System
Originally published by Iron Crown Enterprises (I.C.E.) in 1991-1993, this was a simple, "level-less" roleplaying system designed to help introduce new players (and game masters) to roleplaying in the world of JRR Tolkien’s "The Hobbit" and "Lord of the Rings". It uses only two 6-sided dice to resolve skill checks and combat. It was an expansion of the even simpler rules used by ICE for its Middle-earth Quest books. It was intended as a stepping stone to I.C.E.’s more complex Middle-earth Role Playing (MERP) system and game modules.
Players can create characters from the races of Men, Elves, Dwarves, Hobbits and Half-elves.
Characters possess Attributes and Skills rated between -5 and +5. Skills can be modified to a rating above or below these limits (i.e. under -5 or over +5). An attack roll consists of a roll of 2D6, to which the attacker's skill rating and appropriate weapon rating are added and the defender's defense and armor rating are subtracted. The result is looked up on a table to determine success or failure, and if it is a success how much damage is done.
Spell casters can only learn a very limited number of spells. Some feel this is more in tune with the flavor of Tolkien's writings than other systems.
Read more about this topic: Lord Of The Rings Adventure Game
Famous quotes containing the word system:
“The violent illiteracies of the graffiti, the clenched silence of the adolescent, the nonsense cries from the stage-happening, are resolutely strategic. The insurgent and the freak-out have broken off discourse with a cultural system which they despise as a cruel, antiquated fraud. They will not bandy words with it. Accept, even momentarily, the conventions of literate linguistic exchange, and you are caught in the net of the old values, of the grammars that can condescend or enslave.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)
“Human beings are compelled to live within a lie, but they can be compelled to do so only because they are in fact capable of living in this way. Therefore not only does the system alienate humanity, but at the same time alienated humanity supports this system as its own involuntary masterplan, as a degenerate image of its own degeneration, as a record of people’s own failure as individuals.”
—Václav Havel (b. 1936)
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)