Der PigDog's PigBlog

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.

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...

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'm 10 or more session reports behind and it's time to stop pretending to write the old ones and start actually writing the new ones. Here we go! Second session in Simon's Under the City . Just Jay and me. He is returning with his character Hanbul Al-Alawi, a Sufi mystic and newcomer to the city. We determined that he's living in the crusader state of Odessa, and filled out a lot of detail about the city, its current religious and political tensions, and his place in it. We started with some  downtime maneuvers , three of them since it had been three weeks since the last Under the City session. Normally that would be so much window dressing, but he spent a week collecting rumors in downtime, and he rolled the rumor "Several prominent citizens stand accused of grisly murders." I don't give bum rumors, the whole point of the rumor table is to see if you hear anything scenario-relevant, so we know it's going to come up sooner or later. We figured out who ...

1. First, optionally, we're going to adjust your HP and IP in line with my notes on damage scaling . You now have IP (injury points) equal to your Constitution or Body score divided by 3. I don't bother tracking IP for monsters. If you want to keep your old HP, that's fine. In some cases (AD&D fighters) it'll be a lot more than in my system; in others (magicians in everything other than LBB OD&D), somewhat less. 2. If you are adjusting your HP, ask if your class has low, medium or high HP progression, and then use the following chart to roll for your new HP. HP progression by level; the pattern continues in the obvious way until level 10, at which point it's just +1 per level. I'm not sure why I ordered the columns like that. If you're converting a monster, just give them 1d6 HP per HD in the original. 3. Simply give the character Attack Dice (AD) equal to their attack bonus in the original. (If you really want to get fancy, you can use martial arts ...

I'm rewriting the combat procedures from D&D-like games for my fantasy heartbreaker Coup Étrange. Why? I lay out some motivations here. I got a lot of my inspiration from discussions with Eero Tuovinen and the fine folks at the Finnish RPG Theory discord server. I'm playtesting these rules with the fine folks at the Old School Table-Time discord server . Thanks to everybody involved! The overall structure of combat is different in the overhaul. In normal D&D, you roll initiative to see who goes first, then one side goes, and then the other. Rinse and repeat. (Maybe if you're fancy you get alternating phases -- this would be my preference -- or you get to interrupt your opponent's slow actions with your fast actions, as occasionally happens in AD&D 1e.) In my overhaul, melee ebbs and flows, as in a real fight. When you advance into melee, you commit yourself to being tied up in it for a variable amount of time, possibly unable to retreat. The alternating stru...

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...