The Gaming Den

The key is that 3rd edition made magic items available but rare. That is, you could have whatever specific magic items you wanted, but the expected number of magic items you'd have at one time was very low. A fucking tenth level Fighter wouldn't be expected to have a backup magic dagger. And might ...

maglag wrote: Even without Sauron and the One Ring, there's plenty of danger and adventuring opportunities in Middle Earth.

Unfortunately, absolutely zero of that is what you actually get in The One Ring.

I know I say this a lot in these OSSRs, but every game needs more than just a setting and a bunch of rules. It needs a premise . In D&D, you are adventurers and you go on an adventure. In Shadowrun, you are a shadowrunner and go on a shadowrun. It is not enough to say, "I want to be an Elf...

Joseph Campbell's monomyth is, was, and always will be bullshit. It is terrible and his whole "Hero's Journey" should be left on the scrap heap of history with eugenics and The Golden Bough and Carl Jung's archetypes. They're all bullshit. But sometimes in his mystical fucking dodderings, ...

OSSR: The One Ring RPG Chapter Eight: The Campaign https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-a2Ke5m7QW-0/Ufj7tqkn0qI/AAAAAAAABVw/KBpi3ivw3cI/s1600/frodo-gandalf.jpg AncientH To be honest, I think I would really enjoy the opportunity to design an adventure set in Middle-Earth. It would require the kind of meticulo...

Balancing hard and soft counters with game advancement can be tricky. If, let us say, you have a monster with more hit points, that's usually a soft counter. You need to do more hits to get the same result, but as long as you can do more hits, you don't need to change how you hit. You can swing the ...

OSSR: The One Ring RPG Chapter 6: The Loremaster https://i.pinimg.com/originals/09/91/0a/09910a23801ac4beb93bf4542e4e3d44.jpg AncientH Then a minstrel and loremaster stood up and named all the names of the Lords of the Mark in their order... That's some deep loremastering there. So, this is the gam...

The lack of a positioning system and the 1:1 pair-offs also mean that you want to get as many people into the front rank as possible. If you have a party of 5 and three of them are elves hanging back shooting arrows, that leaves 2 dudes to handle all the front-line troops - which means that probably...

This is right away the essential fucking problem, not just with The One Ring but with any and all Middle-Earth roleplaying games. You have one question to answer at the outset, and that is: What the fuck am I doing? As this illustrates, there's no good answer for that. Dungeons & Dragons took t...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_Canudos

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sebastianism

Also, this game's "Darkening of Mirkwood" I think is one of those adventures that has deeply fervent adherents on random portions of the internet. I've never quite seen how a 30-year campaign wouldn't just end up being a total railroad though. Shadows of Yog-Sothoth and Masks of Nyarlatho...

Today in "eat shit and die": https://thecritic.co.uk/has-the-government-over-reacted-to-the-coronavirus-crisis/ Even if we accept the statistical modelling of Dr Neil Ferguson’s team at Imperial College, which I’ll come to in a minute, spending £350 billion to prolong the lives of a few hu...

OSSR: The One RPG Chapter Two: Creating a Hero https://i.pinimg.com/736x/d5/30/4f/d5304fcec6e8f5ada959967efd704afb.jpg Your musical accompaniment will be 15 minutes of elf music . For your elf game. AncientH Whatever their motivation or purpose, most characters created for The One Ring are individu...

OSSR: The One Ring Role Playing Game https://www.tabletopempires.com.au/image/data/RPG/The%20One%20Ring/one%20ring%20-%20category%20picture.jpg This is the second edition called “The One Ring Roleplaying Game” from 2014. There is also a first edition in 2011 called “The One Ring: Adventures Over th...