, or social damage to the Player. 
HPs will recover quickly, Attribute damage will not...

I wasn't on the ball to realize just what he was saying back then but the dude was obviously rocking the Spice. If you follow my posts you can see over the last couple months as I slowly mulled this over independently I believe that I've hit on almost all of the same points he made way back then.  It was even suggested  in the last post to allow players to burn HP for 'feats' which I thought was an interesting direction to take.  Ha!  I originally dismissed the idea as too complicated!  I still don't know if I'd go as far as writing up feats but I have been considering other ways to spend HP that would be organic and allow other classes to benefit from the concept.

I never really liked using half STR for starting HP - that's not elegant. I also didn't like the idea using just STR + STR bonus and not rolling d6 for HP  That seems to be a double reward for high STR and the amount of HP is still way to high.  You also can't just remove the STR bonus to HP or the d6 because if you change the formula  the you are making an exception to the mechanic and I don't like exceptions.

What I believe now is that players should start with 6HP + STR bonus.  The d6 is represented here in giving players a best possible roll (they are heroes after all) as is the bonus from having a high STR.  What's not there is the initial HP boost from the STR stat and I think that that is fine.  In fact that's what was overloading the system and making the monsters too weak.  Characters still benefit from having a high STR because they become unconscious at 0 hp but they die at 0 STR.  What changed my mind on this was the recent thought that HP should be spent to avoid damage and not just automatically have damage lower HP - this means that players could use their STR as a buffer to take damage but still be able to stay in the game - take 3-4 points actual damage in order to have enough HP to go another round or cast one more spell.  Poison and spells or effects that directly target stats would not be impacted since only generic damage could be soaked this way.

Removing the STR component to HP will drastically drop the starting power of characters, and will be felt a lot by magic using characters but I don't think that's a huge issue because it balances all the characters back to a more reasonable start level which matches the strength of the monsters and NPCs.  I think that magic using characters were overpowered at the low levels compared to the other classes anyway.  Also you don't have to start at level 1 - that's just the lowest level available.  In fact starting at level 3 or 4 should be a very reasonable and common thing if you want to start your campaign with more capable characters and a bit more monsters and  magic going on.  Clawing back the level 1 HP simply allows a lower baseline for the sort of 'farmhands in the forest' campaigns that people like to run as well.

So I think that's the model I believe I'm going to go with -  characters at first level start with 6 + their STR bonus in HP, general damage does not automatically lower HP, but instead hit points are used to avoid STR damage.   Stat damage and stat recovery stays the same and 0 STR is what gets you dead.

I know I owe you an update, but I want it to be a good and proper update.

Hit Points, again

Ya so I still haven't committed rule to paper about the whole starting HP thing.  I am even less certain about the whole taking stat damage when you have no agency.  I like the ideas but I see them taking the game away from a d20 realm and into other directions.  I mean hit point in D20 are pretty flexible and can take a lot of abuse - point being that you can play around with player hit point progression wildly and still recognize the system (although as D&D went along it did become noticeable that something was happening here.)  Still I think having HP bypassed so easily could be easily abused or misused.

I did have a thought this morning on the HP topic from another angle.  What if all 'damage was stat damage?Spell casters in Beacon use HP to cast spells, perhaps all character types should be given the choice to use HP to avoid taking stat damage when they get hit.  This wouldn't really change things because most players would choose to take the HP loss over the stat damage so it would work mostly the same way.  It wouldn't be likely that a player would choose their character take stat damage over losing HP because stat damage is so hard to regain.   It wouldn't change healing magic which remains for restoring HP spent on damage avoidance (and not spells) - but it would align the two experiences of magic use and damage avoidance and clarify how HP work in Beacon - as a pool of fatigue/luck/skill/will - and it would be interesting if/when someone actually decided to choose to take a hit on their stats in order to stay conscious and achieve a task.

I hope I can get in some play-testing again soon because I think these ideas really need to be worked through in the field and run by some players instead of just percolating on the blog.

Hardcover Flame Princess

Its funny but I was going on about how much I liked Lamentations of the Flame Princess and wished I had a hardcover.  I mean I've got the free PDF and I've seen some of the art on the web but I felt that this game would not really cut it as softcovers in a box for me personally.  I hear it is a very nice box set - but then again I have the Moldvay D&D box set and I feel the same way about that.  Heck the first RPG I had was had the StarFrontiers box and it was great - but it was still soft cover.  I think box sets are great (especially for starting out) and I'm glad I have mine - but they don't inspire me.  Maybe it's mental fallout from when I got my first AD&D Players Handbook but a hardcover means the game is for reals.  I felt that if I played some LotFP it should be a for reals kind of game.  I also think it would be awesome looking.

Well then how could I not put my money where my mouth went when I heard that there was a Indiegogo project to publish some hardcovers.  I could not pass this up so I quickly pledged for a copy.  Now I can't wait to have that Lamentations of the Flame Princess hardcover - with all the art and no doubt beautiful - sitting on my shelf.   Or better yet, being used to fight off zombiefied players when the shit really hits the fan.

I'll also get a PDF version with art because they are so damn useful, and why the hell not.

I can't see this not getting funded but if it doesn't I'll hold you all responsible.  So if you want an awesome hardcover Lamentations of the Flame Princess Book then go here and get you one.