[Tunnels & Trolls] Questions about "Colonizing goblin lands"
Eero Tuovinen:
I haven't had an opportunity for playing around with T&T this last year, mostly because I've been playing D&D and Solar System when I could've dragged out T&T. It's been close a couple of times, but that's how it goes.
I haven't gotten around to writing up a complete "equipment list", but were I to fix T&T in this regard, it'd look like something of this sort:
StyleStrength req.Dexterity req.DiceDescriptionBasic Fighting--1Default fighting for those without equipment or learning for anything else. Free for everybody.Rustic Brawling1282A simple fighting style of peasants. Unarmed or farming tools etc. improvised weapons. Free to learn.Fisticuffs8122Unarmed fighting among urban youth and sailors. Free to learn.Spanish Fencing11143Complex dueling fencing style, deadly in 1 vs. 1 situations. Uses light swords, daggers or sticks. At disadvantage in heavy armor, of course. Free pick at chargen, 100 gold pieces to train.Landsknecht melee16124Professional fighting with heavy weapons, especially two-handed swords; requires some minimal pieces of armor, as the style assumes its use in blocking. Free pick at chargen, 200 gold pieces to train.etc.The complete list for a given campaign would probably have just a dozen or so options of which only a couple in the low end would be immediately pertinent at character generation: you have a high strength so you get this, you have a high dexterity so you get this, you don't have either so you get this ass fighting style here, and that's that, no more customization necessary. I'd probably have every character get a single fighting style for free at character generation, while a player could add more styles later by paying for them. (Perhaps a warrior gets some free styles now and then, eh?) In the interest of fucking with the players I'd probably say that you pay separately for the training and the equipment, should you not have anything usable with a given fighting style: the cost of equipment for any given style would be 50% of the training cost so as to avoid having another dull chart. Thusly a character who wanted to fight in the landsknecth style from chargen would perhaps get the training for free as part of his background, but he'd still have to pay a 100 gold for the expensive armaments necessary for utilizing the style. Something like that, just examples here.
As you can see, I don't see much point in fractional weapon strengths: all weapons give dice with no adds. It's true that this removes some of the interesting math involved with some spells (such as those that double the amount of dice your weapon gets, but doesn't double the adds), but this is probably worthwhile just so you don't need to track personal adds and weapon adds separately. In general my goal here would be to replace the persnickety arms-fetishization with some more solid fictional colour: the choice of fighting style in this system tells a lot about your character's cultural background and expectations regarding the battlefield environment, which might all in all be much more inspiring as characterization fodder than the issue of whether your character's sword is a falchion or an arming sword. In general, I find that it matches my personal expectations regarding adventure fiction better if a character's weapon is not a solid part of his identity, but rather just a situational tool that is taken up and put down as necessary.
Regarding equipment, the basic idea in the above table is that it's the fighting style you utilize that determines your dice, not nitpicking over equipment. However, I would probably add the specific equipment used back in here as an exception rule: a fighter whose equipment is appropriate to the situation gets an extra die (or perhaps a static +5 add), while a fighter with mismatched equipment and/or style might get a similar penalty; all this would be in the interest of emphasizing the fictional positioning of the characters in adventurous situations, so as to really make the player think about whether it's a good idea to bring that halbert into a bar fight. Then of course there is the fact that some fighting styles cannot be used at all without the appropriate equipment; I'm not so interested in empowering players as I am in simplifying the bookkeeping and tedious lists of various stuff, so I'm still cool with preventing players from picking the stat-optimal fighting style because they don't have the money for the equipment.
What to do with armors in this set-up is an interesting question. I'm aesthetically inclined to remove micromanaging that as well, but on the other hand the damage reduction tactics are such a central part of the game and the nature of the warrior class that I'd think very carefully before messing with that. Maybe I'd just satisfy myself with some heavy cropping of the list so as to reduce it to significant choices: one dirt-cheap armor set, one at professional levels of expense, one for those noble fuckers and so on. The basic idea that a warrior's staying power is dependent on his equipment is so-and-so in my mind insofar as the themes and issues I like are conserned. On the one hand it seems too narrow to limit a fighter's specialty to what sort of tin he wears (as opposed to him relying on tactics, positioning and heroic feats for his survival), but on the other hand I sort of like the industrial themes this introduces: to be a machine of death you are not just a man, but a man worked over by hundreds of man-hours of skilled smithwork, maintained constantly in preparation for death-dealing. I suppose I could back this whole armor-emphasis as a GM as long as I remembered to emphasize it sufficiently that armor is a big fucking deal inside the fiction, it being the thing that is responsible for most of a warrior's effectiveness.
The spite-activated special maneuvers thing would come on top of the above framework, presumably. I could well imagine how I'd make the individual moves dependent on specific fighting styles to further differentiate between them and to make players make choices about their character development. Helps as a money-sink as well if players want to pay money to get masters to train them in fighting tricks, although I'm pretty good at keeping players poor anyway ;)
(I read that Dan Prentice article just now. Good stuff, he's thinking along the same lines I am. A massive money-sink, but then so is the wizard's guild in the default setting, so that balances well. I'd attack the individual techniques to cultural fighting styles instead of specific weapons, and probably give them a bit more colourful names and some background, but the basics are quite solid.)
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