Quote from: David Johansen;814661Also, I forgot the canonical dancing down forest paths singing nonsense.

I do seriously think that anyone who wants to play an authentic game in Tolkien's setting ought to be prepared to sing once in a while.

QuoteLicenced games are largely about tourism and the players tend to get mad when you stray from cannon.

Actually, after the accident downtown with 'old bess' we decided it was best to keep the tourists away from the cannon.

Quote from: RPGPundit;815178You forgot puffing on a pipe.

Puffing on a pipe can have that effect...

Regarding canon: the campaign my brother GMed was set before the war of the rings (can't remember exactly when I'm not a LOTR fan), after the kingdoms of the north had fallen: no Angmar, no Northern Numenoreans.
We were agents for Elrond, walking around the land bashing orcs and recovering items of lore/books to be kept out of the Necromancer's hands.
At some point one of the books we recovered had a map showing were a Numenorean prince had been burried with a Lesser Magic Stone that could be used to control winds. So we went in the Barrow downs, we had our ass saved from a Nazgul showing up after we had collected the stones when an Elven Noble from Imladris came to our rescue.
In Imladris Elrond decided that the stone was too dangerous to be kept around and we were sent north to Forodwaith and throw it in the ocean in a sort of Mariana Trench, all the while hiding from the Necromancer's spies now on our tracks.

The campaign had a follow up with the same villain (the main agent of the Necromancer was a Black Numenorean from Umbar) leading a sauronic cult trying to subvert the north.

To me (as i said not a great Tolkien fan) it all worked out in a believable manner and was very fun.
As I said we played with MERP, so the magic sometimes was very D&D-like.
There was few of it however (and mostly in the GM's hands) as the group was composed of a Sylvan Bard, a Woddman Scout a Beorning warrior and another Human warrior (a Rohirrim maybe? A Haradrim? Can't remember).

Quote from: TristramEvans;813713I still have a collection of MERP supplements...as background, its awesome. Took a lot of liberties from Tolkien in numerous ways, but I can't think of many other games besides Harn that provide resources on that scale...Certainly not for a licensed setting. Basically all of Middle Earth can be played Sandbox style just from the supplements.

I agree about the MERP supplements.  Back in high-school I ran a year-long MERP sandbox campaign using the books on Eriador (Rangers of the North, Bree, and Trollshaws).  Not that we knew what a 'sandbox' campaign was in the mid-1980s, of course.

Good times!

Quote from: Ravenswing;813846Thieves of Tharbad, Lost Realm of Cardolan, and the Arnor books.  Basically, there were three of us (myself, Rich Meyer and Walter Hunt, who went on to be a noted military SF author) who were the remaining writing core of the old Gamelords, and ICE wanted our spin on things, particularly on Tharbad, which they envisioned was a den of thieves if anywhere in Eriador was.

Cool!  I really liked those books.  

I also was a fan of Thieves Guild and Haven.

But regarding:

Quote from: Ravenswing;813569The typefont on their books is microscopic, and there's a Monty Haul dungeoneering approach that for too many of their products have scanty information on personalities and places, and exhaustive information on every room in ruins and castles, loaded down with traps, and stuffed to the windowsills with magical items.

I'm a bit surprised by this comment.  Not the part about the loads of traps and magic items in MERP adventures -- that is true.  But I thought that the MERP campaign modules generally did an excellent job in describing the regions they covered, especially their geography, history, politics, and so forth.  The information on the major NPCs generally was pretty solid as well.  

At least when I was gaming in the 1980s I was impressed by all the background information in the MERP books.

Quote from: Akrasia;815509I'm a bit surprised by this comment.  Not the part about the loads of traps and magic items in MERP adventures -- that is true.  But I thought that the MERP campaign modules generally did an excellent job in describing the regions they covered, especially their geography, history, politics, and so forth.  The information on the major NPCs generally was pretty solid as well.  

At least when I was gaming in the 1980s I was impressed by all the background information in the MERP books.

Well ... to a degree, I'm shooting myself in the foot here, because the geography, flora/fauna and politics for the Cardolan and Tharbad books were my bailiwick.  (Let's just say I nearly fainted with happiness at the notion of being paid to canonically flesh out Middle-Earth.)  Heck, the origin of the "Beffraen" name came because Walter and I kept calling the aboriginal indigs of the Cardolani coast "BFFs" -- for "Barbarous Fucking Fisherfolk," I never thought of a name I liked better, and I wound turning it into a genuine term.  True story.

Anyway.

But most players aren't all that interested in the grand national politics that ICE pushed.  They're interested in stuff which affects the PCs at their level.  Instead, look at what NPCs were detailed in book after book.  In The Court of Ardor, the NPCs are the Lords of Ardor itself, over a dozen of them: beings of staggering power with whom PCs couldn't contend without many levels and buckets of items.  In the Lorien/Eregion book, the detailed NPCs feature Celebrimbor, Celeborn, Galadriel ... and Sauron himself -- 'nuff said.

It's safe to say that not too many MERP players are going to take on Sauron or Galadriel.  But those are the NPCs, with every item and every spell list and every stat listed, that are the types presented in too many books.

The same thing with history, which repeatedly fell into that old wasteful trap so many RPG products do of wasting bunches of pages on long history lessons of ages past, often with only passing relevance to the timeframe given in the scenarios.  Honestly, I don't need four pages of recap of every nasty thing the Witch-King's pulled over a three hundred year period: a single paragraph explaining that the Witch-King is the longstanding enemy of the Dunedain, seeks the overthrow of the northern Realms and is in reality the Lord of the Nazgul is all most players need.

I think it goes back to the notion that the people who buy setting books are mostly detail freaks and that everyone wants to know whether Elrond could take the Witch King.  The assumption being that players don't buy books.  ICE's MERP line was largely before the splat book revolution that the industry is still recovering from.

Mm, but the problem with that approach is one of the great weaknesses of licensed games: for every player who loves the result of the fleshing out, there are two who hate the daylights out of at least one addition not hitherto present in canon.  This also heterodynes with the syndrome of stone fanboys thinking they know a lot more than they do, and there you have it.

Judging from posts I've seen over the years, there are gamers -- and possibly a good many -- who just loathed the Ardor and Rhun books, not for the content, but that they existed at all: if it wasn't in JRRT's head, seemingly, ICE had no right to create it.

I always feel that licenced games are pretty much a bad deal all around.  If it does poorly, its an added expense.  If it does well, the licence holder raises the rate when its time to renew.  So the fans wind up with incompatible games and retreading of core material.  Game masters have to listen to the canon pedant telling them why they're wrong.  Players get to face ridiculously over powered key characters.  I think Steve Jackson's approach of only doing one offs might be the best way to go about it.  Here's GURPS Conan, don't expect to see it again.

Personally I like MERP, stuff like the big Arnor book is just awesome. And the RM system works well enough. People keep forgetting, what with the movies and all, that most people in Middle Earth aren't Bruce Lee/Rambo clones. That the place is bloody dangerous, and, like in oldschool D&D, chsracters should keep their wits about them. I remember the MERP and RM systems being a revelation to me when I got Into them in my late teens. Just awesome.

The decipher game's broken. Stay away from it. Seriously. It's Made of suck, with a Combat system that doesn't work properly, Made to profit from the movies yet failing at Even that.

Don't really know TOR but it doesn't seem like my kinda thing. It looks kinda twee.

Quote from: David Johansen;815866I always feel that licenced games are pretty much a bad deal all around.  If it does poorly, its an added expense.  If it does well, the licence holder raises the rate when its time to renew.  So the fans wind up with incompatible games and retreading of core material.  Game masters have to listen to the canon pedant telling them why they're wrong.  Players get to face ridiculously over powered key characters.  I think Steve Jackson's approach of only doing one offs might be the best way to go about it.  Here's GURPS Conan, don't expect to see it again.

It increasingly seems that way.

Quote from: Ravenswing;815725 Heck, the origin of the "Beffraen" name came because Walter and I kept calling the aboriginal indigs of the Cardolani coast "BFFs" -- for "Barbarous Fucking Fisherfolk," I never thought of a name I liked better, and I wound turning it into a genuine term.  True story.

Ha!  I always wondered about the Beffraen, since there was no reference to them in any of Tolkien's writings.  

Quote from: Ravenswing;815725
But most players aren't all that interested in the grand national politics that ICE pushed.  They're interested in stuff which affects the PCs at their level.  
...
It's safe to say that not too many MERP players are going to take on Sauron or Galadriel.  But those are the NPCs, with every item and every spell list and every stat listed, that are the types presented in too many books.

The same thing with history, which repeatedly fell into that old wasteful trap so many RPG products do of wasting bunches of pages on long history lessons of ages past, often with only passing relevance to the timeframe given in the scenarios.  Honestly, I don't need four pages of recap of every nasty thing the Witch-King's pulled over a three hundred year period: a single paragraph explaining that the Witch-King is the longstanding enemy of the Dunedain, seeks the overthrow of the northern Realms and is in reality the Lord of the Nazgul is all most players need.

I guess this is fair.  Myself, I loved reading all that history stuff, even if it had little impact on the game itself.

Quote from: The Ent;815890Personally I like MERP, stuff like the big Arnor book is just awesome. And the RM system works well enough. People keep forgetting, what with the movies and all, that most people in Middle Earth aren't Bruce Lee/Rambo clones. That the place is bloody dangerous, and, like in oldschool D&D, chsracters should keep their wits about them. I remember the MERP and RM systems being a revelation to me when I got Into them in my late teens. Just awesome.

Good to know that I'm not alone in feeling this way.