Month: March 2009

“Combat is the true heart of any role-playing game.” – Ken St. Andre, Tunnels & Trolls v7.5

Combat is the first place that T&T is radically different from what went before…and what came after.  Combat is quite abstract, with turns taking 2 minutes each, during which there is

“probably 10 seconds of action and 110 seconds of maneuvering for advantage.  It can be considered a rapid exchange of strikes and parries by all the fighters involved. By arbitrary convention we stop and evaluate how the fighters are doing at the end of each combat round, but in your imagination you should conceive the action as hot and heavy until such time as the winners win and the losers either lie down and die or run away.”

Magic and missile fire are handled separately, but there is no blow-by-blow accounting taking place in melee combat.  In fact, T&T does away with the to-hit roll entirely.  Instead both sides roll damage, and the side with the lower total takes the difference in damage, spread among them as they like.

So that brings us to another thing about T&T combat: there’s a lot of arithmetic.  A sample combat between two parties of adventurers of 3rd to 5th level involved totaling 4d6+4 + 38 + 2d6+5 +2d6 +3 + 26 + 6d6+3 + 27  for a total of 162.  Then the other party rolls its combination of weapon dice and adds, and gets 154.   Higher level groups and monsters could probably easily see results in the many hundreds or even thousands.

It’s not particularly hard math, and each player except the GM handles a small chunk of it, but there’s a lot of it… if you play it a lot, I can foresee either getting quite good at multi-digit arithmetic or farming it out to a calculator.  For some larger monsters you probably need a dice-roller program even to calculate the damage.  A 3rd level fire-breathing dragon might have 88d6 + 440 as its roll.

For the most part, combat is just that simple.  Both sides roll all the dice for their weapons, add in any combat adds, and then compare.  The losing side divides the damage as they see fit, subtracts any armor, and applies the result against CON.  When a character’s CON goes to 0, they’re dying.  (At -10 they’re dead, dead, dead.)  Allowing the losing side to divide the damage among the characters is interesting; it means that the stronger, more heavily armored characters can effectively protect the weaker characters–at least for a while–and opens up the possibility of mixed-level parties where the low-levels aren’t automatically toast.  Other than that, there are no tactical decisions to be made in standard melee combat.

Magic and Missile fire happen at the very start of the turn, and have the unusual (for T&T) property of directly damaging a particular target as well as counting towards that side’s adds.  There’s also a rule (new in 7+) for “spite damage”… damage that happens despite win/loss or any armor: for every 6 rolled, the other side takes 1 spite damage (again divided as they see fit).  It’s entirely possible, though probably rare, that the losing side does more actual damage after armor than the winning side.  This apparently addresses the problem in earlier editions that even moderate amounts of armor could cause a fight to drag on forever if the parties are fairly equally matched.  Because you can choose specific targets for magic and missiles, this is your opportunity to try to knock out spell-casters and deliberately whittle down the effective members of the opposition, which can cause a steep drop in their side’s total damage if you can pull it off.

At its most basic, there’s not really much room for individual tactics in T&T combat….  It also has a moderately low pace of decision.  At least, it seems to me that unless you’re heavily outmatched, fights will go on for at least a few rounds.  One complaint I’ve seen on some boards is that thanks to armor, evenly matched groups stalemate and the only thing that counts is spite damage.

On the other hand, T&T offers a great deal of scope for rules-light RP modifications to combat.  That is, while there are no specific combat rules to cover any sort of facing, maneuver, special attacks like tripping, grappling, disarming, stunning or the like there is a single rule that you can describe what you’re attempting to do and the GM will give you a Saving Roll to accomplish it and rule on the results.  If you have a Talent that you can invoke, so much the better.  In one of the example combats in the rules, the centaur character decides that instead of attacking with her axe, she’ll try to kick an Ogre to knock it out of combat for a round or two.  The GM rules this is a Level 2 SR vs Dex, and the centaur succeeds by so much (rolling a 45 when she needed 25) that the GM decides that not only is the Ogre stunned and out of commission for 3 rounds, but it takes damage equivalent to the centaur’s Combat Adds.  Everything that crunchier systems handle by specific rules to cover each individual situation, T&T handles by the player specifically describing what out-of-the-ordinary feat they’re attempting to influence combat and the GM ruling on it and giving it a Saving Roll to see if it works.  For a “Rulings, not rules” approach, it’s pretty much perfect.

It’s easy to see why T&T is a success for solo gaming and play-by-post: with no blow-by-blow adjudication or maneuver you can easily and relatively quickly resolve combats even if they involve lots of characters.  And because combats can be resolved without much decision-making if you’re not playing real-time or with a live GM, it’s ideal for the sort of “if you beat the monster, go to 12A, otherwise go to 27B” thing found in solo adventures.  On the other hand, if you have a live GM and bandwidth for everybody to describe what they want to do, the sky’s the limit to what kind of combat you can RP.

Overall, I’d give T&T combat a B.  It’s simple, and flexible, can be explained to someone in a sentence or two, and there’s plenty of scope for clever ideas, though perhaps not a lot of tactics… but the sheer number of dice that need to be rolled and resulting arithmetic is a burden.  Play-by-post, with a handy die-roller, it’s no big deal, but I don’t like to be reliant on something like that for face-to-face play.

Continuing our look at T&T 7.5, the next bits deal with Armor, Poisons, and Treasure.

Armor is damage resistance; the value of the armor is subtracted from any damage rolled against the character (apparently including magical damage), though not against “spite” damage.  It can be bought either in complete suits or piece-by-piece, with the values of the pieces being additive. They seem to be equivalent, though you have to be up on your armor names to be able to deduce exactly what pieces go into a particular suit.  They have Min STR requirements, also additive.  As near as I can tell you are flatly prohibited from using any armor or weapon for which you don’t meet the minimum requirements; that’s certainly simpler than figuring in penalties.  Warriors, remember, get double the benefit from any armor worn, which is a pretty spiffy ability, and probably necessary to distinguish them further from everybody else in the world who can wear heavy armor as long as they meet the STR minimum.

Next is a list of 11 example poisons, most of which can be applied to weapons or are a result of a bite or sting by a monster; some do damage, some reduce combat adds, some paralyze a creature, and some permanently reduce an Attribute.  There are also rules for Antidotes (each poison has a specific antidote) and for potions of permanent immunity to a particular type of poison.

Finally (as far as this post is concerned), there’s a Random Treasure Generator.  This is a fairly standard table of types of treasure and sub-tables for more specific details about each type: money, weapon, armor, jewelry, potions, and jewels.  Of note are the facts that, like absolutely everything else in T&T, the charts only use d6; armor is sized for a particular type of Kindred; and potions require a Level 1 SR vs LUCK to see if they do anything each time they’re used!

Nothing particularly special here, though at the time armor as damage reduction instead of armor class as a reduction in the chance of scoring a meaningful blow was a big innovation.  If I recall correctly, T&T armor used to be ablative–that is each hit reduced the value of the armor until it was gone.  Subtracting from each attack is a much more meaningful contribution.  It all seems pretty playable.

I went over chargen in T&T in some detail yesterday, but because of the length of the post held off on my musings.  Overall I’d say I quite like it. It’s simple, quick, and reasonably flexible for a class-based system.

It does have a large random aspect, which is going to be a turn-off for quite a few people, but I’m used to it from my friend Mac’s D&D homebrew game (3d6 in order, no exceptions, no adjustments for race or class).  Also, since advancement in T&T means advancing your attributes, if you survive eventually you’re going to be able to overcome any initial deficit.

As an aside, my favorite way of rolling strict 3d6 is to assign each roll as you go…that way with some luck you can steer your character towards the type of class you want to play, without being able to min-max as precisely as roll 8 times and then arrange to suit.  If you want tougher characters you could easily adopt any D&D method such as roll 4d6 and drop lowest, roll 3d6 in order then switch 1 pair, roll in order and exchange points 2 for 1, etc.  You can also just skip the rolling and use the point-buy option T&T provides; you don’t get the Kindred modifiers in that case, so you can end up with a really weak dwarf compared to the standard…but that just means that you’ve gone out adventuring at level 1 instead of waiting until you’re second or third level like most Dwarves do.

The class mix is fairly traditional…though surprisingly lacks Clerics in any capacity.  Wizards have access to healing and to armor, so it doesn’t really present any problems as far as traditional FRP adventuring goes, but it might come as a bit of a shock to people who like the role.  You could easily use specialist Healers as clerics, but I kind of favor the idea that even if the setting has priests, that’s a profession, not a class. If I do any work on a T&T-specific setting, I’ll just make it that some priests are Warriors, some Wizards, most are Citizens.  Whatever their formal training is, they use their abilities to further the goals of their church and god(s).

The Specialist class(es) mostly seem an afterthought, to fill out traditional FRP roles like Ranger and Healer, but they seem like they’d be interesting to play.  The restrictions on the non-magical Specialists of having to roll triples and get over 15 in the primary attribute to qualify will make them rare, and I can see how if you really want to play a Ranger you might chafe at them…though it seems quite in the spirit of T&T to sweet-talk the GM into letting you.  If it’s conceivable that you can start as a Dragon, you can probably start as a Ranger if you really want.  The Leader specialist seems very, very broken to me unless you’re running a combat-only game with barely any interaction with NPCs, but if the GM just cuts back on the “no matter how far-fetched or difficult the task or the lie” it’s probably quite fun.  I’d also probably house-rule that it just doesn’t work on other PCs… I’ve been down the route where a character with high Persuade just pushes the rest of the group around, and even with my far-from-power-gamer players, it got to be too much.  Even the player who was doing the Persuading eventually asked for the power to be toned down.

The Kindred rules seem like a munchkin’s dream if you have a lax GM, but since I’m used to running games where the players aren’t given any points or budget but just told to make characters at about a certain level of power, I don’t have much of a problem with it.  There doesn’t seem to be any mechanical reason at all to play a human (unlike the D&D 3e or Savage Worlds bribe of an extra Feat/Edge for human “versatility”), but I’m fine with that.  People should play according to concept, rather than mechanical advantage.  T&T gives most starting non-human characters a leg up, but it’s the equivalent of starting at a higher level, which means facing greater challenges and having slower advancement.  It does appear to me that T&T is reasonably lenient about party mix…because of the way combat works, it looks like you can get away with being the sole 1st level character in a party of 4th level types without being suicidal or useless.

Talents are probably my favorite idea from the character generation.  They hit the sweet spot between needless complexity and fiddly accounting of systems with narrow skills, point buys and formulas, and strict class systems where what you know how to do is the same as any member of your class by definition.  Every level you get a new Talent.  Easy to think about, easy to do.  The only thing that bugs me slightly is that you could pick something to be a defining Talent for your character and roll 1 on a 1d6, making your character barely any better than an untalented person (though simply having the Talent can let you call for a roll against your good stat where the GM might have asked for a save against some weak stat or disallowed it entirely).  I might house-rule that if you take the same Talent twice, you get to reroll the add-on.

I also quite like the “everything is a Saving Roll” core mechanic.  While I appreciate the theoretical possibilities opened up by having different subsystems appropriate to different tasks, in the end I usually go for the easy-to-remember and easy-to-adjudicate universal die roll.  You can always rule in more elaborate home-brew subsystems to handle specific things like tracking ammo or overland chases if you find the extra overhead pays off, and I much prefer that to the opposite approach where the game offers an encyclopedic set of complex interlocking rules and dares you to scratch some of them off in order to pare it down to a playable core.

I also like the extensive weapon lists… there are some real surprises hidden in there.  For instance, the kris prevents any magic third level or lower from operating within 5′ of the blade, and prevent the wielder from using any magic at all.  The in-game explanation involves meteoric iron and special magical forging techniques, but just that such things exist and can be easily purchased provides some real flavor for the world.

I’d rate the character creation in Tunnels & Trolls a solid A.  The very fact that it has die-rolls and classes makes it a no-go for some people, but I’m not one of them, and I think there are more than enough knobs to fiddle with that players can generate unique, interesting and playable characters from the beginning.  Add that it’s really quick, taking hardly more time than a 3d6 in order Basic D&D character, and it’s a winner.

At first, the mechanics seem fairly standard.  You have 8 Attributes: Strength, Constitution, Dexterity, Speed, Intelligence, Wizardry, Luck, and Charisma.  (Wizardry is apparently new in 7+…previously Magic used Strength, which meant that powerful Wizards were also amazingly strong.)  You roll 3d6 for each Attribute…and here you run into the first somewhat unusual thing: if you roll triples, you reroll and add.  So a beginning character has a minimum of 4, and no real maximum, though scores higher than 20 will be rare.  When Russell rolled up a sample character, he got a 20 for STR right off the bat.

As characters progress, their Attributes get higher and higher; in fact, that’s the basic advancement in the game.  Your level is determined by how high the stats relevant to your class are…to be a 9th level fighter means to have one of your STR, LUCK, DEX or SPD in the 90-99 range. (Again, this seems to be a change from previous versions where going up a level gave you points to spend on stats, so they were correlated but not equivalent.)  Since there are no real rules for how much various attributes mean (such as how much a Strength of 90 can lift compared to Strength of 15), you’re free to interpret the attributes as you see fit, but it strikes me on the whole better for a setting where because of magical enhancement or whatever powerful characters are capable of literally super-human feats.

Speaking of super-human, this leads into the next thing that strikes me as quite unusual compared to most of the games I’ve played:  Selecting a race (called Kindred in T&T) modifies your Attributes by a multiplier.  So, for instance, Dwarves get to double their STR and CON, while multiplying LUCK by 0.67.  Love the two-decimal precision.  Height and Weight also get adjusted, but they have no mechanical effect.  So, Russell decided to make his character a Dwarf, which meant his starting STR was 40, which automatically makes him 4th level from the git-go.  That actually seems like it would work reasonably well, assuming that you have him face challenges appropriate for a 4th level character.

There are more playable races than I’ve seen in a game since, well, Monsters! Monsters!  In addition to the usual suspects (common kindred) of Human, Dwarf, Elf, Fairy, Hobb(it), and Leprechaun (!), there are stats for 32 rare kindred ranging from Balrukh (Balrog?) to Vampire, with stops in-between for various fantasy staples like Dragon, Ghouls, and six kinds of Trolls, as well as instructions for how to stat up new ones if you can convince the GM to let you play, say, an Angel (actual example).  The purpose of the Rare Kindred charts seems to be as helpful guidelines for statting monsters as NPCs, and not just to let players try to sweet-talk the GM into letting them run a character with 10 times normal STR, 7 times normal CON, 2 x DEX, 5 x CHR, and 4 x WIZ (but only 0.5 LK… poor thing).

The character’s combat ability, called variously Adds, Combat Adds or Personal Adds, is the the number of points above 12 in each of STR, DEX, SPD, or LK, minus the number of points below 9 for the same stats.  CA could be negative if you have low enough stats.  Warriors get to add their level, as well.  So Russell’s dwarf had +28 for STR, +8 for CON, -2 for Luck, +4 for Level = 38.

There are no figured stats.  CON is your hit points.  WIZ is your magic points.  Weapons and armor will have STR and DEX minimums.  Spells have Level, INT, and DEX minimums.  The core mechanic, outside of combat, is the Saving Roll.  You roll 2d6 (doubles reroll and add) and add the appropriate Attribute to beat a target number.  The target starts at 20 for Level 1 Saving Rolls, and increases by 5 per level (2 = 25, 3 = 30, etc).  You also get to add your Level in, but only if you would otherwise fail.  So far I haven’t found any reason you don’t just add your level in and compare, though I can imagine if there’s ever a roll-off of Saving Rolls it could make a difference.

There six Types (classes) of characters: Citizen (your basic NPC type, no bonuses and half the usual adds, and need to make saving rolls on both INT and DEX to cast a spell), Warriors (any weapons or armor, no spells, add level to combat adds, double the protection from armor), Rogues (actually Rogue Wizards, any weapons, armor or magic, and a special Roguery Talent that lets them use the best of Luck, Charisma or Intelligence for any save against any of the three, they also get 1 free 1st level spell but have to obtain new ones through play–the Wizard’s guild won’t sell them to Rogues), Wizards (any armor, no weapons greater than 2d6 damage, start with all 1st level spells and can buy new ones from Wizard’s guild as they level up, get a discount on the WIZ points a spell costs when it’s lower than their level, and can use a spell focus such as a wand or ring for further discounts), Paragons (a combo of Warrior and Wizard, but only available to characters that have 12 or greater in every stat prior to Kindred modifiers) and finally Specialists, of which there are three varieties, each with a particular qualification requirement: Magic Specialists need to have rolled 15 or higher in WIZ and choose one of the 4 schools of magic (Combat, Cosmic, Metabolic and Conjuring) and get all those spells for free and cast at half the WIZ cost but are forbidden spells fromt he other schools; Rangers need to have rolled triples in DEX and gotten a score >= 15 (likely if they rolled triples in the first place) and are master archers…they only have to make a Level 1 Save to hit any target in range of their bow; Leaders require a natural triple and score >= 15 on CHA, and only need a Level 1 Save vs CHA to persuade any one of anything.  That last seems pretty broken to me, but in the hands of the right GM and with a player who didn’t insist on pushing it I could imagine it being fun.

The next step is to pick your initial Talent.  Talents (also apparently new in 7+) are what T&T has instead of skills.  Talents are a really broad class of things that you can get a Saving Roll to attempt, such as Thievery, Swordplay, Acrobatics, or so forth.  You can make them wide or narrow, but there’s no advantage for defining a talent narrowly, so Ken St. Andre explicitly advises players to define them broadly, while suggesting that GMs give NPCs fairly narrow ones.  When you pick a Talent, you choose which Attribute it’s based on, and the talent is that Attribute + 1d6.  E.g. you might have Thievery DEX +3 or Persuasion CHA +2.  The bonus you roll never changes as your attribute changes, but you get to pick a new Talent every level.  Combat talents never figure into your Combat Adds, but can be used in combat to attempt some feat of derring-do such as disarming an opponent that isn’t directly covered by the fairly abstract combat rules.

Finally, you roll or assign your height and weight (modified by the Kindred charts), write down such things as eye and hair color, roll 3d6 x 10 for gold, select your additional languages (1 per point of INT over 12), and hit the equipment lists, which are unbelievably extensive when it comes to weapons.  I haven’t seen such extensive charts since I played RoleMaster, and the polearm list looks like something Gary Gygax came up with.  Fortunately there is a 14-page (!!) glossary of what the weapons are, because half of them I’ve never heard of.  Armor can be bought piece-meal or as suits, and there’s a table of guns (excuse me, Gunnes) that cover various primitive black-powder weapons appropriate to medieval warfare.

And now you have a character, and are ready to adventure.  There’s also a point-pool method of character creation, but since that doesn’t allow for Kindred modifiers I can’t imagine it’s that popular.

Since Scott at the super-cool World of Thool has settled on Tunnels and Trolls as the game system for the setting, I’ve been kind of curious about it.  T&T is one of the first RPGs ever in the wake of D&D (first published the year after the original D&D came out), and has had a loyal fan-following every since.  I never played it way back when, though I did play a couple sessions of Monsters! Monsters!, a version of T&T where you played the monsters instead of the heroes.  So because I expressed an interest, my friend Russell gave me Tunnels & Trolls v7.5 for my recent birthday.  At the same time he picked up a copy of v5.5 for his nephew, which let me at least glance through the earlier version for comparison.

Here’s the blurb for the boxed 7.5 set:

Fiery Dragon Productions : Tunnels and Trolls v7.5

Tunnels & Trolls v7.5

The most jam packed edition of Tunnels & Trolls ever to be released in one box. Includes the following items:

• Version 7.5 of the rules [additional equipment and combat examples previous found only in PDF format as well as a new treasure generator by Ken St. Andre, and a Trollworld chronology]. Page count increased from 120 to 174!
• A gm-based adventure ‘Hot Pursuit’
• A solo adventure ‘Strange Destinies’
• A color world map of Kaball for gm’s to use as a campaign base
• A monstrous compendium, containing over 70 monsters
• A spell compendium with many dozens of new spells
• Special Edition Monsters & Magic book from 7.0 for completeness
• Die-cut monster and PC counters mounted on 50pt cardstock
• Several blank character sheets, easy to copy
• 4 DICE!

The boxed version is quite nice, and I like the digest-sized spiral bound rule book and supplements, which fit neatly into my coat pocket.  The dice are cute, and quite readable.  The pad of character sheets seems like a bit of a waste.  T&T characters fit quite neatly on a 3 x 5 card, and there aren’t any formulas or game-aids that the character sheets serve as a reminder of.

The game is…interesting. I’ll have to see what it’s like in actual play, but there are several things that strike me quite favorably…as well as a few that I think could be a bit problematic.  In particular, I can see why it’s been a success as a solitaire game and for play-by-post, while perhaps being a bit harder to GM well face-to-face without some software assistance (even if it’s just a programmable calculator or dice-rolling program).  The combat system is straightforward, but the numbers can get large.

The rules are written in a conversational tone, and Ken St. Andre isn’t shy about giving advice or opinions.  “Combat,” he says in the introduction to that section, “is the true heart of any fantasy role-playing game.”  “Players should, as much as it is easily possible, role-play their characters.  Try not to think of yourself as an Olympian god moving little chessmen around a mapboard, but instead be Snargblat the Goblin Thief who joined these adventurers at the last moment.”  The game is entertaining to read, not at all like a technical manual or assembly instructions.

I’ll be looking at it in more detail in subsequent posts, more or less the way Nathan Mahney of Save or Die! has been going over OD&D, though perhaps not quite so thoroughly.

update: DriveThruRPG.com currently has the PDF version (contains everything in that box except the dice) for the unbelievably good price of $11.25  (compared to $35 for the physical boxed set) as part of their GM day sale through March 8th.  I was just planning on linking so people could take a look, but I ended up buying it just so I’d have the PDFs to carry around on my netbook….