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Thinking About Square One

Unless you have been living in a monastic cell for the last decade you cannot have failed to be aware of the OSR movement. You can be forgiven for not knowing what the R in OSR stands for but that is par for the course. It could be Old School Revival or it could be Renaissance or quite simply Old School Rules, who knows and frankly who cares.

The OSR movement is about trying to capture that feeling of simpler times from the 1980s RPGs but that is a pretty fuzzy idea and as such it encompasses a lot of vagaries. For example Zweihander is a thoroughly modern game but also considers itself a Warhammer retro clone and markets itself as OSR game. Curiously the DrivethruRPG categories it puts itself in are “d100 / d100 Lite”, “Old-School Revival (OSR)” and “Other OSR Games”. I don’t really know when something becomes ‘Lite’ but Zwei is a 700 core rulebook and already has multiple supplements of additional rules and is growing.

OSR often means D&D Basic/Expert set clones or AD&D 1st Ed. clones. We have seen above that Warhammer retro clones also qualify.

By every measure RM2 should qualify as an OSR game, but that is not where I am going with this.

Square one in Rolemaster terms was as a set of house rules for D&D. If there is one thing that the readers of this blog are good at is House Rules, we propose them by the bucket-load.

In my opinion RMu is moving ever further away from its D&D roots. This is not a bad thing. If you try to be too D&D then you may was well play D&D. There are enough previous editions of varying complexity to satisfy most tastes.

What I was thinking was more along the lines of a “gateway drug”. An original set of house rules for OSR D&D/clones that fix what we know to be the original flaws in the system like the implied DB associated with different armours.

I don’t want to stomp on ICE’s toes but how about a Sci-Fi OSR game. SMu is so far in the future I find it hard to envision it ever existing. Anyone with a RM2 Creatures and Treasure has all the conversion rules they need (these are also in the download vault over on the forums if you don’t have the original C&T).

Furthermore, I would quite like to put all the rules under the OGL license or even better a CC license so it will be perpetually free. I don’t have time to write it all right now but I think I could set up a shared development infrastructure (I know that sounds complex but it really isn’t). What it would entail would be a Trello shared board which would be used to control the project management and documents stored on the cloud, probably google docs so anyone can dip in and work on the project.

I will cogitate a bit more on this idea and blog again on it next week. I think it has legs. I also think that between us we could create a perpetually free RM2 retro clone that will keep Rolemaster alive forever regardless of what happens to ICE in the future.

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This week I am reading…

Sagas of Midgard!

Sagas of Midgard is another d100 system. They [Drinking Horn Games] refer to it as a Roll Over system. The core mechanic is nice and simple. The GM sets the target number taking into account any difficulty factors and the players roll the dice and add any bonuses they can muster. Roll over the target number for success, roll under for failure.

In combat they have a 01-05 critical failure and a 96-00 critical success, although this does not apply to skills.

I suspect that Sagas grew out of a set of simplified house rules for a d20 system, but this is not a D&D retro clone by any standards.

What I like about the system is the ‘sources of competency’. In Rolemaster we have Racial bonuses and DPs, culture ranks and then multiple levels worth of development. I would like to see changes but in principle I like the onion skin of race, culture, training.

Sagas of Midgard uses lots of cultural references to build the onion skin of your character. You start with your family name, each family comes with a long tradition or culture. If you are Erik Battleborn you get a bonus to melee combat. Erik Gunnarsson would get a bonus to strength based skill tests. For each bonus there is a related downside that we would recognise as a Flaw in Rolemaster speak.

Once you have your family name you get to choose a title. Each title confirs skill bonuses or special abilities that we would recognise as Talents. In the core rules there is a fair selection but I imagine that future supplements will add plenty of new titles.

The bonuses conferred from your family and title will typically add up to two or three +10 to +15 bonuses which can stack if you are trying to build a one trick pony or a PC.

Now you get to choose your god. Your god confers more bonuses and special abilities. These increase as your character improves over time. There are no levels, you are awarded skill points for heroic play and a running total of all the skill points earned by a character is used as a measure of your gods favour.

The next step is to spend your skill points. Starting characters get 15 skill points. It is the god you follow that sets your skill point costs. A follow of Thor gets cheaper combat skill costs as well as unique abilities they can by with axe and hammer.

A follower of Loki gains bonuses to dodging and a range of poison related skills.

Each god has a range of combat and magical skills available and they typically cost 5, 10 or 15 skill points so you get to choose either three minor abilities, one powerful ability or a 10 and a 5 point ability.

You now equip your character, give it a description and you are ready to play. You will note that there are no stats in all of this. My first character took 8 minutes to create if you exclude the reading time as it was the first time I had seen the rules.

As it is a player choice and point buy system you are guaranteed to get the character you want.

Criticals and Failures

Sagas of Midgard has some rather simple critical hit and failure tables. There are only half a dozen entries on each one but a nice touch is that at each level you have options such as dealing more damage OR knocking your foe prone. So although there are not many entries on the table they can play out differently and they increase player agency.

Monsters, foes and potential allies are also dealt with in a clean and simple way. Each entry in the bestiary has a base rollover number for its attacks, a total number of hits and then a short list of special actions or attacks. A Beorn for example has a base rollover to attack of 60, 20 hit points and can use either two claw attacks, a bite attack, a bear hug or go berserk. Each attack is fully described in terms of game mechanics.

Cool Adventures

All in all Sagas of Midgard is a single 178 page rulebook. You get character generation, a couple of magical traditions, bestiary and a really strong setting. What you also get are four fully developed adventures. Fully 20% of the entire rule book is devoted to starting adventures.

Each adventure is designed to least two sessions. As most groups of players seem to struggle to meet even once a week the starting adventures are going to keep you playing for a couple of months without any fleshing out or expansion.

I think that is a lesson that RMu could learn. Of course RMu wants to be a generic system for any fantasy world but lots of playable content from day one is a good thing. Sagas is heavily tied to the one setting, one world, one culture. That makes life easier for the developers. Having said that, their single mechanic could easily be turned to any setting. I think they are trading off the cool culture of the Vikings but a Dynasty of Pharaohs game would work just as easily or even a Gods of Olympus.

If you wanted to play RMu in a Viking setting then converting from Sagas to RMu would be a breeze. It seems like multiply everything by 1.5 and you are in the ballpark of RMu’s OBs and #hits. As these are both d100 systems a +10 or +20 just carries right across. If you wanted viking traditions, culture, the gods and their magic then Sagas of Midgard would be quite fun to play. If you just want a detailed drop in viking culture then I guess the HARN Jarin supplement would also serve, but wouldn’t be as much fun.

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Using the ‘wrong’ skill

I was writing an adventure the other night and one of the challenges requires some combination of navigation, survival, region law, tracking or at the very least general perception.

The characters have an option of paddling up a jungle river with its inherent risks of crocodiles, water snakes and possibly hippopotami.

The could of course use the well worn track that edges the jungle. Then they face the threats of solitary big cats, snakes and wild boar.

Additional threats are also impoverished humanoids who have been outcast from their communities.

The point is that there is a lot that the characters may want to avoid or at the very least be aware off and not stumble into. The adventure is expected to be a second adventure for relatively new characters so they will have an additional level under them or if not then this journey will be enough to level them up. Just reaching their destination will be a story point for experience purposes.

I had always assumed that Perception was about THE most basic of skills. I saw on a discord server recently a discussion about leveling up and the advice was not to bother with Perception unless you were a Rogue or such. In my games Perception is probably the most used skill.

Something else I have always done is shift the difficulty factor if the character doesn’t have the ‘right’ skill. So an Easy tracking roll would be a Light Perception. A Medium Navigation test would be Hard Region Lore. If you don’t have Navigation or Region Lore and you are just relying on Perception to keep sight of the track or spot the right tributaries then that would go from Medium Navigation to a Very Hard Perception test.

Using this graceful downgrading it both rewards characters that have build a broad skill base while not making tasks impossible to beginning characters who may not have all the skills they would want.

I know this breaks the RMu similar skills rules. That uses a 0/-25/-50/-75 progression and combines two penalties so that the penalties mount up really quickly. Look at this example from A&CL.

Example: Perception and tracking are in the same
category, but different skills, giving a -50. They share
virtually the same techniques, as well as a similar
subject (the environment). The total penalty to use
Tracking in place of Perception, or Perception in place of
Tracking, would be -50.

A&C Law page 47

My method is much kinder on low level characters and a two step penalty often means just a -20 penalty. For higher level characters the risks tend to be higher and the challenges harder so that -20 turns into a more likely -40 as your more likely to hit Sheer Folly and harder.

It is also easier to work out on the fly. The greater the degrees of separation between the skill the character has and the ideal skill for the challenge then the more steps in difficulty. This eliminates another table lookup to boot.

It also makes it easier to write adventures where to do not know the level or composition of the party.

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Looking again at difficulty factors

I have been thinking about difficulty factors this week. My default position is that I am a huge fan of using difficulty factors on skills.

I normally start with a defined difficulty factor so I know a cliff edge is Sheer Folly at the top and in the middle section it is Absurd and finally Very Hard as it levels off slightly.

With a base level in mind I tend to bump the level up or down a level for each complicating or mitigating factor. So the same climb at night goes from Sheer Folly to Impossible.

When there were multiple complicating factors I bump the level up additional steps. So We have our mountain and it is night and it starts to rain and then the wind gets up as well. This climb is now two steps beyond Impossible.

I handle good things in the same way. So the characters pull out ropes, pitons and hammers. I reduce the difficulty one step for this.

And there lies the dilemma. If they were two steps beyond Impossible (-100) anyway and then they use all this extra gear and it remains Impossible (-100) why bother? Ironically the extra gear would actually make a difference at the bottom of the slope where the added complications do not overtop the difficulty scale.

If you look at this from climbing up from the bottom it makes perfect sense, and you can almost hear the characters looking up and scratching their chins and saying “Aye, without the ropes and gear that climb in nigh on impossible in this weather.” It is only when they are a third of the way up that the climb gets even more difficult.

So far that is how I have always done it. Part of the logic has been laziness. Rather than having to look up or memorise a shed load of possible bonuses and penalties I can just walk up and down a difficulty ladder. The actual ‘rules’ that I am copying are well tested and established as this is how FUDGE deals with things, you just sum all the factors and shift the difficulty according to the final result.

All well and good until horses get involved.

If you horse has a MM penalty of -50, you as the rider only get a -25. The mounts penalty is halved and applied to the riding roll. This is an RMu rule. This leaves me with a bad feeling.

Imagine a short mounted combat that turns into a flight/pursuit.

  • Do I, as GM, roll the MM for the horse each round?
  • Does the Player roll twice, once for their mount and once for their character?
  • Characters starting at 3rd or 4th level can easily have a riding skill in the high 70s or more. Riding ‘impossible terrain or obstacles, for them, is on average a partial success.

If two rolls are required every round, one for the horse and then one for the rider, we need a double success. The first has a much bigger penalty but is a percentage action as a MM. The second roll has a small penalty but would be an all or nothing test. Failure meaning the character hits the deck at worst or cannot fight back at best.

I would frequently bunch rolls together, not rolling for every NPC but one indicative roll just to keep the action moving. If the PC is intentionally leading the party and their pursuers over hedges, along ridges and the like with the intention of dislodging the riders or injuring their mounts then you cannot aggregate these rolls. That would negate the player’s agency. So we are down to 20+ rolls per round just for the riding in a 5 v 5 pursuit, without any actual combat.

I don’t like the idea of the player rolling the horses MM. Eventually you will get a player who will argue that a two foot wall is not medium difficulty or when two walls come up in the same round as they are only 20′ apart then complaints about whether one jump is actually harder than two. (It is as the horse has to rebalance on landing and has fewer strides to adjust its pace and take off position.)

The last concern is that the riding skill penalties being halved mean that a +50 skill wipes out a -100 Impossible penalty. Players who want to play horse focused characters can easily start with more than that if you are starting at 3rd level. 6 Ranks bought, plus culture, plus knack, plus stat, plus professional bonus. Most situations will NOT be impossible, at least a partial success is more likely than not. There is little motivation for a horse loving character to spare the horses if he or she knows they can ride it out.

I suspect that what is irking me is that they have halved the difficulty factor. In effect they have created an entirely new scale. I don’t know if this is the only instance where that is used. It is the only one that I have come across so far.

Noone in any of my games has had a mounted combat yet but if I struggle with these rolls/rules I think I may need look at them again.

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Fantasy Inspiration

In the scene above can you see a face in the rockface? It probably isn’t there at all but it when I first saw the imagine it sort of jumped out at me.

The point is of this is threefold…

The first was the forum post by Jengada on rendering campaign worlds. The second was talking to a GM that is playing his game in Middle Earth and the third is all about adventure design.

Rendering Worlds

With the best software in the world I could not render a campaign world because I am a talentless lump when it comes to arty things. The closest I could get would be to try and explain what I could imagine to a designer and then let them try and create my vision. That is simply never going to happen.

Middle Earth

Middle Earth is always a rich vein for role playing. Right now you can buy into the Adventures In Middle Earth franchise. There is an entire Mirkwood Campaign for just $19.99. Converting from D&D 5e to any flavour of rolemaster is not difficult. There is the The One Ring™ Roleplaying Game which will set you back $30 for the core rules. I don’t know that system at all but it is based upon d12s and d6s. Rolemaster is so flexible that I cannot imagine that it would be difficult to convert the game materials over. Then of course there are the old school MERP supplements. These are potentially too valuable to play with. You could sell a single good condition supplement and buy an entire set of one of the other ME based games with the proceeds. We also have the problem the converting from old school Rolemaster to RMu is just as difficult as it is to go from a completely new game.

Right now there is the brand new Middle Earth Amazon Prime series getting people excited. There are also all the Peter Jackson movies. There are also some books apparently.

One slight problem with all these TV and movie renderings is that the visualisation of the director can over write what was actually in the books. Once you have seen Peter Jackson’s Gandalf then there is a good chance that that is how you will imagine him from that point on. If not you then certainly some of your players.

I think it would be hard to change the physical appearance of any place or people that have appeared on the TV and in the movies as your players will have a vision of what they think things should look like. Take the argument that orcs physically look exactly like elves, humans and hobbits. The corruption is that of the soul not the body. There is this quote on Quora: “When orcs first appeared (as stated in the Simarilion) they were mistaken for Quendi who had ‘gone wild.’ In LOTR when Eomer and his eored pass Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli he initially mistakes them for orcs from very close range. Later Frodo and Sam passed themselves off as orcs in Mordor. The orc leader is close enough to whip them. Despite wearing orc armor, helms and cloaks any radical difference in physical features should still have been apparent. Apparently JRRT intended that they shared physical characteristics with men, hobbits and elves . “

So although ME is probably the ultimate setting for any fantasy game where you want to visualise the setting it is not without its problems.

Adventure Design

When I saw the image above I thought I could see a bit of a nose and mouth on one of the great rocks front and centre. Given the wild mountains, the snow and the water, possibly a lake as it looks too calm to be the sea, I think I could write a location based upon this image by Susan Cipriano from Pixabay Try this, go to Pixabay.com and search for forest or mountains or lake. You will get so many options that could so easily be fantasy locations. You could tweak the setting to fit the images rather than trying to get the images to fit the setting.

It is not just landscapes either…

I could definitely write an fantasy location for that one!

Finally, I think Egdcltd and I both have a desire to create our own settings. The big stumbling block is the sheer cost of getting the art. I would suggest that if one were to start with the art and let that inspire the setting then more people could create great looking settings.

Setting ‘Challenge’?

Or about this? I could scour the image website and build a collection of brilliant and inspiring images for a fantasy setting. I then put it out there as a sort of challenge so anyone could download the package and write a setting based around the images. We all have inspiration but this would take away one barrier that stops people building their own fantasy settings.

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Lazy Peasants

I am bringing together two threads here. The first is Gabe’s Lazy DMing and the second is a conversation I had with Marc about how he has house ruled the Patronage/Renown rules from One Ring in to RMu.

When Marc first mentioned Patronage he described it as a single figure, 0-6, that is used to represent the characters current standing with a particular NPC. 0 means the NPC barely knows you exist. If you do work for the Patron or help them out then your Renown goes up. By the time you get to a Renown of 2 you can start to ask for favours in return.

My immediate response was to ask if these rules accounted for Renown ‘flowing’ from one NPC to another, such as if you worked for a particular lord and had a good standing would that lords brother in a neighbouring town also look upon you favourably. Would the Renown flow along trade routes, so if you are doing good stuff in this town would the next town get to know about you and look favourably upon you when the party rocks up.

It turns out that some of these questions are covered in the rules.

So I started to think about this in the context of lazy GMing.

So imagine you create a little cross reference grid with NPCs listed down the side and across the top. It would be really easy to fill the grid with bonuses and penalties that apply to the characters social skills when acting for or against particular NPCs.

Lord AVizier BBaron C
Lord A+20+30
Visier B-30+20
Baron C-50+20

So in this example, obviously you would have rows and columns for every NPC you create on the spur of the moment:

Lord A likes and probably trusts his Vizier but and Baron C.
Vizier B dislikes Lord A but likes Baron C
Baron C really dislikes Lord A but likes Vizier B

You could easily generate these numbers using 1d10-5 x 10. Whenever a new NPC is introduced we just add a new row and column and add in a new rolls see how much they (dis)like the other NPCs in their location.

Using the table would be a case of looking at how the NPCs feel about each other and how they would feel about emissaries from one to the other. If the characters had been working for the Vizier recently and then they turn up bearing a message for Baron C then he is very likely to welcome them. If the message was from Lord A then there is more chance that he would keep them waiting around on some pretext.

Of course a GM could easily come up with these relationships themselves. The point is that even if you have no idea where the player characters are going to go, who they are going to talk or what they are going to latch on to, this technique will allow you to spontaneously create a level of social tensions and relationships.

If you ignore lords and barons for the time being you could have a table of the ‘normal’ people in the town. The players ask the barkeep about the best place to stay. If you had rolled a positive bonus on reactions for one innkeeper and a negative or near zero reaction to the other inn owner then the barman is likely to recommend the first inn. What if the serving wench is really popular with the few town guards you can had to create so far? The guard are likely to drink in that tavern and when the fighter in the party tries to hit on the serving girl he could end up being given the evil eye by the guard(s).

NPC-templateDownload

The template above has a blank grid with room for about 18 NPCs which is probably as many NPCs are you are likely to create in your typical village or town.

This is not intended to turn your game into roll playing rather than role playing. Where this works really well is when two or three random rolls create a little story of their own. Maybe a married couple end up with -50 in all reactions towards each other or you get a triangle where two men appear to hate each other but are both very keen on the same woman. Then her reactions to one or both of them could be the stuff of local gossip, tensions. And then in amongst all of these walk the PCs.

Obviously your mileage may vary.

This really is my last post before I move. Tomorrow at 8am I am giving up Cornish giants and celtic legends and heading for lands of Norse myths.

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King of the Swingers

I spent the past two weeks writing a set of adventures. Bizarrely I have used a format I have adapted from Shadow or the Demon Lord to create an adventure for Zweihander as a writing tool to create a Rolemaster adventure.

Let me unpack that a bit.

Shadow or the Demon Lord [SDL] has a format for booklets that contain virtually entire campaigns or adventure paths in a single book. Each book contains eight to twelve complete adventures that link together to form a campaign. Each book is only 35 to 50 pages in total and each installment is just a couple of pages.

I like this format. As long as the GM knows the How and Why of the adventure, has the suitable maps and the key NPCs then they can actually run the adventure in the style that suits their players and their play style.

So using this layout I have written a set of adventures. They are all set in a jungle covered land. It starts with the characters being shipwrecked on the beach and from there there are several locations that can be explored and challenges to overcome, random encounters for characters that go exploring off piste and a plot that is running through the whole thing which will move events on around the characters.

I have used Zweihander as target system as a placeholder for all the possible versions of Rolemaster. This works because Zwei has a much smaller skill set, for example Athletics covers all physical endeavours from climbing to swimming and Awareness covers all forms of Perception. Zwei also have avery compact bestiary where there are just half a dozen basic normal creatures to cover all of life on earth that isn’t monstrous. The grimoire has only 9 spells per profession compared to the hundreds of RM spells.

From the Zwei version it is easier to add more detail, to cover the many versions of Rolemaster with its wealth of different creatures, spells and skills.

Writing for Zwei is much faster than it is for Rolemaster as you do not need to check as many references for all these professions, skill, spells and monsters. Once the adventure is written and you know what monster/NPC/spell or whatever the encounter needs it is really easy to find the reference you need.

It also means you get a bit of a 2 for 1 as you can sell the Zweihander version as part of their community content programme.

It seems a bit of a roundabout way of doing things but it seems to be working quite well. It is always going to be easier to do a ‘conversion’ rather than trying to develop for multiple versions of the same system all at once. I think that is where the SDL contribution comes in. If you know what the challenge is then you can either take a skills detailed approach then you can, that will please the RM2 players. If you use a reduced skill set then that is easily accommodated as well.

There is little or no difference between Creatures & Treasures, Creatures & Monsters and Creature Law so slotting in the same monsters is not much of an issue, the same is largely true of Spell Law as well.

I have been really careful not to use any ICE intellectual property and the setting is an unnamed and unidentified jungle coastline. You can drop that into almost any setting.

I have never tried to sell an explicitly Rolemaster adventure that is effectively ready to play before. I am curious as to how it will sell.

I released the Zweihander version at the weekend and it is selling OK, at a $3 price tag.

I am moving house this weekend but I hope to have this finished and ready to list on DrivethruRPG by the end of next week. I will let you know when I release it.

It is possible that I will not be in a position to blog on Thursday or next Tuesday so please forgive my silence. I am packing boxes!

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The Black Companion

Thanks to Marc and his discord server I have had an opportunity to look into someone else’s RMu game.

Everything I run will of course be coloured by my own preference for play style. Marc was half joking when he said about me “You don’t don’t use any rules.” when we were discussing our GMing styles.

One of the things that came out of talking to Marc and seeing his campaign discussions is how RMu is always going to struggle with other people’s expectations. That gave me an idea, the so called Black Companion.

Part of the inspiration comes from Shadow of the Demon Lord supplements. In the descriptions on DriveThruRPG they explicitly list which core and companion books they use.

One of the difficulties with writing for Rolemaster, in the past, has been knowing what optional rules are in play as nearly all the optional rules end up increasing the power level*.

There will be some alternative methods or missing elements in the core books when they are released that have been discussed on the forums but rejected by the dev team. I am thinking of dedicated two handed weapon tables, charging rules, movement costing AP and alternative Called Shot rules. Those are the few that spring to mind. What I am thinking of is collecting these together and getting the authors to formalise their ideas based upon all the feedback that happened on the forum and then publish them as a ‘Black Companion‘ or alternative rejected options. Once we have a freestanding reference source of them then people an choose to adopt the included rules or not. At least they will all be using the same house rule to solve the same problem rather than having 50 variations to solve one problem.

So over the next few months I am going to trawl through the RMu Beta forums and try and identify these rejected, good ideas. Get the authors’ permission and then collate them all. It may even be easier for me to collect the ideas, summarise them and then just ask the originator’s permission to publish.

*Power Level in RMu could prove to be a real issue. How are we going to deal with adventures written for one power level but played at another? I would seem to be a case of having to adjust every single NPC in the book which is going to be a pain in the arse!

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Discordant Thoughts

There are a couple of things I would like to write about this time.

The first is Marc’s Discord server. He has dropped the link on the ICE forums but that was a while ago so I thought I would repost it here.

Aby channel for discussion is better with more people involved.

https://discord.gg/6RP8Wyn

The second thing I want to talk about was inspired by a couple of things that were said in the discord discussion. These were “not sure why everybody likes to use real life examples in rpg. This is a game, stuff is abstracted etc.” The rest I cannot directly quote as it was a longer discussion and it was more of a sentiment than any one explicit expression.

I want encapsulate it into ‘who owns the rules?’ So the situation was that the GM said that X situation was resolved using Y rule and the result was Z.

That would be fine apart from one or more players then said that they have real world experience of X and Y rule is wrong and Z wouldn’t happen.

Years ago, it seemed to me, the GM had the rules and what the GM said was the law and that was that. Today everyone can have a copy of the rules in PDF and check them at any time and if a ruling is not perfectly clear then they can question them.

The issue for gritty, simulationist, d100 games is that they are endeavouring to create a realistic game world experience. The game developers cannot have years of detailed experience of absolutely everything in life and you do not want 16million individual rules to accurately model everything. When you get a player or players with that real world experience they see the rule as written and recognise it as a poor model of reality.

So now you have a dilemma. The experienced players could house rule parts of the game to make it more accurate whilst still sitting within the RMu way of doing things but as GM do you want the players writing the rules of the game?

I had this recently in a game I am playing in. The GM wanted a very high magic game and picked all the RM2 optional rules that he thought would create the effect he wanted.

The result was that it all went too far towards everyone having too much magic too quickly. At 3rd level I have 12 spell lists and by about 7th level I would have had just about every spell open to me in my realm.

I had taken this opportunity to ignore the most obvious ‘go to’ lists in my realm and instead focused on learning the lists that normally get ignored as they are less useful or their utility is not immediately obvious.

Once the GM realised his error he told us all that he thought he had made a mistake and he was changing the rules.

His adjusted version was actually so restrictive that I thought he may have over reacted. It would certainly be the case that by about 8th level we would have no more lists than had we used the rules RAW. By 10th level though we would have less spells than RAW would have given us.

I know this to be the case because he has put certain limiting factors into the game and if they are to have any effect at all then they must limit our ability to learn lists. Any one of them would have been sufficient but their net effect is to dramatically reduce the ability of casters to learn magic.

For my character the effect is minimal and apart from a highly improbable situation where I fail every spell list acquisition roll for the next three levels it will have no noticeable effect. It will stop me learning the less useful and little used lists and make me stick to the tried and tested mainstays but no one else would notice that.

For other characters the effect will be dramatic and immediately obvious. If you take it all into account it is the same as changing the spell list cost for semis to 8/*. That is going to make learning lists rather expensive!

I emailed the GM and told him that for semis I thought his changes were too drastic and I showed him some examples. I don’t know what he has decided to do.

So is it OK for players to suggest rules changes? Who has ownership of the rules? If the rules are there to help everyone have fun and are really just guidelines should they all be up for negotiation?

My personal opinion, purely in theory at least, is that yes they are all negotiable but only before we start play. I dislike changing rules once the game has started as the amount of work for the GM to ‘fix’ hundreds of NPCs is rarely taken into account by players who only see the effect on their one PC.

What do you think?

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Outside looking in

I have been looking at the way that other games publishers deal with community content recently and at the same time at the way that they put adventures together.

7th Sea is the most Rolemaster-esque when it comes to community content. Although there is a community content programme, free art and templates available, there is little or no company support for content creators. There are not enough staff at John Wick Presents and I suspect that the community content programme doesn’t earn enough money to warrant the investment in time.

The net effect is that there are not that many titles and they are of rather patchy quality.

Grim & Perilous Studios is right at the other end of the spectrum. They have a new CCP and are actively courting creators. Everything is fresh, new and exciting. G&PS is not keen on forums, preferring their Discord server but on the server content creators are given special status and a role title so you can spot them a mile off. Creators also have a dedicated channel.

The content creators, known as Librarians after the Grim & Perilous Library, actively discuss what they are working on and even have shared project management software, trello, to manage titles and collaborate to create supplements a bit like the Guild Adventurers (not to be confused with the Guild Companion).

G&PS also provides stock art and document templates for creators but also uses their social media accounts to promote new releases. That is a virtually free way of advertising these supplements and generating sales. It presumably will make the Library financially profitable sooner because of the advertising.

Schwalb Entertainment is another Discord advocate. They to have a dedicated channel for 3rd party publishers. The level of support is not as proactive as G&PS but the creators are actively discussing and assisting each other.

The interesting thing about Schwalb adventures is there structure. As with most community things in life people try to fit in. The ‘official’ supplements have an accepted structure. They cost $8 and for your money you get a 30 to 50 page booklet that details the background material and then six to ten adventures. Each adventure rarely extends beyond a couple of pages, a couple of NPC descriptions and a floor plan if you are lucky. It is more about explaining the ‘how and why’ of the protagonists and then letting the GM run the adventure in the best way for their group.

Each $8 booklet is an entire campaign in a book. I think that has a lot of merit. If most of the supporting material is already in C&T/C&M then just point people to the book. I have also seen caveats that says exactly what books are required. So if the book uses something from a companion that is listed as required.

There is nothing to stop anyone copying the Schwalb Entertainment model. It explicitly avoids using copyright material by pointing GMs at the core books and companions. The text dense, art light format is kind on the independent developer who doesn’t have access to an entire art department.

Somehow, I cannot see some of the big names on the forums going for the collaboration model but for us small fry it has worked well in the past.

I just wished that the RMu rules were finalised so we knew what rules we were writing against.