The higher the level and the more wealth your character attains, the better you are doing in comparison to all the other players.” (See But how do you win?) “ Every time your character escapes from a tunnel alive, you may consider yourself a winner. Brave men and women arm themselves and venture within the tunnels at risk of body and soul to seek treasure and experience.”
Generally speaking, the greatest treasures and most powerful monster are found further below the surface. “ There exist numerous enchanted tunnel complexes (call them dungeons or underworlds if you wish) that are liberally loaded with many types of treasure, and abundantly guarded by every imaginable form of monster, magic, and trap. (See 4 popular beliefs Dungeons & Dragons defied in the 70s.) Only the DM knows what is in the dungeon.” In 1975, games needed boards. The individual players cannot see the board. “ The game is played something like Battleship.
#How to make wargames terrain 2003 david cross how to#
Andre wrote T&T- Tunnels & Trolls-because he found the D&D rules “nearly incomprehensible.” He describes T&T as having the same relationship to D&D as “Chevrolet does to Ford.” His explanation of how to play T&T worked for D&D too. Aside from the referee, the game seems nearly as constrained as Clue-except D&D features a hidden board like Battleship. If monsters appear, roll for distance, surprise, reaction, and then initiative.Īs hard as D&D proved to grasp, this “sequence of play” isn’t too different from Risk. Hargrave’s how-to amounts to this: move, roll for monsters, repeat. But the rule books confused folks accustomed to rolling dice to see how many squares a wheelbarrow could move. Gary Gygax’s peers felt comfortable with rules for inches of movement and for how many 10-foot squares a character could search in a 10-minute turn. D&D arrived as a companion to a miniature battle game called Chainmail, and the rules built on a foundation of turns and moves. The original D&D rules read as a summary for people who already knew how to play. Sure it claims to be an explanation of how to play “a fantasy game,” but in 1976, when Dave Hargrave penned the tutorial, the range of fantasy games included D&D, D&D set in a world called Tékumel, and a game designed under the generic name of D&D until it reached stores as T&T. The first Arduin Grimoire starts by explaining how to play Dungeons & Dragons.