From Chainmail to Tunnels&Trolls

[snorri]

Tunnels & Trolls was among the first games to be translated into french, but I never had the french version in hand. I bought a long time ago the english pocket version, and was a little disapointed. The 'melee' combat then seemed me totally goofy. This was, after all, the reputation of T&T to be a small, funny, goofy game in front of the serious D&D (itself being a funny, goofy game in front of the serious Runequest, and so on...). I only masterised it once, in a convention.

Studying the puzzling question of Chainmail combat in Od&d, I feel things differently now. Let's see a big fight, involving a group of 20 characters / henchmen trying to use chainmail system with OD&D :

- Initiative ? Why : Chainmail use also a simultaneous system.

- each one roll 1d6 per level (a little less if he's not a fighting-men). For a Hero level party, 80d6.

- check which d6 are a Hit (stats says : around 13)

- For each Hit, roll 1d6 for damage. So 13d6

- Share the damage. As in Chainmail, you can attack a group of units without specifyong which unit in the group you attack, in a d&d melee, that's the same. So share the damage between the losers make sense.

This is a lot of d6, which bis fun, but the counting of which d6 is a hit or not is very long, using Chainmail tables (with 20 characters, not of the same troop classes). And you roll d6 a second time for damage. So, roll attack and damage in the same time is far much simplier - you just need to change the armor system and that's ok.

I don't know if this is what happened really, but I suspect now T&T is rooted in Chainmail rather in the Alternative system.

[kesher]

I can't immediately point to a link, but I'm pretty sure Ken St. Andre never saw Chainmail. Every account I've read says he sat down with a borrowed set of the 3LBB and, over a weekend, hacked out what he thought of as improvements...

[snorri]

I don't think he really have need a complete set of chainmail. LBBs says you how each character strike ("as 3 men", and so on) and use 1d6 for damage. It depends not only if he actually read chainmail (and you know like me how ifficult it s to clearly link the two games), but if he knew Chainmail use d6 to hit - which is fairly probable at that time.

[kesher]

Ah, I see what you're saying. That's an interesting thought.

You should email him and see what he says!

[castiglione]

From what I understand, Ken St. Andre used d6 for Tunnels & Trolls because polyhedral dice were hard to find and very expensive whereas everyone who liked to play games had tons of d6 they could scavenge from Risk, Monopoly and Yahtzee sets.

If you read interviews of Ken St. Andre, this was the sequence of events:

1) Read the 3 LBB - could not make heads or tails of them (frankly...I don't blame him since if I had not played already been exposed to D&D, I'd probably not be able to make sense of them beforehand).

2) Didn't like several things in the game, namely, the dependence on polyhedral dice, some of the classes he felt were wonky (Who wants to be a priest? And isn't EVERYONE a thief? You throw a spell once and then you forget it? Huh?), added the Rogue class, which was inspired by The Grey Mouser series and some of Jack Vance's stories and combined it with some pretty bizarre stoner humor.

However, there is an "accidental" connection between Chainmail and Tunnels & Trolls. One set of optional combat rules that everyone uses is "spite damage"...basically, the minimum amount of damage you inflict on an enemy regardless of armor, etc. It's the number of 6's you roll during combat. I'm not sure if the person who came up with those rules was exposed to Chainmail or not. It seemed to evolve from the desire to make combat in Tunnels & Trolls less one-sided during mismatches and also to "reward" really good combat rolls (it didn't seem fair that you could roll a lot of 6's and still not damage your enemy in certain cases).