According to gamer legend, back in the mid 1970's, down in Arizona there was a fella named Ken St. Andre who got his hands on the LBBs and decided there was a game worth playing in them, but the concept needed some work to meet his personal preferences. Mr. St. Andre set about making rules for dungeon delving fantasy adventures that seemed to make more sense to him. He added some of his own unique humor to the mix and tried the new game out on some friends, who apparently loved it. They played it a lot and loved it so much they thought Mr. St. Andre should share it with the wider world. So he printed up his new game and quickly sold out. One print run ran into the next and the world's 2nd published roleplaying game was a hit. Mr. St. Andre and friends soon introduced a series of solo adventures for his Tunnels & Trolls game, thus allowing us gamers to go adventuring almost anytime, anywhere without need for preparation or referee.
I discovered Tunnels & Trolls (T&T) at the first GenCon I attended. I had the good fortune to be living in Kenosha, Wisconsin the summer of 1978 and being freshly initiated into the hobby through the White Box, I was thrilled to learn that GenCon was being held nearby at the University of Wisconsin Parkside campus. By this time T&T was in it's 4th edition as shown in the picture above of my copy. It is a 54-page softback booklet with a comb binding. The book is illustrated throughout with the delightful work of Liz Danforth, who I believe also edited the 5th edition of T&T. The 4th edition has three character classes, warrior, magic-user, and rogue (unschooled, amateur users of magic) from which to choose and the rules suggest the players have several characters in their "stable" so that if one or two get killed on an expedition, they are not too heartbroken (good advice in most early rpgs). Mr. St. Andre spends several pages describing how to create and populate the dungeon which the players will explore through the various actions of their characters. There is only the briefest listing of monsters and Mr. St. Andre seems to prefer each referee make their own unique monsters, which is fairly easy given the T&T mechanics. Combat seems more cooperative in T&T than in any other adventure gaming system/roleplaying game I have played. T&T only uses regular six-sided dice and the player gets to roll lots of them, totaling up the sum, adding this number to the other player's sums and arriving at a grand total to compare against the monster (referee's roll) total. The difference is the number of "hits" taken. Armor absorbs hits and various weapons differ by rolling a number of combat dice and adds unique to each weapon. There a number of weapons listed, more than is usually seen in a roleplaying game. The distinctive and often humorous names of magic spells has become an identifying factor in T&T with gamers either enjoying the lightheartedness or rejecting it. Spells cost Strength to cast and T&T magic therefore seems more akin to magic point systems in general.
I have refereed and played T&T as a tabletop game with friends a few times over the years, but have mostly enjoyed the many solo adventures put out by Flying Buffalo and others. A new Deluxe T&T edition is now in the works and I will look for it at GenCon this year. I imagine the T&T creation story was happening over and over again across the gaming world in those early days of the White Box as folks grabbed onto the new roleplaying adventure game concept of Mr. Gygax and Mr. Arneson and sought to modify the game, to a greater or lesser extent, adding and replacing rules, exercising their imagination and inventiveness, making the game they played their own. Rarely was this done with as much success as Mr. St. Andre has had with T&T.
No comments:
Post a Comment