After a long summer in the bossom of the Beornings, the company brought back a fragment of a long-sought heirloom to the chieftan of Woodland Hall. On the hunt for Azgrask the Orc, they followed a stale trail back to the Great River, only to find a funeral boat carrying none other than Merovech the Mighty, dead. Thus begins our tale of Kin-strife and Dark Tidings.
Read MoreAnd so it was that on May the 15th in the year of 2946, five years hence the Battle of Five Armies, Balin son of Fundin, hero of the Battle of Five Armies and envoy of King Dáin II Ironfoot and King Bard of Dale, heir of Girion, met with Gwaihir the Wind Lord, king of Eagles, inviting him to join in the Dragon Tide festivities in Dale in late November. Gwaihir graciously accepted.
Read MoreI finally found the problem that was causing the favoured weapon skill checkbox to not save properly. The good news is that this means that the favoured weapon skill state is now saved, and it can be used to do macros like this (NPC vs. Adversary, first weapon), one of a series of macros I'm experimenting with that makes setting up characters and having them duke it out with each other a lot easier.
/emas @{selected|token_name} attacks @{target|token_name} (TN #pc_vs_npc_defense ) with a @{selected|repeating_npc-weapon-skills_0_npc_weapon_skill_name} (Damage @{selected|repeating_npc-weapon-skills_0_npc_weapon_damage}, Edge @{selected|repeating_npc-weapon-skills_0_npc_weapon_edge}, Injury @{selected|repeating_npc-weapon-skills_0_npc_weapon_injury}, @{selected|repeating_npc-weapon-skills_0_npc_weapon_called_shot}, Damage Bonus @{selected|attribute_level}).
/r 1t[feat] + @{selected|repeating_npc-weapon-skills_0_npc_weapon_rating}t[@{selected|bar3}] + [[@{selected|repeating_npc-weapon-skills_0_npc_weapon_skill_favoured} * @{selected|attribute_level}]] + ?{Modifier|0} > #npc_vs_pc_defense
This uses the Favoured Weapon Skill State to calculate whether the NPC gets to apply his Attribute Level to his roll (because the Favoured Weapon Skill State is 0 or 1, it's just multiplied with the Attribute Level).
The bad news is that because the new 'true' value of '1' is different than the old one (which was 'on'), all characters will lose their Favoured Weapon Skill States. Sorry about that. I try to not break things going forward unless there is no other way, and in this case it was a matter of me not understanding how Roll20 saves default data (I still don't understand why anyone would want 'on' as the default value over 1, which is much more useful in dealing with macros, but whatever).
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.
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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).
Thus fell Barrak of the line of Durin's Folk, son of Torrak son of Dorrak a veteran of the War of The Dwarves and Orcs in 2793, Dwarf of the Lonely Mountain, fellow to Balin son of Fundin for whom he fought and died, and servant of the throne of King Dáin II Ironfoot and veteran of the Battle of Five Armies. His remains were buried at Amon Naugrim on April 26th, 2946. Iglishmêk mazarb. He will be avenged.
Read MoreMaps 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.