Middle Earth Characters

[Desert Scribe]

But even with the Eagles they were still outnumbered. In that last hour Beorn himself had appeared—no one knew how or from where. He came alone, and in bear’s shape; and he seemed to have grown almost to giant-size in his wrath.

From the underlined text above, it sounds like Beorn should be a multi-hex figure--at least four hexes. That would help out in taking on lots of one-hex opponents.

[Hobgoblin]

Originally Posted by middlearthenthusiast

Good thoughts all around, but technically any role play in Middle Earth is an alternate Middle Earth.

Yes, that's quite true. I suppose there's a slight distinction to be drawn between a game that exists in the gaps between the "historical" events of the books and one where the PCs can change the course of those events.

Originally Posted by middlearthenthusiast

But seriously I think it’d be cool to have players run into him pre-LOTR or do a showdown with him and Gandalf for fun.

Can't argue with that!

[Chris Rice]

The thing that nobody mentions here is "morale" and it's something RPGs generally ignore or do badly. It's quite common for GMs to have monsters always fight to the last man (or Orc). That's ridiculous if you're trying to model LOTR or more gritty gameworlds.

When a gigantic Werebear (Beorn) charges at a line of Orcs and starts smashing them up, it would be entirely reasonable for the formation to break and the Orcs to flee: Orcs want to live too. Modelling behaviour like that makes it far easier for Beorn to achieve the feats of the stories. If you have every enemy just stand it's ground and fight to the death then obviously you'll get very different results.

Since TFT doesn't have "morale" rules, then as a GM, you'll either have to create them or use common sense and put yourself in the mind of the monster for a moment. If you do that, you'll find there will be a lot more fleeing and surrendering than fights to the death.

[Hobgoblin]

Originally Posted by Desert Scribe

From the underlined text above, it sounds like Beorn should be a multi-hex figure--at least four hexes. That would help out in taking on lots of one-hex opponents.

It lets him drive through the ranks more effectively, but it also makes him more vulnerable to orc-arrows. And it means that he has more rear hexes for those wargs to snap at ...

Of course, if you just rule that he's immune to non-magical weapons in bear form, then the problem's solved. That's a more Tolkien-esque tweak to Lars' suggestion of immunity to non-silver weapons, as there are lots of enchanted weapons floating around in Middle Earth ("forged by the Elves" seems to be enough to qualify for that status). And the main effect of most magical weapons seems to be the ability to wound creatures that are otherwise hard or impossible to hurt (trolls in Moria and the Cormallen; the Witch-king, etc.).

I've just had a look at Hrolf Kraki's Saga, and it's clear that Tolkien has more or less lifted Beorn's battlefield role from that:

Hjorvard and his men saw a great bear advancing in front of King Hrolf's troop. The bear was always beside the king, and it killed more men with its paws than any five of the king's champions did. Blows and missiles glanced off the animal, as it used its weight to crush King Hjorvard's men and their horses. Between its teeth, it tore everything within reach, causing a palpable fear to spread through the ranks of King Hjorvard's army.

In the saga, the bear vanishes when Bodvar Bjarki is roused from his trance (the bear is a sort of astral projection, apparently) and urged to join the fight. In The Hobbit, there's no such failure, so Beorn functions as a full-blown deus ex machina.

But the similarities suggest to me that Tolkien meant Beorn to be genuinely invulnerable to normal weapons - as his literary ancestor appears to be.

[Hobgoblin]

Originally Posted by Chris Rice

The thing that nobody mentions here is "morale" and it's something RPGs generally ignore or do badly. It's quite common for GMs to have monsters always fight to the last man (or Orc). That's ridiculous if you're trying to model LOTR or more gritty gameworlds.

When a gigantic Werebear (Beorn) charges at a line of Orcs and starts smashing them up, it would be entirely reasonable for the formation to break and the Orcs to flee: Orcs want to live too. Modelling behaviour like that makes it far easier for Beorn to achieve the feats of the stories. If you have every enemy just stand it's ground and fight to the death then obviously you'll get very different results.

Since TFT doesn't have "morale" rules, then as a GM, you'll either have to create them or use common sense and put yourself in the mind of the monster for a moment. If you do that, you'll find there will be a lot more fleeing and surrendering than fights to the death.

Those are excellent points. My instinct is that it's easier to represent the epic/heroic/demigod figures in Tolkien's writings in wargames than it is in RPGs - because they have morale rules and because they can scale up an individual to the power of a regiment.

If you play Hordes of the Things (to my mind, the best and most elegant massed-battle fantasy wargame), for example, it's easy. Beorn is a "hero", the wargs are "beasts", the Orcs "hordes" and Bolg and his guards are a "warband" element. And you can have a well-balanced game that can very feasibly deliver the exact result in the books (Beorn's initial onslaught evens the odds a bit, and his destruction of Bolg tips the points balance over the edge, causing the army to rout).

But any skirmish game - the category into which most RPG combat systems fall - is going to struggle with a creature that can take on an army single-handed.

[Steve Plambeck]

Originally Posted by Chris Rice

Since TFT doesn't have "morale" rules, then as a GM, you'll either have to create them or use common sense and put yourself in the mind of the monster for a moment. If you do that, you'll find there will be a lot more fleeing and surrendering than fights to the death.

In a roundabout way, a Morale Die Roll was added to TFT for the Microquest Treasure Of The Silver Dragon. I liked the rule enough to add it into my original group's house rules.

"Each time an opponent in an enemy group is downed make a die roll for each remaining opponent. Each opponent will react according to the one die roll made for him. This reaction may be for the combat round to follow the current initiative roll or for another time period designated. Add one to the die roll for each opponent previously downed." (Emphasis mine)

Degree and likelihood of the reaction may also be controlled by placing a permanent plus or minus adjuster (usually only 1) on a character's or animal species' Morale roll. The modifier for many species was given in the Microquest.

The reactions went:
Die Roll / Reaction
1 - continue fighting, no reaction
2 - continue fighting, no reaction
3 - continue fighting, no reaction
4 - hesitates, will not engage voluntarily this turn, but otherwise fights normally
5 - hesitates, will not take any attack option this turn
6 - break and run, will try to disengage and/or run off map away from danger
7 - break and run, will try to disengage and/or run off map away from danger
8+ surrender - opponent drops to knees, drops weapons and trys to surrender

The roll was meant to be applicable to NPCs only, but specific player characters who were cowardly in character might be required to make the roll too

It worked well in Silver Dragon. It would have to be adapted for a large battle though. Every time 1 orc went down, you wouldn't want to roll a die for each of the other thousands of orcs :)

[Hobgoblin]

That's a really interesting - and very useful - rule. I suppose the +1 for each downed opponent would need some careful control in large fights, as you might get a situation where an outnumbering side that's very clearly winning a fight against the PCs might flee automatically even though they'd taken only relatively light casualties. But judicial overruling by the GM could prevent this (no morale rolls until a certain outnumbering ratio is breached, or something like that).

Implicit in this whole discussion, I think, is the question of what a ruleset's 'natural' mode is. For me, Melee's natural mode is gladiatorial combat - which makes TFT perfect for sword-and-sorcery-style adventures, full of tense, gritty fights against fairly evenly matched foes. That's my favourite mode of RPG combat, which is why I like the system so much.

The skirmish game which is 'naturally' Tolkien-esque, for me, is Song of Blades and Heroes. I don't know if any of you know it, but it's very simple, very fast and heavily morale-based. It too has an RPG variant, with which I've had a lot of fun running one-offs, but to which I much prefer TFT, for all manner of reasons. But Song of Blades does something like the fight in the Chamber of Mazarbul perfectly, RAW. It has each side take a morale check when its starting numbers fall below half, when a leader (if the side has one) is killed, and when a friend is "gruesomely killed" (for those close by).

These morale checks are cumulative - so if a leader's killed gruesomely, and his death takes that side below half-strength, then the remaining troops will have to take three morale checks each. The morale checks are rolled on three dice against a "quality" score, with each failure leading to a retreat and three failures leading to flight off the table. Your average orc has only a 50% chance of passing each check, although a (living) leader boosts that. So it leads to lots of temporary retreats and some outright panics (games tend to end through routing rather than slaughter).

The other thing that's very Tolkien-esque about it is that combat results are confined to draws, knock-downs, push-backs, kills (which could just be out-of-action results, like Frodo getting speared by the orc-chieftain in Moria) and gruesome kills - which leads to a lot of the sort of single-blow deaths that Tolkien favoured. I can't think of a better system for reproducing this scene, which coudl be perfectly annotated using Song of Blades RAW:

But even as they retreated, and before Pippin and Merry had reached the stair outside, a huge orc-chieftain, almost man-high, clad in black mail from head to foot, leaped into the chamber; behind him his followers clustered in the doorway. His broad flat face was swart, his eyes were like coals, and his tongue was red; he wielded a great spear. With a thrust of his huge hide shield he turned Boromir's sword and bore him backwards, throwing him to the ground. Diving under Aragorn's blow with the speed of a striking snake he charged into the Company and thrust with his spear straight at Frodo. The blow caught him on the right side, and Frodo was hurled against the wall and pinned. Sam, with a cry, hacked at the spear-shaft, and it broke. But even as the orc flung down the truncheon and swept out his scimitar, Andúril came down upon his helm. There was a flash like flame and the helm burst asunder. The orc fell with cloven head. His followers fled howling, as Boromir and Aragorn sprang at them.

Anyway, for an RPG experience, it might be an idea to bolt on Song of Blades' morale system to TFT. All that would involve would be assigning each NPC a "quality" score and then performing morale checks against it using the (d6-based) Song of Blades rules. Designated leaders could add bonuses as in that system.

A "gruesome kill" could be any killing blow that does more than 6 points of damage, perhaps. Or it might only be the result of an aimed blow.

(I hope it's not heresy here to suggest grafting on elements of other publishers' work - I'm very much from the "take what is useful" school of assembling house rules!)

The thing is, "fleeing howling" is something that happens a lot in Tolkien (it's caused by orc-leader deaths at least twice in Moria alone, if my memory serves). So anything that models that, in dungeon crawls as much as big battles, can only help.

[Steve Plambeck]

Originally Posted by Hobgoblin

That's a really interesting - and very useful - rule. I suppose the +1 for each downed opponent would need some careful control in large fights, as you might get a situation where an outnumbering side that's very clearly winning a fight against the PCs might flee automatically even though they'd taken only relatively light casualties. But judicial overruling by the GM could prevent this (no morale rolls until a certain outnumbering ratio is breached, or something like that).

Yes exactly, the morale checks would be just another tool in the GM's toolbox, not something needed or desired in every situation. Applying such rolls to PC's by rule wouldn't sit well with most TFT players, because there it feels inconsistent with the whole "self-determination" vibe that permeates the RAW. But no one can object to any method the GM chooses to regulate the behavior of NPCs, at least as long as animals don't do things that defy their known natural instincts (a mother bear defends her cubs to the end, dice rolls be damned).

GMs get stuck in the situation where they ask themselves, is this what the NPC I'm controlling would really do, or is this just what I want the NPC to do? Having a tool for determining that choice objectively not only takes some pressure off the GM but may return a more natural, believable result. The NPCs aren't supposed to know everything the GM knows, so they shouldn't act like it, at least not always.

A Ranger of the Dunedain (the PC) surrounded by 20 goblins (NPCs) knows he can be killed in this situation. And the GM, familiar with the rules of TFT can be sure of killing that Ranger with the 20 goblins. But the goblins themselves aren't supposed to know this.

If on the very first turn to act, the Ranger puts down 3 goblins with a sweeping blow, what should really happen? As GM I know if I press the attack with the remaining 17 goblins odds are I'll eventually kill the Ranger, but is that what these goblins would do? Seeing 3 goblins killed (or at least knocked down) with one blow should have them thinking "I'm not attacking that guy! Let someone else do it!".

Just because we as GMs see NPCs as expendable doesn't mean those characters should always act expendable. Especially in a Middle-Earth setting, given the shock and awe of seeing that Ranger sweep away the first 3 goblins, I can see the rest hesitating, freezing, some even dropping arms and running -- and it's still the first melee turn. And that makes for a better story, which is really all we're going for.

[Hobgoblin]

Originally Posted by Steve Plambeck

A Ranger of the Dunedain (the PC) surrounded by 20 goblins (NPCs) knows he can be killed in this situation. And the GM, familiar with the rules of TFT can be sure of killing that Ranger with the 20 goblins. But the goblins themselves aren't supposed to know this.

Yes, that's absolutely the crux of it.

Originally Posted by Steve Plambeck

Just because we as GMs see NPCs as expendable doesn't mean those characters should always act expendable. Especially in a Middle-Earth setting, given the shock and awe of seeing that Ranger sweep away the first 3 goblins, I can see the rest hesitating, freezing, some even dropping arms and running -- and it's still the first melee turn. And that makes for a better story, which is really all we're going for.

Exactly. And as you say, it's nice to be able to do this mechanically because it takes a bit of pressure off the GM. And the smoothness/integration of the mechanic is important; I think most versions of D&D have morale rules, but I can't recall ever playing a game when they were used.

This weekend, I'm going to try bolting on the Song of Blades morale rules to TFT; I like how they provide an easy means of modulating the chances of a reaction through the "quality" score - and it's very easy to assign a score between 2 (best) and 6 (worst) to different NPC types, to give their chances of flinching in the face of adversity. And because leaders boost (i.e. reduce) the score, their presence has an automatic mechanical effect.

The other thing that Song of Blades does well is provide a variety of triggers for morale checks (rather than simply relying on numbers killed). I think that could work really well if adapted for TFT. The sweeping-blow example you give is exactly the kind of thing - perhaps two or more foes downed in a single blow could be one equivalent of a Song of Blades "gruesome kill"?

I suppose you could have a 'trigger table' something like this:

Break point: e.g. 50% casualties, 20% casualties or whatever
Leader death
Ally killed in a single blow
More than one ally killed in a single blow
More than one ally downed in a single blow
Deaths of X elite allies
Outnumbered
No longer outnumber enemies by X:1

And then you could have 'rout blocks' to cover things like threats to cubs or young or mates; defence of homes or treasure; or the presence of allies who are more feared than the current foes.

That sounds a lot, but for each group, it would just take a minute's thought. So, for the Orcs in Moria, the info might look something like this:

Moria Orcs
Morale-test triggers: loss of leader; loss of five uruks; loss of troll; no longer outnumber enemies by 2:1
Rout blocks: Balrog within three megahexes; troll in same megahex.

And for something like a bear, it could be this:

Morale-test triggers: wounded with fire; loss of 10 or more ST points in single wound; wounded by gunpowder weapon
Route blocks: accompanied by cubs; close to lair; cubs wounded

[Steve Plambeck]

Hobgoblin, I've never even heard of Song of Blades before, but the morale system and the way you're planning to implement it sounds awesome.