Der PigDog's PigBlog

The following is experimental! I came up with these rules after reading lumpley's  Edgar Allen Poe's The Raven's Ars Magica: A Quaint & Curious Volume of Forgotten Lore  and mulling over the purpose of a dedicated GM in my own gaming . I haven't played with them yet. At any time, make a common move. When you don't have a main character in a scene, and everybody is silent, make an MC move. When you don't have a main character in a scene, and someone rolls a miss, make an MC move. If everybody has a main character in a scene, anybody can make MC moves, but not moves targeting their own character. One person shouldn't make an MC move immediately followed by a character move, nor a character move immediately followed by an MC move. Remember, the game is not a series of moves. It is a conversation about fictional events in which moves are triggered. Common moves Start a scene from scratch. Turn to another player and ask where their character is, what they are...

This post has some bad language in it, including gendered and homophobic slurs. It Was a Mutual Decision 's pitch is strong, incredibly strong, maybe the single best pitch for a game I have ever heard: you are in a breakup, as civil or toxic as you like, and one or both of you may be a horrible rat-human monster. Oh, and the game ends either when you've both gracefully exited the relationship, or one or both of you are dead. Also, it's a team-based game: all the boys play the girl, and all the girls play the boy. -- Every single time I have delivered this pitch, I see eyes light up. It's so obviously fun, funny, and resonant. Cover of It Was a Mutual Decision with a thumbs-up representing my positive opinion of the game Unfortunately for the reader, there are no digital copies, it is not currently in print, and the writer has no immediate plans to make it available again. I ordered a copy off ebay but it got snatched by porch pirates. Luckily when I was complainin...

"You've ruined everything. I will hate you forever." A game for three players, A, B, and C, shifting roles. Brief definition of a human being for play purposes "Human being" is a keyword I've found useful in playing several narrativist games. When I say so-and-so is a human being, I mean that they are not a structural literary type (pro- or antagonist), a cardboard cutout, a stereotype, a pawn, a monster, a simple player stand-in, or a political or moral idea given fictional flesh. Most human beings have all of the following  Name Age Ethnicity Social class Income (or none!) Hometown Current city A job, and previous work experience (or none!) Sexual and romantic relationships (or none!) Friends (or none!) Family (or none!) Hobbies and interests Material resources  It isn't necessary to fill out every detail, just enough for our current play. You can always add more later. Scenario creation I Player A creates the main girl, a human being between the ages ...

The first half anyway. As is usual in these superhero movies, it gets worse the longer you think about it. 3/5. Sorry folks, this review is lower quality than you might be used to getting from this blog, it's been a long day.  The film lacks thematic unity; its first half sets up really interesting, incisive questions, and then the back half ignores them in favor of yet another "destroy a cgi city with little or no actual human cost" drearily familiar from Marvel. (Yeah there's also the invasion sequence in not-Palestine/Ukraine by not-Russia/Israel, but that's very clearly  not  the actual climax of the movie, just a bit of added stakes. Plenty of brown people die in that fight scene, off-screen.) Superman's interview with Lois was the height of the movie. I keep trying to remember the character's name, I know it's not Peter Parker. Clark Kent. Fuck. Great chemistry. Big fan of Rachel Brosnahan going back to House of Cards. This whole line of question...

Regular readers will remember that in my work-in-progress fantasy heartbreaker Coup Étrange, "HP" stands for "hero points" which are supposed to be spent throughout play. (Actual design is notably lacking on this subject.) Meanwhile real wounds, with game-affecting consequences, belong to a separate subsystem, which is usually only engaged when the character is hit by an attack and they are out of HP. Readers may also recall my suggestions (I don't remember where I put this actually) that some kind of barbarian or berserk warrior could get +1HP/HD killed, keeping the rage machine fueled. So the idea is, you start every scenario with a random amount of HP, in a range fixed by your level and class; say, Xd6+1 for a level X fighting-man. You can increase your current HP past your starting HP, all the way up to, say, 6*X+1 for that same fighting-man. Meanwhile you're also going to be spending it to avoid damage and do cool shit in combat (design work needed here...

 In my play and reading I've identified a few strands that really excite me. If I stick to them they should fill up the next five or fifty years of play, easy. I'll still play other games of course! Old School Naissance I'm very clever with the name. For the past four years I've held that the original sin of the OSR is that it only investigated old-school Dungeons & Dragons. And it was really only interested in D&D as understood by people who played B/X (or, if you're really crusty, some AD&D). That's bullshit. l If you've read  The Elusive Shift  you know that old-school play was tremendously diverse, as were old-school rules. I'm interested in all the forgotten possibilities at the birth of roleplay. I've put together a list of games from the first decade of the hobby (1974 to 1980) with distinctive features that interest me. This turned out to be most games published in that era! Every one had something of interest, based on its wikipe...