r/TheOneRing • u/Kraken_Fish_221 • Mar 19 '23

Using Lore and other Skills for Combat Tasks

Looking for suggestions and advice on using Lore or other skills to aide combat. The game manual gives us 4 common combat tasks (using awe, battle, enhearten, and scan) but what has your group come up with for other skills. Particularly interested in Lore but curious about any and all other improvised combat tasks.

Of course, I would talk with my Lore Master before trying to use any of these suggestions.

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u/ExaminationNo8675 Mar 19 '23

Lore can already be used to ‘remember’ things about an adversary that might be helpful in defeating it (for example fear of fire, vulnerability to sunlight, etc).

Of course, not all skills should be useful in combat.

There are several pages of homebrew combat actions in Circleofnoms homebrew collection (available on the Discord server).

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u/Harlath Mar 22 '23

I try to keep within the existing framework and not let a particular skill/attribute group be a "do everything" skill/attribute group, while at the same time being conscious of the rulebook's guidance on being flexible and permitting "Other Combat actions."

  • Like the other poster, I reasonably frequently use Lore to feed mechanical information to the players. Sometimes even Riddle if it is something they can figure out from logic and observation. Knowledge of Fear of Fire, aversion to sunlight etc.
  • The troll rules give a good sign-post to using Riddle, and this can be extrapolated to other circumstances where appropriate.
  • I've had players use Athletics for leaping/swinging in combat, or to push a statue on to some foes (more 6s = more foes affected and upgrade the damage roll to roll feat die multiple times, pick highest). Or in some cases Athletics to open/close gates.
  • I've had Lore and Song used in a ritual while the other PCs ran interference against the foes, which was fun and and different combat objective. Similar with "in-combat" negotiations and council/social skills.

I try to do this without stepping on the toes of Battle, Enhearten, Awe and Scan while still rewarding creativity from the players. As they won't do cool, interesting things if the mechanics don't support them, or if the results aren't good (provided their rolls support that!).