Hi everyone. Im new to the board, and havent actually bought the game yet. I am very interested in it, but was basically hoping to get your opinions about what makes this game special. Also, I was wondering what there is to avoid about the game.
I keep hearing about these deep travel rules. Would anybody be willing to elaborate?

Thanks in advance.

Welcome! I don't think there is anything to avoid in the game. What makes it special? I like it's social encounters and travel system. Journeys are an important aspect of Middle Earth and I think the game gets it pretty well. It is very much fun for a LM to wait for the players to roll Sauron during journeys

Also I like the combat too. The game is simple and direct and in tone with Tolkien's legendarium.

Thanks for the response. Think you could tell me more about the travel system? What exactly is it, at its core?

Well you first calculate the distance and the nature of the lands the fellowship will travel. According to the length, terrain and the Shadow at work in those lands you get a number of travel and perhaps Shadow rolls. Every member in the fellowship has a role like Scout or Guide or Huntsman etc and it gives both good roleplaying chances while they undertake the journey and if a player rolls Sauron then something bad, "a hazard" happens to them. For example the guide confuses his way and leads the group into a troll cavern etc. It is really fun and I like the fact that now my group thinks more on how to get to a place safely than what are we going to do there when we arrive.

Another cool thing about Journeys is that two maps come with the game. You've got a wonderful map for the players to use, and a second one (made with hexes) that shows the various terrains and what effect they have. It gives a bit of a board-game feel to that aspect.

There's a number of unique features to the game. Beautiful art, and it captures the "feel" of the setting very well. It's very narrative, with an emphasis on not making rolls/tests for mundane, ordinary things that don't affect the plot/story; it is encouraged for players to automatically pass ordinary tests, too. Great Tolkienesque systems/ratings like Hope, Wisdom and Virtues, also.

One of the things I like about it the most is the way that the various Cultures are very balanced (no Elves completely outshining and outclassing the Hobbits), with factors like Standing (social standing) and Standard of Living (wealth). The magic of Middle-earth is also very subtle and is infused into the abilities and items of the various cultures (so no powerful magic users).

Interesting. The Journey thing sounds cool.

Is there much in the way of published adventures? I DM 2nd edition ad&d and always make my own adventures. But in Lord of the RIngs I think I would prefer to run pre-made mods. That way I can be sure it would have that "Middle-Earth" feel.

How is the combat system and character creation? Does making a character take a long time? Does it result in a satisfying character?

Thanks again for the input.

There is the Marsh-Bell adventure in the core set, Words of the Wise adventure and a very nice book called "Tales from Wilderland" that is an adventure anthology.

Being an RPG, this game is basically built on two things; fluff and mechanics. In terms of fluff, the One Ring is a spectacular reproduction of and expansion upon Tolkien's work. Literally every single RPG I've ever seen try to tackle Middle-Earth has ended up being either a generic fantasy with Tolkien names clumsily inserted (i.e. the party is expected to personally beat the stuffing out of all nine Nazgul at some point and Elves are treated as a united bloc with no difference between Rivendell, Mirkwood, Lothlorien, and etc.) or else a ridiculously close adherence to what was written that explicitly discourages actually doing anything new, which makes any adventure other than "tag along in the aftermath of much more important people performing ultimately trivial tasks" very hard to construct.

The One Ring is neither of these. It adds to the lore of Tolkien's world, making room for new adventures and new stories while still feeling like Middle-Earth. You don't get the sense that you're in a generic fantasyland with the Elf town called Rivendell because the writers couldn't be bothered to come up with their own name, but nor do you get the sense that what Tolkien wrote is a holy canon and to expand upon it is blasphemy. It is spectacularly well done, and on a similar subject, the books themselves are really beautiful to look at.

Second, there are the mechanics, the meat of which are the battle and journey mechanics. That the second one gets such a significant position in the game at all is innovative on all its own. Journey mechanics are typically a hasty addition in between dungeon crawls, a tradition which was started for no other reason than because Gary Gygax liked playing his games that way when he was inventing the hobby. The One Ring breaks this mold with journey mechanics that are interesting, engaging, well-balanced, and interwoven with the combat mechanics in a way that makes the journeys unquestionably significant. Unfortunately there is a downside to the new system, which is that, being new, it is still fairly clunky. There've been a couple of revisions to it that help to streamline and otherwise improve it a lot based on forums feedback, a link to which is lying around here somewhere I'm sure.

The combat is kind of the reverse of the journeys; being that nearly every TTRPG ever made has had a combat system, there's not a whole lot of innovation left to be had in the field (at least, compared to what there is in travel systems), but The One Ring takes the basic paradigm and goes a long way to simplify and streamline it, using stances instead of battlemats and simplifying NPC actions down a lot to focus on giving tactical options to the players rather than perfectly simulating medieval combat (this isn't a war game, after all).

As a general rule, I am a very critical person; flaws jump out at me a lot more readily than successes. But the One Ring is genuinely short on flaws. It's not perfect; as mentioned, the Journey rules are a bit cumbersome, and while the layout of the book makes it very readable, it's a huge chore to reference anything. Its social challenges are also kind of a mess. A failure state is offered, but the conditions for success are vague. Characters who have poor diplomacy skills are encouraged to sit around twiddling their thumbs while the player goes for a snack run or plays Angry Birds, which means prolonged social encounters are discouraged. These are all fairly peripheral, though, and honestly social encounters are something that I'm not sure has ever been done right. The journey and combat mechanics are the heart of the game, and they're both way above the industry standard.

The combat rules are simple (which is a huge plus for me).
Basically, you can choose between three close stance (offensive, neutral, defensive) and one ranged stance.
The more defensive you are, the more difficult it is to be hit. But also the more difficult it is for you to hit. It adds a nice tactical flavour, I like it.
And each stance allows you to use some specific moves (rally, protect etc).
It works pretty well (at least when your players' dice are not cursed ^^).

Character creation is quite easy if you use a wonderful fan-made character creator : http://azrapse.es/tor/sheet.html

On the other points :

- The greatest asset of the game is that it captures the Tolkien mood (it's subjective, so "in my opinion").
There's not a lot of fluff in the core book, it's not an encyclopedia. But what's in the book is usable in a game, and that's what important.

- The book "Tales from Wilderland" is a thing of beauty.

- The Journey rules are nicen but they need to be sustained by the Loremaster (GM) or they become a dice feast.
However, it's true for almost all the rules in a RPG. Take a fight without description, it's just rolling dice, rolling dice, rolling dice.
So it's not a problem, it's just something the Loremaster need to work during the preparation.

I agree with most of what Chamomile wrote, with the exception of this. I've never played MERP, though I've seen and read some of their adventures (so I won't speak to that game). Decipher's CODA system had its weaknesses, but I don't think this accurately summarizes them. I thought it very much captures the Tolkien feel, differentiates between the three types of Elves, and allows one to create new adventures that matter (though on that latter point TOR gives even more freedom). Characters do tend to become too high-powered very quickly in it, though, and character creation is a burden and extremely time-consuming (it's extremely easy and fun in TOR). Magic users can do far too much, too. Both games do a great job of capturing some of the essence of Professor Tolkien's Middle-earth, with emphasis on things like nobility and honor and wisdom.

Hey Mim.

I'm glad to see that other fans appreciate the tale of the Petty-dwarves. They make great characters/plots, & I hope that someone considers writing one up at some point - I may as well if I have a chance.

At any rate, welcome to this fantastic game - Middle-earth done right

What I like about TOR is that it is a new and unique system. The travel rules are fun and interesting (though I do think that you have roll a little too many times). The characters are balanced and intresting to play. The only real problem my group ran into was the lack of a monetary system. Not for treasure, but actual buying things (one of our players bought some land to raise horse's). Though I guess has been addressed in the Lake Town sourcebook.

Over all a good game, but I am really on the fence about the whole "it captures the Tolkien feel." To me Tolkein is Epic in scale, and I do find the fact the game concentrates on a small section of ME some what constrictive. But, once the rest of the world is detailed in forthcoming sourcebooks I am sure this feeling will disappear.

Good points, Beran. With an RPG, one does have to be careful, though, in making the PCs too powerful. If the campaign goes on for very long, the PCs can tend to become too much for oridnary challenges. The GM/Loremaster doesn't have many options other than throwing Nazgul and Balrogs at them (or other, really nasty opponents).

I realize that's not always the case, but a game system does have to be careful not to become too "epic" too soon, to avoid these pitfalls. Having interesting characters that are competent and skilled, but who can still be challenged, is a better way to go, in my view. It leaves the opportunity for the PCs to grow over time.

It's funny you should mention CODA, because I personally think it managed to have both fluff problems simultaneously. Not only did the party rapidly turn into Elrond and Gandalf, with surprisingly reachable stablocks given for Nazgul in the core book, but the game was also overly obsessed with faithfully reproducing Tolkien's world in such a stagnant way as to leave little inspiration as to what else could be done besides follow after the Fellowship and clean up after them. Yes, it was hypothetically possible to tell new stories, because you have a GM who can make up new rules and change old ones and thus anything is hypothetically possible with any game system (if he really wanted to, your GM could run a story where little green men from Mars invade Middle-Earth using either CODA or TOR despite the fact that the system does not really provide you with any of the tools to do so), but you didn't really get any help along that direction. The way the three Elf races were handled is probably the most egregious part of its failure to expand its horizons beyond a strict reproduction of Tolkien's writing. While it is canonically true that Noldor Elves are just better than the others, in-game that either needs to not be true or else Noldor Elves need to just not be playable.

It also needs to be the case that one class is not clearly and obviously better than all the others, and classes like Craftsman should not exist for the same reason that an accountant doesn't get featured in a story about Navy SEALs. Yes, there were characters like Sam whose starting skillset were better suited to keeping gardens than decapitating servants of the Enemy, but CODA already had rules for starting out without a class and picking one up later on. It did not need to additionally provide a profession that was inimical to playing the actual game. CODA strikes me as a fairly artless effort to translate Tolkien's writing into a D&D 3.X rip-off with absolutely no care taken to make sure that the game is actually interesting to play at the end.

This is just the tip of the iceberg with CODA's faults. Yes, it very faithfully reproduced Tolkien's world (except for the prestige class that hands out magic spells like Halloween candy, at least), but in order to create a good game set in Middle-Earth, you have to create a game. Which means there needs to be room in the narrative to play. Which means making more room, since the main characters are probably taking up pretty much all of the space the original narrative had. Which means you can't spend the entire time quoting the books; you need to write new stuff. CODA is utterly stagnant in all the places where TOR is innovative, that is to say, practically everywhere.

Here I have to politely disagree. For the game itself (e.g. PH's) you're probably right as it is not obviously not the one endowed at birth with a hero's career. OTOH, especially the Hobbits in the LotR (and Bilbo in the 'Hobbit') were absolutely-un-heroic characters to start with (in terms of capabilities and outlook) and grew considerably during their adventures. They were thrown into it rather than chose it on of their own or prepared for it from birth (like Thorin, Boromir, Faramir or Aragorn for example).

IMO a Middle-earth game needs not only mechanics for providing upright heroes in shiny armour (so to say), but also have rules (need not to be long or very detailed) to make the background world workable. People like farmers, shepherds and craftsmen are the backbone of society and constitute about 90% of the population (give or take a few percent). It is not much work to provide mechanics for such people (e.g. building such characters) as well, and adds depth by showing that one thinks not only about the professional do-gooders, but also about all those others around that feed and support them.
And frankly, the real heroes in all such stories (IIRC Tolkien wrote something similar with respect to Sam) are those with an entirely un-adventurous or -heroic background (e.g. normal civilians) that are thrown in at the deep end and grow. In game terms, I guess it would often be frustrating with such characters with little adventuring skills (they probably know how to grow potatoes or build wooden crates), but the storytelling potential is great for a, say, farmer to leave his home for whatever reason (perhaps since orcs killed his family or abducted a relative) and start an adventuring career. At least it would be believable IMO.

Cheers
Tolwen

How long would you say that character creation takes?

15 Minutes

Wow, thats pretty fast. Looks like Im gong to have to give this game a try.

I highly recommend the TOR character generator.

http://azrapse.es/tor/sheet.html

I disagree with most of this as well. For nearly two years I played a Dwarven Craftsman that was also a great warrior (reflecting that he had been a master smith before taking up the mantle of an adventurer later in life). I had tons of Edges and Professional Abilities that were devoted entirely to being a Craftsmen, and our GM made excellent stories where it mattered in-game. Where the Dwarf would be involved in the actual smithing and construction of important items that mattered for the story/quest.

In the approximately six years we played CODA (two campaigns), we never once followed around doing stuff that had anything to do with the "more important people" (the main characters) from the stories. We might have occasionally met someone like Elrond (in Rivendell), but for the most part we had our adventures in the north, places like Rhovanion and Wilderland. We were able to have some fun stories that still seemed fairly epic, even if they weren't the main events happening in the latter part of the Third Age. Very much like what TOR does with Wilderland.

Decipher didn't give a lot of adventures for one to use, or give you a ton of resources to explore Middle-earth in the way of story ideas, but there were a few, and they were pretty well done.

The Elves were much too powerful, but they did discourage the use of the Noldor, and my understanding of their "Inner Light" ability was that it was meant to discourage their use.

I/we didn't find it to be soulless or generic or any of that. One of my players (who just played TOR for the first time tonight), just said yesterday that our old CODA campaign was one of the most fun campaigns he's ever played in (and he's been gaming for a couple of decades).

I thought the two-page spread that goes over things like honor and nobility and mercy and compassion and the rest was probably the best Tolkien-related thing any game has ever done. TOR does an amazing job of weaving in the right feel of the world, but CODA's wasn't horrible in that regard. The game system was just a bit clunky and perhaps a bit too complex/crunchy.

Decipher's game doesn't try to balance the abilities of player characters against each other for the simple reason that those who play a Middle-earth game are nearly always going to choose a character they want to play, rather than the most effective character. Just try telling a hobbit-loving player that his hobbit craftsman isn't as effective on adventures as a Noldorin warrior. He doesn't care. The point of a Middle-earth game is to experience Middle-earth, not to rack up experience points.

The only issue I had with Decipher's game was with the damage system. Characters have multiple levels of health, and it takes many, many successful hits to down a character. This includes foes like small orcs. The rules suggest bypassing health levels depending on the importance of the enemy, but then what is the point of using health levels, except to artificially prolong "dramatic" fights?

"The rules suggest bypassing health levels depending on the importance of the enemy, but then what is the point of using health levels, except to artificially prolong "dramatic" fights? "

I always thought that was one of the best points about Decipher's game. The ciematic combat system allowed for battles like where Boromir died surrounded by 20 or more orc bodies. In other games you just can't do that (that is take on those numbers and hope to survive.)

You might note I have already responded to exactly this argument in literally the very next sentence after the one you quoted:

Bilbo and Sam are best represented by the CODA system not by the Craftsman class, but by unclassed characters who later on picked up an advancement or two, probably in Warrior.

It's great that your GM created the tools necessary to make a Craftsman part of an epic adventure in Middle-Earth, but that is to his credit, not Decipher's. Your entire post details absolutely nothing about the merits of the CODA system itself, and is really about how your GM made it work despite having been given little, if any assistance in doing so by the game which Decipher had the gall to charge you money for (and you explicitly say that Decipher didn't actually give you much assistance in that direction). Probably you would have been exactly as well off if you'd taken D&D 3.0 and paid your GM $40 to convert it to Middle-Earth. You could've told the exact same plot if your Craftsman was a Warrior, because none of the applications of the abilities he used were built into the game or even suggested by it; they were entirely the work of your GM. The new adventures he crafted were also something he could've done equally well without the CODA system or anything else produced by Decipher.

-

There's a bizarre notion in certain parts of the roleplaying community that good roleplayers play suicidal idiots who suck at their jobs and consistently charge headlong into situations which they are completely unequipped to handle while dragging their far more competent companions down with their ineptitude. And that their companions are powergaming when they make the extremely reasonable decision to ditch the Hobbit whose only contributions to the quest are to be critically injured as soon as you find a safe place to drop him off. It's not powergaming to play a character who wants to stay alive and who takes steps to make sure he doesn't die, and in fact I'd call it terrible roleplaying to play someone who doesn't unless your character was actually built around despair.

I mean, Frodo wasn't exactly stoked to be marching into Mordor and if he were as useless as CODA mechanics make him out to be, he would have turned around and headed back to the Shire. He went because he was needed, not because an adventure sounded like fun and he was going to risk his friends' lives for the thrill. TOR gives the Hobbit's strong will mechanical teeth which means that when you bring along a Hobbit because he can resist the temptations of the Enemy, it's not just words; he actually gets a pile of extra Hope, and they are significant enough to justify taking him on the (potentially lethal) trip. On the other hand, when everyone goes on and on about how Hobbits add so much to the company and then the dice get rolled and actually they add nothing at all, that's only good roleplaying if your characters are intended to be delusional.

It is true that a roleplayer will occasionally make decisions that do not advance his character's power or risk his life for personal reasons. That said, good roleplaying is not measured by the frequency of suicidally stupid decisions made. Your average heroic character is seriously probably never going to be confronted with a situation where the decision that makes him more likely to die is the in-character one, and especially not one where the decision that makes the quest more likely to fail is the in-character one, which means a good game makes it so that all characters contribute enough to the game to justify bringing them along in the first place. If they're nothing but a drain on party resources...What reason do you have to bring them along that justifies jeopardizing the success of a quest when the lives of hundreds or thousands hangs in the balance?

So if a Hobbit player doesn't care that he's not as strong as a Noldorin warrior, it means one of three things.

1) He hasn't thought the implications through.
2) His characterization is incoherent and inconsistent with all of Tolkien's depictions of Hobbits, as well as the vast majority of people who have ever lived; because when real people are in life-threatening situations they don't just shrug it off, they look for ways to stop being in life-threatening situations, and if they aren't actually contributing anything to the cause then just staying behind when the party leaves Bree is the in-character thing to do. Failing to provide me with a reason to actually play the game without breaking character means the system has failed.
3) He wants to play a completely separate game from the Noldorin warrior, because the Noldorin warrior could not in good conscience let the Hobbit join him in storming Dol Guldur; the little guy would only get in the way of what is an incredibly important task, and would likely be slaughtered on top of it.

OK, I missed that. But it also re-iterates the point

It is IMHO not the job of the game system to make the group's composition work, that is the job of the GM/LM. If the game system offers the possibility of playing a Noldo warrior or a novice Hobbit, it does not mean that it has to be done. It is either the GM's job to make this work (quite daunting IMO), or he has a final say which racial composition is OK and which not. It is the GM's job to explain to the players the consequences of their decisions, and if they still want it, no one has a right to complain. For example, if Noldor are sought after by the players, then only other high-powered characters (e.g. Sindar or Númenóreans) should be encouraged by the GM. If a player then consciously decides for the inept Hobbit or farmer's son, it's his problem alone and neither the GM's nor the game system's.
The system only offers possibilities, it's up to each group what they make of it.

The adventures and campaign should reflect the power level wanted by the GM. If someone consciously chooses a character with a vastly lacking character, it is his problem and challenge, and no one else's.
Of course he (the GM) has to watch over that overpowered characters do not ruin the game as well (as your Noldo warrior in a Hobbit-like threat level campaign). It's his decision which ones are allowed and which not. If he says "no Noldor here", that's it. End of discussion.

Therefore I am no friend of "balanced" character designs. In the real world, some people have distinct advantages over others due to a number of factors. IMHO it's not different in Middle-earth (but partly for other reasons). The Eldar in general and the Calaquendi in particular are described as being more hardy and gifted than men (the only real "human" race to be found on our planet now). That's IMO no problem, since they have other disadvantages (which normally do not surface in a short-term RPG campaign of a few years or even decades). The primary elven problems are counted in centuries or even millennia.

Physically and mentally, the Elves were created by Eru to last - in theory (without Melkor's interference) - the whole life of the physical world!. A few dozen millennia is the absolute minimum, and very likely much more. That requires capabilities in physical and mental endurance and generally "fire of life" far beyond those needed for a physical existence for about 80 years or about 200 if we take the original mannish design as a scale.

Cheers
Tolwen

Chamomile, your musings about power gamers and suicidal PCs are interesting, but not really relevant. Decipher's game didn't balance the races as well as TOR does, but most of your perception of their game seems to be way off (from your posts I imagine that you merely read the books, and you're debating points with someone who played the game for years).

First off, it wasn't just the skill of that GM (though he is a skilled GM). I actually did more GMing than he did for the game, and we both found it quite easy to incorporate characters like Craftsmen and even Hobbits.

Our longest campaign had two Hobbits, and both excelled and were a welcome addition to the party. They were very stealthy, one of them was an extremely deadly archer, and the other was a fast-talking con man. They could do other things, too, like cook for the party (not a huge part of a RPG, but in reality this would have made them a very welcome member of a party!)

As for Craftsmen, my Dwarven character had actual, relevant, game mechanics that aided him in that regard. In other words, his Order Ability of Speedy Work allowed him to do his craftmaking in 1/2 the time (by spending a point of Courage). His Craftsmanship racial ability gave him +2 to all Smithcraft and Stonecraft skill rolls. He had 8 ranks in Smithcraft (Jewelsmith), so he would try to acquire great jewels, which he would then set into weapons. The game gave him many skills (Appraise, Craft, Smithcraft) that weren't used during every session, but they did get used quite a bit, and the GM could simply (and easily) weave those things into the story. How is this being an amazing GM? How is this any different than using one's combat skills during a skirmish? Both CODA and TOR have skills like these, and any decent GM simply running the game the way it's designed will use those in their stories.

FWIW, I really like how TOR incorporates many other things (like Standard of Living and a character's Standing), to make the different cultures more equal (and thus to encourage anyone to play any of the available choices). That can end up being more of a game balance thing (as Tolkien's Elves often outshone the other races), but by emphasizing some of these other things (like TOR does so well), it makes for a fun choice for players.

Because the GM arbitrarily decided that these orcs are mooks, not because you're actually skilled enough to slay a score of orcs. And then, if the GM decides that while those orcs were mooks, these orcs are dramatically significant, and suddenly you can't slay scores of orcs anymore.

Being equal to twenty orcs should come about by being twenty times as capable as orcs, not by the GM "cheating" on your behalf.

The One Ring achieves the same effect with the Great Size special ability and by combining Wounds with Endurance. But here it's a property of the creature, not the whim of the GM, that affects the fight.

Uh, no it doesn't. My point is that the Craftsman class didn't come with any warnings letting you know that it was actually a pile of bonuses to skills you wouldn't actually be using. It was stuck in with the other classes with the implication that you'd be contributing as much to the party with it as with any other class, and that's a lie. Likewise, they don't actually tell you that certain races are flat-out superior to others. Unless someone sits down and runs hours worth of number crunching in advance of making their first character, they'll walk in with a Hobbit warrior next to a Noldor thinking they'll be on more or less the same level (the way that Halflings and Elves can totally be in the same party in D&D), and they won't be. You can chop the game into a couple of different tiers and say that certain races or classes just don't get to play on certain tiers, but CODA didn't actually do that. They shunted the work of figuring out which races were powerful enough to be workable with one another onto the GM, even though they were entirely equipped to do it themselves. And since, again, they are expecting me to pay them for their rules, I do expect them to actually do this kind of thing rather than expecting me to figure it out for myself.

So what is the game system's job, then? I'm paying $40 for it, if most of its races and classes are mostly or completely incompatible with one another, it makes me wonder what I paid for. If all it's offering is a list of skills, I could've written that myself.

This is just objectively untrue. Everyone else has to spend time figuring out why the party would even consider bringing them along.

It was directed at Stormcrow, not you. It took me like two and a half paragraphs to build up to the actual point, but that point was that it is bad roleplaying for the other party members (like a Noldor warrior) to allow a clearly inferior companion (like a Hobbit) to continue jeopardizing the quest, and that it is therefore perfectly in-character for the Noldor warrior to not let the Hobbit come on the adventure. Which also means not letting the Hobbit's player play the game.

This is contrary to accepted wisdom in some places where playing clearly inferior characters is supposed to be some kind of mark of superior roleplaying because it means ignoring the hunt for ever-greater bonuses, but it also ignores the narrative so that argument doesn't hold water. Since that argument is really common, I felt I should address it before making my point about it being perfectly in character for a bunch of Noldor to ditch the Hobbit who's trying to tag along on their quest, for no other reason than because the Hobbit is not very capable.

This is, firstly, not true; my group tried to play CODA and it didn't work because the system didn't work out of the box and none of us wanted to spend hours figuring out how to make it work when we could just play D&D and spend our spare time figuring out stuff like characters and narrative rather than which classes can play with each other (incidentally, the answer is none of them, because there is a very distinct hierarchy of which classes are useful as compared to the others).

Secondly and more importantly, it doesn't matter. Because everything that you claim worked for CODA worked because your GM made it work, and no amount of experience playing with that GM will make you more or less equipped to prove that right or wrong. Good for your GM and all (and also you, since apparently you helped), but CODA still provided only the palest imitation of actual game mechanics for crafting, and then tried to build an entire class around those mechanics. We're not talking about the game you played, we're talking about the game in the book, and all that's relevant is what's in the book, not what other people brought to the table.

That's nice. But the game provides zero incentive to actually do any of that. The Smithcraft skill seriously may as well not exist for all the good it actually does you in-game. The idea of spending a point of courage to do nothing faster doesn't sound terribly appealing to me.

The difference between a skirmish and making a sword is that the Warrior gets an entire chapter about his subsystem, and the entire GMing chapter is saturated with the assumption that combat will be a major focus of the game, and then the crafting system is about a paragraph long. CODA doesn't add crafting to the game the way TOR added journeys. It tacked on a couple of skills onto a game engine built from the ground up to be about combat, and then expected us to care as much about a class that revolves around those couple of skills just as much as the class that revolves around what the game is actually built to handle. If a GM wants to figure out how to make the Warrior shine, there is another chapter full of nothing but ghosts and goblins that the Warrior can kill in battle, whereas the Craftsman is still stuck with his ~3 skills and the paragraph or so of rules built around them.

Does the narrative even benefit from your Dwarf acquiring great jewels, trying to set them into a sword, and then failing and trying again until he gets it? The narrative changes when the Warrior succeeds or fails in hacking a goblin's head off, and it changes in a way that's important. If you wanted to model a Dwarf who goes on deadly quests searching for rare jewels to forge into his masterpieces, you could seriously do that just as well with a Dwarf Warrior and then completely handwaving the crafting process. The part of the story you actually pay attention to is the part where you go and get the jewels. The part where you craft something is like two rolls and there's not really any penalty for failure anyway.

I've yet to see a TTRPG with an actually interesting crafting system. CODA is definitely not an example of such.

Just to be clear, I was the one who first ran a campaign using CODA, and after a successful 4 year campaign, this other GM ran a different campaign (for two years) where I played a Dwarven craftsman. So it wasn't that he ran something and I helped. We each ran many, many times, and we did so successfully with a system that is very different than the one you portray here. That just shows that different GMs (with different focuses and styles) can each easily do something with the game to make it work.

It sounds like you and your group tried for a few hours, then gave up before even doing anything with it, and that's fine. But it is not the system's job to tell you that Noldor elves outshine Hobbits in many ways, or that Dwarves are tougher than Hobbits at combat. If you don't have at least a tiny bit of knowledge of the Tolkien universe (especially right after a massively successful series of films around which this game was modeled - though it was also patterned after the books), then perhaps D&D should be your game of choice after all.

Playing around in Middle-earth is far more than simply combat, and both of the games we're talking about reflect that with a whole host of skills that have nothing to do with combat. It doesn't seem that you're getting much of what I'm saying, and I'm not really interested in a stamina contest regarding this. I could completely and thoroughly continue to refute each point of yours, but that could just go on endlessly. Suffice it to say this: Me and my group (of a half dozen of us) played the CODA system (two campaigns) for approximately 6 years, and we greatly enjoyed it. There are still forums out there, with many people still playing the game. In fact, my group has just been playing Star Trek (same game system) for about two years, and we're having a blast with it. There are forums and Yahoo groups and the like with players and GMs still enjoying it today.

TOR is also a great system, that has some elements that are even much better than Decipher's (in my opinion). They have a unique and creative journey system, and they balance out the other races much better, it seems to me. Their Elves (at least the ones we've seen from Mirkwood) aren't god-like compared to the other cultures. I also much prefer TOR's approach to magic, not allowing spell casters (as CODA did), and making it something subtle that fits with each of the cultures in unique ways. I also like the guidance and structure they gave to Rewards and Virtues, rather than leaving it up to the GM to come up with cool gear for the party (and the PCs loading up with Edges, which are like minor superpowers). With CODA our heroes became much too powerful (especially after we built them up and played them for years), and the only real challenges for them were major adversaries. CODA has too many modifiers; I love how TOR keeps things simple (usually a TN of 14), and one can quickly "eyeball" a success with a quick roll of the dice.

But again, we clearly view things differently. When I look to a game simulating Middle-earth, I'm not looking for a hack n' slash fantasy game that is just about combat. I love that there are other things to be good at, and both games give you other skills (like Stealth) that a GM can build exciting adventures around, and that a varied party can enjoy. Suddenly that Hobbit character can excel, and is a valued member of the party. The ranger or scout or lookout can use his Explore (or Survival or Observe in CODA) and save the entire party from even having to fight the nasty group of wargs.

We can simply agree to disagree. This is a TOR forum, and we've talked enough about another system. Bottom line is that TOR is a great game that captures the essence and feel of Professor Tolkien's work, and is well worth checking out!

NO. CODA pays lip-service to non-combat with a bunch of skills that are not attached to any significant mechanics. TOR actually has non-combat mechanics that are important. It is because CODA is a hack-and-slash game that its inclusion of the Craftsman class does not work at all. That is the entire point of what I've been saying. I spent like two paragraphs solid talking about how CODA puts way too much emphasis on combat and not enough on crafting. About how it has multiple chapters dedicated to nothing but combat, and about a paragraph dedicated to crafting. I went on at great length about how this is a very bad thing. I don't know how you could possibly have read that and take away that I apparently want nothing but a hack-and-slash game, which makes me seriously doubt that you have actually read it.

This level of disingenuity is a bad way to try to and bring the conversation to a close.

EDIT: Oh, also worth noting: D&D totally has a gigantic list of non-combat skills, and that doesn't stop it from being primarily equipped to handle a hack-and-slash game, because when you devote about half a page of space total to all forms of social interaction and then have an entire chapter on combat, it means that combat is more important than social interaction. Repeat for every other non-combat activity that is covered by your skill system; if the rules for any of them do not even begin to approach the size of the rules of your combat system, then you have made a hack-and-slash game. Some games get around this by having an absurdly huge number of rules. TOR gets around this by cutting down the combat rules a lot. CODA gets around this not at all; it's a hack-and-slash game.

You are incorrect. The text of the craftsman order (and a couple of others, I believe) explicitly warns you that the order may not be suitable for players because of its non-adventuring bent, and that the GM should approve its use.

Frankly, if you and your group couldn't figure out that gardeners and innkeepers aren't going to be as directly useful on an adventure as warriors and magicians, or that high elves are more capable in a fight than hobbits, you were all being rather dense.

All adventurers are not equal, and not everyone wants to be the superhero. In a Middle-earth role-playing game, the fun is in playing what you want to play, not in playing the most capable character possible. It's also not about rolling the dice as much as everyone else.

Does Decipher's game focus on combat? Sure. But if you're playing a non-combat character, you simply don't need to use those rules. You don't need rules on how to run an inn if you're an innkeeper; you're not going be doing so extensively on an adventure.

Now back to TOR...

TOR is easily the best RPG game set in Middle-Earth. Even if you are no Tolkien or Middle-Earth expert or mega fan, you will enjoy the game and probably wants to learn more about the world.

The Travel/Journey rules are very good but not perfect(there is a TOR revised Journey rules III avalaible). Some will says that there can be too many dice roll during journey, and it can true(in particular when the area is bligthed). But the Loremaster can easily house rule that.

The Hope(Fellowship points, Focuses) and Shadow(Misdeed, Bout of Madness) rules are very good in my opinion.

And yes, the Tales from Wilderland supplement is amazing.

Just about every game has a chapter devoted to combat, and CODA also has a huge section devoted to skills (much larger and longer than their chapter on combat). Combat is a large part of most games, and it makes sense for it to be with a game focused on Middle-earth. You seem to be completely dismissing the huge and lengthy sections that have nothing to do with combat (which is probably more than 80% of their rulebook).

No, they don't give you a chapter on Craft skills, nor should they. Like Stormcrow said, you shouldn't have to be given a chapter on running an inn or cooking or gardening or crafting or anything else that requires skill(s) that only get used periodically.

CODA didn't just pay lip-service to the non-combat skills. They made a very complex and involved way of resoving them. Frankly, it's one of the things that TOR does way better, in my view, by keeping things simpler and easier, and resolving things with a single die roll (or sometimes, with no die rolls).

In CODA, if my character wanted to do something like acquire gems, set some into a sword, and then sell it, this might be resolved as an extended test. Others could get involved, and this would make it a combined, extended test. Then there are all sorts of modifiers to apply, and Edges and Professional Abilities to factor in. All told you could literally be looking at dozens of pages (far more than the small paragraph you seem to think is involved). You continue to display that you don't understand the CODA rules, so let's just say that you don't care for the system and leave it at that.

I think one thing I love about TOR is that it's the first rule mechanics written specifically for gaming in Middle Earth and it really shows. I did play and enjoy the other games but they were more generic and occasionally even contradicted the setting. To me the difference is what truly makes this game special, not least because we have also got published adventures which highlight exactly how the ruleset enables that specific Tolkien feel.

Not complaining about the other systems but so far I'm hugely impressed with TOR.

Me too, bluejay.

I ran TOR for the first time last Saturday night, and overall me and my players enjoyed it.

Ordinary play went smoothly enough, after we'd spent a number of hours building characters and me explaining the rules to them.

It was a bit tough to manage during the first few rounds of combat (the stance chart proved to be really helpful), part of the difficulty was that there were so many combatants (8 Orcs and 6 PCs). By the last few rounds, once a number of the Orcs were defeated, it was cracking along very quickly, and I was easily able to "eyeball" results of die throws.

I'm looking forward to trying some of the other parts out, like Journeys.

It's trivially easy to make gardeners and innkeepers who are as directly useful on an adventure as compared to warriors and magicians. It's a weird design decision, but you can totally make it work if you want to. I have actually seen games were being a cook is mechanically on par with being a swordsman. It is not unreasonable to assume that options will be balanced.

You're missing the point. The total rules for, say, social interaction, are dwarfed by the rules on combat. The total rules for crafting are dwarfed by the rules on combat. The total rules for exploration are dwarfed by the rules on combat. The total rules for everything else but combat are dwarfed by the rules on combat. You can't point to the rules for everything else but combat and say "combined they have greater total word count than the rules on combat, therefore the game is not about combat," because saying that the game exists only in "combat" and "non-combat" phases reveals a disdain for the importance of non-combat activities on its face. Only in aggregate are non-combat skills worth anything to you, apparently, whereas combat gets to be something on its own?

So if I can just rephrase this for you: "CODA doesn't care about non-combat skills because they aren't relevant to the game, therefore CODA cares about non-combat skills." You're contradicting yourself. If CODA wanted to be a game about combat, it shouldn't have made one class decisively better than all of the others at actually playing the game, and the others get a mini-game that comes up maybe once a session at best.

CODA's rules for extended tests are not craft rules. They are rules for anything and everything outside of combat, because all non-combat things put together are equally important to combat things in CODA. And if you put all non-combat things together then you do manage to approach the rules density CODA has for combat. But saying "non-combat" functions as a coherent group only works if you assume that combat is monumentally more important than anything else to begin with. And again: D&D has all of those exact same rules (literally; Decipher would have been sued if it wasn't for the OGL), yet you're happy to dismiss it as being a game for hack-and-slash. Seriously, CODA is a d20 system that runs on 2d6. Everything CODA does in non-combat, D&D 3.5 also does, except that D&D 3.5 has more than one option for class if you want to actually play the game (specifically, it has four: Wizard, Cleric, Druid, and Sorcerer, though you can get away with more if you ban Druid and your the players behind the other casters are sporting enough not to break the game with them).

In CODA combat failure is as interesting as success (albeit in a more tense way). In CODA craft rules, failure means you try again and wish they'd stolen the take 20 rules along with everything else they shamelessly nicked from d20. In CODA, combat gets an entire chapter dedicated to nothing else but adversaries you can kill by swording them to death. In CODA social interaction, you get nothing; none of the Free Peoples you would very likely be encountering and talking to are statted up. In CODA combat, failure is a thing that happens at all. In CODA wilderness exploration rules, you pick a destination, figure out how long it'll take to get there, and it just happens. If the GM wants to throw something nasty your way while en route, it's going to be a combat, because those are the rules that are actually fully developed and interesting.

One of these things is not like the others. CODA is a hack-and-slash game based on a hack-and-slash game, and the fact that you have to resort to lumping all the rules for everything non-combat together to get something greater than their combat rules is proof of that. Lord of the Rings is not best represented by a hack-and-slash game.

Chamomile, you clearly have no idea about the CODA rules, so I can only assume that you either have (a) never really read them, or (b) have problems with reading comprehension. I have not contradicted myself in the slightest. I will summarize everything to make it quite clear for you in a single statement:

In CODA, there is FAR more than just combat.

In fact, just about every topic they cover is bigger than combat. Combat doesn't even have a chapter of its own! (I didn't even realize that until I looked). It is 7+ pages in the middle of Chapter 9 "Good Words and True", and then a few other references and charts scattered throughout (a few pages of lists of weapons, numerous Edges, etc.).

Then there's another 6 pages about Sieges and large-scale Battles (something rarely used; we did them once in all of our years).

Magic, on the other hand, has a chapter of its own (43 pages long) and only a very tiny portion of it can be used for combat.

There's another chapter on Epic Fantasy ("Saga and Grandeur") that is loaded with great stuff for GMs to use (9 pages). It's fantastically written, and gives all sorts of things a Narrator can use to get that Tolkien feel.

There's a chapter on The Free People's that's 15 pages.

And on and on... The Skills chapter also dwarfs the stuff on combat (no pun intended), as do most subjects! The rulebook is over 300 pages long, and only a small portion of that is devoted to combat!

You've admitted that you never really played the game, so stop already. You're like a person who hasn't seen a movie, bashing all sorts of stuff that isn't even in the motion picture being discussed!

TOR does an amazing job. On that we can agree. Let's just let things end regarding a game system that none of us is even playing anymore, because we clearly don't view it the same way.