Dreadful Spells

[Glorelendil]

The alternative is to go by pure RAW and rule that Awe or Battle works fine for Intimidate Foe against a Spectre. After all, the rules don't say that it doesn't work against Undead.

But that seems worse to me than using AngelAlex's suggestion and rewarding players for thinking outside the box in ways that fit well with the source texts.

So I'm with AA and Zed on this one. Even in a con. It shows off TOR's adaptability to good storytelling.

[Hermes Serpent]

I'm going strictly by RAW and ignoring the option to reward out of scope actions as having to explain weird non rules in the middle of a game is not really something I want to handle. it's not something that I'm keen to deal with in a noisy room with six players who may not have any good grasp of the rules.

[Deadmanwalking]

I'm with AngelAlex, Glorelendil, and zedturtle on this one. Thinking outside the box is a part of the rules.

If you really want to avoid giving the impression that it's allowed by the official rules, you can simply mention "That's not technically rules-legal, but it's cool, so sure." It's not actually all that hard to note that you're bending the rules to allow the players to do something, and almost nobody will complain about it.

[Majestic]

Yeah, add my voice to those that agree with Angelalex and the others as well.

It's worth noting that there's a number of situations like that (slight tweaks to the rules, but very much in the spirit of Tolkien and the game) in "Tales from Wilderland", which gives all the more credence to the concept of being flexible with cases like this.