I played my first real TOR session today, running the "Marsh Bell" scenario in the Loremaster's Guide, and I struggled quite a bit with the rules in a few places. The index is not a great help, as others have already pointed out. If anyone has the answers to the following, I would be very grateful.

1) Journey mechanics: When you make a "Fatigue" test, how many success die do you roll? Is it the Feat die plus one Success die per point of "Travel" skill?

2) If a creature has a trait of "Hatred (Dwarves)" the rules say that all its weapon and attack skills are classed as "favoured" when fighting Dwarves. What benefit does this give the creature?

1. Yes. [LB, p. 29]

2. It adds its Attribute Level as a bonus to those skill rolls. [LB, p. 25]

<edit> I found that I still wasn't clear ... hope this is my last edit.

This post has been edited by Throrsgold on Apr 4 2012, 12:53 PM

Thanks.

I think you've got (2) wrong though. Checking LB, p. 25 it talks about adding the Attribute score as a bonus, not as extra dice. As a Troll has Attribute 7, that would be a hell of a lot of success dice otherwise!

You're correct. That's actually what I'd meant, but I got so excited I could help out and got caught up in looking up the of the answer I didn't READ what I'd written. Will fix it in an edit, as well.

No problem.

It is a bit hard to fathom sometimes why adversaries and player characters work so differently. For instance, PC's can spend Hope to add their Attribute score to a roll, or their Favoured Attribute score for a favoured skill. Adversaries on the other hand only have one Attribute score and they can only add the bonus if their skill is "favoured" (underlined). Similarly, PCs add their "Damage" rating to damage scored on a great success and double this on an extraordinary success, whereas Adversaries can only add their Attribute rating on a great or extraordinary success.

At the table, you have one Loremaster and many Players. Expecting that a single person is able to operate at the same level as multiple people is unfair and unnecessary, despite many RPGs assuming just that. Fortunately, The One Ring is not one of those RPGs.

Exactly, Skywalker. Years ago when I ran a Star Wars game I invented what we called "binary storm troopers". All storm troopers were either fine or dead. It saved me having to track several levels of wounds, shooting impairment, etc for each of sometimes twenty or thirty storm troopers at once.

We set an "average" skill level and an "average" damage level. Any hit scoring above the damage threshold took a trooper out of the fight, hits scoring less damage were ignored.

Calculating full player style mechanics for every NPC creature and character in a game can rapidly overwhelm a GM. Each player usually only has to worry about one character, the GM has the whole world to look after.

Savage Worlds does this to an extent. "Boss" bad guys might be treated in the same way as a player character, but mooks/minions are either very simply statted or "binary" (that's a great term) in the Horsa sense of the word. This is much easier on the GM but also allows for more heroic battles (at least more heroic for me) with crowds of mooks doing their best to get at the hero.

Orcs are the prototypical minions, I can certainly see them being handled that way.

7th Sea did the same thing. There would be "brute squads" of basically unstated cannon fodder: one hit and they drop, no worries about how much damage they took or really anything else. Dangerous villains were fully stated out, and worked pretty much the ame way PC's did