Der PigDog's PigBlog

Clickbait opener  The D&D killer has finally dropped: Tunnels & Trolls, by Ken St Andre, with illustrations by Liz Danforth, published 1975. Interior illustration from T&T 5e by Liz Danforth More seriously  I've been playing a lot of Tunnels & Trolls at the Table-Time server lately. It's fantastic. (No, it's not a "D&D killer", there's no such thing, it is not even desirable, just play the games you enjoy. I'm still playing D&D.) I haven't interacted with the T&T community, if there still is one, so I have no way of knowing if what I describe bears any resemblance to T&T as others have played it. Here I will explain the game as it strikes me, and what's so good about it. Player-side fun Tunnels & Trolls is designed for 3 to 5 players, including a GM. I find old-school D&D's insistence on a big play group stifling, not to mention impractical, so this is a nice change. The game is intimate.  Players are ex...

Some controversy in the Table-Time discord server. When you play old-school D&D, does the game get harder as you progress? Do you need to do more adventuring for the same reward? Is that good, or bad? I don't intend to answer the evaluative questions here. But I can definitively answer the purely quantitative question: the game gets harder, and you do need to do more adventuring for the same reward. Let's assume you have a party of 6 thieves at level X. They each need about 1500 * 2^(X - 2) points to progress to the next level. They collect all their XP from treasure rooms in dungeons. These treasure rooms are generated using the procedures in the 1974 D&D publication. How many treasure rooms do they need to get to the next level? Treasure rooms per level up by level   Between 6 and 400, my math says, and the number goes up as you level up. Here's the same data in number form, with a bit more context.   Note that these values are really swingy at low levels. Most o...