Trolls and the trollish Trolling that Trolls do.

  The other day, the group I DM for encountered a Troll in a dungeon.  They fought it, defeated it, but did not initially use fire or acid, so even after the troll was down, it regenerated and started to get back up.  One of the players resumed the attack, this time expressely telling me he was chopping the troll to bits, and expressed incredulity toward me when I said the troll was still regenerating.

Now, D&D is a game that has always had a lot of room for interpretation, flexibility, and imagination.  That's what makes it so fun.  There is a possible downside, however.  In a fantasy world, there really aren't a lot of concrete rules on exactly how things work.  Pick up five different fantasy novels, and you'll get five different mechanics on how magic in that realm works, or how dragons work, etc.  There's a lot of flexibility because it's driven by imagination, not by science.  Why is that a downside in D&D?  Because sometimes you have expectations by players that don't match each other or the DM.  Normally, this is handled by players deferring to the DM since the DM is the referee,  the one who sets the stage and the one who writes the adventure.  That means the DM alone determines how the elements of the fantasy setting function.

Sometimes, players struggle with that.  

In this case, the player had the expectation that chopping a troll to pieces would kill it permanently and thus end its regeneration.  When it didn't, the player (to his credit) didn't try and argue that it should, and he didn't get nasty or anything like that.  What he did do was start trying to think of ways in which this could be used in silly, game-breaking ways.  One example was taking a piece of a troll, putting it in a box, and then using it as a kind of troll-grenade on the assumption that the chunk of troll would start to regenerate into a new troll and burst out of the box.

And hey, in some sillier, more cartoony campaigns, that might fit perfectly into the setting.  It doesn't in mine, and here I was, now having to come up with answers on the minutia of how trolls work in my campaign world on the spot, and I have continued to get ribbed about it since.

Now, I have been a DM for over 35 years.  This isn't the first time I've had a troll in my campaign.  The problem is that I don't like trolls very much, so I don't often include them in my campaigns.  The last time I did was probably back in the 3rd Edition days, and frankly, I don't remember how I handled it.  I do know that it's come up before.  

The 'problem' with D&D (And I don't necessarily think it's a bad thing) is that D&D uses a lot of abstraction when it comes to combat.  We represent all damage, fatigue, morale, etc., all in one stat:  Hit points.  That means there's no rules-based mechanism for dealing with severed limbs or called shots or anything like that in 5E.

99% of the time, that's all you need because D&D was never intended to be a combat game.  Combat was intended to be just one tool in a toolbox of different ways to respond to the various in-game situations.  Why are 90% of the rules in D&D about combat?  Well, that's because while combat is just one tool, it tends to be the one most frequently used out of the toolbox, and for most players, it's the tool that's most fun to use.

The description of a troll says that a troll regains 10hp per round if it was not burned by acid or fire in that round.  That's fine in a purely abstract sense.  Do enough damage to get it to or below 0 HP, do it with fire or acid damage, and all's done.  Easy peasy.

The problem comes in when we want to get more detailed or the scenario isn't that straightforward.  Indeed, what happens when a Troll is hacked to pieces?  Well, based on what we have written, it regains 10 HP per round. 

Alright, so what does that look like in-game?  A troll has to go from being a mess of troll parts on the floor into a fully functioning, combat-ready troll in the span of one round.  Why?  In D&D, you are at 100% combat effectiveness even if you only have a single hit point.  This is where abstraction starts to break down.  The rules, as designed, don't cover that situation.  Now, that's okay. This is why we have a DM and not just some weird decision matrix or overly complex combat rules.  (Looking at you, Twilight:2000) 

Indeed, what happens if a troll is cut precisely in half?  Do we get 2 trolls?  Do the 2 halves pull themselves back together into the original troll?  What if the parts are physically separated by a wall or by being in a container?   There's no help from the rules to answer those questions, so it's up to the DM.  That's perfectly fine.  Again, this is why we have a DM.

But here's where the players need to be part of the solution.  If you want to come up with creative and game-breaking ideas like putting troll bits in boxes or generating additional trolls based on the idea that separated bits regenerate into individual trolls, you've got to cut the DM some slack.  I know it was all just for a laugh, but at one point, I got the vibe that I was being criticized for not having immediate and perfectly consistent responses to those questions.  Maybe I was just misunderstanding, but it did get frustrating. 

So, since then, I've given it some thought and started thinking about how we used to handle stuff like that back in the day when we were teenagers playing 1E and coming up with all kinds of dumb stuff like that all the time.  Here's how trolls work mechanically in my campaign now:

One troll does not regenerate into multiple trolls under any circumstances.  Ever.  If a troll is cut perfectly in half and the two halves are separated, they regenerate up to the point where all that's left is for the halves to be brought together.  At which point they'd fuse, and you have a working troll.  The same is true for a troll hacked into multiple bits.  They'll regenerate, and if they're close by, they'll reattach as they do, and soon (very soon), you have a working troll.

So, what happens if you put a piece of troll in a box?  Well, you have a box with a chunk of living troll tissue in it, but that's all it will ever be.

What I like about this is that it opens up possibilities for in-game scenarios.  Imagine a low-level campaign in which a troll (who isn't evil) hires a party of adventurers to go and recover its arm, taken by a tribe of orcs during a raid.  The PCs bring back the arm, and it reattaches to the troll. The PCs get paid, and all is well.  Or if the scenario is a Valentine's Day scenario, a troll's heart has been stolen (literally) by a troll that was into him, but she's just too fugly even by troll standards and so he wants his heart back. 

Q&A Section: 

• Hold on, if the troll is missing his heart, how can he be awake and functioning?  Well, rule of funny, my friend.  Rule of funny.  Sometimes consistency has to take a backseat to fun.  If you're somebody who is bothered by that lack of perfect consistency for the sake of comedy, then sit out that session or something, I dunno.  This is my DM style.

• Okay, okay, okay, so what if you cut off a troll's arm and incinerate it to ash?  Is the troll forever without a limb now?  For the short-term future, yes.  You'd have a one-arm troll for a very long time, as it regenerates the limb very, very slowly.  Eventually, the missing arm would just die (see below), and the Troll would regain a new one.

• So what happens if you take a troll, cut it up into 100 pieces, put the pieces in 100 jars, and then bury the jars in separate places?  Would you have these pieces just be alive in a sort of limbo forever?  Well, first, if the PCs do that, then all of their alignments change to CE to represent that they're sadistic bastards.  To answer the question, eventually, the separate pieces would die.  After all, a troll needs to eat, breathe and poop just live everything else.  That tells me that the tissues of the body require sustenance, and without it, they have to die sooner or later.

• So, a troll can starve to death?  Yes, it can.  It just takes a while.

• Hah!  Then that means a troll can be killed by means other than just by burning!  Yes, yes, you're very smart.  Now shut up and keep reading.

• Alright, what about cutting off a troll's head?  Would the head still be alive?  Would the body be able to walk around headless and crash into stuff?  Yes, the head would be alive, and no, the body wouldn't walk around knocking things over (Unless it would be really funny,  then maybe).  What happens to your brain when it has no blood pressure?  You go unconscious.  What happens to your body if its connection to your brain via the spinal cord is severed?  Your body goes limp.  So it is with trolls.  Still alive but effectively inert.

• So it sounds like you're saying the Troll grenade idea wouldn't work.  Good morning.

• Well, at the time, you said each piece would become a troll.  Well, I changed my mind.  This is me notifying the players of a ruling that will affect future sessions.

I'm just going to go with this.  It acknowledges the regenerating property of trolls but heads off game-breaking scenarios that would spiral into an unrecoverable level of silliness.

• So what you're saying is that there's no way we could weaponize an incapacitated troll to be used against enemies.  I'm not saying that.  Just providing the mechanics of how trolls work.  Want to cut a troll into pieces, stuff the pieces into a barrel, and then use a catapult to fling it into an enemy's courtyard?  Go right ahead.  That would be perfectly in keeping with what I've written above.

• What if we WANT it to get silly?  If you want that kind of silly, I'd be more than happy to come up with an adventure that runs on that level of silly.  I just don't want it to become the norm in my regular campaign.  I've complained before that I like my D&D to be darker and more serious.  That level of silly is NOT the direction I'd want to take things in the regular campaign.

• Well, above, you said you might trade consistency for funny.  Now you're saying you don't want silliness.  You're being contradictory.  I said I don't want silliness to become the norm.  I didn't say we could never get goofy.  I'm just exercising my DM's perogative to throttle it.