Der PigDog's PigBlog

Prepare a scenario for play, using whatever tools are standard Frame scenes, including describing locations and marking the passage of time Tell other players whatever their characters would know Play their characters, on and off screen Adjudicate task resolution Make models And that’s it, literally nothing else. “Game” here doesn’t just mean published rules text, though it does also mean that. Mostly though it means whatever set of techniques, distributions of authority, constraints on authority, and resolution procedures your play group in fact uses. Following are some possible parts of a game that might not be in any rules text. They’re in the game if the play group does them. Write a little two-sentence bio. Make two characters at once, because one will likely die soon. Since your character died, do you want to play that guard until the end of session? Feel free to add details about [this place], your character is from there. Nat 20, nice! Tell me how you do it. We’re playing...

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...

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 ...

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...

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...

 In my Arcade Mode game, players don't take downtime. They freely adjust their resources between sessions. That was the intent, anyway -- most players are unwilling to simply give themselves more resources. So I decided to draft a very simple downtime system. Every real world week, or every session, since your last session with a character, add 1 downtime point. Spend downtime points and (10 * level * points) rupees on downtime actions. (The rupee is your campaign's base currency type, whatever that is. 1 rupee = 1 xp = 1 days' wages for a basic infantryman, roughly.) Here are some simple downtime maneuvers, listed with their costs: 1 point = 1 streetwise check for new hirelings, rumors, rare items, contacts, trainers 1 point = 1 visit to a known sage, library, expert, important contact 1 point = 1 martial art technique learning check 1 point = 1 hireling recruitment roll 2 points = reroll HP, take the higher result 2 points = 1 attribute improvement roll 3 points = train ...

In essence this is just classic dice pool tech applied to a new topic, morale. I work-shopped these rules with Eero. Used them in play just once, but it was hella successful, so I thought I'd share. First, determine the base morale of the unit, usually a number between 1/6 and 5/6. 3/6 is the default for trained combatants. 1/6 is a pack of cowards or totally untrained combatants. 5/6 is zealous. If you need to go higher than 5/6, you can, you'll just use bigger dice for the pool (see below), and a number like 7/8, 9/10, etc. In a basic combat situation, you roll 1d6 (or a bigger die for super zealous fighters) and try to get less than or equal to the morale score. If the check fails, the unit won't advance or attack, though they will defend themselves. Now let's get fancy. Make a pool of bonus or penalty dice for every advantage or disadvantage, respectively, the unit has at the start of the fight. Bonus and penalty dice cancel out. Advantages are things like "out...

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,...

 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...