New Gaming Horizons

Well, last night would have been another adventure in my Star Wars Alternate Universe game, had it not been put on hiatus by majority vote (fine, I'll admit that I'm still a tad bitter about that, but mostly as the vote had been made before I really got offer any input on the matter).

So instead of playing Star Wars, we discussed what game we'd play next. Oddly, as most of this group has played d20-based games for the majority of their gaming history, they didn't want another d20-based game. So, after some discussion of possible options, we're going to be giving The One Ring RPG by Cubicle 7 a whirl. Most of us are fans of Tolkien, and at the very least have seen the Peter Jackson movies. We've only agreed that we're going to play this, but so far no idea on what sort of characters we'll be playing or even what era (the corebook is set shortly after the Hobbit and thus before the time of the LotR books), so further news as it develops.

There was also the discussion of Margaret Wies Production's Marvel Heroic RPG. I'll freely admit that when it comes to superhero RPGs, I am heavily biased in favor of Mutants & Masterminds, having totally fallen in love with 2nd edition and being quite enamored of 3rd edition as well (though I've not had a chance to get that on the table as of yet), with Hero System being a runner-up. As noted, we agreed upon One Ring, as our communal love of Middle Earth won out over a modern-day supers game (which in some aspects we already are playing one via our Dresden Files campaign).

Having some money to spare, I opted to take advantage of DriveThruRPG's GM Sale, and pick up the PDFs for both games. I've only taken a cursory look at both, but I must say my preference is for One Ring at the moment. Then again, it could be that just trying to figure out the MHRPG's dice system so early in the morning isn't the best of ideas, to say nothing of it looking less "super" and more "story". Not that I have an issue with "story" focus for mechanics, but generally speaking, if I'm playing an RPG built around superheroes, I want to be able to be a superhero. Now I could have a wrong first impression, so I'm willing to finish reading through the PDF before I make a final call as to whether I just wasted 15 bucks or not.

Now, as for One Ring... early impression is I like it. There's some dice funkiness, but overall it looks like task resolution is pretty simple, and a good range of character options. I may end up buying the dead-tree version, simply for the ease of being able to flip back and forth between pages, something that's a tad more difficult when using PDFs. There's not much in the way of magic, which on first view is probably a good thing, as the stories and movies really didn't have much in the way of overt magic like you see in most fantasy RPGs. So I guess I really am looking forward to taking a trek into Middle Earth, something I've only been able to do a scant few times (two attempts under MERP that both ended badly, one attempt under Decipher's CODA version that simply never took off).