Quote from: Ulairi;786442Did anyone else play Decipher's LOTR CODA game? I really liked it.

Nope, I still haven't, although I endlessly intend to.

I suspect the disconnect between the mook rules and the standard wounding rules results in something very akin to Aragorn's battle with that one Uruk in the Fellowship of the Ring movie, complete with the same rolled eyes and "WTF was that?"

The rules seem simple, but they're somehow presented as complicated.

Quote from: tzunder;786446I did, it seemed great but the combat system just didn't quite work right, and I could never put my finger on it so I went back to using BRP for ME.

I would love to see and official LOTR supplement for Legend/RQ6.

I hear the OpenQuest-based fantasy game Age of Shadow has a pretty strong Tolkien flavour, so OpenQuest may be a decent system to use for Middle Earth-set games. The pdf of the Age of Shadows rulebook can be downloaded for free from DTRPG.

Link:
The Age of Shadow RPG

I felt really bad for most of the people involved in Decipher's LotR — they created some really terrific products and major elements of the game were excellent. But the basic mechanics of combat and character creation were ill conceived and likely never fully play tested. One of the few games that looks more or less solid from a distance and then you get up close and realize basic situations are unresolvable dead ends. But the boxed sets of maps? Amazing! And the Moria boxed set is fantastic.

Quote from: Larsdangly;786614then you get up close and realize basic situations are unresolvable dead ends.

Sample case?

Quote from: Larsdangly;786614But the basic mechanics of combat and character creation were ill conceived and likely never fully play tested. One of the few games that looks more or less solid from a distance and then you get up close and realize basic situations are unresolvable dead ends.

Honestly I ran it for a year and a half and had very few issues.

How did you deal with the fact that it is statistically unlikely that you can kill anyone with a sword in less than 20 turns or something?

I found if you diminished the health points by one cumulatively as the penalty grew larger it worked fine. So:

5 at -0
4 at -1
3 at -2
2 at -3
1 at -4

Rather than:

5 at -0
5 at -1
5 at -2
5 at -3
5 at -4

Quote from: Larsdangly;786646How did you deal with the fact that it is statistically unlikely that you can kill anyone with a sword in less than 20 turns or something?

There's also the optional rule presented on p.270, which suggests to dispense with the wound system for minor NPCs and turn them into 1, 2, or 3 success opponents.

A variant would be to turn them into 1, 2, or 3 wound level opponents if you still wanted damage rolls to mean something.

Quote from: Larsdangly;786646How did you deal with the fact that it is statistically unlikely that you can kill anyone with a sword in less than 20 turns or something?

This is not what happened in play. Combats were not fast, but they were no slower than combats in a lot of other systems we have played.

Quote from: Larsdangly;785874LotR was a great product line — better than ToR, I would say, with one fatal flaw: The game itself was one of the few I would say is genuinely 'broken' That word is over used in our online world, but it actually applies in this case. You get the sense it wasn't even play tested. If you think I'm wrong, try resolving a fight between a half dozen humans and a half dozen orcs. Call me when you are 1 week into the process and we can talk about how it is going. But, the Moria boxed set is awesome. And the boxed set of maps is absolutely required by anyone who wants to run a middle earth game. Just use them with another game system...

I came in on the line as a playtester and writer after the core rulebook had already been published. I wish I'd gotten there earlier. Might have helped with combat and some of the other issues.

Sadly, the real way to handle things like that was buried in the middle of a page about having extra successes do additional damage. We ended up house-ruling that every extra success of damage a player achieved was worth another +d6 in damage. It helped considerably, especially for things like that lightning spell that did a paltry 4d6 damage.

The unpublished Barbarians & Warriors sourcebook actually had some nice fixes to combat, as well.

Quote from: jadrax;786406I tend to use the Decipher system that more or less works without having to reinvent the wheel. Although as posted up-thread somewhere, its really only works for one-on-one combats - the rules bog down quickly beyond that.

The core rules do have a mook/rabble system fix, breaking foes into one- and two-hit opponents. However, this system was roundly hated by most people on Decipher's forums.

Quote from: jadrax;786406After that It would depend on what bits of LotR I was looking to emphasis. Runequest might work quite well. The Doctor Who RPG by Cubical 7 could offer a different take, you could see the duel of words between Gandalf and Wyrmtongue working in that quite well, and its got built in support for mixed ability parties so you can have a Hobbit Gardener and a flesh bound Angel in the same party without the game creaking too much. Actually that last idea is more and more appealing as I think about it.

I really, really wish they'd gone that way.

Quote from: Ulairi;786442Did anyone else play Decipher's LOTR CODA game? I really liked it.

I played a ton of it. Our 33-session campaign "A Chronicle of Ice & Fire" was written up on Decipher's forums, and a lot of fans used it as the basis for their own campaigns.

I ran another shorter campaign, at around 16 sessions, set in the North at the time of the fall of Angmar.

Quote from: tzunder;786446I did, it seemed great but the combat system just didn't quite work right, and I could never put my finger on it so I went back to using BRP for ME.

I heartily endorse that route. The Age of Shadow Openquest adaptation also looks pretty spiffy.

Quote from: Larsdangly;786614I felt really bad for most of the people involved in Decipher's LotR — they created some really terrific products and major elements of the game were excellent. But the basic mechanics of combat and character creation were ill conceived and likely never fully play tested. One of the few games that looks more or less solid from a distance and then you get up close and realize basic situations are unresolvable dead ends. But the boxed sets of maps? Amazing! And the Moria boxed set is fantastic.

Agreed. House rules by the fan community did manage to fix most of these issues, however.

Quote from: Gabriel2;786617Sample case?

For example, one of my least favorite ones is that offensive values and defensive values quickly diverge. It was easily possible to get a bonus of over +20 with an attack (as well as rolling an additional die and discarding the low one) whereas the best one could get to defense was much, much lower.

Additionally, they never really figured out what to do with shields, which ended up as a specialization of another weapon type (clubs?), for some reason.

I don't have my books handy right now, though, and can't look up the exact wording and page #s.

Maybe someone should approach Pelgrane and Cubicle 7 about doing a 13th Age version called 3rd Age.

Quote from: Jason D;786854I came in on the line as a playtester and writer

Thanks for all your insights; that was interesting to read. I think of this game whenever I contemplate the over-proliferation of systems in our hobby. At this point, pretty much every major variant of core mechanics has been explored. And in my experience even those people think of as strongly distinct blur together into much of a sameness at the table. Honestly, how many ways of rolling to attack do we need? And adding one more actually isn't harmless. It contributes to the fragmentation of the hobby, which at this point is a tangled thicket of distinctions without a difference. In this sense, we are, collectively, fools. A much more satisfying structure to the whole thing would be a small number of core systems — I suspect a half dozen would be more than enough to cover the diversity of tastes — and focus energy on producing wonderful adventures, dungeons, monsters, spells, items, traps, etc.

Quote from: Larsdangly;786884Thanks for all your insights; that was interesting to read. I think of this game whenever I contemplate the over-proliferation of systems in our hobby. At this point, pretty much every major variant of core mechanics has been explored. And in my experience even those people think of as strongly distinct blur together into much of a sameness at the table. Honestly, how many ways of rolling to attack do we need? And adding one more actually isn't harmless. It contributes to the fragmentation of the hobby, which at this point is a tangled thicket of distinctions without a difference. In this sense, we are, collectively, fools. A much more satisfying structure to the whole thing would be a small number of core systems — I suspect a half dozen would be more than enough to cover the diversity of tastes — and focus energy on producing wonderful adventures, dungeons, monsters, spells, items, traps, etc.

Who knows? Frankly, though, there already are a small number of core systems (d20/D&D/Pathfinder, GURPS, HERO, Savage Worlds, Storyteller,  FATE, BRP, etc.) that dominate the industry.

Even hearkening back to the glory days of the industry (the early 80s, in my opinion), there were dozens of games to choose from, each with its own system. Systems that spanned multiple titles were kind of rare (outside of BRP I am having a hard time thinking of any others). In any given year, my group would play Psi-World, DragonQuest, D&D, Call of Cthulhu, the Tri-Tac games, RuneQuest, Villains & Vigilantes, Marvel Super Heroes, Stormbringer, Middle-earth Role Playing, Ysgarth, Pendragon, Boot Hill, Top Secret, Bushido, and a few others.

After posting, I remembered one telling sign about the LotR RPG. I asked on the forums how extensively hand-to-hand combat had been tested, and the response was that it had been thoroughly playtested using the Star Trek version of the system, which had appeared before. I followed up with a "huh?" and was gently reminded that Klingons used bat'leths.