Dungeon Crawl Classics

Dungeon Crawl Classics

I really didn't want to get into Dungeon Crawl Classics for a couple of reasons.  Firstly I just didn't want to deal with another OD&D revamp.  I mean this is the Beacon blog and Beacon is what I thought d20 should look like, I mean that's the whole reason I wrote it right?  I did like what I was seeing from Lamentations of the Flame Princess, I thought that it was good enough that I wanted a copy of the hard cover, especially with the production quality it promises to have.  I also gave Adventurer Conquer King a try because it looked interesting and I'm an open minded kind of guy - always looking for new things to poke around with.  There's some good stuff in ACKS and LotFP, some stuff I might use in a campaign (domain game tables and charts) and some stuff that is very cool take on an idea but but which I probably wouldn't use (the LotFP skill system).  There is also stuff I certainly don't like about these systems and so I would probably use Beacon for any gritty Fantasy game and tack on bits from these others.

However, I stayed away from Dungeon Crawl Classics because I didn't think it had anything to add to the equation.  I flipped though the book and I thought it had too many charts and special rules and I really don't like that kind of game.  My biggest problem with ACKS is the proficiency system and the fiddly classes and DCC looked to take that even further.  It looked like a pile of disassociated mechanics and charts and probably something you'd have to house rule the crap out of to play a decent game with.  If you read this blog you'll recognize Mike (if you read this blog there's 33% chance you are Mike...) from his unreserved praise and zealous adulation - nay near worship - of Beacon, so it was a little surprising when he started toting around the DCC book and talking excitedly about how great it was and getting animated about all these luck rolls and corruption charts.  Really I felt kind of bad for him.

So then I played DCC.  It rocks.

I got roped into playing DCC as a funnel Mike ran for our kids. It was a lot of fun and ha ha it's a funnel and your guy gets killed by a mud man.  It seemed like it was a pretty solid game but I wasn't convinced.  I think people focus on the killing part of the funnel without understanding what the funnel actually does, but I'll get back to that.  It wasn't until we got a couple characters to first level that the game really became interesting to me.  The classes have interesting mechanics, the charts are many and varied but they work well.  The charts which I expected to hate I actually like because they aren't rule mechanic look-up charts you need to reference and memorize, they are modifier charts to make the game go places you wouldn't think of going.  The other big thing people remark on is the special dice and I, like a lot of other people, just thought that was a gimmick - and it is - but it's a good gimmick because dice substitution is a lot more fun than adding up bonuses and to do that right proper you need more granulation in the dice.  So in stead of getting increasing bonuses to hit as your warrior levels up, you get an extra dice and that dice goes from a d3 to d4 to a d5 which is way cooler and less unbalanced than simply adding +1's until you cannot miss.  This concept is used every where and it's consistent enough that once you get it, half the complexity of those tables goes away.  You aren't looking up rules, you are quickly referencing a die roll.

I'm so jealous of that idea.

I like the magic system too.  Push your luck mechanics are interesting and having the ability to cast away until you blow a roll and then pay the price is a greet mood mechanic that you just don't get with spell slots or spell points, or even a simple fumble table.  Teach you to cast that utility spell instead of getting the thief to do it, now you have an anus on your forehead...

As for the funnel - well it's fun to see characters die and all but I think the real value of the funnel is that you don't have folks coming to a campaign with a story already set up in their head.  More importantly you don't have 4-5 special snowflakes coming to the table with incompatible stories and then getting all butt-hurt when those stories don't progress or mesh well.  What you have is a story emerging out of the actions of these random characters who have learned to work together and seen their comrades die in interesting ways that make stories for them to talk about.  Those are some great stories.

I don't know how I'll like DCC once the higher levels kick in, and I don't know if I'll still be liking it as much a year from now or if something will pop up I'm not happy with, but I'm truly enjoying the game we're playing now (and not all due to the system, Mike can take some credit for being a good DM).  I haven't really felt a need to change a rule or disliked any design choice yet which is pretty good coming from me.  If I wasn't picky I'd still be playing AD&D probably.  We've started a DCC campaign now with our regular game group and after playing the kids game and getting a taste of classed characters, I'm really eager to see how this game works with a bunch of cantankerous and clever grown ups.

I'm still going to run my games in Beacon, but I might be willing to run something in DCC if I was filling in for the regular GM or the players already had characters or something.  Or maybe if someone was interested in trying it out - purely to examine comparative mechanics you understand.  Or if I had a good idea for a session...  That's pretty funny because I told Mike back in November that I might consider playing DCC, but I'd never run something with it.

OPD 2013

Noticed that the One Page Dungeon Contest 2013 is now on.  If you haven't heard about that then you should hear about it.  I didn't enter last year and I make no promises to enter this year because to be honest work and stuff is seriously cutting into my reading and farting around time. However you should entirely check it out even if I don't manage to get my shit together because the OPD is a great thing and it generates a million useful ideas in a good format.  You can run a campaign off of these things since they are boiled down and modular enough to stick into your ongoing adventures.  They are like putting dimes in a birthday cake which is awesome and they are unlike that too because you shouldn't do that anymore.  What were our parents thinking anyway...

I have some ideas for this, but please don't encourage me.

Online character sheet

I have been playing with making a Beacon character sheet for online games in Google Drive.  I like how it's shaping up so far and I've got the inkling that I could save off a bunch of these and share them with players to keep track of their characters pretty well.  You can view the prototype here.  If I can figure out how or why making a template is a good thing I might do that, but as far as I can see you should be able to just copy one for each player, share it for edits, and have them fill it in.   An unexpected upside is how well it works on android phones and tablets.  There is probably a way to do cool stuff like make forms for players to roll up their characters for a game and lock parts of the sheet or feed some of the values on these sheets into a GM dashboard so you can track all the ACs or something, but I haven't really played around with Drive that much.  It's probably a diminishing return as well, too much maintenance for too little gain.

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.