Quote:
Originally Posted by thrash
Many early dungeon fantasy rpgs (including, I think, T&T) emphasized the expansive but minutely stocked dungeon anyway.
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This thread inspired me to get a copy of the First Edition Tunnels & Trolls book so I could see how it all started, and yeah I think that's pretty much right. There's a section on "Digging Your Dungeon," that gives guidelines on how to map out a multi-level dungeon on graph paper, stock it with treasure, traps, and monsters, and make a key to help you easily read it. The GM is instructed to not make the dungeon "dull" and avoid having too many empty rooms.
Character creation is prettty quick in T&T, and monsters are far quicker to stat than most other RPGs (you just assign a single numerical Monster Rating, unless you're really wanting to do something special), but this all still assumes more prep on the GMs behalf than a true "pick up and play" game.
But I think it's worth pointing out that T&T was also the first RPG to have solo books (like The Fantasy Trip would later come out with).
Buffalo Castle was published in 1976 as an adventure for people who wanted to play but couldn't find a GM (it even predates the Fighting Fantasy books). If you knew how to make a character and had a copy of that, then I think the level of prep would be equivalent to any pick up and play game. But that's still quite different from the social dynamic of a pick up and play RPG.