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Vive la Résistance!

by Evan Lorentz
Decipher Game Designer

Welcome back to this continuing series of articles introducing the new rules of Shadows. Today's topic is resistance.

Reflections was actually the first peek at our new plans for resistance, with the "ringed resistance" icons on the alternate Ring-bearers. Regular resistance icons then appeared among the Summer 2004 batch of Weta cards, on Ghân-buri-Ghân, Anárion, and Erkenbrand. But what exactly does it all mean?

Beginning with Shadows, every companion (not just Ring-bearers) is going to have a resistance number. Burdens will become a liability not only for your Ring-bearer, but for your entire fellowship. Each burden on your Ring-bearer reduces the resistance of every companion in your fellowship by 1.

Corruption of your Ring-bearer will still work essentially the same way. It used to be that you were "counting up" until you reached the resistance number of your Ring-bearer. Now you will instead "count down" to zero; when your Ring-bearer has zero resistance remaining, he is corrupted. Although resistance and the threat of burdens is now "for everyone," corruption is still only for the Ring-bearer – there is no penalty if the resistance of one of your other companions is reduced to 0.

So, what then is the point? Check out this guy:

You may recall Gandalf, Leader of the Company from my previous article on the new adventure path. He has a resistance of 7. When there are 3 burdens on your Ring-bearer, that resistance drops to 4, and suddenly the extra archery from Archer of Harad kicks in. And of course, if you have any companions in your fellowship with a lower starting resistance, you'll reach that point of risk even sooner.

As an aside, I should also acknowledge that this card is from one of the three new minion cultures being added to the game in Shadows: Men, Orc, and Uruk-hai. This card is from the Men culture. Everything you already know about cultures applies to these new ones. If you see the culture's icon used in game text, it refers only to a card of that culture. On the other hand, game text that refers to race – say, "an Orc" – would work on any appropriate member of the new Orc culture, as well as cards from the existing Moria, Isengard, Sauron, and Wraith cultures.

That's not a typo... I did say "Wraith" culture. The "culture formerly known as Ringwraith" is taking on a new moniker starting in Shadows, because in the future that culture will be home to other minions that are "spectral" in nature, such as the wraiths of the Dead Marshes.

But anyway, back to the matter at hand – resistance. Don't assume that it's just a liability for the Free Peoples player. Several new cards in the set reward you for keeping burdens off your own Ring-bearer. For example:

This is a new skirmish event intended mainly for a Hobbit-centered strategy. Hobbits have the highest resistance of all the Free Peoples cultures, allowing you to take a few burdens and still be able to keep their resistance above 7. Though of course while you have no burdens at all, Gandalf, Leader of the Company would count for a +1 strength bonus on this new event as well.

Expanding the role of resistance in this way is going to open up a lot of possibilities in card design. Until now, there were essentially just four "levels" at which burdens operated in a game. On the extremes, there were the "10 burdens" and "no burdens" levels, where players either attempted a corruption victory, or ignored burdens entirely. In between, and occurring far less frequently than the other two categories, were the "2 burden" and "5 burden" levels, important stages where certain powerful cards such as Easterling Polearm and Úlairë Enquëa, Lieutenant of Morgul kicked in. Resistance allows us to explore all the additional possibilities in between these four plateaus.

You might ask if we couldn't have done this just by counting burdens and choosing numbers other than 2 and 5. Possibly, but by assigning resistance numbers to companions themselves, we have a more specific tool to counter-balance their strengths. Hobbits, for example, aren't very strong, but they have a great resistance. Men will help you win more skirmishes, but carry with them the liability that a resistance-oriented Shadow strategy will start affecting them sooner. We can also give individual characters a slight tweak up or down the resistance scale to either express an element of the story or to counter-balance the power of their game text.

Having resistance as a separate number also lets us do a card like this:

This condition (part of the new Uruk-hai culture) lets a Shadow player go after a specific character to "activate" their cards that are looking for low resistance. But unlike burdens, it's a less permanent liability to a fellowship. Besides the fact that it's a condition (and thus can be removed perhaps more easily than a burden), it also goes away if the character bearing it is killed. The Shadow player would then have to go after a new target to get their "low resistance" cards working again. Cards like this bring even finer details into focus within the former "plateaus of burdens." (And of course, there will also be Free Peoples cards that will work oppositely for the fellowship.)

Now I imagine one big question that's probably on your mind, and you're very patient to have waited this long for me to get to it: what about all the Free Peoples characters from before the Shadows expansion? Do they just miss out on all this? Do cards like the Archer of Harad just get to walk all over them?

In a word: no. From the moment we started working on the resistance mechanic, we knew we'd have to do something to "retro-fit" everyone's existing cards. We're doing that with this simple rule:

If a companion doesn't have his or her resistance printed on the card, it's 6.

We played around with that number a lot in playtesting, trying to strike the right balance. On the one hand, we didn't want to cripple earlier cards with laughably low resistance. On the other, we really wanted resistance to cause some new developments in deck design, and not simply dissolve into what already existed. The balance between those goals turned out to be 6.

We were perhaps a bit wistful that the fine-toothed nature of resistance in the Shadows set was treated so bluntly by this rule. Rightfully, many cards from older sets (Hobbits in particular) should have a higher resistance than 6. More than a few others should have a lower resistance. But the need for the "conversion" to be simple was far more important than any of that – we certainly didn't want players having to consult some kind of "resistance reference chart" to play the game.

So, older companions have a resistance of 6. As for allies, they have zero resistance. Most new cards in Shadows only pay attention to the resistance of companions, but a few do look at "Free Peoples characters" in general, and yes, allies are intentionally meant to be a liability here. (Allies are plenty good in many other ways.)

Lastly, there's Sam. Dear Sam. He does get a bit of a raw deal here, I'll admit. His resistance is 5 in every previous incarnation, because that's what it says on his cards. Definitely low for a Hobbit, and unfortunate that it's lower than what his "default" would be if he said nothing at all. On the other hand, future versions of Sam, though appropriately rated for resistance, will not automatically have the ability to become the Ring-bearer when Frodo dies. That means that even though they have only 5 resistance, pre-Shadows Sams will have some powerful gameplay to offer in return.

And with that, you're ready to "join the resistance" and explore this new avenue of interaction in The Lord of the Rings TCG.

September 29, 2004