RMC House Rules – Character Creation #2 Potential & Stat Gains

Rolemaster Logo

On Monday I covered how I intended to use a point buy system for generating characters stats. The point is to enable the player to play exactly the character they want whilst still being balanced.

When it comes to potential stats I was quite taken with the idea of giving the players an additional 100 points with which to buy their potential stats but the temptation to just dump that all on the prime stats for the character would be too great. That makes total sense to do that but in the end every ranger would end up looking pretty much the same as would every fighter and so on.

Turning to RMU again, with the point buy system they advocate every character has a potential of 100 in every stat. The player then has to choose which stat to improve. This would I think lead to exactly the same situation of the players being swayed towards improving the stats the give the greatest gains. What I did like was the generosity of the concept that all characters had the potential to be 100 in every stat.

In my system You will have a 100 potential in every stat but the players do not get to choose which to improve. That decision will be made by the skills they have used or the training they have undergone since they last made a stat gain roll. (There are no levels as you will see later so it is not a case of one stat gain roll per level.)

So if a character has been stalking, disarming traps and picking locks then they will get a chance to improve In, Ag and SD stats as those three stats govern those skills.

Making a stat gain roll will be a case of making a D100 roll and if you roll MORE THAN your current stat then the stat goes up by 1. There are no adjustments to that roll so a character with a 99 Strength would have to roll a straight UM 00 to get the stat gain but it is impossible to go above a 100 stat.

Under the old RM2/RMC rules a stat gain roll could yield up to +15 to a stat if you had a big enough difference between your temp and potential stats. In my version the gain will always only be a +1. This is intentional. The smoothed stat bonuses mean that even going up +1 at a time will bring regular increased in stat bonus. Secondly as all stats have a potential of 100, too rapid a stat gain process would even everyone out to exceptionally high stats too quickly. Because of the point buy system guaranteeing well above average stats anyway there is no need to advance low stats more quickly.

One of the objectives here was to take all the dice rolls out of character creation. The total process should be about the players vision of their character and not dictated by good or bad dice rolls.

These stat gain rolls should be made at the ‘end of each chapter’ of their adventure in the sort of same space that giving out experience occupies. As you will see later skills will also improve at the same time.