Der PigDog's PigBlog

I ran Great Ork Gods last week for four other players: Adam, Patrick, Never, and Bulb. I had never spoken to Never before. I had played countless sessions with Adam and Patrick across four or more games, and ran maybe a dozen sessions with Bulb. We played in the included scenario, the raid for the mayor's daughters in Little Uplingham. I used Watabou's fabulous village generator to make a map. Character creation is a bit dodgy; in future games, I'll go with random distribution of points only. We had a few rules hiccups, mostly my fault. As we played the game, goblins simply remove one level of difficulty, no matter whether it's from spite or natural difficulty. Also, I forgot that the God assigns difficulty naturalistically, not based on their desires -- whoops! We made one unintentional rules change that I really, really liked. When you lose an ork, you record their Oog score. Your new ork starts at 1 as usual. At the end of the game, we compare scores between all th...

Some controversy in the Table-Time discord server. When you play old-school D&D, does the game get harder as you progress? Do you need to do more adventuring for the same reward? Is that good, or bad? I don't intend to answer the evaluative questions here. But I can definitively answer the purely quantitative question: the game gets harder, and you do need to do more adventuring for the same reward. Let's assume you have a party of 6 thieves at level X. They each need about 1500 * 2^(X - 2) points to progress to the next level. They collect all their XP from treasure rooms in dungeons. These treasure rooms are generated using the procedures in the 1974 D&D publication. How many treasure rooms do they need to get to the next level? Treasure rooms per level up by level   Between 6 and 400, my math says, and the number goes up as you level up. Here's the same data in number form, with a bit more context.   Note that these values are really swingy at low levels. Most o...

I have spent the last 6 months visiting dojos and HEMA clubs, taping accelerometers to swords and measuring the energy released on impact. As a result I have produced the first scientifically verified damage and penetration chart for melee weapons in D&D. A brief overview of the rules, before I give the actual data: Unlike in AD&D/Greyhawk, damage is not modified by target size. All targets take the same damage. (I tested swordstrokes on squirrels, pigs, cows, and giraffes, and found that they all took the same absolute damage, though obviously this damage took a different proportion of their health.) Penetration worsens AC, to a minimum of 10. No penetration leaves the AC value unchanged. Low penetration means +2 AC (-2 in ascending systems), medium means +4 (or -4), and high means +6 (or -6). Again, you cannot make any AC worse than "unarmored", 10 AC in every system. Without further ado, the fruits of my long labor, the chart.

Impromptu freeform game with Aalisha and Brentley, two coworkers. I had played one abortive session of Vigil, and one successful session of Basic D&D, with Brentley. Aalisha had never heard of roleplaying before, which is how the game started. We played over a series of three workdays, advancing the situation between pizza orders. I explained what we do -- we have a conversation about fictional events, with different people responsible for different things within the fictional situation. The fictional events could be anything. For instance, in a recent game  one character, a chad fuckboy, went to bed with a woman much less cool than him, intending a one night stand, but woke up the next morning to find that he was infatuated with her. I asked Aalisha, what do you do in this circumstance? What would the fuckboy do? She and Brentley both gave guesses and explanations about the fuckboy's feelings and actions. Brentley, it was clear, had a stronger vision for the fuckboy than Aali...

Traditionally we score achievement in the form of treasure looted and enemies defeated. In this post I will argue that we should broaden our scoring to include player-determined quests, and present a procedure for acquiring and scoring quests. Why quests? Literary progenitors Money and victory in combat are great, tried-and-true objectives, worthy of scoring. Low-tier pulp fantasy heroes constantly pursue these ends -- Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, Conan as a young man, Cugel when he isn't under duress, Satampra Zeiros. A pile of gold bullion, a noble goal! Money and victory in combat should always be scored. They're always useful. When you get money or win a fight, you're always winning at life in these stories. But any fan of pulp fiction will notice that money and victory in combat are far from the only objectives in pulp fantasy. Protagonists in the mid-tier and up have larger goals. Some examples: Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser at the end of their career, defending Rime Isl...

Zombie emoticon, sourced from https://moremoji.allezsoyez.com/   Thinking about how I run zombies, skeletons, and other mindless dead, and nailing down the details. First, HD/level. OD&D gives skeletons 1/2 HD and zombies 1 HD. Holmes bumps zombies up to 2 HD, and AD&D bumps skeletons up to 1 HD. These numbers are small enough that they're not really worth disputing; your garden-variety walking corpse, the type we see in a Romero movie, does not have much protagonism or individual combat ability. They get their power from their numbers. I really like that the numbers have changed, so that depending on what table you're at, you might face undead of a variety of strengths. Thus I will actually keep a range of levels for my walking dead -- 1/2 to 2. Unless they've been animated by the T-Virus, radiation, or a passive aura of death magic, the dead walk because someone raised them. If you can't think of an obvious necromancer commanding them to do a specific task, ro...