The One Ring 2e: Strider Mode impressions

One system to rule them all?

[14 min read]

Image by Free League Publishing

Introduction

So I have been on a Lord of the Rings kick of late, and while it might be from the hype of the Amazon series, Rings of Power, I actually haven't watched it yet. I will definitely be doing so shortly! 

I've been reading The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings since I was 10 years old, and they remain amongst the very few books that I reread every few years. It is safe to say their influence on my love of fantasy and role-playing games is inestimable - I don't think I'd be here writing a blog without them.

So whilst I have been mostly focusing on Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition content so far, I am interested in other RPG systems, and I decided to treat myself and purchase The One Ring 2nd Edition core bundle from Free League Publishing. After reading the core rules and all the additional supplements that come in the bundle (in physical format, no less!) I also purchased the rules for solo play, the officially supported PDF, The One Ring: Strider Mode.

Here are my impressions on The One Ring 2nd Edition, after having read all the content and completed one adventure over several hours of solo play.

My impressions

Presentation

Image by Free League Publishing

Right off the bat - the quality of the physical materials is incredible! The paper is of thick stock, made to seem aged like an ancient tome or journal. The art style is very painterly and befitting the setting. The core rule book binding allows the book to sit open easily and the built in bookmark is convenient.

I don't have a lot of physical RPG books to compare to but everything about the bundle feels premium, even the smaller booklets. My only criticism could be that the map of Eriador could be larger, and the dice metal instead of plastic, but for the price overall, I was very impressed with the quality.

Character creation

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Building your Player-hero (as they are known in The One Ring) is quite simple when compared to the process for D&D 5e. The most important choice is your Heroic Culture (a combination of race and  region - such as Elves of Lindon, Men of Bree, Hobbits of the Shire etc). This choice heavily influences stats, skills and combat proficiencies.

Next, there are three primary Attributes - Strength, Heart and Wits - which, combined with your Heroic Culture, determine your derived stats  - Endurance, Hope and Parry. It is an elegant system, and since most primary Attributes will have a score between 2 and 7, and these drive the target numbers to roll for skills, each point feels an important choice. You can also roll randomly for your attributes too.

The One Ring doesn't have a fleshed out class system like D&D 5e, but you choose from six Callings (e.g. Captain, Messenger, Treasure Hunter), which mechanically only really provide you Favoured skills (where you can roll twice, keeping the best, like D&D 5e advantage). Both Heroic Culture and Callings give you these Favoured skills, and you get 10 additional points to use to build up your proficiency in all your skills to reflect your experience up until starting the adventure. Choosing skill proficiency levels and which are favoured is the bulk of the character creation process.

One thing I really liked about character creation was how they tied flavour choices (called Distinctive Features) that come with your Heroic Culture and Calling into the mechanics of the game. When you declare an action that requires a roll, but really embodies one of your Distinctive Features, you can spend a point of Hope and become Inspired - receiving two additional dice to roll instead of just the one extra. E.g. Luindîs, my Ranger, is Honourable, so when rolling to Persuade some brigands that she would be good to her word in letting them go, I could choose to use this Distinctive Feature to be Inspired on the roll. This encourages role-playing your characters features (and potentially flaws).

Lastly, you choose your gear and a starting Reward or Virtue. The former grants a bonus to an item, the latter is more like a feat in D&D 5e, that can raise Attributes, reduce target numbers or increase combat effectiveness. It should be noted that outside your choice of combat gear, the game assumes you have whatever miscellaneous travel equipment you need to be an adventurer. A nice way of streamlining character creation and inventory management.

Determining success

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Unlike D&D 5e, which is a d20 system for determining success, The One Ring uses a mix of d12s (called Feat Dice) and d6s (called Success Dice). You roll one Feat Die (or two dice if favoured/ill-favoured) and a number of Success Dice equal to your skill and any other positive or negative modifiers, adding these results all together against a target number that is determined by your attributes (20 minus the relevant Attribute). Thus a player almost always knows what they need to roll in order to succeed.

There are markings on the dice that again distinguish this system from regular D&D - an Eye of Sauron rune on the Feat die indicates a zero (pictured top left), and the Gandalf rune (pictured top right) is considered an automatic success. Any Success die that turns up a 6 (and marked with the Elvish symbol for "T", pictured above) grants higher degrees of success. These extra successes can be turned into different advantages such as the action taking half the time, or conducted silently, hitting harder, or can even be carried forward as momentum into a future skill check. 

While I really like the degrees of success (more nuanced than D&D 5e), and that the player generally knows the probability of success before rolling, I do find this to be more complex than a d20-based system, and seemingly at odds with the simplicity found elsewhere in The One Ring core rules.

Phases of play

The main The One Ring experience is divided up into two phases of play, the Adventuring Phase and the Fellowship Phase. Adventures often span several sessions, with the Fellowship Phase being the downtime activities of the Player-heroes after finishing their adventure.

The Adventuring phase is comprised of Journey, Combat and Council pillars (much like D&D's exploration, combat and social pillars). Unlike D&D where combat is the most structured and rules-heavy portion of the system, in The One Ring there feels to be more equal weight given to the other pillars. This feels very much in keeping with Tolkien's heavy emphasis on long journeys, and really important dialogues between important characters in his stories.

Journeys

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I really enjoyed the Journey mechanics, where the Company (party) plots the route, and the Game Master (called Loremaster in The One Ring) reviews the hexes travelled on their own specific map of Eriador to see if it covers difficult terrain, or includes perilous locations that might spawn dangerous encounters. The Player-heroes take roles like Guide, Hunter, Lookout and Scout and based on their skill checks along the way there can be random events that tax the Company and add travel fatigue depending on their rolls. When they reach their destination, this travel fatigue could cause the characters to be Weary (when their Endurance is lower than their Load score) and when they make checks whilst Weary, any success dice that turn up 1s, 2s, or 3s are counted as zero, making failure much more likely. Thus managing Journeys to reduce as much travel fatigue as possible is paramount to success on the adventures when the Player-heroes reach their destination.

Combat

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While I find the Combat system of The One Ring to be very simplified versus D&D 5e, it is still too much to go through here. A quick summary of the core loop is as follows.

• Once combat starts, there is an opening volley of ranged attacks on both sides.
• Then the game assumes the distance is closed and each combatant decides which enemy they will engage. 
• Each combatant declares their stance (e.g. Forward, Defensive, Ranged etc) and these give them different bonuses to their attacks, or specific abilities that can be deployed.
• Player-heroes almost always act first (unless ambushed by the enemy).
• Attacks are resolved, damage is done to the opposing enemy's Endurance score which at zero will take the combatant out of the fight.
• Extra successes on attack rolls can cause extra damage, or Piercing Blows (like criticals) that force the enemy to have to make a Protection roll or be Wounded.

My experience with the system is limited, but I imagine this would work well with theatre of the mind (ie no maps and miniatures) and be faster than D&D 5e given the fewer options available. I like the trade-off between having heavier gear for protection against wounds (which severely hamper your ability to heal, even while resting) but knowing that once your Endurance falls below your Load score, you now are Weary and have a lower chance of succeeding in your own attacks. This is in contrast to D&D 5e where you can operate at 100% even at lower Hit Points. With no access to healing magic in The One Ring, combat could be more lethal and is encouraging avoidance.

Councils

Ever imagine role-playing the council of the Fellowship of the Ring? The One Ring provides structured rules to do so! These are similar in nature to skill challenges in prior editions of D&D, where the Company needs to get a number of successes on appropriate skill checks before they run out of attempts based on the challenge of the task. Again, this is an elegant system.

Fellowship

Finally, the Fellowship Phase is a nicely structured down-time, where the Player-heroes have weeks or months in a safe haven to train (spend their experience on new Rewards or Virtues) and complete undertakings like visiting a Patron, gathering rumours, healing scars or strengthening the bonds of fellowship within the Company. 

Overall, the structure and importance placed on non-combat activities really feels at home in Tolkien's world, and the emphasis on long journeys and downtime slows the pace down versus many heroic D&D campaigns.

Included adventures

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The core rulebook only includes one sample adventure (called a landmark) which provides a few locations and some tutorial text for new Loremasters to run it. It feels like pretty standard D&D fare.

However, in the Starter Set there is a series of five connected short adventures set in The Shire, which can be played with pre-generated characters from The Hobbit story. These are clearly designed for new players and Loremasters, but are very charming, grounded stories that allow groups to get used to the system while feeling immersed in the very rich lore of The Hobbit, with low stakes at the start. There are also a couple of easter eggs in the form of very famous characters that become available for play during the series!

The solo play experience

Available on DriveThruRPG as a PDF for $4.99 USD

I have played a considerable amount of D&D 5e solo whilst applying the guidelines from DM Yourself to official published adventures. In that format, I am not using a random-table 'oracle' of any sort to determine what happens - rather leaning on a set of default behaviors for my character or a declaration about what they would do before reading ahead and resolving. It takes some discipline, but it works well, and you can almost experience the adventure in a similar way to players around a table. See this article for further information, but that is the only type of solo RPG experience I have had until now.

The One Ring: Strider Mode, is a fairly minimal adaptation of the core rules, and is an oracle-based free-form system of solo roleplaying that does require more imagination from the player. 

You start by rolling for a random quest from your Patron. You set off, and when questions arise that would normally be asked of the Loremaster instead the solo player rolls on the Telling Table after setting a likelihood the answer will be a yes. E.g. if you think a yes answer is doubtful, you would need to roll an 8 or over in order to have an affirmative result. 

If you need an open-ended question answered, you roll a Feat Die and up to three Success Dice on the Lore Table to give you key words about either an Action, an Aspect, or a Focus. For example, you might ask what the bandits are doing in the forest, and come up with an Action of 'Aid' and a Focus of 'Creature'. Based on the mission and any other context you have so far, you might conclude that the bandits are in fact in league with the Fell Wraith that you are searching for. It takes some imagination to get this to work, but if you're into solo roleplaying, it is likely you have lots of inspiration to draw upon!

Other notable changes to the core rules include:

• Extra skills for your Player-hero since they are on their own and need to be self-sufficient
• Target numbers are two points lower than regular Player-heroes to make success more likely
• The Strider distinctive feature, which makes all uses of Hope whilst journeying Inspired
• Skirmish stance is added to combat to allow for hit and run tactics of the solo Player-hero
• There are no roles in Journeys - events always happen to the Player-hero
• Random tables can be used to determine the events that occur during a Journey

Even with these adaptations, logically the solo Player-hero is more vulnerable than a Company. The guide does call out however that these rules could just as easily be used in two-player coop without a Loremaster, doubling the survivability of the Player-heroes!

My solo setup

Before introducing my solo campaign, a little word on my setup. I started playing physically with the rulebooks and map laid out in front of me, with a notebook and some printouts of character and journey sheets. Having been playing online for the last 18 months, I really enjoyed the tactile nature of rolling dice and flipping through books again! But after that first solo session, it wasn't very practical in a house full of children. So I switched back to digital to take advantage of the many conveniences available free online, such as:

• The rules being searchable in PDF form (when you buy physical, you also get digital copies through DriveThruRPG)
• A dynamic PDF of the character sheet (vs scribbling on a hard copy)
• Adding backgrounds, tokens and virtual dice rolling using Owlbear Rodeo (a much simpler version of the virtual tabletops we use for D&D)
• Listening to Tabletop Audio for background ambience

My campaign

Meet Luindîs, a seasoned Ranger of the North who grew up in the Lone-lands of Minhiriath to Ranger parents protecting the small fortified and isolated hamlets in the region. As the numbers of the Rangers dwindled, Gilraen (mother of Aragorn and de-facto leader of the Rangers), bid them to come to her in Rivendell, that she might personally motivate and direct their energy to protecting the weak against the Enemy. It is in Rivendell, after a long voyage north, that Luindîs is given a quest by Gilraen.

“We’ve had no word from a remote ranger refuge in Fornost, pray tell go and find what fate has befallen our allies.” 

With that brief, Luindîs sets off along the Great East Road towards Bree and then north along the Greenway to Fornost. You can read all my campaign notes here, but Luindîs successfully finds the missing rangers, freeing one survivor from evil men in the ruins of Fornost, and returning an important item back into their hands. However, after a difficult combat with an agent of Shadow, Luindîs is wounded and needs time for it to heal as well as shake off her travel fatigue, before reporting back to Gilraen in Rivendell and getting her next mission...

What's next?

After a really fun first few hours and positive impressions from the system, I am eager to continue my solo journey with Luindîs, as well as see if some fellow Lord of the Rings nerds will want to play a live session or two with me. In the meantime I am approaching the Silmarillion for the first time, and while it reads more like a history book than a novel, I find watching The Nerd of the Rings (on Youtube) at the same time is helping me take in all of Tolkien's rich lore so much more easily!

Image by Free League Publishing

I have also pre-ordered the 5th Edition adaptation of The One Ring, titled Lord of the Rings Roleplaying, out of both curiosity on how well The One Ring rules are adapted to 5e, and also in the hope that I can run a Middle Earth campaign with my regular D&D group in the future!