Tunnels & Trolls rules brief

I'm currently running T&T 5e, with a couple rules imported from later editions and one rule I simply made up. Imported and house rules in italics. Here's how combat works.

  1. Declare spells and ranged attacks. Roll (see below) to see if ranged attacks hit, in which case they'll be added to the group attack roll. (House rule.)
  2. Declare stunts and roll for them.
  3. Combined attack roll. Each side adds up all their dice and static bonuses ("adds"), plus Take That, You Fiend!s.
  4. Every 6 rolled does 1 damage, ignoring armor, spread evenly among combatants on the other side. (From 7.5e.)
  5. One side has a higher roll than the other; they are the winners. Subtract the losers' roll from the winners'. Deal this value as damage to the losers, spread evenly among combatants.
  6. Spells go off. 

Ranged attack difficulty matrix, from the Deluxe edition. I think it's the same as 5e, just better formatted.

A few things to remember, in no particular order:

  • When you take damage, reduce it by your armor. Warriors get double value for their armor.
  • Damage comes right off of Constitution; there is no separate health stat.
  • Damage is distributed evenly among the combatants who can reasonably be targeted. Usually this is just melee combatants, unless there is no order whatsoever to the battlefield.
  • Ranged attacks don't grant stunt AP. 
Monsters have a "Monster Rating", or MR. They get 1 attack die for every 10 points of MR (house rule; original is floor(MR/10)+1 dice), and MR/2 as adds. When a monster takes damage, its MR is reduced. Its adds are reduced accordingly, but it keeps rolling its original attack dice. (From the Deluxe edition.) When the monster hits 0 MR, it dies.

When you want to do a task in combat, roll 2d6 DARO + Stat against 15 + (5*difficulty). The task can modify combat in all sorts of ways, use your imagination, but by default it takes you out of the combined attack roll. You get stunt AP for stunting!

Some suggested effects for stunts (but not the actual stunts that cause them! Use your imagination!):

  • Become ineligible for damage this turn
  • Double your adds
  • Disable an opponent temporarily

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