Der PigDog's PigBlog

Traditionally we score achievement in the form of treasure looted and enemies defeated. In this post I will argue that we should broaden our scoring to include player-determined quests, and present a procedure for acquiring and scoring quests. Why quests? Literary progenitors Money and victory in combat are great, tried-and-true objectives, worthy of scoring. Low-tier pulp fantasy heroes constantly pursue these ends -- Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, Conan as a young man, Cugel when he isn't under duress, Satampra Zeiros. A pile of gold bullion, a noble goal! Money and victory in combat should always be scored. They're always useful. When you get money or win a fight, you're always winning at life in these stories. But any fan of pulp fiction will notice that money and victory in combat are far from the only objectives in pulp fantasy. Protagonists in the mid-tier and up have larger goals. Some examples: Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser at the end of their career, defending Rime Isl...

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...

Been reading Clausewitz, and his modern interpreters the US Marine Corps . Extremely interesting and useful. Here's a question prompted by reading MCDP 1: Warfighting, by the marines: when we go dungeon delving, are we using a strategy of annihilation or erosion? Let's back up a bit, because not all of my readers will be familiar with Clausewitz or Delbrück. A portrait of Carl von Clausewitz Clausewitz says that war is the continuation of policy by other means. (It's not the end of his thought, it's a stage in a dialectic. But it's right on the money.) We go to war to achieve something, and if we are wise, that thing can be achieved by going to war. Military action should serve policy. Our overall aims in war are achieved via the execution of military strategy. The marines outline two very general strategic approaches in war: There are two ways to use military force to impose our will on an enemy. The first is to make the enemy helpless to resist us by physically de...

If you only play with life and death at stake, you'll flatten your game and lose a lot of interesting scenarios. Defeat and death in the dungeon How often are these goblins going to fight to the last man? How often are they going to stay in a pitched battle when they're already losing? How often are your retainers going to do the same? In the second world war, the deadliest military conflict in history,  21 to 25 million soldiers died, out of 70 to 130 million mobilized. Yet nearly every fight in the dungeon is a fight to the last man. Ridiculous! In my game, if an organized enemy comes into contact with the players, they immediately send a runner to a strongpoint to get reinforcements. And they retreat long before they're wiped out; 20% casualties is a good time to turn around, if you can get away. (This requires a precise interpretation of morale. Morale can't just be "roll this to see if the enemy runs away'; the enemy must be played smart enough to retreat ...

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 don't like looking things up in play. I also don't like asinine detail or unprincipled differences. The AD&D monster manual statblock is basically my worst nightmare. You're telling me a wolverine is a 3 HD monster with claw/claw/bite? A wolverine can defeat three trained level 1 human combatants in armor? (They also have an extra +4 to hit, for a total of +7. Plate armor is meaningless to these beasts.) I don't want to have to look up how much damage a creature does, and I don't want the answer to be some ridiculous bullshit. I want clear guidelines for monster damage, guidelines which I can apply consistently and on the fly , without consulting any books. Principles In my heartbreaker, I distinguish between HP (hero points) and IP (injury points). HP is protagonism, plot armor. Only people and monsters with levels have HP. (Nameless humans don't get HP.) You can lose HP all you want and still stay effective, as long as you've got at least 1 left. IP ...

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...

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...

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 ...

 I read A Practical Guide to Medieval Warfare by Richard Brooks and John Curry. Really enjoyed it, found it enlightening and surprising in many respects. You need to buy it on amazon in paperback or via kindle, which I intensely dislike -- I'd prefer to pirate books, or buy through alternate retailers. Sometimes the book gets lost in the weeds of (I think) irrelevant historical debates, important only to specialists. It also wastes time justifying the relevance of wargaming and reenactment to historical research. Putting those caveats aside, it was a worthwhile read, and I'd recommend it, supplemented by other readings in pre-modern warfare (I've also been reading War in Human Civilization by Azar Gat , the blog ACOUP , and the recommended books list on the Ask Historians reddit . Additional caveat: very little about war makes sense divorced from its historical context. You'll want to bone up on your regular history too!) Anyway, here are some takeaways from the book ...

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...

  Chainmail offers two different "turn sequences". It's doing something really difficult, trying to boil down a very dynamic and chaotic event -- a battle --into a linear process. It's worth seeing what it tries, and how it does it. I should say that I've never played Chainmail; this is just how I think things should work after puzzling through the text. The first system is the "MOVE/COUNTER MOVE SYSTEM". It's the one I'll be looking at today. I quote: Both opponents roll a die, the side with the higher score has the choice of electing to move first (Move) or last (Counter-move). The side that has first move moves its figures and makes any split-moves and missile fire, taking any pass-through fire possible at the same time. The side that has last move now moves its figures and makes any split-moves and missile fire, taking any pass-through fire possible at the same time.  Artillery fire is taken. Missile fire is taken. Melees are resolved...