No. Jesus Christ, no. Fuck no.hyzmarca wrote:But does it shit on the lore less than Shadows of Mordor? Does it at least accomplish that?
NO.
Shadows of Mordor is to MERP as "some dude's Tolkien fanfic" is to this:
[OSSR]MERP
Moderator: Moderators
NO.
Shadows of Mordor is to MERP as "some dude's Tolkien fanfic" is to this:
TheFlatline wrote:This is like arguing that blowjobs have to be terrible, pain-inflicting endeavors so that when you get a chick who *doesn't* draw blood everyone can high-five and feel good about it.
Yeah, I forgot about Bill. As starting points go, it isn't terrible, except it's also the last time the issue comes up. Then again, the whole tone shifts from Fellowship to Two Towers. Both in terms of language (more flowery, more declaiming than speaking) and also content- where half the cast stops interacting with the world, and just focuses on the symbolism.angelfromanotherpin wrote:Not completely true. You can actually deduce a surprising amount from a single transaction - i.e. Butterbur buying Bill the pony. From that, we know that they use silver pennies, that ten of those pennies is a reasonable price for a pony, and that thirty of them is a painful expense for a prosperous tradesman. That is a very workable starting point.Voss wrote:And LotR pretty much doubles down on this and everything (but homes) is either a gift or an heirloom.
@maglag- it isn't a useful value.
As for playing it subtle... not really. There was no way to do any of that subtly. There wasn't actually anything they could do. At all. A deus ex machina was honestly the best they could hope for, aside from grabbing a couple gems and trying to leg it.
They shred his kitchen because they're shitty houseguests. They explicitly mention doing better and having a bit 'stored away' or some such, from tinkering and minor smithing.
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Ancient History
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Ancient History
- Serious Badass
- Posts: 12708
- Joined: Wed Aug 18, 2010 12:57 pm
eOSSR: MERP
Endless Lists
Words to live by.
Obviously we are not going to go through all these charts and lists one by one, because there are just a metric shit tonne of these fucking things. Lists, charts, tables, and record sheets drag on for 37 pages, and there are frequently more than one of them per page in tiny tiny font with extremely telegraphic or no documentation whatsoever. These... “chapters” are a war crime.
I think the biggest problem with these lists and charts is that they are all full. That may sound weird, I mean, why wouldn't they be full? But honestly there is no reason or excuse for all of these things to have the same number of list items. Filling charts just to fill them up doesn't make sense – it actually just ends up with a lot of filler and laughable game balance.
Let's consider the Angel Summoner and BMX Bandit problem. Or since we're talking about Lord of the Rings, we can call it the Gandalf and Boromir problem. We all understand that in such systems the guy who is a fucking wizard often outclasses the guy whose life goal is to do shit normal people can do but pretty well. But in MERP you get that kind of power discrepancy between casters. And that's because all the spell lists are filled. Each list gets ten spells of increasing level. But some of the lists just don't have conceptual space to have anything you'd give a shit about as a higher level spell and some of them do. Remember that “10th Level” in this case amounts to 10th character level for D&Disms, so that's like 5th level spells in D&D terms. Even so, “Fire Law” is ten spells about fire and Spirit Mastery is various flavors of Sleep, Charm, Hold, Suggestion, and Quest. Those are pretty good, and you can easily see how you can get D&D style 5th level spells out of the deal. Meanwhile, “Unbarring Ways” is 10 spells having to do with opening or closing doors. Not like metaphorical doors like Dimension Door either, we're talking about ten levels worth of variations on Hold Portal and Knock. There isn't a single thing in that whole list that wouldn't be embarrassing as a 3rd level spell in D&D. And yet, because all the lists are the same size and they are all full, Unbarring Ways had to be fleshed out with trivial bullshit you don't care about.
You saw the same shit with Disciplines in Vampire a few years down the line. All the Disciplines were five dots, so the ones that didn't have obvious analogs in power to the higher tier disciplines still ended up with five powers that were analogous in price. A game with different “paths” needs the 3rd or 4th step on each path to be roughly comparable in utility if they are going to be directly comparable in price. That's just what prices are supposed to mean. If that means that some of the paths have to be shorter, or have gaps where you can't think of something level appropriate, then so fucking be it. Filling out non-level-appropriate crap just for the sake of “completeness” is the designer fucking the chicken. If you insist on having all the power paths have the same number of powers in them (like maybe you hand out a limited number of power path selections like this fucking game also does and thus it has become important for the paths to be balanced) then some of the paths are going to have to be eclectic. If you run out of fucking door powers or light powers before you run out of spell levels, then your door related path is going to have to get some higher level abilities that are only tangentially related to fucking doors. That is how it has to work.
Just because there's space for something doesn't mean it wouldn't be shit design to put it in.
Instead of ranting about lists (I would never take that away from Frank) I'm going to remind everybody that we are halfway through the book and there has been essentially zero setting information at all. It's not just that I.C.E. was going to sell that to you separately (although they did that too), it's just that this is nowhere in the book at all. D&D gets away with that because there is no default setting; MERP does it because D&D did it. I really don't think they expected everybody to have memorized half of The Lord of the Rings so that they could play this - although that might have been a consideration for the game's core audience - but I flipped through and while there is a map, it's useless.
This, except in black and white, and you can't read the names.
There's no real setting development in MERP because...there's no actual setting. I mean yes, nominally this is Middle Earth, but you wouldn't know that by the mechanics and there's no overview of anything particularly Middle-Earthy. You could do a find-and-replace so that this was New Urth and this game would play the exact same way, only pissing on fewer people's childhoods.
Some people will laugh, and the rest will need an explanation.
All these spell lists are adapted from Rolemaster, which is why all kinds of things are “Foo Law” or “Foo Way” or whatever. That's Rolemaster talking, there's nothing Tolkienian about it. Mad props for having a spell called “Nasal Repair” in the path of “Organ Ways” though. That's so fucking stupid that it almost makes up for how Valar damned unplayable this all is.
Page 57 has a picture of Goldberry - apparently taken from some illustrated version of the LotR I'm not familiar with - and you can see her nipples. In fact, on a brief perusal of google image search for Goldberry, I think she's showing the most nipples of any Middle Earth character.
Rolemaster spell lists remind me why there were so Morgoth-be-damned thaumaturgy paths in White Wolf. It's the same shenanigans. You have a limited set of scaling themed powers and people go fucking nuts with the procedurally generated content.
The various Ways and shit are also hilarious unbalanced, which I will generously allow might have been specifically made to explain certain problems that the Fellowship and/or Gandalf encountered. So for example, the "Unbarring Ways" help you open or close doors. Except 90% of the spells very specifically don't work on a magic door.
Like this one.
My favorite bullshit magic might be "Blood Ways," because it a) reminds us that blood loss is a thing in this game which is calculated at hits/round, there are spells with names like "Mass Clotting," and apparently everybody in Middle Earth has the same blood type because otherwise the Blood Transfusion spell would be an insta-kill. This is seriously a level of detail that even GURPS never descended to in its most hardcore moments.
The combat charts are a thing we've ranted about in just about every other chapter, because there keep being oblique references to them. They are hilariously awful.
It's also incomprehensible. These tables are gibberish. And there doesn't seem to be any logic to any of it. On the hand arms fumble chart I just referenced, you add 20 to the result if you are mounted and you subtract 10 if you are using a one handed bludgeoning weapon. Why? You're rolling a d100, it's a flat curve. Static modifiers don't make anything more or less likely unless they push something on or off the edge of the RNG. There's no point in static modifiers, they don't do anything. You could just cordon off some part of the table to have a special result that was different depending on whether you were using a one or two handed weapon.
Consider how this would be different if they were rolling 2d10. Each individual number is 1% more likely than the one before it until you get to 11 and then each number is 1% less likely than the one before it. So if you added +1 to the roll, all the numbers 12-20 would become 1% more likely and all the numbers 2-11 would become 1% less likely. If you subtracted 1, then all the numbers 2-10 would become 1% more likely and all the numbers 11-20 would become 1% less likely. Conversely on the d100 roll they actually use, the 80 result comes up 1% of the time and the 51-65 result comes up 15% of the time. And if you add or subtract 10 or 20 points from the roll then those results still come up 1% and 15% of the time respectively, just on different numbers.
This basic failure to understand how the dice they are using work permeates every part of this game. It's just especially galling when you have charts like this.
The thing about damage in MERP is that they were trying very desperately not to deal with Armor Class and THAC0. It's painfully obvious. Their work around is that every fucking type of damage is different depending on which armor you're wearing. Plate armor doesn't even provide the best protection all the time. If you're being wrassled by a Beornling in bear form, for example, if an 80 or less is rolled, you want to be wearing Rigid Leather Armor, because that gives you less damage than anything else. If you're being pecked at by a Giant Eagle, on a roll of 65 or less Chainmail or Rigid Leather armor is as good or better than Plate.
Folks in plate armor are actually more vulnerable to two-handed weapons than folks who go into battle naked for rolls up to 80. I seriously have no idea why they thought that was a thing. The only time plate armor gives you a benefit is at the extreme upper ranges, because you take slightly less extraordinary damage than the other assholes.
Also, for reasons unknown they decided to fill the white space on the bottom of page 76 (RRT - Resistance Role Table) with a sleeping hobbitt.
You get fumbles based on unmodified rolls. You make rolls to move and rolls to attack and rolls to defend and resist and all kinds of other fucking things. Fumbles happen all the time and they don't happen any less frequently when your character is supposed to be skilled. And they are mean. It says you do shit like “unbelievable mishandling of a weapon” or an “incredibly inept move.” It doesn't just have you suffer a setback, this book is literally never more flowery in its speech than when it comes time to natter on about criticals and fumbles.
Games often have tonal dissonance. Vampire could never really decide whether we were characters in a Grimes video or a Blutengel video. We get those freaky blood showers from Blade either way, but the tone is completely different. There are certainly ways to imagine Middle-earth that are lighter than others. The old Hobbit cartoon is a lot less grim and gritty than the three part movie Peter Jackson made.
One of these is clearly more comedic than the other.
But I don't think I've ever met anyone who wanted to play a skilled warrior who still becomes a bumbling object of mockery every four or five rounds. With a party of adventurers and a squad of enemies, this shit is going down more than once a round, and somebody is being made fun of in a cruel and demeaning fashion at all times. That is super fucked up. Whoever wrote the crits and fumbles thought they were being hilarious, but they weren't and also that is not a time or place to be funny. There's no place for this in Lord of the Rings inspired anything. There are lots of ways you could present this Middle-earth shit, but this way is wrong and insultingly wrong.
It's like Gilbert Godfried was your DM.
This is the part of the game designed by Kafka on a bet.
It's not that you didn't see table madness in other games, but this is ridiculous. It goes beyond any feasible attempt at verisimilitude or simulation and enters the arena of self-parody or masochism. This is the RPG equivalent of hitting yourself in the head with a hammer.
Anyway, for no particular reason, we enter section 7.3: General Tables and Record Sheets. That begins with a good ol' fashioned price list for general goods.
As was already mentioned in this thread, the one and only time in the main Tolkien books that prices are ever discussed is the purchase of Bill the Pony for an exorbitant 12 silver pennies. So it actually really bothers me that the price list in this book prices a “mature pony” at forty sp. That's wrong in a very specific way that there honestly is no excuse for. If you have one data point, you can write an unlimited number of lines through it. But if you draw your line and it misses your only fucking data point, what the hell?
I'd like to take half a minute to talk about semantics. This is a broadsword:
You will notice this is not: a particularly broad-bladed single-handed sword. That is what is usually called an arming sword. "Broadsword" is not actually an historical term; it is something that was later applied to some Scottish swords that weren't particularly broad compared to other military swords of the period, but tended to be broader than some of the dueling swords and court swords of the 18th and 19th century. Tolkien never actually used the term "broadsword" to describe anything, as far as I'm aware.
Which is a long way to say: this is the opposite of showing your work, this is showing your mistakes. Specifically, the weapons list is copied almost wholesale from D&D, including the D&Dism errors that are on it. That is wrong, and everyone involved should feel bad for it.
Why are the short list of creatures in the lists section and the races in the next appendix after the pointless hex paper? That is an excellent question, made all the more perplexing by the fact that the “creatures” write up shit like Orcs and then the Orcs show up again in the next chapter as a race. Look, I just don't fucking know, OK?
"I don't know" sums up a lot of this book. Why is aloe on the Herbs, Poisons, and Diseases Table? Why is there a Physical Alteration & Enhancement sub-table for that, and why does it include Zur, which enhances smell and hearing (1 hr.)? Why is it only on the Treasure Table that we learn that money is actually divided up into tin pieces (tp), copper pieces (cp), Bronze Pieces (bp), silver pieces (sp), gold pieces (gp), and mithril pieces (mp)? Why aren't they pennies? Who mints any of this shit - it can't possibly be the Shire? What is the exchange rate? Why do weapons of orc-slaying suck so bad (when you roll a crit, you get to roll twice - but first you have to roll a crit)? Why the fuck does the Magic Item Chart first make you roll for "Relative Richness?" What does that even mean?
Anyway, next up is 8.0 - Appendix 1: Race Descriptions. Where we once again come across my horrible error in mistaking the umli for being an obscure Tolkien reference instead of bullshit. Because of course it's bullshit. It's all bullshit.
Endless Lists
Words to live by.
FrankT:
Obviously we are not going to go through all these charts and lists one by one, because there are just a metric shit tonne of these fucking things. Lists, charts, tables, and record sheets drag on for 37 pages, and there are frequently more than one of them per page in tiny tiny font with extremely telegraphic or no documentation whatsoever. These... “chapters” are a war crime.
I think the biggest problem with these lists and charts is that they are all full. That may sound weird, I mean, why wouldn't they be full? But honestly there is no reason or excuse for all of these things to have the same number of list items. Filling charts just to fill them up doesn't make sense – it actually just ends up with a lot of filler and laughable game balance.
Let's consider the Angel Summoner and BMX Bandit problem. Or since we're talking about Lord of the Rings, we can call it the Gandalf and Boromir problem. We all understand that in such systems the guy who is a fucking wizard often outclasses the guy whose life goal is to do shit normal people can do but pretty well. But in MERP you get that kind of power discrepancy between casters. And that's because all the spell lists are filled. Each list gets ten spells of increasing level. But some of the lists just don't have conceptual space to have anything you'd give a shit about as a higher level spell and some of them do. Remember that “10th Level” in this case amounts to 10th character level for D&Disms, so that's like 5th level spells in D&D terms. Even so, “Fire Law” is ten spells about fire and Spirit Mastery is various flavors of Sleep, Charm, Hold, Suggestion, and Quest. Those are pretty good, and you can easily see how you can get D&D style 5th level spells out of the deal. Meanwhile, “Unbarring Ways” is 10 spells having to do with opening or closing doors. Not like metaphorical doors like Dimension Door either, we're talking about ten levels worth of variations on Hold Portal and Knock. There isn't a single thing in that whole list that wouldn't be embarrassing as a 3rd level spell in D&D. And yet, because all the lists are the same size and they are all full, Unbarring Ways had to be fleshed out with trivial bullshit you don't care about.
You saw the same shit with Disciplines in Vampire a few years down the line. All the Disciplines were five dots, so the ones that didn't have obvious analogs in power to the higher tier disciplines still ended up with five powers that were analogous in price. A game with different “paths” needs the 3rd or 4th step on each path to be roughly comparable in utility if they are going to be directly comparable in price. That's just what prices are supposed to mean. If that means that some of the paths have to be shorter, or have gaps where you can't think of something level appropriate, then so fucking be it. Filling out non-level-appropriate crap just for the sake of “completeness” is the designer fucking the chicken. If you insist on having all the power paths have the same number of powers in them (like maybe you hand out a limited number of power path selections like this fucking game also does and thus it has become important for the paths to be balanced) then some of the paths are going to have to be eclectic. If you run out of fucking door powers or light powers before you run out of spell levels, then your door related path is going to have to get some higher level abilities that are only tangentially related to fucking doors. That is how it has to work.
Just because there's space for something doesn't mean it wouldn't be shit design to put it in.
AncientH:
Instead of ranting about lists (I would never take that away from Frank) I'm going to remind everybody that we are halfway through the book and there has been essentially zero setting information at all. It's not just that I.C.E. was going to sell that to you separately (although they did that too), it's just that this is nowhere in the book at all. D&D gets away with that because there is no default setting; MERP does it because D&D did it. I really don't think they expected everybody to have memorized half of The Lord of the Rings so that they could play this - although that might have been a consideration for the game's core audience - but I flipped through and while there is a map, it's useless.
This, except in black and white, and you can't read the names.
Some people will laugh, and the rest will need an explanation.
FrankT:
All these spell lists are adapted from Rolemaster, which is why all kinds of things are “Foo Law” or “Foo Way” or whatever. That's Rolemaster talking, there's nothing Tolkienian about it. Mad props for having a spell called “Nasal Repair” in the path of “Organ Ways” though. That's so fucking stupid that it almost makes up for how Valar damned unplayable this all is.
AncientH:
Page 57 has a picture of Goldberry - apparently taken from some illustrated version of the LotR I'm not familiar with - and you can see her nipples. In fact, on a brief perusal of google image search for Goldberry, I think she's showing the most nipples of any Middle Earth character.
Rolemaster spell lists remind me why there were so Morgoth-be-damned thaumaturgy paths in White Wolf. It's the same shenanigans. You have a limited set of scaling themed powers and people go fucking nuts with the procedurally generated content.
The various Ways and shit are also hilarious unbalanced, which I will generously allow might have been specifically made to explain certain problems that the Fellowship and/or Gandalf encountered. So for example, the "Unbarring Ways" help you open or close doors. Except 90% of the spells very specifically don't work on a magic door.
Like this one.
My favorite bullshit magic might be "Blood Ways," because it a) reminds us that blood loss is a thing in this game which is calculated at hits/round, there are spells with names like "Mass Clotting," and apparently everybody in Middle Earth has the same blood type because otherwise the Blood Transfusion spell would be an insta-kill. This is seriously a level of detail that even GURPS never descended to in its most hardcore moments.
FrankT:
The combat charts are a thing we've ranted about in just about every other chapter, because there keep being oblique references to them. They are hilariously awful.
That's such random bullshit that I don't even have a coherent response. If I was playing a game and something bullshit like that cropped up, I'd pick up my dice and fucking leave. This is immature.You stagger and fall in an apparent attempt to commit suicide. Stunned 3 rounds. If using a polearm, its shaft is shattered.
It's also incomprehensible. These tables are gibberish. And there doesn't seem to be any logic to any of it. On the hand arms fumble chart I just referenced, you add 20 to the result if you are mounted and you subtract 10 if you are using a one handed bludgeoning weapon. Why? You're rolling a d100, it's a flat curve. Static modifiers don't make anything more or less likely unless they push something on or off the edge of the RNG. There's no point in static modifiers, they don't do anything. You could just cordon off some part of the table to have a special result that was different depending on whether you were using a one or two handed weapon.
Consider how this would be different if they were rolling 2d10. Each individual number is 1% more likely than the one before it until you get to 11 and then each number is 1% less likely than the one before it. So if you added +1 to the roll, all the numbers 12-20 would become 1% more likely and all the numbers 2-11 would become 1% less likely. If you subtracted 1, then all the numbers 2-10 would become 1% more likely and all the numbers 11-20 would become 1% less likely. Conversely on the d100 roll they actually use, the 80 result comes up 1% of the time and the 51-65 result comes up 15% of the time. And if you add or subtract 10 or 20 points from the roll then those results still come up 1% and 15% of the time respectively, just on different numbers.
This basic failure to understand how the dice they are using work permeates every part of this game. It's just especially galling when you have charts like this.
AncientH:
The thing about damage in MERP is that they were trying very desperately not to deal with Armor Class and THAC0. It's painfully obvious. Their work around is that every fucking type of damage is different depending on which armor you're wearing. Plate armor doesn't even provide the best protection all the time. If you're being wrassled by a Beornling in bear form, for example, if an 80 or less is rolled, you want to be wearing Rigid Leather Armor, because that gives you less damage than anything else. If you're being pecked at by a Giant Eagle, on a roll of 65 or less Chainmail or Rigid Leather armor is as good or better than Plate.
Folks in plate armor are actually more vulnerable to two-handed weapons than folks who go into battle naked for rolls up to 80. I seriously have no idea why they thought that was a thing. The only time plate armor gives you a benefit is at the extreme upper ranges, because you take slightly less extraordinary damage than the other assholes.
Also, for reasons unknown they decided to fill the white space on the bottom of page 76 (RRT - Resistance Role Table) with a sleeping hobbitt.
FrankT:
You get fumbles based on unmodified rolls. You make rolls to move and rolls to attack and rolls to defend and resist and all kinds of other fucking things. Fumbles happen all the time and they don't happen any less frequently when your character is supposed to be skilled. And they are mean. It says you do shit like “unbelievable mishandling of a weapon” or an “incredibly inept move.” It doesn't just have you suffer a setback, this book is literally never more flowery in its speech than when it comes time to natter on about criticals and fumbles.
Games often have tonal dissonance. Vampire could never really decide whether we were characters in a Grimes video or a Blutengel video. We get those freaky blood showers from Blade either way, but the tone is completely different. There are certainly ways to imagine Middle-earth that are lighter than others. The old Hobbit cartoon is a lot less grim and gritty than the three part movie Peter Jackson made.
One of these is clearly more comedic than the other.
But I don't think I've ever met anyone who wanted to play a skilled warrior who still becomes a bumbling object of mockery every four or five rounds. With a party of adventurers and a squad of enemies, this shit is going down more than once a round, and somebody is being made fun of in a cruel and demeaning fashion at all times. That is super fucked up. Whoever wrote the crits and fumbles thought they were being hilarious, but they weren't and also that is not a time or place to be funny. There's no place for this in Lord of the Rings inspired anything. There are lots of ways you could present this Middle-earth shit, but this way is wrong and insultingly wrong.
It's like Gilbert Godfried was your DM.
AncientH:
This is the part of the game designed by Kafka on a bet.
It's not that you didn't see table madness in other games, but this is ridiculous. It goes beyond any feasible attempt at verisimilitude or simulation and enters the arena of self-parody or masochism. This is the RPG equivalent of hitting yourself in the head with a hammer.
Anyway, for no particular reason, we enter section 7.3: General Tables and Record Sheets. That begins with a good ol' fashioned price list for general goods.
FrankT:
As was already mentioned in this thread, the one and only time in the main Tolkien books that prices are ever discussed is the purchase of Bill the Pony for an exorbitant 12 silver pennies. So it actually really bothers me that the price list in this book prices a “mature pony” at forty sp. That's wrong in a very specific way that there honestly is no excuse for. If you have one data point, you can write an unlimited number of lines through it. But if you draw your line and it misses your only fucking data point, what the hell?
AncientH:
I'd like to take half a minute to talk about semantics. This is a broadsword:
Which is a long way to say: this is the opposite of showing your work, this is showing your mistakes. Specifically, the weapons list is copied almost wholesale from D&D, including the D&Dism errors that are on it. That is wrong, and everyone involved should feel bad for it.
FrankT:
Why are the short list of creatures in the lists section and the races in the next appendix after the pointless hex paper? That is an excellent question, made all the more perplexing by the fact that the “creatures” write up shit like Orcs and then the Orcs show up again in the next chapter as a race. Look, I just don't fucking know, OK?
AncientH:
"I don't know" sums up a lot of this book. Why is aloe on the Herbs, Poisons, and Diseases Table? Why is there a Physical Alteration & Enhancement sub-table for that, and why does it include Zur, which enhances smell and hearing (1 hr.)? Why is it only on the Treasure Table that we learn that money is actually divided up into tin pieces (tp), copper pieces (cp), Bronze Pieces (bp), silver pieces (sp), gold pieces (gp), and mithril pieces (mp)? Why aren't they pennies? Who mints any of this shit - it can't possibly be the Shire? What is the exchange rate? Why do weapons of orc-slaying suck so bad (when you roll a crit, you get to roll twice - but first you have to roll a crit)? Why the fuck does the Magic Item Chart first make you roll for "Relative Richness?" What does that even mean?
Anyway, next up is 8.0 - Appendix 1: Race Descriptions. Where we once again come across my horrible error in mistaking the umli for being an obscure Tolkien reference instead of bullshit. Because of course it's bullshit. It's all bullshit.
Ah yes, the MERP fumble tables ...
I once had a character die after falling out of a fucking tree. Only way it could have been more embarrassing was if he'd been a wood elf rather than a grey elf.
In some ways, his death was a relief. Two of the other players were "Tolkien experts" who insisted on playing Noldor "properly" i.e. as massive arseholes.
They were reasonably civil to my character (fellow elf and all) but treated the non-elves like shit, whilst out-of-character correcting everybody's pronunciation of made-up words and objecting if people used "modernisms" such as "firing" arrows instead of "shooting" them.
I once had a character die after falling out of a fucking tree. Only way it could have been more embarrassing was if he'd been a wood elf rather than a grey elf.
In some ways, his death was a relief. Two of the other players were "Tolkien experts" who insisted on playing Noldor "properly" i.e. as massive arseholes.
They were reasonably civil to my character (fellow elf and all) but treated the non-elves like shit, whilst out-of-character correcting everybody's pronunciation of made-up words and objecting if people used "modernisms" such as "firing" arrows instead of "shooting" them.
I thought you "loose" an arrow and "shoot" a bow, if you wanted to be 'realistic'?amethal wrote: and objecting if people used "modernisms" such as "firing" arrows instead of "shooting" them.
Come see Sprockets & Serials
How do you confuse a barbarian?
Put a greatsword a maul and a greataxe in a room and ask them to take their pick
How do you confuse a barbarian?
Put a greatsword a maul and a greataxe in a room and ask them to take their pick
EXPLOSIVE RUNES!
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Ancient History
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spongeknight
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Shh, don't remind them that they actually know nothing about language and the five facts they picked up over the years means absolutely nothing. It crushes their unearned sense of superiority.virgil wrote:I thought you "loose" an arrow and "shoot" a bow, if you wanted to be 'realistic'?amethal wrote: and objecting if people used "modernisms" such as "firing" arrows instead of "shooting" them.
A Man In Black wrote:I do not want people to feel like they can never get rid of their Guisarme or else they can't cast Evard's Swarm Of Black Tentacleguisarmes.
Voss wrote:Which is pretty classic WW bullshit, really. Suck people in and then announce that everyone was a dogfucker all along.
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Ancient History
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That's one interpretation, I guess. The more correct one is he locked the door and the balrog broke the spell, the door and the stairwell.
Unbarring Ways comes more from the Hobbit, where Bilbo and the dwarves chant half remembered fragments of spells of opening at the Secret Door. Which kind of justifies having all these open spell lists (but not their content) laying about. Apparently any fool can canonically mutter shit and have some expectation that something could happen.
Unbarring Ways comes more from the Hobbit, where Bilbo and the dwarves chant half remembered fragments of spells of opening at the Secret Door. Which kind of justifies having all these open spell lists (but not their content) laying about. Apparently any fool can canonically mutter shit and have some expectation that something could happen.
Well canonically, some fool could mutter shit and expect it to work, but that could very well just be because they're a fool. Did those dwarves seem particularly bright to you?
FrankTrollman wrote:I think Grek already won the thread and we should pack it in.
Chamomile wrote:Grek is a national treasure.
Except for the fat one (and Thorin), they weren't really fools until Jackson made terrible caricatures out of them. They weren't really distinct or interesting in the book, but they weren't blithering idiots. Just planless.Grek wrote:Well canonically, some fool could mutter shit and expect it to work, but that could very well just be because they're a fool. Did those dwarves seem particularly bright to you?
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Occluded Sun
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Tolkienian 'magic' is almost entirely about words. See the example of the duel between Sauron and Finrod Felagund - to people without sight into the spirit plane, it merely looked like two people singing at each other.
It's also canonical that common people know many 'magical' things. Like the runes the dwarves put over the troll loot in The Hobbit.
It's also canonical that common people know many 'magical' things. Like the runes the dwarves put over the troll loot in The Hobbit.
"Most men are of no more use in their lives but as machines for turning food into excrement." - Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci
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Ancient History
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OSSR MERP
8.0 Appendix 1 - Race Descriptions
Fantasy Racism
Only with more Apartheid.
We've touched on this before in a lot of OSSRs, but a recap for anyone that doesn't feel like going back: racialism is highly prevalent in roleplaying games. It was present in Dungeons & Dragons, where you had to pick your race at character creation, and the races you picked at character creation were based on Tolkien. This kind of racialism normally gets a pass because it's fantasy: you're not getting a racial cock size modifier for being black or an income modifier for being Jewish, you're getting an extra bow proficiency because you're an elf. That doesn't make it much better, but the veneer of "this isn't like real life racism" means a lot of folks give it a pass - people are used at this point to picking a "race" being a mechanical choice as much or more than as a cosmetic choice.
Tolkien didn't start it. You get this kind of thing going back a long ways in fantasy, and before fantasy in mythology: the idea of different "peoples." The difference is, folks back in the day didn't have the biology to back up their ideas of race - they talked about breeding and the closest they could come up with was dogs and horses and whatnot. People would talk about fractions of "blood" and all that. The principle of heredity had been discovered a long time before the means and mechanics of biological inheritance had been worked out.
Which is a long way to say, the buck does not either start or stop at Tolkien. But he did encapsulate a lot of ideas about fantasy racialism and racism that would go on to become tropes. It's why elves are usually considered good and orcs and goblins are usually bad.
And also why you have "interracial" elf/orc porn.
Racism in Tolkien is a touchy subject. It's importantly true that while Tolkien had no problem seeing that the Hitler chap was a bad guy, but he had an awful lot of difficulty explaining why. Remember that it was the Nazis who embraced romanticism and ideas of noble races and shit, the Allies won with industrialism and the systematic destruction of the old pastoral social structure. The Lord of the Rings is actually structured like Axis propaganda, with the end conclusion being that we have to stop Hitler rather than that we need to kill all the Slavs and Jews. If Tolkien had decided to write Lord of the Rings as a pro-Hitler allegory, very little would have had to change. Mordor would be moved north a bit, the populace of the Shire would be dupes of Sauron, and all the shit about noble Numenoreans would stay exactly the fucking same. When Stormfronters embrace Lord of the Rings today, there is very little they have to ignore.
Tolkien was a product of his time and place, as all people are. He was born in turn of the century South Africa, and his racial attitudes were even somewhat progressive for that time and place (he was against Apartheid long before it was cool to call for boycotts of the South African government). The racist things he said and wrote were pretty tame by the standards of the time. Nevertheless, time marches on, the zeitgeist of history continues to trundle ever forward and writings do not change once written. Which means that when the Overton window shifts about what you can and cannot say about brown people and Mongolians, things you have written in the past get gradually shifted out of that window and become things that people in the future cannot praise without qualification. It's not like racism and anti-modernism magically vanished in 1945, people just keep being people and change for individuals is slow. But the direction that things were going and the direction they were supposed to go was by that point obvious.
Tolkien was able to correctly identify the good guys and bad guys of his time, but the sentiments he had were very much on the wrong side of history. And fantasy has been struggling with that core contradiction ever since.
Which is a really long walk to say that Tolkien's characterization of races and flavors of humans and stuff was nothing for Tolkien to be ashamed of, but if you wrote the same thing in 1986 people would tell you that you were being racist and should stop. And in the thirty years since then it has only gotten less justifiable. For the Race Descriptions appendix to not be awful, they would have had to put in caveats, walk back some of the stuff that makes modern egalitarians cringe, and generally put out something that has a “voice” that is considerably more conducive to late 20th century sensibilities. They did not do that.
This is from a different MERP book, but the point is that MERP never updated their sensibilities to be something socially acceptable by 1980s standards – let alone by today's standards.
Note: for anyone not grokking where Frank is coming from, he's talking about the whole Aryan bit: in a lot of the racial categorizations of the 1930s, the British (Anglo-Saxons) and Germans (Teutons) were lumped together as "Nordic" Aryans. Since they both have Germanic languages, and this excludes most of the French, it probably appealed to Tolkien. But the Nazi atrocities pretty much put the kibosh on Aryanism, except for some neo-Nazi chucklefucks, and anthropology doesn't really bear out an "Aryan" race anyway.
Racial descriptions are a lot like D&D. They didn't have to be, but D&D got them from Tolkien so they're pretty close already, and MERP is a D&D-clone. So it's a bit incestuous up in here as to where the racism starts. The only thing I can say is that MERP goes D&D several points further in doubling down on racial stereotypes - where D&D 3 at least presented the possibility of, let us say, a non-bearded, non-European archetype Dwarf, you're not getting that in MERP.
You can be the two in the middle.
Elf Flavors: We Has Them
The reason D&D has a bunch of weird ass Elf flavors is because of Tolkien. And the reason that Forgotten Realms has crap like Sun Elves and Moon Elves is because a bunch of D&D fans thought that Gray Elves and Wood Elves wasn't close enough to Tolkienian copyright infringement. Tolkien had flavors of Elf, and fantasy role playing games got their start sucking at Tolkien's teat and here we are.
The thing about Tolkien's Elves is that they do not make particularly good RPG characters. They experience things on a time frame that no campaign is likely to do justice to and they are very specifically far more powerful as individuals than members of other races. Elf Guard #4 is pretty well expected to be able to wipe his ass with all but the greatest of human champions. Which was fine for the kinds of books that Tolkien was writing, where there was absolutely no expectation that individual characters would be equal power and only a couple of Hobbits were expected to grow or change at all.
Drink ent draughts, get character growth.
But think of how catastrophically bad a fit this shit is for a typical RPG. The zero to hero story is right fucking out. I don't know what a Tolkienian Elf would look like at 1st level, but she'd definitely be doing it like eight hundred fucking years ago. And giving players equal screen time and influence on the story is pretty hard to imagine when one of the characters is an immortal sorcerer who is also a master swordsman and a gourmet chef while the other is a warrior with a beard.
Nevertheless, as you can see from the works of Colin McComb there exists a substantial faction of RPG players & writers who want their Elves as Tolkienian as possible. Colin McComb can't get an erection without remembering that an Elf has a better erection. The very moment you write up rules for being an Elf, there will be a certain vocal section of the fanbase angry that the rules don't make them better-than-you enough.
It's important to note that Tolkienian Elves are not in any way a problem for other kinds of games. IF you put Elves as Tolkien envisioned them into Dominions or Warhammer, you'd just have each unit cost more for being totally wicked sweet. The fact that this game balance needle is unthreadable applies only to RPGs where each character is expected to play exactly one character. If you were playing the general of an army in like King's Bounty where you could have a smaller squad of elves or a bigger squad of halflings, things could work fine. Hell, if you were doing some troupe play deal where one player played Legolas and another player played Frodo and Sam, that could work too. It's just that if you attempt to make the D&D assumption of “one player == one character” and you make the Tolkienian assumption that Elves are quasi-angelic immortal creatures who are very much better than you, that is a circle that cannot be squared.
Which is all a really long walk to get to what MERP actually did, which was to make different flavors of Elf in no way balanced with each other and even less balanced with other non-Elf races, and still makes them start at 1st level and doesn't give them nearly enough betterness to remotely do justice to the Tolkienian source material. So you get something which has poor balance and playability that also doesn't make the people who want to play Elves in Middle-earth happy. It's a perfect storm of fail where the design fantastically misses every goal it is possible for it to have.
This is also where we get the Umli, who are the non-canon half-dwarves that I had mistaken for an obscure reference to Petty Dwarves. Mea culpa.
Petty Dwarves led to gully dwarves, which is terrible.
Umli led to nothing because no-one gives a shit, but here's a mul from Dark Sun, which is a half-dwarf that shits on the concept of half-dwarves.
There's not a lot to say about the Umli. They occupy a playspace that there was no call for and honestly no room in Tolkien's legendarium to exist. They're about as welcome as the dwelf in Forgotten Realms. Race-mixing is bullshit in regular fantasy gaming, and encourages really distressing thoughts like hot skitty on wailord action, except with storm giants and fairies.
Tolkien offered exactly two cross-breeds: men and elves, which leads to half-elves, and that was rare and complicated, and men and orcs, which leads to uruk-hai, and that was a sin against nature. It's not entirely clear what the difference is between men and elves biologically in Tolkien to begin with, as some folks just argue they're the same species with different spirits. You see what I mean by biology not quite having caught up to things here? This is why games like Shadowrun just nixed half-elves and half-orcs and shit entirely. Because nobody wants to have to explain what "miscegenation" means to a twelve year old that just wants to roll some dice.
Don't mind me, just doin some ethnic cleansing.
There is something quite disturbing about “evil races” if you think too hard about it. But they are super useful for storytelling purposes if you don't think about it. We all love watching zombies or even Nazis get murderated in numbers, killing the “bad guys” is a great way for heroes to demonstrate their heroism. But racking up large numbers of kills is only a sign of greatness if you consider the targets to all be worthy of death – which is actually a pretty high bar. A just society doesn't kill people for most crimes, so it's actually fairly hard to imagine a large group of people who are all reasonable targets for murder. And treating thinking, speaking creatures as something less, something that is not people has... let's just say that the main lesson of the 1940s was that this was a problematic thing to do.
In the Lord of the Rings the position of the Orc is one of the ugly dehumanized monster man that it is totally OK to kill with extreme prejudice without talking to them or asking their political views regarding the Sauron restoration or whatever. Stirring action pieces are written about stabbing them in the face and tense suspense scenes are written about stabbing them in the back. And as long as you simply accept the genre conceit that all the Orcs who get stabbed need to be stabbed, it makes for a good read. But... and of course there's a but... that genre conceit does not hold up when you pull back the curtain and look at things from other directions. Which is super unfortunate because looking at things from multiple perspectives is like 90% of what you do in a cooperative storytelling game. You have like six people at the table contributing to the story, and they all have different perspectives.
In an RPG, the protagonists can and very likely will go look at other parts of the setting. They might go into Orc villages and ask questions about Orc children and Orc women and Orc farming and all the other shit that Tolkien never really talked about. And that means you need to have answers available, and there pretty much aren't any answers you can give that won't make mass murdering them in their Orc faces sound like a monstrous thing to do. Tolkien himself was rather aware of the issue, and in his private letters he waffled back and forth about Orcs being ugly and evil. On the one hand it was narratively necessary for Gimli and Legolas to be able to “keep score” of how many dudes they murder stabbed and have that be a good thing, on the other hand talking up how ugly and evil the people you disapprove of until it is a good thing to murder stab large numbers of them without getting into the details of what any of them did or even what their names are is fairly Hitlerish. Tolkien talked himself round in circles trying to thread that particular needle with caveats about how they had those Mongolian traits least lovely to Europeans and maybe they weren't able to not be evil because Hitler Sauron or something, and he never really managed to make a coherent moral argument about all this in his lifetime. Lord of the Rings works if and only if you don't think very hard about the Orcs.
MERP also has different races of "men." This is problematic because it comes the closest to actual racism. The thing is, back in the 1890s-1930s, people really did believe that there were biological differences between, let us say, the French and English and Irish. National stereotypes were also to a degree ethnic stereotypes, and cultural differences were sometimes ascribed biological roots. So people thought that Jews were good with money because they were Jewish, or that Native Americans can shapeshift. This also showed up in fantasy of the period.
Robert E. Howard kind of got away with talking shit about Stygians and Cimmerians and Shemites because it was the 1930s and was basically translating national/ethnic/racial groupings into a fantasy milieu; it wasn't cool, but he wasn't claiming they were a different species or pretending this wasn't racism - it totally was 1930s racism, just 1930s racism in a fantasy world. Fair enough, right?
It gets more complicated in RPGs, because the cultural/national/ethnic divide becomes a lot more indistinct when you through in the biological angle. You could biologically stereotype French people vs. Irish people in 1914; by 1944 it just looks bullshit and racist, and by 1964 it looks really racist, and by 1984 it's a joke passed around on Stormfront. Having humans from culture A be as distinct mechanically as elf species B is just retarded. But that's what a lot of RPGs do. It's a lot easier to do that than break it down to "add race a modifiers, then nationality B modifiers" - which is what a GURPS approach would look like. Instead, we get...Beornlings and Dunedain and Easterlings and Black Numenoreans, etc. each of which is more distinct than Iron Hill Dwarfs vs. Lonely Mountain Dwarfs.
Tolkien didn't touch a vast deal on the racial make-up of various races of Men in his books - it was pretty much assumed that Middle Earth was fantasy Europe, and the Easterlings had some sort of "foreign" aspect, but he never went into it. You could probably write a fanfic where Middle Earth was fantasy Africa and it would work fine, but most folks have followed the fantasy Europe interpretation, so there's not really a lot of...diversity. No Asians, Native Americans, Native Australians, Africans, Middle Easterners, etc. Even the national ethnic stereotypes are pretty damn vague, though in the films at least they try for cohesive cultural trappings.
Spiky bits are a cultural trait, right?
The thing is, Britain is Old. And it is bullshit small, and every single part of it has been occupied for at least a thousand years, and there are villages there that have hated the next village over for the last hundred generations, and there are British people that very much like to look into all of that and write books and monographs on it, and trace genealogies and names and stories and shit. So Britain packs in more history per mile than mere geography would indicate, and the diversity there is low but if you insist on looking at it up close, it looks big. Which is why the Hobbiton Bagginses and the Sackville Bagginses are feuding. The thing is, all of Middle Earth is like the Shire, and Tolkien had zero fucks to give about Easterlings compared to his interest in whether the Proudfoot clan of Hobbits pluralized themselves as Proudfoots or Proudfeet. So these were all very sketchy grey areas about foreigners that Tolkien didn't give a shit about. It was ripe material for MERP to capitalize on...and instead they fucked it up, by falling back to "well, these are all swarthy foreign types."
As origin stories go “it was born that way” is at least easy to get across. Saying that something is super strong because its dad was super strong is not an ultimate answer for where super strength came from in any ultimate sense, but it's a first order answer which always works. Tolkien used it a lot. Probably mostly because narratively he needed some scarier stuff and he didn't really care to discuss or even particularly think about the origin stories of any of them. But Tolkien was also a Christian and he was pretty sure that it was blasphemy to say that anything other than God created anything, and also he wanted evil shit that characters could righteously face stab and it was probably also blasphemy to say that God created things that were a mistake – which creates a paradox with your Satan analog. You're in theological trouble if Morgoth is “creating” things, but you're in theological trouble if Morgoth's evilest monsters aren't Morgoth's fault somehow. Tolkien dug himself out of that particular self-made Gehenna by having the bad guys breed and corrupt monsters. Because even if creation is off the table, procreation obviously is not.
But that honestly just opens up more questions. If you can breed people to be powerful and cunning and evil, does that mean that there are evil genes in your world? Could you engage in eugenics programs to increase the
goodness instead of the evil? Would you be morally in the wrong to not do that? The implications of successful breeding programs of people are straight up nauseating to the modern viewer, because you're basically living in the world promised by literal Hitler. The only conscious breeding program in our history that has ever delivered positive results has been Japan's bonsai emperor program*. Every other human breeding program has involved a lot of rape and terrible ideas.
*: Each Japanese Emperor is supposed to marry a woman shorter than himself with predictable results.
So when you go into an RPG you naturally get to questions like “is it morally acceptable to kill baby Trolls?” and “what do I have to do to get my own army of Uruk-Hai?” and that is where you would hope that MERP would come up with some not-upsetting answers. Trolls were bred by Morgoth but made from stone, so um... I got nothin. But it sounds like they breed true and it's morally encouragable to murder stab their children. And I think the implication is that Morgoth fucked a pile of rocks and that the better Black Trolls happened because Sauron fucked a bunch of Trolls.
Tolkien never mentioned what the womenfolk of the team evil races were doing. But when you think about the breeding programs that give rise to the elite monsters, it all gets really gross!
Part of Tolkien's thing was the very common idea in his world that the it was getting more crapsack. Remember, the Lord of the Rings is the close-out for the Third Age, as elves are leaving and the greatest, most long-lived lines of men have degenerated so they only live for a paltry 195 years, and most of the magic has gone out of the world. Nothing like the shit that was real back in the First and Second Ages, and still a fuck load more fantastic than the Fourth Age. Biologically, the idea that distinct populations would decline in generations is very common - you can see it in World of Darkness, for example, and the vampire generation concept. It's the kind of view of the world written by old people that think their youth was awesome and perfect and young people just suck and are ruining everything.
Anyway, next up: Chapter 9.0 Appendix 2 - Creature Descriptions
8.0 Appendix 1 - Race Descriptions
Fantasy Racism
Only with more Apartheid.
AncientH:
We've touched on this before in a lot of OSSRs, but a recap for anyone that doesn't feel like going back: racialism is highly prevalent in roleplaying games. It was present in Dungeons & Dragons, where you had to pick your race at character creation, and the races you picked at character creation were based on Tolkien. This kind of racialism normally gets a pass because it's fantasy: you're not getting a racial cock size modifier for being black or an income modifier for being Jewish, you're getting an extra bow proficiency because you're an elf. That doesn't make it much better, but the veneer of "this isn't like real life racism" means a lot of folks give it a pass - people are used at this point to picking a "race" being a mechanical choice as much or more than as a cosmetic choice.
Tolkien didn't start it. You get this kind of thing going back a long ways in fantasy, and before fantasy in mythology: the idea of different "peoples." The difference is, folks back in the day didn't have the biology to back up their ideas of race - they talked about breeding and the closest they could come up with was dogs and horses and whatnot. People would talk about fractions of "blood" and all that. The principle of heredity had been discovered a long time before the means and mechanics of biological inheritance had been worked out.
Which is a long way to say, the buck does not either start or stop at Tolkien. But he did encapsulate a lot of ideas about fantasy racialism and racism that would go on to become tropes. It's why elves are usually considered good and orcs and goblins are usually bad.
And also why you have "interracial" elf/orc porn.
FrankT:
Racism in Tolkien is a touchy subject. It's importantly true that while Tolkien had no problem seeing that the Hitler chap was a bad guy, but he had an awful lot of difficulty explaining why. Remember that it was the Nazis who embraced romanticism and ideas of noble races and shit, the Allies won with industrialism and the systematic destruction of the old pastoral social structure. The Lord of the Rings is actually structured like Axis propaganda, with the end conclusion being that we have to stop Hitler rather than that we need to kill all the Slavs and Jews. If Tolkien had decided to write Lord of the Rings as a pro-Hitler allegory, very little would have had to change. Mordor would be moved north a bit, the populace of the Shire would be dupes of Sauron, and all the shit about noble Numenoreans would stay exactly the fucking same. When Stormfronters embrace Lord of the Rings today, there is very little they have to ignore.
Tolkien was a product of his time and place, as all people are. He was born in turn of the century South Africa, and his racial attitudes were even somewhat progressive for that time and place (he was against Apartheid long before it was cool to call for boycotts of the South African government). The racist things he said and wrote were pretty tame by the standards of the time. Nevertheless, time marches on, the zeitgeist of history continues to trundle ever forward and writings do not change once written. Which means that when the Overton window shifts about what you can and cannot say about brown people and Mongolians, things you have written in the past get gradually shifted out of that window and become things that people in the future cannot praise without qualification. It's not like racism and anti-modernism magically vanished in 1945, people just keep being people and change for individuals is slow. But the direction that things were going and the direction they were supposed to go was by that point obvious.
Tolkien's problem with Hitler was that he was clearly doing his Germanic ultra-nationalism wrong.Tolkien wrote:I have in this War a burning private grudge – which would probably make me a better soldier at 49 than I was at 22: against that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler (for the odd thing about demonic inspiration and impetus is that it in no way enhances the purely intellectual stature: it chiefly affects the mere will). Ruining, perverting, misapplying, and making for ever accursed, that noble northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to present in its true light.
Tolkien was able to correctly identify the good guys and bad guys of his time, but the sentiments he had were very much on the wrong side of history. And fantasy has been struggling with that core contradiction ever since.
Which is a really long walk to say that Tolkien's characterization of races and flavors of humans and stuff was nothing for Tolkien to be ashamed of, but if you wrote the same thing in 1986 people would tell you that you were being racist and should stop. And in the thirty years since then it has only gotten less justifiable. For the Race Descriptions appendix to not be awful, they would have had to put in caveats, walk back some of the stuff that makes modern egalitarians cringe, and generally put out something that has a “voice” that is considerably more conducive to late 20th century sensibilities. They did not do that.
This is from a different MERP book, but the point is that MERP never updated their sensibilities to be something socially acceptable by 1980s standards – let alone by today's standards.
AncientH:
Note: for anyone not grokking where Frank is coming from, he's talking about the whole Aryan bit: in a lot of the racial categorizations of the 1930s, the British (Anglo-Saxons) and Germans (Teutons) were lumped together as "Nordic" Aryans. Since they both have Germanic languages, and this excludes most of the French, it probably appealed to Tolkien. But the Nazi atrocities pretty much put the kibosh on Aryanism, except for some neo-Nazi chucklefucks, and anthropology doesn't really bear out an "Aryan" race anyway.
Racial descriptions are a lot like D&D. They didn't have to be, but D&D got them from Tolkien so they're pretty close already, and MERP is a D&D-clone. So it's a bit incestuous up in here as to where the racism starts. The only thing I can say is that MERP goes D&D several points further in doubling down on racial stereotypes - where D&D 3 at least presented the possibility of, let us say, a non-bearded, non-European archetype Dwarf, you're not getting that in MERP.
You can be the two in the middle.
FrankT:
Elf Flavors: We Has Them
The reason D&D has a bunch of weird ass Elf flavors is because of Tolkien. And the reason that Forgotten Realms has crap like Sun Elves and Moon Elves is because a bunch of D&D fans thought that Gray Elves and Wood Elves wasn't close enough to Tolkienian copyright infringement. Tolkien had flavors of Elf, and fantasy role playing games got their start sucking at Tolkien's teat and here we are.
The thing about Tolkien's Elves is that they do not make particularly good RPG characters. They experience things on a time frame that no campaign is likely to do justice to and they are very specifically far more powerful as individuals than members of other races. Elf Guard #4 is pretty well expected to be able to wipe his ass with all but the greatest of human champions. Which was fine for the kinds of books that Tolkien was writing, where there was absolutely no expectation that individual characters would be equal power and only a couple of Hobbits were expected to grow or change at all.
Drink ent draughts, get character growth.
But think of how catastrophically bad a fit this shit is for a typical RPG. The zero to hero story is right fucking out. I don't know what a Tolkienian Elf would look like at 1st level, but she'd definitely be doing it like eight hundred fucking years ago. And giving players equal screen time and influence on the story is pretty hard to imagine when one of the characters is an immortal sorcerer who is also a master swordsman and a gourmet chef while the other is a warrior with a beard.
Nevertheless, as you can see from the works of Colin McComb there exists a substantial faction of RPG players & writers who want their Elves as Tolkienian as possible. Colin McComb can't get an erection without remembering that an Elf has a better erection. The very moment you write up rules for being an Elf, there will be a certain vocal section of the fanbase angry that the rules don't make them better-than-you enough.
It's important to note that Tolkienian Elves are not in any way a problem for other kinds of games. IF you put Elves as Tolkien envisioned them into Dominions or Warhammer, you'd just have each unit cost more for being totally wicked sweet. The fact that this game balance needle is unthreadable applies only to RPGs where each character is expected to play exactly one character. If you were playing the general of an army in like King's Bounty where you could have a smaller squad of elves or a bigger squad of halflings, things could work fine. Hell, if you were doing some troupe play deal where one player played Legolas and another player played Frodo and Sam, that could work too. It's just that if you attempt to make the D&D assumption of “one player == one character” and you make the Tolkienian assumption that Elves are quasi-angelic immortal creatures who are very much better than you, that is a circle that cannot be squared.
Which is all a really long walk to get to what MERP actually did, which was to make different flavors of Elf in no way balanced with each other and even less balanced with other non-Elf races, and still makes them start at 1st level and doesn't give them nearly enough betterness to remotely do justice to the Tolkienian source material. So you get something which has poor balance and playability that also doesn't make the people who want to play Elves in Middle-earth happy. It's a perfect storm of fail where the design fantastically misses every goal it is possible for it to have.
AncientH:
This is also where we get the Umli, who are the non-canon half-dwarves that I had mistaken for an obscure reference to Petty Dwarves. Mea culpa.
Petty Dwarves led to gully dwarves, which is terrible.
Umli led to nothing because no-one gives a shit, but here's a mul from Dark Sun, which is a half-dwarf that shits on the concept of half-dwarves.
There's not a lot to say about the Umli. They occupy a playspace that there was no call for and honestly no room in Tolkien's legendarium to exist. They're about as welcome as the dwelf in Forgotten Realms. Race-mixing is bullshit in regular fantasy gaming, and encourages really distressing thoughts like hot skitty on wailord action, except with storm giants and fairies.
Tolkien offered exactly two cross-breeds: men and elves, which leads to half-elves, and that was rare and complicated, and men and orcs, which leads to uruk-hai, and that was a sin against nature. It's not entirely clear what the difference is between men and elves biologically in Tolkien to begin with, as some folks just argue they're the same species with different spirits. You see what I mean by biology not quite having caught up to things here? This is why games like Shadowrun just nixed half-elves and half-orcs and shit entirely. Because nobody wants to have to explain what "miscegenation" means to a twelve year old that just wants to roll some dice.
FrankT:
Don't mind me, just doin some ethnic cleansing.
There is something quite disturbing about “evil races” if you think too hard about it. But they are super useful for storytelling purposes if you don't think about it. We all love watching zombies or even Nazis get murderated in numbers, killing the “bad guys” is a great way for heroes to demonstrate their heroism. But racking up large numbers of kills is only a sign of greatness if you consider the targets to all be worthy of death – which is actually a pretty high bar. A just society doesn't kill people for most crimes, so it's actually fairly hard to imagine a large group of people who are all reasonable targets for murder. And treating thinking, speaking creatures as something less, something that is not people has... let's just say that the main lesson of the 1940s was that this was a problematic thing to do.
In the Lord of the Rings the position of the Orc is one of the ugly dehumanized monster man that it is totally OK to kill with extreme prejudice without talking to them or asking their political views regarding the Sauron restoration or whatever. Stirring action pieces are written about stabbing them in the face and tense suspense scenes are written about stabbing them in the back. And as long as you simply accept the genre conceit that all the Orcs who get stabbed need to be stabbed, it makes for a good read. But... and of course there's a but... that genre conceit does not hold up when you pull back the curtain and look at things from other directions. Which is super unfortunate because looking at things from multiple perspectives is like 90% of what you do in a cooperative storytelling game. You have like six people at the table contributing to the story, and they all have different perspectives.
In an RPG, the protagonists can and very likely will go look at other parts of the setting. They might go into Orc villages and ask questions about Orc children and Orc women and Orc farming and all the other shit that Tolkien never really talked about. And that means you need to have answers available, and there pretty much aren't any answers you can give that won't make mass murdering them in their Orc faces sound like a monstrous thing to do. Tolkien himself was rather aware of the issue, and in his private letters he waffled back and forth about Orcs being ugly and evil. On the one hand it was narratively necessary for Gimli and Legolas to be able to “keep score” of how many dudes they murder stabbed and have that be a good thing, on the other hand talking up how ugly and evil the people you disapprove of until it is a good thing to murder stab large numbers of them without getting into the details of what any of them did or even what their names are is fairly Hitlerish. Tolkien talked himself round in circles trying to thread that particular needle with caveats about how they had those Mongolian traits least lovely to Europeans and maybe they weren't able to not be evil because Hitler Sauron or something, and he never really managed to make a coherent moral argument about all this in his lifetime. Lord of the Rings works if and only if you don't think very hard about the Orcs.
That's about the worst compromise you could come up with. I guess if you were actively trying to create a setup that was as morally repugnant as possible you could go the full FATAL if you really wanted to, but this is pretty bad. Orcs in MERP are individually not worthy of death but collectively the world would be better off if they were exterminated. So in MERP you are justified in calling for Genocide, but you are not justified in killing any particular Orc you happen to run into in the woods unless and until you find out some special reason that particular dude needs to die. But remember, this is an RPG where you discuss events from the point of view of a single bumbling warrior, retail killing is all you'll ever be able to do. So the setting as described justifies the worst atrocities supported by Stormfronters, but your character is still a monster if they attack first upon winning initiative. What the actual fuck?MERP Orcs wrote:These hideous creatures are members of a race descended from Elves who were twisted and perverted by Morgoth during the First Age. Although they are not inherently evil, they are culturally and mentally predisposed toward Darkness.
AncientH:
MERP also has different races of "men." This is problematic because it comes the closest to actual racism. The thing is, back in the 1890s-1930s, people really did believe that there were biological differences between, let us say, the French and English and Irish. National stereotypes were also to a degree ethnic stereotypes, and cultural differences were sometimes ascribed biological roots. So people thought that Jews were good with money because they were Jewish, or that Native Americans can shapeshift. This also showed up in fantasy of the period.
Robert E. Howard kind of got away with talking shit about Stygians and Cimmerians and Shemites because it was the 1930s and was basically translating national/ethnic/racial groupings into a fantasy milieu; it wasn't cool, but he wasn't claiming they were a different species or pretending this wasn't racism - it totally was 1930s racism, just 1930s racism in a fantasy world. Fair enough, right?
It gets more complicated in RPGs, because the cultural/national/ethnic divide becomes a lot more indistinct when you through in the biological angle. You could biologically stereotype French people vs. Irish people in 1914; by 1944 it just looks bullshit and racist, and by 1964 it looks really racist, and by 1984 it's a joke passed around on Stormfront. Having humans from culture A be as distinct mechanically as elf species B is just retarded. But that's what a lot of RPGs do. It's a lot easier to do that than break it down to "add race a modifiers, then nationality B modifiers" - which is what a GURPS approach would look like. Instead, we get...Beornlings and Dunedain and Easterlings and Black Numenoreans, etc. each of which is more distinct than Iron Hill Dwarfs vs. Lonely Mountain Dwarfs.
Tolkien didn't touch a vast deal on the racial make-up of various races of Men in his books - it was pretty much assumed that Middle Earth was fantasy Europe, and the Easterlings had some sort of "foreign" aspect, but he never went into it. You could probably write a fanfic where Middle Earth was fantasy Africa and it would work fine, but most folks have followed the fantasy Europe interpretation, so there's not really a lot of...diversity. No Asians, Native Americans, Native Australians, Africans, Middle Easterners, etc. Even the national ethnic stereotypes are pretty damn vague, though in the films at least they try for cohesive cultural trappings.
Spiky bits are a cultural trait, right?
The thing is, Britain is Old. And it is bullshit small, and every single part of it has been occupied for at least a thousand years, and there are villages there that have hated the next village over for the last hundred generations, and there are British people that very much like to look into all of that and write books and monographs on it, and trace genealogies and names and stories and shit. So Britain packs in more history per mile than mere geography would indicate, and the diversity there is low but if you insist on looking at it up close, it looks big. Which is why the Hobbiton Bagginses and the Sackville Bagginses are feuding. The thing is, all of Middle Earth is like the Shire, and Tolkien had zero fucks to give about Easterlings compared to his interest in whether the Proudfoot clan of Hobbits pluralized themselves as Proudfoots or Proudfeet. So these were all very sketchy grey areas about foreigners that Tolkien didn't give a shit about. It was ripe material for MERP to capitalize on...and instead they fucked it up, by falling back to "well, these are all swarthy foreign types."
FrankT:
As origin stories go “it was born that way” is at least easy to get across. Saying that something is super strong because its dad was super strong is not an ultimate answer for where super strength came from in any ultimate sense, but it's a first order answer which always works. Tolkien used it a lot. Probably mostly because narratively he needed some scarier stuff and he didn't really care to discuss or even particularly think about the origin stories of any of them. But Tolkien was also a Christian and he was pretty sure that it was blasphemy to say that anything other than God created anything, and also he wanted evil shit that characters could righteously face stab and it was probably also blasphemy to say that God created things that were a mistake – which creates a paradox with your Satan analog. You're in theological trouble if Morgoth is “creating” things, but you're in theological trouble if Morgoth's evilest monsters aren't Morgoth's fault somehow. Tolkien dug himself out of that particular self-made Gehenna by having the bad guys breed and corrupt monsters. Because even if creation is off the table, procreation obviously is not.
But that honestly just opens up more questions. If you can breed people to be powerful and cunning and evil, does that mean that there are evil genes in your world? Could you engage in eugenics programs to increase the
goodness instead of the evil? Would you be morally in the wrong to not do that? The implications of successful breeding programs of people are straight up nauseating to the modern viewer, because you're basically living in the world promised by literal Hitler. The only conscious breeding program in our history that has ever delivered positive results has been Japan's bonsai emperor program*. Every other human breeding program has involved a lot of rape and terrible ideas.
*: Each Japanese Emperor is supposed to marry a woman shorter than himself with predictable results.
So when you go into an RPG you naturally get to questions like “is it morally acceptable to kill baby Trolls?” and “what do I have to do to get my own army of Uruk-Hai?” and that is where you would hope that MERP would come up with some not-upsetting answers. Trolls were bred by Morgoth but made from stone, so um... I got nothin. But it sounds like they breed true and it's morally encouragable to murder stab their children. And I think the implication is that Morgoth fucked a pile of rocks and that the better Black Trolls happened because Sauron fucked a bunch of Trolls.
Tolkien never mentioned what the womenfolk of the team evil races were doing. But when you think about the breeding programs that give rise to the elite monsters, it all gets really gross!
AncientH:
Part of Tolkien's thing was the very common idea in his world that the it was getting more crapsack. Remember, the Lord of the Rings is the close-out for the Third Age, as elves are leaving and the greatest, most long-lived lines of men have degenerated so they only live for a paltry 195 years, and most of the magic has gone out of the world. Nothing like the shit that was real back in the First and Second Ages, and still a fuck load more fantastic than the Fourth Age. Biologically, the idea that distinct populations would decline in generations is very common - you can see it in World of Darkness, for example, and the vampire generation concept. It's the kind of view of the world written by old people that think their youth was awesome and perfect and young people just suck and are ruining everything.
Anyway, next up: Chapter 9.0 Appendix 2 - Creature Descriptions
Can we get a source for that 'bonsai emperor program' thing?
FrankTrollman wrote:I think Grek already won the thread and we should pack it in.
Chamomile wrote:Grek is a national treasure.
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Count Arioch the 28th
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Or the magical talking wallets trolls have. Same trolls that live in a cave in the woods and eat random strangers.Occluded Sun wrote:Tolkienian 'magic' is almost entirely about words. See the example of the duel between Sauron and Finrod Felagund - to people without sight into the spirit plane, it merely looked like two people singing at each other.
It's also canonical that common people know many 'magical' things. Like the runes the dwarves put over the troll loot in The Hobbit.
I'm not even complaining. If the Japanese want to have a tiny Emperor that's cool and awesome. I'm just skeptical that it's intentional.Count Arioch the 28th wrote:Don't apply your eurocentric standards of beauty to him, you problematic shitlord.
FrankTrollman wrote:I think Grek already won the thread and we should pack it in.
Chamomile wrote:Grek is a national treasure.
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CapnTthePirateG
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Didn't that come from everyone fighting to marry the Emperor?
I will submit there is ONE reason the uruk-hai creation may be evilwrongbad, and that would be because the men and orcs are forced to breed in a messed up eugenics program. We don't ever see what happens when humans and orcs get hitched, but as there are like 3 half-elves I can't imagine that happening often.
I will submit there is ONE reason the uruk-hai creation may be evilwrongbad, and that would be because the men and orcs are forced to breed in a messed up eugenics program. We don't ever see what happens when humans and orcs get hitched, but as there are like 3 half-elves I can't imagine that happening often.
OgreBattle wrote:"And thus the denizens learned that hating Shadzar was the only thing they had in common, and with him gone they turned their venom upon each other"
-Sarpadian Empires, vol. I
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Username17
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I think Count was talking to hyzmarca. In any case, the Japanese bonsai emperor breeding program appears to be entirely accidental. The Imperial Household Agency has a long list of what makes a suitable Empress Consort and in the twentieth century has been repeatedly at odds with members of the Imperial Family who keep insisting on marrying the scions of industrialist families rather than the descendents of nobility that they are "supposed to."
But yes, one of the things the Imperial Household Agency purportedly freaks out about is that the Empress Consort isn't supposed to be taller than the Emperor. Which is just a recipe for having a very tiny emperor after a few hundred years.
-Username17
But yes, one of the things the Imperial Household Agency purportedly freaks out about is that the Empress Consort isn't supposed to be taller than the Emperor. Which is just a recipe for having a very tiny emperor after a few hundred years.
-Username17
Eeerr, the germans back in the day also embraced industrialism and the systematic destruction of the old pastoral social structure. From a massive high-tech air force supporting their tank armies to U-boat fleets all backed up by encryption communication machines to long range rockets to mass-producing of bazookas for their children to use.Ancient History wrote:FrankT:
Racism in Tolkien is a touchy subject. It's importantly true that while Tolkien had no problem seeing that the Hitler chap was a bad guy, but he had an awful lot of difficulty explaining why. Remember that it was the Nazis who embraced romanticism and ideas of noble races and shit, the Allies won with industrialism and the systematic destruction of the old pastoral social structure.
The allies simply did the industrialization thing better since they had more raw resources. But until the very end the german's democratically elected leader was promising that they would yet win the war by pulling a last minute industrial breakthrough.
I heard once that Tolkien himself said that if he wanted to write a WWII allegory, it would've been orcs vs orcs.
You sure about that?Ancient History wrote: But that honestly just opens up more questions. If you can breed people to be powerful and cunning and evil, does that mean that there are evil genes in your world? Could you engage in eugenics programs to increase the
goodness instead of the evil? Would you be morally in the wrong to not do that? The implications of successful breeding programs of people are straight up nauseating to the modern viewer, because you're basically living in the world promised by literal Hitler.
The only conscious breeding program in our history that has ever delivered positive results has been Japan's bonsai emperor program*. Every other human breeding program has involved a lot of rape and terrible ideas.
There are indeed "evil" genes in our world. The kind that inflict you with horrible diseases that cannot be cured. And turns out a lot of people will do selective breeding if it means their kids aren't born into an existence of agonizing suffering.
But nowadays people are also doing it to select their kid's details, from sex to hair/skin color. Now you could argue it's terrible, but it's still not rape. Fuck, the women are paying big bucks for getting a pimped-up embryo implanted inside their womb.
Plus there's the fact non-human breeding programs have been resounding successes. Dogs, horses, cows, plants, we've been selectively breeding all that shit since there's records. Food production would collapse overnight if farmers didn't do seed selection.
As medical tech improves, it's kinda impossible to stop. If your doctor says he can make your kid prettier/stronger/healthier and he has science backing him up, plenty of parents will go "shut up and take our money!".
Last edited by maglag on Mon Nov 07, 2016 12:05 am, edited 1 time in total.
FrankTrollman wrote: Actually, our blood banking system is set up exactly the way you'd want it to be if you were a secret vampire conspiracy.
I hate to complain as that was a good read, but your review of this appendix doesn't seem to address the specific content, of this specific appendix, other than a failure to:
[*] achieve either game balance or genre emulation,
[*] address the various then-problematic now-deal-breaking aspects of Tolkien's own legendarium.
[*] fill in anything useful like different flavors of easterling or Orc culture or what-have-you
Which leads me to ask: what does this appendix actually have in it? Just stat mods? Discussion of the various legendarium dwellers? Are there, I dunno, guidelines on how to play a Noldor or Wood elf or whatever?
[*] achieve either game balance or genre emulation,
[*] address the various then-problematic now-deal-breaking aspects of Tolkien's own legendarium.
[*] fill in anything useful like different flavors of easterling or Orc culture or what-have-you
Which leads me to ask: what does this appendix actually have in it? Just stat mods? Discussion of the various legendarium dwellers? Are there, I dunno, guidelines on how to play a Noldor or Wood elf or whatever?
Chaosium rules are made of unicorn pubic hair and cancer. --AncientH
When you talk, all I can hear is "DunningKruger" over and over again like you were a god damn Pokemon. --Username17
Fuck off with the pony murder shit. --Grek
When you talk, all I can hear is "DunningKruger" over and over again like you were a god damn Pokemon. --Username17
Fuck off with the pony murder shit. --Grek