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Originally Posted by Lars Dangly
I always thought that the best way to play T&T was using the personalized monster stats rather than monster ratings. The latter always felt really limiting to me. Monsters had no real access to the flexible attribute system, they were just bags of rating points to be ablated away. I also always had mixed feelings about the mass combat system: It is a cool way of handling two on one or three on one fights, but terrible for running a party of adventurers vs. a horde of critters. Much better to use miniatures or common sense to sort out who is paird up with whom and run it as a series of small clashes, like in other games.
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Funny you should mention that; I picked up T&T 5.5 as an old fan (some fans might remember The Sorcerer's Scrolls fanzine I did, or the Keepers of Lingusia rules supplement); I managed to run a game of 5.5 (in other words, a game of the usual fun T&T with the skill options and additional combat suggestions mixed in). But this time I did something I've never tried with T&T before: I used miniatures, and lots of them. (been collecting the D&D minis, see....)
And you are right, I think I was enormously impressed with how well the T&T simplicity blended with the minis to produce an elegant gaming experience. For one thing, it flowed much faster than D20 (no surprise there) but for another, it helped to avoid any of the pitfalls normally associated with T&T combat: characters on board in formation could group combat rolls, for example, against opponents, but if some guy charged off to the corner and four ghouls surrounded him.....well it made perfect sense that he got cut down through massive overkill. It also seemed to encourage more saving-roll based stunts; not merely to try and tie-break closely matched opponents (or grossly mismatched, you pick) but simply because some players saw opportunities visually recognized in a nice layout with the minis, and acted on them.
This whole bit was weird to me, because I often felt I had the exact opposite problem with minis in D&D/D20, in which I kept feeling that creative combat was being stiffled by using the figures and maps. That whole theory was blown out of the water with my foray back to T&T; it made me realize that a simple system like T&T by definition encourages more options and interesting stunts, simply because it makes no effort to limit players in what they might conceive of. In fact, T&T's simple rules are built for stunt-taking. D&D/D20 on the other hand is all about carefully defining what can and can't be done, and it takes a lot of fast-and-loose ignoring of the rules to give players the same creative freedom in D20 as they already have inherently in a game like T&T. I would argue that Castles & Crusades manages something similar, as well, by refraining from defined skill sets and removing the feat system.