I've always wanted to run a game with magic that feels like the Lord of the Rings. What's the best method to do this?
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I've always wanted to run a game with magic that feels like the Lord of the Rings.
I've always wanted to run a game with magic that feels like the Lord of the Rings. What's the best method to do this?
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Write a book. Trying to "gamify" Tolkien style worlds completely ruins them.
This, 100%, as loathe as I am to agree with someone who unironically says things like "gamify".
What terminology would you use then, oh so based chadman?
The English language is a good place to start, instead of slang and buzzwords.
So you don't actually have any better phrases to use, you just wanted to pretend to be smart? Got it, thanks.
It would actually be nice to see people stop being so reductive and lazy when they communicate, especially when they feel like they have to make up words despite the fact there are over 100,000 actual words in the English language.
But you know, self-improvement is much harder than maintaining the attitude of "I'm number one, and it's everyone else's fault if they misunderstand me!"
So you still dodge the question with a wall of psuedo-intellection babble instead of giving a straight answer. I didn't need confirmation, but thanks.
I directly answered the question of "just want to pretend to be smart" in the negative, and whether or not I offer any better phrases has no bearing on the fact that there are plenty of words to choose from over buzzwords and slang.
Try learning how to comprehend what you're reading, instead of getting mad and posting based on your knee-jerk reaction.
Maybe you ought to go back to Twitter.
>Use simple word to explain simple concept bad because
The frick is wrong with you anon.
>simple word
It isn't even a word.
The frick is wrong with *you*?
Gamification and gamify have been in the OED since at least 2010
Still no answer I see, but thanks for triple-confirming. Does all this dodging the question get tiring after awhile?
>directly answer question
>explain how it is direct
>"hurr durr ur dodging"
Frick yourself.
Quadruple confirming. I admire your stamina.
NTA but since you can't back up your snark with an intelligent response, you should stop posting instead of digging yourself deeper. It's an anonymous website, so you don't have to attempt to save face because no one will know you were the author of those posts.
Go back.
English is a mongrel language that doesn't deserve anyone mastering it. Majority of people consciously or subconsciously realises this so you have such neologisms like "gamify".
English has no central authority setting its rules and given it's the most widely spoken language in the world it's hard to picture anyone having a serious claim to it. Much of its strength is the flexible addition of new words.
Fortunately they made a language for people like you to use instead, it's French. Go learn it.
"slang" and "buzzword" are unironically examples of slang and buzzwords. You've ouroboros'd yourself.
Just restructure the sentence and use game-like. I think his point is if you can't use an actual word to complete a sentence then its a stupid sentence. Granted I don't care because you used quotation marks to denote that its just something people say, but still.
that escalated quickly
Tie supernatural abilities to skills
Performance skills lets you control people's emotions if you get it high enough, for example
The Medicine skill eventually gives you lay-on-hands
Stealth let's you turn quasi-invisible in dim light or crowds (enemies will see you but they won't notice you)
On top of that, add magic items
Is this how magic works in LotR? Or even Tolkien's mythology?
I remember Aragorn saying, right after meeting Frodo, "I've met with people who could make themselves unseen, but not in broad daylight under everyone's nose"(heavily paraphrasing).
Indicating that there is a clean-cut different between high skills and actual magical effects.
>magic that feels like the Lord of the Rings
A firework party?
A lot of the magic of Tolkein’s world is in the mundane. Herbs with healing properties, incredible blades forged so well as to be razor sharp even after striking stone, and skill and power running so strongly through your veins as to make you seem superhuman.
>dunedain blood
You gain a bonus to your physical power, even standing a head taller than other men.
>elvish
You get fricking cracked. Downside is you’re completely set in your ways and intractable.
>dwarfish
You’d actually get a penalty to combat power to a degree due to your stature putting you at a disadvantage. Gimli couldn’t just run right in the same way Aragorn or Legolas could, it was his skill in battle that made him such a good fighter. So I would represent that as essentially giving dwarfs a bonus to their skill modifier. The way Tolkein describes dwarfs they really should mostly all be using polearms.
>orcs and goblins
Runty but clever. Worse physical attributes on average but probably giving them free rogue like skills. Could take a page from d&d and give them pack tactics and a racial form of sneak attack.
To get back to the magical part. Again a lot of Tolkein’s world is magically mundane. In theory anyone could be at least a little bit of a healer like Aragorn, what sets him apart is his wisdom and knowledge of healing plants, and exactly what those plants actually can heal. It’s more elf territory to openly use healing magic, but healing magic is never shown to be enough to stop imminent death or truly stop curses even then, and it takes days to work. It would probably be something like protracted medicine rolls with a certain amount of successes needed to stabilize someone and the bulk of the healing would require them to recover more or less naturally. The most brazenly magical stuff outside of wizards, is weapons and items. The Ring, Sting, the vial of the first light, that sorta stuff.
He mad.
We have gamified baiting nonsense responses from this guy, good job anons.
Autism is a hell of a system.
OP here.
Why did you ignore my question to get in some dumb semantic argument and derail the thread? I don't appreciate that.
Well what the first guy said before the pretentious pseud had a tantrum is essentially correct, the wonder of Tolkien’s world comes from the world and (to a lesser extent) the characters and to replicate that you’d essentially need to create a world and write a story of comparable quality, trying to turn it into a game doesn’t really work
Not op, but I'm of the opinion that nearly anything with a narrative weight can be represented in a game if it's built around it.
These answers
are a lot more apt and perfectly possible to integrate in a game.
It's crazy, they got triggered into this by the use of the word "gamify".
This is like next level insanity.
And here I was, hoping for Tolkien buffs to give us a good description of magic in his work.
Try reading the books.
I read The Hobbit and LotR, but there's a near bottomless amount of depth you can go, with Tolkien.
The Silmarillion, then the Unfinished Tales, then the correspondence...
That's where lore buffs comes in handy.
Ya know.
Division of labour, all that.
Your idea is trash and you should have a nice day.
Write karma/backlash system, each time mage uses spells, backlash chance goes up, it goes down for solving things without magic and doing good deeds, using magic to harm beings will increase it more to keep it more in line with the idea.
Also, if the wizard goes apeshit murderhobo with their magic, they just turn into a corrupted villain version of themselves at some point or die at the hands of a natural unnatural disaster.
Make magic ambivalent, mysterious and restricted to divine or devilish higher powers and its agents. Sublety is also the name of the game.
Don't have your deathknights raise the dead on the battlefield or fling around eldritch blasts. Make them darken the sky, dull the light and spirits of the opposing faction. Describe how their own soldiers start to rush forward with pale faces and cold sweat on their brows, throwing themselves at and breaking the enemy shieldwall as if they were desperate to escape a burning building.
Did you read the One Ring? Seems like a proper place to start.
Legitimately surprised it took this long for it to get mentioned. Might want to just read through that
instead of getting caught in the quagmire of austistic shitflinging. Even if you do your own setting, you could still use the system or steal parts and ideas from it.
>One Ring
What is the focus in this thing? Adventures in Middle-earth always struck me as somehow wrong considering how much of it is explored in the books.
It is set in time between The Hobbit and Fellowship of the Ring, and is about the party undertaking quests to investigate and fight back rising darkness and returning threats. It can make for cool mid stakes scenarios of unveiling subversions and plots of Sauron's agents instead of just hacking and slashing orcs.
LotR system for D&D 5e
I actually already did this for my low-fantasy, low-magic style game.
Magic is essentially a skill or special power that lets you boost or weaken other rolls, mostly depending on the context of what the roll is or what it's being used for. All mages have a specific "lore" that they specialize in, but can sometimes learn more. For example, a mage who has the Lore of Flame will deal more damage with burning weapons, can grant a bonus to someone forging a weapon or piece of armor, and can add their magic roll to survival checks for doing things like protecting yourselves from wild animals (homebrew rule = your campfire prevents wilderness encounters).
Elves get a bonus lore specific to the type of Elf they are or where they live. So a Wood Elf has automatic magic related to trees (or arrows, since they're made of wood). Magical bloodlines are also a big part of the setting, and magic bloodlines specifically grant bonuses to troops under the command of the leader with the magic bloodline- this also explains why Kings are always showing up and fighting on battlefields instead of staying inside their castles.
Oh, that's pretty good actually. That sounds pretty much spot on.
Perhaps you need the ability to craft items capable of feats of magic, on top of that.
Magic as it is in novels and magic as a mechanic in a game are almost always opposed to one another.
It being a game with rules needs magic to have defined parameters, be repeatable, and have easy 'If X then Y'. If it doesn't then there is no reason to ever make use of it because you as a player have no idea what it can do or how to have a repeatable outcome, which when you are engaging with a game you need consistency.
On the other hand in novels like Lord of the Rings magic is always something mysterious and used by people with no clearly defined parameters for its limits/use. Magic often is also something that requires long periods of time for esoteric or limited benefit, a novel like The Black Company comes to mind where mages have either broken free entirely from the concept of 'rules' or required inordinate amounts of time for powerful but fringe benefits.
Burning Wheel comes close.