I was sitting through a maths lecture the other day, and I started recalling an old forum that was a LotR RPG thing. Basically you had a character and bought wargear etc. and travelled and then there were big online battles held on excel between the good and evil sides and I remember thinking it was really cool but I never got to play much and it shut down I think? Anyone remember the name?

Anyway, as my train of thought progressed, I started recalling playing GW games over excel (mainly 40k). Of course this then led me onto thinking about playing LotR SBG online. But 2 players over ages is boring and takes ages, so I was thinking about multi-player battles. I thought, maybe if each player controlled a hero on the same side... That would suggest a games master or something controlling evil or whatever. And then if you've got a GM, you could change the battles slightly to make them more cinematic (eg. reduce line of sight). And instead of giving the players fully fledged heroes, why not something like Battle Companies where your hero gains experience from killing opponents and is able to increase in skill and buy new wargear (maybe some soldiers?) and can also take injuries and be killed. And then maybe, develop it into a campaign or something...


So am I mad? (I do have a lot of crazy schemes like this but generally they're more unrealistic). Would this be utterly boring and too complicated? Or does it have potential? I haven't played D&D before and I should properly read over the Inquisitor rules to see if they have any good ideas.

i'm not sure here. When you said "LOTR Excel" i was thinking "i have all ready done this" not relsing that you ment effectivly online playing the game rather than creating a template on Microsoft excel whihc you can pet in your heros stats and print it of for a perfect table.

I would be intrested and i very intrested that there is a 40k version?
The question is how much would eaither cost and how would you go about doing this. You can just say "Heres all the gW modals in digital form and you can take any army yoou want and play it". Thnere would be law suits up the ass.

How exactly would this work? I'm confused

Heh, as expected I've made this sound 10x more complicated than it is. And probably raised everyone's hopes.

It's rather simple really. You create a (birds-eye) battlefield on excel, where each square represents say an inch. Kind of like a crude vesion of Vassal if you're familiar with that. Whoever is in charge of the game has the map and the players send their actions to him and he moves their pieces accordingly and then posts a revised map up showing new position and results. So basically like playing a game of SBG on paper or something.

Like that, it doesn't sound that interesting, maybe even tedious. I just got excited by the thought of team play and special scenario rules and the ability to mesh with roleplay levelling/abilities/wargear. But I thought it could be something interesting that might only take a couple of minutes a visit and keep interest/activity up?
And there wouldn't be problems with the rules, as everyone owns them and really only the games master need have the specifics with him.

So, it's sort of like playing chess by post?

Yes, that kind of thing. Squares colour coded to represent different features etc. I mean, it could be done to look better with actual images and such, but that would take more time. Hmm I should see if I've still got Vassal of the Ring on my other laptop. That would work well for map imagery.