Tag: Tunnels & Trolls

An overview of the changes that I’ve noticed between T&T v5.5 and v7.5  All the comparisons phrased in terms of what 5.5 has/lacks vs. 7.5, since I read 7.5 first and went over it extensively.  Also, some of the changes in 7.5 appeared in 5.5 in a couple-page appendix of Ken St. Andre’s house rules:

Chargen

• No WIZ stat, spells are powered by STR.  Advantage: 7.5  STR to power spells isn’t a deal-breaker, but it makes the archetype of the frail old but nonetheless mighty wizard a problem.
• SPD is an optional stat only used for movement rates, which are fairly complicated. It can’t be increased.  Advantage: 7.5  Even if you view Speed strictly in terms of how fast you can run, that’s certainly something you can improve with training, at least as much as you can improve your Intelligence or Charisma.
• No Triples Add and Roll Over. Advantage: 7.5   Not a big deal, but it’s kind of cool. (This is one of the KsA houserules.)
• Weight Possible and Weight Carried emphasized more in 5.5 including rules for how long you can carry how much.  Advantage: 7.5  I’m not enough of a Grognard to value the added bookkeeping.  It’s good to have a rule-of-thumb, but I don’t like tracking it.
• No Specialists or Citizens.  Advantage: 7.5  Anything that increases the number of viable archetypes without unduly burdening the system with complexity is a win in my book
• Warriors don’t get Level adds in Combat Adds. Advantage: 7.5  Something besides the armor bonus as a reward for leveling up is nice to have.
• Warrior-Wizards instead of Paragons. Toss-up. It’s harder to be a Paragon (you need a triple somewhere in your roll-up, not just everything >=12), but the 7.5 advantages are better: they get to double their armor instead of add 1, they get to invent new spells once they reach 10th level, the Wizard’s Guild will sell them spells.  Both versions are rare enough that I doubt it matters which you use.
• No Talents.  Advantage: 7.5. I like Talents…maybe the most out of any skill system I’ve seen published.

Saving Rolls

• Saving Rolls have a minimum for success of 5, and are calculated as the SR – Luck = number to beat (instead of roll +Luck > SR?). Advantage: 7.5   The mechanical result is the same, but roll+add is easier for most people; whether it’s better to have 3 is an automatic failure or <=5 is a toss-up, but I’d personally give the edge to the players succeeding more often.

Combat

• Monster dice as well as adds get reduced as Monster Rating goes down during combat; this produces a much sharper death-spiral effect.  Advantage: 7.5  I don’t really see any advantage to having nearly every combat the PCs win end with several anti-climactic rounds that are rolled (if at all) just to see how fast they can finish.
• 5.5 Makes it clear that armor doesn’t subtract from hits for magic (though a magic amulet might).  Advantage: 5.5
• Missile fire isn’t added into the side’s Total Hits, but some magic is–at least up until the point when it would double-count hits.  Advantage: 7.5  This rule actually puzzles me in 5.5.  If you’re worried about double-counting damage, why does magic get to (semi) double-count and not missiles?  There’s a sort of explanation that Take That You Fiend! jars or shocks nearby foes and makes them less effective, reducing their attack up until it makes them lose the round but never delivering more hits than the magic’s damage, but Freeze Please and Blasting Power are spread out, while other spells don’t, and…It’s far simpler to my mind to just add everything up, and that lets your rear-rank guys like archers and wizards actually figure into whether you win or lose the round.  The whole “the monster can lose the combat because of magic adds, but not take extra damage” calculation makes my eyes water.
• Damage is divided evenly between all the losing side, except that if it doesn’t come out evenly the Wizard (if any) can take the smaller parcel.  Advantage: 7.5   Dividing the damage up is one of the few tactical decisions that the party gets to make during a turn, and I like the idea that the fighters can choose to bear the brunt of it and protect the weaker party members.  I can see play-by-post going with even splits to reduce the back-and-forth, but flavor-wise I think 7.5 is much more interesting.
• Missile weapon fire requires multiplying a distance factor by a size factor to get the SR level, but archers get twice the DEX adds when firing a bow. Advantage: 7.5
• Dodging is handled by an SR against Luck if the players agree that monsters get the same SR. Advantage: 7.5.  There are several points in 5.5 where the rule to be used is negotiated with the players, which I kind of like, but the 7.5 version of just doubling the SR level if the target is dodging or moving erratically is easier and quicker.
• No spite damage.  Advantage: 7.5  Even a stronger party bears some risk of injury in combat, and combats tend to get resolved faster because spite damage bypasses armor.
• Rules for too-heavy weapons.  Advantage: 7.5  While it’s nice that 5.5 has an answer to what happens if you try to wield a weapon too big for you, the answer being that you knock yourself out in short order (your STR is damaged by the difference each round, with it increasing each round as your new STR is even less) is probably worse than just saying you can’t use it effectively.
• Rules for Movement.  Advantage: 7.5  The 5.5 rules are simultaneously complex, with varying formulas based on encumbrance and type of activity (looking carefully, normal dungeon speed, sprinting) and fatigue rules based on CON and abstract, yielding nothing more than a rating of feet/minute traveled.

Monsters

• No special abilities for monsters. Advantage: 7.5  The whole spite-damage activates special monster abilities like stoning gaze or fiery breath makes them a lot less bland, IMO.
• Wandering monsters.  Advantage: 5.5  5.5’s rules are vague, but at least it has some.
• Monster reaction chart.  Advantage: 5.5  Another inexplicable hole in 7.5 is no discussion at all of anything monsters might do except attack and fight to the death.

Magic

• No Kremm resistance.  Toss-up.  I don’t really know whether the whole kremm resistance thing is worthwhile, and I suspect I won’t until I’ve played a bunch.

There’s more, including stuff on learning languages, berserk fighting, a really elaborate set of optional marksmanship rules, hirelings and slaves, some nice discussion of designing a dungeon, and so forth, but that’s the gist of it.  There’s also a fairly substantial (and controversial) change in how experience is allotted, going from advancement in level granting you the right to improve one attribute by an attribute-specific formula (e.g. +your new level to your STR, but only 1/2 your level rounded down if added to your DEX) to a uniform spend your current attribute x 10 xp to raise it by one, with level back-figured from changes to one of your class’ primary attributes, but I haven’t yet bothered to figure out what that would mean for a typical character at various levels.  I suspect 5.5 would tend to preserve initial differences in stats more, since you can only pick one stat to advance per level, and levels take more and more XP to achieve as you advance.

As you can tell, by and large I think V7.5 is an improvement in most ways.  I think 5.5 is a better introduction to RPGs…I’m not sure somebody new to RPGs could really understand what to do with 7.5, and certain things are either cryptic or accidentally ommitted in 7.5 (such as what the 2nd figure for DEX under DEX required for knives meant), but most of the individual rules changes in 7.5 are in the direction of making things simpler and more uniform, and where they add complication (Talents, Specialists) they get a lot of bang for the buck.  Still, I’m very pleased to have both sets of rules now, and I like T&T even more for having read where it is coming from.

update: Commenter G’Noll points out that I was confusing the requirements for Paragon with the other Specialists; Paragons in 7.5 have the same basic requirements as in 5.5: 12+ in every attribute before Kindred modifiers are applied, though that’s much harder to do with an extra two attributes.

Magic in Tunnels & Trolls is a fairly standard (though innovative back in ’76) system of individual spells that cost spell-points to cast.  In earlier editions, your spell-points were your STR, now they’re your WIZ, which seems to me widen the range of possible character types quite a bit.  The names of the spells are whimsical, like “Take That You Fiend!” (the basic magic blast spell),  “Dis-Spell”, “Oh, Go Away!”, which some people find a bit off-putting, but the spell effects are generally straightforward: do damage, turn invisible, heal wounds, and so forth.  Not always: “Troll God’s Blessing” causes a big club to appear over the head of the target and bash it, but if that kind of thing is a problem for your players you can easily substitute more “serious” flavor text.  Spells range in level from 1 to 13 (or more, I suppose, but that’s as far as the books go). Wizards begin with all the standard 1st level spells, and learn new spells from the Wizard’s Guild, by paying 1000 GP per level of spell.  Spells can only be taught by direct instruction (presumably by casting the first level Teacher spell until the Wizard succeeds at the SR to impress it in his mind).  Casting a spell requires a Saving Roll against the level of the spell, which should mostly be a “gimme” except for very low level casters or when trying to cast a spell at a higher level than you’ve reached.

That brings up an unusual feature of T&T magic. While spells have a minimum DEX and INT to cast, they aren’t restricted by the level of the caster.  A 1st level Wizard can attempt to cast a higher level spell, it just requires a harder Saving Roll and higher stat minimums.  A 1st level spell requires 10 INT and DEX, a 2nd level 12, all the way up to 100 for a 13th level spell. Many spells can also be cast at higher level than their minimum in order to ramp up their effects, e.g. Take That You Fiend! costs 6 WIZ and does damage equal to the caster’s INT at 1st level.  If a Wizard with INT 15 casts it as a 2nd level spell, it costs 12 WIZ but does 30 points of damage, as a 3rd level spell it costs 18 WIZ but does 60 points of damage, etc.  Whether a spell can be “Powered Up” and the effects of doing so vary depending on the spell.

Spell costs can be reduced in a variety of ways.  If you’re higher level than the spell you’re casting you get a discount, with a bigger discount the higher level you are compared to the spell level, though there’s a minimum cost of 1.  You also get a discount for using a “focus” such as a wand or ring.  In fact, the primary purpose of wands and staves in T&T is as spell foci rather than bearers of independent spell effects.  Specialist Wizards get to cast all the spells in their specialty at half cost, but can’t cast spells outside their specialty at all. WIZ recovers fairly quickly, 1 point per ten minutes of non-strenuous activity (no combat or running, but you don’t need a lie-down), but high-level spell can still take hours to recover from casting since they can cost 30, 40, 50, even 200 points to cast (for the 13th level “Born Again” spell).

An even more unusual feature, and one that’s apparently new and somewhat controversial, is that spells cannot be directly cast on any target with a current WIZ higher than the caster’s.  That means that not only are Wizards unable to affect more powerful wizards (at least until their targets have expended enough WIZ to make them weaker), but Wizards may find themselves unable to bespell Warriors and monsters if they have built up their WIZ.  Monsters typically have WIZ equal to 1/10 of their monster rating, so a dragon with MR 500 has quite a substantial barrier against direct-effect spells.  Wizards who attempt to cast against a target with higher WIZ get a “bad feeling” that lets them stop before they actually waste any of their own WIZ.

I’m not entirely sure what I think of this.  On the one hand, I certainly see roleplaying possibilities, particularly since spells that indirectly affect the target (e.g. its clothes, or by affecting the ground under it, or drop something on it) are possible regardless of differences in WIZ.  It also gives magic a very otherworldly feel, not at all equivalent to simply having a laser pistol or even crossbow.  On the other hand, since WIZ amounts vary round by round in combat based on the spells the magic users are casting, it might become something of a pain to track, and even if it didn’t you could potentially lose a lot of actions to “bad feelings” when your estimates of the current WIZ of your opponent miss the mark.  On the third hand, it adds another tactical dimension when unleashing a huge spell at the beginning of combat can render you vulnerable to lesser magicians for the rest of the combat, and I’m in favor of increasing the number of tactical decisions, at least in moderation.  As with other things T&T, I really have to see how it plays out in practice.

Here’s a stat-block for a monster from Tunnels & Trolls:

Basilisk MR 78

Here’s the same monster, with the initial Combat Adds prefigured:

Basilisk MR 78  Adds 8d6+39

Here’s a Basilisk with special damage:

Basilisk MR 78 Adds 8d6+39
4/Medusa

4/Medusa means that any turn when it rolls four 6’s in its damage it also uses its gaze to turn someone to stone (as if it had cast the 9th level spell Medusa, though costing no WIZ to invoke).  As far as I can tell, there’s no save…the only thing protecting adventurers from the gaze is the monster needs to roll well in order to use it.

And with some more special abilities:

Basilisk MR 78 Adds 8d6+39
4/Medusa
Healing Feeling (self only), immunity to poisons

Partially Statted:

Basilisk MR 78 Adds 8d6+39
4/Medusa
Healing Feeling (self only), immunity to poisons
INT 27  WIZ 19

Fully Statted:

Gidorah the Basilisk

Basilisk MR 78 Adds 8d6+39
4/Medusa
Healing Feeling (self only), immunity to poisons
STR 18  DEX 32 CON 78  SPD 14  LK 20 INT 27  WIZ 30 CHR 14

I think you get the picture.  Monsters can be described in a single number, or be as elaborate as a player character (not that PCs are all that elaborate), or anything in between as is convenient for the GM and suitable for the adventure.

Run of the mill monsters generally have only one attribute: Monster Rating.   From their Monster Rating you derive their CON (HP) (same as MR), their Combat Adds (MR/10 d6 + MR/2), and their WIZ (MR/10 round up).  As they take damage, their MR drops as do the pluses they get to their Attack, though not the dice rolled.  Unlike adventurers, that means that monsters do have a “death-spiral”–the more you damage them, the weaker their attack becomes.

They can also have additional special abilities to spice things up, like armor, spells, gaze weapons, and so forth. Armor is usually constant, but other special abilities generally trigger when a certain amount of spite has been generated (e.g. the basilisk being able to use its petrifying gaze whenever it rolled 4 or more 6’s on its 8d6 attack).

T&T has a simple rule of thumb for balancing combats… a fair fight is one where the monsters have about the same number of dice of damage as the adventurers.  That might be one monster, or ten.

T&T gets another A from me for the way it handles monsters.  Who needs to “shemp” when you can describe a monster in as little as a single number, or give it a bunch of special abilities, name and personality in one or two lines of text?  For that matter, who needs rules for ganging up, swarms, or over-bearing when a hundred MR 10 goblins are mechanically almost as dangerous as an MR 1000 Titan?

“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.