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Yeah again, I think this comes down to a philosophy- not even so much of play, but of the source material and what we want it to evoke. I don’t know exactly what the writers had in mind with the mechanic, but I do guess it to be closer to what gyrovague has laid out in terms of the player putting th...

Nobody said that 2e was “lazy,” my points about its similarity to D&D or other games was only to reflect that the old mechanic was unique and set TOR apart while the new mechanic is a fairly common mechanic in other games to enhance success. I enjoy D&D, and it’s a little ridiculous to say t...

Davi, it is because randomness is not something that suffuses Tolkien’s stories that its replacement of narrative certainty is causing consternation. There is a line I think mentioned by Gandalf in regards to Bilbo finding the ring as “strange chance, if chance it was.” Repeatedly throughout the nar...

Hearing some weirdly defensive and not quite understanding comments here that deserve to be addressed: “The game isn’t different now.” Yes, it is. And the differences are both a b it less evocative of Middle-earth and more common to many mass market RPGs, not that there’s anything wrong with that in...

Inspire was a perfect description. Why not simply revert to it and actually allow players to use successful rolls of it as another way to grant Inspiration? so players could get big “i” Inspired through playing to traits or by a successful Inspire roll.

Well I mean… yes that’s exactly how D&D works, and it’s also kind of the weakest part of D&D. But leaving aside that there are twice as many attributes in D&D and therefore more variance in skill applicability, D&D also doesn’t encourage characters to be jack-of-all trades and have r...

Likely they wanted to get an early read on excitement levels, crowdsource basic formatting issues, and see if there were areas that generated more or less confusion and would require some revision. I highly doubt they will reverse course on major rules like Hope expenditure or Attribute TNs. Though ...

What I am not understanding is the argument that somehow the automatic successes for spent hope changing impacts the thematic tie to Middle Earth? Frodo’s hope actually failed him in the end. The ring throughly corrupted him and it was Bilbo’s pity for Gollum that saved the world in the end….an eve...

I don’t want to be absolutist about it, but I probably won’t use the Attribute TN mechanic. This one really needs some explaining beyond “it makes a solo play mode possible.” Because I just don’t get it.

I'd like to offer another point of view: in the first edition, the standard TN was 14, and it could sometimes go up to 16 or 18 depending on the difficulty of the task, at the Loremaster's discretion. In this edition, the same range of difficulty is provided by Attributes, instead of being determin...