Sunday 5 May 2013

Swordplay You Say?

Talents are one of the few big tweaks that came with Tunnels and Trolls 7.x. There was also obviously a couple of new attributes thrown into the mix and, the way you measured character level changed significantly. Experience points were spent as well as earned but all of this was pretty black and white.

Talents however where left (quite intentionally it would seem) ambiguous. They could be pretty much anything you wanted them to be and, you don't even have to declare them from the get go. Which is all well and good but, I'd be lying if I didn't say that the vague nature of the official ruling didn't bug me just a little.

It's all well and good when you're constructing a vanilla Talent, such as Climbing say. It's bonus applies when you're climbing, but what of Talents with a combat or magical focus. You know a player will want to take one eventually. Just how do you handle it?

If you're playing it by the rulebook Talents don't do anything for improving how well you fight, which I frankly don't agree with. In the example given in the rulebook Fang uses his Swordplay Talent to disarm an opponent when he is outnumbered, which logically suggests that he is armed with a sword of some description. Yet his Talent affords him no bonus directly to his combat total.. Which just doesn't add up to me.

He should get a bonus, but what exactly? The value of his Talent (not his Talent plus his Attribute) in adds? In dice? Something else completely?

11 comments:

  1. Building off of Kopfy's article a few weeks back, what if the Swordplay Talent also reduced the adds of the opponent? Or, added to your own adds.

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    1. Ooh, I missed that article. Do you have a link?

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    2. http://kopftnt.blogspot.com/2013/02/the-war-cry.html

      not specifically on Talents I guess...

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    3. Ah, I recall that one. :0). Thanks for the link though, I'll include it in the next Swordplay You Say? update as a few more comments have come in over at the Google+ group since I put up todays post. :0).

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  2. In my games, where our dwarf fighter knocks enemies down with his My Shoulder Hates That Closed Door!, I usually rule that a knocked down enemy doesn't sum his MR for a single round: somehow Swordplay could work similarly, leaving the enemy out of combat temporarily.

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    1. I like that idea Hamel. What level of SR do you usually call for when using the ability as I have to figure most of the things the dwarf is charging are bigger and possibly heavier than he is being a dwarf and all.

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    2. As a rule of thumb I do the same Dan Prentice suggested in TrollZine! #1: 1 level each 40 MR.

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    3. That seems fair. MR 40 is the highest MR that a 1st level Warrior can realistically take on single-handed, so tying it into the SR makes sense.

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