Der PigDog's PigBlog

Blood Red Sands  is an a game by Ralph Mazza.  Here's the only play report of it on the internet.  It's an asymmetrical competitive gm-ful game with hidden information, shifting authorities, and formal conflict resolution. Probably nobody but the author has ever run it. Front cover of the pdf. No longer for sale anywhere BRS is grim and gritty swords and sorcery, psychedelic, as edgy as you can make it. The world is a wasteland dominated by witch kings who killed the gods and sucked up their power. You play the heroes attempting to destroy the witch kings. You also play the witch kings. You also play various third parties, who may or may not be sympathetic to the witch kings and to the heroes. You also play the storyteller recounting the legends of the heroes a thousand years in the future. This game is genuinely competitive, on every single level. It is jam-packed with layers of strategy. If it works at all, it is probably really good. Let's find out! The rest of this po...

Runequest orders actions in terms of "strike ranks". You declare your action, and you look up how many "strike ranks" the action takes, which may be modified by your character's formal attributes. Then we go through the different actions in order of strike rank, from lowest (fastest) to highest (slowest). People run Runequest strike ranks in one of two different ways: When you have made your action, your turn ends, and resets the next round When you have made your action, you declare a new action, which "wraps around" to the strike ranks of the next round I find the latter much, much more interesting. If I ever play Runequest (and it's on the list) I'll be doing the latter. If you don't play with wraparound strike ranks, I think Runequest has the same action ordering procedure as AD&D's segments. Welcome to snoozefill! I already play D&D all the time, I don't need a d100-clone with fancy worldbuilding. On the other hand, if ...

I'm currently running T&T 5e, with a couple rules imported from later editions and one rule I simply made up. Imported and house rules in  italics . Here's how combat works. Declare spells and ranged attacks. Roll (see below) to see if ranged attacks hit, in which case they'll be added to the group attack roll. (House rule.) Declare stunts and roll for them. Combined attack roll. Each side adds up all their dice and static bonuses ("adds"), plus Take That, You Fiend!s. Every 6 rolled does 1 damage, ignoring armor, spread evenly among combatants on the other side. (From 7.5e.) One side has a higher roll than the other; they are the winners. Subtract the losers' roll from the winners'. Deal this value as damage to the losers, spread evenly among combatants. Spells go off.  Ranged attack difficulty matrix, from the Deluxe edition. I think it's the same as 5e, just better formatted. A few things to remember, in no particular order: When you take damage...

It Was a Mutual Decision (2002) Photo of It Was a Mutual Decision, stolen from the internet Played with Misha, Divya, and Ken. Misha and I are a real-life couple, and Ken and Divya are a real-life couple. Misha and Divya are women, Ken is a man, and I am nonbinary, though I played on Ken's team in the game. All three, and everyone else I have talked to, were absolutely charmed by the premise of the game. It is an extremely easy sell. The rulebook promises that the rat content will serve to soften the blow of the breakup content, and this is certainly what I observed in play. We would go from shouting and breathing hard as we hurled in-character invectives across the room, to giggling uncontrollably while figuring out how to add rats to the scene. Authorities in play were natural and easy. Ken and I, and Misha and Divya, handed of narration without a word and without conflict. Everyone was creatively focused. We did not put much work into establishing the social landscape around our...

Tunnels & Trolls has the first universal task resolution procedure in gaming. It's called the saving throw, after the D&D procedure. The Judge is expected to apply the results of this procedure to the fiction in a totally organic fashion. This is radical stuff! The procedure is quite simple: roll 2d6+stat, against a target number of 15+(5*difficulty). A roll of doubles on the 2d6 "explodes"; add another 2d6 and repeat this step. If the total of the 2d6 roll(s) is/are 4 or less, the task fails. Succeed or fail, the player gets (roll+stat)*difficulty experience points. I need a hard modelling surface to apply a "pick your own difficulty" procedure like this. I want to know what the odds are for a normal person to succeed at a given task. That way I can set the task's difficulty level irrespective of the player's actual stats. To that end, I simulated 200k dice rolls and counted them up. (Credit to Vivit Elric for doing the actual programming; I han...

Nibelungs play report! I will be light on module details, since I plan to run this scenario again. 2 players, Adam and Never, a knight and a witch. Plenty of debating about equipment. I decided, "Tell me what your item is, and then we will figure out what it does. The effect comes second." The most important two pieces were rope (which we said could come untied any time the user wished, a la elvish rope in the lord of the rings) and an oak twig, which could grow instantly into a full oak if planted in the ground. Before the scenario started, one player noticed that they would need a disposable follower in case they rescued Gunther, otherwise they would violate the rule of 7. They took 2 war dogs, 1 hunting dog, and 2 men at arms. The journey to the Unkensee was pretty easy. Encounter with a revenant who level-drained the witch but killed no one. At the Unkensee, the knight tried to rule-of-three intimidate the hunting dogs into following him after driving them off twice, but...