I've run Middle Earth campaigns using a number of game systems other than the licensed ones (MERP, Decipher, TOR, AiME). The best one, just based on the amount of fun everyone had at the table (the only metric I would say really counts!) was The Fantasy Trip.

We had a fairly long running (though episodic) campaign centered on a group of soldiers and rangers from Gondor who were scouting and generally stirring up trouble on the borders of Mordor, in the White Mountains and in the outer reaches of Moria. It was really a gas. Though, naturally enough for TFT, eventually the party died and we sort of moved on.

The system I think was actually best suited to the setting, and was definitely fun to play, was 1E AD&D. For whatever reason this one didn't get rolling with the same level of excitement as our TFT campaign, but it was fun, and felt like the scales of power accessible to players, NPC's and monsters was more 'right', and the natural support from the core game book was outstanding. Literally everything you need to play a fully fleshed out middle earth campaign is in the 1E core books. Just add a few maps from ICE's modules or something and away you go.

We also ran a brief GURPS campaign and it was fun but I never developed that strong of an opinion about it.

Failed experiments include Runequest and Pendragon. Both of them struck me as totally ideal for Middle Earth, in a white-room, philosophizing sort of way, and I wrote up a bunch of house rules to make the systems translate to the setting. But somehow when we sat down and started playing it just didn't go anywhere. The play felt slow and cramped, and there was so much about the setting that just isn't in these games.

Well I have only played MERP 1ed, TOR and D&D(AD&D starter set, so more like Basic) set in Middle-Earth.

I did have some badwrongfun playing D&D in ME. Run a short game for a friend solo when I had to make shit up on the spot (I was like 12 at the time, before the movies and had just read LotR). He started as a 20 Level Dwarf Fighter . He took the place of Bilbo and the game started with him already owning the one ring, a shitload of treasure, and in the first session Bagend was attacked by a red dragon who wanted that treasure. The last thing I remember was that the dwarf was flying from Rivendell on a griffin against Mordor. Looking back I wish I finished that game

To summarize:

MERP was crappy and not funnat all.

TOR was fun but it was not really the system that made it fun

Batshit-crazy-D&D-Middle-Earth was probably the best D&D game I had back then. But that is kind of a nostalgic thing. But I do think that TSR D&D can be used to run Middle-Earth with a few adjustments and just go with the flow. I want to do that again someday. Either toss out magic for players or restruct the spellcaster classes : Like making clerics into an Noldor-race-class (and dont call them clerics) with the druid spell list as the only playable spellcaster , with no weapon&armor restrictment. Whatever works for you.

Until AiME I never had any luck running Middle Earth with any other system. In hindsight it was because I didn't ditch overt spell casting. For AD&D the mundane monsters weren't tough enough. The closest I got was Harnmaster when the character got to deal with the elves of the Shaba Forest or the Dwarves of Azadmere.

But now I have run AiME, I could probably could use GURPs, OD&D (Fighters and thieves only), or Harnmaster. And get a similar feel.

We had some fun with Legends of Middle Earth (the link is to 1KM1KT) by Jeffrey Schecter. We tried MERP but that didn't really do it and I didn't really fancy TOR. I've got AIME so intend to give that a go sometime because it looks like it might do the job.

(Warning - no ME play experience, feel free to ignore) Fascinating about 1e AD&D being closest fit! I guess it's a very The Hobbit game. Looking at AiME it feels rather like "You get to live in Middle Earth as the guys not in the books" whereas 1e AD&D is more like "Let's play The Hobbit and kill Goblins and Dragons and Trolls (ogres)!"

The AD&D Magic-User class spell list is sort-of off, it seems based on Gandalf & Saruman, ie Maiar, in Gandalf's case a Maiar with the Elven Fire Ring of Power. The Cleric spell list & powers are much much closer to what the Elves (& Aragorn) can actually do, like Turn Undead, healing etc. Maybe ban M-U, rename Cleric as Loremaster (or just assume it means 'person who can write') , and Elf only? Multiclassed High Elf Fighter-Cleric fits a lot of Tolkien's Elf characters very nicely indeed. Humans who want spells can either be Numenorean human 1e Rangers & Paladins like Aragorn (duel class?) , or corrupt "Sorcerers of Sauron", ie Clerics of Sauron such as the Witch King & the Mouth of Sauron. NPC only in most campaigns.

Back in the day I played some fairly decent Middle Earth style stuff using Tunnels & Trolls. T&T had much of the feel of Tolkein's world and far less crunchy than MERP.

Tunnels and Trolls is an interesting angle! I firmly believe that it's the players that make a game 'work' or 'not work' in a given setting, so I believe it could be awesome. I just never tried it.

The match of D&D with ME is actually very good, and I suspect could be good for pretty much any edition. This is why, after decades of nerd rage about how inappropriate it would be to sully middle earth with gonzo, appendix-D dungeons and dragons, as soon as someone put out a couple of nicely produced books of conversion notes (AiME) there isn't a peep of complaining to be heard anywhere.

AiME is quite a good game (as is 5E generally). I have nothing against either and would be happy to play in middle earth using those rules as written. The authors of AiME clearly intend that no one is casting spells other than a few powerful NPCs. I'm not down with that; I think it is obvious that the setting is popping at the seams with magical creatures, objects and effects that can all be modeled using D&D spells. But this is entirely at the discretion of your group: The spells are right there on the page in our PHB's, and we are free to use them. Basically, AiME turns the supernatural dial down to about 1 or 2 for PC's, but you can turn it up as high as you like when you play, using totally self-consistent and published rules, spells, items, etc. I would recommend turning it up to 4 or 5 (low to moderate level spell casters, without too many of the batshit crazy classes, races and effects).

That said, I think if I were in the driver's seat and my group were amenable, I'd prefer 1E AD&D. Mostly because I think 5E raised the ratio of HP to damage output too high. It's a little frustrating because this is not easy to change with house rules without introducing new core mechanics that clash with other things in the game. The issue, as I see it, is that D&D combat is perfectly fun and exciting despite being abstract, but it does not benefit from being drawn out unnecessarily. It is not uncommon in 5E for two combatants to face off where each has 20-30 HP and does an average of 5-7 points of damage per turn, and each has a 30-40 % chance to hit the other each turn. On average, it will take a dozen rounds for such a fight to come to some kind of conclusion. This is about the power level of a tough orc or wolf but well below that of a leader of either type. So, this is going to happen a lot. And everyone recovers a lot of HP every day. Add it all up, and you are signing up to make a couple hundred attack rolls per night when you sit down to play. It just seems too slow, and like too much time spent resolving the parts of combat that should be fast. AD&D is a factor of several faster than this, particularly at low levels, because a large fraction of the combatants have fewer than 10 HP, yet people still dish out 3-6 or more points of damage per attack (or more).

A badwrongfun AD&D Middle Earth game would really hit the spot. It would have to stray into gonzo without being intentionally so. Probably a sandbox hex crawl too. Heck, that's how I used to play MERP anyway.

Moria is and always will be the original and best sandbox dungeon crawl ever imagined. It is so good that most people who have approached it have averted their gaze at the last moment, in fear of the awesomeness before them. That's why we don't have anything like an authoritative and complete game supplement set there. ICE put out its MERP supplement, and Decipher did a surprisingly good boxed set. But both pale in comparison to lots of D&D-genre megadungeons out there (Rappan Athuk, Undermountain, etc.). Basically, everyone who has put pen to paper to make an official version chickened out. But I've run several strings of sessions in Moria and all were super fun. It is limitless, and done right should contain many things that would horrify and then murder the highest level people in the setting.

Another excellent middle earth sandbox setting is Mordor in the decades following the events in The Hobbit. The books tell us little about what is happening there, but we know it is a time when the ruined fortresses were being rebuilt and evil things were waking up and gathering there. The MERP module is one of their better ones, and can be supplemented with another half dozen smaller modules set on its margins. Yet the place isn't quite yet coalesced into an organized and defended armed camp, so PC's can imagine getting in and out. We have had a ton of fun there. Just going on a scouting mission to see what is at Barrad Dur and then get back out is an epic undertaking.

I worked on The Fellowship in Moria combat scenarios for TFT and GURPS, for fun/experiment but haven't run Middle Earth as a campaign. TFT is simpler/easier but a bunch of orcs will tend to cut up unarmored characters unless you add house rules to reduce the chances of that. GURPS can work better since your heroes can block/dodge/parry, but as usual with GURPS, much depends on the GM's skills and experience, and there's the question of what you want it to be like, and translating that into which rules you use, and how you build the characters, especially if you have Gandalf, Aragorn, old elves, etc. One thing to notice is very strong things (e.g. a cave troll with a weapon) are liable to do very high damage if/when they hit someone).

TFT is a deadly system for any campaign where there are lots of fights. Perhaps prohibitively so for gonzo blood baths. I felt like this was a feature rather than a problem with our ME campaigns, because it meant players have to approach adventures in ways that jive with the stories. Yes, there are fights, but there is also a lot of effort put into avoiding enemies and escaping fights, and combat is perceived as dangerous by all of the characters. I think each of the 4 middle earth books (The Hobbit, FOTR, TT, ROTK) has about a dozen fights (including some big battles). A surprisingly large fraction of these involve the 'PC' characters losing and fleeing, being incapacitated, or killed. So, while it's true that if you play a ME campaign using TFT you are probably going to lose a PC every couple of adventures, that can be seen as a good thing. Anyway, we had a lot of fun with it.

Quote from: Larsdangly;1025914Failed experiments include Runequest and Pendragon. Both of them struck me as totally ideal for Middle Earth, in a white-room, philosophizing sort of way, and I wrote up a bunch of house rules to make the systems translate to the setting. But somehow when we sat down and started playing it just didn't go anywhere. The play felt slow and cramped, and there was so much about the setting that just isn't in these games.

I recently strated giving thought about trying to run Middle-Earth with some BRP variant.

 There is a Open Quest variant that seems set in a semi-Middle-Earth First Age setting. Age of Sadow. Anyone played it?
http://ageofshadow.freehostia.com

The swedish translation of 1ed MERP  modules had dual stats for BRP (or rather "Drakar och Demoner" = skills were rated from 1-20 instead of 1-100) which I owned but never run back in the day. But there were zero attempt of rules adapation except from stats mods for rolling up basic attributes  for characters. And the general guideline to tone down the magic on the player side. Suggesting only druid-healer-types of mages for players. The Southern Mirkwood module did have stats for really powerful NPC like Radagast and Sauron himself (as the Necromancer). But within the DoD rules Sauron ( and his high-tier lieutenants) was practically unbeatable. Like a Great Old One in CoC.

Unisystem has been FOR ME the best system for RPGs based on fiction. AKA, the Buffy system.

It has produced the best sessions of Star Trek, Firefly, X-men and LotR that I've experienced by a massive margin.

Why? The mechanics that separate Major from Minor Hero work excellently and the players of the Minor Hero feel great because there's lots to do, whereas the Major PCs shine in the spotlight like the TV shows, movies, books, etc.

Low Fantasy Gaming RPG should do well for a middle earth style game, although you might remove the Magic User class and Dark & Dangerous Magic table. Barbarian, Fighter, Rogue, Bard, plus optional Ranger class from Midlands (free on the site). Likely wouldnt want Monk or Artificer.

opps sorry I see you were asking for real play exp - I havent tried LFG for an actual ME campaign.

A Runequest/BRP variant should be excellent for a variety of reasons, but I encountered a couple of things we didn't like about it. I have a higher-magic interpretation of middle earth than lots of people in the gaming community advocate, and the BRP line editors have never succeeded at crafting a magic system that doesn't feel like re-branded Gloranthan spirit magic, or something that is only suitable for a specific narrow setting (CoC, Stormbringer). I don't think BRP offers the pallet of magic that middle earth calls for. Second, big monsters in BRP are relatively fragile and easy to kill. Like, a dragon is dangerous to a couple of individuals, but could not come close to trashing a company of soldiers or ruin a city. Third, there isn't a plausible route for a heroic sort of PC to become as mighty as a Boromir or Aragorn sort of character.

You could make some of these criticisms about TFT, which I found to be very fun in a middle earth campaign. So, I can imagine others having a different experience than I did. All I know is we gave BRP a serious try and it fell flat.

Pendragon was the one I thought was going to be flipping perfect. The system for passions and loyalties, the combat system, the tech level, the range in power accessible to PC's - all of it seems like exactly what you'd want. I am not sure why it didn't just fly off the page like I expected it to. It might be that you pretty much have to make up the whole magic system (the one presented in 4E Pendragon is garbage and not worth even looking at). You could declare that magic is just stuff the DM says happens, but I really don't think that is the right take on gaming in middle earth. You also have to make up all the races and creatures. And convert all the backgrounds from the specific setting of Pendragon to middle earth. And some other stuff. Perhaps it was just too big of a gap to bridge without putting in more effort.