I'm working on an article on the Games skill group for The Hall of Fire, and I'm here to solicit ideas you might want to contribute to it.
First, I plan to break down the Games skill group into different general categories: Accuracy games, Bluffing games, Puzzle games, and Strategy games, with several examples of each type that might be appropriate in an LotR setting. (I'm aware that highly athletic games like wrestling are included in the Core Book, but I'm excluding them from the scope of this article.)
The games I'm including so far:
* Accuracy games (Nimbleness): Darts, Golf, Horseshoes, Marbles, Pick-up-Sticks, Snap-Dragon
* Bluffing games (Bearing): Brag, Liar's Dice
* Puzzle games (Wits): Guessing games, Riddles, Word games
* Strategy games (Wits): Draughts (checkers), King's Table (an old Viking game), Mills (aka Merrills or Nine Men's Morris), Noddy (an historical predecessor to Cribbage)
I'd like to know if anyone has invented new games for your chronicles, or adapted existing games to the Tolkien setting. I'm especially interested in games that aren't entirely luck-driven, but involve an element of skill.
The article will discuss other ways of influencing the outcome of a game, such as applying affinity bonuses from other skills (Legerdemain for card/dice games) and using cheats such as loaded dice. The Craft TN to make a set of loaded dice, and the Appraise or Observe TN to detect them, are rules that could find their way into an interesting game session.
I also plan to provide suggested extended skill tests to represent a selection of specific games. I'm still tossing around ideas on how to do that. For games where each round or phase is pretty much self-contained, like Liar's Dice or Noddy, you could represent the progress of the game with a few simple opposed Games tests.
For a strategic game like draughts or Mills, strong early play can create an advantage in the later game. I'd like to represent that by awarding a modest bonus to the victor of each opposed test, which could cumulatively have a snowball effect and produce a decisive victory in the last round (or make an upset even more startling).
Let me know if you have suggestions on how to model this sort of thing. I want to stick to simple, quick mechanics -- easy variations on the Extended Tests rule, if possible -- and use a high level of abstraction. I'd like it to be quick and fun for a player to pit her character against an opponent in a game, without it turning into a protracted disruption of the RPG session.
Lastly, I'm hoping to come up with one or two ready-made scenarios a Narrator can drop in to his chronicle to offer a Game skill challenge to the players. If anyone has good ideas about what this sort of thing might look like among the Elves, Dwarves, or other groups, I'd be happy to hear about it.
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