Retro-Role-Playing Blog takes T&T for a spin

[Hogscape]

In one of D&D's 'Against the Giants' modules.

My least favourite AD&D outing but the blog report looks good!

blog.retroroleplaying.com/2010/09/g1-in-tunnels-and-trolls-game-report.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+retroroleplayingblog+%28Retro-Roleplaying%3A+The+Blog%29

[Dhrrru]

2 1200 MRed Giants in the Entrance Hall? That's 242 dice + 1200 adds of HP potential to deal with right off the bat! As the poster notes, the GM had overrated the giants due to the GM's relative unfamiliarity with T&T 5; glad that initial unbalanced encounter didn't put them all off! Should be interesting to watch this 'retro' RPG campaign unfold (though not sure I like my favourite fantasy gaming system which has had two rules revisions issued in the last five years described as 'retro'!).

[mahrundl]

Yes, it does seem a little much for the first room. Although, if you put your crack troops right at the start, less intruders will get inside...

Good point about 'retro', Dhrrru. I'd probably go for 'classic' rather than 'retro'.

[machfront]

Sept 14, 2010 7:42:17 GMT -5 Dhrrru said:

Should be interesting to watch this 'retro' RPG campaign unfold (though not sure I like my favourite fantasy gaming system which has had two rules revisions issued in the last five years described as 'retro'!).

To be fair, I'm sure he means it in the most respectful and loving way. Randall is after a big fan of Original D&D and is the author of Microlite74 and the forthcoming Microlite75. He's a long-time RPGer and a fan of old-school stuff.

[Dhrrru]

Thanks for pointing that out, Mach. So I guess Randall means 'retro' in the sense that T&T drinks deeply of the 'devil-may-care, DIY' spirit of RPGs of the late '70s to mid '80s (before the rise of the 'rules lawyers' & AD&D - I lost quite a few players to AD&D because T&T seemed somehow less 'professional' & 'serious').

[machfront]

Sept 14, 2010 21:50:55 GMT -5 Dhrrru said:

Thanks for pointing that out, Mach. So I guess Randall means 'retro' in the sense that T&T drinks deeply of the 'devil-may-care, DIY' spirit of RPGs of the late '70s to mid '80s (before the rise of the 'rules lawyers' & AD&D

I couldn't put words in his mouth, but reading his posts at Dragonsfoot and so on, I'd say that's a pretty accurate summation.

Sept 14, 2010 21:50:55 GMT -5 Dhrrru said:

I lost quite a few players to AD&D because T&T seemed somehow less 'professional' & 'serious').

Heck, even I thought that (though AD&D wasn't my speed, I was looking to the Rules Cyclopedia and other games like Palladium, etc.). I unfairly disliked T&T for a very long time.

[Darknight]

I came to T&T from the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks (I'd never played D&D, and still haven't) and I was impressed by its complexity of all things.

[Dhrrru]

Me too Darknight! Got into the 'Sorcery!' series, then into 'Red Box' original D&D (& found lots of the rules puzzling). Came across the Corgi edition T&T 5 Rule Book & solos in my local K-Mart store, & it was 'love at first melee'. Found T&T 5 to be both more logical than original D&D, & more fun (I mean, the stock standard combat spell is called 'Take That You Fiend' - what a cool name!). Loved the 'feel' of T&T; if you don't like the way a particular rule works, make a new one! (although these days, I mostly play the T&T 5 rules as they're printed - they strike such a nice balance between realism & playability).

[machfront]

I came straight from Classic D&D (Basic, as some may know it. All I had were the 1981 Moldvay Basic and Cook/Marsh Expert books + the AD&D1E Player's Handbook for some odd reason) and MERP (?!?).

But I'd experienced a number of other rpgs (Warhammer FRP, Palladium, Top Secret/S.I.,etc.) before I finally found a UK Corgi book in a local game a comic shop in 1990 or so.
So, when I saw it, it was as unintuitive to me as D&D may have been to you guys:
Where was the thief?
(Note, not a guy who just steals stuff...anyone can do that...so, not the thief, but the Thief!. There seems to be a large group of gamers who don't get the Thief class as having special abilities. Calling him 'just a dude who steals things' is like saying a professional warrior is 'just a dude who randomly waves a weapon about'.)

What's with all those dice? It's so much quicker to roll 'to hit' and then roll damage. Done. Why roll a billion d6s? Only d6? What about all the cool dice, man?!?

Where are the monsters?
Oh. There 'they' are. A number. A single number. Huh?!? What about monster abilities? What about their saves? What about their ____ and their ____?
Where are the movement rules and encumbrance and morale and what sort of treasure does monster A have and what about monster B's treasure?

No clerics? Meh. Fine.

No skills?

No foraging? No hunting? No stealthy movement or at least surprise rules?

Supposedly easier and lighter than classic or original D&D and yet it's excessively dense with text? (I still think this is the case, actually. T&T could stand to be a bit less verbose.)

A dungeon delving game with no formal rules on lighting and on traps?

It was a paradigm shift that took a very long time to get over/around. In fact it took me years to not look at T&T as a silly, amateurish and incomplete game.
But I finally grew up and learned to stop worrying and love T&T for what it was and for it's strengths.

[Deleted]

I started with the purple box D&D,After my late uncle gifted me with a paper back of the Hobbit, and my first Savage sword of Conan, he taught medieval history at a college , and ran A D&D game for his students. I then moved on to the red box series, ad&d 1st ed, call of cthulhu, Boot hill, Merp( an awesome yet underated game) tsr version of conan, and star frontiers, paranoia, 5th ed TNT, Chill 1st ed. James bond , looking back I had great time with all of these games, somehow I found the time to play them all.

[Dhrrru]

Yep, T&T took some getting used to - but the transition was helped by the fact that the guys I was playing with were roughly split between 'thespians' (i.e. gamers who play their characters like an actor would) & 'daredevils' (i.e. gamers who like to 'push the rules envelope' in challenging situations). The former don't want to be overburdened by rules, whilst the latter prefer a gaming system with plenty of 'give' - we found T&T 5 suited both styles of play admirably in the hands of a fair minded GM (still does).

[Darknight]

Sept 15, 2010 17:00:27 GMT -5 machfront said:

Where was the ......

See, I had exactly the opposite reaction; because the game was so rules-light the answer to allt he "where is the . . . . ?" was "inside the GM's head".

Of course, as I said, I never came from D&D - I came from programmed adventures in FF gamebooks, and so YMMV.

[knorrrskk]

Interesting blog!

Sept 15, 2010 7:57:36 GMT -5 Dhrrru said:

Loved the 'feel' of T&T; if you don't like the way a particular rule works, make a new one!

To be fair, I believe almost all the pre 2nd edition D&D stuff says the same thing somewhere in them.

First time I saw Tunnels & Trolls, I didn't like it. It was the corgi paperback, and it looked like a glorified gamebook. And if I wanted to play a glorified gamebook, I'd play Fighting Fantasy or Advanced Fighting Fantasy instead. A view not helped by my mate then producing a whole bunch of solos... Besides, I'd just discovered Moldvay-Cook, and this was much more exciting than an awkward to use paperback. Even if it did use race-as-class, which I found most bizarre (still do, though I now look at it in a different way).

Then I found a yellow cover proper version, and my opinion changed drastically.

I still can't stand those corgi books!

Machfront: I don't agree that T&T could stand to be less verbose; its one of the few roleplaying games I own where you can actually read it cover to cover without the desire to just flick about the place.

5th edition (possibly the most verbose?) also explains the way things work in a way that ordinary people can understand much better than pretty much any other game I believe. Well, except perhaps for Fighting Fantasy, but then there's not much to explain there, love it as I do.

I agree with all your other points though, although it took me a much shorter time to come around to T&T. My previous gaming experience had primarily been with games like Everway, so I wasn't expecting the same sort of things.

[Dhrrru]

Sept 16, 2010 12:04:17 GMT -5 knorrrskk said:

To be fair, I believe almost all the pre 2nd edition D&D stuff says the same thing somewhere in them.

Knorrrskk, happy to take your word for it; although I still have the 'Red Box' & 'Blue Box' editions of OD&D on the bookshelf in the spare bedroom, it's been 20 years since I opened either of them!

What annoyed (& still annoys) me about the Corgi editions of T&T 5 materials was/is the pointless (well, to me anyway) changing of spell names (I read somewhere that the editor of the Corgi editions thought some of the spell names were 'silly', which is why they were changed).

Like you, I've never found the various T&T 5 rulebooks too 'verbose'; on the contrary, I & most of the people I've played T&T with have appreciated the expansive, conversational style (as you point out, you can enjoy the T&T 5 rulebook as a straight read from cover-to-cover: & I've never had that experience with a D&D rulebook!). [Mach's quicker on the uptake than I am, so he probably feels he doesn't need the Trollgod to go over game mechanics again & again to make sure a reader 'gets it'.]

[machfront]

I actually like the spell name changes in the Corgi book. -lol-

Not much changed, surprisingly. For some odd reason, if they did indeed change them due to silliness (which is what I've always heard as well), they certainly let a number of "silly" ones alone.

I've a thread HERE that details the name changes between the standard and the Corgi rulebook and also differences in the Corgi solo rules as well.

Fifth Edition is certainly not a beefy tome by any stretch. I guess "verbose" was too great a term for what I meant.
It just seems there's a....disproportionate amount of words spent on very simple rules. Hrrmm... Maybe it's the organization, which I've always thought was a lil funky.
I think 5th is a joy to read as well. It just seems a bit long-winded sometimes.
Of course, then again, trimming out a lot of the text would end up sacrificing flavor and I don't dig on losing flavor.

I dunno. First Edition, UK 1st ed., and Fourth Edition have plenty of flavor and very close to the same amount of rules, but in far fewer pages.

Wow. We do threadjack the heck outta some threads here on the 'Bridge, don't we? ;D Sorry, Hogscape.

By the way, Knorrrskk is correct concerning the make-the-game-your-own-ness that early editions of D&D share. Even AD&D 1st ed., usually thought of to be a game that demands to be played btb, says to change what you want and drop what you don't need,etc.