Hi there,

I'm preparing a One Ring game for my group and am reading through the rules right now, which brought up a couple questions.

• Character creation
  
  Is it possible for a character to pick a cultural weapon skill (like (Bows) 2 for Woodmen), then use some of his 10 Previous Experience Points to improve a specific weapon skill from that cultural weapon skill as explained in the Fellowship phase p171 of loremaster book (say spend 6 points to get Great Bow 3), then pick Wisdom 2, Valor 1 to get the Expertise Virtue, and make his Great Bow skill 3 a Favored skill ?
  
  That seems a bit much for a starting character, especially since the option to upgrade from a cultural weapon skill is only shown in the Fellowsihp phase, not the caracter creation phase. Let me know what you think.
  
  
• Prolonged actions (loremaster book p22)
  
  Maybe I'm just not reading it right, but the prolonged action paragraphs explain how to determine how many successes need to get reached to succeed the test, but it does not show how many rolls can be rolled by the heroes to reach that number of success. Is it the same number than the successful rolls ? If so, that does not leave much room for failure, even if you can achieve extra successes with a great or extraordinary success. In the case of cooperative prolonged action, I can dig that each helping character rolls one dice and we add the successes, but for single-player prolonged actions, I'm not so sure.

1. I wouldn't see why not. The costs for upgrading weapon skills at character creation are the same when spending XP during character advancement. The downside is that they are spending 6 of their 10 points on increasing their weapon skill. It is more efficient to just put those points into common skills as it is somewhat cheaper to increase them at character creation than it is during advancement.

Of course if you feel it is too powerful then don't let them do it.

2. The heroes can roll as many times as they like. But you need to determine how long each roll takes, so if they are against the clock and need to do a prolonged action then the less rolls made the better, or if they run out of time then they have to deal with the consequences.
I think that is the idea with prolonged actions is the time factor, it is a lot more likely that they will succeed, unless they fail a lot with 'eye of Sauron' on the Feat Die, but it could take a very long time depending on the results.

Hope this helps.

I know there are specific rules for advancing a weapon from within a weapon grp. Its very costly. It details just such this scenario within the rules you cite for advancing rules. It may seem powerful but TOR unlike many rpgs does not focus on combat - though personal LM tastes may vary in that regard. Someone who focuses so much of their development on combat will be at a significant disadvantage through much of a game because so focuses on use of skills even just to advance. My ex D&D combat min/maxers learned that pretty quickly.

As for prolonged skill challenges, the LM sets the tolerance level for an npc encounter or if a skill challenge the LM sets the amt of failures allowed. Published adventures are typically including this info. The heroes can try as many times as they want but run the risk if reaching the tolerance of failures quickly if they do so recklessly. That ties up my previous point that if you max out on combat your skill challenges are going to suffer to some degree. Or that characters ability to influence the success positively will be more limited.

D'oh. Ninja'd!

Wonderful,

thanks for those very fast and helpful answers guys !

Just as a stray comment in regards to your first question...

As stated, it makes more sense to spread the points around generally speaking.

However, it might be advisable to consider at least bringing a primary weapon (ranged or melee) to 3rd level for one member of the Company. At TN 14, this means a +24% chance to succeed in attacking (2nd vs 3rd level), making it more likely the party will survive.

This is a good point, in my group that I LM for, one of my players, a Beorning has spent quite a bit on his weapon skills, put his axes up to 3 at creation and has spent XP to put it up to 4, so he is very reliable in combat, but has to rely on other characters for some of the more delicate 'skill' interactions. Although he does a lot of Awe and Hunting so he gets by fine in those areas too.

Just thought I'd add my thoughts to the pot..
Similar to what ook-productions said, one of the guys in my group is playing a barding, and he improved his longsword to level 3 right off the cuff, which meant that during combat he rarely missed, meaning that he was extremely effective at protecting the three ranged characters, despite being slightly less useful when it came to common skill rolls

Which winds up following other games similarly. Rogues for instance are skill monkeys. Fighters - notsomuch.

I would have thought that after an initial +-2 weapon skill level difference, things would have balanced out.

That is, warrior types would have to focus on battle related skills for a time (weapon skills, hunting, travel, battle) while other characters would focus on social and research skills. Once the division of labor produced viable characters in their respective areas of expertise, then cross-training was possible.