Der PigDog's PigBlog

I'm ready to start playtesting my newest game, Gathering of the Tunnelmasters, or GotTM, pronounced "got 'em!". (I say "start"; I've been playing through aspects of it for 3 years or more. This is the first time I've assembled every aspect of the game.) Like any functional role-playing game, it does not provide an experience in a box. It is an instrument with which a group of skilled players, black metal samurai, can make their music.  Games as instruments  You can sell somebody an instrument, but you can't sell them its music. They do that on their own.  Some instruments are easier to learn and use than others. Some instruments are very obviously difficult to use. Some instruments have a limited range of expression. Some instruments have a vast range of expression. Zombie Cinema is a gem of a game, which is fantastically easy to learn and use, and will nearly always make something decent, but which respects the players' skill and allow...

Prepare a scenario for play, using whatever tools are standard Frame scenes, including describing locations and marking the passage of time Tell other players whatever their characters would know Play their characters, on and off screen Adjudicate task resolution Make models And that’s it, literally nothing else. “Game” here doesn’t just mean published rules text, though it does also mean that. Mostly though it means whatever set of techniques, distributions of authority, constraints on authority, and resolution procedures your play group in fact uses. Following are some possible parts of a game that might not be in any rules text. They’re in the game if the play group does them. Write a little two-sentence bio. Make two characters at once, because one will likely die soon. Since your character died, do you want to play that guard until the end of session? Feel free to add details about [this place], your character is from there. Nat 20, nice! Tell me how you do it. We’re playing...

Since the Forge has lost some currency in popular RPG discourse, we don’t much talk about its theoretical fruits. In the following blog post, I’ll recover the Forgie notion of "reward cycle", with copious examples, mostly from actual play, disambiguating it from other concepts and showing how it sometimes works in play or goes astray. In the Forgie concept of games, a game is an instrument that a skilled play group uses to focus its play. We play games, not the other way around. I've written this blog post  to show how a skilled play group relates to a good game. I'm not writing for designers, though I do offer some tips for design, but for anybody interested in the phenomenology of play. Collective affective response and skilled play Group RPGs are social games. When I play well, I get a collective affective response. When things are going well, creatively, I can literally see it on the face of everyone playing. We’re all leaning in. (Note that “things going well, cr...

One-sheet pitch Inspiration: Yu-Gi-Oh! the cartoon Look & Feel: Early 2000s children's cartoon from Japan. Expect inexplicable hair. Also expect guns; this ain't 4Kids. Premise: What kind of person will you grow up to be, and how will a children's card game play into that? Humanity: The power of friendship Humanity gain: Being a good, honest person, who supports your friends Humanity loss: Cheating, betraying friends, being mean Humanity 0: Turn into Kaiba circa episode 1, a selfish jerk who'd put an old man in a hospital to get a rare card. Naturally you can keep playing at 0 Humanity, but you're subject to sorcerous rituals, the GM can hose you with karmic retribution, and, if you're using a Millennium Artifact, you turn into the demon of the artifact. Lore: Insight into the heart of the cards and the game's ancient origins in Egypt and Atlantis Demons: Egyptian and Atlantean spirits bound to playing cards. Past that, go wild! Seriously, look up Yu-Gi-...