Der PigDog's PigBlog

One of my obstacles to play is my fear of creating content: what if I get it wrong? What if it's not good enough, there's not enough of it, it's the wrong sort? (It would be dreadful to have to  practice  that sort of thing. (I'm saying that with my tongue in my cheek; of course you have to practice!)) This only applies to GMing. Creating a character is usually easy. Since character creation and scenario creation are the same task under different headings, I know the fear is irrational.  I don't feel this fear when I'm making content on the fly, because there I'm simply responding to prompts or gameplay demands in play, without time to worry. So "no prep" games, and games where prep is both communal and a part of play, like Monsterhearts and It Was a Mutual Decision, don't stress me out. Nor would My Life with Master. I'm stressed out by games like Sorcerer, Wuthering Heights, and Bushido, where I have to make a bunch of stuff in advance. D...

This post has some bad language in it, including gendered and homophobic slurs. It Was a Mutual Decision 's pitch is strong, incredibly strong, maybe the single best pitch for a game I have ever heard: you are in a breakup, as civil or toxic as you like, and one or both of you may be a horrible rat-human monster. Oh, and the game ends either when you've both gracefully exited the relationship, or one or both of you are dead. Also, it's a team-based game: all the boys play the girl, and all the girls play the boy. -- Every single time I have delivered this pitch, I see eyes light up. It's so obviously fun, funny, and resonant. Cover of It Was a Mutual Decision with a thumbs-up representing my positive opinion of the game Unfortunately for the reader, there are no digital copies, it is not currently in print, and the writer has no immediate plans to make it available again. I ordered a copy off ebay but it got snatched by porch pirates. Luckily when I was complainin...

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...

I have run one (1) session of rules-as-written Coup 'Étrange (meaning a session with a custom scenario written to include the PCs) and it was just ok . (Would have been a lot better if I had clearly explained that PvP was on the table from the beginning, and we hadn't had a player drop out last minute -- the missing character was a key part of the scenario.) Nevertheless I feel qualified to write up my guidelines on creating a scenario. (Actually this is a draft. I'm going to put it into practice and revise if necessary.) First, decide if you're playing a dungeon game, a wilderness game, a town game, or a mix of two or three. If you have a published module in mind, that's fine too. For the sake of example, let's say you're doing a dungeon game. Make or read through the dungeon. Make a list of principal agents in the scenario, not counting the PCs. A principal agent is somebody with a motivation related to the scenario who is active within it. If you can, add...

First official playtest of my fantasy heartbreaker, tentatively named Coup Étrange. I ran the game for Patrick and Tschesae, playing a magician and a commoner respectively. Before they made their characters, I gave them the prompts: As the huge red sun gutters in the sky, fabulous, trivial men scheme and cavort in the monuments of dead civilizations Magic is misunderstood and forgotten technology Patrick's character, Marigold, before the start of play Tschesae's character, Karl, after the end of session I had prepared for a third player, Adam, but his internet went out so he couldn't attend. My session prep consisted of a relationship map, a list of forces for two groups of gangsters, and the layout of an extremely barebones dungeon, actually just a house with some treasure, a trap, and clues. Most of this wound up being unimportant for the scenario. The relationship map was composed almost entirely out of characters from the three players' contacts, with two additions,...