Post by machfront on Nov 19, 2009 8:48:26 GMT -5
In lighter news...
Sitting near me is one of my copies of T&T. It's a special one. It's a copy of the Corgi Fifth Edition. I purchased it in 1990.
Specifically, I purchased it on November the 19th, 1990 at 3:42 in the afternoon. I know, because the receipt is still in the book. The price, including tax was $7.88. I paid ten dollars and received $2.12 in change.
It was the first copy of T&T I ever had and ever laid eyes on in person.
Nineteen years ago to the day.
The magic didn't begin right away, though, as I've noted before. Oh, no.
That afternoon and evening, I (a rabid D&D fan who also played MERP and Top Secret/S.I. and dug on some Palladium Fantasy and wished for a copy of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay) read through Tunnels & Trolls, this old game I'd seen mentioned a number of times in Dragon Magazine and from which, I'd somehow learned it was the second rpg to ever exist.
Oh, how I was lost on it. How brilliantly I missed the point.
Where, says I, are all the other classes? No ranger? No cleric? No hot-rod shield-maiden or gruffy barbarian? Boorrriing.
Where are all the special abilities to make the other races distinct?
Where in the world were skills?!? You can't leave out skills! Not in this day and age!
Fairies and Trolls as player races? How stupid. Who would want to play a Fairy or, worse, a silly leprechaun? Trolls are monsters, not player races! The nerve!
The spells. Oh, jeeze, the spells. What an abomination. What an incredibly slim list. How slight the descriptions. The spells were also clearly named by Mrs. Smith's third grade class.
Languages for snakes? Rats? Pigs? Wow. That's genius.
One experience table? For everybody? What's the point in playing one class over the other, if there's no benefit to advancing faster or the detriment to advancing slower if the class has other benefits?
Randomly determined height? Yes. Because I really want to play a human warrior who is four feet tall. Gee, what fun.
Dungeons, dungeons, dungeons, dungeons. What about all the other and much more interesting places for adventure? Where are the rules governing deep, dark forests and trackless wastes and spanning oceans? How can we play if the game doesn't tell me how to walk across a wooded area? I can't play like this! This is madness!
Where are the monsters, I ask you?!? Where? Just numbers? No. Just one measly number! One? What is this? Candyland? Chutes & Ladders? Choose-Your-Own-Adventure? This is supposed to be a role-playing game for goodness sake. Give me a huge tome of monsters and tell me how often they breed and what color their spittle is.
No magic treasures either. This game is obviously incomplete.
Wow. Would ya look at that weapon list! Awesome!
Too bad the rest doesn't follow suit.
What silly art.
Quaint. Passe. A game who's time has passed. We know better now. We are much more advanced.
No wonder no one plays this.
Heck, it even has stats that are rolled on 3d6. Clearly it's nothing more than a D&D rip-off and a poorly conceived and lazy one, at that.
Back on the shelf it went. There, she stayed, day after day. Alone. Silent. Ignored.
Oh. Oh, how things change.
Every once in a while over the following years, it would catch my eye on the shelf. For reasons I still cannot explain I'd feel compelled to take it down and flip through it again. Looking at every illustration. Looking at the classes. Types, rather, I saw.
Reading a passage here or there.
As I said, I've no idea why I did this. I think that honestly, it was a 'train-wreck' mentality. I say this because I would inevitably shake my head, laugh in a sort of sad way and put it back on the shelf.
Years passed.
Eventually, when I first moved out on my own, many things were thrown away. I'm no pack-rat but I am a sentimental keeper of many things. Some things you just don't discard.
Up into the attic in a box it went with some other items. A handful of years later, there I am in that attic looking for something unrelated. I came across a box with some old gaming stuff that I disliked, such as the Avalon Hill Runequest Standard Edition. Under that, tossed in haphazardly, so that the upper right hand corner of the cover had been bent forward diagonally all the way to the spine, was the bright orange Corgi T&T.
Oh. That old, silly thing.
Again, I'm sentimental.
Also, yet again, I've no idea what compelled me to save it, this game I was woefully unimpressed with.
That evening at home, I went through it yet again. For some reason it made me smile a bit. It wasn't so bad. Just misguided. A fanciful relic of a more innocent time.
Back on the shelf again. Not forgotten though. Just "in it's own place".
I'm sentimental.
Over the next couple of years, the pattern would repeat. Looking over my game books in search of that 'something'. Inspiration. Ideas. A mechanic here or there. The Corgi would come out and I'd eventually begin to wish there was more, but with it's own simple way. If only there was more. Still easy, but more. Oh, what could have been. You poor, little game.
I'm sentimental.
I also have a soft spot, due to my own life and upbringing, for the forgotten, the lost, the last-placers, the scorned, the hated. I understood that feeling.
I'm sentimental, and also will attach a sort of empathy with inanimate objects. I felt me in them. Alone. On the shelf. Wronged. Misunderstood.
It may have been a loving pity that drove my view of the old book towards a kindlier light. Perhaps I felt that I'd done to it what I felt had been done to me. Imagined? Real? It didn't matter.
As strangely vivid as my memory is of these events, the next is not so strong. Not as definite.
What is certain, is that, at some point, those illustrations began to look better. Somehow, they looked cool. Somewhere, I began to see them as representative of the fun and adventure they depicted.
The spell list was pretty nifty. When did I ever read, understand and use all those spells and spell systems in those others games I felt were so superior and advanced?
I didn't have to include leprechauns.
Little by little, my old misconceptions and prejudices were stripped away.
It was ok that there were silly spell names. I could just change them.
Just because the book mainly discusses dungeon adventures didn't mean the game was telling me I had to do only that.
Oh, look. There is discussion of just that very thing. My blinders were falling off. Little by little. Still, it took years.
Those classes. Still a problem. The Monster Rating. Still not good enough.
I was maturing, and beginning to grasp what role-playing and free-form gaming was about, but I wasn't ready yet.
At some point around 2000 or 2001, I discovered that there were things and sites that folks had put on the net about their favorite games.
I spent many hours looking over sites about D&D. Looking at pictures of covers of games I'd never heard of or had but never seen. Illustrations within games I'd never had the money to buy or had been out of print by the time I'd really gotten into gaming. Even though I'd read about house rules all those years in Dragon Magazine, somehow it never stuck. Why would you change a game? Doesn't that mean the game is broken or that it isn't for you? Why not find a game you liked instead?
I was in my twenties but still a child in this respect.
Just as I don't know why I kept taking the Corgi book off the shelf, I don't know precisely why I felt it necessary to look for T&T websites. To look for another, and another. Why did I feel sad that, though it looked like it had been forgotten and consigned to the scrap heap of rpg history, that there were some out there clinging to it like a failing marriage, still supped full of the love and familiarity of the decades?
I'm sentimental.
The book came out time and again. No, not yet.
One day in that time period was particularly important. Not long after the Fellowship of the Ring film had been released, and locked in friendly arguments with a friend over the rules bloat in D&D 3E, I took refuge in the old books with their simpler rules. Looking for guidance and justification for my viewpoints and opinions.
One of these times, I came across section 2.37 in the dusty backside of the book (or so it felt).
One can do anything they want in combat? Anything? With this...Saving Roll? Hey. Dexterity? Turning to the section on Saving Rolls I finally saw more. Not much, but more. Other attributes? All the attributes. Not just Luck. Now, that made more sense. It was there all along.
The skills and abilities and powers and, recently, Feats and so on piled up in my head came tumbling down off their rickety scaffolding and crashed. Crushed under their own weight, screaming the injustice of being so set down. They were better and new and improved. How dare I?
I countered a particular argument with this friend of mine. What would it take? What rules? How?
In T&T you could describe it and in one roll, it was done and decided.
He stared and wasn't convinced.
I was. I was convinced it was brilliant.
Too bad about the rest of the game.
I stumbled to and fro over the next few years. My old faithful D&D had it's complaints and detractors, but now, people were waxing philosophical as well as explaining why these 'broken' games and rules weren't broken after all, but mainly misunderstood.
Misunderstood?
I'm sentimental.
I began devouring as much as I could. I finally grasped the concept and intention of archetypes in gaming. Classes weren't arbitrary.
I understood. So much of it....all of it, really...had been staring me in the face all these years. Talking to me. Patiently waiting. Time had not passed them by. They were waiting for me to understand.
I wish there was a climatic moment, a victory, but there wasn't. Again, it was bit by bit. But more rapidly.
At this time, I heard that Tunnels & Trolls was due to be re-released for it's Thirtieth Anniversary. Still around. Still waiting.
In it's place. Still there.
Not forgotten. Not ignored. Not alone.
With my recent understanding, I eventually grew to accept the game on it's own terms.
I understood the classes were not classes but rather broad types, just as they'd always said.
A dozen or score more things fell into place in my mind that we all here understand and I need not explain.
The time had come and it had waited long enough. I was listening. I was ready.
It was time to take it off the shelf. Off the shelf and not return.
After all...I'm sentimental....
-Eric
Sitting near me is one of my copies of T&T. It's a special one. It's a copy of the Corgi Fifth Edition. I purchased it in 1990.
Specifically, I purchased it on November the 19th, 1990 at 3:42 in the afternoon. I know, because the receipt is still in the book. The price, including tax was $7.88. I paid ten dollars and received $2.12 in change.
It was the first copy of T&T I ever had and ever laid eyes on in person.
Nineteen years ago to the day.
The magic didn't begin right away, though, as I've noted before. Oh, no.
That afternoon and evening, I (a rabid D&D fan who also played MERP and Top Secret/S.I. and dug on some Palladium Fantasy and wished for a copy of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay) read through Tunnels & Trolls, this old game I'd seen mentioned a number of times in Dragon Magazine and from which, I'd somehow learned it was the second rpg to ever exist.
Oh, how I was lost on it. How brilliantly I missed the point.
Where, says I, are all the other classes? No ranger? No cleric? No hot-rod shield-maiden or gruffy barbarian? Boorrriing.
Where are all the special abilities to make the other races distinct?
Where in the world were skills?!? You can't leave out skills! Not in this day and age!
Fairies and Trolls as player races? How stupid. Who would want to play a Fairy or, worse, a silly leprechaun? Trolls are monsters, not player races! The nerve!
The spells. Oh, jeeze, the spells. What an abomination. What an incredibly slim list. How slight the descriptions. The spells were also clearly named by Mrs. Smith's third grade class.
Languages for snakes? Rats? Pigs? Wow. That's genius.
One experience table? For everybody? What's the point in playing one class over the other, if there's no benefit to advancing faster or the detriment to advancing slower if the class has other benefits?
Randomly determined height? Yes. Because I really want to play a human warrior who is four feet tall. Gee, what fun.
Dungeons, dungeons, dungeons, dungeons. What about all the other and much more interesting places for adventure? Where are the rules governing deep, dark forests and trackless wastes and spanning oceans? How can we play if the game doesn't tell me how to walk across a wooded area? I can't play like this! This is madness!
Where are the monsters, I ask you?!? Where? Just numbers? No. Just one measly number! One? What is this? Candyland? Chutes & Ladders? Choose-Your-Own-Adventure? This is supposed to be a role-playing game for goodness sake. Give me a huge tome of monsters and tell me how often they breed and what color their spittle is.
No magic treasures either. This game is obviously incomplete.
Wow. Would ya look at that weapon list! Awesome!
Too bad the rest doesn't follow suit.
What silly art.
Quaint. Passe. A game who's time has passed. We know better now. We are much more advanced.
No wonder no one plays this.
Heck, it even has stats that are rolled on 3d6. Clearly it's nothing more than a D&D rip-off and a poorly conceived and lazy one, at that.
Back on the shelf it went. There, she stayed, day after day. Alone. Silent. Ignored.
Oh. Oh, how things change.
Every once in a while over the following years, it would catch my eye on the shelf. For reasons I still cannot explain I'd feel compelled to take it down and flip through it again. Looking at every illustration. Looking at the classes. Types, rather, I saw.
Reading a passage here or there.
As I said, I've no idea why I did this. I think that honestly, it was a 'train-wreck' mentality. I say this because I would inevitably shake my head, laugh in a sort of sad way and put it back on the shelf.
Years passed.
Eventually, when I first moved out on my own, many things were thrown away. I'm no pack-rat but I am a sentimental keeper of many things. Some things you just don't discard.
Up into the attic in a box it went with some other items. A handful of years later, there I am in that attic looking for something unrelated. I came across a box with some old gaming stuff that I disliked, such as the Avalon Hill Runequest Standard Edition. Under that, tossed in haphazardly, so that the upper right hand corner of the cover had been bent forward diagonally all the way to the spine, was the bright orange Corgi T&T.
Oh. That old, silly thing.
Again, I'm sentimental.
Also, yet again, I've no idea what compelled me to save it, this game I was woefully unimpressed with.
That evening at home, I went through it yet again. For some reason it made me smile a bit. It wasn't so bad. Just misguided. A fanciful relic of a more innocent time.
Back on the shelf again. Not forgotten though. Just "in it's own place".
I'm sentimental.
Over the next couple of years, the pattern would repeat. Looking over my game books in search of that 'something'. Inspiration. Ideas. A mechanic here or there. The Corgi would come out and I'd eventually begin to wish there was more, but with it's own simple way. If only there was more. Still easy, but more. Oh, what could have been. You poor, little game.
I'm sentimental.
I also have a soft spot, due to my own life and upbringing, for the forgotten, the lost, the last-placers, the scorned, the hated. I understood that feeling.
I'm sentimental, and also will attach a sort of empathy with inanimate objects. I felt me in them. Alone. On the shelf. Wronged. Misunderstood.
It may have been a loving pity that drove my view of the old book towards a kindlier light. Perhaps I felt that I'd done to it what I felt had been done to me. Imagined? Real? It didn't matter.
As strangely vivid as my memory is of these events, the next is not so strong. Not as definite.
What is certain, is that, at some point, those illustrations began to look better. Somehow, they looked cool. Somewhere, I began to see them as representative of the fun and adventure they depicted.
The spell list was pretty nifty. When did I ever read, understand and use all those spells and spell systems in those others games I felt were so superior and advanced?
I didn't have to include leprechauns.
Little by little, my old misconceptions and prejudices were stripped away.
It was ok that there were silly spell names. I could just change them.
Just because the book mainly discusses dungeon adventures didn't mean the game was telling me I had to do only that.
Oh, look. There is discussion of just that very thing. My blinders were falling off. Little by little. Still, it took years.
Those classes. Still a problem. The Monster Rating. Still not good enough.
I was maturing, and beginning to grasp what role-playing and free-form gaming was about, but I wasn't ready yet.
At some point around 2000 or 2001, I discovered that there were things and sites that folks had put on the net about their favorite games.
I spent many hours looking over sites about D&D. Looking at pictures of covers of games I'd never heard of or had but never seen. Illustrations within games I'd never had the money to buy or had been out of print by the time I'd really gotten into gaming. Even though I'd read about house rules all those years in Dragon Magazine, somehow it never stuck. Why would you change a game? Doesn't that mean the game is broken or that it isn't for you? Why not find a game you liked instead?
I was in my twenties but still a child in this respect.
Just as I don't know why I kept taking the Corgi book off the shelf, I don't know precisely why I felt it necessary to look for T&T websites. To look for another, and another. Why did I feel sad that, though it looked like it had been forgotten and consigned to the scrap heap of rpg history, that there were some out there clinging to it like a failing marriage, still supped full of the love and familiarity of the decades?
I'm sentimental.
The book came out time and again. No, not yet.
One day in that time period was particularly important. Not long after the Fellowship of the Ring film had been released, and locked in friendly arguments with a friend over the rules bloat in D&D 3E, I took refuge in the old books with their simpler rules. Looking for guidance and justification for my viewpoints and opinions.
One of these times, I came across section 2.37 in the dusty backside of the book (or so it felt).
One can do anything they want in combat? Anything? With this...Saving Roll? Hey. Dexterity? Turning to the section on Saving Rolls I finally saw more. Not much, but more. Other attributes? All the attributes. Not just Luck. Now, that made more sense. It was there all along.
The skills and abilities and powers and, recently, Feats and so on piled up in my head came tumbling down off their rickety scaffolding and crashed. Crushed under their own weight, screaming the injustice of being so set down. They were better and new and improved. How dare I?
I countered a particular argument with this friend of mine. What would it take? What rules? How?
In T&T you could describe it and in one roll, it was done and decided.
He stared and wasn't convinced.
I was. I was convinced it was brilliant.
Too bad about the rest of the game.
I stumbled to and fro over the next few years. My old faithful D&D had it's complaints and detractors, but now, people were waxing philosophical as well as explaining why these 'broken' games and rules weren't broken after all, but mainly misunderstood.
Misunderstood?
I'm sentimental.
I began devouring as much as I could. I finally grasped the concept and intention of archetypes in gaming. Classes weren't arbitrary.
I understood. So much of it....all of it, really...had been staring me in the face all these years. Talking to me. Patiently waiting. Time had not passed them by. They were waiting for me to understand.
I wish there was a climatic moment, a victory, but there wasn't. Again, it was bit by bit. But more rapidly.
At this time, I heard that Tunnels & Trolls was due to be re-released for it's Thirtieth Anniversary. Still around. Still waiting.
In it's place. Still there.
Not forgotten. Not ignored. Not alone.
With my recent understanding, I eventually grew to accept the game on it's own terms.
I understood the classes were not classes but rather broad types, just as they'd always said.
A dozen or score more things fell into place in my mind that we all here understand and I need not explain.
The time had come and it had waited long enough. I was listening. I was ready.
It was time to take it off the shelf. Off the shelf and not return.
After all...I'm sentimental....
-Eric
