PC Races of Middle Earth

[Stormcrow]

Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2

Hobbits, though, _are_ affected by the Great Rings just as other Men are, the difference is one of degree. Hobbits tend to be resistant of domination, but they aren't immune to it like Dwarves. Sméagol hardly ever wore the Ring after he went underground, which is part of why he ended up as what he was rather than a wraith.

That Smeagol stopped wearing the Ring for much of the time is PART of his resistance. The point of the Rings of Power is to turn their owners into wraiths under the command of Sauron. Now, the Ruling Ring wasn't meant to be handed over to a hobbit or hobbit-like creature, but it has the same power to turn its wearer into a wraith. And it failed to do this to Gollum. He resisted. He wasn't immune, but he resisted for five hundred years.

Hobbits most certainly do stop aging if they hold a Great Ring,

And the Nine Rings had the same effect on men. Do we know that the Seven didn't have that effect on dwarves?

and obviously a Ring can make a Hobbit invisible.

And men. Do we know that the Seven didn't make dwarves invisible?

Invisibility is really a side-effect of a Ring of Power. Your body is dragged most of the way into the spirit world, where you gain the ability to dominate the wills of others with your own, but prolonged existence there tends to make it permanent, and to dominate your own will, subject to wearer of the One Ring. Being in the spirit world tends to put the wearers of the Rings into a sort of telepathic hub, where they can read each other's thoughts if they try, and where the wearer of the Ruling Ring can try to dominate the wills of the others.

We know that dwarves' wills could not be dominated by the Rings, but we don't really know anything else. Do dwarves resist being pushed into the spirit world? That would tend to suggest they do not turn invisible and do not enter the telepathic link between the Rings. Or do they just react differently to the domination aspect? That would suggest they do turn invisible and join the link.

There are too many unanswered questions to be definitive. I see dwarf stubbornness and hobbit hopefulness as two different things, but not very different when it comes to resisting the shadow. The way they go about it is different, but the end result is much the same: Sauron has trouble controlling them. Dwarves are grim and hobbits are light-hearted, and both attitudes resist the Shadow.

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by Stormcrow

Invisibility is really a side-effect of a Ring of Power. Your body is dragged most of the way into the spirit world, where you gain the ability to dominate the wills of others with your own, but prolonged existence there tends to make it permanent, and to dominate your own will, subject to wearer of the One Ring. Being in the spirit world tends to put the wearers of the Rings into a sort of telepathic hub, where they can read each other's thoughts if they try, and where the wearer of the Ruling Ring can try to dominate the wills of the others.

Different rings do different things. The Elven rings didn't make their bearers invisible, and nor do they seem to have allowed the reading of minds.

Invisibility is not an innate feature of such rings, of Gandalf would not have taken so long to realise that Bilbo's ring was a great ring of power. Heck, Gandalf was bearing one of the Elf rings. He thought that Bilbo's ring was 'merely' a relatively minor ring for a long time.

[Kelly Pedersen]

Originally Posted by Rupert

Different rings do different things. The Elven rings didn't make their bearers invisible, and nor do they seem to have allowed the reading of minds.

It's true that the Three were somewhat different from the Seven and the Nine - they were made later, and Celebrimbor, the crafter of the Rings of Power, seems to have put more of his skill into them. However, I don't think the Seven and the Nine were different from each other. Remember, the elves who made the Rings of Power intended to keep and use them - there was no plan to give them away to men or dwarves. I think the Seven and the Nine were only distinguished later, by how they were disposed, and would probably have had the same effect on their bearers even if they were distributed differently.

On whether dwarves got unaging from their Rings, I don't think so. We know of at least one line of bearers of one of the Seven, the House of Durin, and they included members who appear to have died of old age, at more or less the normal time for dwarves. And I don't think this is a matter of the Rings giving longer life, but the dwarves just willingly passed the Ring on to their heirs at the end of their "natural" lives - the effect of the Rings, to make their bearers coveteous of them and unwilling to give them up, would still apply to them. If it didn't, then the plot of LoTR doesn't make much sense - they could just have given the Ring to Gimli, who wouldn't have any problem dropping it into Mount Doom at the end.

[tbone]

Originally Posted by Rupert

Invisibility is not an innate feature of such rings

I have no idea what Tolkien said on the invisibility power, but I wonder whether it might be specific to the user. Neither Sauron or Bombadil turned invisible when wearing the ring. (Though with Sauron in particular, that may not mean much; maybe he could choose how it worked at any moment.)

What if its special side-powers differed by user? Invisibility could be a side-effect only for hobbits, because "invisibility" was already a thing for them – the mundane "invisibility" of hiding and staying largely unseen by Big Folk. Wearers of other races, or even specific individuals, could get completely different side-effects.

But... wait, Isildur shoots all that down. He was human, but the ring game him invisibility. At least in the movies. So, never mind what I just said. I guess the ring makes anyone invisible, unless you're a Sauron or a Bombadil.

[The Colonel]

Isn't the One Ring meant to be more of a power multiplier - with its own power over the wearer limited by how much they draw from it?
It makes the hobbits invisible because that is both their natural tendency and their desire, but had relatively little influence over them as they asked little of it and had small desires. The already powerful and those with strong ambition would be far more vulnerable ...

[lwcamp]

Originally Posted by tbone

I have no idea what Tolkien said on the invisibility power, but I wonder whether it might be specific to the user. Neither Sauron or Bombadil turned invisible when wearing the ring. (Though with Sauron in particular, that may not mean much; maybe he could choose how it worked at any moment.)

What if its special side-powers differed by user? Invisibility could be a side-effect only for hobbits, because "invisibility" was already a thing for them – the mundane "invisibility" of hiding and staying largely unseen by Big Folk. Wearers of other races, or even specific individuals, could get completely different side-effects.

But... wait, Isildur shoots all that down. He was human, but the ring game him invisibility. At least in the movies. So, never mind what I just said. I guess the ring makes anyone invisible, unless you're a Sauron or a Bombadil.

One explanation I've seen is that the rings draw people into the spirit world (making them invisible, and letting them see invisible things). But beings which are already have an existence in both the seen and unseen worlds (including maiar like Gandalf and Sauron, or powerful elves like Glorfindel or Galadriel, and whatever Bombadil was) don't have this effect happen to them because they are already there.

luke

[Stormcrow]

Originally Posted by Rupert

Different rings do different things. The Elven rings didn't make their bearers invisible, and nor do they seem to have allowed the reading of minds.

They may have allowed the reading of minds. Galadriel was aware of Frodo each time he put on the Ring. "Only thrice have you set the Ring upon your finger since you knew what you possessed." But Galadriel was also able to read minds of those not wearing rings, so it's unclear how she knows this.

It's also unclear whether they made their wearers invisible. I don't think so: they can't be used to dominate other wills, so the apparently don't need to send the wearer into the spirit world to do grant that power. Nenya certainly didn't make Galadriel invisible, but as a Noldo from Aman she lives simultaneously in both worlds, so it doesn't seem likely she would turn invisible even if she put on the One.

Invisibility is not an innate feature of such rings, of Gandalf would not have taken so long to realise that Bilbo's ring was a great ring of power. Heck, Gandalf was bearing one of the Elf rings. He thought that Bilbo's ring was 'merely' a relatively minor ring for a long time.

This is more a question of imperfect Ring-lore. It wasn't definite that Bilbo's longevity was caused by a ring. It wasn't clear that Bilbo's ring's power of invisibility was a result of moving into the spirit world. Very few people even possessed knowledge of the Rings of Power and their numbers and abilities. Saruman might have figured it out faster if he had known Bilbo, because Ring-lore was a study of Saruman's, but Gandalf didn't know much about it. And it just seemed utterly preposterous that a silly hobbit could have stumbled across the Ruling Ring that was lost thousands of years before and presumed rolled into the sea.

If you have perfect knowledge, it's obviously the One Ring by a simple process of elimination. It's a Great Ring because it extends Bilbo's life. It can't be the Nine because Sauron has those. It can't be the Three because the elves have those. It can't be the Seven because either Sauron has them or they were consumed by Dragons; they're all accounted for. The only leftover Great Ring is the One. But Gandalf didn't have perfect knowledge until much later.

Originally Posted by tbone

Isildur shoots all that down. He was human, but the ring game him invisibility. At least in the movies.

And in the book. "He leaped into the waters, but the Ring slipped from his finger as he swam, and then the Orcs saw him and killed him with arrows."

So, never mind what I just said. I guess the ring makes anyone invisible, unless you're a Sauron or a Bombadil.

I think it makes anyone invisible who doesn't already have a presence in the spirit world. It's physically dragging you into another plane of existence.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2

They are inherently high point characters, with immortality, immunity to disease, high fatigue and HT and ST and so forth. That's all Elves.

Not ST so much or at least not compared to Numenorians. It's amde clear in one scene on Caradhras that Aragorn and Boromir were considered to be far stronger than anyone else in the group including Legolas (or Gimli too).

Messing about in some of the supplementary material you will encounter the Numenorian "Ranga" based on their stride length and equalling 38 inches. It is also said that Numnorians considered two ranga or 6" 4 to be "man tall" probably meaning that to be the height of a "proper" Numenorian warrior. Aragorn was siad to be that tall while the famous Elendil the Tall was just shy of 8 feet.

So relatively high ST was probably average for Numnorians. Though if you use the Height and Build table from Basic the +2 ST that's the normal max for genetic Humans might cover that.

[ravenfish]

Originally Posted by Stormcrow

And the Nine Rings had the same effect on men. Do we know that the Seven didn't have that effect on dwarves?

From the Appendices:

The only power over [the dwarves] that the Rings wielded was to inflame their hearts with a greed of gold and precious things, so that if they lacked them all other good things seemed profitless, and they were filled with wrath and desire for vengeance on all who deprived them. But they were made from their beginning of a kind to resist most steadfastly any domination. Though they could be slain or broken, they could not be reduced to shadows enslaved to another will; and for the same reason their lives were not affected by any Ring, to live either longer or shorter because of it.

So we see that the Rings do not lengthen the lives of dwarves, still less turn them into wraiths. Indeed, they hardly seem to even create new evil in the hearts of the dwarves, but merely bring to the forefront the less desirable portions of the dwarven psyche (in The Hobbit, for example, we see Thorin's heart inflamed with a greed for gold and a wrath and a desire for vengeance against those who feel are depriving him without any help from magic rings, and the narrator seems at various points to be implying that this is about par for the course from dwarves). [EDIT: On the other hand, maybe that is just how the corrupting effect of the rings always expresses itself- certainly the behavior of Gollum was more or less prefigured by the behavior of Smeagol even before he took the One. On reflection, it would probably suit Tolkein's theology/philosophy for evil to work with what already exists rather than impose new behavior ex nihilo.]

[khorboth]

So, for Dwarves, we see that they seem immune to total domination, but are still influenceable. Indeed, Sauron managed to get some to make Grond (the ram, not the mace).

Hobbits are resistant, but not immune to... fear, magical fear, domination, influence both magical and mundane, magical control... and maybe lots of other things. This is why I went with WILL. Trying to micromanage each bonus just cost more and did less.