1e Tunnels & Trolls, Part 4: Clarifications

Fly me! (Rob Carver, 1st edition, p. 24)

Clarifications

I want to offer some clarifications before returning to the main review of Tunnels & Trolls, 1st edition:

Overall Approach of the Review

I gushed in my first piece that Tunnels & Trolls is brilliant, and I think that brilliance shines through in the game's 1975 1st edition. This review set is shaping up to be the longest set of posts I have yet written on this blog. Indeed, it's shaping up, embarrassingly, to contain more words than the document I'm actually reviewing. I wouldn't do that if I didn't think the subject made it worth it.

But despite that, or more accurately, because of it, I'm going to be quite critical, not in a "negative" way, hopefully, but in the cause of accuracy. I could do the same with the original three "little brown books" of Dungeons & Dragons, but that has been done to death.

Simplicity

The standard view, and one that was advanced at the outset by Ken St. Andre, is that Tunnels & Trolls is simpler and clearer than Dungeons & Dragons. That's undeniably true if you look at how both games progressed. Tunnels & Trolls would soon evolve a bit - adding clarifications, some new rules, supplementary material and the like. But it wouldn't change that much. It remained quite faithful to its first iteration. On the other hand, the rules-set of Dungeons & Dragons would expand exponentially a few years later with the creation of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons.

Of course, part of the beauty and value of the Tunnels & Trolls system is that it managed to preserve its original simplicity in later editions in a way that Dungeons & Dragons did not. But this is irrelevant when evaluating the original versions of both games.

Yet in terms of the original conceptions, I'm not sure that Tunnels & Trolls was simpler. It was shorter, yes, but that's largely because it left out pages of description - on monsters and magic items to take the most obvious examples - as well as supplementary material, present in the 3 LBB's, on everything from arial combats to sea fights. That Tunnels & Trolls was not simpler, is not a criticism per se, even from the point of view that simpler is better. If you strip away the presentation, I think both rules sets are actually quite simple - especially when compared with the rules sets for other role-playing games that would soon follow.

Tunnels & Trolls might be more intuitive, though I think even that is debatable.

In terms of presentation, I don't think Tunnels & Trolls is obviously clearer. Original Dungeons & Dragons was notoriously hard to understand - perhaps impossible to understand without reference to certain principles and assumptions that were not actually written down, at least between the covers of the 3 LLB's.  The OD&D combat system is a great example of this - with its cryptic references to Chainmail and "alternative" combat mechanics and the like. But original Tunnels & Trolls is also confusing and incomplete in many places. Much of this would be cleared up in later editions, but in evaluating the 1st edition, that's technically irrelevant.

Humor

Two days ago I referred to the "comic bits" in Gygax's original Castle Greyhawk campaign - with elves manning turnstiles and the prowling presence of "Sir Fang," among other things. Actually, I should have said, not Greyhawk, but Dave Arneson's Blackmoor campaign. You can check this by consulting Arneson's First Fantasy Campaign, originally released by Judges Guild, which may or not be still available for purchase in PDF form.

But if I'm not mistaken, much of this comic element was also present in Greyhawk, and you can see a bit of this in OD&D's The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures, with it's references to, for example, "a bowling alley for 20' high Giants."

I asked whether it made sense to criticize the "silliness" of T&T - such as those spell names - against the background of the silliness in Gygax's and Arneson's first campaigns.

In response, Rick Stump of Don't Split the Party, advanced the argument that the neutral and even bland spell names of OD&D allow the referee and players to decide for themselves what level of humor they wanted to have, as opposed to T&T where one particular approach was strongly implied.

While I'm still sympathetic to St. Andre's conception, I think that's a great point.

Tastelessness and Rants

In the original version of Part 2 of this review, I ended with a few paragraphs about preferring the "tasteless" or "juvenile" or, in one case, "sexist" jokes of 1st edition T&T - or at least an atmosphere where such jokes could be made - with the "corporate-vetted, politically correct pap" that "passes for writing" in today's RPG's. I stand by all of that, but I took it out (from the hit totals, it looks like maybe half of you saw it) because I wanted the review to be about OT&T, not about my own quasi-subjective, quasi-political opinions, especially when they threatened to attain rant level.

I might still do some ranting, but I'm going to save it for the conclusion.

Later edit: I think I overreacted, here. I put those paragraphs back in - for good.

If the word "sexist" still has any meaning, I don't think St. Andre is or was a sexist. I shouldn't even have to say that, and I hope by saying it, I'm not further keeping that appellation in play when it shouldn't be. I like writing that contains humor, style and personality, and clearly the hobby lost much of that when it went "mainstream." If you're writing for a small, relatively adult audience, I think the occasional "off-color" joke is just fine, if that's what you (the author) want to do - whether it might be a "sexist" joke about sex, or women or men or anyone or anything else. Indeed, in my more extreme moods, I think such "color" should be subsidized by the gods.

St. Andre interestingly included "misanthropes and misogynists" on his first casual list of monsters, along with goblins and jub jub birds.

And I'll say again what I pointed out in Part 1. St. Andre was the first to refer to both men and women when discussing player-characters. Beginning with 2nd edition, Tunnels & Trolls was also the first game to heavily make use of art by women (or at least one woman - Liz Danforth), and the iconic 5th edition, which is how most people were first exposed to the game, was also perhaps (I don't know this for a fact, but one can check it) the first major role-playing game to be extensively written and edited by a woman (again, Danforth).

In a perfect world, I suppose, one shouldn't be counting these things, but these days one almost has to, at least to rebut certain misleading narratives.

May the monsters be friendly and the magic benign!

And don't let the misanthropes or the jub jub birds eat you.

Next: Prime Attributes.

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This is a multi-part review series focusing on the 1st edition of Tunnels & Trolls. I also discuss the original edition of Dungeons & Dragons (OD&D), the early history of the hobby, later developments in Tunnels & Trolls and game design in general.

The 1st edition of Tunnels & Trolls was authored by Ken St. Andre in the spring of 1975. It was a 41 page, typewriter-written document, from which 100 photocopies were created. These were sold to friends and fellow gamers in Phoenix, Arizona, with some of the remainder being offered at the Westercon 28 gaming convention in Oakland, California. Within a few months, St. Andre entered into an agreement with the play-by-mail wargame company, Flying Buffalo, and a 2nd edition of Tunnels & Trolls was officially published at the end of the year. Many more editions followed, including the iconic 5th edition in 1979, which would remain in print, in much the same form, until 2012.

In 2013, as part of the Kickstarter campaign for Deluxe Tunnels & Trolls, St. Andre donated his only remaining copy of the 1st edition to be used as an incentive. Flying Buffalo later released a PDF of that copy, based on a precise scan of the original document, and including a new one-page introduction by St. Andre and a new back cover. It can now be purchased on RPGNow for $1.95.

At that price, it is now the best "steal" in the hobby. And it acts as a fascinating historical introduction to one of the best values in the hobby, the comprehensive 386 page current edition of Deluxe Tunnels & Trolls.