Der PigDog's PigBlog

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...

Coup de Main, Tuesdays. I'm getting burnt out on big groups. Also, I think I need more visual stimulation while I play; ideally I'll be using video chat for most games in the future. The Bloody-Handed Name of Bronze, take 1  Bloody-Handed Name of Bronze, Codex Edition cover A cool game about bronze-age swords and sorcery heroes; buy it here .  Jay and Simon. Not very good play. A failing of dramatic coordination. We created a situation, in which all the characters were present, but failed to involve them in an interesting way. I had some pretty good takeaways for future games, though. When you're playing, you should always give a name to every single entity that acts in a scene, and you should be expansive about your sense of "acts". Feel free to switch around who plays what entity.  The Lover of Jet and Gold (name of bronze take 2, 2 sessions) TBHNoB started life as three pamphlets: The Lover of Jet and Gold, about Namedealers, Heart of Bronze, about Fated Heroes...

Most of the games I have played involve 1) a division of authority between a "standard GM" and "players"; 2) character advocacy on the parts of the players; and 3) naturalistic modeling on the part of the GM. When I step outside that bubble, I have a lot of trouble! (One exception, Monsterhearts, simply because I know the genre so well I might as well be doing naturalistic modelling.) I'm thinking here about four different games, all of which went poorly, for different but related reasons. My S/Lay w/Me game with Lori; my Shock: game with Jay and Eric; my game of PLAY with Misha, Ken, and Divya; and every game of Tales of the Round Table I have played. S/Lay w/Me   I thought I was going to crush this game because I had had such a good time playing it with Claudio . Though now I would add a caveat to that game. I'm not sure I had a real "story now" moment when playing, because I never had to make any difficult choices. I always knew what Agathon wan...

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...

We did a bit of a refresher since it had been two or three weeks since the last session . Refreshed both rules and the situation at play. I explained the string economy and asked everybody what their character had done last session. Everybody was, of course, able to remember their own activities, with just a few additions from me. I also read through the list of thematic objects, and asked if everybody was interested in them, and told them that if they wanted another topic dealt with, they had to bring it into play themselves, but that they can always talk about it outside play too. I wanted to revisit some threads that got skipped over last time. Evann's Fae had gone for a walk in the woods with her friend before the party; what happened there? I was interested in her feeling of alienation/inhumanity, and I wanted to push her into some decision about her place among humans. So I had the Green Woman, the Fae's mother, a 7 foot tall naked green lady, freeze time and greet her d...