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Hi all,

In this thread I wanted to rise the point that may be armours do add survivability in combat, or rather in long battles after all.

I thought to add a house rule in the form of a new cultural virtue accessible for all cultures that would help palliate the fact that armours are bad for PC suvivability in short skirmishes.

Option 1) When you spend a point of Hope to invoke an Attribute bonus for a Protection roll, you additionally cancel all penalties enforced from being Weary.

Option 2) You don't suffer the penalty of being Weary on Protection rolls.

Any opinions on that?

Option 1 is very niche, and a flat out inferior version of the Hobbit Virtue Brave at a Pinch...which is one of the weaker Cultural Virtues available.

Option 2 is much more solid mechanically, and seems to me to make quite a bit more sense.

That said, I'm not sure either of these are really necessary. Armour is nice, and being Wounded sucks. That's a pretty good incentive to wear armor right there, even in a skirmish, and applies rather definitely at least up to 3 dice of Armour...and how appropriate is wearing more than that for people who primarily skirmish anyway?

Yepesnopes wrote: Option 2) You don't suffer the penalty of being Weary on Protection rolls.

This one works both ways, though. Some of the Giant Size enemies have thick enough armor that making them Weary is the only way to make killing them feasible.

I want to make it a virtue you have to pay xp to get, not a general rule of the game.

Yepesnopes wrote:I want to make it a virtue you have to pay xp to get, not a general rule of the game.

And that's what I get for not reading.

Yesterday I was reading the chapter about Gear in the Revised Book, and found this in the introduction. Sometimes the game explains most of the things we struggle to understand here, only we forgot we read it:

a light pack on a traveller’s back is an indication
of his experience in the trade. The same applies to an
adventurer’s war gear: they should fight the urge to choose
the biggest weapons and the heaviest suits of armour, as
a weighty and cumbersome burden is bound to seriously
hamper their adventuring capabilities.

So it seems that heavier armours being unpractical for adventuring IS designed on purpouse.

Agreed, Falenthal.

I actually really liked the way Decipher's game did it: give hero PCs the ability to get a cool ability called Armour of Heroes (basically the equivalence of 2 points of free protection), as long as they don't wear heavy armor.

Majestic wrote:Agreed, Falenthal.

I actually really liked the way Decipher's game did it: give hero PCs the ability to get a cool ability called Armour of Heroes (basically the equivalence of 2 points of free protection), as long as they don't wear heavy armor.

I've never played Decipher's game so I may be talking hot air here, but that strikes me as a hack: in order to support the RP decision to go without armour, you need a rule like that to make it mechanically viable.

I prefer the TOR approach, even if it's imperfect: baked into the armour rules is a trade-off, which makes any choice, including no armour at all, viable.

I thought it was a pretty simple way of encouraging players not to do 'the D&D thing' and load up their characters with the strongest, weightiest armor.

And it's pretty easily hand-waved away as the subtle magic of Middle-earth. I don't have my books with me for their exact description, but it was something along those lines, IIRC.

The D&D thing only applies to 3 classes:

Paladin, Cleric, Fighter.

Everyone else wants lighter armor. Transported into TOR, those 3 classes would want to wear mail hauberks and a helm for 5d+4 protection.

But...Tolkien doesn't really have medieval knights, does he? TOR was never designed to have the Knights of the Round Table tromping through in magnificent gleaming plate armor.