I keep thinking about how the hope/shadow thing could be integrated with the rules for traits and flaws, because these are the fields where I'm not quite happy with the rules as written. These are just my personal thoughts, based on my personal preferences, and not about how the rules "should" be. And they are far from thought through ...

I'm working from the following preferences:

1. I would like to make the use of traits more "crunchy" in terms of rules.
2. I'd like to restrict traits to positive traits of character and keep out skill specialisations and things like "tall".
3. I'd like to have flaws work analogous to traits, only in a negative way.
4. I'd like to eliminate all elements of the LM taking over the characters of the players (bouts of madness, etc.). Instead, I want to provide incentives for players to play out their flaws and also to have their characters overcome them in the end.
5. I wan't to tie the use of traits and flaws into hope and shadow.
6. I want a more fluent hope/shadow economy, were both point pools go up and down throughout an adventure.

Two general concepts that have yet to be defined in terms of rules impact are at the core of my idea: to invoke a trait or flaw to ones advantage and to invoke a trait or flaw to ones disadvantage (thereby creating a complication for one's own character or the whole group). Probably they would mean to invoke an attribute bonus (advantage) or suffer an auto-fail (disadvantage).

My homebrew rule would say that:

you start with about 4 positive character traits; you can invoke these to your advantage or your disadvantage:
- if you invoke a trait to your advantage, spend 1 hope.
- if you invoke a trait to your disadvantage, lose 1 shadow (e.g.: Merciful: You spare an enemy even though that means you have to drag him along in chains for the next leg of your journey).

You start with 1 flaw (and get more throughout the game):
- if you invoke a flaw to your advantage (e.g. to get a bonus to steal something), gain 1 Shadow.
- if you invoke a flaw to your disadvantage, gain 1 hope AND 1 Shadow. The trick: You can take the point of hope yourself, but you can also give it to any other player.

If your shadow score exceeds your hope score, you can DECIDE to play a bout of madness at any time, thereby putting your character at a serious disadvantage, but also clearing his shadow score. If you roll an Eye, you have to play the bout of madness (but you still get to play your character yourself). In both cases, you get a permanent point of shadow and a new flaw. However, you are not limitet to 4 Flaws and 4 permanent points. Your character is inly fallen to the shadow if his or her Shadow score exceeds its permanent hope score.

That's the basic idea: Invoking a flaw always makes your character darker, but if the flaw is to your disadvantage, either you or one of your fellows can easily see the error in it and might feel inspired to do better or to help you to do better next time (gaining him or her 1 hope).

Using a trait to your advantage needs belief in one's one strength and in the rightfulness of one's cause, and this belief can be exhausted if tapped again and again (lose 1 hope). However, if you stick to your positive character traits even when they are to your disadvantage, you prove to yourself that you are a good person (lose 1 shadow).

Obviously, in this system players tend to accumulate more shadow than hope in the long run. But I'd say that's all right, and I would also keep the Fellowship hope refresh and the shadow reduction in the Fellwship phase.

These are just my first, very general thougts. If i go through with this, I'll have to change more stuff (setting the starting hope score lower, maybe getting rid of favoured skills and tying hope use exclusively to traits).

Any thoughts? As I said, this is just a homebrew idea to make the hope/shadow economy more fluent.

I don't think making Hope any more plentiful helps the game. Even if you incentivize gaining Shadow to counter it all, it breaks the tension by giving more of that power to player choice. I think the scarcity of Hope is what makes the system work as something that has more weight than your normal "fate point" system. Shadow should feel inflicted and Hope should feel taken away.

Plus, if you give this level of control to your players, they will never degenerate. There are so many options laid out here that you could keep a character at near full Hope and barely any Shadow. It would be like handing combat over to player choice.

My suggestion would be to just add "Fate Points" as an alternative reward system, and tie Traits to that. Have them do something simple, like maybe allow you to re-roll the Fate die. You start a session with 1 and have to get the rest through disadvantageous trait-use. When you use a Trait to your advantage you roll the Fate die twice and keep the best. When it is not to your advantage, you roll the Fate die twice and keep the worst, AND get a Fate Point.

Well, this is still very preliminary, I wouldn't even try it at home yet before giving it much more thought ... however, I'm already sure that I do not want to introduce another hope-like resource.

I don't see the problem the players would never degenerate if I gave them that much control. I have players who would degenerate much faster because they like to play tragic characters, and I would have players who would try to develop as few flaws as possible - both is perfectly alright with me. If players don't want their characters to become darker, why should I try and force them? There are others who embrace this element of the game, so it all evens out. They can even form a team (Frodo/Sam-like): One gets darker, the other one gets the hope points to see him through ...

Of course it would alter the feel of the game, that's the idea after all - but only minimally so ...

EDIT: After thinking it through, I actually think it would still be quite difficult to keep shadow down with these rules: The only way to reduce shadow is to use a trait to your disadvantage - the opportunity for that has to arise, and you have to pay a price for it, after all.
It probably depends on the style of play - if the players are trying to min/max it, there are certainly lots of opportunities. But that's only a downside if your players are interested in min/maxing.
I would just like the system to feel a little more as if it enables players to create story-arcs like the one of Boromir, Thorin or Frodo, rather than just imposing such story-arcs upon them. I don't want them to feel that they are failing somehow by gathering shadow points, but that gathering shadow is one way of further defining the story of their characters. It's a small difference, but to me an important one. I think what ticked me off to this was re-reading a passage in the LM Book that says that the LM may take control of a character who suffers a bout of madness even against the will of the player. That's something that just wouldn't happen at my table: You don't take control of the actions of a character against the wishes of the player, not even for a short time. Instead, you offer the player something to lure him into letting his character act the way you want it. He's always in his right to refuse the bait, however. I was thinking: Would something like this work with the shadow mechanic? Luring the players towards the shadow, instead of forcing it upon their characters? The idea that misdeeds give you shadow point is pretty much the same thing, I just want to integrate it more smoothely into the game mechanics. So that the players don't see shadow points as punishments for the misdeeds of their characters, but as a kind of negative currency - "You wan't an advantage out of your flaw? Sure, you just have to pay the price." And on the other hand, I want an enticement for playing out positive character traits even when they put the characters at a disadvantage: "It say's here that you are merciful, how about if you act like it? You don't have to, but you could get rid of a shadow point."

As I said, I don't think the system as written is bad or doesn't work. I actually think it's pretty brilliant. But usually, I think about tweaking the systems I try out a little. Normally, I don't even implement the changes within my own group, because it is much too easy to break a running system by changing something without thinking through all the implications. I'm far from sure that my ideas would work with TOR. However, so far, I like them ...

While I agree that the Loremaster control thing is an issue, I think the idea is to allow a bought of madness to happen even when the player isn't a particularly strong roleplayer. I think it's also to reflect the fact you can't pick when to suffer from the Shadow.. then again, my players have never received more than about 2 shadow points (their quests haven't been overly taxing so far) but I know some of them would hate to give me control.

However, I think the idea of Shadow having to reach the Max Hope (which I think is what you mean by the permanent score) wouldn't work. For a start, that makes it VERY difficult to succumb, and even Gandalf admitted he could succumb easily. Equally, you'd have to think of a different number of stages of madness for each character... and if that character is a hobbit with 7 Heart, they'd need 19 permanent Shadow points. Seems a bit OTT to me... but then YMMV and all that jazz

Beleg

Out of curiosity, why is "losing control" of your character through madness somehow worse than (or even on par with) "losing control" of your character by getting his head smashed in by a troll?

CraftyShafty,
The difference has to do with correct portrayal of a persona. When the LM takes control of a character and acts out some madness scenario, the player feels that their character has been stolen from them. There are also issues of what the character does and how they do it during these times.

When you've been incapacitated during combat and rendered unconscious, dazed, or dead, the acting stops. I don't care if you're pulling a horribly funny Carol Burnett It-Takes-3-Hours-To-Die skit in the process. It's still pretty much comes down to: BANG! Swoon, "Oh...", plop. Lillies.


Jakob,
Not sure how I feel about the suggestion, but I understand the intent. One potential problem I see is characters who cannot be trusted to accurately portray these flaws or madness. Or that will try to min-max even these in some manner.

For example: My character is struck for 17 and I'm now unconscious? Ok, LM, I'll act it out. Ummm... Ok, I got it. I give my sword to the Man, my bow to the Hobbit and as I begin to succumb I say "The knees, strike his knees. He's been wounded there once already and if you keep hacking away at them I'm sure he'll go down much, much easier." I topple over, and... wait, I forgot to give the Hobbit the potion he asked for, I fumble it out of my pack while fading quickly. Placing it safely on the ground, I expire.

Now, I'm not saying this will happen regularly or that their are players who are this blatant. But sooner or later some equivalent to that will happen.

The other issue I have is by making Shadow a form of negative role playing currency you're undermining the impact of Evil. I'm not sure that you're wrong mind you, but I think if you're going to use Shadow than the existing Shadow Mechanism needs a way of being re-represented through a different "currency" or there needs to be some kind of "threshold" response. Something like if you take more than 25% of your max Hope in one session (cumulative) you suffer a bout of madness.

Remember madness is the road to becoming a Servant of Evil. So if a player wants a conflicted character that is one thing. But to have a character who is willingly traipsing down the path to embracing Sauron... that is another thing entirely. Just ask Saruman.

Pretty much what Garn said - the difference is that in one case, something external happens to your character, causing him or her to lose control of his situation, while in the other case, you as a player lose control of the decisions your character makes.
Now there are different philosophies to roleplaying - my take is that a player should always stay in charge of the decisions his or her character makes. There are, of course, several problematic cases, e.g. fear - TOR handles this in a good way by imposing a penalty for failed fear checks, but not forcing you to have your character flee from combat.

I think the section in the LM book could do with a little warning that taking control of a character away from a player may cause friction in the group and that it might be better to have the player roleplay his bout of madness himself. If the player abuses that option, the LM can still intervene.



@Garn:
You convinced me to go about my changes a little more carefully. How about that:

Traits function as normally. However, you can also invoke your trait to create a serious disadvantage for your character or the group (ruining an encounter, fleeing combat, creating a travel hazard). That gains you a point of Spin (a new ressource, term taken from FATE). You can even invoke traits like Tall to knock yourself out on a low-hanging branch (as someone suggested in another thread here).
The same goes for Flaws: If you invoke a Flaw to your disadvantage in a similar way, gain one Spin.
Instead of taking the Spin yourself, you can give it to another character.
(EDIT: Additionally, I might reword the way the LM invokes flaws: If the LM invokes a characters flaw, he has to give the player a point of spin for it. However, the player can refuse the deal - at the additional cost of one point of hope).

Spin has nothing to do with hope - it is an abstract resource that simply means that you did something cool by roleplaying your characters traits/flaws to your own disadvantage and are entitled to a reward. However, you can either have only one point of Spin at any time or you can only generate one point of Spin per session (I haven't decided on that one yet). The latter version might be interesting, because it would allow for a kind of teamplay where two or three characters generate Spin and give it to one character, who will be able to use these several points of spin to be the hero of the day.

What does Spin do? I would say it can gain you an attribute bonus as if you were spending a point of hope, but it can't power anything else usually powered by hope, like virtues (anthough I'm on the fence whether you should be able to power maneuvers like covering someone else in combat with it, which seem a little expensive for me in terms of hope).

If you still have unused spin at the end of a session, you simply lose it - it's not a permanent resource, it just evaporates.


Also:
You start with one flaw - usually the first of your calling.
You can invoke a flaw like a trait to get an automatic success or to try something you otherwise couldn't try. You have to take a point of Shadow (possibly in addition to the Shadow you get for a misdeed). I really want to stick to this concept - after all, the idea that a character can embrace the shadow by doing misdeeds is already part of the game. I just want a way to make shadow points feel less like a punishment to players and more like a part of the dramatic arc of their character. I think this can be a really important difference ("You killed that poor old man, which was really bad. You gain 2 Shadow. Also, I wan't you to roleplay how f*** up your characters obviously have become. Wait, I'll roleplay it for you, you won't do it right anyay", as opposed to: "You wan't to steal that gem? Well, you can get a bonus for it, but that means embracing the shadow a little more ... you know that in the long run this can cost you your character? You still want to do it? Okay, let's go ..." I always prefer offering a deal to a player to punishing a player. In fact, I don't feel in my right to punish a player for anything he or she does with his or her character, because by defintion, he or she knows best what to do with said character. If it turns out that this doesn't gel with my style of play or with the system, that probably means that we should either be playing another game or play with other people).

It might be interesting to intentionally play a character who wants to embrace the Shadow, until he becomes a servant of the Enemy and a non-player character. You would have to play the growing evil subtly, to avoid direct conflicts with the rest of the player-characters.

Not according to the rules, it isn't. When you finally go mad, you don't switch sides; you run off into the forrest and kill yourself (or go to Valinor).

I've seen this idea a lot on the boards, and I don't know where it came from.

Switching sides isn't the only way to serve the Shadow, though: in LotR, Boromir doesn't ever actively espouse the Dark Lord's cause when he's corrupted by the Ring, but his actions while in the grip of madness still serve Sauron's purpose.

Fair enough, but there is a fairly wide gap between "every evil action serves the enemy" and "you are now a minion."

Well, a lot of the flaws make characters more callous and immoral, so a character with 4 Shadow points should have little problems with "switching sides". Also, it is a concept that comes very directly from the book - Saruman is mentioned, but Frodo also switches sides in the end by deciding to serve the ring (even though he might think that he is the master).

Anyway, my alternative rules are in no way intended to encourage players to have their characters become evil. I just want to give the players more control over how and when to enact his or her characters flaws. I would prefer if this discussion didn't get mixed up with the discussion about playing "the road to evil", because that is absolutely not what it is about.