Most RPGs use dice, so why not us? Well, in (very) brief, because cards reduce the randomness of dice-rolling systems found in most RPGs.
Combat challenges aren't the only ones to use cards to alter the progression of your adventures. For example, if you're investigating mysterious tracks in a barn, tracking an animal on a hunt, or declaring your love to a lady, you'll succeed or fail depending on the cards you play.
Let's take a look at how to win a challenge in LotRT.
You have a base score composed of the number of one of your traits (body or soul) and the number of one of your vocations required for the challenge. Let's take an animal tracking challenge with a difficulty of 14. With a base score of 10 (composed of a 4 in Sense and a 6 in Courtesy), you must play a card whose number allows you to reach a total higher than the difficulty number, i.e. a card of 4 or more. You can also spend Inspiration Points you've earned during the adventure to reach the desired number (if you have points in the chosen card's vocation).
There are many ways of modifying your deck and the cards that make it up: the cohesion of your group (affected by the Honor of each knight in your current group) affects the number of powerful Grail cards that will be in your deck, the "13" cards that are added to your hand when a knight succeeds in sitting on the Siege Perilous, certain spells in your grimoire allow you to draw or reshuffle your deck, and so on.
I know we always say this when talking about one of LotRT's mechanics, but there's a TON more to say! We don't want you spoil the pleasure of discovering the game though, so we'll leave it at that for now and end this newsletter with a sneak peek at the new cards designed by Pierre!
We hope you enjoyed this preview, and as always, find us on social media for more!
Clélia & the Artifice Studio team
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