[Lord of the Rings] Oh, CODA!?!
Gregor Hutton:
Ugh, so I got my friend Conor a copy of the CODA version of Lord of the Rings RPG (from 2001/2002) for Christmas. He's trying to get a short run of it together for me and Steve.
Steve has declared he is playing an Elf and I've said I'm playing a Dunedain. As Steve is away at the moment Conor and I met up and got in some Character Creation for me, followed by a short adventure. So, what did we learn?
(1) The book is gorgeous.
(2) There's a lot of Tolkein stuff in there.
(3) It looks a bit like it has all the standard RPG stuff that "RPGs are meant to have" in there.
(4) It was an effort to dig through it and create a character.
(5) There were errors that didn't help that go too smoothly.
(6) No one has any starting money, except the really rich dudes who took the Horder edge.
(7) Combat was quite fun.
(8) Healing is a pig...
(9) ...and none of these target numbers make any sense after a while.
(10) Oh, XP is a nightmare to track and encourages strange behaviour.
... and (11) despite all this Conor and I had a good time. The "system" that worked was Conor short-circuiting the non-working rules in the book. Sigh.
So... I created Maladorn, a Dunedain Warrior. Anything other than "normal age" is a non-optimal joke. Seriously. So I am 38.
I rolled rather than picked my stats, that seemed to work better for me. I avoided the standard packages and followed the custom build stuff. Some of it makes no sense. You can't have a Skill at higher than 6 ranks BUT to take one of the basic Warrior Order Abilities ("pick one of these") requires 8+. And a sample character has one with a 6. WTF?!
Anyway, I create my Armed Combat, Ranged Combat, Stealth monster of a Dunedain. He is Arrogant and a Dullard because those Flaws don't affect anything relevant to him (!) but despite being un-bookish he has 27 ranks in Lores. So... I fill up with loads of ranks in Lore: Mirkwood, Lore: Anduin, Lore: Misty Mountains, etc. and give myself 6 ranks in Westros and Sindarin.
Some of the things you can spend your points on seem really rubbish. I mean, for 1 point I could get 1 Rank in a Skill. OK. But for the same point I could take 1 Rank in a Stat, much more useful if it moves my stat from 7 to 8, or 9 to 10. Or I could buy a totally awesome Edge like Healing Hands (I did!) which gives +5 to Healing. Or an Edge like Ambidextrous or Two-Handed Fighting (I did, both). Quick Draw too. You can buy more Quick Draw to our draw people but... there's an Initiative system for that already... so it'll just be the 1 Rank of Quick Draw, thanks.
Then it comes to gear... I don't appear to have any. So I kit myself out by talking about it with Conor. I also ask that my horse can do "something", so Conor gives it the "Travel Sense" Edge, which is totally awesome (Whisper can never get lost travelling where he is familiar) and this is the sort of cool character gen stuff that should be in the book.
Well, we got Maladorn done and then we set off adventuring in the Ettenmoors. Conor has a real passion for LOTR and so do I so it was a lot of fun but Conor and I kept butting up against the system. Sigh.
The target numbers are crazy. Rolling 2d6 and trying to get 30 is a joke. Even 20 is nuts, even for my Nimbleness 10 (+2), Ranged Combat +6, Dunedain Warrior. I have about a 3% chance of hitting 20!
Conor beefed up his men of the Ettenmoors with an Evade edge, roll 3d6 and pick the best 2. When you're Injured life becomes very hard: Dazed (-1), Injured (-3) before dropping off the precipice with Wounded (-5), Incapacitated (-7) and Near Death (-9). And then we figured that you really couldn't heal back from Injured. Even Dazed was a chore. And what did a healoth box mean? I had 9 of them in each Level. Do so i heal 1/9th of a Level (a box) or one whole Level (9 boxes). Ughhh.
Still, the multiple actions in a round and all that kind of worked. The colour from Conor was good and the damage from weapons to the number of boxes/Hit Points we had worked well.
I guess this game is consigned to the dustbin of history now, but clearly it can't have been playtested before publishing. Some of the stuff was such a roadblock that it must have been handwaved by the GM in any playtesting that did go on.
Oh, and in the character generation under age I figured that Gandalf would get +1 Savvy... except Savvy isn't a stat. We reckoned it must have meant Wisdom and then I decided at that point to play a nicely unmodified normal age dude.
Ron Edwards:
Gah. This sort of thing characterizes a lot of licensed source material RPGs.
I'm posting to call attention to the relevance of this account to the Currency issues being discussed in [Poison'd] Trying to understand Currency and Reward Systems. To complete the circuit, Gregor, can you talk a little bit about the reward mechanics in this game?
Best, Ron
masqueradeball:
Sort of tangent... the sad thing is the Last Unicorn guys became Decipher's RPG team and for some reason went from the awesome ICON system (check the Dune RPG for why its awesome) to the shitty D20 wanna be that is CODA and they also decided on the most inaccessible layout ever. Their Star Trek stuff suffered the same fate.
Gregor Hutton:
Yeah, we've not seen the Star Trek one but someone mentioned it to us on Sunday while we were playing. (They were curious if we were playtesting The One Ring, the forthcoming licenced LOTR game from Cubicle 7, but when we said "No, it's the CODA one" they said how much they didn't like the Star Trek one.)
I think the Reward Mechanics don't really fit well with what you should be doing in game. They can, but only with a lot of work from the GM and players (basically if we ignore the behaviour that the game encourages and instead just do what we want to do without any incentive).
Once you've created your PC they will change very little from that unless you play for a long time. how do you change? XP. And the way you get Experience Points is to beat target numbers. So when Conor rolled 11 for a wild man of the Ettenmoors to "Observe" me, and I rolled a total of 16 on "Stealth" I get the 11 XP as his difficulty. When the wild man rolls 14 to Dodge and I roll 15 to hit then I get another 14 XP.
But I could be rolling against anything to get my XP. I feel I should be asking to roll Westros to understand the gutteral mutterings of the Ettenmoors thug (and I did). And my Ride skill to calm my horse (I didn't, I just roleplayed it and fed him a sweetened cube of food). "What's the XP, err, I mean difficulty?" asks the player.
[It reminds me somewhat of using every different weapon in a session of RuneQuest to get the maximal ticks for improvement.]
So, none of that encourages me to do anything appropriate for the world or character, really.
And then it makes combat strange. I mean, I've created a guy to fight, but it's a bit suboptimal to get XP from fighting. Why? Well, I get XP for the many, many rolls in Combat, sure. But in Combat I get injured and that gives me crippling penalties to earning more XP doing .. well, less dangerous stuff.
At the end of the session I had 324 XP. I need 1000 to get any benefits (I think I get a couple of +1s then... again, why would I spend them on Skill ranks when I could put them in stats to benefit whole groups of Skills).
There are some levers in the game that dramatically help your quest for racking up XP. A high Initiative is good. A mis-balanced set of skills (have some high and use those to mine XP) and leave the rest low is good too (you'll beat higher target numbers). It's all quite un-Tolkein behaviour.
Another feedback cycle is when you take damage. It seems kind of fun at the time until you realise that it really is sucking your totals down, so you take more damage and so on. But still, your opponent is in the same boat. Fine, you'll probably kill him. Then you realise the -7 or whatever has made it impossible to be healed. Even -5 is sucking your total down hard (a 2d6 roll added to a number typically 4 to 6).
And as far as I could tell there was nothing to stop Conor having all three men of the Ettenmoors attack me at once. He can write of Man 1 and Man 2, but by the time Man 3 hits me I'll be at -7 and easy pickings!
That makes me wary of Combat but I can't exactly avoid it if the GM declares it's happening.
It's also some way away from what we're here to do in the moment (revel in Tolkein's Middle Earth), and in a bigger sense (quest like the heroes in the fiction with my Aragorn-clone).
masqueradeball:
Looking at the advancement rules, you're only suppose to get XP for tests that are "story-related." Sounds like you guys were giving out way more XP for tests than RAW suggests.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page