|
 I actually tried to bother someone who has played the game to post this thread. So here goes. The One Ring, the first Tolkien game since Decipher's really bad Lord of the Rings game, was first published by Cubicle 7 a few years back, and most people liked it though the main books were really badly laid out and the game ended up being sort of hard to grasp. Now, there's a new edition out which at least to me was the thing that got me to finally set up a group to play it with. Also there was a cheap 15 dollar bundle deal going on last week. The default setting and time for the game is five years after the Battle of the Five Armies, which Peter Jackson made a really boring movie about, and so far most of the stuff released for the game has been set in the Wilderland, which is portrayed below:  This means you're a dude or a gal adventuring in the most wild part of Middle-Earth, which even after Smaug being kacked by Brad the Bowman remains kinda dangerous. The writers have chosen to portray the region as something quite a bit more Iron/Dark Age type thing than Medieval, which I think is really good, since it makes it actually very Tolkienish instead of just another generic fantasy thing. You can play a Woodman, a Beorning, a Hobbit (since those fuckers are all over the place now), a Mirkwood Elf, a Dalesman or a Dorf of the Lonely Mountain. There's been some additional cultures released in the other books like, Dunedain and Noldor Elves, but I don't have the book that's got them. Pretty much every character ends up as some kind of fighting bro and there's no actual character classes or any sort of pap like that. You can learn a bit of magic if you're a dorf or an elf but nothing really showy. The rules use a special d12 and special d6 dice, where the major difference is that the 11 on the d12 is the Eye of Sauron (Bad) and the 12 is the Gandalf rune (Good) and the 6 on the d6 is again some kind of rune thing. So you can totally substitute your regular dice for the fancy special dice, which is good because the piece of poo poo local gaming store doesn't carry anything that real people would like to play. Most of the time, you're rolling a d12 and adding as many d6 as you got dots in a skill, against a target number, and sixes mean your successes get even better. So fairly straightforward there. Since Tolkien's stuff is very much about travelling Middle-Earth, TOR's got some major effort towards that. There's a hex map that the Loremaster (GM) is supposed to use to plot out the party's route whenever they're travelling in the wild, there's a bunch of rules of how to survive extended journeys through loving Mirkwood which is full of spiders, werewolves, vampires and orcs and other evil poo poo. I really like it, but so far, I haven't been able to test them. Essentially, you can get hosed up by nature itself by getting tired and exhausted by travelling, the terrain, time of the year and the presence of Sauron's evil affects all this. There's been two campaign books released, Tales from the Wilderness and The Darkening of Mirkwood, which apparently are good. I've only read Tales from the Wilderness, and going to be running two adventures from it on saturday. I'll Trip Report it here. The Darkening of Mirkwood is like this megacampaign thing that takes about 30 years of in-game time. There's a Gazetteer for the Mirkwood region called The Heart of the Wild, which I have since one of my players gifted me it, and i liked it since it fleshes out the regions on the big Mirkwood map well and has a bunch of possible antagonists and allies. There's also a Rivendell book which as far as I know has the rules for Noldor elves, Dunedain, magic weapons and a bunch of stuff about Rivendell and the surrounding regions next door to Rivendell. And there's a bunch more coming out. Without my trial run, I'd say that TOR is mos def the best Tolkien elfgame there's ever been, since MERP was annoying as poo poo and Decipher's effort was terrible. The rules seem to back the tone of the game nicely. Trip Report incoming sometime after next weekend. Kemper Boyd fucked around with this message at 23:22 on Jan 13, 2015 |
#
?
Jan 13, 2015 22:13
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 27, 2024 01:15 |
|
|
Can you TIMG that map?
|
|
#
?
Jan 13, 2015 22:41
|
|
|
Flip Yr Wig posted:Can you TIMG that map? Got that fixed. Anyway, people who have actually played or run this, what's something that I should keep in mind while running this for the first time?
|
|
#
?
Jan 14, 2015 14:14
|
|
|
Trip Report: five players, one loremaster, about eight beers and three smoke breaks. We played through the first two adventures in Tales From Wilderland in one sitting which took a bit less than six hours. Everyone's first time at playing it, and some things were really easy, once people figured out the dice mechanic. Though some players kept assuming that rolling a Sauron's Eye means autofail when it doesn't for the first time, and not having the special dice made things a bit more annoying. We also completely forgot about the fact that the game gives you prep rolls for travel, combat and encounters, which made things a bit more difficult. The Woodman who had lot of skills at level 1 had a really hard time at making any rolls, so that's apparently not a really good character creation strategy. Tracking Endurance in combat was sort of annoying at first since the whole deal about when you become Weary and so on isn't entirely intuitive. People also have a tendency to forget to note their Advancement points unless I shouted at them to do so. Using Traits is also something that is not apparent for people with a background in more traditional elfgames. I also forgot about the fact that monsters don't immediately die when their Endurance is reduced to zero, so combat was a bit easier than it was intended to be. Other noteworthy things: Twice-Baked Honey Cakes is hilariously good since it makes travel a lot easier, a Dwarf with three starting dots in (Axes) is pretty much a woodchipper, spiders in smaller numbers don't manage to do anything at all, shooting bows is a lot harder than actually hitting people in the face. One of the crew commented that "yeah this is a good game and I now realized that D&D is really bad about actually being heroic."
|
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2015 18:51
|
|
|
Ever since I first saw this game I thought it looked dope as poo poo. The traveling mechanic looks really neat to me, if I wasn't already slacking off on other games I'm supposed to be running for my friends I'd definitely try to get a game of this going. The announced products excite me. One of the next books scheduled to be released will include pretty much every culture that's not yet in the game, Rohan, Gondor, Lothlorien, and others. Once that comes out I'm definitely attempting to run a game.
|
|
#
?
Jan 21, 2015 22:24
|
|
|
I ran this for like a dozen sessions back... right after the first book of published adventures came out, whenever that was. Your mileage may vary: 1) Hopefully they've fixed the really lovely parts of the journey rules. In our game hazards during trips felt super arbitrary, until I stopped using the rules as written for hazards. There is or was a PDF of revised rules for journeys, which I used, but which didn't seem to help much. 2) The dwarf and the lakeman PCs were both meant to be warrior types, and were, but the dwarf was basically better than the human along every meaningful combat axis. The elf was extremely good at archery, better than the hobbit, but that was to be expected. 3) Shadow points were surprisingly easy to lose and hard to accrue. I went in expecting someone to have gotten at least one permanent shadow before too long, but after a dozen sessions, nope, didn't happen. The player of the elf, towards the end of the game, said he'd been actively trying to get more Shadow points, to see what interacting with that system looked like, but wasn't able to make it happen. 4) At least the previous version of the rules was schizophrenic w/r/t the Awe skill. It explicitly isn't just intimidation, according to the rules, but there's a bunch of NPCs in the published adventures who are all "and if a PC tries to use Awe they take the intimidation attempt as an insult, autofail, your player is dumb for ever trying to use the Awe skill." The rules for how the party talks to NPCs also felt overdesigned; the X successes before Y failures model is good but for my group, X and Y were both much too high numbers and we rolled dice more often than felt organic. 5) My players did a little math and decided that the optimal combat tactic was for melee fighters to never leave defensive stance and for as many PCs as possible to be using missile weapons. I think they did maybe one fight without using those rules of engagement? The rules were very sketchy w/r/t monsters flanking or sneaking up on missile-using characters. 6) Treasure is a big pile of worthless. The players had a hard time convincing themselves that their characters would be interested in a pile of money, given how little the game offers to spend it on. 7) Despite all these complaints, the game still holds a special place in my heart. It's incredibly Tolkien-y. The rules evoke the mood of Tolkien very well; it's a system that strives to capture the sense that crossing Mirkwood or Mordor is an heroic feat in and of itself. The first edition of the ruleset, though, came across as more than a little half-baked to me and my group, which is half the reason we stopped playing and started Rogue Trader instead. (The other half is that more than one of the players had trouble feeling like their deeds were in any way significant, given that the War of the Ring was right there on the timeline and Middle Earth is full of important characters; no matter what they did they would never be as cool as Frodo, much less Elrond.) Everyone really liked the special die, with the Eye of Sauron and Gandalf. I haven't looked at the revised edition but hope the ruleset is less half-baked now; it was a fun game and the ruleset has a bunch of neat ideas that need(ed?) tweaking.
|
|
#
?
Jan 22, 2015 05:09
|
|
|
drunkencarp posted:Everyone really liked the special die, with the Eye of Sauron and Gandalf. I haven't looked at the revised edition but hope the ruleset is less half-baked now; it was a fun game and the ruleset has a bunch of neat ideas that need(ed?) tweaking. Yeah, the revised edition is pretty slick compared to how incoherent the earlier version was. You can check out the changes here: http://www.cubicle7.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/The-One-Ring-Clarifications-and-Amendments.pdf Treasure is sort of underwhelming in the base game, but the Hoard rules from Rivendell make it more worthwhile, since you can now find your own version of Sting or the mithril coat. I wrote a review for GamerXP which is a bit better than the poo poo OP I made in this thread: http://www.gamer-xp.com/the-one-ring-review-a-fun-fellowship/
|
|
#
?
Jan 22, 2015 12:58
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 27, 2024 01:15 |
|
|
Looking at that "Clarifications and Amendments" errata document, it appears that all the major issues we found with the system have been at least addressed. Whether they've actually solved the problems we found with it, I can't say, but I'm glad to see that the combat options and journey rules have been further revised. The essential uselessness of treasure is a more pernicious problem, but it's baked into the Middle Earth setting to some degree. I want to like this game more than I do, because I really appreciate its design goals. The version we played a couple years ago now just didn't have enough mechanical rigor.
|
|
#
?
Jan 23, 2015 19:37
|
|