Der PigDog's PigBlog

Been playing Fox in the Forest with my partner. I'm still new to this modern board game scene; so far it's been this, a lot of Root, one session of Spirit Island, and one session of Arcs. It's hard to believe my family wasted so much time on Clue and Risk when there has been better stuff out there for 40+ years. Anyway, Fox in the Forest. It's a two-player trick-taking game* with two twists: first, if you win too many tricks in a given hand, you  lose  points, and second, half the cards have special powers that change your hand, trump, etc. *(This sounds awful but what it means is that it's like hearts. You compare cards in a given suit and the high card wins. If you can't match suits, play any card from any suit. Also, there's an extra-special suit, and if you play a card from that suit you beat any card not from that suit, no matter what.) When you're playing, you have to balance considerations like the following: Am I trying to play high (win most tri...

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...

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...

Blood Red Sands  is an a game by Ralph Mazza.  Here's the only play report of it on the internet.  It's an asymmetrical competitive gm-ful game with hidden information, shifting authorities, and formal conflict resolution. Probably nobody but the author has ever run it. Front cover of the pdf. No longer for sale anywhere BRS is grim and gritty swords and sorcery, psychedelic, as edgy as you can make it. The world is a wasteland dominated by witch kings who killed the gods and sucked up their power. You play the heroes attempting to destroy the witch kings. You also play the witch kings. You also play various third parties, who may or may not be sympathetic to the witch kings and to the heroes. You also play the storyteller recounting the legends of the heroes a thousand years in the future. This game is genuinely competitive, on every single level. It is jam-packed with layers of strategy. If it works at all, it is probably really good. Let's find out! The rest of this po...

It Was a Mutual Decision (2002) Photo of It Was a Mutual Decision, stolen from the internet Played with Misha, Divya, and Ken. Misha and I are a real-life couple, and Ken and Divya are a real-life couple. Misha and Divya are women, Ken is a man, and I am nonbinary, though I played on Ken's team in the game. All three, and everyone else I have talked to, were absolutely charmed by the premise of the game. It is an extremely easy sell. The rulebook promises that the rat content will serve to soften the blow of the breakup content, and this is certainly what I observed in play. We would go from shouting and breathing hard as we hurled in-character invectives across the room, to giggling uncontrollably while figuring out how to add rats to the scene. Authorities in play were natural and easy. Ken and I, and Misha and Divya, handed of narration without a word and without conflict. Everyone was creatively focused. We did not put much work into establishing the social landscape around our...

Nibelungs play report! I will be light on module details, since I plan to run this scenario again. 2 players, Adam and Never, a knight and a witch. Plenty of debating about equipment. I decided, "Tell me what your item is, and then we will figure out what it does. The effect comes second." The most important two pieces were rope (which we said could come untied any time the user wished, a la elvish rope in the lord of the rings) and an oak twig, which could grow instantly into a full oak if planted in the ground. Before the scenario started, one player noticed that they would need a disposable follower in case they rescued Gunther, otherwise they would violate the rule of 7. They took 2 war dogs, 1 hunting dog, and 2 men at arms. The journey to the Unkensee was pretty easy. Encounter with a revenant who level-drained the witch but killed no one. At the Unkensee, the knight tried to rule-of-three intimidate the hunting dogs into following him after driving them off twice, but...

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...

Traditionally we score achievement in the form of treasure looted and enemies defeated. In this post I will argue that we should broaden our scoring to include player-determined quests, and present a procedure for acquiring and scoring quests. Why quests? Literary progenitors Money and victory in combat are great, tried-and-true objectives, worthy of scoring. Low-tier pulp fantasy heroes constantly pursue these ends -- Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, Conan as a young man, Cugel when he isn't under duress, Satampra Zeiros. A pile of gold bullion, a noble goal! Money and victory in combat should always be scored. They're always useful. When you get money or win a fight, you're always winning at life in these stories. But any fan of pulp fiction will notice that money and victory in combat are far from the only objectives in pulp fantasy. Protagonists in the mid-tier and up have larger goals. Some examples: Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser at the end of their career, defending Rime Isl...

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 ...