Gaming Weekend

(I am writing this on my phone and on the train so if there are any predictive textisms I apologise and will edit it down later!)

I am on the train to Faerún again to run my face to face game. This is the haunted house session in which a disgruntled follower of Lathander will attempt to lure the party to their deaths at the haunted house. He is after vengeance after they ‘accidentally’ defiled on of Lathander temples.
The adventure should take place between the first two Daggerdale modules (the Doom of Daggerdale and the Sword of Daggerdale).
For me this means that I have three prepped adventures. Colderan The Razor is still at large in Daggerfalls and is out to get the characters, the sinister secret of Saltmarsh should be the nail entertainment for the weekend and the Sword of Daggerdale is where the campaign is going next.
It also means that in terms of raw game notes, encounters, physical challenges and such all my game prep is done for the next two years or so. What I will have to do is make adjustments to the challenge level depending on the relative strength of the characters but that is just a level here or an extra foe there.
On the other hand what I can do is continue to layer on ways of making the game better. This time the players will be treated to me ensuring that I don’t forget all if the characters senses. I have made explicit notes about what the characters can hear, smell and taste as well as temperature.
This time they also get the pleasure of all the creepy special effects courtesy of Azukail Games. I intend to use up to twenty selected effects this time.
If I can get my timing right the characters should reach the house during our evening and late night session. It has to be better playing a spooky game at night rather than in glorious autumnal sunshine.
We are also in a new venue. We have rented a house in Glastonbury with views of the Tor. If I had known where we were going to be I probably would have done something with evil druids!

REVISITING SPELL LAW: SPELL CASTING MECHANICS PT. 3: CHANNELING

Doctors of Ancient Egypt

In Casting Mechanics Pt. 2 we discussed our reworking of the Essence spell lists. In this post we’ll tackle our deconstruction and rebuild of the Channeling lists.  Recent posts by Peter talked about his difficulties with the Channeling realm. For Project BASil we rewrote Channeling spells (rather than eliminate it), but I agree that the Channeling realm presents some problems. In short, the Channeling realm is dependent on the setting, world build and presence and type of Dieties. D&D and Spell Law deal with this by making Channeling spells fairly generic and “vanilla”—it took the Channeling Companion to really dig into “Aspect Lists” and rules for more flexibility for Clerics and other Channeling Professions.

First, let’s look at Channeling in the original rule set:

  1. Casting Time. Like all realms, spells take 1-3 rounds to cast.
  2. Metal armor interferes with casting.
  3. Spells require a verbal and hand gesture component.
  4. Spell Powers. Spells cover a very broad range of power but generally exclude elemental attacks spells.

Our deconstruction of Spell Law forced us to look at each aspect of Channeling spells and casting mechanisms.

Spell Access. If the very nature of Channeling implies access to, or permission from, a “higher power” than that also implies that not everyone can access Channeling spells. Unlike Essence where even a non-spell user could make an effort to learn an Open list, we must assume that the potential caster must at least worship a god and that the god allows that person to cast. (an atheist couldn’t learn Channeling spells) This assumption throws away the whole concept of Open, Closed and Base for the Channeling realm. Instead we reclassified/renamed the 3 categories. “Holy Believers” (Open) are less powerful, general spells available to faithful followers of the diety that put the time and devotion into studies and are granted access to some basic powers. “Holy Followers” (closed) are specialized or aspect themed spells that are only accessible to the priests and clerics or to special servants or high ranking members of the religion. “Holy Servant” (Base) spells are lists for Priests/Clerics and Holy Warriors of the religion. In short, spell access is driven by the casters role in the religion or church.

Channeling Mechanics. Given the need for a Diety to justify the Channeling Realm we also wanted to define the god’s role in actual spell casting. Spell Law touches upon the concept but it’s all a little vague. Are Power Points drawn from the Diety? If so, then why have PP limits for Channelers? Are the spells themselves drawn from the god? SL mentions that higher level spells may need tacit permission from the god or at least their awareness, but it’s not built into the game mechanics in any real way. Since we defined spell power (power points) as being single-sourced (the Essaence) and individual, it’s not the power that’s drawn from the god. Instead we see channeling as working like an app download. The caster prays and the god/diety provides the spell template to create the magical effect.

Casting Components. Given the above definition for Channeling mechanics, the channeling user doesn’t need to use a magical language or arcane hand gestures to generate spell effects. Instead, the caster just recites a specific prayer, “asking” for a certain spell effect. The prayer/spellcast doesn’t even need to be spoken but we do add a SCR bonus for praying out loud. We added a Prayer skill that is used for the SCR. The prayer skill measure the level of devotion and connection of the caster and also determines the highest level of spell that can be cast.

Channeling Spell Powers. Because the spell framework is provided by the god, we felt that Channeling spells didn’t need to be as logical or linear as the Essence lists They could manifest as more miraculous, wondrous or illogical. From a realm differentiation standpoint, channeling spells are better with the intangible: souls, spirits, auras and similar non-physical aspects. Because they are tied to a higher being, channeling is also better at divination/augury and other “fuzzy logic” spells.

Encumbrance. We eliminated the encumbrance and armor effect for Channelers. As discussed in another blog, the Transcend Armor work around is just rules for rules. I don’t see a balance issue.

Casting Time. Channeling spells can be more miraculous and powerful than other realms, we eliminated casting penalties for armor—so are Channelers now too powerful? We chose to balance these benefits with longer casting times. Since the caster needs to pray for a spell effect it might take some time. Our casting rule for Channeling is 1 rnd per spell lvl. A caster can cast quicker, by “rushing” the prayer but there are casting penalties. So yes, a 50th lvl spell would take 50 rnds (just over 4 minutes) to cast without a penalty.

 

What would my perfect Spell Law look like? Pt I – A Non Channeling Druid

I am still thinking aboutChenneling magic. As far as I am concerned it is just the channeling realm that causes the problems in Rolemaster. It simply has too many D&D hangups. The idea that healing is the domain of clerics, platemailed paladins and dependence of gods or deities are just things we all grew up with if you started playing in the D&D world. So as a start I thought about the Druid. This is a typical channeling profession. Where would a non channeling Druid fit?

Essence of Mentalism?

Looking at the spell lists in Companion 1 about 80% of all the Druids base spells fall into two schools of magic, Force and Mental. The remained are Healing, Information and a few Phantasms & Illusion. So at first glance Mentalism seems the way to go.

Force Magic

Let us have a look at what the Druid is doing with Force magic and see if that could swing the balance into the Essence realm. The only Force spell on the Animal Mastery list is Animal Summons and that requires concentration. I think that still implies mentalism.

The second Druid Base List is Druids Peace and every single spell on it is a Mental spell until you get to 30th level when you get EARTH CALM (F) Within the radius, caster may “calm” a natural phenomena (quakes, storms, winds, etc) or he may cancel a magically created natural phenomena. Now that does sound a bit elemental but then by the time you get to 30th level you should expect all spell casters to be throwing around some powerful magic.

The third list is Druid Staff. This is one of those enchant your own weapon type lists and the weapon is bound to the caster. Every spell on this list is a Force spell except for three (one utility spell and 2 defensive). In these cases the magic is self only and and requires concentration. I think this still leans towards mentalism.

Natures Forms is the fourth Druid list and just like nearly all mentalism spells the area of effect is self only. All the spells on the list are Force spells bar two that are Phantasms as the druid can mask his own thoughts. This again feels like a mentalsm list.

The fifth list is Stone Mastery and this at first glance looks the most Essence like. There are three Elemental spells in the form of Stone Wall, Curved Stone Wall and Stone Spike. The rest are Force Spells. So what is going on in this list. Well the Druid can speak to animate stones (not particularly useful!). Can throw stones in a similar way to the mentalism Hurling and telekinesis. The rest of the spells involve shaping and animating stone. This list could sit in either realm equally naturally I think.

The final base list for Druids is Plant Mastery and is another Force spell list. The ranges are most touch or self and enable the cast to communicate with plants, heal plants and control their growth. He or she can also create paths though vagetation and animate or activate plants and sentient trees. This is in my opinion another list that sort of sits on the fence between menalism and essence.

The overal balance though is that Druids should be in the mentalism realm rather than essence and there is nothing in here that implies there is any need for a deities involvement. There is no communing, no divination and no cross planes summoning going on here.

Anyone could easily play a non channeling Druid using the no profession and mentalism spell lists and casting restrictions as they now stand.

Weekend Roundup: October 8th, 2016

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Cool treasure at Sutton Hoo. A helm worthy of an RPG.

IT’s spreading and being TALKED ABOUT

So call the FBI and ask for the “Clown Division”.

Art imitating life?

Lord of the Rings?

F#@%ing Elves!

I never turn away from a story regarding GNOSTICISM.

Have you ever cleaned out some old storage and found the “Blast From the Past” RGP adventure?

My go to resource for RPG ships.

Mapping resource. Any good?

RPG Brand Management. How about I.C.E.?

Tombs, traps, creatures and temples! The Lost Shrine of Tamaochan!

Spell list for a Cleric of the God of Needlework!

 

What would my perfect Spell Law look like? Pt I Channeling

I am rather jealous of Brian’s reworked Spell Law. He and his group have obviously but hundreds of hours into that rebuild project. That is time I do not have at present but I am giving this more and more thought. So what would my perfect spell law look like?

Essaence as the motive force

This is one of Brian’s ideas and sums up the concept that all magic is Essence and that what changes is the way that the character taps into the essaence. Essence users manipulate the essaence around them, mentalists control their own essaence and channelers recieve essaence from some outside entity. I like this idea and want to go with it. I do have a problem with Channeling magic though. That is the realm that doesn’t work for me.

Channeling doesn’t work

The problem with channeling is that it seems to be tied into the natural world. This is where you find animists, druids and shamen as well as your clerics. If your nature magic casters are getting their essaence from nature around them are they really not essence casters? Can you have channeling without the gods?

Brian pointed out an issue with Shadow World’s gods in that if there is only one god relating to spirits, souls and the dead can any other clerics cast life giving spells?

Channeling and Armour

Mechanically Rolemaster had an issue with channelers not being able to cast magic in metal armour but the fantasy roleplaying commmunity all want their Paladins in platemail. The Rolemaster solution is to add more rules to bend the existing rules, in this case Transcend Armour as a skill.

Channeling Healers are a bit crap

Channeling Healers are a bit crap. The problem is that there is at least one open channeling list relating to healing (concussion ways), most of the closed channeling lists are related to healing and all their base lists are related to healing. They really are the stereotypical one trick pony. If you want to do anything else with your character you are pretty limited. You cannot afford to get stuck into the action as the party need you  alive at the end of the fight to put them back together so fighting is out and your other magic is rather limited. So what do you do?

So what purpose does channeling serve?

Channeling is the preserve of most of the healing magic and nature magic and bizarely necromancy. Does that need an entire realm of its own? If you bumped the healing into Mentalism and the necromancy into Essence (most people think of Necormancers as mages not dodgy clerics I think) all you are left with is the nature magic. Using the definitions above of Essence using the magic from around the caster and Mentalism using the casters own Essaence then it feels like the nature magic should be in the Essence realm. The rest of the channeling open and closed lists are just duplicates of the essence and mentalism open and closed lists so they could be dumped.

So my perfect Spell Law would have no Channeling realm at all.

What about traditionally channeling professions? Well I would make Paladins mentism users. That is where the healing spells mostly live and ever realm has the basic detection spells for detecting evil. It is a 7th level Essence spell but a 6th level Mentalism spell so even the existing lists suggest that mentalism should be the Paladin’s natural home. I would put clerics in the same pot as the paladins.  Animists and Shamen should be essence users. They can still get their nature magic but their open lists would actually be a bit more powerful. The channeling healer you can simply drop in favour of the Lay Healer.

“NO PROFESSIONS” = All Professions

Jordan Tate: You’re not a cook.
Casey Ryback: Yeah, well… I also cook

I have had a handful of email conversations going on with other RM players about our “No Profession” ruleset and one of the first assumptions that people make is that our PC’s (or NPC’s) are just called “No Profession” or “Layman” or really nothing at all.

As I have discussed in other Rolemaster Forum postings, Professions/Classes do act as a short-hand to summarize a characters skill-sets, aptitudes and general abilities. In that regard, eliminating Professions does create some problems or more work when creating NPC’s. Since we’ve thrown away Professions, we’ve generally thrown away the working template for quickly creating NPC’s and assigning skill abilities.

However, while we’ve thrown away the profession mechanism, we haven’t discarded the professional names. In our rule-set “Professions” are more tags—driven by 2 factors: the skill sets developed by the player and/or the social conventions of the setting. For instance, a player that develops the majority of their skills in armor & weapons will still call themselves fighters. As a counter-example, in RM a PC that chooses the Fighter profession but chooses to dedicate all of their DP’s into thieving/subterfuge is still called a “Fighter”. From a societal/setting standpoint a Fighter may be called a “Warrior”, “knight”, “Barbarian”, “Janissary”, “Armsman” etc. This is no different than a lawyer in our world; some societies call them barristers, counselors or consults. Players can build their character and apply any name/descriptor they want, or based on their background/training or organization ties might be assigned a professional name/tag.

In Shadow World there is already some gray areas around professions using the RM2 rule-set. Navigators and Loremasters could be considered stand-alone Professions, each with their own Base Lists, but in actuality are assigned standard professions giving them 2 sets of Base Lists. Issues around the Unlife, access to evil spells, hybrid magic, power point sources/pools, further complicate things. (this topic was discussed in my blog post about the “gap” between rule sets and dedicated settings).

Our transition to “No Profession” was gradual. First, like many others, we kept designing new professions (with associated spell lists) to meet player wants and needs or to fit into a particular setting. Basically the “RM Companion” approach. At a certain point we realized that small skill cost differentiators meant very, very little past the first few levels and became meaningless at higher levels when skill rank bonuses were minimized. In an effort to maintain “balance” we moved to a archetype template: Non, Pure, Semi but still keeping Realm assignments. (A Pure Essence archetype could pick between elemental spells, illusion spells etc and label themselves a “Mage”, “Illusionist” or whatever fit their character image or setting. After we tried that we realized we had one foot in the old ways and one foot into a better, flexible approach. I realized that using skill costs and other “free market” approaches, character generation would be a process of choices and opportunity costs that would enforce character balance without the need for lots of rules or arbitrary skill cost assignments. (Rules for Rules) Characters can’t be great fighters and great magic users—the fall somewhere in the middle (ie Semi).

So, in short, our campaign and rules have ALL the professions, not NONE of them. A character that focuses on farming skills is a farmer. A character that focuses on the Fire Law magic is a FireMage, Wizard, Mage, Elementalist etc. A character that develops subterfuge and poison might call themselves an assassin or a nightblade. A member of the Loremasters is a Loremaster. A cleric of Z’taar is a Battle-Priest. A character with certain mentalism spells in Itanis is called a Warlock.

It’s not for everyone, but it works for us.

 

Does Low Fantasy Gaming work with Rolemaster?

I have stolen this idea from Brian’s weekend round up. I think the answer is an emphatic yes to Low Fantasy; especially RM2/RMC when played with the core rules and no options.

Why core only? The first one is magic. The actual base ruling on spell list acquisition is in RM2 and RMC is D100 + ranks in the list. Roll 101+and you learn the list. You can learn only one list at a time unless you buy 20 ranks in the first list and then start to learn a second. If you fail to learn a list you can carry those ranks over to the next level and continue learning that list or you can lose all those ranks and try and learn a different list. You will note that there are no bonuses to that spell list acquisition roll, no level bonuses, no stat bonuses.

Building a character that way you tend to end up with maybe 4 spell lists every 5 levels, sometimes slightly less. As most essence spell casters want to be able to fly and go invisible and cast sleep this means that a magician may have just one of their base lists by 5th level, maybe two by 10th level.

The problem with learning lots of Magician base lists is that you need to learn lots of Directed Spells skills to make use of the bolts and the natural development point economy means that you simply cannot afford to diversify like that.

If Low Fantasy is meant to be scarce then making spell lists hard to learn makes spell casters less attractive to the players. If there is a very real chance that your first level character is going to start the game with just 1 first level spell you are going to make the average RM player uncomfortable.

With just the core rules there is no undercasting and no overcasting so they are really stuck with just that one spell.

So pure Rolemaster played RAW (rules as written) fits the magic specification for Low Fantasy.

Fast and Engaging Combat

There is no more engaging combat system than Rolemaster with its descriptive criticals and deadly edge. I personally prefer the Combat Companion version but I have said this is core RM only. Without all the bells and whistles bolted on to combat by many of the companion books rolemaster combat is pretty fast. When I used to use Arms Law I would print the page from the PDF of the weapon used by an NPC and of the PCs and put them in a folder with the most common critical chart facing it. In essence what I had was just the pages of Arms Law I needed for that session. It cut down the rules look ups and page turning.

Rules Light

Without all the companions Rolemaster is not that rules heavy. It has a reputation for being a mammoth but it is really undeserved.

Once you simply know that a skill roll total of 101+ (plus any difficulty mod) equals success you can play for hours without having to look at a single rulebook. Without the companions there are are only something like 50 secondary skills. That is enough to differentiate the characters without bogging the game down.

I have condensed the entire rules down to just 12 pages for running a weekend of gaming.

A Realistic World

Rolemaster does realistic mediaval worlds very well. If anything it is less monster driven than many RPGs including D&D and Pathfinder. If you want to poison someone in RM you do get to choose what type of poison and that describes the effect. This is not a game of make your saving throw or take x points of damage. Poisons are very realistically handled for a game.

Falls are not 1d6 per 10′ fallen. We have an attack table that takes into account velocity and criticals that are in tune with having fallen. This does not add to complexity as it is still jsut roll a d100 + the distance fallen in feet and look up the result but it is a lot more realistic than 1d6 per 10′.

The list can go on. Almost every natural hazard has been given a realistic work over in Rolemaster. So this is another tick in the RM box regarding Low Fantasy.

Rolemaster is also setting neutral

The Low Fantasy that the article points to says it is setting independent. Rolemaster is also setting neutral. Shadow World is the offical world setting but there are no setting specific rules in the rulebooks tying it that setting. It actually works the other way around with the Shadow World books referring to Rolemaster materials not the Rolemaster books referring to Shadow World.

So yes RM is most definitely capable of Low Fantasy judging by the definition above. Just leave all your companions and add on Laws at home.

Weekend Roundup: October 1, 2016

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Science behind the “Bardic Tradition”.

Science or Magic?

Nietzsche’s “Beyond Good and Evil”?

Gods of Old, Gods of New.

Any spell list ideas here? You betcha!

How about ordering some effects for the game table or Peter’s haunted mansion adventure?

Not all loot glitters like gold!

Sweet jesus—that’s a clown photo!

…but clowns aren’t a laughing matter!

Does Low Fantasy Gaming work with Rolemaster?

Anybody watch this on Netflix?