"Black Dougal gasps 'Poison!' and falls to the floor. He looks dead."

Tuesday, July 14, 2009

A Tunnels & Trolls idea

A little out of left field...

I have read Barbarians of Lemuria a number of times over the past month. I may do a bit of a review here at some point.

This weekend I took my kids camping. I took along the 5.5E of Tunnels & Trolls and also the 6th edition. I have had a hankering for some T&T the last while.

Then I had a thought. One of the things I really like about Barbarians of Lemuria is its Traits (or Boons) and Flaws system. The core mechanic of BoL is 2d6 vs a target number. If you have a Boon that applies the roll becomes a 3d6 keep the high 2d6. For a Flaw you keep the low 2d6.

What if you took the same system and applied it to Tunnels & Trolls for Saving Rolls? For example, Ungar the Umbrageous, the level 1 rogue, has a Boon of "Sneaky". If Ungar had to make a saving roll for a situation where stealth was important he could roll 3d6 instead of 2d6 and keep whichever two dice he wanted - thus still being able to DARO (Doubles add and roll over).

7 comments:

  1. That, IMO, is a better solution than the one decided upon for 7th and 7.5, which I do not play.

    Further, I have used that in my Dead Air zombie game (unreleased) and used it successfully for three years of Play-by-Post.
    I have statistical data out to 10d6, using only Doubles for re-rolls, and if you would like that, or the Dead Air system, let me know and I'll e-mail it.

    Please let me know how that rule works for you. I'd like to hear others' experiences.

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  2. Talents work just fine in my campaign, but that options sounds very neat. Maybe I'll try it out. I'd love to hear your playtest experiences.

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  3. I'm not too sure I will get a chance to playtest it in the foreseeable future as it is pretty tough to find anyone around here that plays T&T :{

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  4. I'm going to second that as superior to the existing talent system, especially for Roguery, at first blush.

    Another idea, and one that would scale if someone takes a talent twice, would to have it move you to 2d8 then 2d10 then 2d12 if you wanted to muddy up T&T with weird dice.

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  5. Interesting suggestion.

    BTW if there's few T&T players around, how about a online game?

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  6. Andreas,
    After I see how the skype B/X game goes this weekend, that could be a definite possibility.

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  7. That's certainly an idea that would work well with Tunnels and Trolls. Now, if there was really going to be a chaotic 8th edition of T & T, I'd love to put in Foons and Flaws. Bwa ha ha! It's great. But I like Talents, too, and this is just a version of the Talent idea.

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