Der PigDog's PigBlog

The PbtA community regularly refers to a distinction between "hard" and "soft" moves,. But this distinction is foreign to the game Apocalypse World itself, and should not be backported to it. You can run an internet search to see people trying to establish this distinction in that game. My reference edition here is Apocalypse World 1e (2010), because it's available for free . Cover of AW 1e We find our first reference to the hardness of a move on page 117: Generally, limit yourself to a move that'll (a) set you up for a future harder move, and (b) give the players' characters some opportunity to act and react. A start to the action, not its conclusion. However, when a player's character hands you the perfect opportunity on a golden plate, make as hard and direct a move as you like. It's not the meaner the better, although mean is often good. Best is: make it irrevocable. When a player's character make a move and the player misses the roll, th...

Me hating on point-buy and character builds after only playing D&D 4e I'm going to play a few sessions of Champions Now with Vivit, Jon, and Riku. In that game, players make a detailed character before play, using some extremely cumbersome point-buy interfaces and byzantine rules. Thus I made a Champions Now character, and learned some of the rules to the game. This was a bit like pulling teeth at first, but now I am wholly on board.  Let's start with a brief review of Eero's article on the pitfalls of point-buy design , to wit: Optimization is encouraged but not taught Random access interface chokes up Point-pricing is arbitrary Flaws are externally motivated Most point-buys are dull His discussion of these flaws leads into the "royal conundrum": why are we using point-buy at all? In this blog post, I won't be able to answer all these questions fully, but I'll give them a go and talk about what I like about the game after making a character for it. ...

Regular readers will remember that in my work-in-progress fantasy heartbreaker Coup Étrange, "HP" stands for "hero points" which are supposed to be spent throughout play. (Actual design is notably lacking on this subject.) Meanwhile real wounds, with game-affecting consequences, belong to a separate subsystem, which is usually only engaged when the character is hit by an attack and they are out of HP. Readers may also recall my suggestions (I don't remember where I put this actually) that some kind of barbarian or berserk warrior could get +1HP/HD killed, keeping the rage machine fueled. So the idea is, you start every scenario with a random amount of HP, in a range fixed by your level and class; say, Xd6+1 for a level X fighting-man. You can increase your current HP past your starting HP, all the way up to, say, 6*X+1 for that same fighting-man. Meanwhile you're also going to be spending it to avoid damage and do cool shit in combat (design work needed here...

Runequest orders actions in terms of "strike ranks". You declare your action, and you look up how many "strike ranks" the action takes, which may be modified by your character's formal attributes. Then we go through the different actions in order of strike rank, from lowest (fastest) to highest (slowest). People run Runequest strike ranks in one of two different ways: When you have made your action, your turn ends, and resets the next round When you have made your action, you declare a new action, which "wraps around" to the strike ranks of the next round I find the latter much, much more interesting. If I ever play Runequest (and it's on the list) I'll be doing the latter. If you don't play with wraparound strike ranks, I think Runequest has the same action ordering procedure as AD&D's segments. Welcome to snoozefill! I already play D&D all the time, I don't need a d100-clone with fancy worldbuilding. On the other hand, if ...

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.

Been reading Clausewitz, and his modern interpreters the US Marine Corps . Extremely interesting and useful. Here's a question prompted by reading MCDP 1: Warfighting, by the marines: when we go dungeon delving, are we using a strategy of annihilation or erosion? Let's back up a bit, because not all of my readers will be familiar with Clausewitz or Delbrück. A portrait of Carl von Clausewitz Clausewitz says that war is the continuation of policy by other means. (It's not the end of his thought, it's a stage in a dialectic. But it's right on the money.) We go to war to achieve something, and if we are wise, that thing can be achieved by going to war. Military action should serve policy. Our overall aims in war are achieved via the execution of military strategy. The marines outline two very general strategic approaches in war: There are two ways to use military force to impose our will on an enemy. The first is to make the enemy helpless to resist us by physically de...

If you're playing in a dungeon where every door is stuck, you only need to roll for Open Door once per door. (Bonus dice on the roll for everybody helping to open the door -- two people can try to open a normal door, three people can try to open a really big one.) If the roll hits, well, they've opened the door, and you don't need to roll again. If the roll misses, say "Anybody in the next room has heard you try to open the door; you have no chance of surprising them. Are you still going to go through?" Then they'll go through the door, or not. There's no point rolling again and again if the only consequence for failure is "It didn't open this time, try again?". It only takes 10 seconds to try and open a door. That's nothing in comparison to a 10 minute dungeon turn.  If you spend a whole minute trying to open the door, you've got a 90% chance of success, but do we really want to spend table time rolling 6 times and checking for a hit...

Traditionally RPGs centralize many responsibilities and authorities in one player, the GM. That's not necessarily bad, but it isn't necessarily good, either, and it's certainly not mandatory. I am going to look at some traditional functions of the GM to see why we put them in one player's hands, and how we might distribute the responsibility for these functions differently. A GM traditionally does a whole bunch of different things: Pitches the game Organizes play sessions, including recruiting players Knows the rules and teaches others Leads creatively Creates the background ("worldbuilding")  Creates the scenario for play Runs dramatic coordination Frames scenes Says "what's going on" generally Plays all side characters Resolves in-game tasks and conflicts Pitches the game, organizes play sessions, knows the rules. If the entire play-group is interested in gaming and excited about games, anybody should be able to do these things. (This or that ...

If you only play with life and death at stake, you'll flatten your game and lose a lot of interesting scenarios. Defeat and death in the dungeon How often are these goblins going to fight to the last man? How often are they going to stay in a pitched battle when they're already losing? How often are your retainers going to do the same? In the second world war, the deadliest military conflict in history,  21 to 25 million soldiers died, out of 70 to 130 million mobilized. Yet nearly every fight in the dungeon is a fight to the last man. Ridiculous! In my game, if an organized enemy comes into contact with the players, they immediately send a runner to a strongpoint to get reinforcements. And they retreat long before they're wiped out; 20% casualties is a good time to turn around, if you can get away. (This requires a precise interpretation of morale. Morale can't just be "roll this to see if the enemy runs away'; the enemy must be played smart enough to retreat ...

 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 ...

I'm not a historian. If you want real knowledge, go to a historian. If you want something gameable, read on. The market in medieval times was not the supermarket of today. Obviously! People brought goods to market in market towns, about twice a week. On such days you can buy any common good, straight off, from a stall. If it's not a market day, you can still buy food, but you'll have to order other items from workshops. (Small towns have markets every week or every two weeks.) Prices are generally static throughout the medieval period, for a few reasons -- constant deflation from the trade balance with Asia, relative stagnation in the productivity of labor, and, most importantly, laws setting price ceilings on common goods, and trade unions setting prices for everything else. So you don't need to worry about modelling dynamic prices for goods. You do have to worry about the availability of goods, and the time it takes to produce them. Basic price list So if the gang wa...

I'm not worried about it, at all. (I do worry about questions like, "Should this be a tier 3 spell or a tier 4 spell?", because they relate to setting metaphysics. We should expect a consistent level of power between spells of different tiers.) I don't worry about questions like, "Is this class viable?", because if it isn't, then no one will play it, and there won't be any problem. (If somebody only notices the class sucks after 10 sessions of play, that's too bad, but it won't happen twice. And anyway, it's not really plausible that a character could be totally useless because of their class. I'm strawmanning here.) I don't worry about questions like, "Is this class overpowered?", because if it is, then most enemy groups should be composed of them, too. (If the class does everything , then why wouldn't all the players be members of that class? Why would  that be a problem for me? And if the class doesn't do abs...