Der PigDog's PigBlog

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...

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...

This post gives new magic rules inspired by Ars Magica. It's written for my own fantasy heartbreaker, but it should be compatible with most or all OSR games. Try using this in place of your Magic-User's normal magic rules, or add these as variant casting and spell-learning rules for a different casting class. These rules offer supreme flexibility and extensibility for a sort of magic grounded in magical traditions. I provide links to the traditions at the bottom of the post. These rules also model spell research, including the creation of brand new spells, better than any I have seen in any OSR game. What a spell is A spell is a combination of a noun and verb, spoken out loud, plus some gestures and effort. Your specific magical tradition is going to give you the specific list of nouns and verbs that can combine to form a spell. The same noun-verb combination can be used to cast a bunch of different spells; the noun and the verb just give the basic family of effects. For instan...

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...

In this post, I give a unified procedure for resolving tasks in games. This procedure has a low handling time, but it is extensible and flexible enough to model tasks at many different scales of abstraction. It has been extensively play-tested, by myself and others, used without much difficulty in over 200 sessions. Basic procedure Use the following procedure to model a simple, isolated task, with a binary outcome. Define the task. Assign the task a base difficulty as a score TN/D . " D " is the die size you're going to use (for instance, 6, 10, 20), and " TN " is the target number; you want to roll TN or lower on the die. Also assign the task a period, the time required to complete it. Adjust for situational factors. Count up situational advantages and disadvantages. Cancel one advantage for one disadvantage until only one type remains or neither applies. Assign bonus dice for remaining advantages and penalty dice for remaining disadvantages, 1 die each. Ro...

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 have thought a lot about this while waiting for Eero to write up his CWP and thought I might put mine in the ring first. A lot of it is based on the stuff I've seen in the RPG Theory discord, but not all of it. Some small preparatory notes. The skill system, whatever it is, and the task "system", are totally separate. Their formalisms are just not the same. The task "system" is not a system at all, it is a vocabulary with which you can construct individual task resolutions. Various tasks are so different it would be nonsense to treat them all the same. Simple skill system In the simple skill system, you either have a skill or you don't. What the skill is is completely free-form; anything you can be good at is a skill. At any point, you can declare that you had a skill the entire time, if the skill is consonant with your background and current situation. If you want to train a new skill, go train it, for however long that would take. Maybe the skill requi...