In the thread titled "The Right Way to do D&D Domain Rules," SHARK says:

Quote from: SHARKMy Three Pillars of RPG Campaigns are the following:

FIGHTING: Heroic combat. Lots of fighting, death, blood, and war. People and creatures need to be dying. Pile the bodies up! Unleash the vengeance! Men and women alike, most everyone loves violence. violence is deeply satisfying to the beast lurking under the façade of civilization and polite society.

BOOTY: Lots of SEX. Men and women alike, everyone likes sex. The more, the better. Drown them in all the fine booty they can grab, with both hands. Later on, spouses, families, and kids become important. Otherwise filed under "Romance".

GOLD: Gold, baby. Piles of silver and gold, fine jewels. Crazy detailed toys. Epic, glorious magic items. Give it all out with a lavish hand, like candy.

In all the years I have been playing, these three pillars have kept players engaged, again and again. When a GM is stuck, or uncertain, unload the train of FBG--FIGHTING, BOOTY, and GOLD. It has never failed. It is these three primary elements that make a campaign interesting, dramatic, exciting, and fun. It is important to remember that all three of the pillars are like legs on a table; they are each more or less equally important. These are the three pillars I think that every GM should embrace. Your game and your campaign will always be better off with MORE FBG!

Over the years, I've wondered if Middle Earth role-playing seems a bit.... dry? dull? unexciting? But I've never been able to put my finger on it until SHARK's Three Pillars. 

Fighting: In the Jackson films, there are enough personal and group combat scenes to keep my interest, and the mass battle scenes don't disappoint. LOTR scores higher on the fighting scale than Star Trek, but lower than Game of Thrones. I give it 3 out of 4 swords.

Booty: The only two main characters who get any action are Aragorn and Sam, and that's offscreen and only after they are married. Maybe Tauriel and the dwarf guy in the Hobbit movie? Even so, LOTR is pretty much devoid of sex. Even the Ents complain about it. I give it 0 out of 4 hearts.

Gold: If you haven't read "GM of the Rings" reserve a few hours for a hilarious "what if LOTR was more like a D&D game." The players complain about the lack of loot. If we do a quick inventory of LOTR, the party starts with mithril armor, a magic short sword (Sting), a magic longsword (Glamdring), and a cursed ring of invisibility. Later they acquire some magic (?) daggers, elven cloaks, elven rope, elven brooches, and the phial of Galadriel. And zero GP. That's not a whole lot of loot. I give it 1 out of 4 gold coins.

Basically, MERP isn't scoring too well on SHARK's three pillars. Is my assessment unfair? it possible to spice it up, without losing the feel or the themes of Middle Earth?

In fairness, The Hobbit is almost entirely a bunch of different factions trying to acquire or hang onto loot. But yeah Tolkien pretty clearly had a low opinion of material greed as a motivator. When he uses it it's pretty much always for villains (Smaug, Morgoth) or for the tragically misguided (Thorin, the Sons of Feanor).

I haven't played MERP, but I would imagine that part of the necessary player buy-in is accepting that the motivators are different. Tolkien's good guys are chiefly motivated by a desire to protect what they care about from the machinations of evil. His approach to romance is (not trying to be funny) more romantic. Beren and Luthien don't need to bang, because them meeting in a moonlit glade and then going on an epic quest to recover one of the Silmarils is the consummation of their relationship (though they do have children, so you could read between the lines). If you're the GM, you have to sell it to your players on the promise of sweeping adventure and moral satisfaction, rather than blood and boobies.

In fairness to MERP, there are plenty of other games where getting loot and getting laid isn't conventionally a main motivation for players. Call of Cthulhu comes to mind, and you could probably include most other mystery or horror games as well. Spy games, to an extent as well. If you think about James Bond, he always gets the girl, but money simply isn't a concern for him.

Just to clarify, I meant MERP as a shortcut for Middle Earth Role-playing in general, not the game by ICE in particular. It was a section in "Adventures in Middle Earth" (for 5E) on why gold isn't important that prompted this post.

Quote from: Aglondir on May 23, 2023, 09:02:53 PM
Booty: The only two main characters who get any action are Aragorn and Sam, and that's offscreen and only after they are married.

I think you may be misremembering LOTR Slash Fiction as part of the actual movies.

I've played MERP on and off since about 1988. It was actually before that, but the guy who ran the game just told us about it and ran B/X in that style because his mom wouldn't let him take the book to school. True story. Lots of lunch time MERP sessions using our regular D&D characters. I also have played The One Ring (exactly once), a few sessions of the D&D 5th edition game (got rid of the books last summer) and a couple games with the Decipher one, I think it's just called Lord of the Rings maybe. I actually liked this but the "art" is pretty much all pics from the movies so yeah, didn't care for that part. Anyway...

Roleplaying in ME, and MERP especially, is pretty brooding and dark. We mostly did a lot of early TA stuff, per the MERP books, so like a thousand years after Sauron was defeated and about the same before the Ring was found or something like that. Plenty of room to do whatever you wanted. We never cared for Fourth Age stuff, as that seemed sort of anti-climatic, and lent itself to too much magic use. SA for the same reason. No idea what a First Age game would have looked like...elves beating the shit out of each other? I dunno. So yeah, mid-TA MERP is just like a gritty ass dungeon crawl that really seems almost useless because no matter what happens, you know eventually the War of the Ring is going to happen. Even if the DM is explicit and says something like, "Okay Sauron is GONE and the Ring was eaten by a dragon so he will never ever come back," it's almost irrelevant. The lore is far, far too overwhelming to ever shake the fatalistic nature of the game world. As least every game I've ever played or ran in ME. It's kind of like an upbeat Warhammer, honestly. That said, we still had lots of fun playing it, but there was never any "we're gonna save the world!" nonsense like you see in even low-level D&D campaigns. Every farm boy in D&D thinks he's going to be Conan and rule his own kingdom. All my MERP characters were just happy to finally get home in one piece with a few new tales for the tavern. Which, I guess fits the genre perfectly.

Basically, it's a totally different style of game, for the most part.

Greetings!

Aglondir! Hey there my friend! I'm glad that you like my three pillars of gaming! As for COC, or mystery games, or anime waifu furries, I can't say what makes those kinds of games tick. My three pillars are tailored for D&D and similar games. Through the years, my players have had zero interest in those other kinds of games. I'm a huge fan of the Middle Earth books and the films as well. However, I also believe that Middle Earth, as a campaign setting for D&D, has honestly only a very limited and narrow appeal. There is probably something to that from how all Middle Earth Commercial Campaigns have ultimately been commercial failures. None of them have ever lasted very long. MERP managed to limp along probably the longest, but its broader appeal was likewise pretty narrow.

For lack of a more verbose explanation, Middle Earth promotes a kind of railroad experience, and even when one divorces themselves from the central plot, the overall theme still only appeals to a few, or specifically when someone is in the mood for a Middle Earth Experience.

We see that everywhere in our society today, and especially so in RPG gaming. Everyone wants to play a sexy beast Teifling, or  Dragonborn, or  Vampire. Few have any interest in playing in a world of righteous, high-minded, goody-goody Characters.

That is what is at the deep end of your questions, my friend, in my view.

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

Quote from: Grognard GM on May 23, 2023, 10:00:38 PM

Quote from: Aglondir on May 23, 2023, 09:02:53 PM
Booty: The only two main characters who get any action are Aragorn and Sam, and that's offscreen and only after they are married.

I think you may be misremembering LOTR Slash Fiction as part of the actual movies.

LOL!

Aragorn and Arwen, and Sam and Rosie.

For me, yes and no. 

No, in that, as I've said here before, not in the ME, with hobbits and balrogs and the sheer weight of that particular story on "Middle Earth" with shires and Moria and Rivendell and Ents and so on. 

Yes, in that if do your own settings with a mix of heroic myth, more dark ages than middle ages, and some supernatural/fantastical elements that fit the kind of campaign you want to run, then now we are on the right track.  Add in your own events and motivated NPCs and so on, likely to lead to that kind of action, even more so. Even better, if what you want to do has a little more or a little less magic, or some different archetypes, or any other of a host of changes--no one is going to get bent out of shape trying to mentally fix all those heptagonal pegs into octagonal holes. 

Trying to be "true" to Middle Earth but also be "different" typically leads to deconstructing the story, rarely to good effect.  If instead you are true to your different ideas that share some of the sensibilities of Middle Earth, then you have a much better chance of having fun with it.

Nor is this phenomenon unique to Middle Earth role playing.

Then once that is out of the way, add as much or little of Shark's three pillars as seems appropriate.

ICE's Middle Earth Roleplaying (MERP) has always been accused of having too much magic and too much treasure.  Personally I think it's a little over blown.  The introductory adventure does have a troll hoard that's full of goodies but it's protected by half a dozen trolls and a tenth level party would be hard pressed to fight them.

Magic is quite a bit weaker than in D&D but more ubiquitous.  Minor items like +10 swords, +1 spell adders, and minor daily spell items are common place.  You need to be seventh level to cast Fire Bolt and XP and levels are slow in coming because MERP doesn't have Rolemaster's generous first time x 5 multipliers.  A low level Mage had best take some background items because the first level spells are things like boiling a cup of water.  And no, you can't boil the water in their skull because you can't see it or touch it.

The single column critical and fumble tables are notoriously silly but get stale quite quickly.  Still, you should play it long enough to see some poor soul with a lance polevault 30' and take a D Krush critical.  Arms Law for Rolemaster is compatible and provides full page tables.

I am continously telling people that it's very important to declare parries before rolling initiative and have everyone roll and add up their attacks at the same time.  Ideally they'll have copies of their weapon tables and be able to tell you how many hits they do and what the critical result was when you come around to them.  If it's a bit much adding up the badguys attacks just add the tens. 

As for gaming in Middle Earth, it depends on how much you want to be scorned by the scholars in the field and told how wrong you are about everything all the time.  The setting itself is fine and there's lots of pre-war of the ring history to explore.

Perhaps the point is in defining "Middle Earth roleplaying." What are the defining features?

If it's the setting, that's easy to do and it's as much fun as you make it. If your crowd likes to fight, give them a locale that's dangerous. You may have to come up with more foe variety, but what you read in the books is just the "rolled encounters" that party had. There should be other results on a table.

If your crowd likes social intrigue, set them up in (for instance) Minas Tirith and work out the movers and shakers. You'll need groups and conflicting goals. Just because the novels didn't focus on this aspect doesn't mean it didn't happen. Other times have other urban centers.

Magic is rare and so are spellcasters and overt religiosity. If you don't like that, maybe ME isn't for you. OTOH you can certainly have a variant of ME. Does that spoil things for you?

Exploration is a player favorite? Pick your favorite period and go. Sailing along like Ulysses, island to island. Dwarves tunneling under mountains and finding who knows what in winding passages? The Lewis and Clark of ME can go make contact and map with whatever they can find in a grand adventure.

Why can't any of that happen in ME and fit just fine? JRRT wanted to tell the whole Morgoth / Sauron thing, but that was just his plotline. Make your own, to your own preferences.

Quote from: Aglondir on May 23, 2023, 09:02:53 PM
Basically, MERP isn't scoring too well on SHARK's three pillars. Is my assessment unfair? it possible to spice it up, without losing the feel or the themes of Middle Earth?

Quote from: SHARK on May 23, 2023, 10:05:35 PM
We see that everywhere in our society today, and especially so in RPG gaming. Everyone wants to play a sexy beast Teifling, or  Dragonborn, or  Vampire. Few have any interest in playing in a world of righteous, high-minded, goody-goody Characters.

I've been planning out a Middle Earth game using Savage Worlds -- starting with a convention game later this year. Here's the first discussion thread:

https://www.therpgsite.com/pen-paper-roleplaying-games-rpgs-discussion/a-new-fellowship/

In the test convention game I'm planning, it's an alternate history where the original Fellowship collapses after Moria -- so new characters take up the struggle by different means. It's thus mostly about the PCs heading straight into Mordor. So lots of possible fighting. The booty options are limited to main character romance (i.e. PC/PC like Eowyn/Faramir), though I have a number of women PC options, so that broadens the options. Carrying gold isn't likely going in, but lots of gold potential

SHARK says that few are interested in playing goody-goody characters - but I don't agree. Goody-goody doesn't mean boring. Righteous questing characters can have lots of extreme drama. My current D&D campaign is about agents of a divine patron laying the smackdown on evil -- with plenty of drama and sexual tension along the way.

Quote from: SHARK on May 23, 2023, 10:05:35 PM
As for COC, or mystery games, or anime waifu furries, I can't say what makes those kinds of games tick.

I mean, the appeal of mystery games is pretty straightforward. They're for people who like mysteries. The problem I've found is that a lot of people think they like mysteries, but can't be bothered with actually solving them. I've probably told this story elsewhere, but some years ago I agreed to run a Cyberpunk game for a group of players that expressly requested that their PCs should run a detective agency. I spent a considerable amount of time creating involved mysteries, with multiple paths of investigation, suspects, tons of clues, the whole nine yards. What I got in return was a complete lack of any initiative or creative thought from the players and a response of "we don't know what we're supposed to do". Pretty much put me off the whole genre.

Spy games are a similar thing. Personally, I love the whole spy movie spiel. Cover IDs, confidence games, infiltrations, investigations, femme fatales, all of it. But I've always end up being the only one that engaged with it. I've largely even stopped playing that kind of character, because I got sick of being the designated talker in every party.

I'd still like to play Call of Cthulhu with an experienced GM some day. Maybe I've just been playing with the wrong people.

Quote from: SHARK on May 23, 2023, 10:05:35 PM
My three pillars are tailored for D&D and similar games. ... However, I also believe that Middle Earth, as a campaign setting for D&D, has honestly only a very limited and narrow appeal. There is probably something to that from how all Middle Earth Commercial Campaigns have ultimately been commercial failures. None of them have ever lasted very long. MERP managed to limp along probably the longest, but its broader appeal was likewise pretty narrow.

For lack of a more verbose explanation, Middle Earth promotes a kind of railroad experience, and even when one divorces themselves from the central plot, the overall theme still only appeals to a few, or specifically when someone is in the mood for a Middle Earth Experience....

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

Have to largely agree. While there's a lot you could do in the gaps in Tolkien's material, there's no denying that Middle Earth was crafted to tell a very particular story. I would expect the same to be true of Dune, Game of Thrones, and a lot of other popular IPs. It seems like the settings which have the longest lifespan in roleplaying  are ones that are created either expressly for gaming, or for episodic story formats. The Hyborean Age and Star Trek would probably be examples I would cite there.

Quote from: jhkim on May 23, 2023, 11:01:24 PM
SHARK says that few are interested in playing goody-goody characters - but I don't agree. Goody-goody doesn't mean boring. Righteous questing characters can have lots of extreme drama. My current D&D campaign is about agents of a divine patron laying the smackdown on evil -- with plenty of drama and sexual tension along the way.

I find I can reliably get one or two people in a party that are prepared to play heroes, but I always get two or three that are absolutely devoted to playing callous mercenaries. In practice, though, I find the vast majority of people people fall back to playing characters that are morally pretty average. They're basically greedy and self-interested, but they've got the lines they won't cross. I guess that's how most people are in real life, so you could argue its at least realistic, if kind of uninteresting.

Quote from: SHARK on May 23, 2023, 10:05:35 PM
Greetings!

Aglondir! Hey there my friend! I'm glad that you like my three pillars of gaming! As for COC, or mystery games, or anime waifu furries, I can't say what makes those kinds of games tick. My three pillars are tailored for D&D and similar games. Through the years, my players have had zero interest in those other kinds of games. I'm a huge fan of the Middle Earth books and the films as well. However, I also believe that Middle Earth, as a campaign setting for D&D, has honestly only a very limited and narrow appeal. There is probably something to that from how all Middle Earth Commercial Campaigns have ultimately been commercial failures. None of them have ever lasted very long. MERP managed to limp along probably the longest, but its broader appeal was likewise pretty narrow.

For lack of a more verbose explanation, Middle Earth promotes a kind of railroad experience, and even when one divorces themselves from the central plot, the overall theme still only appeals to a few, or specifically when someone is in the mood for a Middle Earth Experience.

We see that everywhere in our society today, and especially so in RPG gaming. Everyone wants to play a sexy beast Teifling, or  Dragonborn, or  Vampire. Few have any interest in playing in a world of righteous, high-minded, goody-goody Characters.

That is what is at the deep end of your questions, my friend, in my view.

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

SHARK,

Excellent analysis. Sexy beast Teiflings, Dragonborn, or Vampires... you forgot green-skinned goblin strumpets, LOL!

I love Middle Earth, but perhaps it is something best appreciated in books and movies rather than an RPG setting. I keep revisiting the concept, trying to think of ways to make it work, but it never seems to gain any ground.

Quote from: ForgottenF on May 23, 2023, 09:27:32 PM
In fairness to MERP, there are plenty of other games where getting loot and getting laid isn't conventionally a main motivation for players. Call of Cthulhu comes to mind

Except for Innsmouth... where it smelling like fish isn't a good thing.
Dunwich... same, except everyone has the same last name.

I have quite a few of the old MERP modules / campaigns and I ran a very long campaign  that paralleled The Hobbit (Thorin's backup plan in case Gandalf's plan fell through).

It is all going to come down to the the individual region and era. I can imagine a campaign set in Dunland / Isenguard could be rough. Keep in mind that Saruman seemingly 'bred' half orcs.

Also, a Corsairs of Umbar and Harad based campaign could be interesting. There are descendants of 'Black Numenoreans' as well that could be plotting.