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.
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.