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Is this your Saturday night?

The Excited Player "Mongo the Mighty roars and leaps over the blood altar and shatters the stone lich's head with my mace! Yeah, I brain that little nimrod in the name of Wotan!"
The Game Master "Okay. That requires a 5 foot move north, then a partial move action 15 feet forward. Your charge bonus is negated because you did not move in a straight line unless you have the Indirect Charge feat."
The Worried Player "Can I jump over the altar and hit the lich?"
The Game Master "If you had the feat from the Dodgeball Warrior prestige class from the PDF download errata, you could...but the altar is listed as a DC 15 obstacle and provides 43.2% partial cover."
The Bummed Player "Screw this, I'm going to play World of WarCraft."
The Game Master "No please! RPGs are all about telling stories, acting out heroic characters and immersive creativity and...Hey, wait!"

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Welcome to Tunnels & Trolls, 5.5 Edition

If the above tragedy rings true, I have something exciting to share. The brand spanking new Tunnels & Trolls version 5.5 has recently hit the store shelves and online sellers, 26 years after the famous 5th edition arrived in 1979. My review is biased as a major fan of Tunnels & Trolls. My favorite RPGs have always been those with exciting game play and flexible rules framework that allows me to easily tinker and create. Yeah, no 3.25 D20 for me!

BACKGROUND: Ken St. Andre originally wrote Tunnels & Trolls in 1975. Ken felt the original D&D rules were too complex and slow, so he created a very fast and simple RPG that only uses six sided dice and [he felt] adhered more closely to his favorite fantasy fiction of Conan and Lord of the Rings. He also designed the games Starfaring, Stormbringer, Monsters! Monsters! and the computer game Wasteland. Ken's writing style is casual, friendly and humorous. He is very adamant that T&T is your game and should be played your way and a huge part of the fun for T&T GMs is molding the system like playdoh to your own imagination. Everything added in 5.5 are optional house rules, mostly examples of how Ken tinkered with his own campaigns.

CHARACTER CREATION: Each character has six attributes: Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Luck, Intelligence and Charisma rated on 3D6. Individual races modify these attributes with multipliers, such as Dwarves get x2 Strength and Constitution while Faeries suffer x1/4 STR and CON, but can fly. All the standard fantasy races are present, but T&T has an extensive chart that allows every monstrous race imaginable to be played. Yes, you can play a half-Dwarf half-Balrog living skeleton if it fits in your GM's world and 5.5 provides an article on designing Half-Breed races and incorporating them in your game. However, the races are NOT balanced and the GM should be wary about which races to allow in his campaign. Personally, I buff out the humans and equalize the races in my own games. There are only four classes in T&T: the Warrior, the Wizard, the Rogue Wizard (not a thief, but a wanderer who can learn to fight and cast spells) and the Warrior-Wizard, a very rare character.

The basic rules do not include skills, although the optional rules in the new 5.5 edition by author Michael Stackpole offer suggestions on how to include skill ranks and abilities into your T&T game. Advancement is the usual XP toward level gain. However, in T&T your ability scores increase as you gain level so it is quite possible that your STR 10 Warrior could grow into to STR 40. Anyone familiar with the Ultima series will see how T&T greatly influenced Richard Garriott's RPGs and later Blizzard’s Diablo games. Thanks to easy character creation and game play, Tunnels & Trolls has proven the best tool I have found to introduce new players to role-playing, especially children.

COMBAT: Combat in the basic rules is done by contested rolls. Your weapon is rated in a number of dice and your character has fighting bonus based on his Strength, Dexterity and Luck. You roll your 4D6 Broadsword + 10 combat adds vs. the Orc's 3D6 + 10 and the difference is the damage suffered by the loser of the combat. If a player loses the combat, they may use their armor to soak some of the damage and any remaining damage comes off your Constitution. In 5.5, Ken introduces the concept of Spite Damage, which makes even minor monsters dangerous. Whenever 6s are rolled for combat, one point of damage automatically goes through, regardless of your armor. Also in 5.5, Ken gives a suggestion on how to deal with "the Many-dice problem" which plagues T&T when major monsters are rolling 30 or more D6. When you roll huge amounts of dice, the outcomes tend to be is a short section of the bell curve. Instead, Ken suggests on turning 30D6 into 3D6 x10 and he adds several interesting caveats.

The combat rules are not inherently tactical. Much like Exalted, players must create their own stunts and the GM must judge the success of the stunts to keep battles exciting, instead of dull numerical exchanges. I have seen combats as boring as “we got 142, what did you get?” to incredibly cinematic events with elves skidding across icy stones to stab a scorpion’s underbelly while the dwarf grapples with the flailing stinger. To encourage stunting, I recommend that you limit dice pooling by your players by breaking up combats into more personal duels than mass melee. As for magic, wizards cast spells by expending Strength points that regenerate quickly. This new edition introduces the Power ability used by Wizards to tap ley lines throughout the world, so most wizards will be able to launch huge amounts of spells, even at 1st level.

BONUS EXTRAS: The 5.5 Edition includes two adventures; the classic Trollstone Caverns for new GMs and the famous solo adventure Buffalo Castle. T&T has a long history of encouraging solo play and I hope one day these become online games. Also new to this edition are Ken's Chronology of Trollworld and the Money of Trollword which give us a peak into his own home campaign. It's very Arduin with invading space aliens, immortal wizards and a dragon shaped continent. There is no default game world included with T&T core book. The art and layout of the 5.5 edition has not changed since the 1979 printing and appears very dated compared to the slick glossy books of today. But consider this. The best burger joint in Los Angeles is run-down shack at the corner of the 405 and Manchester next to a giant donut. The food there is downright incredible. That’s how I rate T&T.

PS: I have heard people complain that T&T is just a dungeon crawl game, but that's as silly as saying Champions is all about street fights. Politics, intrigue and flowing speeches require no rules so feel free to take your T&T adventures across haunted deserts, under strange oceans and over stormy mountains. In 1975, players really enjoyed going into dungeons, and now 30 years later, we are much more enlightened, much more erudite, much savvier and we enjoy. . . going into dungeons.