Take This You Fiends

This is the story of an encounter with Tunnels and Trolls by a guy who did not know that much about Tunnels and Trolls and still doesn’t, so if you are a T&T maven and don’t want to hear some half-interested newb bang on, then stop reading now. (Also; they are bringing out a new version of this soon, and by god my post has nothing to do with it! I literally stapled together the rules that I used from ancient box-sets and a PDF, and I ignored most of them.)

7.5

Somehow, I have the boxed set for the 7.5 edition of Tunnels & Trolls on my shelf. I must have bought back around 2009-2011 when I was getting interested in RPG’s . Yet more curious; I have a vague sense impression that I actually read these rules. I remembered nothing of them, but if sitting un-played on a shelf for fifteen years makes an RPG guilty then I don’t want to be innocent.

More recently I was listening to Chris McDowalls ‘Rule of Three’ podcast, where he interviews game makers about three favourite works, and he brought up the story of encountering someone at an Old-School meetup who had only ever played Tunnels and Trolls, and in fact, had only ever been in one campaign of Tunnels and Trolls, and had been gaming for years, this one game, this one world.

Clearly there is something going on with Tunnels and Trolls, I thought, and, foolishly, brought this up in a conversation with the Artist; “maybe that’s the secret, maybe we all should have been playing Tunnels and Trolls all along.”

“Oh, you should run it for us.”

Thus came the curse. My smallest statements are literally engraved on Votans Spear, and I am a pussy, a clock was ticking; could I read and absorb the Tunnels and Trolls ruleset AND develop a dungeon for Tunnels and Trolls in time, and well enough to run an actually functional game? (Watch my reality TV series to find out.)

(tldr; I can. Comments from two of the players, the ‘Rogue’ and the ‘Leprechaun’ are scattered through this post.)

Long hours of digging through this ruleset, producing documents to make sense of it, and writing dungeon ideas on the back of till receipts at work, which provoked some consternation when colleagues looked down to discover that I had been scribbling about Moon Mice and “THERE IS A COUNTDOWN”.

Character Generation

T&T Char Gen begins in a space broadly adjacent to Dungeons and Dragons, with Seven stats (in 7.5 at least) rolled 3d6 and in my case, down the line. Add Gold, a ‘Height and Weight table and so-on. When complete you get essentially three Core classes; Warrior, Wizards and Rogues. (There are more but I won’t get into those). So far so D&D.

What’s different?

TARO

“Remember, triples add and roll-over. This rule always applies in Tunnels and Trolls.” – Ken St Andre

It doesn’t always apply; one of a number of ways the 7.5 ruleset seems to be written by someone with an irregular supply of amphetamines. However, this fascinating and distorting rule probably should apply more fully across the ruleset.

If you roll a triple in Character Generation, you add everything together and roll again, adding the resulting value. If the second roll is also triples, you add and roll again. If the third roll is triples, you add, and roll again.

This means that while the general range of stats for an opening character is likely similar to D&D, it’s possible that one or more players may have one or more stats that are insanely ridiculously high, creating an utterly distorting effect on the game.

And in fact this did happen in the game we played, with one Rogue rolling an insanely massively high CHA score and very mid scores for everything else, resulting in one of the party being or a youngish Matthew McConaughey, roaming around the dungeon just charming the shit out of everyone.

This is important because, like a lot of things essential to T&T, it strongly effects the tone of the world in which you play, the nature of the challenges you face and a range of other things. The wilder the dice curve, the whackier the reality.

The Leprechaun – “T&T produces lawless, erratic game outcomes, but *appears to be* rigorously designed. There are a lot of rules but they don’t really work. The depthless complexity acts as a wax seal that legitimizes the game outcomes. In combat, you do a bunch of calculation and roll a big pile of dice, which is a ritual act that irreversibly moves the game timeframe forward one increment.”

Liz Darnforth

Kindred

Kindred is ‘Race’ in old D&D terms, and while it looks like earlier editions had a relatively narrow range of ‘normal’ Kindred you could be, the 7.5 edition has gone utterly loopy and included stat tables for a gigantic (literally, you can be a Giant), range of possible races, from Skeleton to Vampire to Dragon.

Almost all of these Kindred are measurably better than standard humans. Even Skeletons are a bit better. There are no gates or limits on what Kindred you can be. This means, if you are playing 7.5 as written, you can be literally almost anything and that almost all of these are better than standard human stats.

If you include one or two of these ‘hackable’ or ‘optimisable’ elements in a game ostensibly dedicated to a balanced experience then they are flaws, but if you flood the game with them, then you fundamentally alter the expectations for what kind of game it’s going to be. This is one of a wide range of ways in which Tunnels & Trolls is protected from the negative effects of being Tunnels and Trolls by the fact of it being Tunnels and Trolls, the games own anarchic spirit keeps it… stable?; if you are the kind of person who wants to min-max and powergame, (which you could theoretically do easily in T&T), why on earth would you be playing this loosy-goosey game?

I set bounds that no-one could play a Kindred too large to actually fit in the dungeon. We ended up with one very charismatic human rogue, one Leprechaun (size and weight reduction tables are included) and one Star-Obsessed and (below average for his people) strong dwarf with a BIG AXE.

Talents

Every PC gets one ‘talent’; a particular thing that they do, and this could also conceivably be power-gamed but generally is not. They roll a d6 for their talent value and add this to the stat being used when rolling for this particular thing.

Level

Your Level in T&T provides a number of benefits, and is based explicitly upon your highest essential stat. This means you can start play at Level Zero, Level One, Two, or even possibly Three, and that as your stats fluctuate through play, you can possibly change Level, back and forth, within the range of even one adventure. (NONE of the specifically-designed character sheets I saw online were built with the essential changeability of the PC stats in mind. You are better of just using notepaper.)

Loony Tunes Adventure Gang

It’s clear that through the 7.5 editions it took to reach me, T&T had been through a lot of rules changes and additions. As I will describe later, I think many of these are errors, or at least, non-optimal.

Two things I agree with fundamentally are TARO and the more-recent extended-Kindred chart. I actively want a Loony Tunes Adventure Party with a bunch of whacked-out and distorted stats and a range of weird presences in the game. (How would a Leprechaun react to hanging out with a Vampire?). I think it’s generally fine if someone with crap stats inflates themselves with a Kindred, so long as they actually play that role (remembering they are still a below-average member of their own Kindred). I didn’t set it as a hard rule but I would probably state next time that anyone who gets a TARO roll and a massive single stat, should stay human, but everyone else can pick a Kindred.

In its simplicity, adaptability, broadness of concept, lightness and gonzo-feel, T&T feels well-adapted to the ‘Island of Misfit Toys’ style of play. It also seems to suit well a ‘play whatever/whoever you want’ ethos. So long as you stick with it, and take it seriously (coherent and sustained), though not seriously (with tragic gravity). [The two forms of seriousness will prove a vitally important distinction going forward.]

(I also made the PC’s buy clothes out of their initial gold store, which kept them all relatively poor. Though gold doesn’t matter that much in T&T. (Also, TARO applies to your Gold Roll in Char Gen too, so one PC may just have ‘being loaded’ as their core trait.))

The Rogue - “I liked having to buy my own clothes using the gold generated by character creation, it was like starting out in Oregon Trail or something. I appreciate that the clothes list was long and carefully priced out and if I was in charge I would add even more carefully described clothing choices which could be used to define the character you are playing. What if you sunk it all into one really great jacket, no mechanical effects. Could you describe a jacket in such a way that it is really tempting even if you are gonna have to put that arbalest back on the shelf?”

Liz Darnforth

The Combat Sequence

Farewell happy fields, where joy forever dwells. Hail, horrors, Hail! The Tunnels and Trolls combat sequence makes no sense. Attempts to fix have made it worse.

Conceptually it is brilliant. Once it was simple, intuitive, somewhat baggy and clean to play. I think years of people asking questions (filthy nerds) has ruined it. I tried to boil it back to what I thought was the core; a battle is on, both sides roll all their dice; whoever gets the biggest number wins.

Adventurers and Monsters calculate these differently; Adventurers have Combat Adds derived from their physical stats, and whatever weapon they are using. Monsters have a Monster Rating, which breaks down to their dice rolled (The Monster Rating divided by 10), and their own Combat Adds (Half their Monster Rating). Confusingly, some posh and special Monsters can also have stats like Adventurers, but let’s not even get into that.

Everyone has a big pile of dice. Everyone rolls. Bigger is better.

Over time additions have been made, (as a result of questions). Some wise, most I think not.

One positive addition is ‘spite dice’; every roll of 6 on either side, always counts as damage. I think this was made to amend the horribly brutal attritional effect of these massive dice pools contending over multiple rounds, and it works ok.

Other additions are complex arrangements of specific damage set aside and re-integrated during the round to account for people sniping ranged targets or similar, and specific arrangements of spellcasting where damage from certain spells is accounted like a weapon and the effects of others are placed before-this-and-that etc.

I Ignored Almost All of This

I ran combat description-first, rules-light, quick and high consequence. It ended up not unlike a storygame or a Dowlain modern ruleset.

Surprise Rounds are a slightly weird thing in T&T, (if rounds are truly meant to be around 2 minutes long), and thankfully I was able to ignore them. Likewise I ignored sniping in or out of combat.

How I conceptualised it was like this;

First; describe fully where everyone is and what is going on as combat breaks out, be above all vivid, quick and physically exact. Go round the table asking, quickly, what each character wants to do, or “what do you want to achieve in the next two minutes”. PCs can combine actions, do tricks stunts, etc or anything they like, but they can’t take too long thinking about it Tunnels and Trolls does not respond well to planning.

Second; everyone rolls their dice and we add them all up.

Third; whichever side won inflicts damage, and I describe the events of these two minutes turn out largely as they intended. However, the T&T ruleset does say that the losing side of this can decide who on their own side takes what damage. This infers, and I applied it as such, that the losing side gets some vote in how exactly things turned out in these two minutes. They don’t achieve their aims but they do get to choose events relating to damage to their own side (though not whether they take damage at all).

Last; I tried to go for big, consequential swings in the description of events that would rapidly lead one side or the other to be disadvantaged, to flee, surrender, negotiate, be trapped etc, I did not want this shit going on too long.

Liz Darnforth

Why Ignore the Details?

The game does not seem to want to be played that way.

I think the inclusion of Ranged and Magic attacks being, at some points, their own special thing, is ultimately fucking stupid, as you are rolling to make these special pre-attacks (each of which requires their own segment of the round to work in) and then counting them towards the total value of the HPT? And then at the end, you focus special damage on the specific targets of the magic or Ranged attack? At this stage why are you not just going person-by-person?

Even the rules seem confused about this as the details seem to change from edition to edition.

It looks like the simple, basic concept of the opposed, simultaneous, dice rolls, has been subjected to so many tactical questions and faffing about that over time, it has developed so many exceptions, set-asides, layered sequences and so on that it has, in effect, become exactly as, or even more complex than an equivalent D&D combat turn.

But D&D has the saving grace of being sequential-by-person, so at least while you are faffing with big numbers you are doing them one after another. T&T has the elegant conception of simultaneous action, but that then divided, excepted, specified and detailed so much that now the DM deals with an equivalent cognitive weight to D&D and the initially non-intuitive simultaneous action of T&T at the same time. It seems to me the worst of both worlds.

I forwarded description, and tried to keep it forward. Everything that happens can only be allowed to make sense in terms of what has already been visually and spatially described in natural language. The results of dice rolls feed into this and are fed back out as more description. The vivid description of events fills the need for specificity that the rules either ignore or don’t do well. Most of all its meant to happen light and fast.

The Rogue - “I remember way back starting a D&D game with some friends who had never played before, and at first when we got into fights they would say all these wild ideas of what they were gonna do (’I’m gonna put my bow over his head and grab the string and shoot the arrow in his neck that way”) and then get discouraged as the rules generally would at best penalize for you for trying something different than: hit with sword, watch hp go down. Doing the combat as narrative first, even if that did not have very much to to do with the dice rolls, and then narrative again after all the rolls (deciding how the damage gets doled out) was kinda nice. I am surprised at feeling this way as I do not usually like story game rules.

Everyone goes at once feels more nervewracking & unpredictable as a player: instead of things slowing way down you are all making immediate guesses about what would be best to do, which feels more real than if you have to wait your turn & can adjust your actions based on what happened to the person who went first. On the other hand, every time we got into combat seemed to end after a single dice roll: either we got crushed & ran away or the opposite happened- which on the one hand is hugely superior to sitting around waiting for your turn to hit guy with sword, but sometimes made things seem anticlimactic: players all do one thing each, roll dice, cool that’s it evil is defeated. I guess one has to lean heavily on narrating what’s happened (either on the DM or player side) to make things properly impactful? It’s possible this was just on account of lucky rolls & combats could have taken longer? It seemed like our characters were appropriately balanced to the dungeon though (the leprechaun died)”

Rob Carver

The Leprechaun – “T&T combat as written is almost pathologically bad. We generally want things to be useable and simple; if a ruleset has complexity, each complication should justify itself in producing a better play experience. Instead, the rules work together to produce an appalling result. Rolling a large pool of dice that’s the same every “round” makes it likely that there’s a consistent result, so that combat is guaranteed to feel samey and yield similar outcomes from round to round. But there’s also a disastrous feedback effect: damage reduces your Strength, which gives you lower combat adds and less weapon access, so you roll fewer dice, so you lose faster and faster, and you have to do a bunch of paperwork to figure out how much worse you’re going to do each round.”

Running the Dungeon

it all began to go wrong when they re-named Ralph

Play Time

I came up with a relatively simple 12-room dungeon with a lot if diegetic ‘safety rails’ and potential in-world guidance. The Rogue told me that a normal group will only handle about four rooms an hour, if that, so I planned for two possible sessions of up to four hours each. In fact they cleared the thing in just over two hours. Apparently I run games ‘quickly’(?)

The Rogue - “Patrick DMs like he is driving a bus with a bomb on it.”

Rob Carver

“Take That You Fiend!”

People seemed to like the principal of ‘Saying the Spell Names Out Loud’. I felt like it kept the tone right.

The Leprechaun – “I agree that saying the spell names as though you’re casting them yourself is a splendid idea. You can’t cast a spell without literally saying the magic words.”

Post-Adventure System Issues

I only had to make a single, one-shot adventure so I was saved any of the scaling complexities of ‘how much gold is there’ or ‘what do you do with the gold’? Or any worries about ‘what happens after this adventure? T&T (at least in 7.5) bases advancement on ‘Adventure Points’ which you hand out regularly, mid-adventure, and which can be used, mid-adventure, to improve PC’s stats, which effects what level they are. Gold or treasure is mainly used for buying spells or equipment.

The Leprechaun – “The one idea I was interested in was gaining lots of XP and spending it incrementally whenever you wanted. It really changes the texture of the game to be getting these drips of XP and feel like you could realistically, in one session, change something meaningful about your character. This is also a place where narrative and ruleset dovetail nicely: players can spend their XP to level up a given stat *right before they need it*, which feels like the character rising to meet a challenge.”

Rapid Monster Improvisation

T&T’s Monster Rating is a raw, single number from which are derived both the number of d6’s rolled and the ‘adds’. The ‘adds’ are reduced as the Monster suffers damage while the dice are not. This is perhaps even simpler than the Hit Dice concept and makes inventing, moving and shifting around monsters for change and improvisation relatively easy. It does result in some big dumb dice pools though.

Big Dumb Dice Pools

Everything is based on the d6 and everything is Dice Pools, rolled in big piles, simultaneously. The PC’s add up theirs and the DM adds up the monsters. It’s a lot of adding up. I am not sure how this will actually work once you get into the Monsters with really big numbers or the really big amounts of monsters. I think I recall in some Ken St’Andre ruleset, seeing his rules of thumb for managing huge dice pool numbers, which was essentially multiplying smaller pools, which is fine, but also; it’s your ruleset dude.

The Leprechaun – “3d6 * 6 is a *dramatically* different roll from 18d6 and would totally change the texture of the game. I kept finding things like this in the T&T ruleset. Most early TTRPGs seem “game design naive”, even most modern TTRPGs do. This can make them characterful, or introduce some loveable features by accident, but can also lead to miserable gameplay patterns.”

Liz Darnforth

Growing and Shrinking

Probably inspired by the ‘small’ and ‘large’ tables for character generation in 7.5, I included a shrinking rules in the dungeon. While I may have intended to use some complex coherent system based on alterations to the core stats, in fact I just eyeballed it, using patched together rule-ideas that were systemically inelegant but procedurally quick and functional; I made it up. T&T’s super-simple core stats make it easy to adapt things relatively quickly.

‘Lightness’ and Speed

They re-named the Dragon Continent :-(

It seems to me that the speed of T&T combat, combined with the relative lightness and light comedy of its setting, are key to how this is supposed to work.

The description of events plays a huge shaping part in deciding what seems reasonable to happen in a fight, i.e; is it reasonable that one guy might hide out in a corner and try to snipe with arrows? Is everyone going to end up in a big melee or are they spread out or separated? Is the environment going to do something odd?

The enormous potentiality of this simultaneous-resolution roll is only moderated by a mutual, vivid, lively and quick description of events.

Put simply, this shit falls apart rapidly if you are autistic or power-gamy about it, and gamers do tend to be autistic about everything. There should never be arguments over numbers or spazzy autistic D&D arguments over precisely what the rules should allow – if it seems like it makes sense then it can be done, or tried with a Saving Roll, or if not just a flat ‘no’. If this decision or roll didn’t go well, there will be another along soon! Very soon! And another and another and another.

Conversely, if you are lively engaged, largely trusting, and more committed to acting out an adventure than managing risk though careful play, then you may get a great boon; of a rapid, complex unfolding and multifarious range of combat events which might never happen in another game.

There must be a rapid, and easy exchange of description and descriptive power between the Players and DM, especially in combat. It’s like dancing. It only works if you go in moving and go forward. If you hold back and try to plan and limit risk, or hyper-plan, you fail.

The Leprechaun – “Despite working on TTRPG systems myself, I think the ruleset barely factors into how good a given game session is. I had a wonderful experience playing Mausritter a few years ago and that game is rancid. My actual play experience with T&T was excellent, because you’re a great DM, and [The Rogue], [The Dwarf], and I are good players. I still think I would have preferred a system where every single outcome was decided by coin flip. But then my choice to be a leprechaun wouldn’t have been legitimized by doing a bunch of arithmetic with tables!”

The slight silliness of the setting, along with the ridiculous range of possible ‘Kindreds’ (I can play a Leprechaun with a Bardiche), and the slightly light tone, all help to control and manage the kinds of personality drawn to the game and the way that they play. (A meta-game effect like a Gonzo X-Card).

I feel like getting rid of this (slight) silliness and trying to make the setting and the game answer more ‘normie’ Fantasy questions actually ruins it. The absence of tangles and argument is just an effect I can describe of a cause it’s hard to define; it is the spirit of the game. It’s why the Dragon continent is shaped like a Dragon and (should still be) called ‘Ralph’. If you don’t like the idea of running, or playing on, a ‘Dragon Continent’ shaped like a Dragon, and called ‘Ralph’, or of a Skeleton teaming up with a Dwarf, a Vampire and an Elf, then the game has done its job.

The Rogue - “Maybe it is not so important that a game system have any particular level of seriousness as that it have like, any discernable character at all? While there’s a utility in basic fantasy tropes ( everyone knows what a dwarf is like so it is easy in your personal character to subvert or exemplify it) most world building in game systems ends up just being like the collecting of influences listed on such as a Kickstarter page as a reassurance that you won’t find anything too surprising or new here.

Anything in the games rules/setting that is discernably created by a real idiosyncratic human ( whether that is being unfashionably comic or having edges that are not sanded off entirely) is a chance to have an actual experience of art that’s your own interaction with another real person not with a corporation or like sales goals and it’s worth forgiving a lot of shakiness of rules and so on to get that.”

This is also built into the nutty world-creation of ‘Tunnels and Trolls; Trollworld is literally built on wizards. Or at least, huge numbers of whacky wizards have inhabited it over time, burrowed into its crust and disappeared under the earth, building their own strange ‘magical realms’, which form the nuclei of, one would assume, huge tunnel complexes. In in-world history is literally ‘a wizard did it’. Gonzo dungeon design is the actual geology of Trollworld. Gonzo, or a Toybox, or very ‘Dungeony’ gamified non-naturalistic dungeons work well with this ruleset and play experience. It’s not a ‘flat’ game, either in its aesthetic, or the probability curves that underlie it. I am not sure if its modern re-creators have grasped this.