Does anyone know where the rulebooks address restoring Hope?

I can only find gaining Hope from Fellowship points. It seems that due to the large amount of Hope spent during an adventure, there would be a way to restore it in between.

Help! I read both books entirely, but...

You can gain Hope from your Fellowship Focus.

Also, as the Fellowship Pool gets refreshed at the start of every game session, I would suggest people drain every last drop before the session ends as any surplus does not carry over.

And, although I don't think it's stated anywhere in the rules, I would be inclined to award Hope points to characters if they completed an adventure and thwarted the Enemy. Not just beating up bandits, but actually defeating a major villain or agent of Sauron.

If they gain Shadow Points for their trials throughout the adventure, they deserve to have their Hope replenished (a little) for victory.

I may make this a house rule when I start my campaign (next week) with the award being 1-3 points, depending on how successful they were.

1 point for barely surviving, but winning.
2 points for great victory.
3 points or an extraordinary victory.

The above are of course subjective terms.

I would be interested to hear what other Loremasters think on this matter.

"Hope is an ever-dwindling resource..." (AB pg 104). As such, I would suggest that it is only ever recovered by expenditure of Fellowship Points or via Fellowship Focus.

Take for example the experiences of the Fellowship of the Ring at Lorien. Low on Hope after an arduous and costly trek through Moria, the Fellowship finds temporary respite at Lorien. While they were able to recover physically from their trials, they never fully recovered Hope, as evidenced by the events that unfolded at the Falls of Rauros.

I would even go further to say that the Fellowship sacrificed all of their Fellowship Points to allow Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli to regain enough Hope to pursue the Uruk-Hai and the captured Merry and Pippin.

EDIT: added "or via Fellowship Focus" in the first paragraph.

Sounds like your group fell to temptation. PCs seem to have lots of Hope but they can't recover it quickly. As a group they should be aiming to spend no more than 1 Hope each per session for sustainability. This will focus them on using it when most vital.

Hope is only recovered from Fellowship points, spending Hope point to aid your Fellowship focus or if your Fellowship focus is not Wounded.

I will probably have Hope restored at year end too.

Although you make a valid point, I think it may be necessary to 'top up' Hope from time to time in an ongoing campaign, which is why I suggested the above house rule.

I'll add the disclaimer that I have yet to actually run the game, but from what I have read on the forums, Hope does get spent quickly in play.

The One Ring is not just a single (albeit extended) adventure like the Lord of The Rings, but an extended campaign that may last for years of real time and generations of game time.

If there is no way to restore Hope, the heroes may find themselves Miserable before they leave their homes as they build up Shadow Points over their career.

And I know they can retire their heroes and replace them with a more hope filled heir, but most players clutch onto their favourite character until their very last breath!

You make good points. Perhaps Hope should be fully restored in the Fellowship Phase, allowing our Heroes to have the motivation to leave their front doors at the start of each Adventuring Phase?

Whilst I agree there may be scope to regain Hope at significant points in the adventure or at the end of the year, this seems like a really bad reason for doing so. Players will spend Hope more quickly if they regain it quickly. Ideally, a player would love to spend them all the time

What we are seeing on the forums is people not yet understanding the balance. Hope is awesome and one offs are short. I think it's wise to understand the balance first and then fiddle it it to suit, not the other way around. Otherwise, you may just end up in the same position a little later down the line.

Point taken. You are right of course and it was a possible house rule, not written in stone.

I will see how things go over the campaign before I consider introducing such a rule.

Shadow Points may become a problem in a long term campaign and they are not easy to get rid of. Unless you have a bout of madness of course

Be aware that you have effectively increased Hope recovery by around 5 to 6 times and this will increase Hope expenditure by the same amount if the PCs are clever. It will significantly change gameplay and effectively removes the value of Hope and your Fellowship focus and the danger of Shadow as concepts in the system.

One thing I like in TOR is the Shadow is a credible threat. White Wolf and Star Wars RPGs have similar dark paths they tend to wet blankets. In TOR, Hope is incredibly powerful but the cost is high. I think it will be much more satisfying in play.

To quote a small grey chap in LOTR, 'We shall see!'

The Nine Walkers had a nice large fellowship pool to feed off, 13 points (2 per hobbit and 1 each for the others), which is probably about two or three times the size of most groups in the RPG.

Sure FWIW I assume play test groups were more like normal RPG parties, though the 13 Fellowship rating makes sense for the most dificult quest of the Age

Most difficult quest of the age... clearly you haven't tried stealing mushrooms from Farmer Maggot!

When I read that Hobbits give extra Hope to their fellowships, it made me wonder whether the Fellowship of the Ring wasn't comprised of 5 proper PCs who took 4 dopey NPC 'passengers' along just for the Hope boost!

The way I read it, The Fellowship Pool is the only means by which an individual's Hope can normally be restored, plus the Fellowship Focus factor of +1 for keeping your best buddy in one piece. And that's an average of 1-2 Hope per PC (or 2-3 per hobbit) per session, subject to group consensus. To have an average of one or two 'Hope moments' each per session -- sometimes concentrated if one person's being particularly heroic or particularly unlucky, but presumably averaging out as much as the group consensus wants it to -- that's fine by me.

But it might be quite subjective. Our group's sessions are 3 hours on a weekday night, and we're lucky to spend all that time actually gaming, so we'd be getting Hope more frequently than a group that played an 8 hour session on a weekend... Loremasters should adjust according to need, or according to the tone of the game they want to run.
It may be important in some groups to emphasise that Hope is not a commodity to be spent as freely as, say, Action Points in D&D4e or Bennies in Savage Worlds.

There is one other source of a full Hope refresh, when you advance in Virtue and select 'Confidence':

But I'd assume this is pretty rare; the game would suffer if everyone had to periodically buy a level of Confidence just to refresh their Hope!

Shadow points are meant to be the game's expression of the ongoing downward pull, and it would be a shame if simple diminishing Hope had more impact on a group than their Shadow points (though the two are obviously closely linked).

It's tempting to think that Hope's meant to refresh after every Adventure -- in the Fellowship Phase, which will typically be Year's End if you follow the assumed example of one adventure per game year. It's hard to imagine that you could spend a season in a Sanctuary and not regain any Hope.

I'm looking forward to an erratum statement on this, but if we don't get one I would probably either match Garbar's suggested house rule, or introduce one to allow a full Hope refresh as an Undertaking, possibly restricted to Year's End, and possibly to Sanctuaries....

Cheers,
--Os.

All this is a question of "Pacing". And you have to consider how long sessions you play and how much action it sees.

In my case we play only work nights, and seldom more than 4 hours per session.
Usually that can fit in some good role-playing, some social interaction, investigation and maybe ONE combat.

I'd be surprised if the party would exhaust their Fellowship every night of play, so I'm considering even NOT refilling it every night, but maybe every-other night. But we'll see.

If however you meet and play for a full Saturday or Weekend.... then you'd probably want to refresh the Fellowship Pool even DURING the session.

Having things fill up every session is VERY sensitive to how much action your session will see. That's all I'm saying.

/wolf

Bang on GW. I think a 4 hour session is probably the intended benchmark. If I was running 6 hour sessions, I would allow a refresh mid game.

I wanted to point out that Hope refreshes to its full (new) value should you take the Confidence Virtue...

I have to be honest, I was thinking along the lines of hope being restored during fellowship phases as well but you have a fair point. I do think however, reading the rules it seems to suggest that, for beginning characters, hope should be used quite a lot to meet those challenging TN's.

If hope is so difficult to regain, characters will become a lot less playable and a lot less fun for the players. In fact, this topic and the topic about traits and automatic successes are linked really.

If hope is such a dwindling resource that it effectively should be rationed by the players, then automatic successes become even more important and should be more frequent. The last thing you want as a Loremaster is your game being bogged down as your players are trying to drag it out long enough for them to regain some hope.

Also, your characters will become miserable very quickly and very easily and fall to shadow long before they have even seen the main plot develop.

As with anything it comes down to prefered styles of play, if your players prefer dark and sinister games which evoke more of Frodo and Sams journey through Moria then hope shold be slow to be regained. If your players want something a little more like the Hobbit I think hope needs to be more easily accessable.

My feeling is that hope should recover during fellowship phases, not completely but by a noticable degree and based on the that the company are in. Such places as Rivendell, Lorien, and more importantly their own homes, should heal hope more quickly than Esgaroth or such like.

I believe that the Fellowship of the Ring in Lorien was affected more by the loss of Gandalf, than Lorien not increasing their hope. If Gandalf had passed through the First Hall of Moria and into Lorien with them I suspect that everyone's hope (except possibly Boromir) would have been greatly increased if not completely recovered.

I also disagree that hope is incrediably powerful. It is useful but it is not like it completely bypasses a badly failed roll. Don't get me wrong, I like the general hope rules I just think that it's recovery should not be stymied that badly.

One good point that Caul brings to notice is the ruling that if you buy the Confidence virtue your hope is refreshed to its new full value, and this does indeed suggest that hope is not automatically recovered completely during the fellowship phase but to me it is more a matter of degree.

My thinking is that, barring the loss of a companion (most especially a fellowship focus) in the adventuring phase preceeding the fellowship phase; should the phase be spent in an Elven land such as Rivendell or Lorien, or the characters homeland, the character should regain an amount equal to half their hope (but not exceeding their maximum).

This can be increased by the expenditure of fellowship points or by an alternate version of the undertaking 'Reduce corruption' which I shall call 'Be of Heart'. Heroes may increase the companies (for any members of the company who are in the same place) Hope score by attempting a TN14 Song or Inspire roll. On a successful roll they increase everyone's hope by 1, 2 points for a great success and 4 points for an extraordinary success.

Thoughts?

E

hope will regenerate better than people think. page 106 i think states that the fellowship points replentish at the begining of every playing session. so, before the game ends players could divide the remainder .

That is still just 1 Hope per PC per session, except Hobbits. That baseline is what people are worried about I think.

Maybe create a table for Fellowship Phase recovery:

Human Town (Esgaroth, Dale) - 1 pt
Hometown - 2 pts
Ally of the Free Peoples (Beorn's House, Tom Bombadil) - 3 pts
Elven Land - 4 pts

Thoughts ?

I don't see it working in the way you described. There would have to be a very strong narrative reasoning behind a dwarf regaining 4 hope while residing at the courtesy of King Thranduil, for example.

@ Knever - Guess you are right, I didn't think too much on this

Maybe you recover Heart in Hope per Fellowship Phase would be the easiest, with a modifier based on etc

I think one problem with Hope... is there appears to be a lot.

Other games that have Fate or Luck or Hero Points or whatever, tend to have only a few points, so they spend them with caution!

Because everyone in TOR starts with a minimum of 8 points of Hope, it seems like quite a lot, so players feel they can spend it an abundance.

Hopefully, any player worth his or her salt will come to realise that hope is to be preserved. I thought, when I first read this game, that it was strange that hope points were expended after the dice were rolled. I thought "that's not hope, it's a guarantee!" My impression was that it should be declared prior to the dice being rolled - that gives the expression of hope its true dramatic meaning.

Now that I can see that hope is so precious and difficult to recover, I realise that declaring after the dice are rolled is probably the best way to go.

Although you can run this anyway you like, I don't believe that that hope is quite that rare. Also, you are not required to declare hope before the roll according to the RAW.

My own personal preference is that hope should not be a resource to be used only after careful thought. I have been reading of Tolkeins books recently and their is a lot of mentioning of hope, both increasing and decreasing which to me suggests that hope should not be a carefully husbanded resource.

E

Other games -- I'm thinking of Savage Worlds, FATE and more debatably D&D4e -- encourage you to use your special points, and to do things to regain them, such that they keep flowing. TOR's Hope appears to be a more finite resource, and TOR rewards rightminded play by awarding Advancement Points instead of by recharging your Hope.

I agree, eldath, that the books, especially The Hobbit, achieve a lot of their dramatic impact by expressing the rising and falling of the characters' 'spirits'. But I think TOR expresses a lot of that by Endurance, rather than Hope -- even though the name 'Hope' reflects it more directly.

That said, lots of the examples of play show expenditures of Hope; the extended combat example in the LMB sees two of the 4 PCs each expend a Hope point in the opening volley, so maybe it IS there to be spent.

I guess they couldn't say Hope is automatically fully recharged in the Fellowship Phase because that's so variable itself. Some Fellowship Phases might only be a week long: a brief respite before urgently setting forth on the next challenge, in which Endurance should be recouped, but Hope should not.

But other Fellowship Phases, especially ones which follow the final defeat of a threat or -- I'll say it again: ones spent in a Sanctuary like Rivendell* -- surely ought to see the Company refreshed of Hope. If the spending of the Fellowship Pool (and the bonus for keeping one's Fellowship Focus from suffering significant harm) aren't enough to keep Hope levels up, then maybe Fellowship Phases should restore Hope by something like a point per month, or more in a Sanctuary.

Cheers,
--Os.

* Actually, Rivendell's not a good example. Rivendell is specifically a superb place for healing and recovery, more than the Elvenking's Halls, Esgaroth etc. IMHO Rivendell should have its own special rule instead of setting precedents applicable anywhere else.

I think that hope differs from Bennies or Fate points etc. There are indeed more of them than the funky points of other systems but they do not do the same kinds of things.

Dark Heresy's Fate Points allow number of useful effects, and they refresh every session unless you burn one to avoid death.

Savage World's bennies are used to reroll any test from scratch and again, they refresh every session

Cortex's Plot Points can be used to increase your chances (i.e. increasing the dice you roll), reducing damage, and changing the storyline potentially large amounts. Also, although plot points do not automatically refresh every session they do have a larger pool maximum than most and close to TOR (about 12 between sessions and as many as the ref decides to give you during a session).

I will be honest and admit I am not familiar with the systems which give out Luck or Hero points, but the point is that while Hope can be a larger number than games like Savage World's and Dark Heresy the effects are not really that game shattering I don't think.

You can add your attribute bonus to a dice roll to ensure you succeed, but only if your attribute bonus is enough to make a difference.
You can spend one to act as a scout (or other position) to attempt a roll to avoid a Hazard
You can spend hope to activate a cultural virtue (which btw also means that if hope is so slow to return, some cultural virtues become expensive to use and less attractive than the masteries which do not cost hope)

The big one for me is that the lower your hope goes the greater the chance of becoming Miserable and therefore potentailly becoming unplayable. So unless you are powerful enough to have skills at 3 or higher, you will likely fail more than you will succeed unless you spend hope and if it is hard to recover you will probably run for your life from the battlefield or storm out of the debate due to being spiritually spent. Not much of a choice.

As I have already mentioned, this can be varied depending on what kind of a game you want to run, and it is a very personal thing, but given this game is (to my understanding) based more on the Hobbit with the Lord of the Rings being later books, I want to run a lighter game.

After some thought I will likely rule that a character spending a fellowship phase in his own land (or in a realm like Lorien or Rivendell which are specifically healing places) will gain back their favoured Heart in Hope.
A character spending their fellowship phase anywhere else may recover their normal Heart in hope.
In addition a character may use the undertaking I mentioned in my earlier post:
'Be of Heart'. Heroes may increase the companies Hope score (so long as they are in the same place) by attempting a TN14 Song or Inspire roll. On a successful roll they increase everyone's hope by 1, 2 points for a great success and 4 points for an extraordinary success.

Given the potential recovery of hope within in a session from Fellowship points, Fellowship Focuses, and the potential complete reset by purchasing Confidence, I think that this will keep Hope from being so precious that no-one wants to use it.

E

As a benchmark, I ran a session today and the PCs spent 9 Hope and they had a Fellowship Rating of 7. I felt that they perhaps used Hope a little too freely.

After the experience, I think that the current Hope recovery may actually be better designed than I thought. I won't be altering it barring a bad experience in the future.

I would say that I am a big fan of letting it ride as a GM so I don't tend to call for as many rolls as some GMs.

After having played two sessions now, with two different groups, I think the Fellowship becomes extremely important in this whole matter. The game has been designed, I now realize, to force players to work as a team. For every 1 Hope point a hero spends, he can borrow 1 point from the Fellowship pool to recover it (which replenishes after each session). If his Fellowship Focus isn't wounded during a session, he recovers 1 Hope point.

So, it is up to the Loremaster to decide how to pace his sessions in an Adventuring phase. He also gets to choose how dangerous they are. I will probably recommend to my players to only spend Hope during combat and allow sessions without combat to be an easy Hope recovery session, as no one will be wounded (unless they fall prey to a horrible hazard or something).

According to the Loremaster's Book, p. 17, you could have any number of sessions in an Adventuring phase. The example given is a four-session adventure. That means, the heroes would replenish their Fellowship pool four times and each of them could recover up to 4 Hope points (depending on whether their Fellowship Focus was wounded). All in one Adventuring phase.

As a point of interest, NONE of my player-heroes have been wounded yet. So, they all have recovered 1 Hope point each session.

Besides, the Adventurer's Book states on p. 105 that "Hope is an ever-dwindling resource: to overcome the many formidable challenges he is going to face, a player-hero who has just started his adventuring career is bound to count on it quite often (veterans might come to rely more on their own abilities)." To me, this shows that the intention of the game is for characters to improve their skills and become less reliant on Hope.

Great post.

In terms of regaining Hope, don't you need youR Fellowship focus to not be Wounded or not take Endurance damage? It says not wounded or otherwise be harmed.

You get a Shadow point if they are Wounded but I don't think that Hope regain works in reverse.

I wouldn't say they couldn't take Endurance damage at all (that would be VERY difficult I think). I would interpret that as not being wounded or "knocked out" from total Endurance loss perhaps.

Maybe we should ask Francesco what his intention was.

Cool. Good idea. The wording is actually pretty weird in light of all the specific terms used in the system.

With 'otherwise be harmed' I meant anything that gave a fellowship focus a hard time during the last session of play. It can be anything from getting beaten badly during combat (losing a lot of Endurance while not inflicting a lot of damage in return) or ending up being miserable or even weary. But I understand that this is a little too hazy, so I'll try (with your help?) to come up with some stricter guidelines.

Francesco

Actually that is helpful. Knowing that it is intended to have some flexibility and GM discretion pretty answers much of the question.

Francesco, thanks for helping with this issue. Any clarification you come up with will be very much appreciated.

We havnet played TOR yet, and I am just about to wrap up the Adventurer's Book before diving into the LMB

It seems in this and other posts that the "session" might be a fluid thing, ie. subject to interpretation. I have been thinking about it ever since I first read of it.

My TOR campaigns will probably follow the same kind of progression of MERP campaigns which tend to consist of a series of scenario objectives, with a sort of Fellowship phase between scenarios where wounds are healed and treasures counted and tales of their adventures shared in a Tavern and level up if available. The completion of the campaign usually ends up being a wintering at a place of "sanctuary".

But sometimes due to time restraints a scenario might be in mid play and we "freeze the game" to take it up at the next game session.

What would be suggested most, the TOR "session" be complete that night, or after it is completed at the next sitting?

Like I said before I haven't even gotten to the LMB and no play time, but at this point not knowing more of game balance issues I tend to favor the "session" ending with the given scenario.

Any thoughts?

The session is a vague description really.

Because of work and family commitments, my group only games for about 2 hours a week, which is a short session.

In the good old days, we'd play for 12 hours or more at the weekend, but there we would break for meals, effectively breaking the game in sessions!

As a general rule, I try to complete the scene we are in, whatever that scene may be, and if the end is nigh, I try to avoid starting a scene that can't be completed that night.

So, that's my slightly long winded way of saying that I treat one night of play as a single session, which means that I will refresh the Fellowship Pool every week.

My above post ended up in the wrong Topic... sorry about that.

As for restoring Hope, I was wondering about something that would be a matter of interpretation...

In the Movie (I don't remember this scene in the books) when Frodo and Sam are making their way towards the Dead marshes, Sam pulls out a box of Salt, one of the only dear reminders remaining of their home and what they were struggling for...
It seems like such a small thing, but in a Hopeless situation, something like that could be a high point

Could this possibly be a scenario where a point of Hope could be restored?