[Tunnels & Trolls] Colonizing goblin lands
Christoph Boeckle:
Hmm, this sounds very interesting. I had missed some of those points in our hardcore D&D 3 gaming, where I was really trying hard to present interesting situations (as the GM) and not let combat be played by the sole use of the rules. It looks like T&T somehow makes it evident. I wonder if it's just me being too easy on the player characters or if there are some design considerations that help in T&T.
So, how do you decide if there is a gorge that the players can exploit? Is this done via a roll or just GM fiat?
Callan S.:
Damn, sorry, Eero! If it's any consolation, Callum and Calvin (and once...David?) tend to be used over and over in RL for me.
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A spell he doesn't know about is a spell that is effectively not in the game, after all.
Is there a problem with that? I'm guessing the incongruence is important somehow, but I don't know how.
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I imagine that if I were playing the game routinely I'd definitely figure out some practical compromises for these game-slowing chargen steps. The equipment lists would probably fly out, and the wizards would get just a couple of spells instead of the huge bunch. Or if the huge bunch is necessary (it is sort of fun that the wizard can do a lot of things), then abstract them away and just have the player pay magic points to improvise 1st level magical effects; if the wizard is going to have all those spells anyway, then detailing them just gets in the way.
Isn't this rather dramatic? Removing it entirely and replaced with a whole new home invented mechanic? Particularly the paradigm of improvising magic, rather than working from set spells and improvising them to fit the situation?
I've considered the weapon list before and thought of simply offering a list of five items or so, then offering more items latter during play, until all weapons are available. Same could go for spells - player writes down a couple the GM gives him, and as monsters are slayed he gets 'inspirations' and he gets another spell selected by the GM, until he has the full set he was supposed to have at creation. Both don't change the game in huge ways - everyone gets the same access, it just takes longer.
If it slowed down play, isn't it overkill to remove and replace the rules? Are you still aiming to get at what the designers were going for, with your change? Or if you have to take the role of designer do you go the whole hog and do exactly what you want in terms of design, without compromise to a designer who isn't there to help anyway? I hope the questions don't sound daft, I think our mutual approaches are worth a look at. I'm not quite sure why, but I think so, anyway.
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It was pretty fun how the first character got killed in the first fight, after which I told the player to reroll the stats and reuse the rest of the character sheet if he was happy with the concept and didn't want to change it.
The only other part of a character I can think of is gear and character itself. Given that gear use hinges on stats, I'm thinking you mean they can keep the character but reroll the stats. Which means death == change, rather than a completely dead character. Or maybe you didn't mean that, but I thought that and it seemed nifty.
Eero Tuovinen:
Christoph: Yeah, the rules are a major part of it. The direction D&D has taken in the 3rd edition is a major obstacle for flexible, fiction-based combat encounters simply because there are no rules in the game for flexible case-by-case adjudication. In modern D&D you literally shouldn't listen to the GM's descriptions of the fictional situation and try to think of what you'd do if you were the hero; that sort of thinking will lead you to play in suboptimal ways for the most part, and it's considerably better to learn the rules paradigm of the game to heart and optimize towards that, whether it be by spamming opportunity attacks, with reach weapons or whatever else. T&T, which leaves the GM a very clear role in interpreting the fiction and creating rulings, places the fiction first: if the GM said something and you reacted to it with something that "should" work, then by rights it will in this sort of game. In modern D&D, by comparison, the game designer has determined that objective rules are more important than making sense in the fiction. Players won't try rare or inventive strategies, as this mostly means that the game grinds to a halt while the rules are looked up and the tactic will fail anyway if the character doesn't have the right complement of feats to empower said tactics. Consider things like disarming, feinting, tripping an opponent, sundering weapons, grappling... they all have subsystems in 3rd edition D&D, subsystems that tend to marginalize these descriptive and fun tactics, making them something that only get spammed by characters who buy the necessary feats to do them. In T&T these same tactics are available to all characters, and their ease and usefulness depends solely on realism in the fictional situation as adjudicated by the GM.
As for choosing the battleground, that's pretty simple: why is party A going into the battle? Why is party B going into it? Which one of them has the initiative in choosing the time and the place? In the case of the large boulder and the gorge the party had located the main path used by the goblins in their travels between the human kingdom and Goblinia, which meant that they could choose their battleground pretty easily as long as it was along the trait. As the characters didn't care which goblins they'd encounter (they were just trawling for goblin ears), it was just a matter of choosing a suitable ambush spot and waiting patiently for the goblins to appear. In practice I had the party tactician roll a SR to see if his character'd recognize a good ambush spot when he saw it, but in principle the players could just describe what sort of terrain they wanted, and if there were such available, they'd get it. So that's how we ended up with the large boulder (cover) and the gorge (a place to drop goblins in), both relatively common things in Savonia.
Callan: your approach seems perfectly appropriate to me, something like that could probably work well. When it comes to weapons, though, I have a pretty intense dislike for the whole fantasy game paradigm - I'm apparently a stickler for realism or something, but it just annoys me that you deal more damage in combat the larger your weapon is. It makes even less sense in T&T, in which fighting points are very clearly not simply damage. I'm not getting any sort of excitement personally from the idea that the weapons characters use have some sort of qualitative difference for their efficiency. Not getting an erection at the thought that my character is dual-wielding sabers, as it were. If different weapons need to affect something, I'd rather see it being some sort of "right tool for the right job" thing as it is in reality. So I could certainly keep the equipment lists and just give the characters some GM-determined stuff to begin with (suggested in the 7.5 rules, by the way), but that's still not ideal for my own purposes as long as the system insists on making the weapon choice a major determinant in combat effectiveness.
As to the purpose of house rules, I've been wondering about that myself. Give me a Forge game, and I'll probably play it quite a while before starting to houserule. But give me a traditional fantasy game like D&D, T&T or Runeslayers, say, and I'll be at it like a busy bee immediately. No idea why this is, except that maybe I just don't like dungeoneering fantasy and want to strip the genre out of any fantasy adventure rules I use. These equipment rules in T&T, for instance, are not a problem in any way mechanically, except for the slow character creation when first-timers try to learn the list; even then I'm hot to trod with some rules to replace the stupid axe vs. sword comparisons. If I never have to explain to anybody again what a bec de corbin is, I'll die a happy man.
newsalor:
Hullo,
I was the wizard player in our game in Oulu. I wrote down all the spells, because it was made clear that if we didn't have it on our character sheet, we didn't have it. I wanted those spells, because a major thrill of playing a wizard for me was studying those spells and trying to think up ways to use them. Most of the spells are quite useless or useful only if you are really imaginative so if I would have had to pick a few, I'd rather not play wizard at all. If you are going to be spamming sword attack only, why be a wizard?
The weapons lists sure are oldskool and are perhaps a part of the oldskool charm of the game. They did slow down the game in character creation, but a warriors most distinctive traits are his choice of weapons and armor. Also, buing new and better weapons & armor were a major part of "savoring the kill" after actually winning something. This is understandable, because by my recogning we won one encounter in the 5-6 hours of game play.
This brings me to a percieved problem in the play. Of the 5 or so encounters I was involved, 3 were unwinnable, we won one and one we could have won, if we had not been so neurotic in trying to gouge the strenght of our adversary. We had 3-4 mostly first level characters (my wizard was 2nd level, because I had charisma 25, but all the spellcasting attributes were first level stuff), our combat totals were smaller than normal, because we didn't have speed attributes and a typical encounter was something like 8-20 MR20 goblins + maybe a leader of MR30-40?
In the first encounter we tried to search for goblins in the woods. I succeeded in my saving roll, so we found them when we were asleep! The 8 goblins (MR160) we found would have kicked our asses even if we had been awake. Should I have specified that I tried to find them while awake or would the right answer have been to specify a long list of standard party protocols of how we travel, sleep etc. before leaving town?
In the third encounter I succeeded in a hard roll to find a favorable battleground for us and described a path surrounded by really thick woods so that we could limit the amount of adversaries we had to fight at once. Enter 20+ strong goblin posse with MR30+ leaders. I proceeded to gauge the real strenght of the adversary by asking a series of questions and working my calculator to find out the odds. At first the encounter clearly seemed unwinnable and after some calculation it was clear that we had no chance. There was no challenge!
As the game was coming to a close, we had to quit, because I had enrolled in another game, but to tell you the truth, I wasn't really that interrested in defending the town. I knew already that we would lose anyway, because I felt that even if I succeed in training a kickass militia etc., the successes would not matter.
I did appreciate the challenge, but I would have liked a fair challenge more.
That said, I do have to say that Tunnels & Trolls style gamism beats D&D anyday. I really liked the fact that using your imagination was rewarded and actively encouraged. I also loved the retro aspects of the game and the Savonia color was cool.
My proudest moments in the game were:
[*]Adjusting my arguments just right in a reasonable/silly -scale in a key social challenge to get the difficulty high enough to gain a lot of experience, but still win.
[*]Winning an encounter against the goblins.
[*]Finding a use for the "That's a Close Shave" -spell. ;)
Eero Tuovinen:
Ah, perhaps I'll need to explain some GM calls here:
The first encounter with the goblins was mandated by a Luck SR, which basically meant that your characters were "lucky" enough to stumble on some; there was no planning in the encounter on either side. It just happened to be during the night on a whim, as goblins are nocturnal. I didn't particularly intend for the nighttime encounter to be a major difficulty that'd lead to a surprise attack - it mainly became such because the one player whose character succeeded in his SR chose to hide under his blankets and play ninja instead of declaring that he was standing guard and would rouse the others at a sign of trouble; you'll remember that I asked him to pick for himself whether his success meant that he woke up or that he had, in fact, been on guard. I have no idea what Sipi was thinking, he essentially decided that you didn't have guards in place.
As for the difficulty of the encounters, most of those goblin encounters were with 4-6 goblins, MR 20 apiece. That's not excessive in my mind for a group of 3-5 adventurers to face, and I think you adapted to it just fine with time. I'm sure different GMs play differently, but I don't see any particular value in just creating encounters that are intended to be won handily. More interesting to throw some shit together based on the setting and then let actual play prove which encounters are easy and which are hard.
Your choice with the unwinnable encounter was the right one, by the by - I hadn't intended for the encounter to be winnable on those terms, just wanted to see if you'd try anyway. That was the challenge there. The point of the encounter was mostly to introduce the idea that the goblins were moving larger groups with warlords into the area - also, you might have been able to follow them discreetly to strike at a smaller group if they split up (as they did when they got to the human lands), or to find out where they set up their HQ. The choice of hurrying to town to rouse the farmers into defense wasn't a bad one, either.
For the town, I don't know where you got the idea that you couldn't win the fight for it. The defense plan wasn't bad to my mind. The goblins also have their own problems and priorities, they weren't going to march straight in and risk a face-on encounter with the royal cavalry in the area. I didn't get the chance to work out the exact numbers, but I do know that you'd have been surprised when the goblin attack actually didn't come even nearly at the time you expected, only to come a week later - at which point your militia might have already scattered and the king's cavalry potentially come and gone. There might have been some early skirmish with some wolfriding goblins before then, too, to provoke you into taking the initiative in bleeding the goblins before the big fight.
Anyway, that's details. The more important thing is that you clearly didn't think that I was being impartial in my GMing. How come? You also played pretty nice at the time, I had no clue you were dissatisfied with my calls. Do speak up more, feedback is the only way for anybody to improve their GMing.
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