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...

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. 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.) Declare stunts and roll for them. Combined attack roll. Each side adds up all their dice and static bonuses ("adds"), plus Take That, You Fiend!s. Every 6 rolled does 1 damage, ignoring armor, spread evenly among combatants on the other side. (From 7.5e.) 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. 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...

It Was a Mutual Decision (2002) Photo of It Was a Mutual Decision, stolen from the internet Played with Misha, Divya, and Ken. Misha and I are a real-life couple, and Ken and Divya are a real-life couple. Misha and Divya are women, Ken is a man, and I am nonbinary, though I played on Ken's team in the game. All three, and everyone else I have talked to, were absolutely charmed by the premise of the game. It is an extremely easy sell. The rulebook promises that the rat content will serve to soften the blow of the breakup content, and this is certainly what I observed in play. We would go from shouting and breathing hard as we hurled in-character invectives across the room, to giggling uncontrollably while figuring out how to add rats to the scene. Authorities in play were natural and easy. Ken and I, and Misha and Divya, handed of narration without a word and without conflict. Everyone was creatively focused. We did not put much work into establishing the social landscape around our...

Tunnels & Trolls has the first universal task resolution procedure in gaming. It's called the saving throw, after the D&D procedure. The Judge is expected to apply the results of this procedure to the fiction in a totally organic fashion. This is radical stuff! The procedure is quite simple: roll 2d6+stat, against a target number of 15+(5*difficulty). A roll of doubles on the 2d6 "explodes"; add another 2d6 and repeat this step. If the total of the 2d6 roll(s) is/are 4 or less, the task fails. Succeed or fail, the player gets (roll+stat)*difficulty experience points. I need a hard modelling surface to apply a "pick your own difficulty" procedure like this. I want to know what the odds are for a normal person to succeed at a given task. That way I can set the task's difficulty level irrespective of the player's actual stats. To that end, I simulated 200k dice rolls and counted them up. (Credit to Vivit Elric for doing the actual programming; I han...