The Inside Scoop on Gaming

INTRODUCTION

The Lord of the Rings Roleplaying Adventure Game boxed set is an odd mix of RPG, boardgame, and Middle-Earth goodie pack, based strongly on the Fellowship of the Ring movie yet serving as a preview of the upcoming book-based roleplaying game. The question then becomes how well these aspects mesh. Let's find out…

CONTENT

The game box contains all of the following:

What is Roleplaying, an explanation of the basic principles of roleplaying games.

"Welcome to Middle-earth," a 24-page guide to the lands and peoples of Middle-earth.

A 4-page Fast Play Rules booklet.

" Through the Mines of Moria," a 32-page adventure.

Full-color character sheets for each member of the Fellowship of the Ring.

Four full color tactical maps illustrating sections of Moria featured in the adventure's battles.

Cut-outs of the characters and monsters in the adventure.

A poster map of Middle-earth.

An errata sheet for one of the aforementioned maps.

Invitation to the Lord of the Rings fan club.

Four six-sided dice.

Since much of this content is self-explanatory, I'll only delve into those parts that need further comment.

Welcome to Middle Earth

This booklet serves as a whirlwind tour of Middle-Earth's history, peoples, and places. It does a pretty good job of covering a lot of territory in a limited amount of space, but the information it contains has very, very little direct bearing on the game. Presumably, most people playing this game will have read the books or seen the movie. For those who haven't, it seems to me that a full synopsis of the events of the story, at least up to the Fellowship's arrival in Moria, would have done a better job of putting the events of the included adventure into perspective for them. As it is, only the information on the races of Middle-Earth is really useful in that regard. The rest is about as helpful as booklet detailing all of WW2 would be for a Battle of the Bulge boardgame.

Also, the booklet makes at least a couple of odd statements. One is that the Haradrim, or Southrons, are counted amongst the Easterlings, or Men of Rhun. This is the only place I've seen that linkage made. Another is that the events of the First Age have little bearing on the events of LotR. I understand that there are licensing issues at play here, but that's a bit of a stretch -- the very beginning of the Second Age section, for example, says that Numenor was destroyed as punishment for the Numenorean's folly. Punished for what folly, and by whom? The answers to both are tied to the First Age.

Fast Play Rules

This booklet came in handy, both as a quick reference for me as the GM and as a rules summary to hand to the players. "Through the Mines of Moria" contains the rules as well, but they're presented more or less on a need-to-know basis and thus take a bit of digging to find ahead of time.

The system involves a roll of 2d6 added to the character's skill, attribute, or reaction score, the latter being the equivalent of a d20 "saving throw". (In actuality, the system is attribute skill, but the attributes have already been added to the skill scores on the character sheets.) The results are compared to preset target numbers (TNs). Rolls open-end on double sixes, making any TN reachable in theory; however, with the exception of Gimli's "Weapon-Master (Axe)" Edge, exceeding the TN conveys no extra benefit.

In the case of combat, the target number is the character's Defense attribute, although range may be a factor in missile weapon attacks. Having this one TN to consult in combat definitely helped keep up the pace of the action. I'm not sure whether an "active defense" is possible as well, however -- the rules describe the Swiftness Reaction score as being used to dodge incoming attacks, but how this is used in practice is never mentioned.

Weapons do damage rated in a number of d6s plus a modifier, including a Strength bonus for melee weapons. These are subtracted from the victim's Wound points. When a character's Wounds are reduced to zero, he dies. The only nods to healing are the healing potion Gandalf carries and the "Swift Recovery" Racial Ability shared by Gimli and Aragorn; aside from that, if a character gets wounded, he stays wounded.

Each character gets two actions per round, and the characters always act in the same order. During the course of play, I realized that the order of action for Boromir and Gandalf were reversed on the Quick Play rules as compared to the adventure. And speaking of actions, the Quick Play rules don't mention movement rules -- those are listed on the back of the character sheets and in the adventure. (For the record, all characters can move three hexes per action.)

Character Sheets

The character sheets serve not only as, well, character sheets, but also as another preview for the forthcoming roleplaying game.

The first "preview" aspect is in the form of the characters' listed races and professions:

Aragorn: Dunedain Warrior/Ranger

Boromir: Man of Gondor Warrior/Captain

Gandalf: Magician/Wizard (Yup, no race listed. I guess the term "Maiar" falls outside the license. There's that "First Age" thing again…)

Gimli: Dwarf Craftsman/Warrior

Legolas: Sindar Elf Warrior/Ranger

Frodo, Merry, Pippin, and Sam: Hobbit Warriors (?!?)

Hmmm… Well, I would go on about how this illustrates the difficulty of trying to shoehorn characters into a class framework, but I'll reserve judgement until I see the full RPG.

Characters have six attributes: Strength, Vitality, Nimbleness, Wits, Bearing, and Perception. (Well, actually, Aragorn and Pippin's sheets have Quickness instead of Nimbleness. Whoops.) Since there aren't any character creation rules, I don't know what the attribute scale is, although the lowest attribute is 4 (Frodo's Strength) and the highest is 16 (Gandalf's Bearing). As in D20, these scores correspond to positive or negative modifiers, which seem to be their only real application.

Stats also include four Reaction scores: Fortitude, Swiftness, Willpower, and Wisdom. These seem to be the equivalent of D20 Saving Throws, although they see little to no use in the adventure -- there's only one possible use of Fortitude, another of Willpower, and none of the other two.

Rounding out the stats are Defense, the target number for those attacking the character, and Wounds, the amount of damage the character can take (read: Hit Points). And speaking of Wounds, if these rules are any indication, characters in the full RPG will have D&D-style ever-expanding Wound levels. Frodo, for example, has 40 Wounds -- a little over twice the damage that the Cave Troll can dish out in one blow. Of course, this may be nothing more than a means of giving all of the characters a decent chance of getting through Moria without resorting to Defense scores that would make them untouchable.

Next are Edges, Flaws, Skills, and Racial Abilities. All of the Flaws and many of the other abilities have no application in this game, again serving as RPG previews. For example, Frodo is an Elf-Friend, and all members of the Fellowship have the Enemies (Servants of Sauron) flaw. Of the remaining abilities, those not somehow combat-related see very limited use. Wrapping up the front of the character sheets are a list of combat options for the character, with a description of these options sharing the back of the sheet with the character's background and a selection of quotes.

Character and Monster Cut-outs

These cardstock figures are surprisingly sturdy and attractive, most of them featuring images from the movie. Members of the Fellowship are on light green backgrounds, while the monster backgrounds are tan, making them easy to tell apart at a glance. Unfortunately, the three types of Orcs are not easy to tell apart. In fact, I was only able to make an educated guess about which belonged to which type based upon their description in the "Moria" book. There really ought to be a picture of the cutouts near their description in the book.

And even once I had them identified -- I think -- they still blurred together on the battle maps. To solve this problem, I held the figures together with color-coded paperclips rather than the recommended tape. This both saved me time and solved the Orc I.D. issue.

Through the Mines of Moria

For anyone familiar with Lord of the Rings, the name of the adventure says it all: a trip through the abandoned, Orc-infested citadel of past Dwarven glory. In other words, the archetypal dungeon crawl.

The design of the adventure is simple in the extreme, consisting of three combats -- the fight with the Watcher in the Water, the battle in the Chamber of Mazarbul (Balin's tomb), and the confrontation with the Balrog on the Bridge of Khazad-Dum. These three battles are linked by the PCs' exploration of Moria, which consists of a series of Lore (Moria) rolls. Even if the rolls are failed, the characters will still end up at the battles -- they may just have a harder time getting there. Complications include coming across an Orc patrol and having to walk a crumbling stairway. If the group makes all of the Lore rolls, by contrast, the only thing they have to worry about between battles is the possibility of wandering monsters while they sleep between the first and second battles. (That's where the adventure throws know-it-all Tolkienite PCs a curve ball in the form of a possible giant spider attack, by the way.)

The adventure is sufficiently well organized to allow a GM to run it on the fly in a pinch. Each battle is broken down on a round-by-round basis, and the first battle includes a further breakdown of the first round of combat. As mentioned previously, this book also contains all of the rules needed to play, giving particular attention to points at which certain characters may want to use certain abilities.

The group scores points based upon their actions on the way through Moria, with the point values listed at the end of the adventure. Oddly, there aren't any benchmarks for performance provided, so groups will be competing against their own scores. (And that assumes that they'll want to play more than once.)

Ending the book are some rather halfhearted options for expanding Moria or for using the game for wilderness adventures. These consist of little more than a few random room generator and encounter tables.

The Playtest

I ran the game for four players of widely varying roleplaying experience. The rules were easy enough to allow us to divvy up the characters and get started in somewhere between 15-20 minutes.

The attack by the Watcher in the Water was pretty anticlimactic. The Watcher grabbed Legolas, and he and the five others who could get into range started hacking at the tentacle. The Watcher pulls his victim one hex toward the water each round, but he only made it one hex before the PCs destroyed the tentacle. The rules state that the Watcher won't throw out another tentacle until round four, so the battle was over after two rounds of mindless chopping.

The players easily made the three Lore tests between the first and second battles, so nothing really happened until they got to the room where they spent the night. A roll on the random encounter table came up empty as well, so they reached the battle in the Chamber of Mazarbul completely unscathed.

I'll confess that based on my read-through of the game, I really didn't think it was going to be a whole lot of fun. But the second battle was a great time. Orcs (and one Cave Troll) swarmed in from all directions, and a glorious melee ensued. The basic idea behind the battle is that the PCs try to escape, but that never seemed to interest the players -- instead, they wanted to fight to the finish.

A few observations about the battle:

Legolas is very hard to hit. If it weren't for his relatively low-damage attacks, he'd have been able to handle half the battle himself.

The rank-and-file Orcs have only 1 Wound point apiece. Once the players figured this out, they scrambled to change tactics, seeking to concentrate the heavy-damage characters like Aragorn on the larger Orcs.

As you might imagine, the Hobbits are little more than pests. If it hadn't been for the tougher character drawing the attention of the larger Orcs, they'd have been slaughtered. Well, with the possible exception of Frodo -- his Mithril shirt makes him pretty tough.

With his Edge that allows him to make a free attack when exceeding a Defense number by 3 or more, Gimli was the perfect Orc-slayer (as it should be). His player had loads of fun with him, allowing Gimli to be surrounded in one round only to sweep the surrounding hexes clear of Orcs in the next.

The Cave Troll is extremely tough -- so much so that I don't see any character surviving a head-to-head fight with him. In fact, he killed Gandalf in our game.

Gandalf isn't nearly as impressive as he's supposed to be. (See above.)

The players nevertheless won the day, with Boromir and Gimli finally hacking down the Cave Troll after all other foes had been felled.

And with Gandalf dead, the players figured that the battle with the Balrog would be hopeless and decided to call it a night. Which was just as well, since some of them had to leave then anyway. If they'd stayed on, they could have started over with a 500-point penalty, but that would have been unlikely -- while everyone had a pretty good time, they had no inclination to replay the same battles over again.

STYLE

If nothing else, this is certainly an attractive product. The various parts of the set make excellent use of movie scenes from The Fellowship of the Ring and (in the case of what I assume to be Treebeard) The Two Towers. The original artwork is fairly good as well. The character sheets are beautiful but feel a bit flimsy -- I doubt they'd survive many repeat uses. The map of Middle Earth on the flipside of the Khazad Dum battle map is particularly lovely.

The writing is mostly clear and has a nice, casual style, although it did feel a little dumbed down in places. There weren't many typos, but the ones present were significant enough to slow play while we figured them out.

CONCLUSION

After reading and pondering the contents of this product, I was almost ready to give it a "2" for Content. That changed after I played it -- I couldn't give a game that provided a fun evening's entertainment anything less than a "3". Unfortunately, I can't give it anything more than a "3", either -- $29.95 is just a little too steep for a small game with very little replay value packaged with some pretty but extraneous goodies. Of course, that's from the perspective of a solo buyer. If you can convince a group of friends to all chip in for the game, it becomes a much better deal. I just wouldn't want to be stuck throwing down for the full price myself.

A couple of my players observed that this would be a good introduction to roleplaying for young players new to roleplaying. And, in fact, Matt Colville has stated on RPGnet that that's precisely what it's meant to be. If so, Decipher would be better off aggressively marketing it as such. I still think the price would be a big issue, but the customers would be more likely to be satisfied with the content -- kids really could open the box and start playing in no time at all. As it is, the game is more likely to disappoint those who eagerly await the full RPG. (Or worse, make them think twice about getting it at all.)

The Lord of the Rings Roleplaying Adventure Game
The Lord of the Rings Roleplaying Adventure Game Playtest Review by Dan Davenport on 06/05/02 Style: 4 (Classy and well done) Substance: 3 (Average) A fun little adventure game with a price that's not quite so fun or so little, packaged with interesting Middle-earth information that has almost no application in the game. A good choice for kids new to roleplaying if you don't mind the cost. Product: The Lord of the Rings Roleplaying Adventure Game Author: Matt Colville, Kenneth Hite Category: RPG Company/Publisher: Decipher Line: The Lord of the Rings Cost: $29.95 Page count: Year published: 2001 ISBN: 1-58236-950-X SKU: Comp copy?: yes Playtest Review by Dan Davenport on 06/05/02 Genre tags: Fantasy	INTRODUCTION The Lord of the Rings Roleplaying Adventure Game boxed set is an odd mix of RPG, boardgame, and Middle-Earth goodie pack, based strongly on the Fellowship of the Ring movie yet serving as a preview of the upcoming book-based roleplaying game. The question then becomes how well these aspects mesh. Let's find out… CONTENT The game box contains all of the following: What is Roleplaying, an explanation of the basic principles of roleplaying games. "Welcome to Middle-earth," a 24-page guide to the lands and peoples of Middle-earth. A 4-page Fast Play Rules booklet. " Through the Mines of Moria," a 32-page adventure. Full-color character sheets for each member of the Fellowship of the Ring. Four full color tactical maps illustrating sections of Moria featured in the adventure's battles. Cut-outs of the characters and monsters in the adventure. A poster map of Middle-earth. An errata sheet for one of the aforementioned maps. Invitation to the Lord of the Rings fan club. Four six-sided dice. Since much of this content is self-explanatory, I'll only delve into those parts that need further comment. *Welcome to Middle Earth* This booklet serves as a whirlwind tour of Middle-Earth's history, peoples, and places. It does a pretty good job of covering a lot of territory in a limited amount of space, but the information it contains has very, very little direct bearing on the game. Presumably, most people playing this game will have read the books or seen the movie. For those who haven't, it seems to me that a full synopsis of the events of the story, at least up to the Fellowship's arrival in Moria, would have done a better job of putting the events of the included adventure into perspective for them. As it is, only the information on the races of Middle-Earth is really useful in that regard. The rest is about as helpful as booklet detailing all of WW2 would be for a Battle of the Bulge boardgame. Also, the booklet makes at least a couple of odd statements. One is that the Haradrim, or Southrons, are counted amongst the Easterlings, or Men of Rhun. This is the only place I've seen that linkage made. Another is that the events of the First Age have little bearing on the events of LotR. I understand that there are licensing issues at play here, but that's a bit of a stretch -- the very beginning of the Second Age section, for example, says that Numenor was destroyed as punishment for the Numenorean's folly. Punished for what folly, and by whom? The answers to both are tied to the First Age. *Fast Play Rules* This booklet came in handy, both as a quick reference for me as the GM and as a rules summary to hand to the players. "Through the Mines of Moria" contains the rules as well, but they're presented more or less on a need-to-know basis and thus take a bit of digging to find ahead of time. The system involves a roll of 2d6 added to the character's skill, attribute, or reaction score, the latter being the equivalent of a d20 "saving throw". (In actuality, the system is attribute skill, but the attributes have already been added to the skill scores on the character sheets.) The results are compared to preset target numbers (TNs). Rolls open-end on double sixes, making any TN reachable in theory; however, with the exception of Gimli's "Weapon-Master (Axe)" Edge, exceeding the TN conveys no extra benefit. In the case of combat, the target number is the character's Defense attribute, although range may be a factor in missile weapon attacks. Having this one TN to consult in combat definitely helped keep up the pace of the action. I'm not sure whether an "active defense" is possible as well, however -- the rules describe the Swiftness Reaction score as being used to dodge incoming attacks, but how this is used in practice is never mentioned. Weapons do damage rated in a number of d6s plus a modifier, including a Strength bonus for melee weapons. These are subtracted from the victim's Wound points. When a character's Wounds are reduced to zero, he dies. The only nods to healing are the healing potion Gandalf carries and the "Swift Recovery" Racial Ability shared by Gimli and Aragorn; aside from that, if a character gets wounded, he stays wounded. Each character gets two actions per round, and the characters always act in the same order. During the course of play, I realized that the order of action for Boromir and Gandalf were reversed on the Quick Play rules as compared to the adventure. And speaking of actions, the Quick Play rules don't mention movement rules -- those are listed on the back of the character sheets and in the adventure. (For the record, all characters can move three hexes per action.) *Character Sheets* The character sheets serve not only as, well, character sheets, but also as another preview for the forthcoming roleplaying game. The first "preview" aspect is in the form of the characters' listed races and professions: Aragorn: Dunedain Warrior/Ranger Boromir: Man of Gondor Warrior/Captain Gandalf: Magician/Wizard (Yup, no race listed. I guess the term "Maiar" falls outside the license. There's that "First Age" thing again…) Gimli: Dwarf Craftsman/Warrior Legolas: Sindar Elf Warrior/Ranger Frodo, Merry, Pippin, and Sam: Hobbit Warriors (?!?) Hmmm… Well, I would go on about how this illustrates the difficulty of trying to shoehorn characters into a class framework, but I'll reserve judgement until I see the full RPG. Characters have six attributes: Strength, Vitality, Nimbleness, Wits, Bearing, and Perception. (Well, actually, Aragorn and Pippin's sheets have Quickness instead of Nimbleness. Whoops.) Since there aren't any character creation rules, I don't know what the attribute scale is, although the lowest attribute is 4 (Frodo's Strength) and the highest is 16 (Gandalf's Bearing). As in D20, these scores correspond to positive or negative modifiers, which seem to be their only real application. Stats also include four Reaction scores: Fortitude, Swiftness, Willpower, and Wisdom. These seem to be the equivalent of D20 Saving Throws, although they see little to no use in the adventure -- there's only one possible use of Fortitude, another of Willpower, and none of the other two. Rounding out the stats are Defense, the target number for those attacking the character, and Wounds, the amount of damage the character can take (read: Hit Points). And speaking of Wounds, if these rules are any indication, characters in the full RPG will have D&D-style ever-expanding Wound levels. Frodo, for example, has 40 Wounds -- a little over twice the damage that the Cave Troll can dish out in one blow. Of course, this may be nothing more than a means of giving all of the characters a decent chance of getting through Moria without resorting to Defense scores that would make them untouchable. Next are Edges, Flaws, Skills, and Racial Abilities. All of the Flaws and many of the other abilities have no application in this game, again serving as RPG previews. For example, Frodo is an Elf-Friend, and all members of the Fellowship have the Enemies (Servants of Sauron) flaw. Of the remaining abilities, those not somehow combat-related see very limited use. Wrapping up the front of the character sheets are a list of combat options for the character, with a description of these options sharing the back of the sheet with the character's background and a selection of quotes. *Character and Monster Cut-outs* These cardstock figures are surprisingly sturdy and attractive, most of them featuring images from the movie. Members of the Fellowship are on light green backgrounds, while the monster backgrounds are tan, making them easy to tell apart at a glance. Unfortunately, the three types of Orcs are not easy to tell apart. In fact, I was only able to make an educated guess about which belonged to which type based upon their description in the "Moria" book. There really ought to be a picture of the cutouts near their description in the book. And even once I had them identified -- I think -- they still blurred together on the battle maps. To solve this problem, I held the figures together with color-coded paperclips rather than the recommended tape. This both saved me time and solved the Orc I.D. issue. *Through the Mines of Moria* For anyone familiar with Lord of the Rings, the name of the adventure says it all: a trip through the abandoned, Orc-infested citadel of past Dwarven glory. In other words, the archetypal dungeon crawl. The design of the adventure is simple in the extreme, consisting of three combats -- the fight with the Watcher in the Water, the battle in the Chamber of Mazarbul (Balin's tomb), and the confrontation with the Balrog on the Bridge of Khazad-Dum. These three battles are linked by the PCs' exploration of Moria, which consists of a series of Lore (Moria) rolls. Even if the rolls are failed, the characters will still end up at the battles -- they may just have a harder time getting there. Complications include coming across an Orc patrol and having to walk a crumbling stairway. If the group makes all of the Lore rolls, by contrast, the only thing they have to worry about between battles is the possibility of wandering monsters while they sleep between the first and second battles. (That's where the adventure throws know-it-all Tolkienite PCs a curve ball in the form of a possible giant spider attack, by the way.) The adventure is sufficiently well organized to allow a GM to run it on the fly in a pinch. Each battle is broken down on a round-by-round basis, and the first battle includes a further breakdown of the first round of combat. As mentioned previously, this book also contains all of the rules needed to play, giving particular attention to points at which certain characters may want to use certain abilities. The group scores points based upon their actions on the way through Moria, with the point values listed at the end of the adventure. Oddly, there aren't any benchmarks for performance provided, so groups will be competing against their own scores. (And that assumes that they'll want to play more than once.) Ending the book are some rather halfhearted options for expanding Moria or for using the game for wilderness adventures. These consist of little more than a few random room generator and encounter tables. The Playtest I ran the game for four players of widely varying roleplaying experience. The rules were easy enough to allow us to divvy up the characters and get started in somewhere between 15-20 minutes. The attack by the Watcher in the Water was pretty anticlimactic. The Watcher grabbed Legolas, and he and the five others who could get into range started hacking at the tentacle. The Watcher pulls his victim one hex toward the water each round, but he only made it one hex before the PCs destroyed the tentacle. The rules state that the Watcher won't throw out another tentacle until round four, so the battle was over after two rounds of mindless chopping. The players easily made the three Lore tests between the first and second battles, so nothing really happened until they got to the room where they spent the night. A roll on the random encounter table came up empty as well, so they reached the battle in the Chamber of Mazarbul completely unscathed. I'll confess that based on my read-through of the game, I really didn't think it was going to be a whole lot of fun. But the second battle was a great time. Orcs (and one Cave Troll) swarmed in from all directions, and a glorious melee ensued. The basic idea behind the battle is that the PCs try to escape, but that never seemed to interest the players -- instead, they wanted to fight to the finish. A few observations about the battle: Legolas is very hard to hit. If it weren't for his relatively low-damage attacks, he'd have been able to handle half the battle himself. The rank-and-file Orcs have only 1 Wound point apiece. Once the players figured this out, they scrambled to change tactics, seeking to concentrate the heavy-damage characters like Aragorn on the larger Orcs. As you might imagine, the Hobbits are little more than pests. If it hadn't been for the tougher character drawing the attention of the larger Orcs, they'd have been slaughtered. Well, with the possible exception of Frodo -- his Mithril shirt makes him pretty tough. With his Edge that allows him to make a free attack when exceeding a Defense number by 3 or more, Gimli was the perfect Orc-slayer (as it should be). His player had loads of fun with him, allowing Gimli to be surrounded in one round only to sweep the surrounding hexes clear of Orcs in the next. The Cave Troll is extremely tough -- so much so that I don't see any character surviving a head-to-head fight with him. In fact, he killed Gandalf in our game. Gandalf isn't nearly as impressive as he's supposed to be. (See above.) The players nevertheless won the day, with Boromir and Gimli finally hacking down the Cave Troll after all other foes had been felled. And with Gandalf dead, the players figured that the battle with the Balrog would be hopeless and decided to call it a night. Which was just as well, since some of them had to leave then anyway. If they'd stayed on, they could have started over with a 500-point penalty, but that would have been unlikely -- while everyone had a pretty good time, they had no inclination to replay the same battles over again. STYLE If nothing else, this is certainly an attractive product. The various parts of the set make excellent use of movie scenes from The Fellowship of the Ring and (in the case of what I assume to be Treebeard) The Two Towers. The original artwork is fairly good as well. The character sheets are beautiful but feel a bit flimsy -- I doubt they'd survive many repeat uses. The map of Middle Earth on the flipside of the Khazad Dum battle map is particularly lovely. The writing is mostly clear and has a nice, casual style, although it did feel a little dumbed down in places. There weren't many typos, but the ones present were significant enough to slow play while we figured them out. CONCLUSION After reading and pondering the contents of this product, I was almost ready to give it a "2" for Content. That changed after I played it -- I couldn't give a game that provided a fun evening's entertainment anything less than a "3". Unfortunately, I can't give it anything more than a "3", either -- $29.95 is just a little too steep for a small game with very little replay value packaged with some pretty but extraneous goodies. Of course, that's from the perspective of a solo buyer. If you can convince a group of friends to all chip in for the game, it becomes a much better deal. I just wouldn't want to be stuck throwing down for the full price myself. A couple of my players observed that this would be a good introduction to roleplaying for young players new to roleplaying. And, in fact, Matt Colville has stated on RPGnet that that's precisely what it's meant to be. If so, Decipher would be better off aggressively marketing it as such. I still think the price would be a big issue, but the customers would be more likely to be satisfied with the content -- kids really could open the box and start playing in no time at all. As it is, the game is more likely to disappoint those who eagerly await the full RPG. (Or worse, make them think twice about getting it at all.)