Solo Play with Tunnels and Trolls, part #1

A sad topic, but one nonetheless I think about. One of my steady and long-time players is struggling to attend playing sessions. Our main group has been MIA for a while and it has been just me and him for a little while as we regroup, and he often doesn't want to participate due to several issues in his life. What if he goes his own way and I am a game-master without players?

Box everything up? Find new players? Hope for the best?

I blog and that helps, I have been at this too long to just give up, but I am coming to the realization changes are needed to keep my tabletop gaming mojo going.

Going Solo

The thought occurs to me to go solo for a while until I find a group. This is possible, and I would probably change my game to something more solo friendly and also find a way to share what I did with others, like here on the SBRPG blog. Something like Labyrinth Lord or Tunnels and Trolls 8.0, where I could just keep a character sheet by my computer, knock off a few encounters, and write them up for the blog every so often. T&T is the more solo-friendly option, as with B/X games they typically need a party to have the most fun (and many adventures are party focused).

I un-boxed my T&T 8.0 book last night, why I boxed this up is beyond me, and managed to knock over half of everything in my closet. Everything is fine save for a fluorescent light now that doesn't work, but that was old and was on its last flicker of life anyways so it was overdue for a replacement. Such is life and the constant replacement and maintenance of the things around us, it never ends and one should take it as part of the normal flow of things. Plus, that may be a sign from above - go forth and adventure to find the (replacement) light! A quest hath been discovered!

T&T was always a game that worked well with a single person or a small party of up to three (and run by one person). While some don't appreciate the abstract nature of the combats, I like them a whole lot and feel they are closer to fictional writer-ly combat where there is this unseen "tide of battle" determines who gets that last, critical blow in. The system also does a good job at simulating the wearing down of the losing side well, both in gear durability and in damage ability of the participants. In a lot of games a fighter or monster on turn one still has the same damage ability as on the last turn of battle, and that doesn't happen here since during combat monsters wear down and characters can wear down in both armor, weapons, characteristics, and health.

T&T is also simple, and I can "sim" any sort of dime-store paperback pulp fantasy setting easily with the rules, from Conan-style pulp fantasy to two-fisted Indiana Jones style adventure (just pick up the T&T compatible and excellent Mercenaries, Spies, and Private Eyes game for seven dollars over on RPGNow for all you would ever need in a modern weapon and talent list). I can even play Buck Rogers style science fantasy with this rules set if I wanted, it isn't too hard to adjust the talent list to include piloting and a few other sci-fi skills, pick some damages for ray guns, and blast off to adventure using the three base classes and MR ratings for all of the space-bound foes. I need to do a conversion guide from MS&PE to T&T 8.0 later on here on the blog, and that sounds like a fun project to do. More on that later.

How to Start

There are so many solo adventures (some free, some very inexpensive) over on RPGNow as well for Tunnels and Trolls, and it really isn't much effort to play them with any version of the game. I could probably buy one of these (and I love supporting the authors and creators in the community, it is cool), and go through it a couple times to enjoy the creativity and fun they put into these adventures. I am probably done, and there is no real reason to think any further beyond that.

But I like coming up with silly ideas, and I would love a random adventure generator to have fun with for solo adventures. I will add this as another TODO item on my list since it would be fun to have an adventure creator to just kick around with as my character goes on dangerous expeditions, levels up, and possibly fails in his or her grand epic quest of randomness.

So Random! So What?

With published solo adventures, there is very little "so what" factor. You are playing through like a golf course, and you are seeing all the cool choices and entries that the author came up with. With a purely random game you get this "so what" feeling after a while that I get when I play a purely mathematical game - sort of like a rouge-like where it is just more a spreadsheet of numbers fighting each other with no real purpose or goal.

It is like spinning up a character and then fighting a numeric list of monster ratings without a story, monsters, encounters, or rhyme or reason - I mean, why? You can fight numbers and roll dice, hooray! That is what I want to avoid in a random adventure system. Some dungeon games I get off Steam are like this, I go into some hole in the ground, fight a couple rooms, and then eventually give up because it is more about making numbers fight numbers and there isn't any real sense of progressing a story or making an accomplishment.

I like getting treasure, upgrading my character, getting better weapons and armor, leveling up, combat, and succeeding against all odds - you know, the mechanical stuff. T&T's treasure tables don't seem well suited for random adventures, there is a lack of magic items, potions, and other cool loot that I may want to make my own tables to raise the level of game in this area. I like finding traps, parlay, puzzles, and jumping pits, so there has to be some interaction more than just combat in a system like this.

A really good random solo play system is a very hard thing to design, so maybe my wants here are going to outstrip what I should do is focus in on finding a great single-player adventure and playing through it solo. Or just finding some silly way of generating random adventures and go with the flow. There is a point where you have so much structure to random generation that you lose all the fun.

Challenge Level

Remember this?

http://sbrpg20.blogspot.com/2016/07/tunnels-and-trolls-what-is-average.html

50-50 challenge MR = (average party damage - 3.5) x 1.174

That formula is going to work nicely with creating Monster Ratings for my random system. I want to figure out the "starting damage" before the run (and not adjust up during play so upgrades found during the adventure are not minimized). And then use some sort of chart like this to determine MR for the fight:

1. -20% MR
2. -10% MR
3. Average MR
4. +10% MR
5. +20% MR
6. +30% MR

I wanted to bias towards tougher fights because upgrades will be found, smart tactics will be used, and I like putting a little fear into encounters. Half the chart is average or below, so these fights should be winnable. The other half of the encounter table should be the home of nightmares and lucky rolls. Also, avoiding a fight, parlay, and using sneaky tactics to gain an advantage should always be an option.

It needs to be tested, I really don't know, and in a long dungeon an "even" fight may be too hard after a series of them, so there is that to consider. This is one of those things where you really have no idea until you get in and watch the pain happen after five or six of these, and then test again because your first test may have been a fluke. And then test again because you need more data, and the first two runs could have been flukes.

That said, figuring out the MR of a fight is really the easiest part of the random solo adventure problem, and it is really just the beginning. This problem is not 5% solved yet, and there needs to be something more to this - even a off-the-cuff system needs some risk, reward, and failure system worked out that says "pass the check, something good happens; fail the check and something bad happens." Also, how does one determine the end or goal of a random adventure?

In part two, I will continue my ideas on this...or I may just try something and see how that works. You never know since you want to keep iterating when you do game development like this.