This month, we played yet another game I'd never played before but had sitting on my Games shelves, the Lord of the Rings Roleplaying Game by Decipher, Inc. Decipher released the game in 2002. This is the third role playing game (RPG) licensed for the setting, the two former games being Middle Earth Role Playing (MERP) and its simplified little brother, the Lord of the Rings Adventure Game, (LOR) both from Iron Crown Enterprises (ICE). There's a new Middle-Earth RPG called “The One Ring”, published by Cubicle 7, but I have not yet encountered that one. It should go without saying that these RPGs are all set in the world of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion. Decipher's version uses the “CODA” system rules – the same basic rules they used for their Star Trek Role Playing Game. Only six-sided dice (d6) are required to play, and actions are resolved by rolling 2d6 and adding modifiers. The core rule book is beautiful. I bought it (used, from Half-Price Books) simply to look at the pictures, most of which came straight from the Peter Jackson movies The text is sometimes not the easiest to read – it is printed over pictures quite often, and the font keeps changing colors to compensate. The layout of the book is poor. One comment I saw on the Internet (it's a tube filled with cats) said that when the page layout people handed the book over to the printers, the printers said, “Hey, it's gorgeous, but where are the rules?” In a panic, three monkeys wrote the rules on the back of used napkins from Subway, and handed them in. The rules aren't that bad... they're just not organized well. Character creation is fairly easy, but not straightforward at all. The book never lists the steps in character creation, like most modern RPGs do. Fortunately, I was able to find a few things about the game on the Internet, including blank character sheets and a character creation checklist. One starts by rolling stats, using 2d6. One rolls nine sets of numbers, keeps six, and assigns them as desired. One then chooses a race (Elves, Hobbits, Dwarves, and Men, most of which have some sub-races.) If you want the most advantageous character, there is no reason to play anything other than an Elf of the Noldor sub-race. The races are not in any way balanced between each other, except that Elves cannot be Barbarians and Hobbits shouldn't be Magicians. The creation process goes through several steps: skills, edges, and flaws derived from Racial background, Languages & Lore skills derived from the character's intelligence; skills, edges, and flaws derived from the character's Order. Orders are like what other RPGs call “classes”: Barbarian, Craftsman, Lore-master; Magician, Mariner, Minstrel, Noble, Rogue, and Warrior. If one desires, one may even start play without first selecting an Order (there's rules in there for it; it would replicate the way Frodo, Sam, Pippin, and Merry started out from the Shire without any real experience in the world.) Equipping a character is one of the worst parts of the game. The player is instructed to get together with the gamemaster and decide what weapons, armor, and equipment the character is likely to have. There is no “starting money.” For that matter, money in this system is very weird. 100 copper pennies (cp) equal one silver penny (sp). Four silver pennies equal one Silver Piece (SP), or one gold penny (gp). Four Silver Pieces or four gold pennies equal one Gold Piece (GP). (So, yes, a Silver Piece equals one gold penny.) Confusing. It took me about three hours to create the first character, and about an hour each to create the next three. We had a Noldo Elf Magician, a Hobbit Rogue, a Man (well, a woman) Warrior, and a Dwarf Noble (who may, or may not, have been female. You can't really tell, you know.) I used an adventure from ICE's MERP, and converted it mostly on the fly. (MERP is easy to convert). The party was hired in Lake-town to help find some villagers/farmers who live near Mirkwood who went missing. Our Heroes trailed them through a small bit of Mirkwood, found a Giant Spider nest just off the road, killed the spiders, and rescued the two still-living farmers. Combat worked okay, but we didn't use some of the options. The CODA system uses “exploding” dice – if you roll a six on a die, you keep the number and roll another d6, repeating if you keep rolling sixes. The result of your die roll, added to the appropriate modifier, is compared to a Target Number (TN) (for combat, the TN is usually the opponent's Defence). Exactly hitting the TN is a “success”; for each 5 above the TN, the degree of success is improved – likewise, rolling two “ones” is a Critical (sometimes Disastrous) Failure. The Hobbit got lucky, and ended up with an amazing result on one attack. Combat lasted four rounds, the first of which was a surprise round (the Spiders are sneaky). Overall, I'd say the game isn't all that good. I'd give it a 2 out of 5. I certainly would never use this game to introduce someone to RPGs (I think the Ghostbusters RPG would be the best for that!)
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Commodore Tank ClarkCommodore Clark has been the Team Leader of the 33rd STARFLEET Rangers for several years. His monthly articles about games (usually Role-Playing Games -- RPGs -- but sometimes about other tabletop forms of entertainment) appear regularly in the Regulator Charge!, the ship's newsletter. Archives
September 2017
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