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to be published materials that need tweaking for your campaign adjustments to monsters treasure spells the desired tone etc however i wanted people to be able to use as much of the existing d20 material in beacon with as little work as possible after 12 years has this paid off well yes and no using a simple d20 system has been great for running games and for tweaking rules its a great baseline as for using other material its not come up as much as i expected and to be honest most of the material i personally use for games is scaled and compatible with the older pre d20 rules and so needs a lot of adjustment anyway the d20 materials i have read don t fit the tone i like although the power levels are closer to beacon up to the point where they aren t i have had a constant tug of war trying to find that balance to maintain compatibility between the low values often seen in old ad d style games and the higher values seen in modern d d my preference for campaign materials seems to land in the older material mostly the pre d20 or more modern osr stuff however i am first to admin that beacon which has d20 in its core tracks much closer to d20 monster manuals than it does to the old school monster stats i enjoy i have a simple monster stat system in the rules but you can still easily pull 5th edition monsters right into your beacon game for use at their intended threat level where say labyrinth lord monsters would generally be too low powered and take a bit of adjustment i have mostly relied on generating simplified beacon monster stats based on creature hd type x number and then adding special abilities from the source material i have many times lamented this and thought about making changes to down shift this towards the old materials but it would come at the expense of this initial design statement twelve years ago that seemed like crazy talk to throw away d20 sources but today with so many niche d20 experiences its not as wild a prospect the market keeps changing however especially with digital vtt products coming out to be useful beacon needs to be usable and so maybe its not so bad a novice gm can drop in their favorite 5e dungeons and monsters while still benefiting from the other streamlined features in beacon as for my preferences i can always adjust my favorite adventures on the fly as i was writing this post the alexandrian posted a thing about the difference in skill resolution between different editions of d d which is a pretty good read and very relevant to this topic beacon ties skills to leveling and already bounds 20 and 1 rolls with a critical hits and fumbles but that bounded accuracy does not apply to rolls outside of combat its possible to roll a natural 20 and succeed a non combat challenge but roll a 19 3 and fail one he does have some good discussion in that article why the different versions feel so different power wise the next design choice i want to talk about is related to how these d20 core mechanics are leveraged beacon is a rules lite fantasy game so that s next time posted by todd at 3 35 pm 0 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels influences mechanics review rules tuesday september 6 2022 beacon is 12 years old where does the time go it was september 2010 when i started posting about beacon there have been big stops and starts in that time but i have been pushing my thoughts for my fantasy heartbreaker rpg out onto these pages for quite some time i ll be the first to admin that this blog is not a very good ambassador for fantasy role playing or osr games or even for beacon i post rarely and when i do its usually a rambling kind of post that references rules and obscure details the beacon blog seems to be more of a navel gaze and not a really a repository of comprehensive ideas the purpose of this blog is to represent the game and document the design choices i make that said the most useful thing a general audience will find on this site is the page where you can download the rules and maybe a notification of a new or upcoming update i did write a sticky page to help players navigate character generation i should do more of that kind of thing i find that when i have time to work on the game its generally fixing rules that are not working and trying to do layout changes to the pdf or updates to the roll20 character sheet that s important stuff certainly but i think it may all be for nothing if i don t occasionally communicate what beacon is about and why you might want to play it so what the hell is beacon anyway beacon is my take on the dungeons and dragons game by way of d20 microlite and osr content i realized i haven t come back to the beacon mission statement in quite a while over two years ago i laid out a bunch of changes i wanted to make to the game and i ve made most of those changes then i went on to make many more changes based on running the game over a longer period of time once that rabbit hole was opened i ve dived right in and i have been updating and playtesting and re updating the rules i ve pushed past the fairly minor tweaks and polish and have been really making a lot of additional changes i didn t foresee part of this is just catching up with ideas in gaming over the last 5 6 years but there have been some bigger changes as well playtesting has been a real boon and i m lucky i have some players who are pushing the rules and making me think about the how and why of beacon vs other systems and or their expectations of how the rules should work what works online and what suits the kind of games i like to run i think that the game has been improved tremendously over the years the last 3 years especially in my opinion it is just overall cleaner simpler and better designed for the kind of play i want to be doing but as i ve alluded to already my thoughts lately are trying to sort out if its all just a stack of home rules or if beacon is its own game and following an actual design certainly i have an internal idea more of a feeling of what rules i want in the game i ve had many discussions with players on why a rule works a particular way in beacon as opposed to other d20 systems i think i have a design but i m not sure i ve communicated it out also beacon has some rules or systems that are clunky or that seem inelegant but have been kept for compatibility with other d20 games and i have done a lot of back and forth over if i should fix these or leave them i ve had some large back and forth swings on how to deal with some aspects of the game over the years for these situations sometimes i need to swoop out and look at the bigger picture of what the game is supposed to be doing so what is the mission statement the design what separates beacon from basic d20 and the hundreds of other fantasy rpgs next post i ll start with the first one beacon is a d20 fantasy game posted by todd at 3 04 pm 2 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels d d influences mechanics rules wednesday march 2 2022 beacon 7 5 i ve updated the current pdf of the beacon rules it s the 7 5 draft now this version of the rules lines up with the changes i made to the roll20 character sheet in february as always i wanted to fix more things then i had time for and i had to weigh the need to have the new rules available against fixing unfinished items or formatting you will see some stuff in red that is under revision along side the stuff in purple which is highlighting new content or changes the pdf isn t as pretty as i d like but its usable this version of beacon has a lot of changes and includes new rules or tools that i ve been using for some time in my playtesting this release is really the skill release and many changes involve the skill system during playtesting i noticed that the power creep was starting to become very noticeable around levels 6 and 7 i tried to address this by halving the dice bonus from skills at the same time i was able to make skills more important in all aspects of the game in most cases i am trying to give players choices in how they can progress their character builds by choosing where to put their skill points i also had noticed a problem with the way spending coin to add experience points was causing some players to outpace others as well as generally making leveling up too rapid changing the level requirements from instead of xp plus treasure equals the level target to xp and treasure both equal the level target allows for a lot more treasure in the game in general and doing this means that i don t need to put any arbitrary limits on how much a player spends on their advancement other important tweaks to the game were reworking the attack bonuses to utilize the physical skill adding the rogue s ability to have a special skill and changing the hunter environment bonus to apply to any non combat skill checks instead of just survival rolls any place i could take out a lookup table or special class rule related to a particular skill i tried to do that i did wind up making a new class of small weapons which are the same as light weapons but have less encumbrance this change primarily serves the character sheet but is necessary in the game because of the way weapons are abstracted i balanced this out somewhat by removing the special rules for two handed heavy weapons and codifying how bonuses are applied to these now three categories of weapon small weapons get no bonus for str light weapons get an attack bonus and heavy weapons get an attack and a damage bonus i do like having weapon damage being set instead of rolled but at the same time i ve added back in some complexity like weapon damage types blunt slashing and piercing damage types are good fun in combat i think and give reasons for pcs to carry specific weapons again i ve removed the monster section for now i plan on replacing it with more of a monster builder section instead i still use the basic idea of everything based on hit dice when running monsters but i have found that having large monsters always using large dice for initiative does take away from combat i still rely heavily on number and type of hd for coming up with monster stats but i ve gravitated toward having monsters with multiple hd types per attack and special abilities which i want to reflect in the rules the direction of beacon for a while has been to abstract many of the game processes while still retaining meaningful resource management to support the expedition style play i want to encourage this release finally has the table for making camp while on an expedition and lifestyle chart for cost of living between adventures the goal of these changes was to make the fun bits more fun and the bookkeeping more streamlined finally i am still working on fixing the spells something that is taking longer than i ever imagined i like a lot of the newer spells i ve put up which are more quirky and less generic than the original spells i brought over from the d20 srd there are still a lot of spells that are not suited for point spend still but that number is dropping next release i hope to have most of the spells out of the red and adapted for microlite style magic posted by todd at 3 32 pm 0 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels mechanics pdf updates sunday january 30 2022 introducing the skill bonus i wrote this post a while back but got caught up in other things and didn t post it since this i ve gone and made a bunch of changes to beacon and the roll20 sheet consider this post 1 of the new changes for the next release skill bonuses vs skill points i ve been doing lots of hemming and hawing over skill points and damage etc the basic microlite mechanic is to add skill and your attribute bonus to your d20 roll and classes are defined by which skill they can use and which ones they advance in its a great mechanic and gets rid of so many special rules coming up with simple but robust skill advancement for longer campaigns is what started me writing beacon however as i am playtesting higher level play i am starting to see some issues with beacon and how it plays playtesting is a big deal especially when you start to see the trends to the way a game changes as players get more skills and abilities elegant rules at low levels can start to really change as the players progress the problem i am seeing is i don t like seeing 10 bonuses to dice rolls before magic or other effects at mid level mid level players getting that much of a dice bonus seems fun to them now but sets of warning bells in my mind when i extrapolate that trend to the second half of the level ladder given the current rules its very likely players at the highest levels would be getting 15 or even 20 to their dice rolls at which point so many of the other rules become irrelevant or washed out by that one calculation magic swords need to be 5 or more to make any noticeable difference at that level since armour does not scale to match all those high numbers become wasted unless you start ramping up the opponents you can just keep scaling up the monsters but then you have inflated the numbers to no purpose also i don t like seeing higher damage bonuses flatten out all the differences between weapon types and attribute bonuses there is already a problem where clerics and magic users do such low damage in comparison to the martial classes that they cannot participate in combat this is by design when the certain classes are doing two or three times the baseline damage of others but when it becomes 4 or 6 times greater then its a problem the root issue is the core mechanic of adding skill number to the dice roll having such a big component of the bonus come from skills flattens out the dice rolls and either washes out or causes inflation to everything else i tooled around with making it harder to get skills like one every couple levels or limiting how much a skill could be raised per level etc however this just makes it harder to level up and less fun skill is such a core differentiator to class in the system that it made progression more complex and harder to manage you really do need to give a new skill point each level and the classes getting extra additional skill at different levels helps balance and define their progression also i found any time i limited total skill points it caused issues somewhere either there was not enough of an effect or there was too much effect from the skill in and i was fiddling around with each case i think i have the answer though making the skill bonus equal to half the skill number this is the same as how stats work where every second point gives a point except skills have no negative mods it also has the effect of letting skills operate on two scales the skill bonus can be used for die rolls and the skill number can be used for other things this seems to me that it may resolve the issue and a downstream of this change is that i can simplify a lot ...