We had what I think was my very favorite session of The One Ring last night. Lots of things worked out really well. And we had both our first retirement as well as our first refusal to retire. Terrifying and fascinating. Notes and thoughts in bullet form as always for your bathroom reading pleasure.
* Our dwarf finally got his fourth and final PC-side dark trait: Murderous. And it was so great. The session was 2951 of Darkening of Mirkwood, with Ceawin trying to appease the uneasy spirits south of his lands in the old barrows. Instead of making it an off-screen NPC thing, I had the dwarf himself actually craft the offering to the uneasy spirits: a beautiful and expensive helm to be placed in the barrows.
So they need to get the helm from the dwarf’s workshop (outside Woodman Hall) over to East Bight, yeah? They’ve figured out that the “short cut” through the Narrows is a terrible idea, so they’ve established a fairly safe route down around the bottom of Mirkwood. It takes like 2 weeks by horse to make the trip but whatever, they’re not getting poisoned by the Shadow along the way.
But they are well exposed to bad apples out of The Toft, this creepy town that was once enthralled to the Necromancer. I build the place up to be like a really creepy rural village you might not want to stop in on a long road trip.
So, anyway, since they didn’t really take any precautions to be secretive about their trip, word gets out that they’re moving this expensive bit of treasure. The hobbit lookout gets 3 great successes to spot the bandits, and I give them plenty of time to make a plan: stand and fight, or try to disappear in the woods (which are Southern Mirkwood, which is pretty much the most evil place in Middle-Earth other than Mordor itself).
Well, when they all made their awareness/hunting/whatever rolls to spot the bandits, the miserable Dwarf rolled an eyeball. And his scene was about his Murderous trait.
Something I’ve always been a bit skeptical about in The One Ring is that the GM takes over for the bout of madness. Ehhh…I’ve seen a couple times that neither the player nor the victims seem to really own their actions. When the elf decided to slit the throats of some of Mogdred’s men instead of bringing them back to Ingomer for questioning, that was me. And sure enough, neither the elf’s player nor anybody else in the party really holds him accountable for that. Weak.
This time, I asked the dwarf player who he felt most needed to be murdered in their company. And it was perfect, perfect for the game because he made a choice and everyone knew it.
He chose the hobbit, who has enjoyed a charmed life all game long. He’s never gone mad, he’s been miserable or weary maybe once each, he wisely took Confident as his first virtue when he had the chance, and he’s been extraordinarily lucky in our fight scenes. So the dwarf, overcome with jealousy, is sick of the little showboat’s bullshit as he once again tries to make (entirely reasonable and smart) plans about these bandits. He dives across the tiny campfire and lays into the character with his axe.
* One thing The One Ring doesn’t really do well is PvP combat. Related to that is that the game also doesn’t really handle non-combat actions that well. There are a few baked-in options (awe, inspire, defend, escape) but if you want to do anything other than stand toe-to-toe, well, you need to get creative if you want to stay within the framework.
We ended up structuring the fight around the Dwarf basically being an NPC, with the rest of the company positioning against him. It worked quite well, actually. And there were some great mechanical/story twists within the fight! Like, the dwarf is actually the hobbit’s focus character! So the hobbit’s player does not want the dwarf harmed, because that’ll mean taking a shadow point. So when it’s the Barding’s turn out in the open to try and wear down the dwarf (hopefully not wounding him but you never know, shit happens in combat), the hobbit in defensive drew the Barding’s attack to himself! I couldn’t figure out why that’d be illegal, so we rolled with it. Totally fascinating.
The hobbit’s plan was to draw the dwarf away from the rest of the company so nobody would get hurt. That’s pretty tricky to do within the Battle rules, which as a baseline offer nothing more than positioning for the company to defeat a group of enemies. But what The One Ring does have is its Trait rules, which I’m now convinced are the killer app of the game.
The most interesting Trait rule, IMO, is that you can use a Trait to make a common skill roll where you normally could not. So that’s what they did, injecting skills into the combat sequence where normally they’d only be allowed to make weapon checks (or the special actions attached to each combat position). This is totally genius! Because, guess what, not everyone’s gonna have the right tool for the job. The Barding, for example, is this smooth talker but has literally nothing available to stop a fight and get some words in edgewise. So trying to talk the dwarf down didn’t work. But the Hobbit, well, he’s True Hearted, so yeah, absolutely Persuade the Dwarf to ignore the rest of the company as you run away.
I have more thoughts on just how powerful the Trait rules are, but for now this is my current favorite thing about them.
* Eye of Mordor rules, wow, the game is fucking grim now. Since the Enemy has retaken Dol Guldur, I’ve activated the Eye rules from Rivendell. They’re fantastic! Basically you come up with a baseline value for the company based on who’s in it (the Eye ignores hobbits but takes special interest in elves, for example), what they’re carrying (oh all those Famous Weapons you’ve been picking up with your Valor increases, yeah, the Eye finds them very interesting), who they are to the people in the area (helloooo Heroes of the Woodmen!), and so on. Then as the game proceeds, that value gets a bump every time the company gains Shadow, rolls an Eye, uses “magical” virtues (elf magic, dwarven “broken spells,” etc.), and so on. When the chase number equals the target of the terrain they’re in — it’s an inverse of the regular terrain TN table, with free lands having a very high chase value and the darklands obvs being very low — there’s a Revelation. The Enemy takes direct action against the company, or the company experiences supernaturally shitty luck, or whatever.
Combined with my “everything is blighted all the time” rule w/r/t Shadow gain from the terrain, that’s a fucking lot of bad-guy pressure applied to the company at all times.
The net result in our game was that the Revelation happened while the Hobbit recovered from his wound delivered by the dwarf. They’re chilling in East Bight and everyone wants to use their two-rolls-per-day option while they’re just sitting around. Okay, cool. So they’re investigating stories of orc attacks in the area, as well as the lights/voices of the uneasy dead. Then the roll an Eye, the Enemy reveals itself, and a Great Orc with a band of soldiers springs its trap on the company.
The game feels really dangerous now, I think.
* Fellowship phase after everything that went down was bittersweet and difficult and actually pretty amazing. I was saying that The One Ring doesn’t really pump me up but I gotta say I’m feeling pretty pumped now!
The Hobbit, having been nearly killed by someone he considered a dear friend, took the “There and Back Again” option from Rivendell: he left the company, went home to the Shire, and spent it with his family. He gained a permanent Shadow but got back like 6 Hope. Really the narratively perfect choice.
The Dwarf, looking down the barrel at his fifth and final bout of madness and with Murderous, Spiteful, Brutal etc on deck, realized he’d be a terrible danger to everyone. Without apologizing or explaining, he’s withdrawn to his workshop outside Woodmen Hall, his adventuring days behind him. Hobbits are not allowed in his workshop. No idea what the player is taking next, but he’s looking at the cool Rivendell options as well as a straight Woodman (which tbh they should have, given the focus of Darkening of Mirkwood).
The Barding, though, whoo boy. Miserable for almost the entire session, he decided to try and heal his Shadow through craftwork at his home in East Bight (where he’s been married to Ceawin’s daughter and now has a kid). Not only did he fail to do so, he rolled an Eye. While miserable. In the Fellowship phase. Boom, now he’s Treacherous. So he snuck into Ceawin’s hall and murdered him, freeing the clan from weak leadership. I think he’s just taken over the clan, actually. But talk about weak leadership! He’s only got status 2, and there are plenty of clansmen NPCs who surely must have higher status than him. Then there’s the matter of answering, or not, difficult questions about the death of Ceawin: lying and deception gets you 2 Shadow, after all. Tick tick tick.
Oh, and where the dwarf knew enough to retire before he hurt someone? The Barding says fuck that. They basically have a villain in the company now. Yowch.
Other stuff:
* Magical Treasure rules from Rivendell are actually pretty neat. I wanted the elven weapon the hobbit retrieved from Dol Guldur last year to be magical thing, so I built it. And sure enough, he’s really anxious to discover/unlock the two hidden weapon goodies. Hard-pressed to find a Loremaster, though, and they haven’t set Rhosgobel up as a sanctuary yet, so… I’ve got goodies built for everyone else now as well.
* Status rules are starting to make a difference. Everyone has 1 or 2 status now, and they’re all starting to embellish the end-of-year stuff quite nicely. The elf, for example, has started formal patrols in Mirkwood of mixed human and elven troops (with her in command, since she’s Arrogant and all).
* The retirement/inheritance rules are ridiculous. We’ve played 7 sessions and they’ve earned, I think, a total of 18 XPs. The dwarf’s successor will only get 2 free XPs to start! The table goes to 250 XP, which by my calculations is about 100 sessions of play. So, you know, two solid years of weekly sessions to max that out. Come on.
* A recurring meta-problem has raised its ugly head again: the fact that my attention span typically limits the game to 10ish sessions. Well, we’re on #7 right now and thus far I don’t feel any itchiness to move on. But maybe! Anyway, that fact kind of fucks up games that rely on loooong reward cycles. For example, the dwarf burning out in 7 sessions: I’m not so sure the game is actually built to do that, you know? But maybe! Dwarves are exceptionally goth in the Tolkien as well as in The One Ring, and he did take the “get a bonus to common skills equal to your Shadow” virtue, so maybe? It certainly played out that the Dwarf blew out first, the human may blow out next, the elf is riding a very fine line and the Hobbit will hold out a good long time.
This happened in our Urban Shadows game as well: one of the players decided to go all-in on gaining Corruption, “knowing” the game wouldn’t last long enough for him to actually suffer for it. That’s kind of a bummer. I have no idea what to do about it. Probably nothing.
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A couple weeks off the game but we’re back in the saddle. It was our come-to-Jesus session, where the Company faced a for-real existential crisis and came to grips with the fact that belonging to a Company means sharing goals. The last session, everyone was flying in all different directions and there was tons of (really interesting) Shadow-driven internal drama.
First decision was whether to winter together or apart. Wisely, I think, they went their separate ways, licked their wounds so to speak. One of the characters achieved his first level in Standing! Neat. One of them tended to their holding, the hobbit went back to the Shire and was graced with his culture’s Lucky Armour (terrible name), and the elf continued to withdraw and hold everyone at arms’ length.
Notable stuff that I thought was notable:
* Since rereading The Hobbit, I decided to put that knowledge to good use! So they had a chance to make some Explore rolls in search of ancient ruins and, perhaps, treasure. It turned into a neat scene: traveling through the east nether vales en route to Rhosgobel, they went to visit the Kingstone (+3 Hope! Once! I decided not to make it a Fellowship action since they’d gone out of their way to make the journey), and then continued down to the Great Anduin River to poke around the ruins of a funereal … funerary … hell, I don’t know what to call it. The pre-mausoleum prep area before the ancient Northmen of the river valley sent their honorable dead down the river in a boat. Turned out great.
* Followup to the previous bullet: What’s the carrying capacity of a horse? They pulled a lot of treasure out of that structure, and I love the idea that encumbrance is the limiting factor to treasure-hunting, but if horses can, you know, carry hundreds of Encumbrance then the point is kind of moot. Or more likely, I keep horse-accessible barrows low-stakes.
* I’m really enjoying the existential dread that the Dwarf player is now feeling. He’s got 3 of his 4 shadow traits, he’s at 10 Hope and 18 Shadow (and of course 3 permanent), and every roll is a chance for him to invoke “Murderous” as a trait in a shadow scene. Terrifying. The player kind of bounces back and forth between happy nihilism (yay, I’ll play a different dude) and omg it’s going to shit everyone’s gonna dieee. Good! I think there’s a lot of very effective black magic baked into the particular sequence of shadow traits you pick up. It ramps up expectations really well.
* My Burning Wheel addicts are grumbling that their shadow traits don’t earn them XPs. That way lies madness! I agree that the roleplaying has been really great; they’re more than happy to proactively indulge their shadow traits. But it’s pure roleplay, not an incentivized economic decision. How interesting that that decision is a-ok in BW but I feel like it would be all wrong in TOR. BW wants to reward character-driven play while TOR wants to reward companionship. It is surprisingly and sometimes hilariously difficult to get them all on the same page.
* They just finished the last good year before the Shadow reappears in Middle-Earth. I struggled not to laugh and laugh as they looked at their burned-out husks and said those were the good years? I think my personal take on Middle-Earth is way heavier and grimmer than maybe Tolkien’s, especially in the years after The Hobbit, but whatevs.
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Intense! Sounds like you really have cracked the bones of the system and gotten to the delicious marrow, even if it took some struggle to get there. I wish I was able to get my TOR group together regularly. I think we’ve played 4 sessions in 6 months… I’m pretty convinced I’m not going to bother again.
Dang that’s good stuff.
Good, meaty breakdowns of actual play are the foundation of the Beakley #brand.
It certainly played out that the Dwarf blew out first, the human may blow out next, the elf is riding a very fine line and the Hobbit will hold out a good long time.
That sounds…pretty accurate compared to Tolkien’s writings. Maybe the human would have gone first in actual Tolkien, but this isn’t far off. The Hobbit holding out is entirely appropriate.
I am loving the sound of how character development works in this game. I’m having a hard time finding games that give players meaningful choices about turning from good to bad and then making concrete and interesting things happen because of those choices. Sounds like this hits that mark pretty well, especially if you let the player run their own madness scene (which I’m entirely in favor of – losing control to the GM is one of my least favorite RPG tropes).
Splunge for me, too.
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Dave Turner I’m doing a terrible job of leveraging my #brand to #monetize your #eyeballs. I’m not even sure what a KPI is but I don’t have any.
You’ve missed that window, but maybe you can start charging your players in exchange for being their GM? You will be the one to turn professional GMing into a pillar of the American economy.
They’ll just end up outsourcing my GMing to a call center in the Philippines.
I hear they got killer GMs in Manila. 🙁
Well given the extraordinarily awful things I’ve said to/about folks re for-profit GMing, I’d have to change my name or set up a dba or something.
Paul Beakley We’re in a post-Trump world now, Paul. You can flip-flop all you want and no one is allowed to say anything.
You’ve been using your encounter hack for a while now. Are you happy with it? Wishing it could do more? I guess its a good sign that its mostly dropped to the background.
You said last time you missed the mechanical beat of end of session moves touching base with player goals. Do you think shadow points fill that void?
Your players really seem to bring a lot to their characters. Does the game facilitate that, or is it more your table style that comes up no matter what game you are playing?
Your revelation about giving the player the choice of how his murderous trait surfaced, gave me chills.
Adam D something I meant to mention earlier before I derailed my own thread: I feel like our experience playing The Great Pendragon Campaign was vital training for me, at least, to get the most out of Darkening of Mirkwood. The skill I learned there was how to leverage all the year-end context that got layered on. In GPC it’s procedurally generated, which is very cool but wow it’s a lot of overhead (brain cycles, time, system mastery if you’re using Book of the Manor/Entourage/Battle and so on). In DoM it’s largely delivered in complete form by the campaign.
It kind of makes me want to swing back around on Torchbearer and/or Mouse Guard as well, and see if I can put the town/winter rules in those games to better use. OTOH they’re so relatively crunchy and restrictive that I’m not sure they’d actually prompt new fictional context that much. Maybe! I don’t know.
Paul Beakley Agreed. I think I need to wait for my players to realize that setting aside three hours a week where nerd games are a priority isn’t actually that oppressive a request, so that I can actually play enough to learn those year-end systems.
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Adam D I thought you had a regular RPG group! Or am I misunderstanding your comment?
Paul Beakley I do! With about a 65% attendance rate, and the attention span of coked-up pigeons.
I know the house management stuff in ASoIaFRPG informed a lot of the early campaign and led to what’s happening now. I really do need to get back to using that stuff because it’s pretty much situation generation and helps focus both players and GM.
Josh Mannon that whole school of design really works for me. I know not every game needs it but the games that have it are games I usually like.
Adam D offer better coke? Dust the birdseed with it?
That sucks, man.
Wow, some great moments in the story there! I’m running the DoM campaign using the Burning Wheel so it’s really interesting to read your observations running it with ToR. Sounds like the system does indeed promote some interesting situations. I must admit I wasn’t confident ToR would deliver in that way, but it’s great to see that it does!
Aaron Berger sorry! I didn’t realize you had asked questions. Okay:
Encounter rules: they ended up very gently drifted in the end. Also we had a actual failed Encounter, and it’s put my players on notice (since the consequence was getting banned from the Black Tarn). I can go through it all once more if you’re curious.
Player goals: actually this was a really interesting evolution. The game really emphasizes The Company, and you only get xps for pushing the Company’s agenda. It’s the game’s fruitful void: there really aren’t rules for forcing your agenda onto the group, so they’re forced to talk things through. They pursue their own stuff mostly in Fellowship and everyone tries to do a little of their own stuff as long as it doesn’t jack up their XPs.
Roleplaying: at this point I think the system is giving the players all the right prompts. The chain of Shadow Traits is really potent, for example. Traits in general are quite effective. The Hope/Shadow struggle is perfect and very difficult. I’d say my players are largely being prompted in ways they respond well to, if that makes sense. By comparison, at least one of my players just cannot connect with a PbtA type character at all.
Getting the players to own the madness is awesome. Not every player will want to own that, but if they want to chew the scenery, there’s no better chance. The Darkest Self rules from Monsterhearts produce a very similar vibe.
Dan Hall oh yeah, Burning Wheel would produce quite a different game. TOR is kind of the anti-BW in some important ways! Specifically, I think, in how the Company is so dominant. You could mandate every character take a Company related Belief and maybe replicate that. No idea at all how you’d do the Shadow stuff. Probably a custom emotional attribute. Are you bothering? Middle-Earth in TOR reeks with radioactive evil.
Paul Beakley Yes, I’ve encouraged players to make a “fellowship belief”. Mostly that works well. The plot has enough traction now that most of the beliefs are heavily tied to the situations at hand (we’re up to year 2962 this weekend).
I did start with Shadow as an emotional attribute, but I soon realised that Grief, Greed, and a slightly modified Corruption for mortals would do the trick anyway, and that seems to be working pretty well so far. It is a slower burn, though, than what has happened in your game.
As far as replicating the accumulation of shadow from journeys within the wood itself, I’ve just made really high stakes for failed orientation rolls. Sometimes I’ll throw specific Greed, Grief, or Corruption related encounters at them in the forest. Usually pretty severe consequences in encounters (a large group spiders are pretty awful to deal with in BW), or by taxing their Health (which really sucks, setting them up for failed recovery tests later). Those things seem to have built a reasonable amount of dread about even entering the wood, but I suspect not in the same direct way as with ToR.
So, yeh, evidently different. It’s cool to see the comparison! I like hearing stories from the same campaign. It’s a cool campaign and your ideas gives me ideas about how it should run. But also interesting from a game design point of view. I’m fascinated by the different experiences the systems might deliver.
Dan Hall I did something similar with Adam D, who was running GPC with Dramasystem (which I still think is/was crazypants).
Someday I’d love to sketch out how different games prompt different creative contributions.
Wow, GPC with Dramasystem…I’m impressed!
Crazypants is my middle name.
I want to hear more about that pendragon-dramasystem game! Have you got a write up anywhere Adam D ?
Dan Hall no, I ran it a few years ago. I’m happy to answer questions. Circle me and tag and I’ll fill you in?
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Sounds awesome! We’re going at a much slower pace through Tales and only the Elf has started to really build up shadow.
I really do feel the extra mechanics in Rivendell are the missing piece of the puzzle. Magical Treasure and the Eye of Mordor really make the game zing.
Oh and Rangers too. I let one of my players be a Ranger and they are NOT to be fucked with.
Andrew Kenrick yeah, I’m very satisfied with the pace. Any slower and I’d despair of ever getting through the campaign; any faster and nothing would feel meaningful.
So from playing Paul’s TOR game I will have to tell you that lack of complex beliefs in the character burn was hard to adjust to. They felt very broad and undefined. My main trait, curious felt very vague. Turns out that is the fun of it. Turns out that a vague undefined trait sets up for a lot of fictional freedom. Now when i want to interact with the story I’m curious and roll (if possible) my way into the scene. Great mechanic
?
Meanwhile, my players keep making stupid salacious jokes, and seems to be more eager to abuse NPC’s weakness than to help them…
Pierre M abusing NPCs is almost certainly a misdeed! That shit generates Shadow! Seriously, hold their feet to the fire on that.
Ara Winter do you like the performative quality of having the chase tokens on display? I was wondering about that; it’s implied in the rules as well. Feels like Static from Lacuna: you know something terrible is coming but you don’t know when or what.
I prefer the ramp up be secret. I don’t like when people try to game that
kind of count down. They look at the pile and say we can take some more
shadow no worries
Robert Chilton haha if they actually convince themselves to take more shadow, I’m all for it. Maybe try it once? Consider that you guys haven’t actually tried to suss out the region types/levels that closely on the map (other than Southern Mirkwood and the mountains being a no-go zone!), and that’s what you need to know to understand the danger you’re in.
I’m kind of intrigued!
Paul Beakley Well, they only discuss, as players, never in characters, about “fun” stuff they might do to NPCs; suffice to say I have a few issues with my players (and am trying to deal with it)
I went to bed thinking it was just the worst session ever, but woke up thinking the game is stronger than ever. Weird!
It’s been maybe 3 weeks since we played. One missed week is usually enough to let the fizz out of the bottle, and more than half the time it’s me having spotted something shiny on the ground (hello Undying). Less than half the time it’s because nobody’s really paying much attention to the storylines, and they’ve got a game-fiction memory the size of a tiny commemorative thimble.
Last night we were down a player, and will be next week as well. We agreed we’d continue, especially since the missing player is also the one who took his Dwarf into retirement after his fourth bout of madness. There’s another character, a Barding, who’s also at his fourth bout of madness and decided to not retire him. Which is great! But on his very first roll, he rolled an Eye and that was that.
Thoughts in bullet form for your bathroom reading pleasure:
When the Barding player hit his fourth bout of madness, I had an idea about how it would play out so, per RAW, I took over the scene. But just previously, when the Dwarf experienced his fourth bout, I let him choose. And I felt weird about that. Lots of conflicting agendas happening: my desire for that scene to play out the way I wanted it to, not super-trusting the player to take the reins and really chew the scenery with his villainy.
Well I was stupid as hell, because that dude chewed the scenery on his fifth and final break! Having smothered a grievously wounded Ceawin in his sleep, the Barding had expected to take over the woodmen of East Bight (because he’s treacherous and scheming and all that). Well, the East Bight families decided instead to have a folk moot and decide among the families who would lead them. So the Barding stands up to make his case and eyeballs the roll. This time I let him play out his final break, and it was fabulous: he made a marvelous villain speech (who else do I have to kill to take the crown? Wasn’t killing Ceawin enough? You fools! etc.), tried to murder the crowd’s favored candidate on the spot, and fluttered away to the woods to continue scheming.
tl;dr let your players do their bouts of madness and give them total license to chew the scenery. It plays out just as well as Darkest Self in Monsterhearts, and if your players aren’t feeling it — you know, they want to mitigate and finesse and edge-case it — this is not the game for them.
Having to create a new character on the spot and shoehorn him into the company, we only had a couple hours to play out 2952. Which turns out to be fine, because it’s a pretty short year: march down the Old Forest Road to help an NPC on a fetch-quest. The fact the game survived a 50% turnover in the company and we had to do chargen on the spot should have been the death blow, but it was not. So yay us/them.The Eye of Mordor rules + everything is blighted = wow, hard game. Mirkwood is just the worst fucking place. We started with a completely fresh character and he’s already had his first bout of madness, having spent three weeks stumbling around in the forest. They had the pursuit run up three times in the forest, which I used to juice up otherwise normal Hazards into full-blown terrifying scenes. My favorite: I drew the Hidden Lair card from Hobbit Tales and it became a freakshow temple built out of Dwarven paving stones in the middle of the Old Forest Road, a honeypot trap laid by the Ghost of the Forest (a nazgul). Nazguls are way bad news one at a time.On the other hand, lengthy trips into the forest are starting to feel a teeny bit procedural, especially when it’s a roll-rich environment. There’s a lot of math setting up the Journey: 18 days in the Heart of Mirkwood in the summer means 3x TN18 Travel rolls and daily Corruption tests. Combined with Eye of Mordor, you do not go into the forest without the Enemy knowing you’re there. You just don’t. But it’s also a fairly heavy improvisational load for me to come up with stuff that frequently. It’s not terrible! But I think I need to brainstorm Mordor pursuit scenes in advance and keep them in my pocket.Last night, I walked away thinking I’d just call this game and start something fresh. I’m so pleased that we’re not, though: we’ve lost two excellent character threads but gained an amazing villain (the treacherous Barding!) and injected some fresh new ideas into the company.
Onward!
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Once again, real life has reared its ugly head. We’ve got some big life changes coming for one of our regulars, summer schedules are notoriously hectic, and it’s just been very hard to keep a dense game going in the long run. So I’m putting The One Ring to bed for now. We might maybe swing back around to it but if I’m being honest, we probably won’t. Pendragon and Mutant: Year Zero were both excellent long-form games and we could return to either, but probably won’t.
It’s been a good run! 10 sessions I think? And I have no regrets at all running it. Honestly I don’t even have an especially interesting postmortem. Here’s all I’ve got:
* The traits are the killer app of the game, even moreso than the Hope/Shadow economy. I think my favorite thing about them, truly innovative, is the mechanism that allows the players to roll dice when they normally “couldn’t.” That of course requires some sense of when dice can and cannot be rolled, which the game has (making common skill rolls during combat) but also is kind of hazy on (the GM has hard-framed a scene or consequence, maybe not knowing they’re doing hard framing, and the players intercede via a Trait).
There’s also this thing where a Trait can be used in lieu of a roll (that you could have already made) to succeed with a normal success. That works pretty well, but more than once there was this kind of vagueness about a) did the Trait give me the opportunity to roll? and b) so does that mean I’ve now succeeded? Just requires the GM always stay on top of the logic of the scene.
I like how Traits interact with advancement. I love how Shadow Traits bite you in the ass, actually making the game harder instead of easier as you advance. But maybe the most potent medicine in the cabinet is the fact that they provide such great guidance to play — especially the Shadow traits. There’s something super-powerful in knowing the track you’re on: players feel empowered to play their worst selves, even when motivated by nothing more than the virtue of doing so.
Traits are great. Highest marks.
* I should have paid much more attention to the Company Goal element. It’s so subtle but so important that all the players hash things out among themselves. It’s most definitely the game’s fruitful void: no social combat rules, no leverage, pure negotiating and compromising. It means the players themselves have no tools to go to, so I think quieter and less assertive players get the short end of the stick (the very oldest of table problems), but it is what it is.
It was super interesting to watch the Company Goal fall apart whenever I didn’t step in and ensure that it had been discussed. And it most assuredly did fall apart every time I didn’t specifically stop and make them settle on something. There was one outright argument during one of the sessions, even. Negotiating the Company Goal is completely core to the experience; if I ever return to this, I’ll make damned good and sure it happens every session.
It’s not perfect, though, since the GM (Loremaster whatever) has to spend a good bit of time in prologue before every session before the players have enough information to settle on a plan. Not the worst, not by a long shot, but it’s part of the game’s form factor.
I think if you stick to formalizing a Company Goal every session and you can be a hardass about rewarding XPs based on it, it’s a very solid method of encouraging communal effort. I’ve kind of gotten soft in my old age, though, and don’t love arguing with argumentative players who insist their efforts were aligned with the Company Goal (even if indirectly, obliquely, or by accident).
* Hope/Shadow is a very satisfying play economy. It evokes all the right feelings, gives the players both a sense of safety (I can succeed!) and a sense of dread (but at what cost?!). Solid design.
* There are tons of finicky little things about the game I wish were formally hammered out. True of every game ever published, of course. No “buts” attached to that. It’s just a fact. I do think the underlying philosophies of TOR’s game design are conflicted enough, though, that it’s hard to really nail down what they were going for all the time: trad with some new school gewgaws, with an extra layer of trad assumptions you have to filter for when trying to use the gewgaws. I’ve talked about that in previous threads and I don’t feel like re-litigating any of that. It makes me especially happy to play games where design and mechanical intent is straightforward (Burning Wheel, Apocalypse World, Fate, etc.).
* This was the first sprawling game in a very long time where I didn’t doodle up a Relationship Map. I love me a Relationship Map! But the fact that the Company travels around so much meant that I really needed to have lots of community-based r-maps maybe interconnected somehow. Some elaborate 3D thing maybe. Instead, I did up little tent cards for every NPC, with name and descriptive stuff on the front and notes to myself on the back. I’d set those up to indicate who was present in a scene.
This meant that sometimes I forgot about certain NPCs until I reviewed my notes (one sheet per year of play). It also meant that I could sometimes surprise the players when an old face reappeared. Not purposeful, just how it worked out.
* Related to the lack of R-map, kind of: I made a real effort to make all the Free Folk by-default friendly to the Company. Like, they might be suspicious of the Company if they wandered into a remote village, but the Company could reliably not worry about getting stabbed in their sleep everywhere all the time. Kind of an anti-Circle of Hands vibe, you know? I think the Cultural Title rules went a long way toward making this happen: oh hey, you’re heroes of the Woodmen, aren’t you? You’re one of Beorn’s thanes, awesome. And so on.
Sad but true: I don’t think hardly any of my other games feature friendly NPCs that will go out of their way to find, greet and be nice to the PCs. But, like, in our last session, Gierbald the Kinslayer (he’s nicer than his title makes him sound) kind of stumbled back into the Company after several years of absence and they all partied together. It was nice! And I think it helped the players feel not so isolated and distrustful.
That’s something I’m going to bring to future games: not everyone needs to apply negative pressure to the characters. Positive pressure, or even just friendship, is okay! (Duh.)
* I have Opinions on how to run the game as a one-shot. I think it could be done! Like as a convention game or whatever. I may try it. Mostly it involves building pregens that are pre-loaded with a Shadow Trait and maybe some temporary Shadow when the game starts. Get the economic pressures into play a little faster.
Annnnnd that’s it. Hope you’ve enjoyed the TOR posts. Thinking about what to run next!
The AP Series
Part 0Part 1Part 2Part 3Part 4Part 5Part 6Part 7Part 8Part 9Part 10And this Wrap-Up
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