I’ve been running a campaign of The One Ring for two players for over a year now. Questions about adjusting TOR for two players seem to come up surprisingly often, so I wanted to share my notes.
In short, I recommend giving 5 extra experience points, adjusting the fellowship pool amount, and playing as you normally would. Don’t make it harder than it needs to be!
Table of Contents:
- Character Creation
- Fellowship Pool
- Fellowship Focus
- Situational Difficulty
- Combat
- Benefits of Two Players
- References
Character Creation
I do not recommend reducing the attribute TNs (i.e., calculating from a base of 18 instead of 20). While it makes things initially easier, players can ramp up to a power level where it’s difficult to challenge them. Starting with base 18 makes this happen much sooner.
I do recommend adding 5 extra starting experience for each player.
Players need to be aware that in a two player game, not all combinations of cultures and characters will work. I recommend some extra hand holding here to make sure that there’s good coverage of the necessary journey/council/combat/healing skills.
We have not used the Strider distinctive feature in our game, and this hasn’t been a noticeable difficulty for the party. It is an option though.
You could start the characters at Valour and/or Wisdom 2.
Fellowship Pool
DanW uses (8 – player count).
“I sometimes calculate the base pool = 8 less number of heroes, rather than just number of heroes. It boosts small parties and debuffs larger ones, with no impact on a typical party of 4.”
We play 1.5 hr sessions, I gave them with an extra +1 to the baseline (i.e., 3 points per session before cultural and patron bonuses). The end result is effectively the same as DanW’s.
Fellowship Focus
With just two players, we don’t play with fellowship focus. No shadow point when the other takes a wound, only +1d when assisting.
Situational Difficulty
My personal approach was to start with mimimal adjustments, tell the players that we might have to adjust things along the way if we find there’s a balance problem, and then just dive into the game.
I think the big pitfall to avoid in a two player game is making things too easy out of worry about difficulty. I observe my own tendency to pull punches and give extra rewards when playing with two players. And this does help in the beginning, but it’s also easy enough to get yourself into a spot where it’s hard to challenge the players.
I recommend remembering you have the option to offer Success with Woe instead of a Failure in many circumstances. This can allow the players to push the narrative forward instead of getting stuck, while having fun, awful setbacks accompanying it.
Combat
Fights are definitely a place where I worry – I don’t want to make every fight easy, but I also don’t want to wipe the party unexpectedly. In the first combat roll of our campaign, one of my players took nasty wound and I thought it was going to be a TPK. But since then, they have gone better than expected.
It’s fine for parties to struggle with combat. My players have gotten wise about recruiting help, using situations to their advantage, and finding alternatives to combat.
Moria warbands are a good way to model help from multiple NPCs.
I recommend giving one of the players the Cleaving quality on a piece of treasure – this helps keep the momentum up in fights.
I’m open to Skirmish stance from Strider mode, they haven’t reached for it yet. But it’s something to consider.
Benefits of Two Players
We focus so much on the adjustments needed for smaller parties, I just want to talk about some of the benefits I see from my small group:
- Scheduling is so easy – we played 44/52 weeks in 2025!
- Each player gets plenty of spotlight time, and they also get plenty of breaks
- Splitting the party is easy to manage – switch back and forth between players.
- Decisions get made quickly
References