I'm new to LotR tabletop gaming. I was disappointed to hear on a Facebook group for local LotR players that the War of the Ring had largely fallen by the wayside due to significant problems with the rules. They said that it's all right for narrative/casual play, but suffers if you expect fairness or balance or want to play with any degree of competition.

My questions for you all?

1) Is this true in your experience?

2) Has anyone taken on the project of updating and improving these rules (the way fans did for Battlefleet Gothic, Inquisitor, and other neglected games)?

I'm happy to play skirmishes, but it might be fun to build up to a mass combat worthy collection. One of the players in my area is heavily invested in the War of the Ring and it would be nice to tell him that there's a version of the rules we might be able to promote until it catches on!

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I blog at Tiny Plastic Dead. Only the tiny plastic dead have seen the end of tiny plastic war.

I only played War of the Ring briefly when it was new. Some of the people I played with really liked it but I did not. It had a very Warhammer-ish quality in that it was high model count encouraged, throwing lots of dice, and having lots of things die real fast. Magic, as I recall, had some balance problems in terms of it being able to delete units very quickly for not risk. Air units were like that too. If you have a few of them you could strafe an opposing army with impunity. Really annoying.

I was younger then but I recall not having a great time with it when it was more than 1000pts and magic was involved. Might have been more my interest in the skirmish style though. Like I said though, some people really liked it.

As far as I know there have not been any efforts to create a 2nd addition. At least none that got off the ground. There is a thread that gave stats to all the Hobbit era models that was very well done but that is about it.

If you friend is really into it perhaps he could make a stab at some edits with house rules. With how receptive the ME team is being at present getting some interest in it might be enough to get them to have another look at it the future.

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"Draw your sword with a heavy heart, but swing it with a heavy hand"

What is ME team?

The Middle Earth Team. I thought that was the name for the department within GW that takes care of the Middle Earth product range. It is a group of five people or something over in GW's London office.

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"Draw your sword with a heavy heart, but swing it with a heavy hand"

In their Nottingham office rather than London ... the UK's wargaming companies all live up north!

I generally prefer skirmish games as well, but it's really hard to think of playing a Middle Earth battle game without at least sometimes going full rank-and-flank. Anyway I'm happy to noodle around with the rules. Maybe the latest version of the skirmish game can be a sort of guide? See how they've modified the game stats, throw out or tweak anything that doesn't apply to mass battle, and use the points values to create the per-company cost of each unit?

Having read the full War of the Ring rules, I think there's a lot of potential there. I, too, played WFB before the world ended in WotR, it's a lot easier to figure out how many dice you are throwing for attacks, both shooting and in melee, which I appreciate. Moving and maneuvering the big blocks of soldiers seems a lot easier, too. I also think that having a special hero simply replace a model in a unit rather than hanging out alongside the movement tray is pretty brilliant and makes the game a lot less fiddly.

Anyway, thanks for clearing it up. I'll play some games and we'll see what happens. It won't be the first time I became enamored of a game that didn't really work (*cough* Firestorm Armada v1 *cough*) and still had fun with it.

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I blog at Tiny Plastic Dead. Only the tiny plastic dead have seen the end of tiny plastic war.