Barrels Out Of Bond

Just starting to recover from a very, very long trip. I managed to get out of South Korea, despite the air traffic disruptions caused by the Tsunami (and wow, talk about an apocalypse...). Trying to get back in the blogging swing of things, I realized that I'm a little behind on the Hobbit re-read. I'm actually on "Inside Information" with the boys, so I have a little catching up to do as far as my write-ups go.

Barrels Out of Bond
This chapter concerns the dwarves' capture by Wood-elves and their subsequent escape in a bunch of empty barrels (as facilitated by Bilbo and his magic ring). From the perspective of a gamer, this chapter reminded of a D&D 2e game that I played in some fifteen years ago where there seemed to be a minor theme of getting captured and escaping. I believe the running joke was that we had become connoisseurs of prison gruel. As the party thief, I fell into the role of Bilbo and usually had to bust everybody out (at least I recall doing it at least twice). It was great fun... for me, anyway. I can't remember how the rest of the group took it.

Getting captured is great for drama, but it is very hard to engineer in a game. In many cases, genre conventions demand that the heroes get captured, stand by as the villain monologues, and then must navigate some outrageous death trap. But players characters rarely go down quietly. Until games came around where I could dangle Fate Points or Awesome Points or what have you to submit to capture, I consistently failed to choose the correct amount of force or the proper tactics that would allow me to satisfy that genre convention. Risus would have worked perfectly in this situation, of course (due to the nature of its combat system), but I have yet to use Risus for that particular genre. [Note to self... time to make a super-spy adventure].

One other note (not much else to report on in this chapter)...

In the previous chapter, the elves came across as very inhuman and fairy-like. In this chapter, they seem all too human as they easily succumb to Dorwinion vintage. I like this, though. It grounds the elves a bit and makes them somewhat more suitable as a player race in a Hobbit-based Middle-Earth game. They are not human, but they have their share of human fallibility.