Amount of area explored
Distance travelled
Worth of treasure retrieved
Number of people saved
Quests completed


Thats whats been missing!!! So many games are so caught up in stat development, and none about ''emotional development''. I mean, you see games all the time with strength, dex, damage stats. I very much like this, as it would mean that for once it would be perfectly feasible to play a card suffling gentlemen. Previously this could not be done since the only way to improve would be to beat up half the country side, which I dont want to do..I want to put all my points into ''offending ladies''

Of course, this means that there couldnt (ok, shouldnt) have a big bad fight at the end, since this will come down to fighting skills...again.

quote: Original post by boolean
I want to put all my points into ''offending ladies''

Of course, this means that there couldnt (ok, shouldnt) have a big bad fight at the end, since this will come down to fighting skills...again.

maybe you could offend the evil bad guy''s wife, so she beats him for you when he laughs at your jokes... or you can challenge him to a geography contest instead of a duel!

quote: Original post by dede
Unlike normal movies or RPGs, where characters "work hard", and level up, or summon strength from somewhere else. LoTR rely on leveling up using items. Which is less RPG than adventure.

Who said they don''t ''level up''?

Just because Tolkien doesn''t say anything about levels, it doesn''t mean their experiences aren''t making any difference. You can clearly see that the hobbits aren''t the same innocent, harmless little things they were at the beginning of the book, and it''s not just down to stuff they''ve picked up. They''re just generally tougher and more confident in themselves.

Of course, Tolkien *could* have written stuff like "And then Frodo stabbed the orc with Sting, his elven frostband +3, inflicted 56 points of damage, and gained 100 experience points. As he had now gained enough experience to advance to level three, he improved his STR by one point and took another rank of short sword skill, enabling him to dispatch the next orc with even more ease". However, it would have sucked horribly. As boolean says, it is the fact that he really develops the characters that makes their progression more believable.

Can this sort of character development be incorporated into a game?

quote: Original post by Sandman
Can this sort of character development be incorporated into a game?

i dunno... but if it were, i don''t know how well it would work. the hard-core role-players wouldn''t need any stats to develop their characters, and the hard-core roll-players wouldn''t want to not see lots of numbers. this hybrid idea (using lots of stats, but not mentioning them at all) would alienate both camps. i don''t think a computer could come up with enough variety of descriptions to replace the numbers, without being cheesy.

just my 2 cents

I think that having stats is a good thing, but the way they are used is what will make or break it. Pretty much any movie/book/story has the main character end up different from the start, like learning a new skill, becoming stronger, doing things they never thought they would, but you dont have to have the words ''LEVEL UP'' appear on the movie screen for the audience to relize. Sure, have stats, but they should only serve as a reference to whats going on with your character. Its how you increase those stats, and what those stats actually are that is going to bring it all together. For example, we could say they Bilbo had a willpower stat of 18, and that the ring was a invisiblity ring but had -10 willpower, enough to send most people over the edge, but not the hobbits. But it does so without saying, and thats the main thing.

Ok, its late here and Im talking out my ass. Im going to sleep now.

Goodnight everybody.....zzzzzz......zzzzzz...

I''m not so sure characters in LOTR got their powers through "power ups". While granted the Hobbits did have to get by on this, for the most part all the other characters relied on their own skills and innate powers. Aragorn was not just a superb warrior, but one of the best human herbmasters in Middle Earth, Legolas got his bow skills from his innate "elvishness" as well as Gimli''s skill with an axe. Boromir was a superb fighter, and Faramir was both a good fighter and with a sixth sense bordering on that of the wizards. So really, other than the hobbits, no one really relied on powerups too much.

As irbrian pointed out, LOTR was made in an era before games of this nature existed, and in many ways it''s very hard to translate into a game setting. Games usually rely on the idea of your charcter slowly progressing, becoming more skilled and experienced as time goes on. In most literature, this usually isn''t the case, as the protagonists already are at their peak. Some genres do do this however...namely martial arts stories in which the character can only defeat his arch-nemesis by studying extremely hard under a master. Even Karate Kid used this formula...so it''s still around to this day.