Tunnels & Trolls: Monsters
Posted by Joshua on Mar 4, 2009
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?
It’s Raining RPG Soup!
Posted by Joshua on Mar 4, 2009
So what are you waiting for? Grab your bowl!
Stargazer’s World » Dungeonslayers: The deed is done!
This marvellous tome is based on the 3rd Edition of the original German Dungeonslayers rulebook and already includes the latest errata. The PDF document which can be downloaded for free contains all the rules you need to play Dungeonslayers including the introductory adventure “Lord of the rats”!
I haven’t had a chance to do more than glance at it yet, but it looks interesting. Seriously, the care and professionalism of the free RPGs available continues to ramp up. This is the stuff that makes me excited to be part of this hobby, not news about Hasbro’s latest quarterly reports and lawyerly parsing of either licenses or rules.
So many games, so little time!
Hot Off the Presses
Posted by Joshua on Mar 4, 2009
And just in time to run a memorial game on the anniversary of Gary Gygax’s death one year ago:
RetroRoleplaying: The Blog: Microlite74 Version 2.0 Now Available
Microlite Version 2.0 is now available for free download. Over 2000 copies of Microlite74 version 1.1 have been downloaded since its release on October 6th last year. Microlite74 is dedicated to the memory of E. Gary Gygax and Version 2.0, which is even closer to that the very first edition of the world’s most popular fantasy roleplaying game he co-authored over 30 years ago, is being released on the first anniversary of his passing.
Plus, if you look on the very last page, you’ll see I got an acknowledgement (under my nom de comment jamused) for help in proofreading. And if that’s not a reason to download it, I don’t know what is!
Seriously, though, Microlite74 is a solid rule-light approach to Old School RPGs in the spirit of the old D&D boxed set (0e) for those who think even retro-clones like Swords & Wizardry are too crunchy. It’s intended more as a guide for those are familiar with D&D3 and d20 and want to try a simplified rule set that has more of the feel of the original D&D than a complete introduction to role-playing for the novice. Check it out!
Tunnels & Trolls: Combat
Posted by Joshua on Mar 3, 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.
Tunnels & Trolls: Armor, Poisons, and Treasure
Posted by Joshua on Mar 3, 2009
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.