This was a game I played in rather than ran for once! It’s a published adventure in both The One Ring (and Adventures in Middle Earth) 1e, now updated to 2e. So unlike normal, I’ll skip the story.

In AiME it’s To Dungeons Deep in Erebor Adventures - for TOR 2e it’s been lowered in difficulty of enemies considerably, but otherwise is identical.

Thoughts

The good stuff:

  • It’s great being in LotR again - I don’t know why I like playing games in Tolkein’s world. I guess it’s the fact that you can stitch in eurofantasy around the cracks and it’s pretty easy to cover things up. Or just quotes from the film!
  • Stances add a bit of interest to combat, and encourage some Saxon shield walls. Characters can be in Ranged combat (or fleeing) or various levels of aggression in melee, effectively giving you 5e-style Reckless Attacks
  • A bit less cruft than 5e (AiME), less hammering the square 5e peg into a round hole

The bad stuff:

  • The fucking dice! I can’t remember which glyph is which - the Discord bot solves a lot of it but I’d still be asking the DM if I’d read it correctly. For those who’ve not seen, there’s a d12 where 11 and 12 faces are used for “bad event” and “good event”. The events depend on why you’re rolling.
    • This also means I think I’m using enough hope and favours to get a probable-good outcome, but no. There’s tables of probabilities (and I guess we do this for 5e as well) and I think I had poor luck, but even throwing 3-4 d6s seemed to give surprisingly bad results
    • All this effort trying to read rolls and gain advantage made the game not feel any faster than 5e
  • Being weary/miserable/wounded sucks. And my character was all of them at once! But that’s true for any game. But it still sucked!
  • Having previously read The One Ring 1e, I was expecting more from being “free from 5e” and using a dedicated system. But honestly? I kinda preferred AiME - if I was going to teach someone, you can just get on and play it.

Some other comments:

  • I was amused (but pleased) to see that what is effectively a D&D 4e Skill Challenge is still a core part of these games That’s fine, I just remember the hatred some people gave it in 4e, and it’s still here now
  • Journeys have been made a bit easier in terms of weird dice maths, but it’s still a bunch of tables that either the DM has to rush through, or pre-roll in downtime. It’s not a complaint, just an observation they haven’t suddenly solved it (somehow)

Finally, I signed up to play this with friends still in Europe, and ugh, playing 1100-1300 on a Sunday was pretty crap for me. I don’t think I was the best player, distracted trying to squeeze it into the almost-middle of the day.

Tools

We played with Discord for voice, a Google Jamboard for our VTT, and Google Sheets for the character sheet. The sheet is neat, it auto-calculates nearly everything - although that does mean you have to use it the way it wants to be used, which isn’t always obvious when you’re new to the game.

Jamboard is alright if you’re okay with boxes for the minis.