[Tunnels & Trolls] Killed me a player-character (spit)

[Mike Holmes]

Funny, but when I came to those "Sister/Interesting path" splits, I was always trying to figure out if there was a tactically better way to go or if the author was trying to get me to go in a particular direction. So that I'd do better. Sort of a meta-gamism. I had no interrest at all in whether my character saved the sister at all; unless she was worth points to save...

The over-riding mechanics, to me, made anything other than Gamism just not the point of the game. All color to adventure by.

I remember this with "choose your own adventure" books a lot. What really cheesed me off is how in both this sort of game, and book, you really can't as a player "figure out" what the smart move is. When you get hosed, you almost always feel that the game betrayed you by not giving you a chance to avoid the problem. I mean, it's like you say, Ron, sometimes it was actually "Do you go left (p23) or right (p24)?" And left meant death.

No wonder people cheated. I always did.

Mike

[Ron Edwards]

Hey Mike,

For me, Beyond the Silvered Pane is the best of the Gamist solos, mainly because its "rules" for what was smart and what was dumb were pretty intuitive to pick up (again, for me). It could kill ya, but most of the time, you could see why. Also, it was made up of mini-adventures rather than one long grind, so you could choose how much you'd put yourself at risk - or similarly, how much/long you felt like playing at all. Very different from Naked Doom, for instance.

Best,
Ron

[efindel]

(Hope it's OK to still post to this thread a week later...)

I don't remember if I've mentioned it here before, but here's another bit of foreshadowing of later narrativist systems in T&T...

Last year, I was talking about Story Engine to an old friend, and started telling him about the "cut scene" concept in it.  In SE, a scene which needs resolution is supposed to be coupled to a particular attribute -- Mind, Body, or Spirit.  In order to use a trait under another attribute to affect the resolution, you have to invoke a "cut scene" -- a mini-scene where you do something to affect the main scene, using that trait (or traits).  That mini-scene is resolved, and its resolution "feeds into" the main scene.

My friend then replied that that was just like how magic, missile fire, surprise, and other things work in T&T combat -- since combat rounds are two minutes long, missile fire while closing, say, is resolved as a separate sort of "sub-round" within the main round.  I looked through a T&T rulebook, and that is just how they talk about doing it -- just without the fancy terminology.

--Travis

[ejh]

Ron -- I grew up on T&T, played virtually nothing else from the late 70s to the mid to late 80s.  (Remember, I was born in '69, so when I say I started in the late 70s, I literally grew up playing T&T.)

Is it any wonder I'm allergic to rules-heavy systems, and a sucker for solo play? :-)

Having started out with T&T instead of D&D is kind of like having started out on an Amiga instead of a Mac or PC, or having started out with Lisp instead of C or Java.

You're out there in left field wondering why everybody else likes that boring shit so much, but kind of wishing it weren't so lonely where you are.

Oh, yeah, and the Danforth art, I'm so with you on that.  I grew up defining "good fantasy art" by how much it reminded me of Liz's work. :)