Der PigDog's PigBlog

Sometimes it's ok to have a movie with no subtlety whatsoever, especially if the movie blows straight past "blatant" and into "ridiculous". Plus the concept is good (though derivative; I thought about Seconds (1966) and The Picture of Dorian Grey (1890) throughout) and inspired deep emotion in my partner and me. The acting and practical effects are mostly outstanding (with one bad scene by Moore, though I think it's the script's fault more than hers). On the other hand, every single important beat is repeated two or even three times, sometimes literally, and by the end I was waiting for the movie to conclude. The last half hour really dragged. A strong 3/5. Goofy robe, what's up with the dragon? Anyway, how I would rewrite/re-edit the movie. (This is something I think about for most artworks -- what would I do differently, to preserve its core and show it in a clearer light?) Lots of stuff is going to stay the same, and so I won't bother listi

This is mostly a summary of the Coup procedure, so credit where it's due there. I've added the bit about different action speeds as it's come up in games a fair deal. Maneuvering Combat is divided into 1 minute maneuver phases. Declare what you are doing at the start of the phase. Everybody declares at once, no particular order. Actions in the maneuver phase are immediate, fast, or normal. Every action in a speed category takes place simultaneously. Fully resolve all actions in one speed category before you move on to the next. Conceivably, your action could take some sort of penalty if you are disrupted by an action from an earlier category. Immediate actions: shooting an arrow, throwing a spear, tossing a rock, readying a spear, giving a brief command, charging into melee (maybe? this is separate from the ordinary walking-speed "closing into melee" and requires a martial arts technique to get a whole group to do it at once) Fast actions: closing into melee Norma

Dice tech basics When you make a check of x/y difficulty, you want to roll x or lower on a y-sided die. Call that a hit. If you roll a hit, you succeed. Very occasionally you will modify the base difficulty of the task, the target number (TN). If you'd ever make the task a sure thing or impossible (if you'd ever have x = 0 or x = y), increase the die size, y, by one step and change x accordingly. (1/4 becomes 1/6; 5/6 becomes 7/8.) More often you will add bonus or penalty dice to the roll to reflect advantages and disadvantages. When you roll with a bonus die, you roll two dice, and if either one hits, you succeed. When you roll with a penalty die, you roll two dice, and if either one misses, you fail. Bonus and penalty dice cancel out. You can count the degrees of success or failure for roll as follows. On a success with bonus dice, the degree of success is the number of dice that hit. On a failure with penalty dice, the degree of failure is the number of dice that missed. Oth

Played two games of Murderous Ghosts with Misha, Divya, and Ken. I was the MC for the first game. Ken was the MC for the second game -- his first-ever time MCing! Unfortunately, I don't remember the sequence of pulls or moves precisely, so this  Before play I thought up a pretty detailed chronology of the violent act which spawned the ghosts. A husband, the owner of the hotel, found his wife cheating on him. He castrated his wife's lover and tossed their twin babies in the fireplace, and then hung himself. His wife clawed her eyes out in despair and slit her own throat. The precise chronology turned out not to matter at all during play. And the whole thing was more complicated than it needed to be. We started off with "Fang" finding the husband's corpse, still swinging, dripping someone else's blood from its hands. Fang recalls that he doesn't want children any time soon. Fang moves to another room, a richly appointed living room, where he finds the burnt

 Trigger warning: school shooting Werewolf with a gun, photo by Pumpkin Lizard on Deviant Art, a reference image during the game After last session, I realized I had made a mistake. I shouldn't have asked the other players "What do you want from the other main characters?". My intention was to push the main characters towards each other, but this was wrong. I shouldn't encourage the other players to make any particular decision, or have any particular orientation towards each other. Even apathy is fair. It's a valid move to isolate yourself from the others, play cold, and only interact with side characters. I said as much to the others, and instead asked them two two-part questions: What identity have you constructed for yourself? How secure are you in that identity? What do you want? What do you fear? My inspiration for the first question was Apocalypse World; at the end of every session, you're supposed to ask each player if their character is satisfied with

 In my Arcade Mode game, players don't take downtime. They freely adjust their resources between sessions. That was the intent, anyway -- most players are unwilling to simply give themselves more resources. So I decided to draft a very simple downtime system. Every real world week, or every session, since your last session with a character, add 1 downtime point. Spend downtime points and (10 * level * points) rupees on downtime actions. (The rupee is your campaign's base currency type, whatever that is. 1 rupee = 1 xp = 1 days' wages for a basic infantryman, roughly.) Here are some simple downtime maneuvers, listed with their costs: 1 point = 1 streetwise check for new hirelings, rumors, rare items, contacts, trainers 1 point = 1 visit to a known sage, library, expert, important contact 1 point = 1 martial art technique learning check 1 point = 1 hireling recruitment roll 2 points = reroll HP, take the higher result 2 points = 1 attribute improvement roll 3 points = train