Fourth episode of our TOR game is in the books. It was very satisfying! I’m smiling at myself that “satisfying” is now my benchmark for success; dunno if I will ever have, really need, or should ever again aim for “fucking awwwwwesome!” again. Satisfying. Yeah.
Our company was finally faced with a wide-open “soooo what do you want to do?” Fellowship phase aftermath. I talked through what all had happened through the end of 2948 and the beginning of 2949, set everyone up with stuff-at-home momentum, created a few new NPCs to start tapping into. The plan ended up being “let’s swing south to the Black Tarn and check out the progress on their new hall, look into Ingomer’s “bloody ghost” story, take a long hard look at Mogdred’s setup down there, then swing through East Bight, rest at Ceawin’s, then up north to Thranduil’s royal hunt.”
It’s great! Very open-ended. I love that everyone in the company gets a little of what they care about, and they all stick together and help each other out. Nice.
Anyway, I had a chance to roll out my modifications to Encounters, and I would say they were quite successful. I talked through them all, and the players raised some good concerns. Anyway, to re-outline with additional thoughts:
* Roleplaying through figuring out what the NPC is about = Good! This is pure RAW and will set both Tolerance as well as the best way to introduce yourself. The players ground up against the “awe is for a single awesome spokesman to represent the company” rule, mostly because the Dwarf is terrific at Awe but suuuucks at social skills. So they have to decide, you know, whether it’s worth pulling in Courtesy or even Riddle just so everyone has a chance to talk, even if those are not the preferred introduction modes. That whole system really worked well.
* Setting the high-level intent for an Encounter and holding off until it’s nailed down, that’s good. It’s hard. It’s a best-practice thing that feels an awful lot like “so what can you ask for in a Duel of Wits?” It also intersects badly with the rest of the system unless you bundle in Ralph Mazza’s Boons stuff. I didn’t do Boons but I’m going to try it out next time.
* Secret Tolerance is GOOD, especially when combined with “meeting Tolerance means something terrible happens.” Not RAW I think (Nicholas Hopkins you’re playing correctly), but the cat-and-mouse freakout about nudging up against Tolerance, that’s very nice.
Stuff I want to nail down tighter:
* Probably roll Boons in next time. That reorganizes the system around actual achievables, and sets up compromises. It’s good. In fact I think this is all I need to roll in, because this will fix other issues I have w/r/t the Encounter’s intent, Tolerance, and just what non-talky successes/failures look like. As written, I think, successes and failures of any rolls during Encounter count toward success level as well as breaking Tolerance. It feels very abstract, i.e. you roll Lore to gather info about some new shit that has just come to light, and you fail, and that…looks like it’s pissing off the NPC, even though it’s something entirely inside your own head.
We also had this awkward bit where a failed Lore roll split the company on whether to pursue their original intent — Amadeola helps us hunt the “bloody ghost” versus the belief that Amadeola cooked up the “bloody ghost” story to cover for internal badness (murrrrder?) at the Black Tarn. This is kind of where the Duel of Wits also falls down: you’re committed to this thing, even though your thing may reasonably change shape in the course of argument. I think Boons may fix this as well, esp. if they’re renegotiable along the way.
After a lengthy Encounter at the Black Tarn, they decide to head south into superbad forestland looking for Tyrant’s Hill. Amadeola’s folks never go that far south, because South Mirkwood is a bunch of scary bullshit.
We finally had our first bout of madness, which was pretty wild. The corruption tests started stacking up pretty bad against both the elf and the dwarf. The dwarf took a cultural virtue last session that I’m totally in love with: your standing Shadow counts as a bonus on all Common tests. Holy shit! So he’s up to, get this, 12 fucking Shadow. Oh my food. But he also doesn’t really care, since all, all of it goes away as soon as he goes mad. Meanwhile it’s a really sweet carrot. Who doesn’t want +12? It’s clever.
But it wasn’t the dwarf who broke, it was the elf. Her curse is power, so now her first negative Trait is Resentful. So flexible. So perfect. She also is in the middle of this love triangle with the Barding PC and this Beorning trader lady I introduced over the fellowship phase. They’ve already been catty toward each other, but now with Resentful? Niiiice.
The elf’s bout of madness was marvelous and scary and was entirely the player’s idea. They had stumbled onto Tyrant’s Hill and started evaluating Mogdred’s force disposition. And then someone fumbled their Stealth test and they stumbled onto a small patrol. They had a fight, didn’t kill anyone but did knock everyone out of the fight. The brave little hobbit got wounded, augh! But during the fight, the elf rolled an eyeball.
After the battle, they’re gathering the prisoners they’ve taken to start asking them questions. And the elf starts quietly slitting their throats. And since the GM gets to play the character, gosh yes I start spending Hope to avoid the PCs who are trying to stop me/her! She’s a fucking elf, totally at home in Mirkwood and an unstoppable killing machine when she needs to be. Yeah, they all died. The company is horrified.
So we ended the session sincerely torn between backing off to the Black Tarn and recovering the hobbit’s wound, or pushing forward through the narrows and resting with Ceawin’s folks. If they back off, they’ll miss Thranduil’s royal hunt. If they push on, the Narrows are no treat either.
Satisfying!
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Last night’s session was dedicated almost entirely to hunting and fighting the Werewolf of Mirkwood. Despite being, basically, 2+ straight hours of fighting a single monster, it was a surprisingly satisfying session.
Some thoughts!
* I have moved from being meh about the Encounters system to actively disliking it. It’s dumb. It doesn’t work. Given the extraordinary popularity of the system, I tend to think I’ve missed…something. I don’t know what! OTOH it wouldn’t be the first time that I’ve discovered a fatal flaw in something and stood as the lone voice of reason howling against the fandom hordes.
My gut is undecided on this. My most likely scenario is that my NPCs need to be pushing back in Encounters, making their own personality rolls. The game is totally unclear on how binding or effective NPC social effects may be. Can an NPC Persuade (via “personality”) a PC? No fucking idea. But this would, at the very least, allow for compromises and partial victories. As it stands, between the one-way nature of social conflict in TOR and the stupid Tolerance system, the characters don’t ever face possible failure or even compromise. I hate it. It’s broken.
TOR veterans, please tell me how you’re working Encounters. I need to see how it’s been drifted into something functional.
* I used the Hobbit Tales deck to generate hazards. Works okay. A little generic but also a little faster than rolling on two tables. I’ll use it again. The illustrations are nicely inspiring, at least. Allowing these hazards to play out into full scenes (and not just one-off resolutions, depending on the mood at the table) is healthy and good.
* Everyone’s finally earned enough XPs to up their Wisdom/Valor and get new Virtues/Rewards! Fun. After the godawful beatdown of hunting and killing the Werewolf of Mirkwood, they went straight to Fellowship and just blew off the rest of the year. The Hobbit, who through player bravery and some lucky rolls ended up being the one to kill the Werewolf (amazing, really), bought himself the Confidence virtue, and just in the nick of time: he was down to 2 Hope and 1 Shadow after the fight. Of course he won’t be buying Confidence again for a very long time.
Everyone took the title “Hero of the Woodmen” as their Fellowship action, which is just perfect. I’m loving that they can build and maintain their Standing across multiple locations via Titles, clever and smart. So now they have homes scattered across Woodmen territory. Neat!
Meanwhile, the players think it’s weird that the only thing Treasure is really good for is buying Standing. Since they don’t have any, it’s hard to illustrate the difference in the fiction between having roots in a community and being an untrustworthy wanderer.
Gonna try and get at least a couple of the characters involved in Holdings (per Darkening of Mirkwood). I think that’ll be interesting.
* Reverting the advancement point system to RAW was absolutely the right call. In fact my player who really wanted to just use Traits for everything saw it immediately. “But I like leaning on my Traits!” he says. And I’m like, go ahead, nothing’s stopping you! And sure enough, he looked at his APs and saw the work ahead of him. So, yay, correct diagnosis and an easy fix.
*Also on the Trait front, regarding the extreme ease that players can opt out of the Journey system entirely by spamming a good Trait (i.e. Bardings and their Hearty trait): my ad hoc ruling is that you can use any given Trait once per Journey. That makes for an interesting gamble, especially if they’re going somewhere new on the map and don’t know how hard it’ll be. It also helps mix up the fiction a little more.
* There’s this thing that wears me out, maybe more than anything else at any gaming table for any game: when a player maths out solutions with a complete disregard for fictional consequences. Turning a fictional situation to make a character statement into a math problem to solve just bums me out. Maybe it shouldn’t! But it also feels like taking the player at their word and letting them live with the fictional consequences is kind of passive-aggressive bullshit on my part. I’d prefer my players just talk honestly when these situations arise. But then there’s the investment and the winning. :-/
Ugh, agendas. Also Agendas.
The big one last night was the point at which the company has to decide whether to venture into the Mountains of Mirkwood — the single most evil place in all of Middle Earth, right alongside fucking Mordor — or possibly turn back (which of course is a completely false dilemma: someone else suggested setting a trap and using their brains and, hey, awesome idea). When I heard “well, I can take four bouts of madness and still survive,” I had to scratch my head. Really? That’s your criteria? Your character isn’t saving the world, he’s on a critter hunt. Yeezus.
I mean maybe, right? Do I take a player at their word? Do I stop the proceedings and try to have a heart-to-heart? In the moment, I hate this. As a practical human matter, it’s really fine as long as everyone in the conversation is participating honestly. Boy that last part, though. Hard to know for sure.
The Darkening timeline proceeds to the next year! My feeling is that, like The Great Pendragon Campaign, the passage of years is important enough that I should be keeping the Adventure phases of each year short and snappy, and focus more on the heroes’ lives during Fellowship.
<- Part 2 | Part 4 ->
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My Dwarf player grabbed that same one…yeah…i love dwarves.
…it’s elvses I hate, precious; nasty, trixy, so-special elvses…I hates them…
Nice! We’ve not had our first bout yet but money’s on out elf breaking first too – he’s spending Hope like there’s no tomorrow and has a few Shadow already…
Elves are douche-bags.
I’m rapt. I don’t have this game, and the system terminology’s going over my head, but it sounds fascinating.
So.. any complex system can be an entertaining Rube Goldberg machine in its own right. Deciphering what it’s trying to do, the designer’s intent, figuring out what you want to get out of it and how, etc. If I read you right, some of your enjoyment is from this sort of thing. Apart from that, are you finding there are tools in the system that you’d be sad to leave behind in moving to other games, perhaps because they’re producing experiences your group might not have had otherwise?
Satisfying is a good state to achieve from gaming. Nothing wrong with shooting for awesome but I’m happy if I hit satisfied. Like walking away from the game with that same feeling of eating a really good meal.
I judge a game/sessions success based on the number of emails and chats that happen afterwards. I find that a good session sparks creativity and excitement for the next one.
Michael Prescott I’m sad every time I move on to another game!
Chris Groff yeah, man. My players don’t really communicate with me about the game at all outside of the game, but I can usually read the aftermath pretty well.
Speaking of moving on – do you ever run long extended campaigns? I used to have this desire to run different games but in the last several years I’ve found myself far more content to stick with a given game (assuming everyone is enjoying it) and just stick with it.
One shots aside I want to see where a game/players go as things progress and escalate. I think that in some games as power scales up and the game broadens even if the core mechanics don’t change the game often has.
My upper tolerance has been 10ish episodes. I used to think that was a baked in personal limit but I’m going to see where this game takes us.
The skill base needed to extend a game beyond where novelty will carry you is hard to practice!
There definitely is a level of art (and luck) required in keeping things going and feeling fresh. There is a very narrow set of circumstances that can keep it moving a long and a whole crap ton of obstacles that can derail it.
Love reading these! Where can I read about “the Boons stuff”?
⚔
Whoa! Nice dark turn there…
Chris Gardiner I’ll talk about my take on the idea tomorrow. The short version is that you break up the Encounter intent into smaller steps.
After a week off, everyone was eager to jump back in on their adventure phase. It involves lots of tramping around Mirkwood, which is just this miserably blighted zone. And we stumbled into the game’s corruption death spiral.
Basically it goes like this: when your Shadow equals or exceeds your Hope, you become Miserable. When you’re Miserable, eventually you’ll experience a bout of madness in which you pick up a new bad trait, wipe your old Shadow, and pick up one permanent Shadow. It’s really similar to how Rot works in Mutant: Year Zero.
Well, so, play the game long enough and you see how hard it is to get Hope back. If you’ve had a bout of madness, you’ve certainly burned your Hope down. But then that damned permanent Shadow is right there, waiting to make you Miserable again and again. One of our characters went from zero to three permanent Shadow points (and three shadow traits, and three really terrible scenes played out) in one session. The dwarf started with one and now has three, and the elf went from zero to two.
On top of the ever narrowing window between Hope and Shadow, those shadow traits! They’re for the GM to hammer you with an additional d12 (take the lower of the two), which is the die that triggers the bout of madness! Eventually the H/S window closes, and you’re permanently Miserable.
I found the process to be surprisingly fast. It’s incentivizing! It’s also quite sudden. They went from “let’s push through to Ceawin’s Hall, heal our wounds, and make Thranduil’s hunt in time” to “fuck this, we’re fucking done, we’re totally fucked, oh my god we’re all gonna die” in a couple hours.
Not surprisingly, I think, this session also featured the most interesting roleplaying interpersonal scenes. Two characters had lovely mirrored bouts of madness in the same scene; another alienated Black Tarn’s clan during a freak out; and the human (who is now haughty, scornful and scheming!) decided Ceawin needs to ally with Lake-Town so seduced his daughter. There goes Ceawin’s plans to tie the clans together through marriage (as well as the Beorning woman who’d taken an interest in him).
From the outside, the fiction is suddenly brutal and intense. Good! I can’t tell how it feels from the inside, though. Two of the players have really keyed into their bad traits, a good excuse to ham up how they’ve already been aiming themselves. The third, the dwarf, is checked out now that he’s cruel and brutal, which doesn’t especially map to his internal vision I think. The rules say the GM plays the character through the madness but I opened it up to the players: they seemed to own their situation better when they were part of it. When I took over, there was enough emotional distance that it felt more like inconvenience than horror.
At this point I’m not sure how they recover. Really, really modest adventure phases for several years I guess? Sequential Fellowship phases? Only the Hobbit bought the Confidence virtue, and he is managing his shadow very carefully: no madness! The others got excited with fancy power-ups and now they don’t have the XPs to raise their wisdom. And maybe that’s okay: over the next two to five years, they tend to their knitting, rebuild their internal reserves, and build the courage to go back out into the world.
<- Part 4 | Part 6 ->
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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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