a few questions and concerns

[gumbydammit]

1) in the frequently asked question doc.. it says on pg 226 Q: Does the winner of initiative take all his actions at once, or do they alternate in initiative order?
A:The character with the highest initiative has to state and execute all his actions ( some of them can be delays) before the next character can act..

ok now none of this was a surprise to me except the ( some of them can be delays). our group has always assumed that if its your turn in the round.. you do your actions in order.. (i.e. two actions.. then any combat actions you have remaining). once you delay, all actions you have left are delayed. So in other words if you did not move in the first two actions, you are beat. Does this statement imply you can delay one of your first two actions, do a combat action from say swift strike.. then later on use your delayed action to move?

2)Situation... Our group are all have fealty to the gondorian army.. We came across a caravan of travellers south of mordor in the desert. Lores were done to obtain which tribe they were from ect.. they were declared as an enemy tribe by the narrator.They are moving towards mordor with supplies... a battle insued.. ok now.. we have a spy\archer in our party.. (high level obviously) who has basically maxed out his poisoner order ability. The narrator gave us years off prior to this campaign. so needless to say the party has a fair deal of poison amongst them..we are badly outnumbered 25-4.. so our group starts launching piosoned arrows at them.. One of the players suggest we should be doing corruption rolls for this.. which frankly i dont see. I cannot find in the core book an example that suggest an "evil act" warrents corruption rolls, unless some influence is involved..but besides that we seem to have a disagreement in the group even about the nature of this so called "evil act" personally i do not see using poison against "enemies" as evil.. especially for the spy.. but even for a gondorian warrior using it against an enemy i dont see it.. If it was a knight or noble.. well ok Any insight on this? Do any of you use corruption rolls in this manner? I mean im not asking about like cold blood murder.. as a narrator i would definately make someone do a roll for that.. but poisoning an enemy? under what circumstances would you make a spy roll corruption for using poison? and under what circumstances would you make a man using poison?

3) I'm not sure if any of you have a spy or barbarian in your party.. but let me just say that poison is extremely deadly in this game..the spy in our group is excellent at it.. like as in spent many levels raising his poisoner ability.. his favourite poison to make is..
injury.. +20 potency , 1d6 stages, immediate onset,treatment +10 effect: full wound level.. secondary effect: half damage or none..
now keep in mind +20 potency means a 27 stamina test.. Is any one else finding poison a little too tough? and if so how are you dealing with it?

[Scottomir]

Originally posted by gumbydammit
Does this statement imply you can delay one of your first two actions, do a combat action from say swift strike.. then later on use your delayed action to move?

under what circumstances would you make a spy roll corruption for using poison? and under what circumstances would you make a man using poison?

Is any one else finding poison a little too tough? and if so how are you dealing with it?

1) Yes, a character with a higher initiative can save as many of his actions as he wants and use them later in the round to pre-empt a lower-initiative enemy. I don't see any reason in the Delay description why a character could not save some of his actions for movement later in the round. And, of course, any character can (and probably should) save an action to Dodge/Parry. What's important to remember, though, is that actions cannot be saved from round to round. If you delay to the end of the round without taking your actions, you lose them (you don't get double the action count in the next round).

2) "Corruption" is a general measure of how much your character has succumbed to the power of evil. Using poison, like torture, is a nasty thing that most people agree is "evil" but that sometimes they do anyway, if they feel it necessary. For example, in The Lord of the Rings both the Rohirrim and the Rangers of Ithilien admit sometimes to putting captured travelers "to the question" to learn important information. I also believe that the Woses are described as using poisoned darts. So I think it is quite reasonable to have characters who resort to torture or poison make Corruption tests, but the TN should be variable based on the situation and the participants. A spy who uses poison in battle against known enemies in a time of war might be only TN 5; a Gondorian knight who slips poison into the drink of a rival in peacetime might be TN 25.

3) Poison is pretty tough, but only if somebody goes all-out and brews extremely potent toxins. Your run-of-the-mill stuff is dangerous but not automatically lethal. So it sounds to me that your problem is not poison per-se, but the fact that you have a character who dumped all of his advancements into it. Perhaps it is time to make the ingredients for brewing poison more scarce? Maybe he should only be able to find enough toxic roots to brew a few doses at a time?