The Lord of the Rings Online Community Q&A #2
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Q: Have there been any sacrifices to the core fiction to make the game more fun? For example, the mail system, or "death" system?
A: We have two (sometimes competing) goals on LOTRO - make a great game and make a Tolkien world. Where those things fit together, the results are excellent. Take our Title system for instance. Tolkien described in great detail just how important titles are in Middle-earth and how the main characters earned those titles. (A perfect example is Treebeard the Ent. He spoke at length about how long his name was and that it was growing all of the time like a story.) In that case, Tolkien's amazing detail made it easy for us in designing the Title system in LOTRO.
But, the opposite is also true - conflicts between game play and Tolkien are much harder to reconcile. Take magic for instance; it is clearly one of those systems where there is tension between what the lore says and what good game play dictates. Game players generally want to see a wizard casting fireballs, both of those concepts don't fit neatly into Tolkien's world. (First, because he explained that there were only five wizards in the world and, if you were a wizard, you'd be in very elite company with Gandalf, etc. and second because there is no concept of magic fireballs.) Still, we needed to find a way to let players to enjoy a magic class without violating Tolkien's lore. We wanted people to feel the excitement and visceral feeling of throwing a fireball ... but without throwing an actual fireball.
Admittedly, it was a sticky issue for us.
We spoke a lot about hot to bridge that gap. The final result was to use physical objects to represent magical concepts. Let me explain. If I walked up to someone 200 years ago and showed them a cigarette lighter, they would have sworn it was magical. We began to think about that and how we would apply that to Tolkien's universe. We began with simple ideas at first. (What physical property could we use instead of a magical spell that debuffs a monster's armor? Why not let a player could throw a vial of acid on a monster and it would actually wear down the armor!) But, eventually, we had to tackle the issue of fireballs. The result is a skill called "Burning Embers" which allows lore-masters to use their understanding of nature and science to throw burning hot embers at the monster (essentially a kind of Molotov cocktail), emulating a fireball.
