"LOTOW Fighting" Topic

Did I miss a bit of the book? Am I just tired?

I don't understand how the fight skill works, the rules seem to say that you just dice to get the highest number. Why the skill?

IIRC any ties go to the higher skill, so it gives you a very thin edge.

It is the weakest bit of the rules, without a doubt. Some thought was put into other aspects of the rules, but fighting in hand to hand … it's almost an afterthought. And a poor one at that.

I agree. I had to shake my head when I read that bit in the book. I guess there is a reason why it and its cousin games are dropping off the face of gaming. Pretty pictures don't make great rules. Shame. I was hoping for more from this game.

I had the same reaction when I read the Lord of the Rings rules, on which LOTOW is based. I don't like it myself but there are quite a few people who do, and describe it as "elegant," but I am sure most of us used the same rules when we started fighting with plastic army men when we were children.

The system is designed for LotR, where great heroes are expected to be able to fight on even terms with large numbers of mooks. The Fight value isn't the only measure of HTH ability – a higher number of attacks is more important for heroes, arguably.

All I can say is: it works on the night. For mooks, your low-skill characters have a slightly-less-than-evens chance of scoring a hit on even the highest-skilled character, and will overwhelm them with numbers. Conversely, higher-Fight characters just need to keep rolling those sixes to hold off any number of foes. And heroic characters really can take on the hordes.

So, I like it. But I can see why others don't.

Has anyone tried D6 + fighting skill to determine the winner?

thebinman – yes, we tried that for a set of LotR games I ran for the kids at school. It works quite nicely, but you do have to decide whether to allocate each of the hero's attack dice in advance (i.e. blue dice is against that enemy, red dice is against this enemy), or roll all together as in the rules. We didn't come to a conclusion on this as the campaign came to an end and their interests moved on. I hope to incorporate this when we start playing LotOW soon.

In reference to TMP link we also are considering a card based system for activation of each character, details of which are still being hashed out – I'll let you know if we come up with something that works.

It works once you have heroes with brawlin' skills as they pretty quickly get an edge. Heroes also win through through extra attacks, extra wounds, Fame points, fortune points etc. It may take 'em longer to beat the scrotes but they get there. See the mechanism as part of that whole. & ties come up more often than you'd think!

Take my Kid, Delilah Crane. Her fightin' score is routine but she's now got trigger-happy (very useful when being charged) 2 wounds & her last advance was pugilist, so peons, troopers etc attacking her are better known as 'fools' in US parlance & get put on the floor a lot.