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Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Thimble the Squit" data-source="post: 866796" data-attributes="member: 6756">Decipher and CODARegarding Decipher's CODA system, I have the Lord of the Rings RPG and I have played their Star Trek.  I have to say that I MUCH prefer their treatment of Star Trek to their utter mishandling of the Lord of the Rings.While the rules might be (on the surface) identical, the difference in quality between the two systems is astonishing.  The LotR RPG is rushed and surreally unbalanced (who'd ever play anything other than an elf?) with frequently unreadable text squeezed amongst too much artwork (which is either gorgeous shots of Peter Jackson's divine movies -- or truly heinous comic drawings).  The layout for their Star Trek game is clean, elegant and very colourful, with plenty of great photos liberally splashed throughout -- but not interfering with the typesetting.Even the attributes are different -- for some insane reason, Decipher saw fit to replace Star Trek's Intelligence score with something called Wits -- this is Tolkein not Deadlands, for crying out loud!  Worse: Agility becomes Nimbleness!  Whoever believed these were sensible names for attributes obviously suffers from low Wits and critical Stupidness.While the science stuff in Star Trek is neat and tidy (although I do think that the single skill Technical Operations covers a few too many bases), magic in LotR is extremely weak.  After about an entire page preaching how magic is used very rarely even by the most powerful wizards, for risk of corruption and weakness, the rules themselves then utterly fail to punish over-use of spellcasting.  Words of power (such as "Elbereth") can assist your heroes in their actions -- but the rules fail to limit their use to heroic deeds, only suggesting the referee remind players not to exploit this loophole.Decipher's Star Trek Roleplaying Game is great.  It works very well: it's clean and concise and easy to play; it captures the setting very nicely and it looks fabulous.  Conversely, The Lord of the Rings Roleplaying Game is clumsy and ill-conceived; a hasty attempt to cash in on the New Line Cinema franchise, which fails in almost every manner.  It looks fabulous too, but that's thanks to all the still shots from the films -- the typesetting and bespoke artwork is terrible.That's my two pence.  Buy Star Trek.  Avoid LotR.  Go back to MERP.MERP's (Rulesmaster Lite) game system might have been messy and over-deadly, with magic far too weak at low levels whilst far too powerful at the higher ones; it might have had cheap production values with awkward organisation; it might have had all those silly and gross critical hit and fumble tables ("Tremendous crsuhing blow -- try a spatula", "Trip over unseen imaginary deceased turtle", "Groin strain -- foe stunned 3 rounds laughing"); it might have been all these things -- but at least ICE respected Tolkein's work.  Their artists were better too.</blockquote>

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