Systemic Alignment

One of the things I appreciate quite a lot about more of the modern RPGs I've read, is that the systems themselves guide the game to go in a certain direction. This is certainly true of The One Ring, where it's implicit that the players are the good guys. The possibility of playing an evil character in the Chaotic Evil D&D sense of it, isn't even properly addressed in the system itself, because after all this is a game about fighting against the shadow, so it would serve no purpose for a character to be 'evil'.

But systematically it also brings Shadow Points into the mix, which when the player's Hope dips below his accumulated Shadow Points means the character suffers consequences, none of which are good, even if a player is trying to be 'that guy'.

Personally I don't care much for playing an evil character in a game, unless it's tongue-in-cheek, but somehow it remains a thing with some people. To me it's so obviously problematic with regards to any kind of team play, that unless there are some fairly serious constraints keeping the party working together towards a common goal it's bound to falling apart, and probably fairly fast.

This kind of 'guided system', even if it's not expressed mechanically, just alleviates so many problems and all it requires is that everyone understands the underlying premise. The same goes for a system like Trail of Cthulhu, in which it's expected that the investigators will investigate, because that's what they do!

Somehow the early sandbox-days of RPGs set a hard-to-kill expectation with some players that it's 'anything goes', when the expectation that everyone should really have is 'let's have fun together'. If my elf character hates dwarves to the point of attacking them on sight and there's a dwarf in the party, maybe I should just throw out that part of my character 'vision' and find something else to hang my hat on, otherwise it'll be pretty damn hard to fight the evil wizard when we're busy tearing each other a new one. That's not to say that there can't be tensions in a group, but they should obviously never hamper the fun or indeed the story (unless that's what the group is into, in which case...)

There are no wrongs ways to play RPGs, but there are quite a few that trip the fun part of the experience up before it gets a chance, and it's great to see that the games themselves have reach a level of maturity where it's understood that each game doesn't have to be everything to everyone, but that it can be built to create a particular kind of experience, and that it's probably better off for it.

There's some sort of joke in here about Alignments doing exactly the opposite of aligning the group, but I can't really figure out how to put it together.

Dot Dot Dot

Skills now have dots for their ratings, instead of simple number input fields. Makes it a lot easier to quickly gain an overview over which skills and categories are your strength, and which you should steer clear of/work on. Adversaries and Loremaster Characters retain the number input field, to allow for some more... flexibility.

I used the same technique as the Exalted sheet, but built the CSS from scratch (this approach works a lot better).

Mapping Amon Naugrim

Maps have always been intimately tied with tabletop roleplaying games, and never more so than after the D20 wave, which practically required tactical combat to be played out on a grid-based map.

The One Ring however doesn't require a map, and in fact I'd argue that the use of maps aside from the Wilderland map itself, is potentially damaging to the game, especially if the players have a grid-based background. The One Ring's combat system is entirely narrative/abstract, to the point where it doesn't even attempt to concern itself with locations, figuring that the group will handle it on their own with circumstantial modifiers and common sense. That's all fine and well, however in larger battles or in places with slightly more complicated geography, position becomes important, as does the effects of those positions.

We played the first part of the Battle at Amon Naugrim (Part 1, Part 2) using the map provided by Rich H in his extension of The Marshbell. The map is great at giving sense to the area, but when it came time to plan the coming battle and play out the arrival of the first orcs, the map started grabbing more attention than it should have. So for the second part of the battle, I decided to try something else, as seen above.

It worked quite well, giving everyone a sense of the geography and placement of a considerable number of adversaries at the same time, which would otherwise have been completely chaotic.

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Hobbit Tales

I wasn't really aware, until I read the rules just now after having bought it on a whim, that Cubicle's 7 Hobbit Tales could be used while playing The One Ring to spice up the travel rules. If I'd known that, I would have bought it a while ago.

It works, in short, but drawing one of the 'Adventure' cards from a deck and using it to draw inspiration for hazards. It can help determine the sort of hazard encountered, as well as who in the company it befalls and what the consequences of a failed Hazard is to the poor companion to whom it happens. I can't wait to implement it over the weekend, when our company either falls at Amon Naugrim, or (hopefully) makes their way out of Mirkwood.

PS: Roll20's Data Delve update is now live, and that means you can use my Character Sheet for The One Ring without access to the dev server. Let me know what you think!

Middle-earth from Space

Spliced together a JPEG version of Google's Middle-earth Map released in relation with the film. Have at it.

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New Loremaster Character Sheets for Roll20

Finally got around to creating a creature/NPC sheet for Loremaster use, this'll make making macros and scripts a lot easier. I'll create a pull request later today, with some luck it'll be in the official sheet list by the 28th when the sheets go live on the productions servers, until then you can get it on Github.

The Player Character sheet is of course the full sheet, where as the LM Character and Adversary sheets are for the Loremaster. And the difference between the two is that the LM Character uses has Hope points and uses the 'feat' table to roll, whereas the Adversary sheet has Hate points and uses the 'lm-feat' table to roll.

Finding Amon Naugrim

I like to provide my players with some visual references for the locations and events they partake in throughout our campaign. We can't sit around a table, but we can easily share images. Many of them I take from the books, but I've found that old paintings are a fantastic resource, and that a quick Google Images search can reveal all manner of imagery, much of which will in turn spark ideas for use in the game.

The players are currently crossing Mirkwood for the first time, and have sought refuge at Amon Naugrim, an old abandoned trading post and inn along the Men-i-Naugrim. I wanted to find some image to show them what the place might look like, but I couldn't find anything that matched close enough. But I did find an old crumbling tower, albeit with a variety of features I didn't want; and so I took to some quick and dirty Photoshopping. And voilá, the tower on Amon Naugrim.

Here's the original.

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And here's a night version of mine.

Introducing The Fellowship

That's Anders, and in order Jens, Tom and finally me, in the midst of an incursion against an orc scouting party on the old Dwarven road. This was our first more structured combat situation, and I think I'm starting to get the hang out of how to get the most out of Roll20. We'll see soon enough.

I'd like to run Roll20 full-screen, but beyond referring to my notes, which Roll20 doesn't really support, and Google Hangout, which my players prefer, that'll have to wait. We've got a mix of screens in our party, me with one 27" and Tom and Anders with dual large screen setups (who knows what kind of monitor Jens is on; probably his phone). So while I'm whining about running out of space (and me having to have much more reference materials on hand that everyone else), they prefer to split the load between their screens.

I'm hoping that battle isn't lost just yet.

I still haven't found a good way to keep track of which enemies are on which companions during combat; in the above case it becomes a bit much with all the tokens bunched up like that. I might have a separate set of tokens off to the side to track that with.

Also, I think I'll start using the turn tracker to show the stances of the companions, but for that I think I'll have to write a script, since I don't want to input it manually.

Script Updates

I'm not sure they're quite ready for primetime, but I've worked over the Roll20 scripts for The One Ring a bit, mostly to work with the character sheets (one of which I've also made), that are being released later this month. With the right attribute and token setup, they'll do some of the lifting for both the Loremaster and Players. Each of the scripts has its own description embedded in the JS files, have at it.

The biggest advantage is probably having the script automatically set the weary state on characters and mooks, and using that attribute value in macros to roll on the right table for Success Dice. Shoot me an email if you're not sure how to set that up.