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Thread: Fellowship of the Ring Sourcebook available for purchase

  1. #46
    Originally posted by CorpBoy
    [B]Kong,

    Don't forget that the advancement rules aren't like other systems where the amount of experience to gain the next "level" goes up with each new level attained.
    makes no difference. any PC who actually manages to achieve that level of ability will break the system.

  2. #47
    Originally posted by Ineti
    I agree with EW and RobRob; errors aside, the FOTR sourcebook is a great reference. What's more, it's another nice LOTR RPG product. And there are more on the way.

    None of the errors in the book are what I call show-stoppers, though in an ideal world it would be nice to release an error-free product. I've been in the publishing business long enough to know that there's always an error SOMEWHERE in a release.
    considering the novel itself costs a fraction of the price of the sourcebook, it doesnt seem worth it. regional books would have been so much better.

  3. #48
    Originally posted by E W Dawson
    Unlike D&D, Coda LotR has, directly in the core rules, rules for bending the rules for epic or cinematic effect (see the narrator and magic chapters in the core book). But any further discussion of the rules and how to apply them should probably be the subject of another thread.

    that isnt quiote true, coda is simplistic and just asks that the narrator use his own judgement in most situations. this is not the same thing. there i snothing epic about the system at all other than it is married to an epic setting. starting players are not very epic in myview.

  4. #49
    >Okay, first off, there is no such thing as an "average" PC.


    the pc created by the default system is an average pc.

    >The way the advancement process works in CODA, each character is much more individualized tham that. AQre they more powerful than a starting character? Of course they are!

    why? whats to be gained by setting those limits? there is no 'of course' about it.

    >Actually, since Persuade involves an Opposed Test, then it is possible for her to fail if her opponent rolls higher than she does. It's really quite that simple.

    so the only people who could 'refuse' her cetainly wouldnt be starting PC's or indeed pc's for many sessions to come. that doesn strike me as pinkeeping with her character. it also eems too high. if her Persuade is +17 then how can you explain her being more persuasive than saruman!

    >Come on! These are HEROES (capitalization intentional)!

    what are the pcs then?
    the attraction of the game has to be the allure of playing those kinds of characters and not playing second fiddle to them.

    >They're legends. Nothing in the stats provided portrays the characters as more powerful than they were in the books and movies.

    seems to me that the game portrays them more powerfully.

    > But they aren't beyond the reach of the game's mechanics, kong. Given enough time and advancements, PCs too could have similar stats.

    and the system would fall to pieces .

  5. #50
    >If someone doesn't want the stats (or the other content) then no one (Decipher or anyone else) is standing there forcing them to buy the book. Out of curiosity, was kong required to purchase the book? Didn't think so.

    i never swaid anyone was obliged to buy the book, so what?

    >Who are you to tell people what they do and do not need in their games? Are you running my LotR RPG game? No, I am. You have no business telling me, or any other Narrator, what we need. We buy what we need and use what we need.

    im me and youre you, and im telling you you dont need those stats at all - especially for a character whose level of power breaks the system in two.

    you simply dont need stats for these characters there is nothing you as a gm will ever do that requries you need them.

  6. #51
    Bzzt. This is incorrect. You can not create Buffy using the Core Book and play her as a starting character. Her stats are insanely high.

    then you havent really designed a system that simulates the source material very well. its not incorrect at all, you are just missing the point.

    since the buffy rpg does include stats for buffy and is designed so that the role of the slayer is playable buffy herself is playable.

    >Buffy and Friends are not the "default" setting and you do not elect to play weaker characters--all characters created in Buffy are "weaker," starting characters that can one day strive to be of the same talents of the featured characters.

    buffy and her friends are provided in the book; the option to play them isnt coimpulsory (by way of providing no option for creating different pc's for example), but it is one of the main attractions for the game in a way thats not present in lotr.

  7. #52
    Originally posted by Lt. Dade
    Hi,

    I think Coda Trek and LotR handle the issue of starting character power quite well. By having the default character creation system create meek characters at the start of their lives,
    which might be rewarding for some, but i cannot for the life of me see the attraction to playing ensign redshirt who has to worry he might perish while tying his shoelaces. i want to play the characters who inspired me to play that game in that setting, characters like gandalf or aragorn. coda doesnt reflect this. someone with a gazillion advancements is ridiculous. its the same argument don uses about buffy.

  8. #53
    >IIRC, Buffy at the begining of Season One was basically just starting. Just found out what she could do and learning to adjust to it, right? In LOTR analogy, that would make her on par with the hobbits in the fellowship (Merry & Pippin have 1 advancement each, Sam has 2, and Frodo has 6).

    buffy and lotr are not really the same in terms of source material. while the hobbits may change and develop over the story, the rest of the characters dont really devlop in the same way that the scooby gang does. those changes - in fact the characters in buffy are kids growing up (thats on of the main draws for the show), gandalf, whom you might argue does change (grey to white) doesnt really become aedvanced in the same way, he just gets his power back upon being returned to arda.
    the point is that buffy handles its source material better than lotr by directly equipping the players to play the same kind of characters from the show, as well as those characters themsleves.

  9. #54
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    Originally posted by John Kim
    To re-state: it isn't clear to me what PC character sheets will look like after 50 advancements. A warrior (or any other skill-based character) will quickly hit the skill maximum. What do you put your points into for the next 45 advancements?
    Aragorn in the FOTR Sourcebook has over 60 advancements. A couple of his key skills are maxed out. One or two of his attributes are maxed out. He has two orders and two elite orders. He has most of the order abilities from those orders. And he has lots of edges.

    And he still has growth potential.

    Yes, a hero will max out their key skills within 4-5 advancements, but there are so many other places they can grow. Maybe a hero starts life as a warrior, and after 20+ advancements, something happens in game to cause them to pursue a magician's path.

  10. #55
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    John Kim said:
    Well, nothing wrong with that as a preference -- though you probably should have qualified your statement earlier if you didn't really know.
    I'm sorry, the point I was speaking to was the ability to create characters on the level of Aragorn or Legolas right out of the gate. The game does do that, through the number of starting Advancements. To be clear, this is do-able because the Advancement scale is directly incremental, rather than logorithmic. Since experience in Coda is based on story concerns rather than monsters bested in combat, it's easy for us to explain how Aragorn might earn 50 Advancements over the course of his life without having to face escalating numbers of orcs in combat. We, when creating advanced, epic characters in Coda, have a lot of flexibility in assumptions of the character's history.

    In all these ways, it is quite possible to create epic characters from scratch; thus the game assumes a lower starting level for the sake of encompassing gameplay preferences like mine. The game doesn't force folks to start at "The Hobbit" levels and progress to "Fellowship of the Rings" levels, in other words. There are no special mechanics necessary to begin play at such levels; the existing, fundamental procedure is just repeated (by adding Advancements) until the desired power level is attained.

    I can't say how satisfying Aragorn-levels of play are, but I can say that the game doesn't necessarily break down. I do really know. How? See below.

    A lot of RPG systems tend to break down outside of the default range -- probably because they aren't playtested. Your guess is that the CODA system scales pretty well, but I think the only way to know for sure is to try it out. For example, it appears to me that warrior characters will fairly quickly max out on their offense roll because of the maximum skill of 12. A warrior character will probably hit this maximum within 4 or 5 Advancements, I would think. It isn't clear to me where things go from there.
    You're right on the nose, here, John. You've qualified my own statement. I've played Coda adventures with very important, maxed-out stats. (E.g., System Operations or whatever it is in Star Trek.) Once a character's stats max out, you have a pretty good idea of what epic-level play in Coda is going to be like. The game has an operational ceiling which, as you say, can be reached in 4 or 5 Advancements. So, my experience with the operational ceiling is congruent with having experience with high-power characters.

    This is one of the flaws in Coda I'm talking about. To be fair, it's less of a flaw and more of a shortcoming. Anyway; Coda doesn't break down outside of the default range the way a lot of RPG systems do, it breaks down outside of the expected play style, at any range. What this means is that the game can fall apart as easily with beginning-level characters as it can with high-powered characters, because it's possible for low-powered characters (read as "characters maxed out in only one or two skills") to casually defeat any challenge related to their expertise. For example, a warrior with just four Advancements might have very little fear of a small squad of orcs.

    So where do things go from there? The Coda system has two or three techniques built into it that facilitate an increase in dramatic challenges. Off the top of my head, these are:

    1) The language of the game rules put emphasis on how a story's dramatic significance is more important than its mechanical challenge. The game, hopefully, instills a sense of this dramatic storytelling in the players, so that Aragorn's player might still play as though the fight in Balin's tomb is achingly difficult, even though the individual foes are mechanically insignificant.

    2) This dramatic sensibility is reinforced with the success rules. In melee combat, a player doesn't merely earn a mechanical potency through dramatic successes, she earns a bit of extra narrative control. She doesn't just slay the orc chieftain, she disarms him or knocks away his crown, and humiliates him in front of his followers. If these dramatic options are ignored by the player, the game will be very unsatisfying, because the Coda system isn't a very good simulator. It wasn't built for that. Chalk that up under "shortcomings."

    3) The difficulties of certain actions can be heavily slanted by altering the game environment, making it easy for the Narrator to follow a classic rule of fiction: Complicate the action, not the story. Look at all of the modifiers to skill test TNs and consider ways in which a great many of them might come into play. Fighting orcs is tough. Fighting orcs on a sloping, crumbling floor in a smokey room that's being shaken to pieces by an approaching Balrog whose roars are deafening is a lot harder. This makes the challenge to Aragorn substantially greater.

    4) Extended tests are one of the greatest options available to a Coda Narrator. They're very dramatic; even when they're easy they breed uncertainty. They're easy to tailor to the strengths or weaknesses of a given party; there are so many variables for a Narrator to tweak: action time, TN, TN modifiers, the ability to cooperate or not, deadlines, etc. They're a great way to emphasize skills the characters might not otherwise rely on; an extended test can challenge those skills a player might not ordinarily think are valuable without just creating a situation where a character is statistically likely to be met with a humiliating defeat. They encourage creative troubleshooting in the players; e.g. can I whittle down the TN to cross the chasm with my Craft (weaving) skill somehow?

    5) For all that success in LotR might be easy, failure often has especially dangerous consequences. Healing is scarce. Aragorn only needs to suffer one good hit from a cave troll to have his abilities severely diminished. This gets into "the taxation of self," below.

    The dramatic stakes can rise to challenge high-powered characters. This is what I was getting at before: it might be easy for Aragorn to fight off the goblins in Balin's tomb, but he's got to do it in such a fashion that Frodo, Sam, Merri and Pippin don't get killed, either. That's a different challenge. It's easy for Legolas to jump the broken stairs in Moria, but the group has to manage the success of the whole party. If Legolas hadn't jumped first, Gimli would be dead. That's a consequence to Legolas' easy success which should be emphasized by the Narrator.

    Incidentally, I totally didn't understand your last statement about "issues of responsibility of power and the taxation of self (!) which conveniently take advantage of some of Coda's flaws".
    The two games that Coda has been built to play are Star Trek and The Lord of the Rings; each of which has its own dramatic undercurrents. The game mechanics are well-suited to the exploration of those themes.

    Star Trek tells a lot of stories about the responsible use of power. The human condition in the 24th Century is about being forthright and responsible. Starfleet officers have phenomenal power, even in their sidearms, which could make success easy. Star Trek game adventures often focus on the nature, cost or method of success rather than the likelihood of success. Data and Picard worry about margins of error and enormous consequences. In the game, this means that a whole adventure might focus not on the test with just a 10% chance of failure, but on the millions of lives which will be lost in the case of failure and the tension leading up to the test. The associated shortcoming of Coda is that, if the players aren't interested in playing this way, an adventure might be ruined. Rather than spend the session brainstorming the best possible option and then playing in the stories that stem from the difficult choice, a player might just want to roll the dice and finish the crisis in 30 minutes. The game itself only goes so far to prevent that sort of thing.

    Lord of the Rings is about the journey, it's about how much you're willing to give of yourself to the cause, it's about devotion. Lord of the Rings adventures shouldn't just focus on whether or not the characters can slay orcs, but on the taxation of self; how much of themselves are they willing to give to have those orcs slain? Narrators shouldn't have an adventure come down to a party of orcs, but instead ask how many orcs the characters are willing to face to give Frodo the time to get the ring to safety? Is the character who can't swim willing to dive headlong into a river to catch up with his friend?

    Both games gives players the ability to make their characters masters of a particular field. This creates a certain narrative authority in the game's story, wherein the player knows her character can track anything or easily talk himself out of any situation. This lets the players carve out any niche for their characters, rather than those prescribed by character classes. Once those characters reach the operational ceiling, they'll have to grow and learn and spread out in new directions. In Star Trek, this is the goal of humanity, to better one's self. In Lord of the Rings, its the natural reward for striking out on dangerous adventures; Legolas and Gimli learn to appreciate the other's way of life while Sam finds strength within himself and the skills necessary to build a new life for himself in the Shire. So, rather than escalate to new heights of power, Coda characters are encouraged to expand outward, into new ways of life and new depths of character.

    word,
    Will
    Last edited by Lt. Dade; 03-20-2003 at 11:40 AM.

  11. #56
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    Kong, I had a whole long post addressing many of the pointsyou seem to have contention with when I realized the main thing I've learned in our interactions over the past year or so. Doing so would be a waste of both your time and mine, as an agreement will likely never be reached.

    So, in the age-old tradition of this board, I'm going to suggest we simply agree to disagree and move on to something a little more constructive.

    To the rest of the folks participating in this thread, I want to inform you I will be closing it because it has evolved from discussing the Fellowship Sourcebook into something else entriely.

    If there are other aspects that were brought up in this thread you wish to discuss, I suggest doing as John Kim has already done and creating a new thread.

    Have a nice day!
    Former Decipher RPG Net Rep

    "Doug, at the keyboard, his fingers bleeding" (with thanks to Moriarti)

    In D&D3E, Abyssal is not the language of evil vacuum cleaners.

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