[Lord of the Rings] Oh, CODA!?!

[Gregor Hutton]

Ugh, so I got my friend Conor a copy of the CODA version of Lord of the Rings RPG (from 2001/2002) for Christmas. He's trying to get a short run of it together for me and Steve.

Steve has declared he is playing an Elf and I've said I'm playing a Dunedain. As Steve is away at the moment Conor and I met up and got in some Character Creation for me, followed by a short adventure. So, what did we learn?

(1) The book is gorgeous.
(2) There's a lot of Tolkein stuff in there.
(3) It looks a bit like it has all the standard RPG stuff that "RPGs are meant to have" in there.
(4) It was an effort to dig through it and create a character.
(5) There were errors that didn't help that go too smoothly.
(6) No one has any starting money, except the really rich dudes who took the Horder edge.
(7) Combat was quite fun.
( Healing is a pig...
(9) ...and none of these target numbers make any sense after a while.
(10) Oh, XP is a nightmare to track and encourages strange behaviour.

... and (11) despite all this Conor and I had a good time. The "system" that worked was Conor short-circuiting the non-working rules in the book. Sigh.

So... I created Maladorn, a Dunedain Warrior. Anything other than "normal age" is a non-optimal joke. Seriously. So I am 38.

I rolled rather than picked my stats, that seemed to work better for me. I avoided the standard packages and followed the custom build stuff. Some of it makes no sense. You can't have a Skill at higher than 6 ranks BUT to take one of the basic Warrior Order Abilities ("pick one of these") requires 8+. And a sample character has one with a 6. WTF?!

Anyway, I create my Armed Combat, Ranged Combat, Stealth monster of a Dunedain. He is Arrogant and a Dullard because those Flaws don't affect anything relevant to him (!) but despite being un-bookish he has 27 ranks in Lores. So... I fill up with loads of ranks in Lore: Mirkwood, Lore: Anduin, Lore: Misty Mountains, etc. and give myself 6 ranks in Westros and Sindarin.

Some of the things you can spend your points on seem really rubbish. I mean, for 1 point I could get 1 Rank in a Skill. OK. But for the same point I could take 1 Rank in a Stat, much more useful if it moves my stat from 7 to 8, or 9 to 10. Or I could buy a totally awesome Edge like Healing Hands (I did!) which gives +5 to Healing. Or an Edge like Ambidextrous or Two-Handed Fighting (I did, both). Quick Draw too. You can buy more Quick Draw to our draw people but... there's an Initiative system for that already... so it'll just be the 1 Rank of Quick Draw, thanks.

Then it comes to gear... I don't appear to have any. So I kit myself out by talking about it with Conor. I also ask that my horse can do "something", so Conor gives it the "Travel Sense" Edge, which is totally awesome (Whisper can never get lost travelling where he is familiar) and this is the sort of cool character gen stuff that should be in the book.

Well, we got Maladorn done and then we set off adventuring in the Ettenmoors. Conor has a real passion for LOTR and so do I so it was a lot of fun but Conor and I kept butting up against the system. Sigh.

The target numbers are crazy. Rolling 2d6 and trying to get 30 is a joke. Even 20 is nuts, even for my Nimbleness 10 (+2), Ranged Combat +6, Dunedain Warrior. I have about a 3% chance of hitting 20!

Conor beefed up his men of the Ettenmoors with an Evade edge, roll 3d6 and pick the best 2. When you're Injured life becomes very hard: Dazed (-1), Injured (-3) before dropping off the precipice with Wounded (-5), Incapacitated (-7) and Near Death (-9). And then we figured that you really couldn't heal back from Injured. Even Dazed was a chore. And what did a healoth box mean? I had 9 of them in each Level. Do so i heal 1/9th of a Level (a box) or one whole Level (9 boxes). Ughhh.

Still, the multiple actions in a round and all that kind of worked. The colour from Conor was good and the damage from weapons to the number of boxes/Hit Points we had worked well.

I guess this game is consigned to the dustbin of history now, but clearly it can't have been playtested before publishing. Some of the stuff was such a roadblock that it must have been handwaved by the GM in any playtesting that did go on.

Oh, and in the character generation under age I figured that Gandalf would get +1 Savvy... except Savvy isn't a stat. We reckoned it must have meant Wisdom and then I decided at that point to play a nicely unmodified normal age dude.

[Ron Edwards]

Gah. This sort of thing characterizes a lot of licensed source material RPGs.

I'm posting to call attention to the relevance of this account to the Currency issues being discussed in [Poison'd] Trying to understand Currency and Reward Systems. To complete the circuit, Gregor, can you talk a little bit about the reward mechanics in this game?

Best, Ron

[masqueradeball]

Sort of tangent... the sad thing is the Last Unicorn guys became Decipher's RPG team and for some reason went from the awesome ICON system (check the Dune RPG for why its awesome) to the shitty D20 wanna be that is CODA and they also decided on the most inaccessible layout ever. Their Star Trek stuff suffered the same fate.

[Gregor Hutton]

Yeah, we've not seen the Star Trek one but someone mentioned it to us on Sunday while we were playing. (They were curious if we were playtesting The One Ring, the forthcoming licenced LOTR game from Cubicle 7, but when we said "No, it's the CODA one" they said how much they didn't like the Star Trek one.)

I think the Reward Mechanics don't really fit well with what you should be doing in game. They can, but only with a lot of work from the GM and players (basically if we ignore the behaviour that the game encourages and instead just do what we want to do without any incentive).

Once you've created your PC they will change very little from that unless you play for a long time. how do you change? XP. And the way you get Experience Points is to beat target numbers. So when Conor rolled 11 for a wild man of the Ettenmoors to "Observe" me, and I rolled a total of 16 on "Stealth" I get the 11 XP as his difficulty. When the wild man rolls 14 to Dodge and I roll 15 to hit then I get another 14 XP.

But I could be rolling against anything to get my XP. I feel I should be asking to roll Westros to understand the gutteral mutterings of the Ettenmoors thug (and I did). And my Ride skill to calm my horse (I didn't, I just roleplayed it and fed him a sweetened cube of food). "What's the XP, err, I mean difficulty?" asks the player.

[It reminds me somewhat of using every different weapon in a session of RuneQuest to get the maximal ticks for improvement.]

So, none of that encourages me to do anything appropriate for the world or character, really.

And then it makes combat strange. I mean, I've created a guy to fight, but it's a bit suboptimal to get XP from fighting. Why? Well, I get XP for the many, many rolls in Combat, sure. But in Combat I get injured and that gives me crippling penalties to earning more XP doing .. well, less dangerous stuff.

At the end of the session I had 324 XP. I need 1000 to get any benefits (I think I get a couple of +1s then... again, why would I spend them on Skill ranks when I could put them in stats to benefit whole groups of Skills).

There are some levers in the game that dramatically help your quest for racking up XP. A high Initiative is good. A mis-balanced set of skills (have some high and use those to mine XP) and leave the rest low is good too (you'll beat higher target numbers). It's all quite un-Tolkein behaviour.

Another feedback cycle is when you take damage. It seems kind of fun at the time until you realise that it really is sucking your totals down, so you take more damage and so on. But still, your opponent is in the same boat. Fine, you'll probably kill him. Then you realise the -7 or whatever has made it impossible to be healed. Even -5 is sucking your total down hard (a 2d6 roll added to a number typically 4 to 6).

And as far as I could tell there was nothing to stop Conor having all three men of the Ettenmoors attack me at once. He can write of Man 1 and Man 2, but by the time Man 3 hits me I'll be at -7 and easy pickings!

That makes me wary of Combat but I can't exactly avoid it if the GM declares it's happening.

It's also some way away from what we're here to do in the moment (revel in Tolkein's Middle Earth), and in a bigger sense (quest like the heroes in the fiction with my Aragorn-clone).

[masqueradeball]

Looking at the advancement rules, you're only suppose to get XP for tests that are "story-related." Sounds like you guys were giving out way more XP for tests than RAW suggests.

[Callan S.]

It's funny - while I can imagine various problems, getting more XP for doing harder to do things makes harder to do things attractive! Heck, using lots of different weapons (instead of the same damn best choice weapon over and over) sounds good (I know that example was from runequest, but...)

Of course I'm talking from a gamist angle, here.

Fine, you'll probably kill him. Then you realise the -7 or whatever has made it impossible to be healed.

Wow, sounds like it's really set up neatly for you to win battles, but then die of your wounds. Given the melancholy in Tolkien that sounds pretty dead on.

[Gregor Hutton]

Hey Nolan and Callan

Nolan, that may be true, but if it is then it raises another problem. Namely, how in hell do you advance at all? If you're only taking really significant "story related" rolls as contributing to your XP I think you run into a wall. Given that a difficulty of 10 might be typical of tests in the game (or at least, ones that you can pass), you'll need to pass 100 of them to get the 1000 XP needed for two +1s. That's crazy. How many sessions will it take to get 100 story-related tests per player?

(And if that's the intention they should have beefed up starting characters so that advancement was less of an issue.)

Now, I happen to think it's not a large mental leap for a roll "to understand what the Man of the Ettenmoors" is shouting as "story related". Conor must have reckoned it was as he gave me a roll and XP for it. It  turned out he was shouting for help, which is why his three pals turned up after I had slain him. And given the combat rules, the lists of combat-related edges, the range of weapons and the combative nature of the source material I think combat rolls are probably going to get called story-related a lot of the time.

But, hey, that was Conor's call as GM (and this game, like a lot of games) leaves the call on what is and isn't "story related" up to the GM. I'd like to know if there are examples in there of what are and aren't fair calls for awarding XP.

Callan, the problem we had with healing was that my Aragorn clone couldn't heal someone very easily from Injured never mind help save Frodo after Weathertop. And my take on Tolkein is that the Fellowship didn't fight through Moria only to fall off the bridge because they were rolling at -7, y'know? My take on Tolkein is that there is a lot of death of incidental characters in large battles, but significant characters only die at crucial points. Boromir doesn't die from his wounds after a battle, he's slain because he chooses to sacrifice himself so that the others can be warned/escape.

I'd feel pretty miffed playing Boromir if I'm slain in the first round of combat (rolling at -5, -7 then -9) because I couldn't heal the damage I took off three brigands the week before.

I'll see if I can get Conor on here to talk about it from his point of view. He's the one who's read the book more than me.

[Finarvyn]

Sort of tangent... the sad thing is the Last Unicorn guys became Decipher's RPG team and for some reason went from the awesome ICON system (check the Dune RPG for why its awesome) to the shitty D20 wanna be that is CODA and they also decided on the most inaccessible layout ever. Their Star Trek stuff suffered the same fate.

Agreed. I have all three games you mentioned (ICON Dune, CODA LOTR, CODA ST) and the CODA system doesn't seem like an evolutionary improvement of ICON at all. Indeed, the LOTR game feels so much like 3E to me (feats aren't called "feats" but have the same purpose) that they might as well made it compatible with other 3E/d20 products. That would have made it at least somewhat useful. As an orphaned and abandoned system, it has little value to me anymore.

Also, the 2d6 dice mechanic is somewhat limiting. As soon as you stack a few plusses onto a character you start to break the dice curve. Guys like Aragorn and Legolas simply never miss their target.

Things like this make the game a strange one, because the spell system feels pretty Middle-earth and the background flavor is pretty Middle-earth, but the rules in general don't feel very Middle-earth. If that makes any sense.

[Devon Oratz]

I actually owned this game once.

I'm not surprised I never got any actual play out of it. In hindsight (this didn't occur to me at the time) I don't know why anyone wouldn't just use/modify D&D instead.

[Callan S.]

Hi Gregor,

Callan, the problem we had with healing was that my Aragorn clone couldn't heal someone very easily from Injured never mind help save Frodo after Weathertop. And my take on Tolkein is that the Fellowship didn't fight through Moria only to fall off the bridge because they were rolling at -7, y'know? My take on Tolkein is that there is a lot of death of incidental characters in large battles, but significant characters only die at crucial points. Boromir doesn't die from his wounds after a battle, he's slain because he chooses to sacrifice himself so that the others can be warned/escape

Yeah, but I'd say your working in a sim sense where...well, I'll quote someone else

I've spilled more than a few gallons of electronic ink over the years suggesting that much of fantasy's appeal lies in the way provides readers the kinds of worlds that humans are prone to cook up in the absence of science, worlds adapted to our psychology, rather than vice versa. Scriptural worlds.

source

Worlds adapted to our psychology, rather than vice versa. Worlds where, if you think a small rock falls slower than a larger rock falls, then it does, for example. It's a striking thing to consider both from a distance. While the perspective I was applying of is that the world works however it works and you step up and deal with that - more of a gamist perspective. In the gamist perspective, if you think the smaller rock falls slower but it turns out they both fall at the same speed, well you suck up that you were wrong (atleast in terms of this world) and then you start taking that into account in terms of winning.

Anyway, in terms of working with what you get, getting more for doing harder things is a pretty sweet deal/sweet thing to deal with - very cuddly. And with the healing thing - was there a way of naturally healing over time or such? I can't imagine someone, when writing a game, falling into such an autistic-like state they actually expect someone to sit and roll healing rolls hundreds of times to reflect long term care. But maybe it happened?

[masqueradeball]

Going into the advancement system a bit

There's suppose to be a story objective, which gives 1000 points to divide amongst the characters
Then, each scene leading to the story objective gives away I think 100 XP to the characters who managed to complete that objective
and then the "story related" roles

and optional RP awards

I got the impression that the rolls were supposed to be mapped out before play started

[Gregor Hutton]

I've not read the GM bits about the ins and outs of XP myself, so I'll not get into what the book says, or doesn't say, on setting and meeting story objectives (which fearfully to me sounds like the GM planning the story, or hoops to jump through, though I hope it means the GM setting big opposition that must be met and defeated).

Anyway, Conor's plan was to have my character adventure a little in Arnor (which he narrowed down to Rhudaur) as a sort of "prelude". I had enough Lores to be an expert on a lot of Middle Earth, but we narrowed the areas of Lore down from things like "Arnor" or "Eriador" to smaller regions like the Misty Mountains or Mirkwood. Steve's Elf will get the same sort of thing and then we're going to do some adventruing together.

Conor had a rough outline in his head (which as it turned out was a weary traveller attacked by some Men of the Ettenmoors, who I happen to stumble across on my travelling north of the Great East Road) and we played it from there. As I put the injured man on my horse and instructed Whisper to take him to the Inn a few leagues away I then fought off some more brigands before making my own way on foot to the Inn. With time aplenty Conor had some enemies attack the Inn in the morning in revenge/for loot. We were firmly planted in the colour of the world.

I don't know what Conor's background to Middle Earth is. I got my love for it from my father. He read the books long before I was born so they were always around me growing up. I loved the Hobbit as a child (and then the excellent radio serialisation on the BBC), I fought my way through LOTR about the same time I was getting into gaming at high school and I bravely/naively ventured into the pages of the Silmarillion too (luckily armed with my Dictionary of Middle Earth). But before I got into RPGs I had played the War of the Ring boardgame when I first moved to Cumbernauld (some pre-ZX Spectrum gaming for me!) with some neighbours (who ultimately got me into RPGs) and I had an unhealthy admiration for the Nazgul.

So, from my point of view I'd be quite satisfied with a simmy, gamey or narrey take on Middle Earth (the board game was gamey). From playing this CODA game it felt a little like the disconnect I have between MERP and Middle Earth. I don't feel that fits well either.

The dice curve works well when you're keenly matched to an opponent, but when someone gets 5 up then the odds have shifted heavily in their favour. This was quite pleasant in a battle when I was able to injure my opponent, then his totals reduced and I could force my hand. The problem was that the GM could always bring more opposition if he wanted and I'd be worn down in the long run. So the momentary thrill or gaining or losing advantage to a specific opponent became a wearying in the face of more enemies.

Natural healing seemed very slow. A box a week or twice a week? Did it mean Level? We presumed so as I had so many boxes. Still, that was tough to heal with angry Ettenmoors Men at my heels.

Conor, of course, was able to read when the tide had turned against me and not to bring any more heat on me once I had defeated the last three men of the Ettenmoors (even though a few more watched from a copse of trees nearby). But was that just his benevolence to not kill me off in my prelude, right?

The rules set, of course, does create a world from its levers and pulleys, but I'm sure it's not the world of Middle Earth as I see it. And it's not like facing up to hard difficulty is well incentivized. Its far, far easier to beat rolls of 10 than of 20 (in fact the odds of the game make it likely that my character Maladorn could pass something like 3 times as many 15s as he could 20s).

I also should mention Courage. I had two points of Courage that I could use to get a +3 on a roll. Conor had given his brutes a point of Courage each. That worked out well in one-on-ones between us in a fight. And it was a nice if limited resource, though there were times where the +3 was swamped by circumstance (on both our rolls).

It was interesting to me that I had taken a Flaw which disallowed me from using Courage on Lore rolls. Having seen the use of Courage in game I wasn't dissatisfied with my choice. In fact, it seemed to really vindicate my choice. Perhaps the rules were encouraging all characters to deliberately be Dullards in some great quest to replicate the mood of the books. In the end though I doubt that was the plan.

[Silmenume]

Hey Gregor,

Sorry to hear about you gaming experience.  I really don't have anything to say about CODA as I know absolutely nothing about the system, but you did bring up a subject or two, perhaps in passing, that I believe ricochet quite strongly off of critical core Sim issues and misunderstandings.  The parts that I wish to focus upon, if you find it so suitable, are where you A. state that you wanted to "revel in Tolkien's Middle Earth" and B. where you lament how System failed or worse confounded the process of "A."  The two issues are closely intertwined but as the process of Sim play has never been elucidated it makes all too common sense that there are continuing serious problems with creating any System to support functional Sim play.

I would like to start with your hope of "reveling" in Middle Earth.  I believe that revelling in a given pre-existing fiction is a fairly common desire that is indicative of Sim play desire.  One of a number of "tells" if you will.  So the questions become what does one mean by "revelling" and how can role-play facilitate that desire.  By role-play I mean the Exploration process as described in the provisional glossary. 

I don't know if its still the case or not, but several years ago there was employed a musical analogy to describe role-play in general.  I would like to expand on this analogy in reference to Sim play for a number of reasons.  One of which is run as far away as possible from the sticky and troublesome problems associated with the words "Story," "Character," "Conflict," etc., for the time being as they are so impossibly bound up with not only Nar play in particular but they have a corrupting effect on the discussion in general.  Ron had analogy of differing CA's that employed the use of a bicycle as the exemplar.  In one CA a person would ride the bike and use if for transportation while a person with another CA would have a completely different and incompatible use for said bicycle – in Ron's example the other use would be to use the bike as a work of art hung on the wall to be looked at.  (I hope I am not misremembering!)  I sidetracked to this example to illustrate just how different and ultimately incompatible CA's are.  The problem with the words I temporarily proscribed is that they often lead to confusion whereby the two CA's, Nar and Sim, are conflated leading to unexamined conclusions and thus cock up the conversation to ruin

So let's talk music.

Imagine for the sake of argument that Sim is the verbal equivalent as jazz is to pre-existing works of music.  That the piece of music in question is pre-recorded or just composed on the sheet matters not.  What does matter is that the piece of music in question is well know by all the players in the jazz ensemble.  Jazz, understood in this fashion, could be described as a process of "revelling" in a given piece of music.  So we have musicians with instruments all playing together riffing together both with the source piece and each other, but what they aren't doing is playing willy nilly.  There's a huge amount of highly informed structural work being done on the source piece of music.  To do this effectively the musicians must all be skilled with their given instruments, they must know the source piece of music intimately and most critical of all they must have a thorough and vast (implicit or explicit) understanding of music theory.  So, in order to effectively participate in this jazz session one must have a deep understanding of what gives said piece of music its identity.  The players must understand at some level what it is they like enough about a given piece of music to "revel" in it.     Note that we are not talking about doing covers (exact copies) but jazz – the process where the source music is altered and play with in a creative, recognizable and celebratory manner.  To do that one must understand music theory.  Why?

Music is not the random playing of notes.  It is a highly structured process but it is ultimately based on what is pleasing to the human ear.  To understand a piece of music one must be able to break it down, abstract it to make it understandable.  Once understood one can then be able to intentionally play on the various structures of the piece.  Different yet similar.  Theme and variation.  Creating and the already created.  In music there has been described and thus we can talk about and thus intentionally modify pitch, rhythm, melody, harmony, structure, form, texture, scales, timber, etc.  What's neat about all this structuralism is that these "rules" are not necessarily hard and fast – they are subject to interpretation and innovation.

...and this is brings us back to Sim and its similarity to jazz.  Sim is not about product but process.  Its not so much the created as the process of intentional creation of structure in the here and now.  And like jazz what happens in a given session is typically best enjoyed by the ensemble and not the audience unlike a the playing of a scored piece of music.  Jazz/Sim operates on a bajillion levels, is incredibly transitory and usually fairly opaque to those outside the ensemble.  I draw very broad strokes here, but this is argument by analogy so please allow some latitude – this will be an imperfect fit even if the gist generally holds true.

So what does this relate back to Sim role-play and "revelling" in a given fiction?

First of all it means we must reconsider the terms story, plot, character, etc. in the traditional sense when discussing the Sim game play process.  This in and of itself is not much of stretch given the how Narrativism is defined and uses the aforementioned terms.  I'm going to have to lame out because I don't have a vocabulary to offer at present, but I do want to hammer home the notion that there is an identifiable structure to Sim play and that it is most significantly not founded in "Story-play" memes.  Like's Ron's illustrative CA bicycle, many of the parts (story, character, plot, cultural norms, social mores, history, healing is slow, combat is deadly, conflict, action, etc. - an interesting thread that tangentially touches on these ideas can be found at A Language for "The Package") are similar on the surface to those parts as used in narratives/stories but they are employed in substantially different ways and for differing reasons. 

In keeping with the music analogy Music Theory is to Role-play Theory (The Forge) as "(musial themes)/semantic structures" from the source material are to mechanics in G/N play.  So instead of having conflicts or challenges in Sim play you have "tension".  By tension I don't mean low grade hostility but rather something akin to music imbalance/disharmony/discord with regard to the semantic structures of the source material.  The process of play would then be the return to "harmony" - structurally.  In resolving the structural disharmony the player tries to adhere/interpret as many of the established semantic structures as possible in resolving the issue at hand.  Let's look at the Dunedain example used before.

The semantic structures might include (and this is by no means exhaustive):

• The History of Numenor
• The History of Maladorn
• The gifts of the decedents of Elendil
• The values of the Dunedain
• The struggle of the Dunedain to keep the peoples of Arnor free of supernatural predators
• The relationship of the Dunedain with the Elves
• The relationship of Maladorn with his horse "Whisper"
• The gifts of "Whisper"
• The personality of "Whisper"
• Maldorn's geographic knowledge of the Mirkwood, Anduin, the Misty Mountains, etc.
• If the system tries to hold to the books magic is very rare and there is no magical/clerical healing, i.e. healing is very slow.
• The theme of "eucatastrophe" (and others which can be found in his On Fairy Stories)
• That there is absolute good and evil in the world...and it matters.
• The inhabitants of the fictional world rather live in peace.
• What the other players were doing (if any had been present)
• The relationship between the Maladorn and any PCs (if any had been present)
• That the encounter was near the retreat of the Witch-king after the Battle of Fornost.

The major source of "tension" in the set up was that a man was beset by brigands in an area that the Dunedain feel is theirs to protect.  The return to harmony (the resolution of this structural "tension") while adhering to as many of the semantic structures as possible would be to "revel" in Middle Earth.  Thinking and acting like a denizen.  How well one does this is the source of pride and regard.

Food for thought.

[David Berg]

In resolving the structural disharmony the player tries to adhere/interpret as many of the established semantic structures as possible in resolving the issue at hand.

Yes!  Not only adhere, but re-invoke!  Now is when I play the "History of Numenor" catchy hook on my instrument!

Interpreting is harder, but even more rewarding.  You played the catchy hook in double-time, or in a different key!  Neat!

As for the necessity of tension and disharmony, or the requirement for a consonant resolution, I'm not familiar with that, but it makes sense to me that that's certainly one way to revel...

[Ron Edwards]

Look out for false agreement. Jay hasn't said anything about the crucial step you're describing, David.

Also, Gregor, let us know whether this issue is something you want to see developed on this thread.

Best, Ron