Aaron Berger​​ interesting question! I love it. Okay.

So the Mordor rules were a one-time escalation, right? Individual rolls aren’t any harder but there are many more of them now. And this game isn’t really built on interesting failure the way, say, Burning Wheel is. The mechanisms are nearly identical but the reward cycle is different.

So instead of interesting failure being the main point of engagement, you’ve got hope/shadow management. You can succeed nearly always, but it’ll cost you. And Traits make it so you’ll succeed (almost) the rest of the time. If you’ve failed in TOR it’s on your terms. But all those extra rolls mean increasingly more chances to flub a roll, or spend precious hope.

Now in some ways its most certainly getting harder for the characters! Specifically, permanent Shadow. Because along with that are new shadow traits, and an ever growing range for the GM to use them. The designers did a nice job of stepping around lots of obvious overlap.

So…Yeah, I think in some ways the game is getting harder as they go. It’s really hard to get back hope. It’s impossible to rid yourself of permanent shadow. The more your Valor goes up, the fancier your gear gets (which the Eye pays attention to). The higher your skills get, the more expensive they are to level up (prompting you to not use Traits and instead gamble on rolls).

Lots of layers of things affecting each other.