Why I don’t use House rules When I Play Tunnels & Trolls

Why I don’t use House rules When I Play Tunnels & Trolls

It’s often said that ‘if you ain’t using house rules, then you ain’t really playing Tunnels & Trolls.’ Which distresses me, because I never use house rules when I play T&T, which means I’ve never played T&T, and 30 years is a long time to be never playing. Silly me. Must try harder. By the way when I say Tunnels & Trolls this is what I mean . . .

So why don’t I use house rules when I play Tunnels & Trolls?

Firstly it’s because Tunnels & Trolls was the first RPG I ever played. Before T&T I hadn’t even heard of RPG rules, let alone house rules. In fact in my first game we didn’t have a copy of the rules. All we had was Sword for Hire, 3d6, a pencil and my Maths exercise book (most fun I ever had with that thing). But my mate, Gareth had read his brother’s copy of the rules. He knew enough for us to be able to roll up a character (a warrior I called Boromir with not a hint of irony) and play through Sword for Hire.

Then there was the fact that it was 1980 and I was stuck in a small village in the middle of England. There was no internet, no way to easily share ideas with a community of players or T&T’s creators. To me, back then, Phoenix Arizona may as well have been another world, another universe. So I don’t know when I first heard the term house rules but it wasn’t when I started playing. So in the beginning I had to play without them.  It would probably be a year or so later when I started buying White Dwarf that I’d read about House Rules. Even so I probably wouldn’t have really ‘got’ house rules back then which leads nicely on to my next point . . .

. . . I was ten when I first started playing and even if I knew what house rules were any that ten-year old me would have made up would have been all over the place.

Omission of rules is not the same as house ruling and as kids me and my friends might not have known enough to make house rules, but we were experts at ignoring any rules we didn’t want to use. Hell, we pretty much ignored all the rules in AD&D and just used the good stuff in our B/X D&D games. It was the same for Runequest, Traveller, Bushido, all the games we played. If we didn’t, like, understand, or see the point of a rule we just ignored ‘em. Doing that we made games work for us without house rules.

Who needs house rules when you have options,and there are plenty of options in T&T: Multiple ways to handle APs, three different ways to generate monsters, and PCs, and three different ways to handle Monster Ratings to name a few of ‘em.

But the main reason I don’t use house rules when I play T&T is that it just works for me as is. From day one T&T has always just clicked. Most of the common T&T house rules have evolved to deal with problems common to a lot of T&T fans. Nerfing the warriors x2 armour and Spite are used to deal with problem of stalemate between evenly matched and well armoured foes. I like the idea of stalemate as it forces the players to come up with cunning (or fatally stupid) plans using the Saving Rolls rules. Of which there are plenty of great examples in the 5^th ed rules and Solo #12 The Arena of Khazan (and now the excellent Dare to Daro by Dan Prentice). Also the more SR the players make the more Adventure Points they gain.

Another perennial problem for some is the idea of the Schwarzenegger Wizard. Because T&T magic is powered by ST most folks playing wizards will seek to increase ST above other stats. Often this might mean a wizard has more ST than a the party’s Warriors and folk imagine that instead of  T&T wizards looking like your archetypal Gandalf or Merlin they must be muscle-bound meatheads. I never saw it this way. Yes the St range for a normal human is 3-18 so the average guy has a ST of 9-12, but in theory the stat range for T&T characters is 3-3,000 and beyond.  Of course it depends on the GM, but if the solos are a good guide it’s not unusual to get characters with stats in the low hundreds, so would a ST 300 character really look 30 times more muscle bound than a character with ST 10? I don’t think so. Just as I don’t think a 1^st level Dwarf with a ST of 36 would have a gym sculpted body of rippling muscles.  They’d have an ale scuplted body of rippling flab, but they’d still be able to rip yer arm off and beat you to death with the soggy end if you spilt their pint.

Speaking of stats, Power & Speed are house ruled additions to the classic six stats. POW to replace the use of ST in spells, and Speed basically for legging it from Trolls. I like the idea of POW, but not as much as I like the affects that losing ST has on casters, and I never use SPD as a stat. After all the character that misses their LK SR by the most is the one that’s gonna get eaten, right?

Finally there’s the funny spell names. Sadly it seems like most of the folk who couldn’t stomach those just dismissed T&T rather than rename them. Their loss, it’d be trivially easy to rename the spells and what kind of wizard doesn’t want to yell ‘Take That You Fiend!” as they vaporise a Troll?

Why I Lie When I Make Up Post Titles

Because ‘Why I Don’t Use House Rules When I Play Tunnels & Trolls . . .’ is clunky enough without adding . . . Except These Two House Rules . . .’ that’s why.

Okay, so I do actually use a couple of house rules these days. I use POW with racial modifiers so that Elves, Fairies, and Leprechaun’s have a high POW, humans average, and Dwarves, and Hobbit’s have  a low POW modifier. I use both POW and ST for spell points with the players deducting the cost from whichever stat is highest first and then both when they level out. I do this because I like the results of ST depletion and how they affect the game, but I also think Wizards, and the more magical races, should be able to cast lots of spells without needing a high ST.

I also use a simple Fatigue system. After 10 rounds of combat (20 minutes) everyone deducts 2 from their ST for each additional round they fight. Apart from Warriors who can fight for 10+ their level in rounds before they suffer Fatigue penalties.

Anyway as Ken St Andre says . . .

1.1 Troll Talk

There is no "right" or "wrong" way to play, only suggestions.

. . . the cardinal rule remains: adjust the system as you see fit to suit your own style of play.

Ken St. Andre – July 1979

I guess that means my style of play is straight up 5^th ed with very few houserules, but lots of Saving Rolls!