Der PigDog's PigBlog

Writing this to keep track of games, for my own sake. It may be of use to people in my play communities, in case they want to play some games with me, or just hear about new games. Challenge-oriented maybe sounds better than "gamist" or (ugh) "step on up", but it means the same thing. A game where your skill is on the line. Where the point is victory. Something like an early edition of Dungeons & Dragons (1974) by various My strong preference is for the original publication, 1974, the "little brown books". I have played a lot of Moldvay Basic (1980)/Cook and Marsh Expert (1981) under the title "Old School Essentials". I'd like to try out Holmes Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set (1977) as written. These are the majority of games I play; just read the blog! Tunnels & Trolls (1975) by Ken St. Andre I read it once. Keep meaning to play it, but really, who cares about dungeon crawling? I am not sure what is supposed to be so good about it, ...

I ran Great Ork Gods last week for four other players: Adam, Patrick, Never, and Bulb. I had never spoken to Never before. I had played countless sessions with Adam and Patrick across four or more games, and ran maybe a dozen sessions with Bulb. We played in the included scenario, the raid for the mayor's daughters in Little Uplingham. I used Watabou's fabulous village generator to make a map. Character creation is a bit dodgy; in future games, I'll go with random distribution of points only. We had a few rules hiccups, mostly my fault. As we played the game, goblins simply remove one level of difficulty, no matter whether it's from spite or natural difficulty. Also, I forgot that the God assigns difficulty naturalistically, not based on their desires -- whoops! We made one unintentional rules change that I really, really liked. When you lose an ork, you record their Oog score. Your new ork starts at 1 as usual. At the end of the game, we compare scores between all th...

Some controversy in the Table-Time discord server. When you play old-school D&D, does the game get harder as you progress? Do you need to do more adventuring for the same reward? Is that good, or bad? I don't intend to answer the evaluative questions here. But I can definitively answer the purely quantitative question: the game gets harder, and you do need to do more adventuring for the same reward. Let's assume you have a party of 6 thieves at level X. They each need about 1500 * 2^(X - 2) points to progress to the next level. They collect all their XP from treasure rooms in dungeons. These treasure rooms are generated using the procedures in the 1974 D&D publication. How many treasure rooms do they need to get to the next level? Treasure rooms per level up by level   Between 6 and 400, my math says, and the number goes up as you level up. Here's the same data in number form, with a bit more context.   Note that these values are really swingy at low levels. Most o...

I have spent the last 6 months visiting dojos and HEMA clubs, taping accelerometers to swords and measuring the energy released on impact. As a result I have produced the first scientifically verified damage and penetration chart for melee weapons in D&D. A brief overview of the rules, before I give the actual data: Unlike in AD&D/Greyhawk, damage is not modified by target size. All targets take the same damage. (I tested swordstrokes on squirrels, pigs, cows, and giraffes, and found that they all took the same absolute damage, though obviously this damage took a different proportion of their health.) Penetration worsens AC, to a minimum of 10. No penetration leaves the AC value unchanged. Low penetration means +2 AC (-2 in ascending systems), medium means +4 (or -4), and high means +6 (or -6). Again, you cannot make any AC worse than "unarmored", 10 AC in every system. Without further ado, the fruits of my long labor, the chart.