Racial Determinism: TNE

[Crissa]

I don't think the eagles were allowed to carry the ring (Sauron would have seen it) and the Orcs needed to be defeated before they could fly in.

Like take Warcraft for a moment... In the next expansion they are taking out flight for seven levels inexplicably. But they could just as easily make blizzards that you're unable to fly through.

-Crissa

[angelfromanotherpin]

If they were one of his class features, they'd have just flown straight to Mount Doom at the beginning and three books of adventure wouldn't need to be written.

Yeah, I've heard that scenario before; it's got no legs. Mordor isn't exactly short of air defenses.

But my point was that Gwaihir and his buddies are never seen except when G is in the picture. The eagles only ever show up to carry or fight alongside Gandalf, and only carry other people along with Gandalf. There are clearly some limits on how often he can invoke them (roughly 1/book), and what services he can ask of them.

[K]

If they were one of his class features, they'd have just flown straight to Mount Doom at the beginning and three books of adventure wouldn't need to be written.

Yeah, I've heard that scenario before; it's got no legs. Mordor isn't exactly short of air defenses.

Like what? Even if they scrambled those flying lizard things AND the Wraiths had been around to do that and not in Shire like they actually were, then the eagles could still have been in and out of Mordor in twenty minutes once they reached the borders of Mordor, well before any kind of response is possible. Then once Sauron is out of the picture the orcs don't band together and cause a war. It's all of two pages of story and not three novels.

The eagles are straight narrator intervention when Tolkien realized he had written himself into a corner, and if taken to its logical conclusion it becomes just silly.

[SphereOfFeetMan]

Also, it is important to note* that the giant eagles actually did fly to Mount Doom! And this occurred when Frodo had the ring, and was in Mordor for a significant amount of time, so any semi-perceptive abilities Sauron had about the ring being close (and his attention being in Mordor) had no bearing whatsoever on the eagles flight being successful.

*(In the movie at least, it has been too long since I read the books).

[Crissa]

Wasn't, uhh, the Orcs defeated, the Wraiths defeated, the ring destroyed, Sauron disappointed, and Mordor shattered when the eagles swept in to pick our heroes up from Mt Doom?

K, a limited ability is still an ability. Just because he used his self-rez to get back out of the cleft doesn't mean he didn't have it.

-Crissa

[angelfromanotherpin]

Like what? Even if they scrambled those flying lizard things AND the Wraiths had been around to do that and not in Shire like they actually were, then the eagles could still have been in and out of Mordor in twenty minutes once they reached the borders of Mordor, well before any kind of response is possible.

Statements like this are why I'm not going to argue the point further with you. You clearly don't know the geography, you're pulling numbers out of thin air, and you're glossing over potential counters as simple as archery and as elaborate as a psychic archdevil. You're either too ignorant or too disingenuous to have a conversation with on this subject, and I don't care which it is.

That discussion was tangential to the original point anyway, which is that flight does exist in the Middle-Earth setting, and it seems to be as a class feature of a few people. G has his thing with eagles, and the Nine have their thing with the hell-hawks. High-speed terrain-ignoring travel is a big deal when the location of easily portable objects is a big deal, and when communication and spying are also big deals; and the only faster way to communicate is a very few artifacts.

This really does get into the setting interacting with specific abilities, like Frank was talking about.

[RandomCasualty2]

Statements like this are why I'm not going to argue the point further with you. You clearly don't know the geography, you're pulling numbers out of thin air, and you're glossing over potential counters as simple as archery and as elaborate as a psychic archdevil. You're either too ignorant or too disingenuous to have a conversation with on this subject, and I don't care which it is.

Don't know the geography? He's talking about flying creatures. They can ignore the geography. Same with arrows. If you fly high enough, arrows can't touch you, which really doesn't even require that you fly all that high. Flying at 1000 ft is pretty much enough to ensure that nothing from the ground can hit you and eagles can fly way higher than that.

[K]

Statements like this are why I'm not going to argue the point further with you. You clearly don't know the geography, you're pulling numbers out of thin air, and you're glossing over potential counters as simple as archery and as elaborate as a psychic archdevil. You're either too ignorant or too disingenuous to have a conversation with on this subject, and I don't care which it is.

Don't know the geography? He's talking about flying creatures. They can ignore the geography. Same with arrows. If you fly high enough, arrows can't touch you, which really doesn't even require that you fly all that high. Flying at 1000 ft is pretty much enough to ensure that nothing from the ground can hit you and eagles can fly way higher than that.

Yup, that's about it.

And this why I try not to argue with fanboys. They always want their favorite thing to be better than it actually is (For example, they want Sauron to be a psychic archdevil when his only show of psychic powers is when people are directly linked to his mind via a magic item. He couldn't even rally a defense when people have the Ring in Mordor and the Eye the within flashlight range. Heck, it's not even clear that he had a body of any kind).

[Crissa]

There's a type of bird that flies through the tallest mountain range to migrate each year. Only one type.

But they lose a hefty number of them trying to get over those mountains. Not all the birds can fly that high. Or for that long without water. Or they get lost in mountain passes. They literally have to go around most of the mountains.

And as well, there are other birds, who live in the mountains year-round, who can fly higher than these migrating birds, who take advantage of this migration to kill and eat the migrators coming through their territory.

This air combat between birds is at such a high altitude that helicopters and small planes cannot follow them, and until recently we had little knowledge of what happened when they entered the mountains.

Flight is not a panacea. You can't just 'fly over' everything.

-Crissa

[Kaelik]

Well then it's a good thing that Gwy and his eagles buddies are specifically described as living atop mountains, specifically the misty mountains, which are taller then the very very short ones around Mordor.

[Talisman]

It's actually irrelevant whether Gwaihir & Co. could've flown Frodo straight to Mount Doom. since Tolkien explicitly stated that, standing at the Cracks of Doom, no mortal could have mustered the willpower to destroy the Ring. This was the place where the Ring was strongest, and it was only through an unlikely confluence of events that it was destroyed at all.

It's also important to keep in mind that LotR was written as a story not a game. Tolkien didn't think about thinks like "how many times per day can Gandalf do X?" The Eagles intervened when Tolkien felt it was appropriate/interesting for them to do so.

Finally, the auto-rez after the balrog fight...wasn't. Gandalf explicitly died, and was sent back by Eru. This occured because he had been faithful to the Cause, and Saruman had not; therefore, he had to replace Saruman. This was explicitly an Act of God...a literal deus ex machina, if you like.

Carry on.

[baduin]

Actually, in Tolkien the Great Eagles are divine messangers and their every intervention is a kind of miracle, literally "Deus ex Machina". If you read Silmarillion, there is a lot more of that kind of eagle interventions.

The important point is that they never do someone's work for him.

[Crissa]

If everything is divine intervention, how is that different than being a Cleric ability?

-Crissa

[Draco_Argentum]

Can we have a moratorium on LotR examples please? They always turn into dumb arguments.

[PhoneLobster]

Can we have a BLANKET moratorium on LOTR examples. This is not the only thread to suffer.

[CatharzGodfoot]

If everything is divine intervention, how is that different than being a Cleric ability?

-Crissa

Sometimes it's hard to tell when the DM just throws down the dice and says, 'Shit, um... Oh, you see a bunch of eagles on the horizon, coming towards you. The eagles of the gods!'. Especially when there's no DM, and no dice either.

[baduin]

Can we have a BLANKET moratorium on LOTR examples. This is not the only thread to suffer.

I support this suggestion. LOTR is actually quite an atypical and complicated book, and any example from it will be the source of a separate discussion.

[Username17]

I think that the fact that the eagles were clearly capable of undermining much of the story and didn't do so because it was a single-author story is quite telling and a quite important point for the design of a game world. A role playing game is not single author, and if a great eagle is capable of unraveling the action, there is a fair chance that it will.

If you're going to include great eagles in a story you can just have them not do any Mordor overflights and you don't have to justify that. If you're going to include great eagles in a game setting you have to give Mordor some genuine eagle defenses or accept that players will make some Mordor overflights in some games.

-Username17

[JonSetanta]

More Tolkien comparisons.
Yawn.

[Absentminded_Wizard]

It's actually irrelevant whether Gwaihir & Co. could've flown Frodo straight to Mount Doom. since Tolkien explicitly stated that, standing at the Cracks of Doom, no mortal could have mustered the willpower to destroy the Ring. This was the place where the Ring was strongest, and it was only through an unlikely confluence of events that it was destroyed at all.

It's also important to keep in mind that LotR was written as a story not a game. Tolkien didn't think about thinks like "how many times per day can Gandalf do X?" The Eagles intervened when Tolkien felt it was appropriate/interesting for them to do so.

Finally, the auto-rez after the balrog fight...wasn't. Gandalf explicitly died, and was sent back by Eru. This occured because he had been faithful to the Cause, and Saruman had not; therefore, he had to replace Saruman. This was explicitly an Act of God...a literal deus ex machina, if you like.

Carry on.

A couple of more points:

1. Sauron controls the weather over Mordor, so he has incredibly potent air defenses.

2. Flying eagles can't sneak their way into Mordor, and that's an important limitation. In Mordor, where Sauron's power is strongest, if he knows the ring is in Mordor and bends its will to calling it to him, he's going to get it. That's why the whole Fellowship plan from the beginning was to sneak the ring into Mordor without Sauron noticing. That's also why so much that the West-bank Fellowshippers do after the breakup is about allowing/causing Sauron to believe the ring's over there instead of in or around Mordor.

3. As mentioned before, the Eagles' flight to Mount Doom in RotK takes place only after the ring has been destroyed and Sauron's power broken, so it has no bearing on whether they could have solved the problem of the ring by flying to Mordor.


After all that, I have to support the moratorium on LotR examples. All the creators of D&D got from Tolkien were ideas for races and monsters. The setting itself has so many different assumptions from standard D&D that it's a bad basis for comparison. Especially when half the people on this board don't know much about LotR lore. I mean, I'm not the biggest LotR geek in the world, but it's pretty easy for me to figure out why so many LotR-based arguments made on this board are totally wrong.

[RandomCasualty2]

2. Flying eagles can't sneak their way into Mordor, and that's an important limitation. In Mordor, where Sauron's power is strongest, if he knows the ring is in Mordor and bends its will to calling it to him, he's going to get it. That's why the whole Fellowship plan from the beginning was to sneak the ring into Mordor without Sauron noticing. That's also why so much that the West-bank Fellowshippers do after the breakup is about allowing/causing Sauron to believe the ring's over there instead of in or around Mordor.

This is the part that doesn't make any sense. Sauron's divination abilities were entirely arbitrary through the entire book. We know that he can sense the ring when it's used, but aside from that, he really can't sense it. Sauron thought Aragorn had it when he attacked the gates of Mordor, when the ring was actually in a completely different direction, so his ring sense clearly isn't even a pointing arrow with a direction. He pretty much knows nothing unless the ring is being used.

As for eagles flying in, they can easily just stay above the clouds and be undetected. Mordor had a few flying fell beasts, but it didn't have that many and patrolling an area that vast just isn't going to be possible, especially not when most of them are probably busy at the siege of Gondor.

Then of course, the entire book made no sense really. I mean, who gives a shit about Sauron and the ring, what Middle Earth is really worried about is the armies of orcs and trolls. That's what's actually doing all the damage. Sauron really doesn't do... well anything, for the entire book, except for being an eye in a Palantir.

[Absentminded_Wizard]

Except that Sauron and Saruman both have spies, some of which can fly. If Sauron ever gets word that eagles are flying toward Mordor with a hobbit in tow, the whole enterprise is in trouble. Remember, Sauron knows from the interrogation of Gollum that a halfling has his ring. This is what caused him to incorrectly assume that the ring was at Isengard when he saw Pippen in the palantir of Orthanc. If he finds out about the eagle/halfling expedition heading his way, he's likely to correctly deduce that this halfling has the ring. Then you have the ring in Mordor, with Sauron's knowledge of that fact. It's established that Sauron is at his most powerful in Mordor and that the ring's ability to mess with people is strongest in Mordor, close to Sauron. In that situation, Sauron bends his will to calling the ring and he'll get it through an orc or through the corruption of a mortal.

Now, was it an incredible oversight for Tolkien not to eliminate this approach as a solution to the problem at the Council of Elrond? Yes. But, given what we know about the setting, this method is not a panacea guaranteed to solve the problem.

And about your second point: You do realize that if Sauron gets the ring, Middle Earth will be overrun by armies of orcs and trolls forever? And that as long as the ring exists, it's virtually guaranteed to work its way back to him eventually? It's a case where treating the symptoms isn't enough; you have to treat the disease.

[Draco_Argentum]

After all that, I have to support the moratorium on LotR examples.

I could've stuck in my own thoughts then asked people to stop using LotR examples. I didn't for a reason.

[RandomCasualty2]

And about your second point: You do realize that if Sauron gets the ring, Middle Earth will be overrun by armies of orcs and trolls forever? And that as long as the ring exists, it's virtually guaranteed to work its way back to him eventually? It's a case where treating the symptoms isn't enough; you have to treat the disease.

Actually no, I don't really realize that.

The ring was in Gollum's hands for about a hundred years, and then in Bilbos fro another 50 or so. And before then it was lost.

Seriously it seems like their best bet would just be to give it to the elves on their voyage away from the continent and have one of them toss it in the ocean. If the ring can rest at the bottom of a lake for hundreds of years, then there's no way Sauron is getting it at the depths of the ocean. And that also ensures that no future hobbits or humans find the ring. If the goal was simply to prevent Sauron from getting his hands on the ring, it was actually shown that that was very easy to do, especially if the ring's corruptive influence declines the farther it is from Mordor.

[RiotGearEpsilon]

MORATORIUM! SHUSH ABOUT THE LOTR PLZ