The One Ring (and ME RPGs in general)

[Hriston]

Anyway, I tought it would be nice to have a thread where we can talk about The One Ring and other Middle Earth RPGs.

Here's a link to a thread I started yesterday where I posted a write-up of the "Great Wheel" cosmology for a D&D game with a Middle-earth-like setting that nevertheless avails itself of many D&Disms (like elementals). Since it's for D&D, it's a somewhat generic presentation of the concept, but I think it represents how D&D could be considered a "Middle-earth RPG".

 

[Celebrim]

While I don't care all that much for the execution of Rings of Power, there's a lot of fertile and loosely defined ground in the Second Age. I'd definitely consider it seriously if I were to run a game in ME.

The later Second Age would be awesome for a Pendragon style game of knights with a setting where the Numenorean Empire is increasingly the big bad, and the various smaller Kingdoms have complex political relationships and valid grievances that are secretly and cunningly being exploited by Sauron - leading to the doom of the Nine Kings who end up with rings of power. Imagine some El Cid style, "It's hard to figure out who the bad guys and the good guys are because both sides have honor" storytelling, or even something like the Clone Wars where the nominal protagonists that you'd normally want to be rooting for are actually the bad guys and the bad guys - while sometimes despicable - have an underlying philosophical basis and complaint ("Stop your imperial colonialism and racism!") that is sympathetic.

RoP could have been amazing in the hands of a competent writer. It just isn't.

 

[Micah Sweet]

The later Second Age would be awesome for a Pendragon style game of knights with a setting where the Numenorean Empire is increasingly the big bad, and the various smaller Kingdoms have complex political relationships and valid grievances that are secretly and cunningly being exploited by Sauron - leading to the doom of the Nine Kings who end up with rings of power. Imagine some El Cid style, "It's hard to figure out who the bad guys and the good guys are because both sides have honor" storytelling, or even something like the Clone Wars where the nominal protagonists that you'd normally want to be rooting for are actually the bad guys and the bad guys - while sometimes despicable - have an underlying philosophical basis and complaint ("Stop your imperial colonialism and racism!") that is sympathetic.

RoP could have been amazing in the hands of a competent writer. It just isn't.

I love everything about this.

 

[bert1001 fka bert1000]

I owned 1E but only ever got to run a one shot of it, so I never deeply understood its mechanics. What about 2E do people dislike?

The biggest for me is that they made the math worse, which wasn't super strong in 1e either but sort of worked. Specifically they changed most of the modifiers from TN (TN = DC the number you need to hit or higher) to number of dice in dice pool.

The issue is that One Ring dice pools are very very chunky / swingy (in either edition). So 1 or 2 dice added or subtracted can give you huge swings in success rates.

So for instance at TN14 you have success of:

1 dice = 17%
2 dice = 42%
3 dice = 69%
4 dice = 89%
5 dice = 97%

IMO it's just not a good way to modify within their system. This isn't a roll x dice keep the best 2 type system in which the math works better.

In 1e you usually had a more or less fixed dice pool per skill during an adventure (could change as you leveled up) and usually modified TN during play which was more granular. 1 point of TN is more like 5-10 percentage points different in success rate (it changes depending on your dice pool and TN unlike D&D due to the dice). There was still a bit of an issue with "sweet spot" of rolls but could be mitigated somewhat through TN modification.

Some other things in 2E that I didn't like:

• hope implementation as someone said
• less distinctive racial abilities
• still didn't fix the math on their multi roll non combat encounter system -- Skill endeavors and Councils. They did print a fix to the blatant math error in Ruins but the systems aren't great because of the before mentioned dice pool modifiers. It's even worse in multi roll situations and you quickly get to very very easy or very very hard if you have a small or large pool. (note: they used a different system in 1e which didn't work well either math wise)
• more a matter of taste but I really liked the "pre rolls" in 1e before travel, combat, social that you could bank for later representing the more intellectual aspects of each.

 

[Celebrim]

So for instance at TN14 you have success of:

1 dice = 17%
2 dice = 42%
3 dice = 69%
4 dice = 89%
5 dice = 97%

IMO it's just not a good way to modify within their system. This isn't a roll x dice keep the best 2 type system in which the math works better.

One of the problems I've had with just about every dice pool system is that it never feels like the designer's have the slightest understanding of the odds of success or failure in their system, and that all the intuitive "elegant" modifiers could be better handled with a single d% throw against a table like the above.

And further, if the simplification to a single throw of the dice with a d% and a table didn't feel elegant, than all the rules about altering dice pools shouldn't feel elegant either. Humans are just terrible at intuiting probabilities.

I've very much over the years come to much prefer single dice systems based on D20 or D% over anything with a pool of dice, and generally even prefer linear percentages like D20 over 3D6 simply because modifiers are much more straightforward when dealing with one die than a non-linear distribution (ei, +3 has a very different effect depending on where you are on the curve).

 

[Bill Zebub]

One of the problems I've had with just about every dice pool system is that it never feels like the designer's have the slightest understanding of the odds of success or failure in their system, and that all the intuitive "elegant" modifiers could be better handled with a single d% throw against a table like the above.

And further, if the simplification to a single throw of the dice with a d% and a table didn't feel elegant, than all the rules about altering dice pools shouldn't feel elegant either. Humans are just terrible at intuiting probabilities.

I've very much over the years come to much prefer single dice systems based on D20 or D% over anything with a pool of dice, and generally even prefer linear percentages like D20 over 3D6 simply because modifiers are much more straightforward when dealing with one die than a non-linear distribution (ei, +3 has a very different effect depending on where you are on the curve).

I like the results of the non-linear distribution, personally.

I have always thought the TOR math is actually quite useful. The character improves in fairly large increments, but the LM can control the difficulty with finer granularity. Plus the overall dice pool/rules provided a lot of richness and variable results.

My only complaint is that they took away that granular LM control.

 

[niklinna]

I tried Lord of the Rings Online briefly, and got overwhelmed with all the free gifts and invitations to go to places far away before I'd even oriented myself to the starting zones. Also tried a Beorning and the beginning tutorial omitted like half the material (including getting the free mount (yes a free mount!)). And then the crafting stuff forced you to pick from arbitrary bundles of crafts that made no sense, instead of just picking individual crafts. Apart from all that I really enjoyed it, both the wizardy class* (whatever it's called) and the Beorning were quite fun in combat.

* Edit: Loremaster, that's what it's called. You can have a bear, or be a bear!

 

[pemerton]

Apart from all that I really enjoyed it

For the sake of clarity: it had all these problems but you enjoyed it nevertheless? Or they weren't really problems? Or you're just easily pleased?

 

[niklinna]

For the sake of clarity: it had all these problems but you enjoyed it nevertheless? Or they weren't really problems? Or you're just easily pleased?

Well, when I was just running around doing quests in the local area, and doing fighty things, I had as much fun as one generally has doing such things. But the game kept filling my bag with free crap I didn't need, which included invitations to parties in the Shire and such. I suppose I should have just ignored the invite and not accepted the teleport to the Shire, where I immediately got lost and couldn't figure out what to actually do there. I never did settle on a crafting bundle either. So my enjoyment, while really, was also really limited.

 

[Bill Zebub]

Go to Bag End, steal the Ring, find a Nazgul, hand it over.

Then go back to the Shire and yell in /general chat, "This is what you get for inviting me to terrible parties!"