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Hey guys! Glad to be back and informing you all that my normal group that gets together to play the Game of Thrones board game have agreed to take the plunge and participate in playing The One Ring!!!

Now, since we're all pretty new to tabletop roleplaying (I've had maybe... 4-5 sessions of 4e D&D), the task seemed a little daunting. There are only 4 of us in total, so although I really wanted the fun of creating and playing a part with my own character, I stepped up and will be LMing (or DMing for that matter), for the first time ever.

Thankfully, my group is pretty understanding, and they stuck with me while I read through the Character Creation process, helping them create characters while reading the rules for the first time. It was definitely a learning experience.

We were left with a few questions though that the Adventurer's book didn't seem to really cover fully. So, hopefully, you guys will be willing to help me out.

1) When helping my group pick out their weapons, we didn't quite understand what difference or impact having a (Cultural) weapon has on combat or stats in general. And for that matter, what effect does Favored Weapons have? I would assume it helps with feats that you could petition to be able to do automatically without a roll? Or does it add an extra die or +# to rolls?

2) Once we got into the nitty-gritty of the Character Creation, going through Backgrounds, Traits and Callings, the question of "What does X skill do?" arose quite often. I did my best to find out for them (even venturing further into the book to the Encounters section to describe the likes of Awe, Courtesy and Riddle), but I found the Adventurer's Book to be a bit lacking in this regard. Is there a more detailed list and explanations of skills laying around?

3) To further build from question two, we also wondered about the Skill Groups themselves. It wasn't exactly how the skills are grouped (we found that one out just fine), it was more along the lines of... how do we fill in the boxes once they're chosen? Do you fill them in to represent the Favored Skill groupings chosen from your Calling? If so... why are there three boxes when you only have the potential to choose a max of two from one group? Are you able to further upgrade your Calling's Favored Skills in the chosen groups?

Any help would be greatly appreciated. These are just minor and we haven't even quite finished the characters yet, the first session for character creation/learning the rules somewhat lasted a good few hours. I decided it would be best to have them create their characters first before reading through the combat rules with them. It'll give them a better investment in their characters to envision themselves fighting or such.

Also, I've already started to notice some considerable wear to the binding of the softback books that came with TOR. Has this problem been addressed? Is there any way to let C7 know through feedback or somesuch?

Thanks, again.
TGP

First of all you're new so you probably didn't understand that the best thing you can do is read the rules through before attempting to explain character generation to others. (that's a general RPG rule not just TOR).
Second thing to do is get the revised/updated index from the stickied thread in this forum. It'll make finding things much easier.

Third, if you have the PDF you can extract the pages covering the skill explanation and use them on a tablet to pass around when players need to know what things do. Mostly they do what they say but being fairly new you might not know what effect these things have in RPG's.

AB page 92/3/4 Cultural weapons are a group of similar weapons that a culture has skill in. So you can have skill in (axes) and use all the types of axe equally well or have Great Axe skill and only use a Great Axe. Only those weapons that are not cultural can be Favoured. A Favoured weapon allows you to use you Favoured Body value for the Attribute bonus when spending a Hope point to change a miss to a hit otherwise you use the basic Body attribute value when spending a Hope point on non-Favoured skills.

The boxes adjacent to the individual skills are filled in to show the level of skill. Take a look at the pre-generated characters in the book for an example. There is another set of boxes on the extreme right of the sheet. These are checked off when Advancement points are gained (max 3 per adventure in any one row). Francesco Nepitello (the author) suggests that LM's give out AP's in the following way.

1) AP-for-Trait: if a player succeeds at an action he may invoke a Trait to gain an Advancement point. Additionally, this is the only way to get a point if two circles out of three are already checked.
2) if a player succeeds at an action with TN above 14, he gains an Advancement point (unless it's the third in a row)
3) if a player succeeds at an action producing a great or extraordinary success, he gains 1 Ap as above (not third circle).

The binding on some copies of TOR are an issue. If they get too much such as pages falling out then take a picture and send it to C7 Customer Service and they usually get you a replacement copy.

HTH