Each rule has 4 sections: a description, a “rationale” section, a “rules symmetry” section, and a “test” section. The “rationale” section gives both a logical and a meta-game explanation to the rule, while the “rules symmetry” section recalls analogues with other rules of TOR: this is mainly because I usually prefer to build up symmetries with other rules of the same game system when developing home-rules, rather than creating them completely from scratch. It’s both a tribute to game developers and a need for formal coherence, I guess.
In the “test” section I’ll sum up how it performed in game and I’ll give a rating.
Let’s start:
*NEWLY ARRIVED*
SYLVAN ELVES SMALL BOOST - expanded Folk of the Dusk: It can be debated, but I think that Sylvan elves just needed a small boost. I developed this modification as an expansion of Folk of the Dusk, which was quite the weak point of this race.
When an Elven character is inside a forest or under the earth, or it is night, his Cultural Virtues (whichever he may have) change as follows:
Deadly Archery: the bonus attribute to attack given by the Virtue becomes the Favourite score of Heart, instead of the base Heart score.
Elvish Dream: In addition to the benefits described, if the Elven character gets a prolonged rest in a forest, under the earth or during the night, he recovers 2 Endurance points plus his Favourite score of Heart, instead of 2 points plus the base score of Heart.
Shadow Bane: In addition to the benefit described, if the Elven character is fightin in a forest, under the earth or during the night, when he is in the Forward stance he uses his Favourite score of Body to determine his melee Damage against servants of the Shadow.
The Speakers: no modifications.
Wood Elf Magic: Stinging arrow: when spending a Hope point to obtain either effect in the description, the ranged Damage for this attack is the Favourite score of Body if the elf is fighting in a forest, under the earth or during night; Elf-lights: when in a forest, under the earth or during night the effect is doubled, that is to say that 2 points of Hope or Hate must be expended to resist the effect, and the weary penalty lasts for 2 rounds; Enchanted sleep: inside a forest, under the earth or during night, the maximum Attribute Level that can be affected is 7.
Rationale and Rules Symmetry: redundant, it's pretty much all said.
Test: I haven't tested it yet, but these rules resulted after an extensive discussion with my elven player and we ended up with reasonable conclusions.
Now go and ask your LM to use one or all of these rules if you feel your elven character is a bit underrated, then let me know!
RULES FOR TWO-WEAPON FIGHTING: any character who wishes to fight with two weapons designates a primary weapon (wielded in his main hand) and a secondary weapon (wielded in his off-hand). He must have at least 2 points of weapon skill in the primary weapon and at least 1 point in the secondary weapon. The latter must be a one-handed melee weapon with an Encumbrance value of 1 or less.
A character fighting with a secondary weapon in his off-hand adds 1 to his Fatigue score.
If the secondary weapon has an Encumbrance value of 0, it grants the following benefits: in Defensive stance, the wielder gains +1 to his Parry value, as if he was wielding a buckler; in Open and Forward stance, the wielder gains +2 to the Wounding TN of his primary weapon.
If the secondary weapon has an Encumbrance value of 1, it grants the following benefits: in Defensive stance, the wielder gains +1 to his Parry value, as if he was wielding a buckler; in Open and Forward stance, the wielder gains +2 to the primary weapon Damage, and +2 to its Wounding TN.
A successful called shot with a sword against a two-weapon fighter still disarms him of his primary weapon; a successful called shot with an axe breaks his secondary weapon, as if it was a shield.
LMs may also want to adopt the following new Virtue complementary with the rules above, and make it available to whichever culture they deem appropriate:
Virtue: Two-Weapon Fighting: the character was taught the exotic art of two-weapon fighting by a dexterous master, and can make rapid, dangerous flurries with both his weapons. While he is fighting with two weapons, whenever he hits an opponent he can roll his Feat dice: on a result of 8 or more, he deals additional damage equal to his off-hand weapon Damage.
If the result of this roll is also equal to (or greater than) the Edge score of the secondary weapon, the opponent must make a Protection check against the Wounding TN of the secondary weapon to avoid getting WOUNDED.
Rationale: two-weapon fighting has been recorded throughout history, albeit it’s a rare form of combat. It should, however, have its place in Middle Earth. And come on, every LM has at least a player who wants to fight with two weapons!
Rules symmetry: I’ve created the rules so there’s no real advantage, in terms of Encumbrance and combat statistics, between fighting with two weapons, a weapon and a shield or a two-handed weapon. Mathematically speaking, a two-weapon fighter is at best equal to a weapon-and-buckler fighter, but only in Defensive stance, while in the other stances he’s at a small disadvantage respect to other choices (for example, a sword-plus-short sword fighter in Open or Forward has a Damage of 7 and a Wounding TN of 18 for a Fatigue of 4, while a fighter wielding a longsword with two hands has the same statistic except a lower Fatigue of 3; a short sword-plus-dagger fighter in Open or Forward has a Damage of 5, Wounding TN of 16 and Fatigue 2, same as a sword-wielding fighter that has, however, the other hand free; other combinations, say two-short swords or two daggers, have similar considerations). The real advantage, of course, is better versatility.
The Two-Weapon Fighting Virtue has, of course, a clear symmetry with Men of the Lake’s Shield-Fighting.
Test: well, a success. More combat options are fun, players who use this system feel stylish without unbalancing the game and think cleverly about the stance to adopt during a fight.
Rating: *****.
EXHAUSTED: When a character's Endurance drops to zero, the character doesn't pass out. Instead, he can spend a point of Hope to gain a new condition: he is considered EXHAUSTED.
An EXHAUSTED character's Parry drops to zero; he also loses any shield bonus. In any check (included attack checks) except Protection checks, all scores of the feat dices count as zero, except the six (Tengwar), that still counts as a six (and also counts as a great or extraordinary success, where it matters). The character can still spend Hope points with the usual effects.
Any successful attack check against the EXHAUSTED character is considered a Penetrating Strike that doesn't deal Endurance damage, and it requires a Protection check.
If the character gets WOUNDED when he is EXHAUSTED, or if he was already WOUNDED when his Endurance drops to zero, then he drops and he is dying, as usual.
A character who gets EXHAUSTED can choose not to spend a Hope point and drop helpless to the ground, as usual.
When a character recovers at least 1 Endurance point, he is no longer EXHAUSTED.
Rationale: this scene.
Rules symmetry: Great Size ability of big monsters.
Test: At first, odd results. You need to pump up a bit the combat encounters to get this work properly. Your characters may feel somehow immortal and keep fighting, before they'll realize that when they are EXHAUSTED the fight is almost over for them unless they get help soon. Heavier armor makes the difference here: EXHAUSTED characters can still tank the enemies if properly armored, even if they'll get hit all the time, because their armors will soak the Penetrating strikes of lesser weapons. Lightly armored characters, on the other hand, will last no more than 1 or 2 turns in this condition.
Rating: **** and a half. Me and my players find it great and makes the game a little more epic.
Penetrating strike on Extraordinary success: a.k.a. more wounds. On attack checks, an Extraordinary success (2 or more Tengwars) doesn’t deal an additional amount of Endurance damage equal to 2xDamage. Instead, it deals the weapon damage plus 1xDamage score and it is also a Penetrating strike.
Also, on Called shots with swords or axes, if the opponent is already unarmed (in case of swords) or without a shield (in case of axes), a successful Called shot is a Penetrating strike.
Optional (to make combat even deadlier, but I don’t use this): a successful Called shot that would be a Penetrating strike and that scores 2 or more Tengwars (an Extraordinary success) increases the Wounding TN of the attack by 2 for every Tengwar after the first (+2 for 2 Tengwars rolled; +4 for 3 Tengwars; etc.). Also, if a character rolls a Gandalf rune on an attack check, his Wounding TN increases by 2 for every Tengwar score on the feat dices.
Rationale: first, I felt that armors, especially heavier ones, needed more importance. Hence, more wounding = need for better protection, and less Endurance damage (on extraordinary successes) means that Encumbrance has now a (marginally) lesser effect on combat (again, good for heavier armors). Second, without this rule the wounding chance of a character wouldn’t increase with his skill level with the weapon (since it only depends on the weapon type), which seems odd to me: a skilled swordsman is a deadlier swordsman, and his ability to lethally injure an opponent shouldn’t be the same as when he was just an apprentice.
Rules symmetry: none.
Test: no real difference in the early stages of the game. I tried then a session with powered up characters and challenging encounters. This mechanic will speed up high level combat (more frequent wounds on lesser foes) but be wary that when facing many foes, wounds will rain on the players. Also, Great size single monsters will be more vulnerable, so you may want to increase by a dice their Protection rolls or require 3 (or even more) wounds for them to be killed, to keep those encounters interesting.
In general, combat is deadlier and armor DOES become very important, but this may not fit with your game style. In mine it’s been a good addition.
Rating: ****.
*OLD HOUSE RULES*
Use Body instead of Heart when you determine Endurance: as the title says. This required a little tweaking of the base cultural Endurance values, to match the original game balance. Hope base values remain unchanged, while the new Endurance values are:
Bardings, Beornings, Elves, Woodmen: 22 + Body Attribute
Dwarves: 24 + Body Attribute
Hobbits: 18 + Body Attribute
With these new cultural base values, all average Endurance attributes at character creation are 1 less than in the original system (Bardings 27, Beornings 28, Dwarves 30, Hobbits 21), except Elves that have now 2 more (27, like Bardings) and Woodmen that remain unchanged (25).
Not a great deal actually, but look: as a side effect, all the races that have more or less the same physical makeup (men and elves) now have the base starting value of 22, which seems more logical.
Moreover, now all races’ sums of base Hope and base Endurance values are 30 (with the exception of Woodmen that are at 32; but one can consider to lower their base Hope to 8 like the other human cultures), which is good in terms of coherency and meta-game balance/alignment.
Rationale: I see Body as a general take on the character’s fitness, both offensive and defensive, and I think it should somehow affect a character’s ability to resist fatigue way more than Heart. Moreover, it is a widespread feeling that Body tends to be underrated in the current system. While Heart should still be decisive to evaluate a character’s recuperative ability, during combat it’s your physical training that makes the difference, for the most part.
Rules symmetry: none (but see the description to see how it positively impacts the base cultural values).
Test: my Elven player said thanks, as we all felt that he needed a small boost, while the others had not any complaints. A very small effect on the game? In terms of mathematics yes. In terms of general balance, not at all. I was surprised looking at how much Heart remained important to my players, despite it lost one of its main purposes. But now thinking about it, it still affects Hope score, healing rate, corruption tests, it’s used as the attribute for Valour and Wisdom checks and it influences Inspiration/Travel/Insight/Healing/Battle checks. My Hobbit player even said that Heart is STILL the most important Attribute, while my Beorning player was finally glad to max his Body score.
Rating: *****. So good to game balance.
Weapon Damage no more fixed, but equal to Body + modifiers: this is not my idea, all the credit for this goes to Corvo (which means “crow” in my homeland language, btw
. With this rule, all the weapons with Damage 5 have now Damage equal to the wielder’s Body; the other Damage values are obtained summing Body plus (or minus) a modifier to match the original value (Damage 7 = Body +2; Damage 9 = Body +4; Damage 3 = Body -2, etc.). A great success then deals the damage above x2, while and extraordinary success deals x3. Everything else remains unchanged.Rationale: on a normal success (no tengwars), without this rule a 7 feet tall Beorning with bulging muscles and a 3 feet tall fat Hobbit, both attacking with a short sword, cause the same damage. This rule makes the players feel the difference since the early stages of the game, when not many tengwars are rolled. It also does streamline combat calculations, since players tend to fumble upon the additions (weapon Damage + 1x or 2xbody is more complicated than simply weapon Damage x1, x2 or x3).
Rules symmetry: actually none, but it’s kind of a simplification.
Test: my Hobbit player cursed me, but the rule also pushed him to find other, creative solutions to combat than simply attacking or max out his Damage output. Which is good, since in the books the Hobbits don’t fight that much, but they still give a contribution. Except Meriadoc of course, who even kills the Mordor Troll Chieftain: but he drank the Ent water which gave him at least a +1 to his Body score, so it doesn’t count
Beware though that the damage outputs will increase slightly when tengwars are rolled. Not a great deal, anyway.
Rating: **** and a half.
Armor as Damage reduction equal to the protection dices it grants: As the title says. It’s been also debated for quite a while and credit for this actually goes to more than just one member of this forum.
Rationale: armor doesn’t give a real advantage in some fights and heavier armors actually give a penalty, since the characters wearing them will be WEARY too soon. So armor should soak some of the incoming damage, rather than simply avoiding wounds. Check other topics in this forum for more detailed discussions.
Rules symmetry: none.
Test: bad effects to the game. Players become almost invulnerable to lesser enemies, who on the other side (if you apply the same rule to them; but remember that if you don’t, serious issues of encounters balance arise) become much more resistant. Result: combat is now way, way longer than it should. But then a Hill Troll comes… 86 points of Endurance, soaking 4 damage from every blow. And all of a sudden my players realize that maybe they don’t have a chance against such a monstrosity…
Lowering the damage reduction (say, 1 to 3 only to chain armors) help mitigate the effect, but careful playtesting would be needed to find the right balance. Plus I don’t like the absence of rules symmetry here.
Rating: *, or ** with lesser values of Damage Reduction. Not sure if it will ever work this way.
Armor augment healing immediately after combat, equal to half its value of Encumbrance: as the title says. I came up with this idea when I started thinking that maybe the effects of armor IN COMBAT should be left as they are, because it’s how the developers intended them to be. But still armor, proportionally to their encumbrance, should give some other, tangible advantage that the players would actually seek, avoiding the common trap “heaviest armor = best armor”.
So it goes like that: at the end of combat, standard rules state that provided some rest (roughly half an hour) the characters immediately regain Endurance = Heart. With my rule, characters regain Endurance = Heart + 1/2 Encumbrance value of armor (2 for leather shirt, 4 for leather corselet, 6 for chain shirt, 8 for coat of mail, 10 for mail hauberk).
Rationale: why armor should increase healing right after combat? Because you may not feel an armor effect on your Endurance during combat, as it is heavy and it actually gets you tired faster with all those pounds of metal on your shoulders… but then, when you’re resting, you notice that after catching your breath all those blows are not as bad as they could have been. You were more tired, but not more bruised.
Rules symmetry: removal of the Helmet. At 6 Encumbrance, removing your Helmet during combat reduced Fatigue by 3 (half its Encumbrance value). Of course you can’t remove your armor during combat but similarly, when you have enough time to get comfortable, you regain half the armor Encumbrance in Endurance points, which may also remove the WEARY condition.
Test: a simple rule that works very well. At first the players won’t notice any change: but after frequent and prolonged assaults, given some rest between each of them (but not enough to allow a complete recover), the armor can really make the difference. Which is how it should be: you don’t go without armor in vast, long battles, because eventually wounds and bruises will take their price. Imagine a siege: with a big armor, the character will get tired soon in combat defending the gates, but after a tactical withdrawal and some rest inside the walls, he’ll be ready to fight much sooner than any unarmored companion who got bruised or wounded.
Rating: ****. We still need something to get a character wearing heavy armor more durable during combat, but it’s a satisfying solution so far.
Others coming, stay tuned!
