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March 2025 AP: freeform dating game at work

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...
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Questing

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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...
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Modelling the dead

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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...
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OSRs Magica: Muspelli

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The Muspelli are are Hyberborian magicians who worship the giants and aim to bring about Ragnarok. They have specific giants as patrons. They learn to take on the form of a giant, at least the size of a bear. Creating your Muspelli Muspelli advance and roll HP as other magician classes. They do not memorize or research spells. Instead they commune with a giant to master their transformation into giant-form and improve their ritual ability. Roll for a patron: Aegir Sea-King. You know Storm's Eye, Twisting the Sight, Threads of Fate, and Dowsing. +1 bonus die on all casting rolls if you are crippled (legs smashed on rocks while swimming) Gullveig the Wicked. You know Entrancement, Hex, Summon Animals, and Magic Sensitivity. +1 bonus die on all casting rolls if you are blind (plucked out own eyes) Gymir Frost-Father. You know Storm's Eye, Winter's Breath, Wildfire, and Wilderness Sense. +1 bonus die on all casting rolls if you have three heads. Leikin Hel-Queen. You know Hex, ...
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Two strategies in war and dungeons

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Been reading Clausewitz, and his modern interpreters the US Marine Corps . Extremely interesting and useful. Here's a question prompted by reading MCDP 1: Warfighting, by the marines: when we go dungeon delving, are we using a strategy of annihilation or erosion? Let's back up a bit, because not all of my readers will be familiar with Clausewitz or Delbrück. A portrait of Carl von Clausewitz Clausewitz says that war is the continuation of policy by other means. (It's not the end of his thought, it's a stage in a dialectic. But it's right on the money.) We go to war to achieve something, and if we are wise, that thing can be achieved by going to war. Military action should serve policy. Our overall aims in war are achieved via the execution of military strategy. The marines outline two very general strategic approaches in war: There are two ways to use military force to impose our will on an enemy. The first is to make the enemy helpless to resist us by physically de...
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Some trouble with dramatic coordination

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Most of the games I have played involve 1) a division of authority between a "standard GM" and "players"; 2) character advocacy on the parts of the players; and 3) naturalistic modeling on the part of the GM. When I step outside that bubble, I have a lot of trouble! (One exception, Monsterhearts, simply because I know the genre so well I might as well be doing naturalistic modelling.) I'm thinking here about four different games, all of which went poorly, for different but related reasons. My S/Lay w/Me game with Lori; my Shock: game with Jay and Eric; my game of PLAY with Misha, Ken, and Divya; and every game of Tales of the Round Table I have played. S/Lay w/Me   I thought I was going to crush this game because I had had such a good time playing it with Claudio . Though now I would add a caveat to that game. I'm not sure I had a real "story now" moment when playing, because I never had to make any difficult choices. I always knew what Agathon wan...
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You only need to roll Open Door once

If you're playing in a dungeon where every door is stuck, you only need to roll for Open Door once per door. (Bonus dice on the roll for everybody helping to open the door -- two people can try to open a normal door, three people can try to open a really big one.) If the roll hits, well, they've opened the door, and you don't need to roll again. If the roll misses, say "Anybody in the next room has heard you try to open the door; you have no chance of surprising them. Are you still going to go through?" Then they'll go through the door, or not. There's no point rolling again and again if the only consequence for failure is "It didn't open this time, try again?". It only takes 10 seconds to try and open a door. That's nothing in comparison to a 10 minute dungeon turn.  If you spend a whole minute trying to open the door, you've got a 90% chance of success, but do we really want to spend table time rolling 6 times and checking for a hit...
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