Der PigDog's PigBlog

I played Melee with Vivit yesterday and have some thoughts on charop. Box art of the most recent edition of Melee Why melee? A history of the game Melee is an early game by Steve Jackson, published by Metagaming in 1977. (I'm playing the 2019 3rd edition, published by Steve Jackson Games.) He intended it to work as a standalone combat board game, or to function as a drop-in replacement for D&D combat. It is the first combat ruleset to work on a small timescale, to bring the regimented action ordering from wargaming into roleplaying, and to require actual combat tactics. (D&D on the other hand focuses on operational matters.) It also introduced the conceit of point-buy character creation. Moreover, Jackson kept developing the game, making a sequel, Wizard , the next year, and a full-fledged RPG, The Fantasy Trip , in 1980. Later that year Jackson left Metagaming and founded Steve Jackson Games. He couldn't afford the rights to The Fantasy Trip. Thus in 1985 he publishe...

Clickbait opener  The D&D killer has finally dropped: Tunnels & Trolls, by Ken St Andre, with illustrations by Liz Danforth, published 1975. Interior illustration from T&T 5e by Liz Danforth More seriously  I've been playing a lot of Tunnels & Trolls at the Table-Time server lately. It's fantastic. (No, it's not a "D&D killer", there's no such thing, it is not even desirable, just play the games you enjoy. I'm still playing D&D.) I haven't interacted with the T&T community, if there still is one, so I have no way of knowing if what I describe bears any resemblance to T&T as others have played it. Here I will explain the game as it strikes me, and what's so good about it. Player-side fun Tunnels & Trolls is designed for 3 to 5 players, including a GM. I find old-school D&D's insistence on a big play group stifling, not to mention impractical, so this is a nice change. The game is intimate.  Players are ex...

I watched the trailer for 28 Years Later  a few months ago. There's a eerie sample playing in the background, somebody repeating some creepy phrases. Today I looked up the sample. It's from a poem by Rudyard Kipling, "Boots". Here's a fantastic reading. Be warned, it's also disturbing. I read a lot of Kipling as a child. He (and Tennyson) wrote poetry a child can love, and short stories too. But I threw him down in disgust at "White Man's Burden" and never picked him back up again. Even so many of his lines echoed through my mind, all my life. Nowadays a lot of his stuff comes off as stodgy, over-serious, outdated. I won't read "If" again if I can help it. I'm glad to see he wrote at least one good poem. Orwell wrote a pretty good essay on him.  It's Orwell, so there's still plenty of bullshit to disregard -- "I don't say that it's a true thought, merely that every intelligent man who hasn't deluded hims...

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...