[Lord of the Rings] Oh, CODA!?!
Callan S.:
It's funny - while I can imagine various problems, getting more XP for doing harder to do things makes harder to do things attractive! Heck, using lots of different weapons (instead of the same damn best choice weapon over and over) sounds good (I know that example was from runequest, but...)
Of course I'm talking from a gamist angle, here.
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Fine, you'll probably kill him. Then you realise the -7 or whatever has made it impossible to be healed.
Wow, sounds like it's really set up neatly for you to win battles, but then die of your wounds. Given the melancholy in Tolkien that sounds pretty dead on.
Gregor Hutton:
Hey Nolan and Callan
Nolan, that may be true, but if it is then it raises another problem. Namely, how in hell do you advance at all? If you're only taking really significant "story related" rolls as contributing to your XP I think you run into a wall. Given that a difficulty of 10 might be typical of tests in the game (or at least, ones that you can pass), you'll need to pass 100 of them to get the 1000 XP needed for two +1s. That's crazy. How many sessions will it take to get 100 story-related tests per player?
(And if that's the intention they should have beefed up starting characters so that advancement was less of an issue.)
Now, I happen to think it's not a large mental leap for a roll "to understand what the Man of the Ettenmoors" is shouting as "story related". Conor must have reckoned it was as he gave me a roll and XP for it. It turned out he was shouting for help, which is why his three pals turned up after I had slain him. And given the combat rules, the lists of combat-related edges, the range of weapons and the combative nature of the source material I think combat rolls are probably going to get called story-related a lot of the time.
But, hey, that was Conor's call as GM (and this game, like a lot of games) leaves the call on what is and isn't "story related" up to the GM. I'd like to know if there are examples in there of what are and aren't fair calls for awarding XP.
Callan, the problem we had with healing was that my Aragorn clone couldn't heal someone very easily from Injured never mind help save Frodo after Weathertop. And my take on Tolkein is that the Fellowship didn't fight through Moria only to fall off the bridge because they were rolling at -7, y'know? My take on Tolkein is that there is a lot of death of incidental characters in large battles, but significant characters only die at crucial points. Boromir doesn't die from his wounds after a battle, he's slain because he chooses to sacrifice himself so that the others can be warned/escape.
I'd feel pretty miffed playing Boromir if I'm slain in the first round of combat (rolling at -5, -7 then -9) because I couldn't heal the damage I took off three brigands the week before.
I'll see if I can get Conor on here to talk about it from his point of view. He's the one who's read the book more than me.
Finarvyn:
Quote from: masqueradeball on February 17, 2011, 09:45:30 PM
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.
Agreed. I have all three games you mentioned (ICON Dune, CODA LOTR, CODA ST) and the CODA system doesn't seem like an evolutionary improvement of ICON at all. Indeed, the LOTR game feels so much like 3E to me (feats aren't called "feats" but have the same purpose) that they might as well made it compatible with other 3E/d20 products. That would have made it at least somewhat useful. As an orphaned and abandoned system, it has little value to me anymore.
Also, the 2d6 dice mechanic is somewhat limiting. As soon as you stack a few plusses onto a character you start to break the dice curve. Guys like Aragorn and Legolas simply never miss their target.
Things like this make the game a strange one, because the spell system feels pretty Middle-earth and the background flavor is pretty Middle-earth, but the rules in general don't feel very Middle-earth. If that makes any sense.
Devon Oratz:
I actually owned this game once.
I'm not surprised I never got any actual play out of it. In hindsight (this didn't occur to me at the time) I don't know why anyone wouldn't just use/modify D&D instead.
Callan S.:
Hi Gregor,
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Callan, the problem we had with healing was that my Aragorn clone couldn't heal someone very easily from Injured never mind help save Frodo after Weathertop. And my take on Tolkein is that the Fellowship didn't fight through Moria only to fall off the bridge because they were rolling at -7, y'know? My take on Tolkein is that there is a lot of death of incidental characters in large battles, but significant characters only die at crucial points. Boromir doesn't die from his wounds after a battle, he's slain because he chooses to sacrifice himself so that the others can be warned/escape
Yeah, but I'd say your working in a sim sense where...well, I'll quote someone else
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I’ve spilled more than a few gallons of electronic ink over the years suggesting that much of fantasy’s appeal lies in the way provides readers the kinds of worlds that humans are prone to cook up in the absence of science, worlds adapted to our psychology, rather than vice versa. Scriptural worlds.
source
Worlds adapted to our psychology, rather than vice versa. Worlds where, if you think a small rock falls slower than a larger rock falls, then it does, for example. It's a striking thing to consider both from a distance. While the perspective I was applying of is that the world works however it works and you step up and deal with that - more of a gamist perspective. In the gamist perspective, if you think the smaller rock falls slower but it turns out they both fall at the same speed, well you suck up that you were wrong (atleast in terms of this world) and then you start taking that into account in terms of winning.
Anyway, in terms of working with what you get, getting more for doing harder things is a pretty sweet deal/sweet thing to deal with - very cuddly. And with the healing thing - was there a way of naturally healing over time or such? I can't imagine someone, when writing a game, falling into such an autistic-like state they actually expect someone to sit and roll healing rolls hundreds of times to reflect long term care. But maybe it happened?
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