[Tunnels & Trolls] Questions about "Colonizing goblin lands"
John S:
Quote from: Eero Tuovinen on November 22, 2010, 03:02:12 PM
The T&T system is not universally unified, but I find it surprisingly pleasing aesthetically nonetheless - there are not many rpg systems that manage to similarly have twists in the right places instead of all over the place. For instance, the conceit the game has about the combat mechanic only covering the cut-and-thrust melee, while everything else from archery to movement runs off the SR system, that's beautiful. The systemic disjunction and the necessary shifting of gears between these systems provides a very pleasing framing for combats, one where bloody hand-to-hand alternates with desperate repositioning and dialogue and whatnot - quite cinematic, actually, and as surprising as it is, in my experience this is more tactical (in the sense of making difficult decisions under fire) than the D&D model.
This is one of the killer features of T&T in my view. It doesn't assume that every. single. attempt. to hit. is important enough to simulate-- before Trollbabe was ever born, there was a game that allowed you to run combat at the clash-by-clash pace instead of assuming every conflict must be rolled out blow-by-blow. And for those conflicts in which blow-by-blow narration could turn the tide, it has this Saving Roll system that kicks in and allows you to narrate in bullet time, but only when you need to.
I like how you tie the idea of a round of combat in T&T to rounds in boxing and similar matches. That really captures the feel well!
Callan S.:
Quote
Heck, considering the dicing system of the game it's actually going to be a massive grind to fight an even fight simply by dicing turn by turn, as most of the dice on both sides will simply cancel each other out
As I read the rules, the thing to remember is that a monsters dice reduce as it's MR reduces. What's interesting about T&T is that it implemented death spirals for monsters only. This means although it's essentially a dice pool system, a twist of fate against a mighty foe can have a big effect.
John S:
Quote from: Callan S. on November 22, 2010, 10:59:51 PM
As I read the rules, the thing to remember is that a monsters dice reduce as it's MR reduces. What's interesting about T&T is that it implemented death spirals for monsters only. This means although it's essentially a dice pool system, a twist of fate against a mighty foe can have a big effect.
In the 5th edition rules, that's very much the case: a monster's dice and "Combat Adds" diminish with damage, which has a dramatic effect on combat. In the 7th edition, the effect is still there, but less pronounced: When a monster takes hits, it's Adds are reduced, but not its dice. That means monsters with spite-activated abilities still have the same chance of triggering those abilities even in their last throes.
Diminishing Combat Adds still has a big impact on battle though, since Combat Adds are added to the sum of the dice when computing each side's total attack power, and Combat Adds is always equal to half of a monster's current MR.
Ron Edwards:
Hello,
In the interest of historical accuracy, regarding game systems in the middle and late 1970s: the blow-by-blow combat systems of the era were exemplified by The Fantasy Trip, DragonQuest, and RuneQuest, but not by D&D. The combat system for Advancd Dungeons & Dragons (1977-79) was not blow-by-blow, but rather almost as abstract as T&T's. If I remember correctly, a player's roll to hit (or everyone in the party's) accounted for one minute of fictional time. The AD&D Player's Handbook and AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide were explicit about this minute-long fiction being composed of the drama of weaving, ducking, maneuvering, clashing without incident, and so on, with the roll being about the moment or moments, somewhere in there, in which actual injury might occur. Hit Points, incidentally, were equally abstract, with 20 hit point loss to a 10th level fighter being legitimately described as a scratch.
However, I do agree that T&T did provide a more workable procedure for the same idea by unambiguously combining everyone's rolls into a skirmish outcome. The AD&D design favored an interpretation of individual action which clashed gears with the skirmish model, especially the way that a round began with a flux of social complications involved in establishing who was doing what in what order. (It's not surprising that tournament play, which favored skirmish thinking, relied on one-person callers, the only person the GM would consider authoritative.) It showed up most strongly when considering individual initiative vs. group inititative, which was a sticking point of play for any group I played with and illustrated the way that combat couldn't quite manage to be about the group skirmish or the indivdual bits at the same time.
My point is to clarify that the combat distinction between contemporary T&T and D&D in the 1970s was not skirmish vs. individual action models, but rather different ways to embed individual action within the skirmish model. The individual action model, in which the skirmish outcome was purely an emergent effect from individual blow-by-blow events, was found in entirely different games.
Best, Ron
John S:
I was thinking about this again today:
Quote from: Eero Tuovinen on March 30, 2009, 12:14:16 PM
The wizard thing was not my numero uno hateful thing in the game, though; that honor is reserved for the awful equipment lists. I f***ing hate buying non-mechanical equipment and calculating weights, that much is given - didn't do that, only had the players buy their weapons and armor. But even then T&T geek autism got to us with the 200 different weapons with weird names. Despite my efforts to get the players to just buy some stupid sword, they insisted on optimizing their weapon choices carefully (smart, as you need it in this game; but lord it was dull), which meant wasting something like five times as much time in this than the other parts of the character generation combined. A classic example of why not to use point-buy systems in character generation; the amount of options overwhelms the player and grinds play to halt. Afterwards the players agreed with me that I should have been allowed to try out my simplified, less pain-in-the-ass alternative system wherein fighters upgrade their fighting dice by learning martial styles instead of buying sticks with embedded shark teeth.
[Empahsis mine --John]
Quote from: Eero Tuovinen on November 22, 2010, 03:02:12 PM
Ever since I got the 7th edition rulebook, which uses Spite more than I seem to remember 5th edition using, I've been thinking that I should write down some Spite-using house rules. For instance, it'd be interesting if characters (fighters) could get some special moves for spending Spite dice or such - you have the default effect of causing a point of damage over the melee calculation, but a character could forgo that in exchange for something else as well now and then. I understand that this is not unusual for magic items in T&T (a sword that bursts into flame for the rest of the battle when you roll enough Spite, say), but one might consider making this a bit more central mechanic by introducing it as a sort of "martial arts" option. I think I was considering this last year already...
I'm curious if you ever got a chance to playtest your weapon/martial style rules? Going with a spite-activated power system like Dan's still requires you to divert attention to the weapon list so players can get weapons that enable them to bat more dice around. If you jettison the weapon list, you need another method to determine how many attack dice are available.
Here's one idea that just came to me: Derive attack dice from a character's Strength (for heavy weapons) or Dexterity (for light/missile weapons) as if the ability score was a Monster Rating. Then you can have a weapon list that allows the players to pick a weapon for flavor instead of optimum combat advantage. So a character with a Strength of 25 and Dexterity of 15 would get 3 dice for a mace and 2 dice for a fencing foil. Spite effects could build on that.
But I'm curious what you had in mind?
@Ron: Thanks for the history. I didn't get to play D&D until 2nd edition, and the GM narrated our attacks blow-by-blow. Later I got into GURPS (derived from TFT, from what I gather) and I assumed that blow-by-blow roll-to-action ratio was the standard.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page