Alone on the range: Strider Mode

 Recently, the tinkerage picked up Strider Mode, the solo rules for The One Ring RPG. Strider Mode, as you might think, contains rules for playing a single player-hero in Middle-earth, adapted from the system of The One Ring.

Now, The One Ring Second Edition is a fine system with many thoughtful and atmospheric touches, but it still isn't the game I would choose to run adventures in Middle-earth. As per my review of the first edition, the system is still too programmatic and committed to phases and counters of all sorts. It feel sometimes as if deep down it's a board-game, where your character's engagement, reactions, and choices are shuffled off to dice-rolls on a table. As readers might gather, my instincts for gaming in Middle-earth are either to strip everything back to a free-form core in the style of the Green Dragon, or to use the clean, flexible structure of Basic Role-Playing.

Strider Mode, on the other hand, is a great resource for playing through a solo Middle-earth experience. It contains two elements that are essential to solo play (and darn useful for group play also): a chance resolution system and a semantic generator.

By a chance resolution system, I mean a way to pose the question how likely is a certain thing to come about, roll, and resolve that question. In Strider Mode, that's a d12 roll ranging from a "certain" chance to an "unthinkable" one, with an extreme result on either end. I often use the same sort of roll to determine the severity or intensity of a certain condition, so a low roll is hardly at all and a high roll is extremely so. This can range from the friendliness of an inn to the severity of the weather on a given day. And chance resolution also provides a basic action resolution system, as you can check whether, given current conditions, a character's action is likely to succeed or not.

What I call a semantic generator is the "oracle" in other systems. The semantic generator allows you to randomly generate words or phrases that you can use to attribute meaning to an uncertain or open situation. Strider Mode calls this the Lore Table. In my play all the books approach, this would be the library of tables and generators that you can call on to frame an otherwise open encounter or scene. In fact, as you travel in Strider Mode there are "Event Detail" tables that provide descriptive seeds for events along your journey (from mishaps to chance meetings), as well as the atmospheric lore tables which suggest the Action, Aspect, or Focus of the moment.

These two tools provide the adventure and discovery for the player that the GM's preparation or the written scenario usually deliver. If you lost your way, did you stumble on a ruined tower or a bandit camp? What is the tale of that ruin? The task for the solo player is to deliver these questions to the dice and then play the options they suggest.

As I mentioned before, I don't use the core rulebook for The One Ring for resolution, but rather a free-form approach using the chance resolution system. Of course, there's nothing wrong if you enjoy using the published rules and engaging with the variables of the full system, but I find that a lighter, more adaptive system allows me to engage with the scenario at hand rather than the intricacies of the rules. 

One might think that this adds another kind of challenge, switching between the GM's mindset of making assessments and calls on the fly and the player's mindset of responding to the action without the support of firm procedures. This isn't what I find. Consider that even with a complete "system" in play, the GM or the scenario author has already prepared the encounters and considered the modifiers and relative difficulties, and this means neither setting dead-end tasks that are too difficult nor challenges that are too simple. All you need to do to GM yourself is be open to the chance of success and failure, which means that you sustain the uncertainty and hence the drama of the moment, and estimate chances fairly. For any given roll, there's always a chance of a wildly high or low outcome; and if you're rolling for yourself, that wild result is bound to come up. Finely-measured probabilities are not really required. And as Hickman et al observe, in the end it always comes down to a probability, assessed as a number on the die or dice that is constrained to a given range. Call it fairly as you see it, check the result, and keep going.

In my test of Strider Mode, I found myself bushwhacked by bandits in an abandoned farmstead, trading words with stiff-necked dwarfs, and battling orcs and a cold-wyrm in a ruined tower. The Lore Tables in particular do a good job of pushing your to engage with Tolkien-like tropes and challenges. For something that's either in one's own head, or in the dice and the tables on the page, that's a pretty good trip, alone, across Eriador.

Roll on the random notes table

 It's been a while: some random notes and impressions.

Roll a d6:

1. Warhammer FRP 4E

The Old World is still as cool, dark, and evocative as ever. This is the one "almost played" game that I've known of for years and never played a session. This edition is massive, detailed, comprehensive, wonderfully illustrated. But there are so many fiddly rules, stats, statuses to manage. XP converted to individual skill percentages! While there are plenty of enhancements to the original system, there are also too many gritty sub-systems.

• The map on the inside cover should be evocative, but the coloring is too green-grey, the detail too fine, to make it engaging, let alone readable.
• Years ago, I converted the classic WHFRP adventure "Night of Blood" to RuneQuest 3, and it was an easy conversion and an excellent adventure in play.
• All the classes and careers would make an excellent sourcebook to convert to Whitehack (see below).
• Even better, convert to BRP using the SRD (see below).

2. Whitehack 3E

A hack of the original "White Box" edition of D&D, Whitehack uses the familiar design elements: the same six ability scores, levels, accumulating hit points and Hit Dice (HD), armor class, saving throws, classes, and XP advancement.

But these original rules have been ingeniously adapted into a flexible, compact system of their own. The profession-like classes, Fighter, Thief, and Wizard, have been converted to true archetypes: the Strong, Deft, and Wise. You then assign your own groups—species, vocations, associations—and abilities to create professions and sub-classes that can be wholly unique. For the Wise, magic "miracles" are a free-form system to duplicate any powers. Sometimes, the slightly awkward generic phrasing—groups, slots, miracles—makes it hard to follow how these choices mesh together to make a character.

Although it's the version of D&D I'd play if I were to play D&D, it still has the same features of the original. Armor makes you harder to hit, but this doesn't scale much with your chance of hitting or your chance of hitting something else, so you gain an abstract reserve of hit points instead. Monsters have HD alone, so their chance to hit you is always proportional to the number of hits they can take. You chase experience points, and at certain points acquire levels that grant instant access to new abilities that you perhaps didn't have or even practice before.

On the other hand, Whitehack has some brilliant subsystems, like bases to represent patrons and other extraordinary adventuring party resources, and it's concise and clear and engaging. And it has some neat random tables that would work for solo play as well as in-game inspiration.

• There are a few intriguing pages in Whitehack about converting ability scores to use those of other systems. This means with relatively little work, you could convert content from almost any ability score and hit points system to run with Whitehack. I looked at the old ICE Middle Earth Role-Playing (MERP) modules and the idea was very tempting (Strength=St, Dexterity=Ag, etc.).

3. The One Ring 2E

I only have the PDF, but this is evidently a beautiful book. But you don't play the book design or the illustrations, you play the system, and the rules, though no doubt strengthened and improved, seem to me to have the same issues as with the first edition. As in my previous review, the rules are evocative, but my concern is that in trying to guide play through a Middle-earth experience the systems tend towards being prescriptive or procedural, with multiple conditions and narrative elements to track for every activity. When journeying, or in encounters with major NPCs, this ends up pushing the players' significant decisions away from their sense of the world and towards a series of dice rolls.

• On the other hand, the descriptions of cultures and locations, the way that Eriador is presented, is exactly how I'd like to play that old corner of Middle-earth. BRP would make a better fit, but also the freedom of XD20.

4. Basic Roleplaying SRD

Chaosium has published the core rules of Basic Roleplaying (BRP) as an SRD, and it's astonishing that there isn't more discussion about this. The BRP system in the SRD is truly basic, in that it's a base, a foundation, for any range of games. It presents only a compact version of the core rules. Sure, it lacks a detailed equipment list, bestiary, or magic system. But if you're a GM building your own campaign from your own sources, these are what you're designing or lifting from other sourcebooks already. 

• Download it, print a copy, decide on your skills list—you could run your game in the Old World or Middle-earth with this. (OK, for WHFRP you'll have to add the Consume Alcohol skill.)

5. XD20 2E

The original XDM: X-treme Dungeon Mastery was insightful, inspiring, and influential, but as I noted in my review, it was also hastily written, oddly organized, and not always adequately edited. So I was keen to join the second edition kickstarter. With the PDF of the page proofs in hand, I've confined myself to checking out the revised in-house system, or XD20, before the printed book arrives. 

It's a promising start. The second edition XD20 is now presented in one version, the simple rules for creating your character makes sense, and the core system—roll a d20, roll high to succeed and then roll again for effect—is elegant and flexible.

I still have no idea what the stat "WAH" means, but I know exactly what all the stats do. It's maddeningly unclear if the combat system means enemies would roll each round exactly like PCs or if it's all combined in the PCs' roll, but it would work either way. It's a system designed to wing it, but now you can wing it with elegance and speed.

• If TAC=Strong, PSYCH=Deft, and WAH=Wise, you basically have the means at hand to play any fantasy setting.

6. Roll a d100 instead

While reading a certain tome mentioned above, a compressed d100 system kept running through my head. For some actual rules tinkering, see below.

The situation:

• Grim 15
• Perilous 30
• Risky 50
• Uncertain 70
• Favorable 85

+/-10 for unusual circumstances

Roll d100 under the situation number to prevail.

Character can use a Quality to reprise a roll (reroll a single die) or change the situation (if feasible).

EXAMPLE: Linz, the boatman, find himself on the river as a possibly magical storm sweeps through. Suddenly, the situation is Perilous! Linz decides to try and run to shore. The first roll is 42! Linz can reroll the 40 die to try and reach safety, or use the next round to steer into the current to find a better course (roll Risky).

Your character has a Station in life (roll situation and read accordingly), a significant Characteristic (Strong, Quick, Smart, etc.) a current Career and two related Qualities.

A character has Toughness (3) points and sometimes armor points (1-3) with which to fend off wounds. Each wound taken then potentially makes their situation worse.

The One Ring RPG - a review

The One Ring Roleplaying Game, from Cubicle 7, the latest game that aims to create a roleplaying experience specifically for Tolkien's Middle-earth, is a fine game: well-designed, beautifully produced, closely and thoughtfully integrated with the background material. It is also one of the most restricted and procedural games in the Tinkerage collection.

Character creation, for instance, shows a lot of thought. Characters are deeply rooted in their cultural background, and character traits are evocative and interesting. But creating a character is largely a question of choosing options from a list, and although the cultures of Wilderland (Woodsmen, Beornings, Bardings, forest elves and dwarves) are represented, there's no option to play, say, a roaming Gondorian knight or a Rohirrim tinker – although in honour of The Hobbit, halflings are perfectly plausible player-characters. Now, other cultures are slowly being added as new sourcebooks are produced, but this restriction of the scope of character creation in the core rules to the types of the area represents the game's aims: narrow focus with exceptional depths, leading to guided play.

The core mechanic is elegant and nicely evocative, combining a single linear roll for effort on a d12 (with a "Sauron" face for automatic failure and a "Gandalf" face for automatic success) with a pool of d6s for skill and extra levels of success. These dice are rolled against a simple target number (with a nice fatigue mechanism to boot, meaning only the upper digits of skill dice are counted if the character is weary). But with this simple mechanic, there are procedures for almost every aspect of play. There are procedures for encounters with potential patrons and allies, based on a "tolerance" rating and multiple rolls. There are detailed procedures for travelling – one of the strengths of the game is this journeying system. And the abstract combat system requires a multistage approach from surprise to initiative to combat advantage and positioning. All this means that new loremasters will, unless very familiar with the rulebook, find themselves skipping or forgetting many of the stages of play. Speaking of which, there are even procedures for abstracting adventuring play (the adventure phase) from experience and character development (the fellowship phase).

If this weren't enough, there are points for everything. Attributes aren't just standing values, you need to spend a point of Hope to add an attribute score to a roll, unless it's going to a favoured skill, in which case you add the attribute's favoured value. Along with Hope, you spend Endurance; just keep it above Fatigue, or you become Weary (and keep Hope above your Shadow, or you end up Miserable). For encounters, you get Valour and Wisdom, and there are also your Fellowship points, and your Standing, which you keep up by spending Treasure points, and so on. To be fair, all RPGs have their lists of tallies and expendable hit points and fatigue points and so on, but play in The One Ring feels like a great big character points economy with a lot of interdependent values always in flux.

All of this helps to encourage deep, considered play with a detectable Tolkien theme, as characters are pitted not just against external dangers and weariness but the influence of the Shadow and personal corruption as well, but there is a fine line between rules that encourage a particular style of engagement and rules that force a  structure onto player choice, and the shadow of TOR's game design is this sort of prescriptive approach to play itself. Overall, TOR does a fine job of evoking and instilling a sense of Middle-earth and Tolkien themed roleplaying, but one can't help but think that a lighter hand on rules and sub-systems and more evocative and entertaining setting detail could have made this game into a true classic.

[This review is based on a reading of the core rulebook in PDF format, and is not a report on actual play.]