Loping To the Attack (follow up)

I am surprised at the level of response that I received to the "Lope Troll" earlier. Thanks for the emails and praise folks really. Thought I'd take the time to answer one question that has come up multiple (three and half times) in different emails. So Tisi, Matt, Geoffry and Daelga (there are T&T players and troll fans in Portugal?), here goes nothing.

To paraphrase the question, "Does a single player or the whole party have to be able to withstand fifteen six-sided dice plus seventy added points?"

My answer, "Yes."

I thought I covered this sort of thing earlier, but here let me go into more depth. As in real life, sometimes a task can be handled by a single person, other times it has to handled by a team, or at least a group within proximity to the situation.

Now a single high level PC can indeed around the on average 112 points that the Lope Troll can dish out, maybe even from an Ambush style of attack. A Warrior-Wizard, err Paragon with a lot of armor and high Cn might be on a god-quest or something, the Lope Troll will make an interesting encounter, maybe even a whole side story, in that saga.

And in T&T, the Player-Character group can absorb damage from combat, though not the Spite damage, as the players see fit. So a group of say four near beginning level delvers might be able to handle the beastie as well. Well, thinking about it, make that five adventurers, because the single PC ambushed more than likely will be dead before he knows it, and his player will have thrown her Mountain Dew can at me and stepped outside to smoke a cigarette and key my car by the next round. Hey, death happens in sword and sorcery RPG campaigns. If I don't get the players used to early on, it'll more than likely get ugly later on in the campaign when I, as the GM, kill 7th or even 10th level heroes. To me it's about the narrative not the personal "daydream fulfillment."

As usual, I digress, I suppose my real point here, is that this question strikes me as being posed from people unfamiliar with an open-ended and not balanced rules matrix like T&T. But I am flattered to get such attention, and hope you all will become fans of my favorite RPG game.

As for questions like "What's the MR?," "Do Lope Trolls eat leprechauns?" or "Are you being surreal with mentions of periodicals?," I can only answer with... (not responding).