Der PigDog's PigBlog

Tunnels & Trolls has the first universal task resolution procedure in gaming. It's called the saving throw, after the D&D procedure. The Judge is expected to apply the results of this procedure to the fiction in a totally organic fashion. This is radical stuff! The procedure is quite simple: roll 2d6+stat, against a target number of 15+(5*difficulty). A roll of doubles on the 2d6 "explodes"; add another 2d6 and repeat this step. If the total of the 2d6 roll(s) is/are 4 or less, the task fails. Succeed or fail, the player gets (roll+stat)*difficulty experience points. I need a hard modelling surface to apply a "pick your own difficulty" procedure like this. I want to know what the odds are for a normal person to succeed at a given task. That way I can set the task's difficulty level irrespective of the player's actual stats. To that end, I simulated 200k dice rolls and counted them up. (Credit to Vivit Elric for doing the actual programming; I han...

Zombie emoticon, sourced from https://moremoji.allezsoyez.com/   Thinking about how I run zombies, skeletons, and other mindless dead, and nailing down the details. First, HD/level. OD&D gives skeletons 1/2 HD and zombies 1 HD. Holmes bumps zombies up to 2 HD, and AD&D bumps skeletons up to 1 HD. These numbers are small enough that they're not really worth disputing; your garden-variety walking corpse, the type we see in a Romero movie, does not have much protagonism or individual combat ability. They get their power from their numbers. I really like that the numbers have changed, so that depending on what table you're at, you might face undead of a variety of strengths. Thus I will actually keep a range of levels for my walking dead -- 1/2 to 2. Unless they've been animated by the T-Virus, radiation, or a passive aura of death magic, the dead walk because someone raised them. If you can't think of an obvious necromancer commanding them to do a specific task, ro...