Cubicle 7 Entertainment and Sophisticated Games have announced plans to make a Dungeons & Dragons® compatible roleplaying series for J R R Tolkien’s legendary fantasy world of Middle-earth, the setting for The Lord of the Rings® and The Hobbit®.
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I wasn't particularly excited when i read this piece of news yesterday.
We already have a beautiful game set in Middle earth which was published by the same company.
Countless gamers out there already tried the so-called "porting" (as this term is used in the software field): that is, trying to adapt Tolkien to D&D mechanics or vice versa.
I am not saying that Cubicle 7 won't be able to do that: quite the opposite. I feel they are likely to publish a decent game, considering how well they did with their entire line.
But this is not the point of my rumbling today.
thiInk - quite simply- that Tolkien fans and people who want to play in a Tolkien environment should stick to "The One ring" RPG or for what that matters, to MERP (Middle Earth Role Playing game) by ICE. Or "Tiers Age". (link here).
But please, stop try to tweak D&D to anything. This is the same old blind attempt. As far as i am concerned, this is tantamount to believing that only D&D exists- without taking into account that other games serve the scope in a far better way, without admitting that there are rule sets devised specifically to convey a certain flavour to your game sessions.
And this is, again, one of the reasons why in the past D&D "clones" or other fantasy games published by other companies never really hit the market. They provided other flavour to the game sessions, but people instead tried to correct and make amendments to Dungeons & dragons when they realized that its rules were not fit and that there were "holes".
When D&D isn't enough, that prods us to see things right. And maybe to change our game of choice.
We are compelled to use another system, not to tweak D&D instead.
If we hanker to have a Tolkien-like experience, we should use TOR by Cubicle 7, not D&D.
But it seems that we always grudgingly recognize that D&D may not suffice.