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Why kill a PC out right?

What advantage does killing a PC actually bring to a game?

Does it add to the drama? Probably not. Does it add to the story? Again, probably not.

Imagine that a PC party is fighting a gang of orcs and the main fighter is knocked out cold and the fight goes badly. In the end the magician grabs the cleric and using long door they escape.

So what happen next?

The GM has two options. The fighter is dead and the game session pretty much ends for that player has they have to create a new character*. The rest of the party head back to town and try and recruit a new muscle man for the adventure to continue. The other option is that the character is a captive of the orcs and the remaining PCs now need to mount a rescue. The fighter is master of his own destiny to some extent and can try and engineer their own escape.

I am not suggesting for a minute that the PCs should never die. Without that threat it robs the game of some of the sense of danger. A one hit death on the other hand adds nothing. An unconscious character is maybe capable of being revived if the party have the right healing. An unconscious character is still an active part of the story. Even if they cannot talk then are a burden that needs to be carried, slowing the party and changing their tactical choices.

Sure, the orcs can kill the character, maybe even eat them, but does a random roll of 66 on the critical table need to be so fatal?

There will be times when the characters death is inevitable or even desirable and a heroic death can top off a campaign perfectly.

This is an off the peg critical:

Neck strike shatters bone and severs an artery. Foe cannot breath and is inactive for 12 rnds. The poor fool then expires.

What are the chances that the foe will live for 12 rounds? I am guessing that if it is an orc then the PCs will finish it off just to make sure of the exp. If it is a PC that has taken the critical then either some kind of Fate point will be spent which reduces the fatal result to unconscious or causes a complete re-roll or the party healer averts the death or the GM fudges the result to keep the PC alive or the PC dies.

The Fate point option just reinforces what I am thinking, that the death doesn’t add anything to the game so additional optional rules are required to fix the broken rule.

The Healer healing the wound is the perfect outcome, even more so if the healer is another PC and not a rent a medic NPC. The rent a medic is really just a walking, talking GM fudge.

If the GM fudges the result then it is just pointing to the death being ‘not fun’ and so why is it in a game?

If the critical read Neck strike shatters bone and severs an artery. Foe cannot breath and is inactive for 12 rnds the passes out. The victim will die eventually unless help arrives.

The effect during the combat is identical but the death is no longer certain. It is down to the narrator to decide what is best for the heroes story.

What I think I would love to see is a critical that reads:

Crush foe’s skull. +30 hits. Opponent dies immediately or if they are a PC then they are unconscious. Add +20 to your next swing. You have a half rnd left to act.

Yes, an entire two-tier system with the odds inevitably stacked in the heroes’ favour. Surely, we are sat around the table to tell the heroes’ story and have fun doing it?

 

*not all new characters are 1st level so creating an 8th level character, for example, can take a damn sight longer than just a 1st level one to re-join the party with.

 

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The orcs are coming!

Before I get on with the main point of today’s post I want to digress somewhat…

I use Google Drive and in there is a folder of ideas. In the ideas folder there are a great many other folders. Every time I have an idea I create a folder for it and then stick a simple text document in the folder to describe what I was thinking. If it was inspired by an article or an image or whatever then I may stick all these things into the folder.

As a general rule I create more folders like this each week than I complete. Some of the ideas I will never touch again. Maybe I have a deeper look and realise that it was not a good idea. Sometimes I turn them into full on commercial products either RPGs or supplements. I have published one game (3Deep), one is about to go to public play test (Devil’s Staircase Wild West Role Playing) and one has been completed once but upon reflection needs revising. One game (Rolemaster Kids) is still in its infancy as I have not completely finalised the core mechanics let alone all the supporting material.

My supplements vary from simple 10 page adventure outlines to 60+ page more substantial supplements. I think I have published 30 or more or the smaller supplements like that.

There are the things that do not really fit in any neat category. These bounce around. Sometimes I work on them and they start to develop and then I look back and strike down a lot of what I had already written when looking at it again after a break.

This month is unusual as I have actually completed more of the mini projects in my ideas folder than I have created new ones. In addition I have learned some new skills that have solved a problem that was holding many of the other projects back.

One of these ‘bed blocker’ ( a terrible phrase used to dehumanise elderly patients being kept in hospitals because the UK has inadequate social care for the elderly ) projects was to convert the D&D 5e monsters from the SRD (Standard Reference Document) into Rolemaster compatible monsters.

The sorts of monsters I am talking about are orcs, goblins, giants and amusingly a Balor which is a D&D attempt to sidestep the Intellectual Property rights around the Balrog in role playing games. So D&D stole the Balrog to make the Balor possibly from RM 1st Edition and I am now converting the Balor from 5e back into RM. What goes around comes around. As all these monsters are part of the SRD we are free to use them as long as due credit is given.

So what is the point?

The point is that we spent the summer writing adventures that we really wanted to use to promote Rolemaster but we were hobbled at every turn because we cannot publish any of the monster stats as they are ICE IP. We cannot talk about what spells and lists the NPCs may have because they are covered by ICE IP and so on.

So I have had this project on the back burner since I first started this blog. I published a few monsters converting denizens of the underdark as new Rolemaster monsters. The intention was to encourage more D&D players to try Rolemaster. The more of the Forgotten Realms monsters that were available in RM means that players can reuse all their FR books but with RM PCs.

So last week I made an Orc. This is just the basic grunt of an orc and I used my own rules to create them. Bearing in mine that this is a D&D 5e Orc what do you think?

The stat bonuses include racial modifiers and there is still some work to do. I want to get rid of the (MS/AG) SL/MD crap and use real words that anyone can understand without having to use a look up table.

Orc

Orc Grunt

Level 3
Base Rate 55’
Max Pace/MM Bonus Fast Sprint/+10
Speed (MS/AG) SL/MD
Size/Critical M
Hits 58

ST AG/QL CO RE/EM IN/ME PR/SD
80 60 80 35 55 50
+15 +5 +15 -10 +0 +0

AT 3 (20) Leather Hide or by Armour type
Attacks OB 38 Weapon Spear or Javelin
Environment: Temperate hills

Organization: Gang (2-4), squad (11-20 plus 2 5th level sergeants and 1 leader of 9th level), or band (30-100 plus 150% non-combatants plus 1 5th level sergeant per 10 adults, 5 8th level lieutenants, and 3 11th level captains)

An orc’s hair usually is black. It has lupine ears and reddish eyes. Orcs prefer wearing vivid colours that many humans would consider unpleasant, such as blood red, mustard yellow, yellow-green, and deep purple. Their equipment is dirty and unkempt. An adult male orc is a little over 6 feet tall and weighs about 210 pounds.

Females are slightly smaller.

The language an orc speaks varies slightly from tribe to tribe, but any orc is understandable by someone else who speaks Orc. Some orcs know Goblin or Giant as well.

Most orcs encountered away from their homes are warriors; the information in the statistics block is for one of 1st level.

Combat

Orcs are proficient with all simple weapons, preferring those that cause the most damage in the least time. Many orcs who take up the warrior or fighter class also gain proficiency with the

falchion or the great axe as a martial weapon. They enjoy attacking from concealment and setting ambushes, and they obey the rules of war (such as honouring a truce) only as long as it is convenient for them.

Comparing Orcs

So this is just the basic orc. How do they compare?

  • A rolemaster orc is 2nd level and mine is 3rd level.
  • A Rolemaster orc has a base move of 50′ and mine 55′
  • The default #hits is 50 and mine has 58.
  • The AT and DB was 8(30s) and mine is 3(20) but without a shield or wearing armour.
  • OB-wise the default orc has an OB of 40 for both melee and missile. Mine has 38 for both.

The first impression is that of swings and roundabouts. A few extra hits here and a couple of points less OB there. C&T offers us two orcs a lesser and greater. The D&D 5e monster comes in 5 flavours from Grunt 3rd level to Captain at 11th level.

All my experience is with RM2 and RMC and I was trying to fit the 5e Orc into the RM2 Orc’s shoes.

All my playtesting of RMU has been human vs human as the normalised monsters in Beta 2 filled me with horror. How would this Orc stack up against an RMU PC?

Rolemaster Monster Manual

I am not offering a Rolmaster Monster Manual, or at least not soon. What I am offering is to build a reference of monsters that will be free to all and free from IP restrictions. This means that we can finally properly stat our adventures.

This is work in progress but I will make two commitments. Firstly, I will not sit on this until it is all complete. I will be releasing each creature as I do it. I have not thought about formats yet but I think many GMs would like a physical book they can flip though and stick book marks in. So if that proves to be true then I will publish this, but that is a discussion for another day. The other commitment is two fold really. I will commit to doing this as fast as I can, not a monster a week as that would take years. One the other had I cannot say I will spend tens of hours on this each week; there has to be a compromise. That compromise will be that Rather than starting from A in the monster manual I will do things on a request and demand basis. If you are looking at publishing an adventure but want a monster then let me know and I will create the monster for you. That is the request element, if there is a request for a monster then I will supply it.  I work on many adventures, these days mostly for the Fanzine. If I need a monster then I will create it and then add it the public list. If there is a demand for a monster then I will meet that demand and then share it.

I will have a think about the logistics of all this this week.

 

 

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What Merriment One Can Have With a Broadsword and a Drunken Elf!

Somewhere in our deep dark roleplaying history someone made a mistake. They had misread the racial description for Elves and rather than making them immune to normal diseases had made them immune to normal poisons. This had a consequence of making it impossible to get an elf drunk.

When my last campaign started I wanted to correct this error and pointed out the rules where it shows the immunity and resistance roll mods to show the players that we had been doing it wrong all this time. I was amazed at the players reactions (if those that wanted to play elves.) The ability to drink anyone under the table was really important to them despite the fact that is was a blatant mistake on our part.

They were adamant that elves cannot get drunk. I tried to argue that if Alcohol doesn’t effect them then how do all the healing herbs work? The answer was that herbs were magical and alcohol is natural. There is no helping some people so in my game now when ever an elf takes a healing herb I make them make a resistance roll and if they make the roll then the herb has half the usual effectiveness. Believe it or not the players are happy with that.

That little story has nothing to do with today’s post. I just wanted to share it as I was creating an Elven NPC and I just saw the immunity to disease on the character sheet!

So What Is It All About?

The last fanzine I published was the Halloween special and it is proving quite popular. The Shadow World issue was the best selling version to date. Don’t get me wrong, these sell in tiny quantities but I am hoping to build the readership over time and I hope it will grow significantly once RMU is released.

I would like to create a Christmas Special and pack it with cool playable material. Adventures, magic items, maybe a Grinch monster, some Icelandic Christmas Trolls and some festive spell lists. Really what I am asking is for anyone who like to contribute anything to a Christmas Special then please do.

I am trying to make the Fanzine a GM’s resource. By putting monsters and adventures in a ‘paid for’ publication then there is less chance that one of their players may have already have read the plot and know the twist or the villain. The Halloween Special includes three adventures and ‘new’ monsters, as these are my own creations I am free to publish them. All a GM would have to do to play them is create a couple of NPCs.

So try putting your creative hats on and send your submissions to weareareallawesome AT rolemasterblog DOT com!

 

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Thought Experiment part one of two

 

I would like to do an experiment.

What I would like is for everyone who has house ruled character creation to look at the pen portrait of an NPC, or PC, below and create the character using your own house rules.

What I would like is a starting character, not necessarily 1st level as I know full well that an RMU level 1 is a whole different thing to a RM2 or RMSS level 1.

Once you have created the character could you email a PDF of the character sheet to weareallawesome AT rolemasterblog DOT com.

If the character has spell lists please only give the name of the list, no actual spells. This is just because of ICE’s IP rights.

I will not use your email address for anything. I only want you to email the pdfs so I do not have to open the server up to anonymous uploads, god knows that we would get if all the spam bots thought they could upload files to our site!

If you don’t mind I would also like your permission to share these characters. I will not need your name, and I wouldn’t publish your name if you give it to me.

I don’t need to know what your house rules were, unless you are really proud of them and want to share them!

So here is the pen portrait.

Xan

Xan was born on the streets down in dockside. She never knew either parent but her reflection tells her that there is some oriental blood in her. The first few years of her life she was someones prop to get a few more coppers when begging. Once she was too big to be cute she was left to fend for herself amongst the street kids. By the time she was twelve she was leading the guard a merry dance and was more than capable of looking after herself through petty crime, stealing food when she was penniless, which was more often than not.

Where she learned to fight or got her swords is not known but now she commands her fair share of respect on the streets. If anyone makes the mistake of treating her as a street walker it is not a mistake they will make twice. She is fast and uses a pair of slim short swords, almost as oriental looking as her own eyes. More than one inebriated sailor has felt one of those pressed against his neck and the other pressed against his groin for making the wrong kind of suggestion! These days she does not beg but earns a passable living as an enforcer for anyone with coin and a need to get a message across.

The second half of this experiment I will post on Friday. I hope you can find the time to create an NPC between now and then!

Your help will be greatly appreciated!

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‘Well sir, if I were you, I wouldn’t start from here’

Rolemaster Unified Character Law Cover

This is my reply to Brian’s http://www.rolemasterblog.com/rmu-mission-accomplished/

Well here is a real bunch of thoughts for you…

Firstly, I don’t think the RMU devs have any intention of attracting new players. Through their inaction they have proved their intention. If they had reached out to any one of the other games systems communities and looked for play testers they would have got fresh eyes on the rules. They would have found out if the rules as written are enough to engage those new to RM. They would have started the discussion about the new version of RM with the wider gaming community. They would have raised ICE’s profile all over the world and the on going conversation would have drawn in more people.

They didn’t do that.

There was never any hope that RMU would really unite the RM2 cohort and the RMSS cohort. There are things in each version that do not appeal. None of us ‘need’ RMU as we all have bought and paid for games that fit us like a glove. We have nations of NPCs that would all need recreating and ploughing thousands of hours of work just to get back to where we are now. On top of that there are bound to be parts of RMU you don’t like compared to the version you play now. I don’t like the size rules but the experimental tables on the forum get rid of most of the problems, the complete rewrite of creature law to get rid of normalised stats get rid of more. I have never liked talents and flaws and that is for the most part the last bastion of the size rules. That is just my perspective. Hurin, not to put words in his mouth, will not be using the skill category system. He wants individual skill costs and the RM2 professions. I like his 5AP variant of the combat round as well.

The point is that the existing community are so used to house ruling and the modular design strength of RM that none of us are going to play RMU, we are going to play a personalised variation of the rules. As you say above, you have already decided what will make it into your game and what won’t.

RMU has been designed for people who want a new RM but they want it to be just like the old one but better. The problem is that those people already have a game that is just like the published RM but better, that is their own house ruled version.

Look at us… Brian has his own character law (SWARM), his own spell law (BASiL) and working on his own arms law (that I think should be called BAAL Brian’s Alternative Arms Law).

Intothatdarkness has the modern weaponry rules and unique variation of character law.

Hurin is the most dedicated to RMU but will also the biggest issues with Character & Arms Law.

Edgltd doesn’t even play RM.

We haven’t seen Warl on the forums for a while but I have played in his game and it is very heavily house ruled when it came to Character creation, combat and magic. What else is there?

RMU cannot and will not meet all these peoples’ needs. It cannot be a unifying force.

So here is a hypothetical question for you.

If you sat down at the gaming table and your character has the right stats in the right range (1-100). They had the right magnitude of stat bonuses the right number of skills and those skill to the right level of competency do the rules that creating the character matter?

We all have our own hybridised versions of Character Law and yet all our characters fight the same monsters in Creatures and Treasures in the same numbers, deliver the same criticals and take the same wounds. Do the character creation rules actually matter?

Brian has SWARM, it sounds like OLF on the forums and I are going down the same road with Spell Law and the open and closed lists. Spectre711 on the forums does not even use spell law, they exclusively use Elemental Companion, then does it matter what the source of the characters spells are (from a rule book perspective) as long as they are all on the same power level regarding ranges, durations and effects?

I am creating a new monster book based upon creating all the D&D 5e SRD monsters into Rolemaster compatible monsters. This will mean that I can produce completely statted out adventures without using any ICE intellectual property. I can also share that document so other adventure writers will be able to do the same. The book will be published under the WotC license as I am using their intellectual property. Edgltd said himself in a comment only this week that RM could go back to its roots and engage with the 5e and Pathfinder community.

Long ago I used to write this blog completely on my own, producing two posts a week, week in week out. In 2015 I produced this post http://www.rolemasterblog.com/roleplaying-games-do-not-exist/ and I still hold to that idea. The problem for RMU and ICE is that if the experienced players do not need Character & Arms Law, Spell Law and Creature Law and none of these have been designed to be attractive to new players nor to draw in players of other same genre games then who is going to buy into RMU?

I think ICE are going to have to do the most outstanding marketing task I have ever encountered and I am a lover of marketing, both in my professional life and privately. I would love to be in charge of marketing RMU. The problem is that I would have wanted to start 5 years go. There’s a well known joke about a tourist in Ireland who asks one of the locals for directions to Dublin. The Irishman replies: ‘Well sir, if I were you, I wouldn’t start from here’.

Things I would have done…

I would have posted invitations to the first beta on every major gaming community. To give you an idea scale I rarely ever see more than 7 names and as many as 15 guests as being active on the ICE forums. Right now there are 3 registered users and 11 guests the best ever was 276 back in 2006. On the first D&D forum I look at there were 191 members and 398 guests right now and the best ever was in March this year 18344. The first War Hammer forum I looked at had 600 users online at that time.

I would have bundled up a play test set into a single zip file and put it on RPG now as a public play test. By letting people download it that way you can automatically send out updated version and you are immediately building a marketing contact list for when you want to sell them the finished rules (at a hefty discount but everyone appreciates a thank you).

I would not have produced multiple hundred page PDFs for each book. Each chapter would be a separate document so they are easy for the tester to read and digest. You can then hold a separate discussion on a chapter by chapter basis with your testers. That sounds like a Dev action but it is actually marketing. The more people you engage with the more good will you will engage.

There should be a playtest adventure and playtest pregen characters as a single download. This will get people actually play testing your game without having to read and understand 1200 pages of text. Play first and look under the hood second. You can commission some great evocative art for that first adventure and the characters to fire the imaginations of these first play testers. Art does not have a short shelf life. You can reuse it in the final paid product so nothing is lost.

That art is the only expense in everything I have just outlined. You can pick up some great art on Deviant for $20 a piece so there is no real need to spend more than $200 in total. I would set myself the aim of getting 300 active play test groups. That then would show up the flaws in the system but also bring in 300 advocates for the new game. That isn’t a limit either 300 would be my failure test. Any less than that and I would have considered my efforts a failure. There is no real maximum limit for the number of testers you could reach. Over time that community is likely to grow as more people discover the game. The more testers you get at the beginning the bigger their online footprint becomes.

With a large testing community the flaws will be found faster, the rules refined faster and the game would have been brought to market faster. I would have expected it to be on the shelves back in 2013. By now we should have SMU and some companions out!

I don’t think that is overly optimistic. I do recognise that this is a rambling mess of a post. I think the nub is that RMU isn’t really for us, it is for the next generation. That is its mission. Whether it is accomplished or not remains to be seen.

 

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Halloween Rolemaster

I have written about witches a couple of times recently. I am not going to post that same photo again but this got me thinking.

For all of you that get to play on a weekly basis why not insert a small side plot for the next four weeks that culminates in a really good horror story ending as a Halloween special.

We do not ‘celebrate’ halloween here in the UK like you do in the USA (yet, we seem to have imported everything else so there is time yet) but thinking beyond the undead there are a lot of options for a good old scary tale.

Here are a couple of plot ideas for you to try and inspire a little halloween fun.

Werewolves are a good stand by. Why not avoid the hack and slash solution and this time make the characters the prey. Don’t confront them directly but use the  hunting pack to pick off NPCs, their mounts and innocent bystanders over a number of days. Slowly whittle down the characters support. Then bring back the NPCs as newly turned werewolves so the numbers are slowly swinging in the enemy’s favour. This being Rolemaster it is not the level of the creature that is important but the odds on the battlefield. Add on the complication of some of the enemy being friends when they are not changed and you have an interesting role playing opportunity.

Something in the darkness?

There is a saying amongst players, “If it has stats, we can kill it.” So don’t tell the players what the enemy is. Send the players down a completely barren dungeon. Send in a handful of NPCs with them and the moment anyone is alone then have them disappear, maybe accompanied by blood curdling screams? A combination of Sleep, Long Door and Sound Mirage is all that is needed, maybe throw in Long Eye so the enemy can keep an eye on the party. All the time the characters do not know who or what they are facing they cannot plan. If a PC is ever alone then have them start making resistance rolls against that Sleep spell. What the villain wants with it the players once they are captured is a different story and one that the GM can tell.

 

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Community Created Content

Rolemaster Unified Character Law Cover

Following on from Brian’s post about the 80/20 rule I have been thinking about Rolemaster’s attitude to community created content.

Right now, community created content is the ‘big thing’ in games publishing. The big names are shown below but OneBookShelf hosts 18 community content schemes.

 

The way they work is this…

The rights owner, the publisher, makes available some or all of their intellectual property and with it a set of guidelines about what can and cannot be done with it. In return anyone can take that IP and their own ideas and publish their own adventures, addons and supplements. The whole thing is managed through a single portal so the publisher has the final say over what is published and what isn’t and they control the revenue split between themselves and the content creators.

The granddaddy of them all in this is WotC. They have made available the core rules of D&D 5e, a selection of the most common monsters and the Forgotten Realms setting. Furthermore if you create something amazing then there is an option for WotC to adopt it as official and put their resources behind it and your content can end up in the WotC licensed games.

So now WotC have an army of content creators working purely on commission so it costs them nothing. They can cherry pick the best to include in future books and the gaming community gets a regular free flow of new content. On average there are 7 new products released for D&D 5e each day. Many of them are free or Pay What You Want. In the past week 20 of the 49 new releases had prices ranging from $0.50 to $14.95.

For Traveller, the TAS programme, there have been 20 community releases this year so this is not just a WotC and the OGL phenomena.

ICE maintain two avenues for community created content. The forum and the Guild Companion. You can publish your ideas on either but with different restrictions applying to both. On the forum you cannot lists spells, but list names are OK. You cannot quote substantial parts of the rules and the like. What ICE do not want to happen is for people to be able to play RM by collecting the rules piecemeal from posts on the forum.

The Guild Companion on the other hand will allow you to post entire spell lists of your own creation and most recently Nicholas has been posting excerpts of forthcoming books presumably to whet your appetite.

You can publish adventures, new professions, monsters and so on but everything has to go through Peter Mork and his team of editors.

None of these options give the creator an opportunity to get any compensation for their efforts. The Guild Companion has been limping along for a couple of years now with no or just a single community created article per month.

There is a misconception amongst many people that see things like the OGL (open game license) as taking revenue away from publishers. Community Created Content Programmes do not require games to be published under the OGL or anything similar. There is just a simple agreement between the rights holder and the community about what can and cannot be released. The publisher in return is earning probably 30%-40% of the revenue from all the sales for virtually no effort. The community gets a steady stream of new content and as the prices can be so low that they can buy things for less than a Dollar just to use it for ideas.

ICE struggle to put a single new book out each year, mainly because of the bottle neck created by RMU. A new system is a massive undertaking for a small company of part timers. That is one of the reasons why community content should, in my opinion, be embraced. Just how long will it take for Kevin to update all the Shadow World books to RMU? Years? A decade?

I think most of us think that there should be a ‘lite’ or ‘quick start’ edition of RMU to encourage people to give it a try.

I think Shadow World should be made open to a Rolemaster Community Created Content programme along with a core RMU reference. Let the gamers contribute and get something in return.

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Fleckles and Hip Action?

I may be making some assumptions here but I am guessing most of the readers here are English speaking. That most English speaking territories have some sort of TV shows along the lines of Strictly Come Dancing, Dancing with the Stars, Dancing on Ice. I also assume that as roleplayers we do not watch Strictly Come Dancing, Dancing with the Stars, Dancing on Ice.

Bear with me, I am going somewhere with this.

So whereas the fans of those sorts of shows are avid watchers of fleckles, hip action and correctly pointed hands and feet we are more interested in different sorts of moving manoeuvres.

Now, last week Brian brought up the old topic of No Profession and his idea of the free market economy for skill costs. Another element of making Rolemaster more accessible and faster to play is meta skills.

One of the arguments against meta skills was put something like this. Meta skills are fine for fantasy and historical settings but in modern settings subjects are far more specialised.

I am not saying that meta skills are right and a multitude of specific skills are wrong. I do not believe in right and wrong at all in rpgs. We make and play the games we like in the way that we like them. This is all about an idea I had on Saturday evening when Mrs R was watching one of those dance shows!

So in a RM2 game every typical farmer that the players meet probably have the a cross section of or even the majority of this mix of skills.

  1. Animal handling Pig
  2. Aminal handling Cow
  3. Animal Handling Chicken
  4. Animal Handling Donkey
  5. Aminal Handling Dog
  6. Animal Healing Pig
  7. Aminal Healing Cow
  8. Animal Healing Donkey
  9. Animal Healing Dog. No farmer can afford to lose live stock and this includes animal midwifery.
  10. Herding Pig
  11. Herding Cow
  12. Herding Chicken
  13. Loading
  14. Driving Cart
  15. Flora Law for crops
  16. Wood working for repairs around the farm
  17. Rope Mastery for repairs around the farm
  18. Weapon Skill (spear encompassing pitchforks etc) as someone has to deal with foxes, coyotes, mountain lions and join the lynch mob to drive undesirables away.
  19. Perception to spot foxes, coyotes, mountain lions and undesirables.
  20. Body development as farming is hard work.
  21. Trading to buy and sell seed and produce.
  22. Weather watching to know what tomorrow brings.
  23. Singing
  24. Dancing
  25. Musical instrument. These three are essential social skills for finding a wife and making your own entertainment.
  26. Time Sense.

So that is not an exhaustive list. You could add in a lot more Lores depending on how the farmer manages their land. If they have water wheels, a smithy or a tannery on their farm then that comes with a skill burden. If they have farm hands beyond the family then they may need some public speaking or people management skills.

If the typical secondary skill has a cost of 2/6 then my snap shot of skills requires 52DPs per level or straight 70+ in every stat. Or the alternative is that some of the skills come from culture and hobby skills ranks and they do not have all the animal skills, if a cow goes sick they call on the neighbour that does know about cows and people come to them when their pigs are sick and so on.

So the idea that modern settings do not fit in with meta skills as modern skills are too specialised does not work. Portraying historical farmers in RM2 are just as detailed.

Now going back to our Strictly Dancing on Ice with the Stars their are often athletes, sports personalities and former Olympians as contestants. These people almost invariably do extremely well. The reason they do so well is partly down to the fact that almost all sports require a combination of hand/eye coordination, core strength, balance and footwork. All of these translate well to dance apparently. Some of the people who have done well in the past have been gymnasts, rugby players [rugby is like American Football with the training wheels taken off 🙂 ], and track and field athletes.

In my vision of the Athletic Games meta skill the list of  hand/eye coordination, core strength, balance and footwork is almost the skill definition. Taking these dance programmes seem to say that all forms of athletics provide a great level of cross over.

The way I handle unfamiliar situations is by using higher difficulty factors which would mean that as the weeks and months (although it feels longer) that these shows go on for the contestants would be able to apply more of their full skill to each routine and the Difficulty diminishes.

I do not really want to reopen the argument on Meta Skills. I think we have done that to death but this came to me this week as I was writing whilst Mrs R was watching the show and I noticed that one of the highest scoring contestants was Jonathan Peacock who is a para-Olympian and amputee.

Finally, I think it is a damn sight easier just give Vocation:Farmer as a skill and move on to doing something more fun.

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Wicked Witches

I want an wicked witch for my next game session and I have been playing with the RM2 RoCoII witch profession.

This is quite easily one of the most powerful professions I have ever seen!

In my world spell multipliers are as rare as hen’s teeth. This means that power points are not overly abundant. Permanent magic items are not common either including rune paper. It does exist and the characters do have a few runes (they are all about 5th level) but there is not much of it about.

The witch can create their own potions, spell infused candles and as they are hybrids they can use Symbolic Ways to create standing stones and Rune Mastery to create runes. One ton stones are not actually that uncommon if you live out in the wilds. That gives the witch access to some home made daily items even if they are low level and not movable.

The runes as I have said are hard to make without the rune paper but if they have some then they are easier to make than standing stones and more potable.

Candles and potions though are easy to manufacture and carry around.

I am extremely tempted to give the witch some candles of Sleep V or Sleep VII and let the characters walk off with them. That is going to do their heads in for a while as I am making them roll resistance rolls almost every evening!

This profession can easily have almost unlimited low level magic. Power points can be burned using their most powerful magic as they will have tons of low level stuff just lying around.

I am thinking along the lines of a pretty high level witch as a sole adversary against 5 5th level characters. I am now thinking that I may have to tone down my NPC or they will eat the party alive (you can interpret that last sentence as you wish).

Have any of you use the Witch as a single Foe?

p.s. The boggle-eyed witch is back just because she freaks BriH out!

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Face to Facetime

The last time I posted about my face to face game I was dealing with the issue of how do I make it feel like the characters are fully engaged with the the adventure when they are searching for something that isn’t there. I know they will not find it, or ‘him’ in this case as he is not there to be found.

As it happens the session has been delayed, it was originally intended to be played in June but with real life getting in the way it has been pushed back and we are now looking at late October or early November.

Even so it is time to get my gaming notes out again.

If you strip out meal times and the other game (where I get to be a player) I have about 16hrs of game session available to me. 5 5th level characters and a fruitless search in a monster rich forest.

I had a bit of a eureka moment this morning when I remembered Brian’s Vignette post. What I am going to do is string together a series of one off encounters, each one quite atmospheric and evocative.

I am thinking of a witches cottage in a dark shrouded clearing; a pack of wolves, maybe lead by a werewolf stalking the party; an attack by giant spiders coming down from the forest canopy at night. They are adventuring in the Spiderhaunt forest after all! I think I may throw some ghouls at them and a butchered unicorn for good measure.

These could so easily be my players!

A typical dungeon crawl could take 16hrs and would have multiple combat encounters. I can treat the forest as a ‘dungeon without walls’.

My original intention was to run a more coherent side quest but the problem with that, on reflection, is that if the do not complete it in the time I have available we the players even remember what they were doing and why the next time we play? More than a year of real life will have passed between the day they entered Spiderhaunt and when they complete any side quest.

I am the youngest member of our group but a couple of months so I am allowed to make jokes about their fading memories and how they are all getting on. By the new year I will be the only one still under 50!

The more I think of this the more I like the idea. I can let rip a bit and throw some tough challenges at them and at the same time if things go badly I can ease off. They do not have the meet every encounter I throw at them. I can also have them some problem solving like trying to cross waterways, scale rocky outcrops and so on. It may also be an opportunity to replenish some of their herb supplies.

Can you think of any really cool forest monsters I can do atmospheric one off encounters with?