Capturing the "feel" of Tolkien.

[SJB]

In my current listening to Fellowship, I was amused by the fact that while travelling through the wild Gandalf was very careful about even the smallest magics because using his power meant being a glaring beacon in the wild "Gandalf is here!" But in Moria, once they are under attack, he just starts blasting. That, I think, is a great way to "balance" such characters: consequences.

It sounds like LoTR is the only IP for which Modiphius’ 2d20 might be an appropriate system. I can’t believe I just wrote that.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

If you look at Tolkien's work and see it as a thing you would want to emulate in play, have you ever managed it? Did it require a ME/LotR game or campaign? What elements were hard? Which seemed to come easily? What do you think makes game "feel" like Tolkien?

1) The party starts off relatively weak. There may or may not be a more powerful NPC helping them.

2) The players should be aware that not every hostile encounter is winnable via force of arms- running away might be the only viable option. Depending on the players, this may require a “Session Zero” or similar event to make this clear.

3) Powerful magic- especially combat magic- is rare and relatively subtle.

4) Magic users tend to specialize in a few kinds of magic- generalists are almost unheard of

5) there is not necessarily a mystical prohibition against spellcasters using weapons or armor- it may simply be a function of the respective training & skill required to master the disciplines of magery or martial arts. Most simply don’t have the time and resources to study both in depth.

6) there is one overarching campaign plot line.

 

[ART!]

Tolkien has this wonderful, distinct structure for the characters' experiences in The Hobbit and LOTR: harrowing trials, followed by suprisingly comfortable stays in safe environments, followed by the need to continue to the next harrowing trial, etc. The comfortable stays are often a surprise to one or more of the characters, and usually involve good food, stories, lore about their recent experiences and/or what's coming next, strange (to one or more of the characters) new kinds of people, and quality rest.

I'm not the most well-versed person in fantasy fiction, but this is one hallmark of Tolkien I haven't noticed elsewhere.

The One Ring builds this rhythm into how the game works, which is cool.

 

[MichaelSomething]

If you want the feel of Tolkien, better get to world building. Dude had hundreds of pages of world lore.

 

[nevin]

NOTE: This thread isn't specifically about Middle Earth/Lord of the Rings RPGs, licensed, fan created or otherwise. it is about emulating the feel of high fantasy as exemplified but Lord of the Rings and, to a lesser extent, The Hobbit.

The full Lord of the Ring trilogy was recently on sale at Audible (the narrated, unabridged versions, not the dramatized versions) and so I have started listening. Not only am I reminded how much I love Tolkien's prose and world building (yes, I know some people don't, but this really isn't the thread for that discussion) I am reminded how much I want to be able to emulate the feel of Tolkien's work in an RPG and have had, at best, fleeting success doing so. By "feel" I mean the tone of the work that balances the mundane, the wondrous, and the horrific all at once; the sense of a deep history reaching up to produce the drama of the Now; the archetypes and ideals that yet hold on to humanity and even grittiness to some extent; and, most of all, the tug-of-war between hope and despair.

I can get some of those sometimes, but never all of them in a single game. I am not sure it is even possible in a game because the GM is not the author as such, but I do strive for it. The closest I have ever gotten is during the sequel D&D 3.x campaign to a highly successful 2E campaign, where the PCs were the children of PCs from the previous campaign (largely the same player group) and all the history, both background and played, really mattered. It was really wonderful, and I don't expect i will ever feel that way about a game again.

If you look at Tolkien's work and see it as a thing you would want to emulate in play, have you ever managed it? Did it require a ME/LotR game or campaign? What elements were hard? Which seemed to come easily? What do you think makes game "feel" like Tolkien?

never. I've been in several game's where the DM was desperate to do that and they usually suck the fun out of the room and the game flounders.

 

[nevin]

I have, but this isn't about "what's the best ME game" or specifically about Middle Earth at all. It's about the feel Tolkien's work creates and how to potentially create it at the table.

Tolkien at the table would be 2 to4 years of misery and hopelessness coming to an end because the weakest members of the party got lucky and destroyed the artifact. The misery the characters have to go through is almost a gaurrantee no one will have fun.

 

[GMMichael]

Such as?

Sauron himself couldn't achieve such a masterful two-word necromancy.

 

[damiller]

I love TOR. It has gotten me consistently the most ME feel.

But stripped of mechanics I think the one way I achieve the ME feel is by leaning into hope.

There is a lot of wonder, nostalgia, corruption, and lore -but for me - Tolkien crafted, like all myths before him - a sense of hope.

Not wish.

Which is the way "hope" is usually defined.

Nope. Hope, for me, in ME particularly (and myth in general) is the realization on the part of the characters that their actions matter. They know that their suffering is redemptive. To someone (maybe only themselves). Somewhere (maybe only right now). And they choose it. And we celebrate them for it.

They (the characters, and we the hearers) know they are, as everyone else, all a part of the same story. And I think THAT is what Joseph Campbell calls the Power of Myth.

 

[Benjamin Olson]

Sauron himself couldn't achieve such a masterful two-word necromancy.

And some things that should not have been forgotten were lost. History became legend. Legend became myth. And for three years, the thread passed out of all knowledge.

 

[Benjamin Olson]

To my mind Tolkien presents three major problems for an RPG adaptation:

1. It is a lore that many people respect and sort of know, but few have the patience to master the extreme complexity of. This makes it sort of the perfect storm of difficult to manage on the world-building front. There are authoritative correct ways for almost everything in Tolkien's world to be, and players will likely care to some extent, but it's difficult knowledge to master.

2. It is a legendarium built around the several stories Tolkien wanted to tell, and he has told them. For all the richness of the setting it's actually a harder setting to tell additional stories in than most, because the whole world revolves around Morgoth and the Silmarils, and Sauron and the Ring. Even Tolkiens own side story of The Hobbit he eventually felt the need to weave into the grand epic of the Ring. The degree to which the whole worlds revolved around the rise and fall of these villains is much of how Tolkien makes these almost entirely "off-screen" figures compelling villains.

3. As several people here have pointed out, a key part of the feel of Tolkien is that he focuses on the hobbits, who, while I would argue that they "level up" more than some people in this thread have given them credit, they are still not turning into anything but the most reluctant action heroes. TTRPGs tend the focus on the people willing and capable of going on adventure, and generally a problem one has to fight is players wanting to create reluctant heroes like those they see in books and movies and it then being on the GM to thrust adventure upon them against their character's preferences. RPGs tend to work better when they focus on characters like Legolas and Gimli who, sure they have a quest, but at the end of the day they both seem to just enjoy adventuring for adventuring's sake, at least to some degree, and spent years traveling the world together after the quest of the ring concluded.