Posted by
Billiam Babble on
Oct 23, 2010; 5:16pm
URL: http://the-lost-and-the-damned.71.s1.nabble.com/Tunnels-Trolls-old-and-new-tp5665913.html
I rather like Tunnels & Trolls. My orange box edition 5, keeps coming off the shelf. When I was struggling to learn D&D, Tunnels & Trolls seemed more accessible and "complete". No, that's not it. I started learning to DM through the Fighting Fantasy role-playing game, which encourages DMs to make up stats for monsters. The survival rate of player characters seemed easy to maintain whilst presenting beasts larger than rats and bats to contend with. T&T seemed similar to me. T&T also encouraged solo-gaming. Many UK players will remember the Corgi book range (often sold next to Fighting Fantasy and Lone Wolf gamebooks!)
Tunnels & Trolls is currently in it's 7th (7.5) edition. It's no longer in print but a very nice PDF bundle can be purchased on RPGNow, as published currently by Fiery Dragon. (The infamous 6th edition is the subject of hot debate, since there's more than a little bit of a copyright war going on ...)
http://www.rpgnow.com/product_info.php?products_id=59112
I failed a save throw, crumbled and purchased one, but I still love my old 5th edition set to death!

I still also fantasise about writing my own solo texts for publication (but enough about me).
Free to download scaled down rules by Flying Buffalo are available here:
http://www.rpgnow.com/product_info.php?cPath=311&products_id=54407If you know Tunnels & Trolls please feel to skim or skip the next bit.
T&T is both flexible and yet slightly flawed, but like all games which are flexible and yet flawed they beg for the invention of house rules. T&T old and new uses a fair amount of irreverent humour, brutal Troll jokes mainly. I think this irreverence comes out of the beer-n-pretzels pick-up-play/fast-play. This comes from the use of Monster Rating, and the simplistic ensemble battle rules.
Monster Rating
Room description: "In the room are 3 Dog-Wyrms (MR 30 each)."
MR 30 translates as
Attack: 4 Dice (d6) + 15 "adds"
30 Constitution (HP)
The "Adds" is half the monster rating and is reduced as the damage is taken. The dice remain constant in T&T 7.5 (which is different from earlier editions)
Naturally, the MR system can become unstuck when you want to represent specific damage from specific weapons, armour and NPC attributes for specific saving throws and magical defences (MR doesn't always cater for these things), but through most of T&T it's accepted by players that the rules for monsters are different for ease-of-play to the more detailed rules for PCs.
If all three Dog-Wyrms attacked together they'd get to roll 12d6+45 to create their Hit Point Total.
The PCs would roll their own HPT (worked out from weapon types plus "personal adds"). The highest HPT wins and the difference is damage. Damage is divided equally between the losers and then armour is deducted.
Did I mention that it's d6s only? Buckets of em!
Interesting fact: T&T is one of the first ever games to use an attribute Saving Roll (Throw) so that almost any situation could be resolved by comparing an attribute like Strength to a difficulty like climbing a wall. The 7+ task resolution in Traveller followed. (From the primordial days when D&D, T&T, Traveller and Runequest were the
only games)
The newer editions of T&T use "Talents" which will remind some players of Advanded Fighting Fantasy and more modern games like QUERP and WR&M where the players and GM can agree on invented universal skill like "Thievery" or Entertaining. Another addition since T&T 5.5 is the "Wiz" stat which is now used instead of the Strength in casting spells, making Faeries and Wizards in general a little less muscley. It's a bit like Power in Runequest. In fact one of my first home-brew/house rules in 5th edition was for PCs to have Magical Strength also well as normal strength.
A really big change is the treatment of levels and Adventure Points (AP) - but I won't go into that now, and it certainly wasn't as bad as I first feared.
Okay. This laptop has just run out of battery, so I'll keep this short and post some links in a bit.
Here's the character sheet for T&T 7.5 - from which you may be able to guess a few things about the system, or see some changes if you're used to older editions:

I'll post some links to resources and other current T&T products in a bit.
Nice little Wikipedia article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunnels_%26_Trolls
Thanks. Bb