UncleBear Media

“If you haven’t messed with the printed rules and made at least a couple of changes, you aren’t really playing Tunnels and Trolls” - Ken St. Andre, T&T v7.5 rulebook, page 4.

This is why I love this game. Because even though the game is incredible as-is, if you know me or have read this page for any length of time you know that I’d find a way to tinker with even a “perfect” system (if such a thing existed). So here are the house rules I’ll be using for any future T&T games I run.

Talents and Specialists
In my game, you don’t have to roll triples in order to be Specialist. I like the flexibility of the class too much, and the options for customization it presents for players. The only prerequisite is a rolled attribute score of 15, prior to modification by Kindred.

If you’re playing a Specialist from the written rules (Specialist Mage, Ranger, Leader) you don’t get an additional Talent. You Specialty is your starting Talent. Custom Specialists pick a Talent, and that becomes their Specialty. The benefit is that they always make save for the Specialty at Save Roll Level 1.

Let’s look at some examples, using the Talents on page 32 of T&T 7.5 as Specialties. Zam the Bony would normally take Thievery as a Talent, but the player rolled a 15 (or better) and assigned it to Dexterity. The player decided Zam will be a Thievery Specialist. When Zam engages in Thievery, the player makes a DEX SR at Level 1.

Fang the Delectable would normally take Swordplay as a Talent, but his player rolled a 15 (or better) and put it into STR. The player decided to make Fang a Swordplay Specialist. When Fang engages in Swordplay, the player makes a STR SR at Level 1.

So, why play any other type of character? Specialists are one-trick ponies. Fang is absolutely amazing at Swordplay, but isn’t nearly as versatile as a Warrior. Zam is an outstanding thief, but doesn’t have the advantages of, say, a Rogue with Thievery as a Talent. Players should carefully consider whether the benefits of being a Specialist outweigh the limitations, as should the gamemaster before agreeing to allow a Custom Specialist into his or her game.

Where Specialists are useful are as non-player characters. A Specialist Blacksmith will shoe your horses in record time and mend that otherwise irreparable sword. A Specialist Chef will prepare amazing gourmet meals. A Specialist Gambler is going to take the player characters for every gold piece they have.

Starting Gold
According to the rules, starting gold is 3d6 x 10 gold pieces. I like the random factor, as not all characters will come from equal backgrounds. Some will come from wealth families, some from poor families. Some will have saved since childhood, some will have stolen the money, some will have worked odd jobs or even begged for it. To encourage roleplaying and help develop the character’s background, I will give Adventure Point equal to the 3d6 roll if the player tells me a story about where the starting money came from.

Rolling 3d6 is a random factor, and you could consider that a function of Luck. So, rather than multiplying starting gold by 10, players should multiply it by the character’s Luck score. If the character has high luck, it stands to reason that they’d have more starting gold, right? An unlucky character would have less gold.

Poker Chips and Adventure Points
Something I’m considering is using poker chips over various denominations to dole out Adventure Points during the course of the game. I like poker chip and token mechanics in other games, and there’s something exciting about getting a physical representation of your reward. Players can cash in the chips when they modify their characters, and at the end of the game session can write down their total so the gamemaster (or chips owner) can put them away.

Using chips can also help encourage roleplaying. If someone does something particularly interesting or entertaining, toss them a chip. I would go so far as to allow the players to reward each other for roleplaying. If I’m a player and you spout off a good one-liner or your character comes up with an incredible way to bypass a trap or solve a riddle, I’ll give you a chip. The value is entirely up to the giver — if you want to give away your adventure points because you think another player deserves them, that’s your call.

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Disclaimer: I’m talking out of my hat here. These are purely my opinions, not backed up by any sort of education or expertise. Many grains of salt are prescribed.

Games are largely technical. Whether you’re talking about tabletop rules or the engines that power video games, there is technical expertise and execution there. Art is emotional. It’s about making human connections, evoking feelings and memories and other reactions. This is where a disconnect can occur, as technical prowess and artistic vision don’t always mesh. This, I think, is where some of the problems lie when analyzing reactions to a game like Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition. It is very technical and precise, and some have used the phrase “tactical miniatures game” almost as an epithet or slur, implying that there’s no inherent roleplaying in it, none of those personal connections, no “art”. Others defend that there’s plenty of roleplaying, plenty of “art”, it’s just that the technical and creative aspects are separated and not tightly (or at all) intertwined. Roleplayers, not the rules, make it art. The rules don’t encourage art, but they’re designed in such a way as to get completely out of the way of the artist.

My feeling, when looking at roleplaying games as creative endeavors, is that rules are merely tools. Canvas, paint, and knowledge of technique do not make an artist. There has to be some creative spirit, some desire, some talent that’s engaged to use those tools. It’s what makes, or can make, a roleplaying game so much more exciting than a board game or video game. A good gamemaster will get players invested in their characters, make them care about the world and its inhabitants. It’s more than just the technical action of moving pieces on a board or consulting statistics and rolling dice. It’s a human connection to what’s going on that makes it art.

For art to work (for me, at least) as art, as something emotional rather than a mere technical rendering, it needs two things. The first is context. I can look at a beautifully painted full-page piece in a game book, and it can mean nothing to me because I don’t relate to it. There’s a fight scene between wildly armed and armored warriors. Sure, looks cool, but I don’t know who they are, what they’re fighting about. If you don’t know who George Washington is, and you look at Emanuel Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware, it’s just a bunch of guys in a boat. If you know the historical context, what that painting represents, there’s now some conveyed meaning. You can critique it on more than technical skill, you can review the emotion behind it and how well that aspect has been captured. This is one of the reasons I employ gamemaster techniques such as asking why; if the players understand the series of events leading up to meeting in a tavern and being hired to guard the caravan, they start to become invested, and the adventure starts inching up on art.

The other element of art (for me), is consequence. Obviously, this is not a universal constant. When considering the Russian Impressionist painting from World War II that Cameron Goble writes about in his piece on video games and art, part of the power comes from consequence. We can look at scenes of war and have an idea of what that means. People dragging large guns through a field means they’re going to use them. People will die. Towns and cities will fall, or be liberated again. Again, it’s context that allows us to see consequence. This is also why, when I look at gorgeous painting in a game book of a heated battle, I can’t become emotionally involved. I don’t know who those people are, I don’t know the consequences of one side winning over the other, aside from loss of hit points and a gain in experience point. It’s merely a technical representation of a technical function. It’s why I don’t like these sorts of pictures in games; I don’t find them inspirational. If the art is part of a setting book, however, and an illustration shows a mighty diety falling before the power of an evil wizard, an event that forever changed with world and has consequences that I can tie into my character’s backstory or the metaplot of the campaign I’ll run as a gamemaster, then it has meaning. Then, it inches up on art rather than mere technical illustration.

That judgment, of course, depends on the skill of the artist to emotionally engage me. I can draw stick figures, or positions on a map grid, depicting a scene. A good artist will be able to use lighting, body language, facial expressions, and other techniques to draw out the emotion of a scene. The personal connection you’re making, in addition to a connection to the events and characters, is with the artist. As I told Cameron, when I lived on the east coast I used to go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and spend hours sitting and looking at Renoir’s painting Two Young Girls at the Piano. Yes, I brought my own context to the painting, because it’s a scene from real life, two girls seat at a piano. It could be evoking memories of a sister, a daughter, yourself. No, there really was no consequence to the painting, but again it could evoke memory, when you took lessons, when you were young, the girl you know who takes lessons. It was communication between myself and Renoir, over a hundred years dead, via what he was “saying” in that painting. With over 30 years of roleplaying game experience, I can make some of those connections with artists, the “yeah, I remember the time our party fought a red dragon, that’s when Bob’s paladin died” and things like that, pulling my own context and consequence in.

The bottom line, for me, is that game art doesn’t pull me in because, well, it’s not real. My emotional involvement with fantasy art is, at best, superficial. The feeling evoked by the painting of the red dragon don’t invoke the way I felt when Bob’s paladin died; they invoke the feelings of how the actual people sitting around the table reacted. Yeah, those are good memories. But the dragon is one step removed from that emotional context for me, if that makes any sense. The “art”, if any, happened on that day, around that table, in the interactions between those people. It was a beautiful thing, joyful, sad, everything art can be.

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My friend Cameron Goble of Long Tail Gamer wrote a beautiful piece about art and video games, which I highly recommend. We ended up having a long, philosophical conversation about art in games and games as art. It got me thinking about my feelings toward art in roleplaying games, which feeds into how I feel about roleplaying games.

First, I generally dislike a lot of art in roleplaying books. Yes, I want to know what this type of monster looks like, or that type of weapon, the useful types of illustrations, but I don’t have a need for pages and pages of full-color, glossy “flavor” art. Aside from the fact that it jacks up the price of books, I think it stifles imagination. As a gamemaster, my job is to paint word pictures. As a player, it’s my job to describe my character and what he’s doing. I have an unlimited special effects budget. When there are pictures to point to, my budget’s just been cut because I’m now limited by what’s in the picture, and even how well the picture was executed.

It’s the same phenomena one experiences when you read a book, all in prose, and then go see a movie. Yeah, sometimes it translates well and it’s neat to see it on the screen. A lot of times, it’s lame. The book was better. The actor that got for a certain role didn’t quite fit what you’d imagined. The fight scene wasn’t as epic. It goes the other way as well; Cameron said he can’t read the Lord of the Rings any more without seeing Elijah Wood.  The visual has replaced the imagination.

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This is a mostly dreadful film, which I was dragged to for the Gerard Butler factor as he is apparently considered “dreamy” by some. It’s an action-thriller posing as a science fiction film, shot in my current city of occupation (Albuquerque, New Mexico) using the latest SeizureVision techniques of shaky-cam and flashy lights.

The films main premise is that in the future video gamers will control actual people rather than digital avatars. There’s a Sims-like game called Society, where you pick your character’s outfits and make them do stuff, quite a bit of which seems sadistic and unpleasant (but it’s okay, because people volunteer to do this; it’s a job). There’s also a game called Slayers, where your human avatar is a convicted felon and you make him run around and shoot other convicted felons on seemingly arbitrary combat missions. This is all made possible by nanotechnology that replaces a chunk of the avatar’s brain. Yes, it’s a sick subject, and while it acts like it wants to be a social commentary on becoming desensitized to violence and how a whole bunch of stuff is dehumanizing on a while lot of levels, it’s really just about non-stop kEwl viOlenc3.

The concept had potential, but at every decision point it makes the predictable choice. Michael C. Hall, as inventor of this nano-mind-control texchnology and of course the main villain, would have been awesome if given better material to work with. As it is, the best scene in the whole move is him dancing and lip-syncing Sammy Davis Jr.’s version of “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” while his retinue of mind-controlled thugs dances with him. If the rest of the movie had been that creative and over-the-top, it would have been more enjoyable. Mostly, though, it just gave me a headache.

Now, as a tabletop roleplayer, what are my useful takeaways from this flick: First, I’m using Michael C. Hall as a villain in something. I need to re-think the potential uses of mind control not just as a psionic power but as technology. I need to work a “Running Man” scenario into some game, where the player characters get in trouble and have to run a gauntlet (maybe a dungeon) and survive to the end to earn their freedom, while magical aristocrats watch via scrying devices. Most importantly, I’m going to be thinking about how we, as players, treat our player characters and how that reflects on us as human beings.

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Over the weekend I  had the opportunity to run a game for someone who’s never roleplayed before. It’s been a long time since I ran for a brand-new player, let alone any sort of one-on-one game. I was a bit nervous, because I didn’t have any other players to back me up and it was entirely up to me to make a solid first impression of our hobby.

To keep things as simple as possible, I decided to run Tunnels & Trolls. My player was a non-geek but geek-curious, and had asked about Dungeons & Dragons, but the only iteration of that game that I had available to me was Pathfinder.  As cool as that game is, I was afraid that plopping that massive core rulebook down on the table would permanently frighten her off.  T&T is easy to learn, easy to teach, and best of  all for me, easy to run so I could focus more on the storytelling and less on the crunchy rules bits.

I started by describing the basic concept — the world is full of monsters, and there are people who go out and kill monsters for a living. You keep the world safe, and you can make good money and acquire magical treasures along the way. This led into a version of my “why” technique: why would  your character go hunting monsters? Why would your character take (possibly fatal) the risks? Why would your character want the money? We ended up with a good idea of who her character was, and some story hooks I could work with. We decided her character would be human, to keep things simple.

Only after we had an idea what the character was about did I introduce the crunchy bits. I decided that while pregenerated characters are good for experienced gamers, it would be easier to explain concepts by walking her through character creation. I didn’t hand her a blank character sheet, but had her hand-write things down on a 3×5 card (again, I love the simplicity of T&T!).  I named each attribute and explained it, Then I had her roll numbers, explaining the ranges of good, bad, and average, and let her assign them where she wanted. Working with her character concept, she used the numbers to flesh out her character a little more, coming up with reasons why she was better at this and not so good at that. She caught on really well.

Then we went over character classes. Rather than going over all of them, I picked a couple that suited the concept and background she had, and explained those. By talking through character ideas, she’d already filtered out options, which made it easier to focus in. Then we went over Traits, and she was excited that she got to make up her own (T&T is very story-game in this area).

We started out having her working a non-adventuring job, and dreaming of finding work as a monster killer. This gave me the chance to teach her the system with some non-combat challenges. She was trying to make money to buy weapons and equipment, while at the same time looking for a sponsor or patron who would set her up with gear. Yes, I made most of an adventure out of gearing up. She heard that a merchant was having trouble with a monster hijacking his caravans (hey, it’s cliche to us but new stuff to her) and was going to hire some other well-known adventurer to deal with it. She had to find a way to get in to see the merchant, then negotiate with him to give her a shot because she’s do it for less money.

I build up tension around fighting one monster. This entailed gathering some information about the monster, talking to survivors, asking a wizard about its powers and weaknesses, so she could properly equip with the paltry budget she was given. When she finally tracked it to its lair and killed it, it had become the most epic quest a 1st-level character had every undertaken. Tremendous fun.

This approach worked because in the conversations that led up to her agreeing to play she was interested in story and characters. Yes, I roped her in by telling her about my paladin. By staying with the story, and showing how the rules support the story, I kept her interest and drew her in further. Had she initially expressed interest in tactics and crunchy bits, I would have gone a different route, probably with a pregenerated Pathfinder character and an explanation of each of the character’s abilities.

We’ll be playing again on an occasional basis, because she wants to see what happens to her character next. I think I have her hooked. I’ve offered to try to get her into a group with me, but she doesn’t think she’s ready to go public yet and game with other people. For my part, I’m happy to have helped create a new gamer, or at the least to have given a non-gamer a good time and left her with a positive impression of what this quirky hobby of ours is all about.

Buy Tunnels & Trolls V7.5 (official T&T RPG Box Set)

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Welcome to RolePlayMedia.net

One thing I keep hearing bloggers, podcasters, and other roleplaying content creators say is that they enjoy the sense of community they’ve found working and exchanging ideas with other content creators. To that end, I’ve created a social network for roleplaying media providers and their audiences. It doues matter if you create content for roleplaying games or about them. It doesn’t matter if you’re a fan, a professional, or somewhere in between. Bloggers, podcasters, vidcasters, writers, artists and, really, everyone else are welcome.

There are blogs, forums, and groups, ways to stream your audio or video, and so much more. It’s highly customizable to your needs, a great place to interact with other content providers, a place to plug your stuff, plan crossover events, discover new blogs, podcasts, and creative people. And it’s free. Always free. No dues, no membership fees.

Join RolePlayMedia.net

Berin Kinsman
Director, Role Play Media Network

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At Rincon I ran Ken Hite’s Adventures Into Darkness, the “What If H.P. Lovecraft wrote Golden Age superhero comics for Nedor” mashup setting. A single adventure wasn’t enough, and it really made me want to run this as an ongoing campaign.

The version I used was for Mutants & Masterminds, because that’s my superhero system of choice. There are other versions available, for other the HERO System and Truth & Justice. Because it was a one-shot, I wanted to cram as much Mythos goodness as possible in, but I also wanted to have plenty of slam-bang action. To that end, there wasn’t a lot of investigation, and one fight scene essentially led directly into the next fight scene.

All of the player characters were pulled right from Hite’s writeups in the book, in spite of disparate power levels. i have characters ranging from level 9 to level 14. No one seemed to notice or mind, as I played to my philosophy that game balance is in the hands of the gamemaster, and threw appropriate foes at each of the characters based not only on their level but their powers.  For NPCs, I used characters from Lovecraft stories as well as supporting characters mentioned in the PC’s backgrounds. Nearly everyone has a girlfriend, a mentor, asidekick, or a scientist. It gave me plenty to work with.

The Plot
I want to note that I embellished a lot on what Hite wrote, tweaked things, and filled in blanks. If you haven’t read AID, don’t expect this to be in the book. If you have, then you’ll see what I did.

It’s 1953. The heroes are summoned to the Henry Armitage Memorial Library at Miskatonic University, in the bustling metropolis that is Arkham City. Someone has broken in and stolen the notes of the mad scientist Dr. Slade. He was killed when his own invention, the Vita-Ray, exploded on its first use. The invention did bring a mummy back to life, who turned out to be one of the player characters, ancient Egyptian sorcerer Mystico the Wonder Man. They figure out that it was stolen by a strange crime family from Innsmouth that controls the docks. They track the mobsters to a warehouse, where they’re making a trade with Dr. Ghoul and his gang. A large fight ensues in the warehouse, with ghouls and deep ones and superheroes mixing it up.

The heroes question the Deep One mobsters and learn that Dr. Ghoul wanted to modify the Vita-Ray to make a Ghoul Ray that would turn people into ghouls. They were trading the plans for something the ghouls had, a bunch of wooden crates with Nazi markings! The Deep Ones were going to trade the crates to someone else, they didn’t know who, for something their boss, the crime lord known as Devilfish, wanted. But they didn’t know what else. The heroes told the Deep Ones that they’d have to trade with them, and to have their boss meet them back at the warehouse the following not.

Back at the library, the heroes check out the crates and discover they contain strange cylinders. Mi-go brain cylinders, marked with the names of Nazi leaders. Yes, the Mi-go saved Hitler’s brain! Returning to the warehouse the next night, they’re attacked by Mi-go, because the cylinders were stolen from them and they wanted them back! Superheroes pounding on fungus was… interesting. Mi-go basically just explode when punched by supers. I made the descriptions as icky as I could.

Of course, sitting off Devil Reed was a U-boat, and the villain who wanted the Nazi brains was none other than the Black Scholar, Baron von Juntz! A fight ensued, of course, but the heroes couldn’t stand up to his sorcery. He never lifted a finger, he just mind-controlled player characters and had them beat up on other player characters. It was Captain Future who saved the day, appearing to fly off, then flying in at supersonic speed, grabbing von Juntz, and throwing him into space.

In Play
The horror was toned down because one of my players was a 3rd grader. The kid played Night Terror (the Black Terror’s brother, a character of Hite’s invention). He couldn’t roll successfully to use any of his powers, so he just started punching people… and doing it very well. The running joke became “and who does Night Terror punch this round?”. He was the first one to get hypnotized by von Juntz, and since the kid’s dad was playing Mystico I had him wail on his dad. We all had fun. We all agreed the kid was the best player and the MVP of the game, and he got the prize (RinCoin, aka convention bucks to spend with vendors).

I was blessed to have Ken St. Andre of Tunnels & Trolls fame in my game, playing Randolph “The Dream Master” Carter. He came up with weird uses for Cater’s powers, and talked me into letting him enthrall one of the ghouls. Since Carter really isn’t a combat character, it worked out and the ghoul did his fighting for him.

Ongoing
As I said at the beginning, I would really like to run this as an ongoing game. There’s a lot of history with the Nedor heroes to be explored, especially when you start crossing them over and making connections between their supporting characters. That’s before you add in the Lovecraft elements. Making Arkham into Arkham City, a large enough city to support a superhero population, with Mickatonic U. right there as a source of weird science, has so much potential. Tying the superscience and magical origins of the heroes back into the Mythos is great. I want to slowly make the heroes go mad as they realize the true origins of their powers. I want to introduce some moral and ethical dilemmas regarding the way their powers work. I want to pull in some of the tone of Watchmen, some of the feel of Marvelman/ Miracleman, and a bunch of background material from Delta Green. Oh, yes, I can have sooo much fun with this.

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ROLPUNK with Shakabuku Hyde
The founders of the RPG Bloggers Network are, for the most part, stepping down. They’re stepping down because they’re tired of taking crap from people who think they’re owed something beyond what they’ve been given. yes, given. Four guys built the RPG Bloggers Network, with their own time and their own money. Joining was a priviledge, not a right, but it was free and open to all with a few guidelines and quality-control measures in place. The network grew fast, and achieved great success. that’s when some folks started feeling that old sense of entitlement, and felt that as members of the network they had rights, and some say in how things were run.

They started whining about “transparency”, and how an “arbitrary” group of people were making “arbitrary” decisions about what posts were appropriate and what blogs got to join. Weh, weh, weh. You know, as if the guys who paid to set up the service and put the sweat equity into running have no say in how it operates, but a bunch of freeloaders who use the service for free should get to call the shots. Not to sound like a Libertarian or an Objectivist or anything, but your logic is severely impeded and you just need to clam up and/or pound sand.

Berin Kinsman, the founder of this site, has been talking to financial backers about buying up the network and running it as a business. Some other folks are talking about running it as a democracy, or a non-profit organization. I have no idea who’s going to win, who’s going to end up taking over, but I’ll tell you what i’d like to see. I would like to see the whole damned thing collapse in on itself. I want to see if fall apart just so people will realize how hard it was for four guys to create it and run it, and to appreciate what a miracle it really was. I know, that’s going to put out a lot of nice people who did nothing wrong, and did express gratitude, and will be put out. Yeah, well.

Rather than an agregater, I think the next-generation RPGBN (or its replacement, when it falls on the heads of the commie-hippie commune that I expect will actually end up taking over) is something more along the lines of Slashdot, Metafilter, or FARK. Nobody’s posts get on their atuomatically. Someone has to submit them. Submitting your own stuff is bad form, so you submit your buddy’s stuff. Then other members comment and vote on the quality of the content, so it either makes the front page or gets banished for being crap. That’s about as fair a democractic process as you can get. Of course, some folks will hate it because it’s not the entitlement program the original RPGBN is.. was… is… is the site still up? Whatever. The point is, no one owes anyone anything, especially internet traffic to your blog, so whatever it is you think you want, you’re going to have to work for it.

Shakabuku Hyde is the Bodhisattva of Two-fisted Enlightenment, as well as the Op/Ed editor and ROLPUNK blogger for UncleBear.com. His comments probably reflect the opinions of no one else on earth but himself, but we’re not going to argue with him.

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