![]() And the fact that the leg keeps kicking you afterward is both hilarious and horrific. ![]() So the specificity of being able to cut off a troll’s leg is deliciously enlivening. In fact, unlike in some systems, having taken serious damage doesn’t even reduce a character’s or monster’s efficacy in combat. It doesn’t mean you’ve crippled its arm, opened a gushing wound or given it a concussion. What does “ x damage” mean? It means you’ve come a certain amount closer to defeating your opponent. In the Loathsome Limbs variant, you can lop off the troll’s arms, legs and head- and they keep fighting independently! Not only that, the troll can grab them and reattach them! This is what Anderson’s troll did, and it adds tons of flavor to the combat encounter.įifth-edition Dungeons and Dragons is a streamlined affair, compared with earlier editions of D&D (and other role-playing systems such as Pathfinder and GURPS), with little in the way of directed attacks or limp-specific injuries, so when you hit an opponent, you do x damage. ![]() Such a monster would be an uncomplicated opponent: It would close to melee range immediately, slash and chomp away, and retreat only if seriously injured or attacked with fire or acid.īut add in Loathsome Limbs, and trolls become a lot more fun. It operates more by smell than by sight, regenerates damage unless it’s been struck by fire or acid, and has a claw/claw/bite Multiattack. It’s got darkvision, so it prefers to operate at night or underground. It’s a straightforward brute, with exceptionally high Strength, extraordinarily high Constitution and low-to-middling mental abilities. The vanilla troll isn’t all that interesting. ![]() TROLL FF WORKS TRIALThe suspense was heightened by the fact that they didn’t know what it could do, and they had to discover its weakness by trial and error. I love this variant because it creates trolls that hark back to my favorite troll combat scene ever, from Three Hearts and Three Lions by Poul Anderson, and because I once ran a solo adventure for a friend in which he and a couple of NPCs had to fight one such troll without ever being told what it was. Trolls are great- if you use the Loathsome Limbs variant. This is an inexcusable oversight on my part. TROLL FF WORKS FULLI mentioned trolls in an earlier post on this blog, but a reader recently brought to my attention that I’ve never given them the full treatment. ![]()
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