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Hey all

After a mere 16 years or so I've finally got around to looking at the LOTR rules, as they seem to be pretty well regarded in the wider wargames community. There's a lot of aspects I like - especially the way heroes and wwarriors are treated differently. I can see adapting that to other settings quite well.

I have one very basic question though, about whether I'm reading something correctly, to do with how fights are resolved. As I read the rules on page 26 of the big blue book, it appears that the winner of a fight is decided entirely on the dice roll, and the relative fight values of the combatants only come into it if the dice are tied. Is this correct or am I missing something? It seems very random if the stats of the different combatants have no real bearing on the outcome of the fight in most cases.

cheers
Pete

That is correct, and while on paper it sounds random and unfair, in practice, it works fine.

The Fight value is definitely important, think of it like this: If your F is higher and you roll a 6, you've automatically won the fight regardless of how many enemies you're fighting, which is huge! One Elf has a 1/6 chance of auto-beating pretty much any other basic troop. Even better, think of someone like Aragorn; 3 Attacks, if he rolls a single six (if my maths is right, that's a 50% chance) he's basically won any fight he's in.

The number of Attacks and the Strength of the combatants are also crucial, Fight is not the only stat in play in combat.

Fair enough. I'm very much on my first read through, so I guess I haven't really thought through the implications.

My suggestion is just to try it out, I agree it can seem a little odd on paper, but on the tabletop it works quite nicely to give you a nice back-and-forth, and I also like how one side will definitively win the fight each turn, rather than both sides landing blows each time like in some games such as 40k.

You've got it correct. It randomises things enough that your basic goblin has a chance of beating an elite troop, but the casualty rate is slow enough (most troops are strength 3 and usually wounding on 6's) that losing a combat is not the terrible thing it can be in 40K (where you end up removing ten men from a squad in one combat). Not only that, you tend to find low model count elite armies usually field a banner or two, which gives them a reroll locally in every combat, utilising the higher fight value to win more. It works really very well in practice.

You will realise how important the fight value is when you will se an Uruk Berserk supported by pikes try to impacts on a line of F3 humans. Or a surrounded Sauron rolls a 6. Is actually one of the best mechanics in the game: it matters but it does not skew the things in a way that certain matches are so impossible to be unfun.. but still you will definitively see a difference between an elf and a goblin.