Talk:Middle-earth Role Playing

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"The setting for this game predates the War of the Ring by around 1400 years and as such it represented a version of Middle-earth radically different to that seen in The Lord of the Rings trilogy or The Hobbit."

I'm pretty sure my copy of MERP is set in the Fourth Age... Ausir 08:46, 10 Mar 2004 (UTC)

There was a spin-off simplified version, I think marketed just as "Lord of the Rings Rolplaying" or something like that, back i nthe early 1990s

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Yeah, it was by ICE and called the Lord of the Rings Adventure Game. Used a different system, too. But has nothing to do with the Decipher Lord of the Rings game.

[edit] Fourth Age

The version we played was set twenty years after the War of the Ring. Aragorn was High King, the elves were leaving, Mordor was in chaos, the Shire was back to its old self after the 'Scouring'. It was all pretty cool. MERP is underrated as a game and that map was amazing.

Is the comment about roll-playing an opinion? Nothing in MERP ever takes more than 3 rolls of the dice, unlike D&D where actions can take many dice indeed. There is a subset of D&D and AD&D players who dislike anything based on Rolemaster because it proves assertions made by Gygax & Co about magic and combat systems are wrong. My opinion is that the MERP system is indeed much cleaner with less roll-playing than AD&D. I don't see how the opinion about roll-playing adds to the article unless you add the opinion that it is actually simpler and more internally consistent than AD&D Johnpf 20:43, 18 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Magic System

"In Tolkien's books, magic is a rare... , whereas in MERP magic ... was possible for nearly any Player Character"

Much of the spell lists from MERP/Rolemaster can be interpreted as special abilities or talents, rather than overt magic; the game system using the same framework to represent and limit different special abilities. Rather a nice system in retrospect, and I recall campaigns in the 80s which played well with this distinction (Edinburgh Uni, c.1988/9). Sawatts (talk) 13:30, 10 June 2008 (UTC)