Character Optimization Guide

[Glorelendil]

Note: Zedturtle rightly pointed out that my attempts at humor may have conveyed the wrong impression about TOR to new players, so I'm renaming (and slowly editing) the document.

I truly do love the storytelling and roleplaying aspects of TOR. Nevertheless, some of us also really enjoy optimizing our characters mathematically. Also, for new players the character creation process is kind of confusing.

To address both of those issues, I wrote The One Ring Character Creation Guide.

This is a very first draft. Feedback, suggestions, and arguments welcome.

[Rue]

Brilliant! This is just what I need, because being new to the sport I waste a lot of time trying to figure out the best choices (within my vision for my PC), and still making a hash of it most of the time. Glorelendil (which my autocorrect wanted to make "galore lentil"), to the rescue!

[Glorelendil]

Galore Lentil Stew.

It's a refluffed twice baked honey cake.

[zedturtle]

Your #2 under Party Composition almost certainly means Courtesy when it says Travel.

Otherwise, it's fairly interesting stuff, but I'd be leery of handing it out to new players, as I think it might create the wrong sort of impressions.

[Glorelendil]

Your #2 under Party Composition almost certainly means Courtesy when it says Travel.

Otherwise, it's fairly interesting stuff, but I'd be leery of handing it out to new players, as I think it might create the wrong sort of impressions.

Actually that should have been Riddle. Fixed.

Yeah, I'm sort of trying to stitch together multiple purposes here. Point well taken, though...a next step is go through it and try to include the information without misrepresenting the game.

[Rocmistro]

Personally I like it. I would advise going more in depth however with recommendations to newbies.

Here are some areas of advice I might offer to those looking to "optimize"

1. Trait selection. Try to go for a Renaissance man approach with your traits, and get at least 1 that can be applied in each of the following 3 situations: Physical (usually combat or travel related), Social, and Mental/Lore/Knowledge based. This will give you 2 benefits: 1) You will have a diverse toolchest to draw upon for many different situations. 2) You will stand a better chance of being able to find a trait you can tag when it comes to time to claim a 2nd or 3rd AP. As a sidenote, it's also just more interesting. Playing a character who is Lordly, Proud and True-Hearted might give you the image of the gleaming paladin-like character you desired to play, but he is not terribly well-rounded.

2. Favored Attributes. I think there are some hard bits of advice that can be put in here. Priority Favored Attributes are as follows: Dwarves-Heart; Woodman-Wits; Mirkwood Elf-seek for equilibrium, with all stats in the 7ish area. For all other cultures (I think), favored attribute priority should go to the stat that will contain the most number of favored skills. It's worth noting that favored weapon skills should not really factor in to weighing a high priority for favored body unless the player commits to never raising the corresponding weapon skill higher than 3.

3. Favored Skills. . Aside from Dwarves, Woodmen and Elves, favored skills should be chosen first, and favored attributes setup afterwards to realize them. Since 1 favored common skill comes from culture and 1 from background, players should note that they don't have much choice in those, although the common skill from their background could be a deciding factore. In general, I would advise players to choose favored common skills from calling and background based on the AP discount for them rather than the static bonus to them from corresponding attribute. Ie, select common skills based on skills that you forsee as your "signature skills", by that I mean any skill which will define your character (ie, that you want to be good at and use a lot), and thus ones that you will purchase to rank 3 or more. Having such a skill as favored will pay dividends to AP discount over the course of your career. Don't select as favored skills those skills which you only plan on keeping at rank 1 or 2 unless you also plan on spending hope to boost them via your favored attribute.

4. Increasing Common Skills. There are a handful of personal skills which almost everyone can benefit from having at a value of 3: Travel, Courtesy, Athletics, [Song or Craft], [Song or Inspire], [Battle or Awe]. That being said, Battle and Song are really great because they perform double duty in a number of situations. Song allows you to Rally Comrades and Heal Corruption; Battle allows you to intimidate foes and make preliminary battle checks. Another advancement tactic is try to spread out your common skills to get a 3rd rank in a given skill of each of the 6 different categories; this increases your chances of chances of rolling a great or extraordinary success and thus pegging out 3rd advancement points in each of those respective areas. In general, rank 3 should be your target for competency in a given skill. Less priority for advancement should be given to common skills that don't have measurable gains from rolling additional Tengwars; in those cases a rank of 2 or max 3 should suffice.

5. Weapons and Qualities. Pick a weapon and pursue one of two paths with it: either a crit monkey or raw damage. You can go all-in if you want and have a great weapon, but you might find, with only 5 "items" to select throughout your career, that pickings are slim. Personally I think it's better to decide if you want to be a minion killer (high damage output) or a monster killer (high edge/injury). So either go with high crit type weapon (spears are good here) and commit to keen and fell, or go with high damage type and commit to grievous (or any cultural damage bonuses, such as giant slaying spear). If you want to be a monster-killer, having weapon skill 3 and going crit monkey is probably good enough. If you want to be a minion-killer, grievous quality with weapon skill 5+ is probably what you want. All this being said, i could write a term paper on my thoughts here, so these are my basic rules for this.

6. Armor and Qualities.. My opinion is that the best all-around Armor is Mail Shirt with one or two cunning makes on it. That being said, it's all situational. Armor should be selected to give the highest possible protection and still leave the wearer a minimum of 10 points of margin between top endurance and fatigue threshold. If you decide to forego the Travel skill, it should probably be even higher. If you carry a shield it is, in my opinion, higher priority than armor. The best "bang for buck" with shields is a normal shield with +1 parry and -2 enc. You are thus getting +3 parry and 1 enc, a 3:1 ratio. Great shields can get +4 parry for 3 encumbrance, snagging you a less efficient ratio, although it's still a good selection if you can bare the extra weight.

[Rocmistro]

Personally I like it. I would advise going more in depth however with recommendations to newbies.

Here are some areas of advice I might offer to those looking to "optimize"

1. Trait selection. Try to go for a Renaissance man approach with your traits, and get at least 1 that can be applied in each of the following 3 situations: Physical (usually combat or travel related), Social, and Mental/Lore/Knowledge based. This will give you 2 benefits: 1) You will have a diverse toolchest to draw upon for many different situations. 2) You will stand a better chance of being able to find a trait you can tag when it comes to time to claim a 2nd or 3rd AP. As a sidenote, it's also just more interesting. Playing a character who is Lordly, Proud and True-Hearted might give you the image of the gleaming paladin-like character you desired to play, but he is not terribly well-rounded.

2. Favored Attributes. I think there are some hard bits of advice that can be put in here. Priority Favored Attributes are as follows: Dwarves-Heart; Woodman-Wits; Mirkwood Elf-seek for equilibrium, with all stats in the 7ish area. For all other cultures (I think), favored attribute priority should go to the stat that will contain the most number of favored skills. It's worth noting that favored weapon skills should not really factor in to weighing a high priority for favored body unless the player commits to never raising the corresponding weapon skill higher than 3.

3. Favored Skills. . Aside from Dwarves, Woodmen and Elves, favored skills should be chosen first, and favored attributes setup afterwards to maximize them. Since 1 favored common skill comes from culture and 1 from background, players should note that they don't have much choice in those, although the common skill from their background should be scrutinized in the selection of the background to make sure it synergizes with the rest of their build (or at least doesn't conflict with it). In general, I would advise players to choose favored common skills from calling and background based on the AP discount for them rather than the static bonus to them from corresponding attribute. Ie, select common skills based on skills that you forsee as your "signature skills", by that I mean any skill which will define your character (ie, that you want to be good at and use a lot), and thus ones that you will purchase to rank 3 or more. Having such a skill as favored will pay dividends to AP discount over the course of your career. Don't select as favored skills those skills which you only plan on keeping at rank 1 or 2 unless you also plan on spending hope to boost them via your favored attribute.

4. Increasing Common Skills. There are a handful of personal skills which almost everyone can benefit from having at a value of 3: Travel, Courtesy, Athletics, [Song or Craft], [Song or Inspire], [Battle or Awe]. That being said, Battle and Song are really great because they perform double duty in a number of situations. Song allows you to Rally Comrades and Heal Corruption; Battle allows you to intimidate foes and make preliminary battle checks. Another advancement tactic is try to spread out your common skills to get a 3rd rank in a given skill of each of the 6 different categories; this increases your chances of chances of rolling a great or extraordinary success and thus pegging out 3rd advancement points in each of those respective areas. In general, rank 3 should be your target for competency in a given skill. Less priority for advancement should be given to common skills that don't have measurable gains from rolling additional Tengwars; in those cases a rank of 2 or max 3 should suffice.

5. Weapons and Qualities. Pick a weapon and pursue one of two paths with it: either a crit monkey or raw damage. You can go all-in if you want and have a great weapon, but you might find, with only 5 "items" to select throughout your career, that pickings are slim. Personally I think it's better to decide if you want to be a minion killer (high damage output) or a monster killer (high edge/injury). So either go with high crit type weapon (spears are good here) and commit to keen and fell, or go with high damage type and commit to grievous (or any cultural damage bonuses, such as giant slaying spear). If you want to be a monster-killer, having weapon skill 3 and going crit monkey is probably good enough. If you want to be a minion-killer, grievous quality with weapon skill 5+ is probably what you want. All this being said, i could write a term paper on my thoughts here, so these are my basic rules for this.

6. Armor and Qualities.. My opinion is that the best all-around Armor is Mail Shirt with one or two cunning makes on it. That being said, it's all situational. Armor should be selected to give the highest possible protection and still leave the wearer a minimum of 10 points of margin between top endurance and fatigue threshold. If you decide to forego the Travel skill, it should probably be even higher. If you carry a shield it is, in my opinion, higher priority than armor in terms of selecting qualities for it. The best "bang for buck" with shields is a normal shield with the reinforced and cunning maek qualities (+1 parry and -2 enc). You are thus getting +3 parry and 1 enc, a 3:1 ratio. Great shields can get +4 parry for 3 encumbrance, snagging you a less efficient ratio, although it's still a good selection if you can bare the extra weight. The reason I would prioritize shields over armor is because your shield, once you take it, will be useful over your entire career. Armor choices might change. As you "increase" in level and get more Endurance (or lower Fatigue as a result of your shield enc. dropping), you might decide to go for heavier armors in the future.

[Glorelendil]

Longer response later, but can you say more about favoured Wits for Woodmen? (Did you mean Hobbits?) And balanced 7/7/7 for Wood Elves?

[bluejay]

Woodmen favoured Wits is similar to Hobbits. The Woodcrafty cultural blessing uses Favoured Wits.

[Rocmistro]

Longer response later, but can you say more about favoured Wits for Woodmen? (Did you mean Hobbits?) And balanced 7/7/7 for Wood Elves?

Woodmen use their favored wits in place of their regular wits for parry in the woods, so it behooves them greatly to pump that up by +3 (unless of course they have an array of common skills in heart or body that simply MUST benefit from a better favored array).

For Wood Elves, since they get the Folk of the Dusk ability, they use favored stats on all common skills at night, woods or underground. Since you really can't know when that is going to kick in and what skills you are going to be using when it does, my advice is to basically get all the stats in the roughly +6 to +7 range. That way, when you do use it, you always get a solid, tangible, fairly predictable benefit*. (a 4/4/6 stat array becomes 7/6/7, rather than, say, 5/7/8. It's my experience/opinion*, that the marginal difference between +6 vs. +8 or 9 to a roll is far less important than, say, +4 or +5 getting boost to +6 or +7.

*With 2 pips in a common skill, an average roll will be 3.5x2 + 6 = 13, thus on average, you will miss TN: 14 by 1 pt, TN: 16 by 3.

With 1 pip in a common skill an average roll will be 9, thus on average, you will miss TN: 14 by 5 pts and TN: 16 by 8

Since most standard TN's are 14, most of the time, you will be failing by within 7 pts of the TN. And for super critical tasks, you will choose to tag a trait for auto-success rather than risk failure anyway.