Man, all of my best gaming seems to happen in Oulu. I live something like 300 kilometers from the city, but I visit a couple of times per year for conventions and such. They have excellent players and atmosphere there, seems that you can't go wrong. Can't know what you're going to play, either - I was going to playtest my new TSoY material, but instead I ended up playing mostly Tunnels & Trolls. For some reason the guys in Oulu haven't even seen the game before, so it was all new to them. The reception was very excited and the comparisons to red box D&D favorable; my local friend Olli ordered the game for himself in the middle of the convention on the strengths of its performance. It was somewhat embarrassing how the folks seemed to agree that this is a much cooler game than my own, on-going D&D hack.

I'd packed T&T with me as a fallback plan sort of thing, so I didn't actually have anything prepared for it. My relationship with T&T is in something of a flux as I create houserules and try to tame the game to a place where I'd be happy with it myself. This time the guys wanted to play very much by the book, which I accepted on the premise that I'd mix my favourite rules from the 5th and 7th edition and keep good hold of my authority as the setting manager regardless of the Trollworld setting in the book - I don't like the setting much, not colored to my taste.

Although the play itself was mostly improvised, I was very pleased with the quality of the fictional world that I spun in the dance with the players. The default Tunnels & Trolls style is pretty jokey and "dungeon fantasy" in flavour, while these sessions took a strong turn towards homely fairy tale sort of stuff: the monsters were goblins, wolves and brackish, the challenges a sort of tribal war in the wilderness with a 7 Samurai finale. I lifted the whole setting out of the early history of Savonia, with goblins in the place Karelians. It was great fun to describe the wildernesses of my hearthland to the Ostrobothnians (another Finnish tribe) I played with, and the colonization of Savonia provided an excellent background for the tribal skirmishes between the Tavastian colonists and the goblins. All in all the fantasy layer on top of the historical scenario was just deliciously thin and fun.

The player stock cycled through the weekend, but I had 3-5 players at the table for the sessions, and there was enough overlap to preserve continuity. On Sunday T&T had to clash most powerfully with In a Wicked Age, but the latter proved a timorous loser for players who were hooked to trying to reach level 3.

Rules

Many parts of Tunnels & Trolls fictional style are pretty contrary with my own likings in fantasy fiction, so I used my powers to the utmost: I didn't have time to work out many details, and the players wanted to play without major houserules, so my rules toolbox wasn't quite completely honed. Still, I like the dynamics I managed to establish. For instance, I allowed the players to choose the race of their character from three options:

• Humans: The default sort of people, liked well enough by their kin. Humans get the "tripples roll over" rule in character generation.
• Overmen: Or "Numenorians", as I called them simply. They get even more explosive dice in chargen: if they roll a double in stat generation, they get to roll those two dice again. The overmen are a superior breed of people who often worry about blood purity, being a minority among other people. They are no longer rulers, having been ousted and forced to live a life of adventure, banditry and drifting beggary. Consequently they only get minimal gold to begin with, just enough for their basic needs.
• Goblins: Civilized goblins can gain human rights by getting a tattooed mark of the king. Goblins get 1.5 multipliers in strength and constitution, but suffer a .66 multiplier in the mental abilities. They also get the extra talent "Goblin", useful for seeing in the dark, eating human flesh (an issue for survival in the wilderness) and especially knowing about the ways of their monster kin.

The players chose to play the different races pretty equally, so obviously I was quite successful in offering good deals. I especially liked the fact that I myself didn't get the fantasy race dissociation syndrome I tend to suffer from when a full-blown D&D game gets underway and I try to imagine the fictional world with all those weird inhuman critters living side by side. The goblins here provided just the right touch of alieness, while also being thinly disguised foreigners whose inhumanity I could ignore at will; the folklore connection helped as well, Finnish forest otherworlds obviously have lots of goblins.

Ruleswise I played it pretty close to the book, especially as that was what the players wanted. I saved myself from the agony that are the 7.5 talents, though - instead of giving a couple of bonus points on talent checks I allowed the players to reroll their saving rolls when the talent applied. Prettier system aesthetics for me in that. Another bigger thing I did was that I dropped the Speed attribute as superfluous. Other than talents and Speed... I think those are pretty much the only major rules I finangled. I allowed wizards to use "soul sight" to evaluate Wiz strengths of other characters, allowed rogues to start with two talents and that sort of thing, but those are all par for the course in T&T GMing.

Dungeons and monsters

As this was an improvised setting and adventure, I was pretty minimalistic in what I did. This works very well in Tunnels & Trolls, and I'm quite happy with the stuff I created. I could well imagine using this material again at some point.

Wilderness was my basic dungeon level 1. The colony town of Borlog (a thin fantasy name, no Finnish significance) was situated in the middle of the woods, which teemed with goblins. The crown had encouraged the colonization efforts with free land grants and promises of 10 gold piece fees for goblin ears (left ones, which obviously had to be specified for the intrepid adventurers). Borlog was a choice destination among the frontier settlements due to the critical situation: the local farmers had increased the crown's bounty by half again in the hopes of attracting adventurers to take care of the goblin problem.

The major challenge in first level proved to be in charting the wilderness, learning to plan supplies for extended wilderness treks and finding the goblins in the woods. The first fatality came about when a player character opted to take on a bunch of goblins alone instead of organizing the party for the fight; the players learned pretty quickly in practice what they hadn't listened to when I told it to them in words: this is not a narrativistic drama game, nobody's going to congratulate you for getting your character and the party killed. It took the players a bunch of encounters to learn how to take out the goblins by preparing the battleground, focusing their forces and in general playing ruthlessly. It was obviously rather rewarding when they finally managed to wipe out a goblin scouting party after getting three characters killed and others humiliated several times.

Goblins were my simple stock monster, the same guys that were also available as player characters. Monster Rating 20 made them horrifying opponents for players used to the easy "20% of your resources" encounters in modern D&D. The goblins in the wilderness were all part of roving raiding parties that moved in groups of roughly 3+d6 members; the number of players in the game fluctuated through the weekend, but most of the time the goblin parties provided a good challenge that required concerted effort, preplanning and knowing when to let a catch go. Lootwise the goblins had spears, clubs, leather armor, that sort of stuff - nothing major, except when they were coming back from their raiding, at which point they had human stuff as loot starting with cows and copper pots.

Wolves were something I brought in after the players finally managed to overcome some goblins and gained confidence. They were just Monster Rating 5, but it was quite gratifying how careful the players were with the new and unknown adversary. They were especially freaked when they noticed that one of the wolves was a larger variety the party goblin recognized as a "goblin hound", a cunning dire wolf worth at least three normal ones. They didn't close in to melee with the wolves, but the hound would have been worth MR 20 like the goblins.

Goblin cave was a 2nd level dungeon the players found by interrogation and tracking. It was abandoned when they got there, but a further tunnel brought them to the brackish encounter I wrote at Story Games a while back. I love those critters! The players were thoroughly creaped out by the brackish and the whole situation with the collapsed bridge, so much so that they ultimately didn't dare to engage the brackish or try to cross the river to delve deeper into the cave. The brackish would have been MR 10 a pop, but they also had a Slough worth MR 25 - and there were something like 8 normal brackish, so perhaps the beginner adventurers were smart to pass on this one.

The characters got some real loot out of the goblin cave, though. The amber necklaces they found would have helped them negotiate with the brackish, but they didn't make the connection and instead sold the jevelry in town.

Goblin land is a very bad translation for another 2nd level dungeon I had... the Finnish term is "Hiitola", it's a forest otherworld deep in the in-land wilderness, ruled by the goblins. "Goblinia" would be sort of an exact translation, at least if it were an Eastern European country. Anyway, it seemed like the players were sort of freaked out when they got lost in the wilderness and stumbled into Goblinia - all the more so when I told them that finding your way out of Goblinia and into the human lands is a 3rd level SR, except if you're a goblin, for which it is just 1st level. I just adored how the characters managed to soon after encounter a group of goblins that killed their only goblin, leaving the rest of the party stranded in the strange wilderness. Luckily the only survivor had enough of a presence of mind to shadow the party of goblin raiders as they left for human lands.

Commentary

Some notes on Tunnels and Trolls as a game system:

The 7th edition of the rules has removed the connection between experience levels and experience points, which is actually a very good move for the game. What this means is that there is now no structural benefit to having super-high initial ability scores, which again means that the non-human races are finally balanced! Earlier I was pretty annoyed by the permanent advantage a high roll or a good race would give a character, but in the 7th edition rules a Strength score of 25 literally just means that your character starts at 2nd level instead of 1st. This is quite acceptable to me, as opposed to having some characters be qualitatively better than others with no mechanical recourse.

I personally am not very concordant with the ability matrix and the SR gauging in the game. I can hack it, but to make myself really comfortable, I'd need to switch the abilities into something less abstract and more rooted in the fiction. For example, I changed the attribute "Wizardry" (a great addition to the game, by the by) into "Soul" to give it a bit more generic usability in the various SR situations that crop up. I imagine that if I spent time thinking about it, I'd probably change the abilities quite a bit.

The combat system of the game is a marvel: a very early rpg rules set that is still fresh and relevant, extremely realistic and flexible... I fell in love with it all over again now that we played T&T for the first time in ages. It's amazing what you can do with the MR system, which we used to shape the farmers in town into a credible defending militia against the goblins in the adventure finale. I'm also very happy with the 7th edition expanded spite damage conception - spite damage dice are sort of special ability activators that can be expended to cause a point of directed, armor-ignoring damage to an opponent, but may also be used to activate magic items, special attacks and whatnot. I know already that the next time we're playing I'll give fighters the ability to learn special moves that get triggered with spite dice, as a sort of counterpart to the spells wizards get. I don't like how much more crunch wizards get as compared to fighters, so this is a very clean method for leveling the field in that regard.

(Counting dice results is a pain in the ass, though. A dice roller program would be a necessity for high-level play with its hundreds of d6.)

Speaking of wizards, I didn't like the rules-mandated thing where wizards get all the first-level spells in the book. It took the longest time to write down all those spell names, and the wizard player had to spend all available downtime familiarizing himself with what he could do. Things were not helped by the 7.5 edition box and the additional spell book it contains; even more 1st level spells for the player to riffle through. This is definitely a spot where it would be appropriate to give the wizard one first level spell plus one per a point of Intelligence over 12 - chosen by the GM, too, to make it quicker. Look to D&D for fixes, in other words.

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.

A final thought is that if I were going to run a full campaign of this, I'd have to think very carefully about setting SR difficulties and the experience rewards related to them. It's sort of screwy that you can get more experience points from more difficult SRs even when the risks are not commensurate. (I'm discussing the 7.5 xp rule here; I seem to remember that the 5th edition had a separate formula for failed SRs, which helped with this.) I guess it's my job as the GM to screw over the player who fails his SR, but sometimes that is relatively difficult even with modern conflict resolution technique. The natural response to this is to not allow SRs when there is no risk present, which sort of makes sense (it's a saving roll, after all, not a skill check), but requires training a new thought pattern: all tasks in the game succeed automatically, unless they involve some sort of risk. This means that a character shooting a wolf, say, will actually automatically hit and do damage if there is no personal risk involved.

Hi Euro,

Bravo on the kill! I don't mean for making it, but just for following whatever procedure involved and an actual death occuring. I guess it doesn't need a bravo, but it's nice to see some actual meat on the table. Evidence that death can somehow happen in a roleplay game sessions happening out there in the world, every now and then.

Perhaps it's my own drift, but why did the player write out all the spells anyway? Why not just write a few and hell, if he dies because of it, okay, he needed to put more effort in? Why the attempt to get it all under his belt the first time? Or is it the same reason as the whole weapons catalog pouring over? I have to say, to me that's the gamist equivalent of story before. Solving everything (or alot of things) in advance of play, during character creation.

And what do you mean by...

Luckily the only survivor had enough of a presence of mind to shadow the party of goblin raiders as they left for human lands.

Sure, we had several deaths - three at least. Basically the players had to go into several abortive encounters with the goblins before they learned that escaping might be a survival strategy for the individual, but those who fail their SRs to escape are then left worse off, and nobody actually gains anything by going into those fights half-prepared and then escaping immediately. The players only started getting results when they rigged the field, attacked from surprise, used spells and actually combined their combat strengths for the combat rounds instead of, say, spending the round escaping. It was pretty amusing how the players complained about the goblin encounters being overwhelmingly powerful before they got the hang of it, and how much more confident they were about encountering the small goblin army later after they'd tasted the sweet victory.

I didn't have any problem killing off player characters myself, I've done enough of this sort of thing - and I'm naturally adept at following procedure, so if the game is about killing of PCs, then that's what I do. The people I played with in Oulu were very highly skilled as well (the city has a very high quality of roleplayer in general), so they got the hang of it quickly. It was pretty fun how the first character got killed in the first fight, after which I told the player to reroll the stats and reuse the rest of the character sheet if he was happy with the concept and didn't want to change it.

As for spells, the player playing a wizard wanted to list them to get a handle on what the wizard could do. Understandable, certainly. A spell he doesn't know about is a spell that is effectively not in the game, after all. I imagine that if I were playing the game routinely I'd definitely figure out some practical compromises for these game-slowing chargen steps. The equipment lists would probably fly out, and the wizards would get just a couple of spells instead of the huge bunch. Or if the huge bunch is necessary (it is sort of fun that the wizard can do a lot of things), then abstract them away and just have the player pay magic points to improvise 1st level magical effects; if the wizard is going to have all those spells anyway, then detailing them just gets in the way.

Hi Eero

This might be somewhat off as a question, but I have done very little dungeoneering in the last past years. The little I did was quite abrupt gamist, and the players would concentrate on the combat and optimization. Hardly any descriptions of character and even less inter-character discussions, except when the paladin did his "oh, I can't do that: I'm good" trick, which nearly killed the session.
My question to you is, what did a typical fight scene have? Just tactical descriptions, tactical descriptions with colour, some gratuitous character portrayal to increase character credibility? What about between fights? Did the players brag to each other about their character's merits? What about the characters themselves?

Hey Callan, listen to the intro of this interview with Eero. I'm sure you'll find the pronunciation of his name interesting.

To tell the truth, I've pretty much lost any hope of getting rid of "Euro". And don't listen to that podcast, I sound just awful in it.

You should know, Christoph, that Tunnels & Trolls enforces the fiction very strongly. It's nearly impossible to run a satisfactory combat encounter without having the fiction play a major role. The players will often be in trouble tactically if they don't leverage the fiction in inventive ways. For instance, the first time the players in our game actually managed to win a combat against a goblin party was when they chose the terrain for themselves and used it to their advantage, plunging something like half of the goblins into a gorge at the beginning of the fight. In general, the effective way of playing the game is to always be on the lookout for ways to do things that make sense in the fiction.

Gratuitous character portrayal was always pretty common, which is mostly because of the flow experience: everybody was enjoying play and liked the setting, so we added to the fiction in different ways. Most of the time in between challenge situations (fights included) was spent in a mix of abstract planning and snippets of fiction used to negotiate and pace the game forward. So the players would make a plan about doing something, I'd call for a Saving Roll, I'd describe the result, the players would go back to planning, we'd perhaps jump back to the day before to find out what happened to something we needed in the current plan, then again some planning, some rolls, and so on, until we'd navigated play into the next challenge situation on terms acceptable to both the GM and the party.

The interaction between characters tends to be relatively low-key in this sort of game most of the time, simply because a party adventure game like this has a lot of interaction between the players already and thus allows the players and characters to interact simultaneously, so to speak. This is not to say that the characters didn't interact independent of player interaction at times. For instance, the wizard player noticed that he had a spell for removing body hair (T&T has some pretty weird spells), which he then used at an appropriate moment as a physical gag on another character. For the most part complex backstory and radically forced character nature are non-existent in this sort of game, though.

Hmm, this sounds very interesting. I had missed some of those points in our hardcore D&D 3 gaming, where I was really trying hard to present interesting situations (as the GM) and not let combat be played by the sole use of the rules. It looks like T&T somehow makes it evident. I wonder if it's just me being too easy on the player characters or if there are some design considerations that help in T&T.

So, how do you decide if there is a gorge that the players can exploit? Is this done via a roll or just GM fiat?

Damn, sorry, Eero! If it's any consolation, Callum and Calvin (and once...David?) tend to be used over and over in RL for me.

A spell he doesn't know about is a spell that is effectively not in the game, after all.

I imagine that if I were playing the game routinely I'd definitely figure out some practical compromises for these game-slowing chargen steps. The equipment lists would probably fly out, and the wizards would get just a couple of spells instead of the huge bunch. Or if the huge bunch is necessary (it is sort of fun that the wizard can do a lot of things), then abstract them away and just have the player pay magic points to improvise 1st level magical effects; if the wizard is going to have all those spells anyway, then detailing them just gets in the way.

It was pretty fun how the first character got killed in the first fight, after which I told the player to reroll the stats and reuse the rest of the character sheet if he was happy with the concept and didn't want to change it.

Christoph: Yeah, the rules are a major part of it. The direction D&D has taken in the 3rd edition is a major obstacle for flexible, fiction-based combat encounters simply because there are no rules in the game for flexible case-by-case adjudication. In modern D&D you literally shouldn't listen to the GM's descriptions of the fictional situation and try to think of what you'd do if you were the hero; that sort of thinking will lead you to play in suboptimal ways for the most part, and it's considerably better to learn the rules paradigm of the game to heart and optimize towards that, whether it be by spamming opportunity attacks, with reach weapons or whatever else. T&T, which leaves the GM a very clear role in interpreting the fiction and creating rulings, places the fiction first: if the GM said something and you reacted to it with something that "should" work, then by rights it will in this sort of game. In modern D&D, by comparison, the game designer has determined that objective rules are more important than making sense in the fiction. Players won't try rare or inventive strategies, as this mostly means that the game grinds to a halt while the rules are looked up and the tactic will fail anyway if the character doesn't have the right complement of feats to empower said tactics. Consider things like disarming, feinting, tripping an opponent, sundering weapons, grappling... they all have subsystems in 3rd edition D&D, subsystems that tend to marginalize these descriptive and fun tactics, making them something that only get spammed by characters who buy the necessary feats to do them. In T&T these same tactics are available to all characters, and their ease and usefulness depends solely on realism in the fictional situation as adjudicated by the GM.

As for choosing the battleground, that's pretty simple: why is party A going into the battle? Why is party B going into it? Which one of them has the initiative in choosing the time and the place? In the case of the large boulder and the gorge the party had located the main path used by the goblins in their travels between the human kingdom and Goblinia, which meant that they could choose their battleground pretty easily as long as it was along the trait. As the characters didn't care which goblins they'd encounter (they were just trawling for goblin ears), it was just a matter of choosing a suitable ambush spot and waiting patiently for the goblins to appear. In practice I had the party tactician roll a SR to see if his character'd recognize a good ambush spot when he saw it, but in principle the players could just describe what sort of terrain they wanted, and if there were such available, they'd get it. So that's how we ended up with the large boulder (cover) and the gorge (a place to drop goblins in), both relatively common things in Savonia.

Callan: your approach seems perfectly appropriate to me, something like that could probably work well. When it comes to weapons, though, I have a pretty intense dislike for the whole fantasy game paradigm - I'm apparently a stickler for realism or something, but it just annoys me that you deal more damage in combat the larger your weapon is. It makes even less sense in T&T, in which fighting points are very clearly not simply damage. I'm not getting any sort of excitement personally from the idea that the weapons characters use have some sort of qualitative difference for their efficiency. Not getting an erection at the thought that my character is dual-wielding sabers, as it were. If different weapons need to affect something, I'd rather see it being some sort of "right tool for the right job" thing as it is in reality. So I could certainly keep the equipment lists and just give the characters some GM-determined stuff to begin with (suggested in the 7.5 rules, by the way), but that's still not ideal for my own purposes as long as the system insists on making the weapon choice a major determinant in combat effectiveness.

As to the purpose of house rules, I've been wondering about that myself. Give me a Forge game, and I'll probably play it quite a while before starting to houserule. But give me a traditional fantasy game like D&D, T&T or Runeslayers, say, and I'll be at it like a busy bee immediately. No idea why this is, except that maybe I just don't like dungeoneering fantasy and want to strip the genre out of any fantasy adventure rules I use. These equipment rules in T&T, for instance, are not a problem in any way mechanically, except for the slow character creation when first-timers try to learn the list; even then I'm hot to trod with some rules to replace the stupid axe vs. sword comparisons. If I never have to explain to anybody again what a bec de corbin is, I'll die a happy man.

Hullo,

I was the wizard player in our game in Oulu. I wrote down all the spells, because it was made clear that if we didn't have it on our character sheet, we didn't have it. I wanted those spells, because a major thrill of playing a wizard for me was studying those spells and trying to think up ways to use them. Most of the spells are quite useless or useful only if you are really imaginative so if I would have had to pick a few, I'd rather not play wizard at all. If you are going to be spamming sword attack only, why be a wizard?

The weapons lists sure are oldskool and are perhaps a part of the oldskool charm of the game. They did slow down the game in character creation, but a warriors most distinctive traits are his choice of weapons and armor. Also, buing new and better weapons & armor were a major part of "savoring the kill" after actually winning something. This is understandable, because by my recogning we won one encounter in the 5-6 hours of game play.

This brings me to a percieved problem in the play. Of the 5 or so encounters I was involved, 3 were unwinnable, we won one and one we could have won, if we had not been so neurotic in trying to gouge the strenght of our adversary. We had 3-4 mostly first level characters (my wizard was 2nd level, because I had charisma 25, but all the spellcasting attributes were first level stuff), our combat totals were smaller than normal, because we didn't have speed attributes and a typical encounter was something like 8-20 MR20 goblins + maybe a leader of MR30-40?

In the first encounter we tried to search for goblins in the woods. I succeeded in my saving roll, so we found them when we were asleep! The 8 goblins (MR160) we found would have kicked our asses even if we had been awake. Should I have specified that I tried to find them while awake or would the right answer have been to specify a long list of standard party protocols of how we travel, sleep etc. before leaving town?

In the third encounter I succeeded in a hard roll to find a favorable battleground for us and described a path surrounded by really thick woods so that we could limit the amount of adversaries we had to fight at once. Enter 20+ strong goblin posse with MR30+ leaders. I proceeded to gauge the real strenght of the adversary by asking a series of questions and working my calculator to find out the odds. At first the encounter clearly seemed unwinnable and after some calculation it was clear that we had no chance. There was no challenge!

As the game was coming to a close, we had to quit, because I had enrolled in another game, but to tell you the truth, I wasn't really that interrested in defending the town. I knew already that we would lose anyway, because I felt that even if I succeed in training a kickass militia etc., the successes would not matter.

I did appreciate the challenge, but I would have liked a fair challenge more.

That said, I do have to say that Tunnels & Trolls style gamism beats D&D anyday. I really liked the fact that using your imagination was rewarded and actively encouraged. I also loved the retro aspects of the game and the Savonia color was cool.

My proudest moments in the game were:

• Adjusting my arguments just right in a reasonable/silly -scale in a key social challenge to get the difficulty high enough to gain a lot of experience, but still win.
• Winning an encounter against the goblins.
• Finding a use for the "That's a Close Shave" -spell. ;)

Ah, perhaps I'll need to explain some GM calls here:

The first encounter with the goblins was mandated by a Luck SR, which basically meant that your characters were "lucky" enough to stumble on some; there was no planning in the encounter on either side. It just happened to be during the night on a whim, as goblins are nocturnal. I didn't particularly intend for the nighttime encounter to be a major difficulty that'd lead to a surprise attack - it mainly became such because the one player whose character succeeded in his SR chose to hide under his blankets and play ninja instead of declaring that he was standing guard and would rouse the others at a sign of trouble; you'll remember that I asked him to pick for himself whether his success meant that he woke up or that he had, in fact, been on guard. I have no idea what Sipi was thinking, he essentially decided that you didn't have guards in place.

As for the difficulty of the encounters, most of those goblin encounters were with 4-6 goblins, MR 20 apiece. That's not excessive in my mind for a group of 3-5 adventurers to face, and I think you adapted to it just fine with time. I'm sure different GMs play differently, but I don't see any particular value in just creating encounters that are intended to be won handily. More interesting to throw some shit together based on the setting and then let actual play prove which encounters are easy and which are hard.

Your choice with the unwinnable encounter was the right one, by the by - I hadn't intended for the encounter to be winnable on those terms, just wanted to see if you'd try anyway. That was the challenge there. The point of the encounter was mostly to introduce the idea that the goblins were moving larger groups with warlords into the area - also, you might have been able to follow them discreetly to strike at a smaller group if they split up (as they did when they got to the human lands), or to find out where they set up their HQ. The choice of hurrying to town to rouse the farmers into defense wasn't a bad one, either.

For the town, I don't know where you got the idea that you couldn't win the fight for it. The defense plan wasn't bad to my mind. The goblins also have their own problems and priorities, they weren't going to march straight in and risk a face-on encounter with the royal cavalry in the area. I didn't get the chance to work out the exact numbers, but I do know that you'd have been surprised when the goblin attack actually didn't come even nearly at the time you expected, only to come a week later - at which point your militia might have already scattered and the king's cavalry potentially come and gone. There might have been some early skirmish with some wolfriding goblins before then, too, to provoke you into taking the initiative in bleeding the goblins before the big fight.

Anyway, that's details. The more important thing is that you clearly didn't think that I was being impartial in my GMing. How come? You also played pretty nice at the time, I had no clue you were dissatisfied with my calls. Do speak up more, feedback is the only way for anybody to improve their GMing.

Eero wrote:
Anyway, that's details. The more important thing is that you clearly didn't think that I was being impartial in my GMing. How come? You also played pretty nice at the time, I had no clue you were dissatisfied with my calls. Do speak up more, feedback is the only way for anybody to improve their GMing.

No problem, it's interesting to hear how others view sessions. For instance, I don't remember coming out and saying that I'm trying to kill the PCs - I might have said that, but that certainly wasn't a goal for me. Interesting challenges might lead to fatalities for characters, but that's life in T&T. Usually I express this more along the lines that there is no plot protection for PCs, but I guess I might confuse things by saying that I'm "trying to kill PCs".

Luck was the only way to find the goblins in the scenario before the group scouted Goblinia and met the old fisherman, thus learning more about the routes the goblins used, but that first ambush wasn't exactly due to luck. I was thinking more along the lines of your nightguard alerting everybody and then seguing into a nice little skirmish in the light of a campfire or some such. Doesn't go that way always, but that's freedom in roleplaying for you. I did lightly upbraid Sipi for endangering the party with useless grandstanding, if you'll remember - he should know better, having played several sessions with me during this winter's old school binge.

Anyway, that's nitpicking. A longer campaign would no doubt be different, not the least because everybody would have an opportunity to calibrate their gaming better - more entertaining challenges, more appropriate contingency procedures and so on and so forth. Tunnels & Trolls has no rules for balancing encounters like D&D does, so the game is very much dependent on all players calibrating their play to reach an equilibrium in what the players expect and what the GM throws at them.

I meant that you stated above, that you meant to kill PCs. During the session, youjust said it would be hard.

I think Eero said he was going to follow procedure, and if procedure wants a character dead, he's happy to continue following procedure. Though I'll grant that alot of the time in most RPG's, what someone thinks is the procedure is often self invented (oh, I've been there a few times...that I know of. Dread to think of how many times I didn't know I was doing it). So if it was self invented, isn't that the direct intention to kill a PC? That's an odd place and I'd say no, even if it were self invented I'd say Eero was, in good will, following procedure as he saw it (hope you don't mind me saying so, Eero). But at the same time, that's why I focus alot on getting procedure ever so clear cut (as clear cut as a maths equation) and without ambiguity (if anyones interested in what's been called my investigation into rules and fun). Good will is nice and means things are good overall. But it is not enough, IMO. Umm, so yeah, it's worth considering when looking at who intended what.

Eero,

Your choice with the unwinnable encounter was the right one, by the by - I hadn't intended for the encounter to be winnable on those terms, just wanted to see if you'd try anyway. That was the challenge there. The point of the encounter was mostly to introduce the idea that the goblins were moving larger groups with warlords into the area

I'm with you on procedures, Callan. And they're often self-implemented and self-regimented, I know exactly what you mean - these games simply don't have the huge amount of rules procedures that you'd need if you wanted to be able to point at them from a book. So instead the GM constantly regulates himself with these small subgames. An example from the convention was the way I decided to deal with the "wilderness" as three concentric zones centered on the town the PCs used as their HQ - I then used this zone structure to regulate strategic-level travel movement of characters and monsters, as well as setting difficulties for various checks. Much of this sort of procedural systematization is invisible to players even when I do a lot to make my rules procedures obvious, so it might seem that I'm just lifting stuff out of thin air. What makes it more complicated is that sometimes we are lifting the stuff out of the air, specifically when new scenario elements are introduced.

As for the unwinnable combat, there was just one of those situations in the game. It was rather obviously different from the other goblin encounters: while the normal encounters had been 4-6 goblins, this one had something like 30 goblins and 10 dire wolves, and some of those goblins were obviously some sort of chiefs based on their armaments. So it wasn't difficult by any means to make the call to not attack them, although I liked the math the players did to figure out their chances. Had they attacked, the T&T rules system would have made the battle relatively short, so that wasn't a problem. There's also the fact that while I characterize this encounter as "unwinnable", that doesn't mean anything in mechanical or procedural terms, it's just my own judgment - had the players decided to attack (surprise, terran advantages) and then proceeded to win, then obviously it wasn't as unwinnable as I thought. I'd definitely play the combat procedure out in full to find out what happens in such a combat, however desperate; I'd especially do this in T&T, which is very friendly to alternate goals, scaling back your objectives and other such wrinkles. Without playing through the combat we don't find out which characters escape, which surrender and so on.

Normal encounters? I was never involved in a encounter that had less than 7 goblins if you don't count the encounter with the wolves.

Hmm...

The difference with the brakish encounter and the forest encounter was that while we couldn't have beaten the brakish in combat, it was kinda cool to gauge their strenght. You know, even if they were total ninjamonsters, there was some uncertainty and the challenge was to realize that we couldn't beat them. We even devised a way to get past them with a boarding bridge of sorts, because now way we would give up the amber, because it was more treasure that we had ever seen in our life!

Also the terrain and the situation was cool.

The forest scene, as I saw it, however, a clearly unbeatable opponent, that on close inspection was still unbeatable, partly because our saving rolls generated terrain didn't effect them much. We tried to find a place where we could limit the amount of goblins we had to fight, so you'd think that it would be an ideal place to encounter 20+ goblins, but the goblins are tough customers.

I wasn't in on the Hiitola/Goblinia part of the adventure, so I didn't know how they trailed the goblins then, but last time we had to try something sneaky we had to roll individually, so I estimated that it would have something like 80% chance of failing.

My point is, that in terms of challenge, this was a null encounter. How are you supposed to step on up if running away is clearly the only choice?

But hey, don't take this the wrong way! I had tons of fun playing. I even ordered the game from the States. It's just that I don't think that getting to the point that players are too neurotic to engage much weaker opponents or don't believe in the chances of winning (I definetly read Sipi's actions in the town defence as defeatist) is worth bragging about.

That's a good viewpoint, Olli. The GM is often in a blind spot when it comes to picking up player reactions, I had no idea you found the whole set-up desperate as opposed to just challenging, and I thought Sipi just flavoured play with his character's role and was confident about the encounter with the goblins; the game's played for fun, after all, so why not take some risks and try to play a cool character.

So it wasn't difficult by any means to make the call to not attack them

Agreed, again. GMs are powerful figures and intensely problematic in roleplaying. It's difficult to be objective about them.

The way I myself saw that meeting with the oversized enemy force wasn't at all that I was railroading - rather, I was just introducing a new element, an organized goblin attack on the human lands. The players could have chosen to trail the goblins, send their own goblin to spy on them, commit to a hit-and-run war of attrition against them or any number of other things; even the choice they made was hardly "running away" when they decided to return to town and start preparing it against the imminent goblin attack. It was hardly a null scene in my mind - which of course doesn't mean that it wasn't that to the players. A new group with no history of communication, so of course we'd communicate to cross-purposes here and there.

It's all about perception. Maybe if we had played the town defence out, all the events prior to it would have gained new significance. :)

I feel that perhaps with extended play, the players would learn to keep a more open mind in terms of framing the challenges they encounter. I guess we had two major frames of mind to learn out of. The first one is the heroism thing. In a game like this, you just have to play lowlifes, who kill rats and employ hit&run style guerrilla tactics against foes and view an escape against a superior foe, a victory.

I seem to remember that RuneQuest was once like that, except that often the enemies were lowlifes like yourself and combat against the broo was more like throwing some attack spells and rocks to test the other side, before one or both parties withdrew.

The second kind of brain damage would be the boxed in encounter thing. D&D and such games tend to train you into thinking that each encounter is boxed in like an fight in a JRPG. Perhaps it's the same thing with scene based narrativism, I don't know. In a game like this, you should think outside the box and come up with victory conditions of your own instead and note that the world outside of the encounter still exists.

I could see someone playing as a kind of midfielder fulfilling this role or perhaps it would be a cool procedure for the players to have a short discussion about what should they try to achieve in each encounter. It would be somewhat similar to the thing that you do in The Mountain Witch, but actually this kind of reframing is pretty natural with everyone just assuming what the goal should be.

I don't know. What do you guys thing?

That's it, Olli, you hit the nail in the head! Both of those are definitely part of the assumptions in this style of game, assumptions which I didn't lecture about too much through the game. It was more show and tell, but in hindsight it's obvious that the compartmentalized encounter thing would make much of the process of the game seem weird for the unprepared player.

Structured leadership is a feature I'm very fond of myself in a team-based challengeful fantasy adventure game. I've sort of encouraged that in my home game by requiring the players to organize themselves purposefully and define their goals clearly to get xp at all.

Hey Eero,

If you could have houseruled all you want, what would have you done? I'm asking, because based of the sessions the other week, I'm thinking about how I would run T&T. Also, I think I'll be able to collect the books from the post office tomorrow.

That's a good question. The last time I tried to hash this out on paper in detail I got stuck due to time crunch. Our sessions in Oulu pretty much convinced me that the equipment system of the game doesn't really do anything I'd be interested in, so that'd probably be my first pick to change. I'll write this up in detail at some point, but what I'd do is, I'd replace individual weapons with "combat styles". So you'd have the average "brawling" at Strength 12 and 3 dice, then "civilian" style at strength 8 for 2 dice, something exotic like "ninja fighting" at 5 dice or whatever for those high dexterity types and so on and so forth. A monetary outlay could also be attached if desired for that low-level zing - you could only use "ninja fighting" if you had "ninja equipment" at XX gold pieces, or perhaps it's the training you have to pay for. Either way, I'd get rid of those hyper-detailed equipment names and replace them with a tidy list of a dozen or so different fighting styles, out of which any player could easily choose the optimal one for his character's current statistics. The part that really messes me up in the current equipment lists is the cross-referencing and alphabetic order; even if you know what you're doing and are just trying to find the optimal weapon for your character, you still have to go through the entire list of 200 weapons to find it because they're sorted by name and type instead of ability requirement.

Another larger fix I'd go for would be to replace the ability set with one that I'd like more. The way T&T handles abilities is very powerful, and I like how the abilities go up as characters gain experience, but I'm not necessarily entirely happy with the list of abilities itself. This is really 80% just a matter of taste and crazy game design urges - I have this notion that I should be able to redefine the procedures of the game in a way that'd allow different characters to have different ability sets altogether, and curiousity drives me on. But then there's also the fact that the abilities need to be imaginatively interesting - as you'll remember, I already dropped the extraneous Speed attribute they've added to the game since 5th edition simply because I can't deal with it as meaningful in the fiction next to strength, dexterity and constitution. Likewise I change the name of "Wizardry" into "Soul" just to make it sensible to my own aesthetics. Left to fiddle with this on my own, I'd probably end up with some ability set akin to the one I've been using in my D&D hack - Body, Wit, Will, Learning, Charisma and Luck, for instance.

A minor bit I'd fix would be to give wizards starting spells based on intelligence as opposed to giving them all 1st level spells. This is mainly a setting issue; T&T is not always entirely clear on what parts of the game are rules and what parts are setting, but in this case the reason wizards get that long list of spells is that they all belong in the guild with a standardized teaching method in the designer's game. I'd probably replace this with something else just to get out of a technical conundrum: what happens when a new 1st level spell is introduced into the game? Does a wizard learn it retroactively? If not, then what exactly is the list of spells he learns at chargen? I'd have to put some sort of less vague limit on that spell-learning than "all 1st level spells" anyway. This also has the positive effect of giving low-level wizards something to buy, as they can get more 1st level spells.

Those are the sort of things I'd do just to make the game bearable. Just for fun I'd add a maneuver system for fighters: sort of like spells, but activated by spite dice which the fighter could spend in battle to make special attacks. The 7th edition monsters tend to have this sort of mechanics, so it's easy to copy it for fighters. Perhaps fighters would pay money to learn this stuff as well; otherwise they don't tend to have the sort of money-sinks spell research is for wizards. This sort of houseruling is easy and fun in T&T, so nothing particularly special to it.

I'd also remove the 7th edition talent system and replace it with my own, which I pretty much already did when we played. The system in the book is just embarrassing.

What else... Those are the largest changes I'd make, frankly. Perhaps something else would come up after extensive play, but for the most part I'm really quite happy with the T&T rules system. Not like D&D, which lends itself to endless fiddling.

I'm leaning towards a similar direction.

I was thinking about character creation, races and rolling your attributes. I think that the overman approach worked best while the multiplication seemed cumbersome. So what I would do would give the goblins for example 2D6 in Charisma, but 4D6 in Strenght with the rule of 3 in force. You would't ever get triples with 2D6, but 4D6 would have a much greater chance of getting 3s than 3D6.

The stat spread that we used in the game suits me just fine, but I think I'd use the key stats thing in the book. Warriors would have the physical stats as key stats, scholars the mental and rogues would have all stats. In the rulebook it says that you can only use the level bonus on saving throws on those stats and you only level based on the same stats. This would give the rogues a lot more flexibility.

The talents I would ditch / change. I'd actually implement the character class thing from your D&D homebrew with the classes representing either a wide area of expertise like a vocation or a special advantage like knowing first level magic, having the fighter bonuses or having cheaper magic. The zeroeth level would represent childhood, so a beginning first level character would essentially have 2 class levels.

I'd keep the restrictions that the scholar, warrior and rogue arctypes have, but like a first level warrior would have something like "Lovable street urchin" and "Soldier (warrior bonuses)" levels with the first one of those providing rerolls in a wide variety of situations and the second one giving warrior bonuses. Likewise a wizard character could have something like "Gifted Child (cheaper magic) and "Scarlet Order Initiate (1st lvl magic)", but skills in the rerolling sense.

The neat thing with this system would be that a 1st level rogue would have the extra vocation naturally, because almost all special advantages would be denied to them. So you could have a first level rogue with "Scarlet Order Initiate (1st lvl magic)" and "Vagabond" or "Thief" and "Trapper". Combined with the saving rolls this would elegantly make rogues the jack-of-all-trades they deserve  to be. If both vocations would apply to a saving roll, I would perhaps give a second reroll or perhaps some added bonus to the success?

I'm also contemplating solving the magic problem with ditching the spell lists completely in favor of a more freeform approach to magic. However, I'm thinking about having the level of magic that the character knows, determine its scope and then using the power of the saving roll system in implementing it. Spells would cost soulpoints according to their level in the power of 3 with the first level being smoke and mirrors or in general efects that would effect the circumstances for one character. A bolt of fire would be a second level spell consting 9 soul and with a fourth level spell, you could have a big wave hit a 100km stretch of coastline.

To access second level spells you'd also have to devote two levels to a particular style of magic. Let's say that the Scarlet Order would have a style of magic including summoning, illusion, hypnosis and all sorts of things that you can do with different parts of all sorts of lotus plants. If you had something like "Scarlet Order Dropout (1st lvl magic)" and "Scarlet Order Renegade" (2nd lvl magic)" and you'd want to learn elemental spells, you could apprentice to a elementalist and when you gain your next level, you could take "Elementalist apprentice (1st lvl magic)" or something.

The weapon/equipment side is actually the only part that I don't have a clear vision yet, so if you come up with something, do tell.

Sounds good to me. I agree with you that the multiplication thing with non-human character abilities is not very pleasing aesthetically. Then again, I'm not that much of a fan of lots of different weird demihumans as player characters anyway, so it's not much of a problem for me, especially as the character race hardly impacts the numbers after character creation. I could imagine going with simple bonuses in D&D style, too. Whatever makes sense for the specific aesthetic of the campaign world; the thing I like about T&T is that it's very easy to create new content for it due to its simplicity.

That rule about only using the level bonus on key stat SRs is news to me. The new rulebook is arranged in a pretty confusing manner, so no wonder that I'd miss something like that. Sort of makes sense for why the game even bothers with the key statistics: without that rule there is not much point to it, as a player will focus his ability improvements on abilities that actually fit his character concept and character class - in other words, a key stat will be the highest anyway without any need to enforce it.

Using feats like you describe to implement special privileges is a pleasurable approach - "feats" being what I've been calling those special powers you get in my D&D homebrew. I'm not sure if I'd do it in T&T, but that's just my personal weirdness talking, not wanting to mix currents or something like that. No reason not to make the characters a bit more detailed if you feel like it.

Losing the spell list is certainly a simple approach. I'm hesitant of doing it myself at this point, but that's mostly because the spell lists are one of the largest sources of structure that T&T has. If you device a feat system as replacement, then it's not a problem of course.

Overall, good vision. I'll have to make a point of harassing you about this when I manage to lure you to visit us here in Upper Savo. I wouldn't mind playing T&T as a player, it seems that I'm almost the only GM for it in the country.

I don't know how you guys get the energy, at a purely mechanical design level, to add mechanics to the game. When you've stripped out almost all the mechanics to begin with, or intend to? How do you get the energy to do so much design work, if so little excited you about the pre existing mechanics of the game?

No idea. Or maybe I have, at least for my own case: I'm a back to basics sort of guy, and have been ever since I restarted my roleplaying hobby. What this means is that I'm constantly trying to improve the basics of what I do, which keeps me interested in f.ex. different variations of fantasy adventure. Many people seem to choose a rules system and stick with it, amassing layers of tools and rules on top of it, but I like to throw everything away and start a new iteration from the basic level. Perhaps I'll make something new and excellent that way at some point.

Another factor is that while I like fantasy adventure, I don't like dungeoneering fantasy. My blog is idiotic reading for exactly this reason: I mess about with games where I like the mechanics and creative agenda but not the color, so that makes for a lot of retooling.

As for liking T&T - I like a much higher percentage of core elements in it than I like in any version of D&D, for example. The combat rules, say - apart from the somewhat weird missile weapon rules there's nothing significant in there that I'd change. The same goes for the magic rules, overall.

It's important to point, though, that I don't consider any of the mechanics I've mentioned here truly important for the systemic greatness that is Tunnels & Trolls. The abilities, for instance, are rather fundamentally arbitrary in this game. A good example of this is how you can actually add or remove abilities without changing the game balance; whether characters have the "Speed" attribute or not doesn't matter for their combat adds, only for how you adjudicate those rare situations where speed has some in-fiction meaning.

Olli on the other hand - he's clearly creating some sort of unholy  T&T + D&D hybrid. More power to him, I say. If you're going to do fantasy adventure at this age, it might as well be customized to your personal preferences.