reCalled from Action - Blogging Challenge

 Or how I had a cool idea that I wanted to turn into a blogging bandwagon because by god I need to write more of these.

I would also like to apologise in advance, the formatting of images is not exactly one of blogger's strong points so I couldn't make this post look exactly super pretty. Hopefully it should still be readable and not go too janky on mobile view or anything of the sort.

The what now?

So this is an idea I stumbled myself into after witnessing another user on the OSR discord server going over their re-read of Berserk and talking about it's fight scene of Guts facing off against Lord Zondark and how some of the things that happen in the fight might translate to stuff players could do during combat in a tabletop rpg.

You wouldn't believe how difficult formatting this on blogger was,
there's no way to make text wrap around images

Some amount of spitballing ensued, and I wanted to try getting people on board with this for couple of different reasons.

Firstly, there really isn't that much player-facing advice out and about on the osr blogging circles, or if there is I have ran into pretty much exactly none of it, and I figured something like this could kinda be used to highlight to the players how you can pull off all sorts of cool stunts in a fight in order to attemp to level the playing field instead of just resorting to the "I hit you, you hit me, I hit you, you hit me" that I find B/X combat can often devolve into.

Secondly, I thought it would be really interesting to get to take a peek inside the heads of different GMs and see how they approach adjudicating these type of more unorthodox fighting manouvers in whatever syster, hack of one, or other amalgamation of rules and procedures they use to run their games with, as well as seeing how two different GMs might adjudicate the same scene with the same ruleset in a completely different manner to kinda highlight how the OSR scene is often more about rulings made during play rather than hard rules recited from a book and a number of GMs aren't afraid to let players pull of cool figting manouvers just because there's no rules precedence for them.

The Challenge

It really is as simple as:

1. Pick a fight scene that isn't just two dudes hitting/shooting each other back and forth. Preferrably something with clever/weird manouvers and unconventional fighting techniques.
2. Run as through how you would have adjudicated the fight, what kind of rulings would you have made to allow the players to pull off all the cool manouvers. 

I would of course love to see as many people as possible run us through the same scene to get to see how differently it would run between numerous systems and GMs.

As such, the scene that sparked this all is from the manga Berserk and takes part during The Guardians of Desire chapter between Guts and Lord Zondark.

Here's the short of it, you can go find it yourself if you'd wish to read around it for more context or just prefer not squinting through series of screenshots on blogger.

Also, how would you run mass combat? Do you got a cool scene that displays all sorts of things that might come up during adjudicating the clashing of armies or just fighting against swarms of mooks?
I would love to see your thoughts on running something like that!

Thoughts on (mega)Dungeons & the experience of crawling them

We all know what a dungeon is, right?
A dungeon can be a hole in the ground, a cave, a crypt, an old abandoned castle or even a full city depending on how it gets framed by the GM. The common denominator in all of these cases being that a dungeon is a hostile environment which a regular sane person wouldn't wish to set foot upon, and from where treasure hunters and the desperate go to and sometimes return from with enough shinies to comfortably sit back and live a good life for a year or two.

What'll follow are some of my musings regarding dungeons and the experience that I personally would wish to evoke among those crawling through them.

 A dungeon should be information warfare

• It should be important to scout the place and try to learn of it in order to understand it's traps and dangers better, thus being able to anticipate and avoid them.
• Initially, decisions are made based on incomplete information and like with a puzzle the PCs keep acquiring new information to fill in their gaps in knowledge untill eventually "mastering" the dungeon.
• As such, planing about future delves should hold some importance other than just making sure the party has enough torches and rations for the coming delve. Different types of gear required for specific paths, traps or even entrances to the dungeon in order to safely traverse the locale.
• The dungeon and it's denizens can likewise learn about and prepare for the party as they delve deeper, creating a kind of tug-of-war between PCs and Dungeon trying to learn more of each other and figure out how to handle and navigate around the dangers they pose to each other

This is something that obviously works the better the larger a dungeon you're working with. A small five room dungeon doesn't have a lot of room for mystery and hidden secrets, let alone to imply them and slowly trickle in information about them for the PCs to find and intuit out.

In a larger dungeon, let's say closer to 20 rooms and all the way up to mega in size there starts to be noeugh breathing room so that you aren't constantly peppring the players with clues about the place as if every room contains five clues and hints to the true nature of the dungeon and it's workings I can see t becoming very exhausting not only for the players to keep track of these things but also for the GM to continue presenting them in a consistent and interesting manner.

TL;DR I want dungeons to be something that can be learned and eventually mastered, if not in their entirety then at least in chunks of certain areas and wings of them. Not "system mastery", but in a sense "mastery over the fiction".