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...

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'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...

Untitled Vampire Game with Martin. Martin played a refugee and orphan from a civil war between rival ethnic groups in a small east African country. I played a charismatic older boy assembling a gang of child soldiers among the refugee. Despite the oppressive subject matter, play was in a sense relaxed; we didn't drive towards any climax or conflicts, we simply narrated events as they struck us. In the end, the boy survived the gang, but his overall odds look grim, and I doubt he'll live much longer. I have complicated feelings about the ending of the game. It worked, as in, it felt right, that the boy should escape the gang by jumping off a bridge, and in the process breaking his leg. But I don't want things to be up whim like this in general; the chance of wimping out and pulling punches is too high. I want a resolution method with teeth. My current thought is that the Vampire should add a die whenever they take steps to feed on the Victim, and the Victim sh...

I don't like looking things up in play. I also don't like asinine detail or unprincipled differences. The AD&D monster manual statblock is basically my worst nightmare. You're telling me a wolverine is a 3 HD monster with claw/claw/bite? A wolverine can defeat three trained level 1 human combatants in armor? (They also have an extra +4 to hit, for a total of +7. Plate armor is meaningless to these beasts.) I don't want to have to look up how much damage a creature does, and I don't want the answer to be some ridiculous bullshit. I want clear guidelines for monster damage, guidelines which I can apply consistently and on the fly , without consulting any books. Principles In my heartbreaker, I distinguish between HP (hero points) and IP (injury points). HP is protagonism, plot armor. Only people and monsters with levels have HP. (Nameless humans don't get HP.) You can lose HP all you want and still stay effective, as long as you've got at least 1 left. IP ...

I've been using a slightly modified version of Eero's combat structure for about a year, and my brand-new attack procedure for about a week, and I like both. Why? What's so good about them? What's so good about any combat procedure whatsoever? I'll start by narrowing the field a bit. I'm only interested in combat procedures for a war game that's roughly compatible with classic D&D modules. The procedures need to scale from ordinary humanity to pulp action heroes. (Conceivably it could go higher than that, but I've never played a game that is that high level, so I don't really care.) The procedures need to take as inputs the kinds of things we find in a D&D dungeon key and monster write-up: number, defenses, level, special abilities, place in the dungeon ecosystem. It doesn't have to use all those things, but it can't ask for any information outside of those things. Ok, that's it for hard requirements. Now let's list the thin...

This is mostly a summary of the Coup procedure, so credit where it's due there. I've added the bit about different action speeds as it's come up in games a fair deal. Maneuvering Combat is divided into 1 minute maneuver phases. Declare what you are doing at the start of the phase. Everybody declares at once, no particular order. Actions in the maneuver phase are immediate, fast, or normal. Every action in a speed category takes place simultaneously. Fully resolve all actions in one speed category before you move on to the next. Conceivably, your action could take some sort of penalty if you are disrupted by an action from an earlier category. Immediate actions: shooting an arrow, throwing a spear, tossing a rock, readying a spear, giving a brief command, charging into melee (maybe? this is separate from the ordinary walking-speed "closing into melee" and requires a martial arts technique to get a whole group to do it at once) Fast actions: closing into melee Norma...

Dice tech basics When you make a check of TN/D difficulty, you want to roll TN or lower on a D-sided die. Call that a hit, otherwise, the die is a miss. Sometimes you'll modify the roll by adding bonus dice (roll an extra die of the same size and take the better result), penalty dice (roll an extra die of the same size and take the worse result), or changing the target number (TN). If you would increase TN to the point where the task is a sure thing (in other words, TN = die size), bump up the die size instead and increase the TN accordingly. (So a task gets easier as 4/6, 5/6, 7/8, 9/10, 11/12, 19/20...) Similarly, if you would ever decrease TN to the point where the task is impossible (in other words, TN = 0 or less), keep TN the same and increase the die size. (So a task gets harder as 2/6, 1/6, 1/8, 1/10, 1/12, 1/20...) If you have both bonus and penalty dice, cancel out one of each until you have only bonus dice, only penalty dice, or neither. Now, roll the dice. If you have a...

 I read A Practical Guide to Medieval Warfare by Richard Brooks and John Curry. Really enjoyed it, found it enlightening and surprising in many respects. You need to buy it on amazon in paperback or via kindle, which I intensely dislike -- I'd prefer to pirate books, or buy through alternate retailers. Sometimes the book gets lost in the weeds of (I think) irrelevant historical debates, important only to specialists. It also wastes time justifying the relevance of wargaming and reenactment to historical research. Putting those caveats aside, it was a worthwhile read, and I'd recommend it, supplemented by other readings in pre-modern warfare (I've also been reading War in Human Civilization by Azar Gat , the blog ACOUP , and the recommended books list on the Ask Historians reddit . Additional caveat: very little about war makes sense divorced from its historical context. You'll want to bone up on your regular history too!) Anyway, here are some takeaways from the book ...

Over the past three months I've been experimenting with using a VTT for combat. These experiments were failures; a VTT is no good for my purposes. So here I'll show you how I have run combat before and after the experiment. I think it's pretty good; give it a try! Unless one or both sides of a melee are suicidal or chaotic, everybody is going to form up into lines. If you don't form up, you are sure to be out-flanked and attacked where you cannot defend. If your line is shorter than the other side's line, you'll want to spread out a bit so you can avoid being outflanked. (They're probably not going to want to advance into the gaps in your line, because any of them who so advanced would be flanked.) To keep track of where everyone is, I open a txt file and make two rows like so: The top line is shows the players. There's an asterisk on the retainer in the middle, showing that they are holding a torch. The bottom line shows the enemy, specifically, their H...