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This is the Rules thread for my LOTR game. Whilst a lot of the rules for it may look intimidating, the actual operation of the mechanics, as far as playera are concerned, is very simple- you just roll a die and add your skill on, and hope you get as high as possible.

The base system for this game- called 'Middle-Earth Role Playing'- dates from 1981 and is a very... 'classic' system. Which is to say, because the rules mechanics are very table-related- and it would take me forever to copy all the tables out- I do not intend to try and replicate the full rules here, simply the parts of them that are relevant to you.

BASIC MECHANICS


Dice

All dice rolls in this game are d100s. For those of you who are not role-players or gamers, the number after the 'd' tells you how many sides the die has. So a normal six-sided die is a d6. A d100, then, is a one-hundred sided die. This is not literal- though you CAN actually buy 100 sided dice, this is considered nerdy, even for a role-player. Normally, a d100 is produced by rolling two d10s, nominating one die to give you the tens, the other the singles. So an 8 on the tens die and a 2 on the singles die gives you an 82.

Unlike some other d100 games, though, this is not a 'percentile' game, where skills are rated out of 100, and you try and roll under them. THis game is entirely additive- you roll a d100 and add your skill to the roll.

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Basic Rolls

Nearly all out-of-combat rolls in this game can be performed with a basic skill check. This is as simple as it gets. I set a difficulty- say, 100- and then make a roll for the player trying to make the check and add his skill to the roll. If he beats the difficulty, it is a pass!

Example- Bilbo is attempting to evade Goblins in the depths of the Misty Mountains. Sneaking past a cavern full of bad guys on a high ledge, he has to make a Stalk/Hide roll. His skill is 50- he is talented but inexperienced. The Goblins are not directly looking for him, though, so the difficulty is set at 110. Bilbo rolls a 74, and adds his skill of 50 onto that. His final roll is 124; he's passed, and sneaks past safely.


Graded success rolls

Some rolls are less about success/failure and more about how far you have gotten towards achieving something. When this happens, a failure does not necessarily represent a total failure, merely that you have not achieved it all yet.

Example- Arwen races towards the Ford around Rivendell, and safety from the Nazgul. Trouble is, she has far to go, and despite a stupendous total ride skill of 150 (including her horse), it is a difficulty 300 roll to get there in one round- too much even for Arwen! She rolls a 48, giving her a 198. But whilst this is a failure, this does not mean she has not moved. A look at the relevant table in the rules tells me that this result means she has covered 50% of the distance. Next round, the roll will be much easier. Too late though- the Witch-King is drawing near...


Movement/Manoeuvre Rolls

A very common roll in action situations is the 'Manoeuvre' roll, used whenever you are trying to run somewhere, climb something, jump something etc. As character creation will have shown, your Movement/Manoeuvre rating is mainly dictated by what armour you are wearing. No Legolas-style jumping in full plate, for sure! Many Movement rolls are Graded- in fact, in the example above, Arwen wwa performing a Movement roll, but could use her Ride score instead, for obvious reasons.

Your M/M score also dictates the order you move in battle- highest goes first.

COMBAT

LOTR combat is nasty and brutish. Whilst there is room for style, it is, on the whole, people hacking each other to pieces as fast as possible. It is very different from the Matrix- and much less forgiving. You do not just shrug off damage in this game; a nasty hit will cause you considerable problems very fast. Sufficiently nasty hits kill outright.

Because of the viciousness of the system, players normally get breaks. If I roll a result that should sever your hand, I would probably mangle it instead, making it useless for the fight but treatable later. A bow shot that should go through your skull and kill you outright will probably deflect just under your eye socket instead- taking you straight out of the fight but not killing you stone dead. Any time you receive such a blow, you get a scar as a reminder. Unless you are an Elf; they do not scar. Bah.


Basic operation

Everyone declares what they wish to do in a round of combat; I then execute those orders in order of people's M/M score.

Although there are a few more mechanics here, the basic operation is still the same- when you attack someone, I roll a die and add your skill to it. In combat, your opponent's defensive skill is also subtracted from that roll.

However, the difference is that there is no difficulty number. The final result is referenced to a table, which will then tell me what has happened.

As I shall note below, you can also chose to allocate some of your offensive score defensively for a round.

Other than the negative effects wounds can have, when you take hits, you lose stamina.


This being the case, I always keep track of four scores in combat, and continually update them for people to see. They are:

1. Movement/Manoeuvre

2. Offensive Score

3. Defensive Score

4. Stamina.

They will be noted on-screen like this:

MM/Offence/Defence/Stamina

Hits and damage

Eventually, someone is going to get hit and hurt.

As a very rough measure, after all additions and subtractions, you need a final result of about 85 to hit someone, and 100 to hit them with any effect.

But it is never that absolute. The table I check results on splits into four types- one for one-handed edged weapons, one for one-handed concussion weapons, one for two-handed weapons, and one for missile weapons- and each of those four tables checks its result against the type of armour the target is wearing!

As a general rule though:

Two-handed attacks do the most damage but obviously preclude a shield

Edged attacks do more outright damage than concussion, but concussion attacks tend to have more subsidary effects (like stunning) which may be more useful.

Armour works on a simple principle- the more armour you wear, the more likely you are to be hit, but the lass damage you take when you do. It's a bit more complex than that on some of the tables, but that is the basic rule- in plate, you are easily hit but the hits tend to be glancing. With no armour, you are quite hard to hit but go down pretty fast when you are.

When I get a hit result, it gives me two things:


1. Stamina loss. Now, it is important to note that Stamina loss in this game does not represent notable physical damage- you could lose 90 out of 100 stamina and not have a serious wound. Stamina loss represents how bady knicked around and knackered you are. The advantage of Warriors is that with their high staminas, they can stay longer in a fight.

2. Wounds. Any serious hit produces a wound (non-wound hits, ones that only cause stamina loss, are called 'superficial'). If you take a wound, I roll on a table to see what the wound is; again, different types of weapons cause different wounds. Wounds are rated from 'A' to 'E', from lightest to heaviest; heavier wounds add to the die roll when I check what wound you get.

Wounds can be VERY nasty. Here are the possible effects:


Stamina loss: Many wounds immediately cause more of a shock to the system and hence more Stamina loss. In fact, with minor wounds that is all they will do.

Stunned: Some blows- especially from Crushing or Unbalancing wounds- will stun you, making you very much less capable of fighting for a stated duration. Whilst stunned you are at -25 to attack, can only use half your offensive score to parry, and all attacks on you are at +20. Stuns last for a varying amount of time; sometimes, to be simple, I make a one-round stun equate to you losing your next attack.

Activity loss: This is nasty. This is a penalty to all rolls. With some hits, this is temporary, representing a major form of stun, but this can also be permanent, normally from a slashing or piercing wound making a limb useless, for example. Lower Activity losses might be caused by damaged tendons or even simply by painful wounds.

Bleeding: A bleeding wound causes you to lose stamina each turn- this can cause severe problems. Even worse, if you go down to zero stamina and are still bleeding it will not take you long to die.

Permanent disfigurement: You can technically lose eyes and other body parts from a nasty roll.

Death: Some blows kill you.

As noted above, those last two results I will normally go easy on for players.

It is important to note that somne wounds are made much worse if you are not wearing a relevant piece of armour- Helmet, Leg Greaves or Arm Greaves. In fact, the only effect of these pieces of armour is to mitigate some wounds- and very useful they can be too.

And that's more or less it! The only other mechanic in the game is Magic, which is dealt with in its own thread. Any questions, ask away.

Here is the checklist:

1. Decide how much Offensive Score you will pull out to help defend yourself
2. Pick an opponent to strike at this round. You will be facing that opponent, so others enemies will be at your sides and rear appropriately.
3. Allocate that offence you pulled out for defence amongst opponents, and if you have a shield, nominate that against an opponent to your front.
4. Wait to see if you hit! Remembering your Offensive Score will be reduced by his Defensive score plus whatever he puts into parrying against you, and maybe also his shield.

And remember:

The person with the highest Manoeuvre score goes first
Unarmoured people are hard to hit but go down quickly when they are hit.
If wearing armour, you tend to be easier to hit but take less severe wounds.


Following now are the weapon lists.

And finally...

Experience- or xp

Basics

This is the big one. Many of the liabilities of your characters can have disappeared by the time you are level 3. You need to go up levels as quickly as possible! However, advancing can be difficult and you are not expected to go past level 5 in any amount of short time at all.

You will note you all started with at least 10000 points of experience. This makes you level 1, as opposed to level zero which is what the average guard on the street would be. So you are all a little better. Level 1 is the 'trained soldier' level. Worth remembering that the typical Arnorian or Gondrian soldier, then, is about as good as you are now.

Level 1 is also the level of a Weak Orc- or Goblin. That is something else worth bearing in mind- the 'typical' Orc is Level 3, which puts the war between Orc and Man in perspecticve when you consider that their average warrior is better than what Man can field. You will note that right now I keep making sure you are always meeting raiding parties and other such things when it comes to Orcs- if you met elements of the Witch-King's main army at this point you would not last long! Elite Orc units are at level 5, and these are of a deadliness that will not be surpassed until the Uruk-Hai come along.

(And also remember that these are just levels for the nameless ranks of Orcish foot soldiers. Orcish personalities- people with names that you may meet and have as enemies- can be any level I wish them to be, acorrding to how dangerous I want them).

For the first five levels, each 10000 points of experience are worth one level- 10000 for level one, 20000 for level 2, 30000 for level 3 etc. AFter level 5, things slow down and they cost 20000 each, so it becomes 70000 for level 6, 90000 for level 7, and so on. Right now, the difference between the veteran characters and the new characters is large- but after a while, it will be barely significant once you need much larger numbers to make a difference.

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Gaining experience

Players of RPs in real life or on computers/consoles should be no stronager to the concept of gaining experience by success. However, whilst following the ame theory, this system is a little different.

First of all, there is no group distribution of experience at the point at which it is earned (more on that below. If Player A is in a big fight and kills an Orc, HE scores for it- players B, C and D score nothing.

Secondly, experience is not added on at the point it is earned. Instead it is banked (I will likely open a thread for this) and all experience is added together to players in one big lump at a time I declare is appropriate.

Thirdly, you can score experience for almost ANYTHING. Here is a list of things you sacore for:

Doing damage.
Causing a wound
Killing
Taking damage
Taking a wound
Sucessful manoeuvres
Casting a spell
Travelling (yup, seriously!)
And probably more...

And fourthly, and most importantly of all, we have this system's Socialist ethic of redistributing bonus experience!

Bonus Idea Point redistribution

This is where experience becomes fun, as other players beg for different players to get experience just so it goes into the idea pot.

Basically, at the point at which I decide it is time to give out basic experience, a bonus experience award is given to players., The total size of this award is equal to half the experience that EVERYONE has banked- this is why you want the whole party, not just yourself, to gain as much experience as possible.

But this bonus experience is distributed amongst the party- but it is not distributed evenly. Instead, what happens is this. I draw up a list of all the good ideas and heroic deeds and important achievements that were achieved during the game. I then match up players to deeds/ideas/achievements. I then break up the bonus experience pot into fractions based on the amount of achievements there are- and I then distribute that experienc to players according to how many such achievements they were involved in.

For example, say there is 10000 experience banked after some hard adventuring. That means the bonus xp for the day is 5000 xp.

Now, let us say there were 3 good idea during the game, and one great achievement. There are four players, A, B, C and D, and they contributed as follows:

Good idea 1: A
Good idea 2: B
Good idea 3: C
Achievement: A and C

So we have there five seperate awards- A and C twice, and B once, and D not at all.

I therefore split that bonus 5000 xp into five- which, luckily enough is five lots of 1000 experience. A and C get two shares- 2000xp- each,. and B picks up the final 1000.

But waht about poor old D? Has he not been left behind? Far from it.

Bcause, you see, D is a Warrior. He already has LOADS of xp. He got it by hacking Orcs to pieces. Were it not for him, the xp pot.- and so the bonus ideas pool- would not have been so large in the first place. He is perfectly happy!

A and C are Animists. They were not able to get as much XP by fighting. But by having good ideas of what to do, being the cleverer types, and by saving the life of an important person- the achievement- they make up their XP in the idea pot!

B is a Ranger. He had a good idea, scoring a little idea xp, and he allo did some fighting, so he should even out the same as well.

Whilst, obviously, some players will end up doing better than others, the basic theory is that Warriors pick up all their xp in fights, whilst the more thoughtful, less violent types pick it up afterwards in the idea pool.

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Relative awards

Combat experience- whilst being awarded all the time (doing wounds, taking wounds, killing... it is very hard to NOT gain xp whilst fighting!) is awarded differently accroding to several factors:

You get more for fighting something of a higher level than you, and less for fighting something of a lowr level

You get more for fighting a foe without aid from anyone- 'aid' counts as there being anyone else nearby that your opponent has to even consider, whether that friend actually ends up helping you or not.

The first time you kill a 'type' of opponent (e.g. Weak Orc, Dunlending etc.) you get four times as much experience for it. The second and third times you kill one, you get double. The fourth time and onwards, you get the standard amount.

So, level 1 players, fighting opponents for the first time, none of which can be of lower level than them, tend to RACE up in experience very fast- which is fine, as that means more for the pot, and so more for everyone! But after a while, once you have killed a few things, the experience rush starts to level out.