Hi tom.
I deffinately agree on the text adventure and parza idea, however one
problem with character picking is balancing the game.
Lets say you made a lotr game. Well doing hobbiton to rivendell would be
relatively easy, provided aragorn was an npc since your four principle
characters are the four hobbits, so are pretty evenly matched. Admittedly to
make life interesting you might make some changes, ---- frodo for instance
would naturally have higher int and maybe some boarderline magic abilities
from his translations of elvish, Sam would be less intelligent but stronger
and a far better warrior, while pipin would make sense as a good ranged
attacker (remember the tooks were traditionally the hobbit hunters), and
Merry would probably do better in constitution, journeying and mounted
combat (the brandybooks being more well travelled than most hobbits).
however, once you got to rivendell things would become much harder. Someone
like arragorn for instance, who is 83 years old, has masses of battle
experience, was tutored by Elrond and also has some hereditory abilities
such as long life from his heritage is just not on the same league as the
hobbits. Gandalf, who is for all intents and purposes a miner deity and
could if he wished be as powerful as Sauron in his own right is different
again.
heck, I remember a very crazy lotr brawler in which you could play as either
aragorn, gimly or galadriel! which is just plane loopy!
If you were to make a straight up lotr game, i'd recommend just limiting
players to the four hobbits only and having the rest of the fellowship as
powerfull npc allies, since the fellowship of the ring while great
characters do not really sute an rpg.
A better idea personally might be to invent some characters which suted your
game and setting better but in the middle earth style.
for example, in his adventure thror's ring, and his later sequal (yet to be
converted to Eamon deluxe), Dolni keep, Tom Zuchowski introduced two allies
who go on the quest with you. These are an elf called galahir, and a dwarf
called Gorim, supposedly one of Thrain's brothers.
galahir is naturally a very fast attacker and a bow expert, while gorim is
tough and strong and uses an axe, and can also read dwarf runes (which as
you'd imagine being in moria is pretty useful).
I'd personally advise doing this sort of thing, creating several middle
earth characters and suting them to your game. Even if you wanted to retell
the quest for Mordor and the ring, have more appropriate characters
involved, indeed in his Eamon versions of lotr, Sam ruby assumes that "you"
ie, your eamon character is the ring barer, and other people such as golum,
frodo and sam etc yyou meet along the way.
while I can see an advantage to various characters, or indeed to a class
system ssince it gives choice and replay, I'm just not sure the lotr cast
are really suted to this if you know your middle earth history. After all,
many of the sterriotypes we have about characters come from d&D which was
long after Tolkien's time, ---- I think tolkien himself would be quite
surprised if you faced him with the glass cannon, strengthless wizard, or
the thick as a brick meat shield warrior that are such standards of D&D type
systems.
Beware the grue!
Dark.
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