I recently got to play The One Ring a game designed to give you the Tolkien experience. I’m not a big fan of setting-heavy games these days, least of all games designed to sumptuously weave that setting into every facet of its very being so I was intrigued as to how the experience would pan out.
Where I am coming from
I’m not the biggest Lord of the Rings or Tolkien fan. Tolkien’s writing is less dramatic fiction and more a self-indulgent exploration of geography, history and myth which is a great thing but not really a great thing for me.
I like the Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films. I am ambivalent about Jackson’s Hobbit films. I am enjoying Rings of Power. I really don’t like the novels. I’ve tried to get through the Lord of the Rings trilogy about three times and always stop somewhere around the siege of Helm’s Deep.
Basically, I like some Tolkien adaptations usually in proportion to how many people complain it’s not Tolkien. This means any great simulation of Tolkien fiction isn’t necessarily going to work for me naturally.
The Structure
The post is structured into the below sections: –
This isn’t a comprehensive review of the system it’s more a discussion of my experience playing it and what I thought.
The Day Con Experience
This is the second game of the Day Con experience, the first experience being Blades in the Dark. It continues to work out well as you easily get three sessions in if you measure them at three hours, it’s closer to 2.5 if you count them at four.
It’s a perfect compromise of not being able to string together a long, more frequent game because it also makes the experience more social and a bit more of an event.
I still think the games produced have a different quality than if they were played one session at a time over a consistent period due to the power of reflection and thought that happens between sessions but it does work.
There and back again…
The core idea of The One Ring is to saturate you in the world of Tolkien. The game definitely does that. It could be argued it does it so well it’s a bit stifling, but that’s for another section. It delivered a great day of gaming and these are the key things I took away from it.
Travel is interesting which is amazing considering how much we de-prioritise travel in our usual games to the point it effectively doesn’t exist. It’s a good job it’s interesting as it’s a major focus of the game. It manages to make travel mundanely interesting. Sometimes dangerous things happen, and sometimes small wonders are experienced. It creates this interesting dynamic of wanting to roll well to minimise the ‘moments’ but also enjoying them at the same time. You know all this has worked when you see how far Rivendell is from Bree and raise an eyebrow. The strange thing is it’s a disguised hex crawl in a way, which is clever and also a bit funny or ironic.
It’s epically magically mundane which is genius. It’s genius because many people call Middle Earth a low magic setting. This isn’t true, the place is infused with it and it seems to be everywhere. The issue is people associate high magic settings with people casting spells like they have superpowers. How do you make magic constant but subtle, yet all-pervasive but low-key? You do it like The One Ring. Characters have skill-enhancing magical items or have low-key magical natures which means magic is everywhere but it feels part of the natural surroundings. It makes magic subtly wondrous and it’s very well done.
Combat is very desperate and exciting, as well as dynamic and unpredictable in a good way. Possibly this changes as your characters power up as I can’t really speak to that. Each of the fights was interesting and you can go from being in desperate circumstances to winning depending on how the dice rolls go. It never had that ‘from this point on we can work out we are doomed’ inevitability about it.
The piercing rules are a revelation. Let’s face it, many a role-playing game has tried to resolve the mortal wound versus points as pacing / narrative mechanic. Games usually have rules closer to one or the other and those that have tried to mix the two have always felt a bit jinky. I believe The One Ring pulls it off. The way endurance, the piercing rules and armour work mean both fluidly work at once to create a great and exciting feel to the game.
You feel the cultures a lot. I can’t fully comment on humans, but the dwarf definitely felt very dwarf and the elf very elf. I normally play humans and I don’t normally play the short species. This time I played a dwarf. I can thoroughly say this is the most dwarf character I have ever felt or experienced right down to his bones.
You meet historical figures from the novels, which I’ve listed as a good thing here but I’m not entirely convinced it was. It seems character creation ties you to known figures from the book via a patron. We had Gandalf. This meant we met Gandalf in The Prancing Pony and we also met Elrond when we went to Rivendel. This either works for people or it doesn’t. I found it a bit odd and jaring.
It feels like Tolkien, well at least it does to me. I say for me because if there is anything that feels like a religion that isn’t supposed to be one it’s Tolkien fans. The whole thing oozes with the feel of being in a Tolkien book or the Lord of the Rings films. It’s fantastic in achieving that. The challenge is it does it so well you have to be careful you don’t end up in some sort of cultural simulation where you have cultural simulacrums as characters.
That’s my main take from the game. It’s undoubtedly a great game and I can see why people absolutely love and adore it. I tend to think the very reasons it’s great are also the reasons why it’d be a highly contextual long-term play experience for me.
Cultural simulacrum…
Let’s face it, the main issue for me was always going to be its main strength. It simulates Lord of the Rings and Tolkien stuff very well. There is a lot of subtly around what it means to be like Lord of the Rings and the place of dramatic characters within it.
In this experience at least, I found the setting and the heavy typing of being a dwarf left very little space for a dramatic character. I get this doesn’t have to be the case but it felt like that anyway. I wasn’t playing a dramatic character I was playing a facet of a rich setting that just happened to manifest in something that happened to be called a dwarf. A sort of cultural playing piece that simulated itself well in an overall rich, cultural simulation.
It was a bit ‘insert dwarf stuff in here’ sort of play model and I literally could not think of anything to make that not the case so I just went with it. Lean in.
Can this not be the case? Possibly. You can see that sort of thing coming across in Rings of Power where I actually feel we get a better set of characters! Yeah, the various cultures still feel like themselves but Galadriel, Elrond and Arondir all come across as very different characters. It’s probably very important the characters have some grand desire or quest to integrate into their cultural past and narrative future to turn them into something unique.
It’s definitely the case that Lord of the Rings characters need to be burned with a grand premise at least in meaning (Sam in Lord of the Rings) if not in scope (Galadriel in Rings of Power).
I think just pottering about in the setting and solving smaller scale problems while it feels very Lord of the Rings it strips the ‘big problems’ and ‘big issues’ off the characters and they turn into cultural simulacrums. You can see this playing out with Gimli and Legolas in the films, as opposed to say Aragorn, Gandalf, Frodo and Sam.
And, Finally…
I enjoyed the experience, the big question is would I play it again? Yes. We are in fact playing it again and I did debate whether I should wait for the second Day Con session to publish this post, but I’d 90% written it so I decided not to hold off.
Would I play in a long-form game of The One Ring? That would depend. It would be a game that I wouldn’t just raise my hand for based on the promise of the game itself. I’d need to know what the whole set-up was. If I felt the set-up was more pottering about doing Tolkien things I’d avoid it. If I felt it had a driving narrative like Lord of the Rings or Rings of Power and I could see how I could create a character dramatically integrated into that to distance myself from the cultural simulacrum challenge then I’d maybe all for it.
It’s very unlikely we’d play this game in any long-form style these days so I guess I don’t have to face that discussion and challenge.