The Trollish Taproom - A Closer Look at Spite Damage

Spite Damage as a concept is great.  Each 6 rolled on a d6 is damage that makes it thru, even against the side that wins.  In a Tunnels & Trolls game with a GM and a full party, it adds to the drama and the tactics of the party.  It also makes the Poor Baby spell even more valuable then it was before.

In Solo Play, spite sucks.  Big time.  Unless you are willing to declare it is a player ability only, and deny it to the monster side of things, it makes the solo adventures unplayable.

Look at it this way.  Each encounter a player survives, he carries over his spite damage to the next encounter.  The next adversary will be fresh.  Spite was added to prevent the endless combats of evenly matched and armor opponents, but instead it whittles the player down to nothing as the adventure goes on.

This problem goes is worse with the 7e rules of T&T - monsters no longer lose attack dice as their MR goes down, just Combat Adds.  So yes, even more potential spite damage.

Pretty much every T&T solo published by FBI is pre-T&T 5.5e - pre-spite in other words.  They are not balanced for spite, and they are not balanced for monster's not losing combat dice as their MR gets whittled down.

This was all pretty obvious as I sat down to game last nite.

So, if you are going to run any of your 7.5e characters thru an earlier solo, these are my recommendations:

- Only your PC's attacks generate spite.  It won't make much of a difference, but every little bit helps.

- Damage to a monster's MR results in a loss of CA and Combat Dice (if appropriate)

- As long as you CA are appropriate for the adventure, you wont need to worry about adjusting monster MRs - 7.5e characters tend to be more powerful then earlier editions, but solos are balance against CA, so it all works.