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Aiden Harrison
Posts: 133
Joined: Sun 18 Apr 2021, 09:49

Re: TNs for starting character

Sun 18 Jul 2021, 23:36

Perhaps some way of spending tengwars on a failed roll could be away around the feeling of whiffing.

This is off the top of my head, but something like:

Failed Skill check
Dig Deep - spend a tengwar to be able to test the skill again. (If time allows).
Close Call- spend a tengwar to avoid catastrophic failure.
Favour of the Valar- spend 2 tengwar to allow an immediate reroll of the skill.

Failed Combat roll
Close call- spend a tengwar to gain a 1d6 bonus to attack the same opponent next round.
Fluster opponent- spend a tengwar to subtract 1d6 from your opponent next round.
Will of the Valar- Immediately reroll the attack roll

An Eye result on the feat die would cancel this - Fated has willed it.

Would strengthen the inspired mechanic, more dice equals more chance to get a 6, even if the other dice suck.

It would throw a bone to weary characters as well.

This would tie in well with the problem of spending Hope and failing anyway, assuming the dice are somewhat with you.


Like I said, just thought of this, but it COULD be a solution to the problems that seem to be worrying folk - both High TN for starting characters AND the spending of Hope. It would alleviate the feeling of multi whiffing that can happen and makes combat more dynamic.

What do you think?
 
Themadviolinist
Posts: 67
Joined: Sat 10 Jul 2021, 16:01

Re: TNs for starting character

Mon 19 Jul 2021, 00:28

I'll be running my first session tonight, and should be able to report back our experience. I'll say I'm less worried about this than some, because of the number of ways to modify die rolls. I'm a little puzzled about the reluctance folk seem to have with giving situational bonuses. To use a quoted example, Merry Brandybuck is attempting to attack the Nazgul, who is totally engaged in being about to murder Eowyn, and has no idea that he is even vulnerable, let alone that he is about to be attacked. Merry gets a solid 2d bonus to his attack roll, is inspired by his admiration of Eowyn, spends a hope for an additional 2d, and I might even give him a helper die from Eowyn for her aforementioned drawing of attention, though that may be double-dipping. Merry is rolling six or seven dice minimum at this point, with a Westernesse blade, wound round with spells for the doom, etc, which might be keen.
Granted, Merry is not exactly a starting character, but there are four to five bonus dice in that scenario that a clever player can draw on. Let's reward clever players, or players playing their characters for inspiration etc.
I have a different view on all this, not having run 1E, and coming from FAte and Cortex and games like that, where players jockeying for bonuses for playing their characters, and the situation is the norm. Perhaps this was not true for 1e? I don't think that's cheating, I think that's brilliant play, and in the spirit of the material. SAm ducks under Shelob's body to avoid the claws, (-1d on her attack), and strikes up at her 4d protection roll, so that even his keen blade, scoring a pierce only does a small amount of damage. (She has a negative parry bonus for size). Then she drives herself down on top of him, "too soon" for he has the strength for one more blow, inspired by his fellowship focus Frodo, for 2d and a hope, +1d for what I would call a forward stance attack by her, and yes I know that's not RAW, but really, who plays RAW, and he does some major hurt.
I can think of many ways to control the difficulty of a situation. If your objection is that I'm adding or subtracting dice, which aren't certain, that's true enough, but I'm feeling pretty good about the tools I have to work with to sculpt a situation, so that a a die roll is meaningful, and successes are savored. I may come back tomorrow and report that my wife is divorcing me, and my kids want to go to military school, rather than ever play this game again, but I think we'll manage. Let's see what happens.
 
Davi
Posts: 78
Joined: Mon 15 Feb 2021, 04:16

Re: TNs for starting character

Mon 19 Jul 2021, 00:51

Roleplaying and finding creative ways to find advantageous positions, situations and so on to get additional dice is RAW from what I read in the rules.

So I also think the games incentive clever thinking and incentives the player to come up with those. If I want to sneak, I wait until dark to get additional dice, if I want to influence I will offer a strong drink on the house to facilitate the negotiation, if I want to battle I will lure the enemy into a position I have the advantage and so on.

I also think that as before, you narrate what the dice rolls, so if your character happen to roll very well you narrate the great speech, you don't give a great speech then roll the check, the dice define what the outcome was.
 
RichKarp
Posts: 120
Joined: Tue 29 Jun 2021, 19:37

Re: TNs for starting character

Mon 19 Jul 2021, 04:32

There are plenty of ways to reward creativity on the part of the players without forcing them to scrounge for dice with stunt-like descriptions of how awesomely they track the Warg, curtsy at court, flip through books of lore, etc. We’re talking about the central mechanic of the game - a Skill test - and some of you guys are acting like it should be normal to make players go around collecting dice from all sorts of situational bonuses in order to have average chances of success.

Look I love the narrative open-ended nature of the game, I like circumstance bonuses and Favoured/ill-Favoured and I see no problem at all with those being viable options. But the basic fact is some characters are going to have to hit TN 20 with a solid third of all their skills. That doesn’t just encourage specialization, it more or less prohibits wise investment in those areas.

Of course we don’t expect all characters to be equally good at all Skills… that is silly. However, certain character builds are now less viable than they were before. Given that skill diversity was a good thing and possible for anyone before, this is not an improvement to me. While equally good at all things is boring, so is “let the Elf roll Lore because he’s the best at it” ad infinitum.

More importantly though to me, some character types are simply less capable now - those combining skills, professions, or inclinations which crossed between two or more Attributes weighted against them. The wise and insightful craftsman, the traveling scholar who knows many rhymes and lore, the itinerant huntsman; those archetypes will be harder to play in practice. I don’t see why certain concepts should be inherently more difficult to realize because of the game mechanics.

I’m also really struggling to see how the mechanics encourage characters’ diversity when really what they incentivize is getting really good at the things you’re already better at by default. It seems to run totally contrary to the spirit of Tolkien’s literature where unlikely people do incredible things that would seem beyond their original capacity and where natural inclinations like song, gardening, healing are actually deemed more powerful than force of arms.
 
Davi
Posts: 78
Joined: Mon 15 Feb 2021, 04:16

Re: TNs for starting character

Mon 19 Jul 2021, 04:55

There are plenty of ways to reward creativity on the part of the players without forcing them to scrounge for dice with stunt-like descriptions of how awesomely they track the Warg, curtsy at court, flip through books of lore, etc. We’re talking about the central mechanic of the game - a Skill test - and some of you guys are acting like it should be normal to make players go around collecting dice from all sorts of situational bonuses in order to have average chances of success.
When you put like this sounds like metagame and boring. But from your examples you could look differently, instead of curtsy at court, they could, before joing the court, look for a well suitable gift, before going through books of lore, they could travel to Rivendell and have access to a better source of knowledge, both in books and the memory of elves. So, it is not just metagame adding bonus, if you really want to find some knowledge and you trully want to influence a lore master character, maybe looking for this extra sources of dice might be a whole adventure in itself, and might even be fun!

Remember that you don't need to roll for things that are not Danger, Retrieve hidden Knowledge and Manipulate someone. So to be curtsy at court requires no roll, unless you want to change someones behavior.
 
Elenath
Posts: 63
Joined: Sun 18 Jul 2021, 00:22

Re: TNs for starting character

Mon 19 Jul 2021, 05:06

- and some of you guys are acting like it should be normal to make players go around collecting dice from all sorts of situational bonuses in order to have average chances of success.
This is along the lines of my thoughts
 
RichKarp
Posts: 120
Joined: Tue 29 Jun 2021, 19:37

Re: TNs for starting character

Mon 19 Jul 2021, 05:08

The issue isn’t that you shouldn’t / wouldn’t want to do those things though. It’s a question of whether players need to be jumping through hoops to set themselves up for a successful Skill test. The answer if their Attribute TN for that skill cluster is a 20 is probably yes, but I think that’s just a very forced way to play.

I dislike an incentive structure that makes it likely some players will struggle and need to go dice-begging for a considerable portion of their rolls, or else just let someone better suited handle most situations involving 1/3 of the Skills in the game.
 
Davi
Posts: 78
Joined: Mon 15 Feb 2021, 04:16

Re: TNs for starting character

Mon 19 Jul 2021, 05:33

I agree, odds of success and failure on TOR was and is, one of the parts I dislike most. If you have 0 or 1 you are good as nothing, if you have 2 you might starting get a few successes, but once you reach 4 and above it is hard to fail. So, the sweet spot is generally 3.

I wish the impact from going from 1 to 2 to 3 was diminished. If you drop the TN, you make it much easier for people who have level 3 on a skill, if you increase you make it too difficult to characters with less than 3.

Because the more dice you roll, the higher the bell curve of distribuition of results it will become, and therefore more reliable the average results becomes. hmmm... really insteresting concept, hard to find a solution.
 
Dunkelbrink
Posts: 22
Joined: Thu 10 Jul 2014, 22:29

Re: TNs for starting character

Mon 19 Jul 2021, 12:15

There are plenty of ways to reward creativity on the part of the players without forcing them to scrounge for dice with stunt-like descriptions of how awesomely they track the Warg, curtsy at court, flip through books of lore, etc. We’re talking about the central mechanic of the game - a Skill test - and some of you guys are acting like it should be normal to make players go around collecting dice from all sorts of situational bonuses in order to have average chances of success.
What, then, do you mean is an average chance of success? 50%? 75% You mention the central mechanic, the skill test, but that includes so many situations. Not all of them can have an average chance of success. I agree that even starting characters should have an average chance of success without extra dice, but with skills they're competent with (3d). And that is also the case, even with a TN from a low attribute like 3. But a skill roll where the character has has a low skill value (0-2) and a low attribute shouldn't have an "average" chance of succeeding if you ask me, it should have a "low" chance, therefore requiring Hope, the creative use of distinctive features for inspiration, help from others, useful items etc. That is not "scrounging for dice with stunt-like descriptions", that is creative use of the game rules and a way of engaging players. It's these mechanics, along with the Gandalf rune, that makes unlikely things possible, like Merry striking the witch-king or whatever example you prefer.
 
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Michele
Posts: 105
Joined: Tue 29 Jun 2021, 16:58

Re: TNs for starting character

Mon 19 Jul 2021, 13:46

There are plenty of ways to reward creativity on the part of the players without forcing them to scrounge for dice with stunt-like descriptions of how awesomely they track the Warg, curtsy at court, flip through books of lore, etc. We’re talking about the central mechanic of the game - a Skill test - and some of you guys are acting like it should be normal to make players go around collecting dice from all sorts of situational bonuses in order to have average chances of success.

In my experience, it was way more than just "average", as explained above. And yes, it sounds perfectly normal, at least to me and my players. "Scrounging for dice" isn't metagame, it's how the game handles the emerging narrative. Situational bonuses give players agency and bring out their strengths: a player will be glad to have chosen that Fine Pipe during character creation, or the Patient Distinctive Trait, since those choices translate into tangible bonuses and let them roleplay more effectively. Will they fail anyway sometimes? Yes, of course. How often depends on many factors, mainly on their level of experience and how much they have specialized in certain tasks. But is that so wrong that the group lets the player with the most suitable character roll for that action? That's called teamwork. That player earned that right by developing his character in that way. I would be quite annoyed if I had built a character very gifted in Lore, but then it was someone else less good than me to always roll in my place (maybe even getting better results than me, to add insult to injury!).
The Fellowship should act as a group, rather than letting everyone follow their own agenda and do whatever they want at the expense of the rest of the group: that's the whole point of having Journey roles, for instance.

Look I love the narrative open-ended nature of the game, I like circumstance bonuses and Favoured/ill-Favoured and I see no problem at all with those being viable options. But the basic fact is some characters are going to have to hit TN 20 with a solid third of all their skills. That doesn’t just encourage specialization, it more or less prohibits wise investment in those areas.

Hmm, are we looking at the same game? The maximum TN is 18 and even then, you chose that for your character. You simply can't expect for him to be good at Skills corresponding to your worst Attribute, otherwise you would have chosen differently. If you put 2 in one of your Attribute scores, you have to expect to fail a lot on a third of your Skills, but guess what? You'll have much lower TNs on the remaining two thirds. That's the very definition of specialization.

More importantly though to me, some character types are simply less capable now - those combining skills, professions, or inclinations which crossed between two or more Attributes weighted against them. The wise and insightful craftsman, the traveling scholar who knows many rhymes and lore, the itinerant huntsman; those archetypes will be harder to play in practice. I don’t see why certain concepts should be inherently more difficult to realize because of the game mechanics.

I really don't understand where you draw such conclusions from. How is that supposed to happen? A steeper learning curve doesn't mean that characters can't become very proficient in many different fields sooner or later during their adventuring career. They can take Prowess and Mastery, they can invest Skill points, they can do a lot of things. You want to play a jack of all trades? Choose the 5 5 4 Attribute distribution. You want to play a very specialized character? Choose the 7 5 2 Attribute distribution. Something in-between? Choose the Attribute distribution best suited to your needs. They're not such strange concepts (to me, at least!), but you make them sound like they've ruined the game for some reason that I still fail to figure out.

I’m also really struggling to see how the mechanics encourage characters’ diversity when really what they incentivize is getting really good at the things you’re already better at by default. It seems to run totally contrary to the spirit of Tolkien’s literature where unlikely people do incredible things that would seem beyond their original capacity and where natural inclinations like song, gardening, healing are actually deemed more powerful than force of arms.

Then I must have missed the part where Merry and Pippin became better warriors than Gimli and Legolas. Or where Sam became a huntsman and explorer on par with Aragorn. :roll:
It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till.

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