Re: (TFT) Converting Dungeons and Droolers...

["Anthony Merlock" <amerlock@execpc.com>]

"Joe Hartley" <jh@brainiac.com> wrote:
> "Anthony Merlock" <amerlock@execpc.com> wrote:
> > My point?  I guess it would be that the player's and the GM define the
game,
> > not the rules, and it's far easier to avoid the rules and get to the
> > role-playing if everyone knows the rules well.
>
> Ah, the crux of the biscuit.  The game module, be it Tollenkar's Lair,
> Grail Quest or Death Test, rests in a large part on the people involved,
> but especially on the GM.  The game you're playing is nothing more than a
> framework, and people shouldn't be afraid to add or remove as seems
> appropriate.
>
> I played GrailQuest with Brett a while back, and had a great game.  part
> of that is that the game lent itself to RP, but also because I wasn't
afraid
> to embellish where I could.  One of the best encounters was a random "on
the
> road" encounter that I turned into a blood feud between Brett's wizard and
> a crazed person from out of his past.  For a moment or two there was some
> real uncertainty as to whether the new character was a nut or whether
Brett's
> wizard (who was an NPC hired along the way) was really a murderer.  Brett
> role-played it very well, with his knight staunchly defending his
hireling's
> honor, and it went great.  It was a lot more fun than "You meet 3 orcs who
> want to rob you."

The two most memorable game sessions I've run in recent years had exactly
zero dice rolls - the first was an encounter with some wandering dwarves
which ended up with the characters spending the entire session socializing
with the dwarves.  One of the players kept saying how drunk his character (a
dwarf) was getting.  The next morning, as they were leaving, a young female
dwarf ran up to him, kissed him on the cheek, and gave him a braid of her
hair before running back into the dwarf hold.  When he asked, I told him
that he had no memory of her..... His character asked the guards who she
was, and they just chuckled at him..... Plenty of fodder for fun and future
adventures (they still don't know who she was)!

The second was an adventure that I wrote to test the group - basically, it
was designed so that if they decided to fight their way through, it was
guaranteed that they would die.  Amazingly, they realized this themselves,
and role-played their way through the entire adventure, and we all had a
heck of a good time.

Surprisingly enough, both adventures were run using D&D, and both groups
were "died-in-the-wool" hard-core D&D players, who normally would rather
hack, slash, & loot their way thru encounters than think their way thru.  I
was quite impressed.

>
> > Or, you could run them thru Death Test/DT2/Orb Quest and bore them to
death
>
> There's not much to these 3, that's for sure.  I can see using them as a
> small part of a *much* larger game (in the same way TL is set in the
> larger setting of Dran), but it takes a lot of work on the GM's part.
>
> BTW, did you know TL was originally going to be part of ITL?  Apparently
> HT thought that ITL was getting too big, and that it would benefit by
> having a module immediately available and that a separate module meant
> more $$$, so it was split out.  There are some things in each book that
> don't make a lot of sense unless you use them together.

That makes sense - I did read somewhere that AM, AW and ITL were originally
going to be in a boxed set, with plenty of counters and map boards, but HT
decided that people wouldn't buy it.  So, it makes sense that TL would be
part of the equation.

TL is the one TFT book I don't own.  At the time, I was just not interested
in running pre-made modules or using a pre-made campaign world, so I never
bought it.  My older brother has it, though (between my older brother, my
youngest brother, and myself we have quite a collection of TFT stuff!).

Tony Merlock


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