Der PigDog's PigBlog

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...

Traditionally RPGs centralize many responsibilities and authorities in one player, the GM. That's not necessarily bad, but it isn't necessarily good, either, and it's certainly not mandatory. I am going to look at some traditional functions of the GM to see why we put them in one player's hands, and how we might distribute the responsibility for these functions differently. A GM traditionally does a whole bunch of different things: Pitches the game Organizes play sessions, including recruiting players Knows the rules and teaches others Leads creatively Creates the background ("worldbuilding")  Creates the scenario for play Runs dramatic coordination Frames scenes Says "what's going on" generally Plays all side characters Resolves in-game tasks and conflicts Pitches the game, organizes play sessions, knows the rules. If the entire play-group is interested in gaming and excited about games, anybody should be able to do these things. (This or that ...

If you only play with life and death at stake, you'll flatten your game and lose a lot of interesting scenarios. Defeat and death in the dungeon How often are these goblins going to fight to the last man? How often are they going to stay in a pitched battle when they're already losing? How often are your retainers going to do the same? In the second world war, the deadliest military conflict in history,  21 to 25 million soldiers died, out of 70 to 130 million mobilized. Yet nearly every fight in the dungeon is a fight to the last man. Ridiculous! In my game, if an organized enemy comes into contact with the players, they immediately send a runner to a strongpoint to get reinforcements. And they retreat long before they're wiped out; 20% casualties is a good time to turn around, if you can get away. (This requires a precise interpretation of morale. Morale can't just be "roll this to see if the enemy runs away'; the enemy must be played smart enough to retreat ...

Famously, your ability/competence doesn't decrease as you lose HP. Lots of games have tried to model injuries and death at low/zero HP; here's my shot at it. We'll add a new stat to people and monsters, Injury Points, or IP, scaled to their size. System assumptions HP doesn't represent physical durability or martial fitness directly; it represents protagonism in a genre that privileges those things. Thus as we increase in HP (via leveling) we normally improve our attack bonus, but we also improve our ability to ignore various harms and annoyances. If I've got high HP, it'll take me ages to starve to death, not because I have secret caloric reserves, but because, holy mackerel, when was the last time you read a good pulp fantasy novel where the hero starved to death? Similarly, I'll last for ages in combat, taking many more hits than a normal man, and it's not because I'm more physically durable, but because I am a hero, and heroes don't die in pi...