A March of Monks

I have mentioned a few times that our group has multiple GMs. Last night I got to play a character in one of the other GM’s RMC game.

It was the first session of the campaign, running on Fantasy Grounds.

We bought the new Companion One for FG this week and at least two of the characters were built using that.

The party is comprised of a rogue, lay healer, paladin, high warrior monk and my character a ‘normal’ monk.

The high warrior monk and paladin are both companion one professions.

The first thing that was striking was how high the stat bonuses get for characters built using the Skill at Arms and Skill at Magic background options.

One of the curious things, and it was really apparant starting again at first level, was the difference between a starting arms user, the high warrior monk, and the a semi spell user, my monk.

One had an OB of +66 compared to my +21. The HWM had bought Rank 1 and Rank 2 martial arts. I could only afford Rank 1.

The gulf between us is of course that I am investing in magic, the HWM is a pure arms profession. I fully expect to be in the HWM’s shadow for about the first five levels. After that I expect the diminishing returns to start kicking in for the HWM and I my magic to start becoming more useful.

In last night’s session we had two combats vs goblins. In the first fight I got almost taken out in the first round. I went from 26hits to 2hits in a single hit by a goblin arrow. Our lay healer gave me some herbs which helped somewhat and I did get to rejoin the fight for the last combat round.

In the second combat, almost exactly the same thing happened to the high warrior monk.

We are both running around in AT1, if someone lands a blow on us, we don’t have the hits to absorb the damage. My defence is largely going to be built around Adrenal Defence, but that is no good to you when surprised. I will also improve my ability to self-heal, but that is limited to Flow Stop 1 at the moment.

Last night we got ambushed when the path went through the woods, which we did survive, but far from unscathed. We met some farmers who complained about the amount of goblin activity and point us to an old ruin of a keep. We found the keep without getting lost, by no means certain given our skill level, and ran into some goblin lookouts.

That fight went much better for us, only some light wounds. The HWM took the brunt of it and that was just concussion damage and stunned. No broken bones or anything nasty.

In the next session we are going to press on and explore what looks like a dungeon level below the keep.

2 Replies to “A March of Monks”

  1. The High Warrior Monk is of course the improved version of the core rules’ Warrior Monk; I don’t think the normal (spell-using) monk ever got the same improvement. But yeah, the High W. Monk is a significant upgrade from the Warrior Monk, and spellcasters do take a while to catch up to the pure arms users at low level.

    RMU has changed that a bit, because spells no longer take so long to cast, and Power Points are more plentiful. So the level 1 Monk is a bit more capable in RMU than in RM2.

    I had to rule out the use of those Skill At Arms options when I played RM2 — they were just too powerful.

  2. I tend to agree, you get a lot of superhuman stat bonuses off that table. I have a lay healer wandering around with a +50 stat bonus in one primary and a +45 in the other.
    The GM for this game loves higher level play, so I am expecting to progress through the lower levels relatively quickly.

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