I became a fan of Gottfried as the result of another part of my misspent youth: the discovery of USA’s Up All Night, hosted Friday nights by Gottfried, Saturday nights by Rhonda Shear. I preferred Gottfried, which is probably a sign that I need professional help. 

I could just smell the seventies oozing forth.

Players (and named monsters important enough to have detailed stats) do damage based on the weapon they are using, plus adds based on their ability scores.  Nameless monsters have a Monster Rating that serves as both their Hit Points and the damage they do: MR/10 (rounded up) D6, plus MR/2 (rounded down) adds.  Most nameless monsters don’t have armor.

The result is rolling huge numbers of D6 on each side and quickly summing them up with the adds. 

If the players have the higher total, the monsters will take damage, which lowers their Monster Ratings, which gives them less dice and adds in the next round of combat, and the death-spiral accelerates from there.

If both sides are about even, or the monsters roll a little bit higher, the players’ armor will hopefully soak up the difference, while spells and missile weapons wear down the other side to the point the death-spiral starts.

If the monsters rolled much higher, the surviving players should retreat. ;)

Enemy selection as a GM is about figuring out in advance what the likely damage output of the characters will be, and selecting MR that does about the same average damage.  Or less, if you want an easy encounter, to teach the system.  Or more, if you want the players to solve the conflict with something other than combat.  It’s pretty clean and mathematical, once you figure it out.

Clearly, the game isn’t about the realism of the combat, but the role-playing and problem-solving, with occasional punctuation of combat thrown in when parlay with encountered monsters (who typically dislike death as much as you do) breaks down.

Of course, once players understand the system, you can complexify, and allow clever things like breaking the combat into independently resolved sub-melees, or cutting some enemies off from the fight by confining them to a tight space, or otherwise taking advantage of the terrain… bringing more opportunities for problem-solving and roll-playing further into the combat part of the game.

So, really, it depends on what you want out of a game, and what “role-playing” means to you.

If you want a crunchy, realistic combat system, and role-playing means fight scenes where you make clever use of the stuff on your character sheet, and a session is a couple of big fights that take all night to resolve in gloriously epic detail, this is not the right game for you.

If you want combat to be simple and over with quickly, so that you can get back to role-playing part, where characters talk to each other, outwit traps, outwit monsters, and solve puzzles, with a system simple enough that you can teach it to your kids as their first RPG, then T&T is ideal.

Actually, the first noble truth is “Life is suffering (dukka),” which I think is pretty self-evident, so I’m down with that one.

Not sure that an evaluation of the quality of life that was made two and a half millennia before most people had running water is entirely valid. Although life might still be suffering for many people, and there might still be some suffering for almost anyone, I see no reason to take a 2,500 year-old pessimistic view of life.

Just let go of desire and revulsion and enjoy life.

“Suffering is born of desire” (often translated as “attachment”) is the second noble truth.

But yes, a corollary to that truth is that happiness comes from the attainment of desire. That’s why, strictly speaking, Buddhists don’t pursue happiness (in the conservative, Therevadan perspective at least). They aim for cessation/nibbana, which is the end of suffering.

Equanimity is also higher on the list than happiness.

Sometimes if the setting is interesting enough people will port the characters and monsters over to a better designed system, but that’s a lot of work and if your setting is “D&D but a little funnier” then there isn’t going to be much motivation to do it.

Basically, first edition D&D was pretty rough around the edges, a little spare, and had some braindamage.  I’m quite dubious about a cheap knockoff version of it. 

Then again we didn’t need a game that was “sillier and far more casual than D&D” because we were usually pretty casual when it came to the rules, and brought a lot of silliness to the game ourselves. I once spent an entire evening playing a cleric as Gilbert Gottfried.

It’s a pretty smart game.

(“Monsters! Monsters!” let you play a monster going on a surface raid. You got experience points for eating people.)