[Review] The One Ring

I played a one-shot of the One Ring this weekend at LozCon. This is more notes from that experience than a review of the book:

1) The One Ring is a game about friendship and fellowship that doesn't have rules to allow two PCs to assist one another on a task. Or, if these rules exist, they are not registered in the index at the back, or clearly indicated (via a subheading or something else) in the task resolution chapter. I know because I spent ten minutes looking when we tried to sing a song together. It's also weird because during the journeying phase and at the start of combat, there are group checks where everything throws their successes into a common pool.

2) The scenario we played in (the opening scenario of Ruins of the North) was a good experience, but a bad adventure. There were two main changes that the referee made before the game that made it a better scenario, along with several smaller ones along the way. The big changes were to include a goblin horde that marches down with an orc warboss leader to pin us in the abandoned manor while the ghost stuff was going on, and giving one of the PC pregens a magic sword so we could actually fight the ghost big bad. The small changes included changing the table of possible journey problems so the hazards weren't mainly just wolves, but instead were goblins prefiguring the later horde. Also, all hobbits, PC pre-gen option and NPC alike, were removed.

3) I sang a song to my dwarf bud while he was fighting the orc warboss in single combat, and it made him tougher so he could keep on fighting the warboss (the song was "Atmosphere" by Joy Division). This would be the Tolkieniest thing that ever tolked, except that earlier in the session I had said "What ho! I see the faces of Men and they gladden my heart!" with a straight face when we encountered the NPCs that are a thinly-obscured rip-off of As I Lay Dying.

4) It's one of those games where you have abstract gear, and most of your resources for getting things done (like hope points) are kind of abstract, though thematically it's kind of cool that you burn out and become hopeless when you're in a desperate situation. Everything is meant to tie together to create consistent, recurring themes that are driven by the mechanics, and it succeeds on that for the most part, though obviously point #1 still holds, and also there's a ton of stuff that should have been group checks by default that isn't. Perception and stealth were two obvious points - if I ran this, I'd probably make everyone check perception or stealth and pool the successes on their rolls and then allot them out to notice or hide various traces of passage.

5) I dislike the era of Middle Earth they chose for the game. It's too hemmed in by the published properties. You're not going to refound the kingdom of Arnor, you're not going to prevent Sauron's rise, you're not going to stop Saruman's fall, you're not going to be the ones who win the War of the Ring, etc. What it gets you is that the jive-talking wizards who give you your mysterious quests are all named characters from the books, which is OK, but I'd rather play something set in the Fourth Age where you've got more narrative freedom to make big bads and plots and the few things that you do know about are really open, or the Second Age, which has an overabundance of material that's suitably vague about who did what (at least until they publish yet another volume of Tolkien's grocery receipts).

I'd play it again if it was on offer, but I don't think I'd ever really seek it out as a game to play by preference.