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After running lots of TOR, I'm still very unclear on, RAW, how the scope of the Player's narration portion of the Fellowship phase is supposed to go.

For example, my player wants to help the Woodmen become better defended. So he proposes spending $ and time in his downtime to hire mercenaries to help train a militia.

It seems like there should be a bunch of discussion and interactions about this.

Do we just do that without rolling?
Does the player just declare arbitrarily the outcome of this activity?
Something else?

One thing I love about TOR is the Fellowship Phase. It is a great opportunity for character and relationship development. Interacting with the people in a sanctuary is a good way to build investment in a place. The intensity of the Fellowship Phase varies a lot depending on how much the players want to invest. For some players, the FP becomes quite extended as they interact with an NPC and other characters, while others do the bare minimum to get on to the next Adventure Phase. As an LM I try to encourage the latter by requiring all players to narrate how they healed corruption or raised their standing or whatever they did that FP and I also ask characters reflect on the last adventure either through internal monologue or in a conversation with another PC or NPC. Still the results are uneven. I do not require any rolling, apart from what is needed to heal corruption.

Don't bother to roll. Remember that the entire group gets a chance to veto anything outrageous. The Loremaster, as a dispassionate participant, should consider the Standing, Valor, or Wisdom of the character as well as whether what they're trying to do is plausible. Be generous as to plausibility, but do draw the line somewhere. If anything requires resolution with an adventure, take it to the adventuring phase.

There are a number of official fellowship phase undertakings that do require a roll, but in many cases it's rolling on a table of results, not using any specific skills of the individual. So you could, for example, whip up a table of possible results of training the militia, and modify it by +1 for each point of Treasure spent (or a different ratio, if you've been generous with Treasure).

There are also some examples where common skills are used, for example Noldor weapon enchanting, but those are definitely the exception.