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Seconds ticking away

Following on from my last post about movement and mounted combat I have been thinking about combat rounds.

There are three combat round lengths in the ICE world. RM2, Spacemaster and I guess RMSS use the 10 second round. RMU uses 5 second rounds and HARP uses a 2 second round.

If was obvious that the 10 second round didn’t work for modern day and Sci Fi. There is no way you can only squeeze  the trigger of a gun once every ten seconds. The fix was to introduce fire phase 1 and 2 into the standard RM2 phased combat round.

If everyone was using firearms, which was not unusual in modern settings then it left anyone who had to move wading through molasses. If you could not get from cover to cover in a single move then you would get ripped to pieces.

Splitting the round into two five second rounds does improve things slightly but there is always going to be a disparity between how long different tasks take. Picking a lock could be seen as a 10 second activity for a skilled thief but it becomes more of a stretch at 5 seconds and surely for the typical PC two seconds is not likely?

Is it better to have some actions take multiple rounds compared to some actions happening multiple times in a single round?

I think I am inclined to go for the very short round and things just take as long as they take. We are used to bows taking rounds to reload. I think those times are a little exaggerated in RM2/RMC but that is because they have been rounded to an easy number of whole rounds. I know that I can shoot five arrows in twenty seconds from a galloping horse and be on target. That does not marry up with one arrow every 2 rounds for a short bow in RM2. One arrow every two rounds in HARP is closer to my observed reality.

But lets ignore combat for a moment. A real dramatic plot device is the hero in action movies defusing the bomb with 3,2,1… seconds to go. If you are in combat time, the rest of the party are keeping the enemy at bay while you are defusing the bomb then ten second time chunks do not fit well with this staple of the action genre. If you treat bomb disposal as a static action you really want to avoid partial or near success as either of those leave you with having another go 10 seconds AFTER the bomb went off.

The more I think about this the more I think the 5 second round is not the right choice for RMU. 2 seconds is tried and tested in HARP and works without compaint. Sure it means rejigging spell casting, durations, movement and critical results (bleeding) but they are rebuilding all of RM anyway so now is the time to do it and not in a future companion as an optional rule.

What do you all think? 10, 5 or 2?

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How many skill rolls?

Or how many times can you roll the same skill in the same round?

In a recent forum post there was a reference to mounted combat. The horses were all fast moving, galloping around and their movement rates were huge, in the order of 400′ to 500′ a round.

This is partially a problem with 10 second combat rounds. If two combatants were in melee range at the end of round 1, eg the clash of lances in a joust then 10 seconds later they could be 900′ apart (500′ + 400′). Try using a battle map for that! I for one would need a bigger dining room table.

My suggestion was partially prompted by my recent reference to car wars in the #RPGaDAY posts. If you break the horses movement down into second by second movement over the round and only allow a single melee or ranged attack per round you can more easily manage the scale of the movement.

The problem then becomes that Player 1 sees an NPC wheel their horse off to the left so they change their direction to intercept cutting inside to take a shorter line, the NPC then bears to the right hoping to wrong foot the players horse. This is now much more exciting for everyone as they can move their horses strategically, Fred can try and lead an NPC on until he is right in Ernie’s path as Ernie lowers his lance and spurs his horse up into a final dash.

So when do you make the riding roll? If the players are making 10 strategic decisions about their horses movements which manoeuvre calls for the roll? How about perception rolls? If I am trying to shake you off my tail as you are closing do I need to make perception rolls to see you over my shoulder?

You could make one riding roll at the beginning of the round and have that effect the pace of your horse. On the other hand that does not reflect how your horse is handling. If you are not completely in balance with your horse it may ‘fall in’ or ‘fall out’ of a corner. Falling in is where on a corner the horse suddenly cuts in and across the corner rather than on a smooth arc around the bend. Falling out is rather like drifting a car, the horse is travelling both forward around the arc and stepping sideways at the same time. These are caused by the horse trying to step under the riders centre of gravity so if you lean a little too much one way or the other the horse tries to compensate for that. In a chase situation how the horse handles bends and corners can make a difference when trying to get away or make up ground. Flip that around and a poor riding roll should have a reflection on how the horse handles.

If I am making a single riding roll at the beginning of the round and I know I have made a poor roll I could choose to do only the simplest of manoeuvres in that round.

What if, on the other hand you played the mounted combat out second by second and allowed multiple riding and if necessary perception rolls at a strategic level?

This is where the car wars reference comes in. Each turn had a difficulty factor from D1 for a simple 15° turn to D7 for a bootlegger reverse. Each manoeuvre reduced your handling class by the D number and you then cross referenced your current handling class with your speed for the target number for you driving skill.

So you could let the players describe their planned moves and give each riding manoeuvre a difficulty using the regular RM difficulties, they make a skill roll each second but with an accumulating penalty. A highly skilled horse person could then lead a lesser skilled rider a merry dance or even put them well outside their comfort zone and outside their ability if they wanted to give chase or overhaul the other horse.

So in Car Wars terms:

Routine (+30) Turns up to 15° Drifting 5′ left or right
Easy (+ 20) Turns 16° to 30° Jumping a small log or obstacle
Light (+ 10) Turns 31° to 45° Drifting 10′ to left or to the right
Medium ( +/- 0) Turns 46° to 60° Jumping a medium log or obstacle
Hard (-10) Turns 61° to 75° Jumping a large log or obstacle
Very Hard (-20) Turns 76° to 90°
Extremely Hard (-30)
Sheer Folly (-50)
Absurd (-70)

So each manoeuvre moves you further and further down the table, so two routine moves would result in a light manoeuvre.

As Brian said recently, players love to roll the dice. So giving them more rolls in a round as they try to out race the enemy is not necessarily a bad thing. It does break the 10 second round though.

I also think it will cause havoc with the RMU action point economy. APs tend to imply an amount of time. A fast 2AP attack will normally take place before a full 4AP attack. That makes it seem like each AP is 1.25 seconds long.

So would you be prepared to try this style of mounted combat?

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RolemasterBlog Fanzine Issue #0005

So issue 5 is out on both RPGnow (http://www.rpgnow.com/product/220906/Rolemaster-Fanzine-Issue-0005) but more excitingly it is also on Kindle (https://www.amazon.co.uk/RolemasterBlog-Fanzine-September-2017-Issue-ebook/dp/B075D79LH7/)

I also hope that by the time you read this it is also in print on Amazon (https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1549678930)


I find the simple fact that anyone can write, publish and distribute a book now in virtually no time and at virtually no expense is very democratising.

This month I am trying to train myself to try and write 2,000-3,000 words a day on RPG related stuff. The fanzine is about 7,000 words but it also includes an adventure and a monster complete with stats. These take longer than just writing an essay or prose.

My guilty pleasure is the other game I have written, 3Deep, which is also available in print on both Amazon and RPGnow. I have both books on my bookshelf and I get a lot of pleasure just to pick them up and flick through them.

We have touched on something a few times recently and that is that you cannot truly divorce setting from rules. The rules exist to bring the setting to life. My game is billed as ‘generic’ and is sold without a setting. The fact that I am one of the ones who says that you need to have setting and rules in harmony how have I squared the circle?

My core rulebook is intended to be used with a setting companion. Each setting has its own companion that not only gives background and flavour for the GM wanting to play with that genre but any necessary rule tweaks. In this way the core magic system can be tweaked to create super powers for a Marvel style game or Mental abilities for Stranger Things.

So rather than being truly generic what I have built is something I conceive to be adaptive. The rules are only half the equation. Referring back to my challenge of writing 2k-3k words a day, my core rulebook is about 26,000 words in length but by the time you add in the obligatory tables and art that turns into an 80+ page rulebook.

3,000 words a day gives me about 20,000 words a week. I have nearly finalised my page layout style by begging, borrowing and stealing from the best looking books I have seen recently. So I theory I can write an entirely supplement in a week to ten days. Give me another week to edit it and another to do the page layout and I think I can publish a 60 to 80 page companion at a rate of one a month.

To make that even more impressive is the fact that I only really write this stuff while Mrs R is watching crap on TV. She rather likes period dramas such as Poldark, The Queen and Downton Abbey as well as Strictly Come Dancing. If you are not in the UK none of those may mean anything to you but the point is that I am just making use of time I would otherwise be wasting in front of the TV.

So far I have only hit the 3k target a couple of times but it is getting easier each day to get in the writing ‘zone’ and start getting productive. This week I wrote less but I did have to read a game for a review for a different blog.

I know that none of you care about my game or my insane desire to produce supplements but this does relate back to Rolemaster as well.

As long as we steer well clear of ICEs intellectual property we can, between us, produce non canon companions. ICE are not going to support RM2 any more but we could. Our 50 adventures are one such project. Brian has a  wealth of projects on the go from adventures to SWARM to BASiL and I even tried to tempt him with another cute acronym the other day, anyone fancy an alternative to Arms Law called BAAL?

So, in theory(!) if RMU turns out to still be one to two years away, and that is entirely possible. What bits of the companions did you find the most useful?

For me it was probably new open and closed base lists for the three realms and new base lists for the core professions.

What about you?

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Setting or Unsettling?

Brian recently touched upon the need for Rolemaster to fully commit to Shadow World as its default setting. I am 100% behind this idea.

It is obvious from Brian’s deconstructions that as soon as you start to look critically as Spell Law that the amount of setting specific magic is far greater than one would have given credit for initially. This will always be most pronounced in the Channelling realm as gods have a big role to play in most fantasy settings. That then throws up the issue of why is a cleric of a fire god just as good at healing as a god of healing?

I think it was in Rolemaster Companion IV that they introduced deity specific base lists and I have been using them ever since. For most of my games I have not had a problem with Clerics being broken.

The first version of Spell Law that I used was the blue text with the naff handwritten font. I wasn’t comic sans but it was not far off. Apart from lay out improvements I don’t think Spell Law has changed much since that first edition and I think that may explain some of the problems.

Spell Law was intended as a drop in replacement for the AD&D magic system. I am playing Rolemaster in the Forgotten Realms which is an AD&D setting. My game is set after the time of troubles which gives me areas of wild magic which are not unlike esseance storms.

In AD&D all clerics could cast cure light wounds and at higher level finger of death and raise dead. They could commune with their god and they can turn the undead.

Rolemaster Clerics can cast all the closed healing lists, they can use absolution for the finger of death, life giving for raise dead and there is a whole list for communing and another for repulsing the undead.

RM Clerics are a perfect fit for AD&D Clerics. The fault lines that Brian experiences do not manifest in my games because Spell Law is written to fit the AD&D tropes.

This just goes to show that not only is Spell Law well over due a complete overhaul but BASiL is the way forward.

I don’t care if most people use Shadow World or not. If you set RM, and specifically RMU, to use Shadow World as the default setting, tie in all the rulebook examples to that setting, feature a starting adventure in the setting and describe magic against the Shadow World context then you will have a much richer product.

A significant number of GMs will create their own homebrew setting just as a significant number of 5e DMs create their own homebrew settings.

To all intents and purposes MERP is a homebrew setting these days. Yes, there are old books that are mostly compatible but there is nothing new and there never will be. It is as easy to convert from Cubicle 7’s One Ring or 5e Adventures in Middle Earth resources to RMU as it is to convert from the 1980s MERP region books.


I do not think you can divorce setting from rules once you start to look at magic and channelling magic most of all.

It is not only the magic system but the unique monsters and races that make the setting from a rules perspective. The companion I gave me all the AD&D races I needed but I still see questions on the ICE forums about Shadow World races.

With RMU it is going to be easy to create balanced races but I don’t think ICE customers buying ICE games to play in an ICE setting should have to make the things up themselves!

I don’t think I am a diva or over demanding or is joined up thinking too much to ask?

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#RPGaDAY 29th, 30th and 31st

This is the last of the #RPGaDAY posts. My answers the 29th and 30th are pretty generic but skip down to the 31st for the best answer!

29th What has been the best-run RPG kickstarter you have backed?

I have never backed a kickstarter. I don’t think I would for an RPG either. I have nothing against kickstarter or RPGs but I just do not have the gaming group to buy games and play them. With my meagre collection of games I still don’t have time to play all of them so backing games just to get more games that will sit on a shelf and never be played does not make sense. If there was a decent RM based kickstarter then that would be a different case. I guess I am just not part of the kickstarter/crowdfunding sub-culture.

I have seen a lot of interesting things done with crowd funding. I also blog on Stargazer’s World and that is now patreon funded. The past time I look there were only three patreons paying $3/month. I think it is an interesting concept to pay bloggers to blog and one I think is a damn fine idea! Dyson Logos is patreon supported to produce his maps and that seems more successful running to hundreds of dollars per month.

Kickstarters though are just not may thing. What keeps coming up again and again is art. If you want to produce RPG publications be it rule books, companions or supplements then the one skill that almost all of us lack is artistic talent. This is where the expense is in producing professional looking material. This will come up again below in the answer to the 31st question!

30th What is an RPG genre mashup you would most like to see?

I have often done mashups, I mentioned my Doom/RM one off in a comment this week. I recently put my players into a classic night of the living dead scenario. I tend to think of these as really fun one offs rather than something I would like to play on a regular basis. I think the fun is in the shock or surprise value. Very soon either the joke wears off or gaps in the rules appear.  If you are playing something set in the wild west then you can build a very detailed representation of that genre. If you then try and stick space pirates in then it is harder to maintain a coherent world. Combat rules tend to break down when you try and model too many different types of weapons. If you look at the movie representation of a light sabre it does not behave like a sword, armour is not effective against it. If anything it behaves more like a D&D vorpal sword than a RM longsword.

I think the answer to this for me is I don’t know yet. The inspiration will grab me. If I am pressed for an answer I think I would like to do something soon involving Ninjas and Terminators.

31st What do you anticipate most for gaming in 2018?

This has to RMU. I don’t think it will be delivered this year but I would be very surprised and disappointed if it was not released during 2018. If I had to say I would imagine it will be probably just before Christmas 2018!

Now, this is not intended to be an ICE bashing but I am not impressed with the way the publish Beta but 1 & 2 have been run. There are a number of problems with it in my opinion and these have been brought into sharp focus this week when I saw another companies public playtest.

Part of the problems I think comes from ICE not committing to who RMU is being created for. It seems like they have tried to take good bits of RM2, RMSS and HARP and blend them together. The result is that the RM2 players miss the bits of RM2 that didn’t make the cut, RMSS players don’t like the bits that do not work like RMSS and HARP players don’t like the bits that are too crunchy for HARP. That is a generalisation but the principle is sound. The U in RMU is meant to be Unified but I do not see RMU unifying the RM community. I think RMU will be house ruled back into its constituent parts probably before it hits the shelves. Hurin will have his individual skill costs, I will have my minimalist rules, BriH will have his free market economy. Arms Law will be ripped a part and alternative tables will abound, and so on.

The real shame is that there has been no visible effort to engage the wider gaming community.

I want to show you how it could be done differently. There is a game called Eclipse Phase. It was released in 2009. Since its release there have been 70 additional books/publications. That is nearly 1  a month for 8 years. If we had had that sort of publication rate we would be over the moon. Ah yes you say, but ICE is only a small company, they cannot produce books like that. Posthuman Studios who make Eclipse Phase is just 4 people Rob Boyle, Brian Cross,
Jack Graham, and Adam Jury. The books they have produced range in price from free and PWYW and from $0.99 to $19.99. There is literally something for all pockets Take a look at their listing on RPGnow.

I would also argue that because Posthuman Studios has this terrific production rate, they earn more money which enables them to buy in the art and freelance page layerouters (made up word but I don’t know the collective noun for people who do page layouts) which enables them to produce more books. The more books they produce the more they sell and so on.

Now what is really interesting is that they are developing Eclipse Phase 2nd Edition right now. They have put an open play test out on RPGnow. Anyone can download the playtest rules. These are not hdden behind a NDA agreement and hidden forums. They want the game discussed in public.

When you download the open playtest you a set of PDF documents that are text heavy and lack art just like the RMU beta 2 books but you also get a pdf quck-start rulebook. This book would not look out of place on sale right now. It is beautiful to look at. The book is just 26 pages and includes a background to the setting, the core game mechanics, and full first adventure and pregen characters. Anyone could pick up that pdf, print it and be playing inside of an hour.

This is a page from the 2nd edition quick start. The actual pages are very light on the artwork whilst still being very visually attractive. You are looking at a single icon for the page number and a single page background image.

In addition the playtest files are not arranged at multi-hundred page PDF books. They are broken down into almost chapter sized booklets. This means that each part of the rules is easier to read and digest and discuss. Our mammoth books are not the easiest to navigate and the contrast is striking when you see it being done this way. Each booklet has its own public discussion forum, again not behind closed doors. I guess that by working on the rules ‘chapter by chapter’ they can be signed off and finalised faster.

The simple fact that anyone can download the play test for free and has everything they need to play the game means that the play test itself is bringing new players into the game. With the quick start they are up and running and with the beta rules they can go on to make their own characters and create their own plots and adventures.

It can be argued, and I accept, that Eclipse Phase is a smaller game than RMU. That does not take away from the fact that the play test is being run in a completely different way. It is almost as different as it is possible to be, in my opinion. I will put my neck out and say that the Eclipse Phase 2nd Edition open play test started on 5th of May 2017, RMU first play test was released 27th of September 2012. I reckon that Eclipse Phase 2nd Edition will be on sale before RMU hits the shelves.

I don’t mean to be down on ICE and RMU. RMU is my most anticipated game of 2018. The frustrating thing is though that RMU could have been on the shelves in 2015 and we could be anticipating its 5th birthday in 2018!

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#RPGaDAY2017 26th, 27th and 28th

26th Which RPG provides the most useful resources.

Having read other people answers to this already it is funny how they all cancel out. Some say Pathfinder has the best resources and then others that Pathfinder is a victim of its own bloat. Some say the new D&D 5e online service is amazing but then admit that none of their players have even made an account so paying more to be able to share resources was money down the drain.

I am a less is more sort of person and for me most of the companions I junked anyway even when playing RM2. When I started afresh with RMC not having the companions was a blessed relief.

I am going back to my old time favourite of Car Wars again. There were loads of expansions for it but none of them made the game more complicated. There was an expansion for trucks but that just added a new vehicle type. The game remained the same but players got to face new challenges. Half of those little plastic boxes were filled with battle maps such as Truck Stop that were big enough to cover your dining room table. There was a periodical, Autoduel Quarterly, that released regular new material. I think everyone eagerly awaited any new equipment! There were also adventures, there were two that I remember buying Turbo fire and Hell on Wheels. Hell on Wheels ended up becoming the launch point of an entire campaign as the starting character had a really cool Lamborghini Countach which has to be the best starting equipment for a new character ever!
So that is my answer, Car Wars again.

27th What are your essential tools for good gaming?

Post-it notes! I love them and with the best prep in the world you are still going to have to make and record changes on the fly and that is where Post-it notes come in. I also use them for recording NPC turns of phrase when talking, key strategies when in combat and important magic items so I don’t realise AFTER they are dead that they had a staff of teleport and would have bugged out long ago!

A post-its and pencils are the things I cannot do without, even dice are optional but those are my essentials.

28th What film/series is the biggest source of quotes in your group?

I think the answer is probably anything by Monty Python, absolutely anything and everything they have ever done is likely to come up at some point.

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#RPGaDAY2017 22nd, 23rd, 24th, 25th.

Not sure I said this last time but I think I am missing the point somewhat by doing #RPGaDAY in bi-weekly chunks. Having said that I will freely confess that the point for me was to get rolemasterblog mentioned on the twitter feed for #RPGaDAY. Anything that raises Rolemaster’s awareness has to be a good thing.

So to the questions…

22nd Which RPGs are the easiest for you to run?

This seems like it is going to be which ever RPG the GM is most familiar with. Given the writers and audience here any answer that is not RM would be a little weird. On the other hand Rolemaster is not a ‘thing’ it is many things or even a whole library of things. Anything that requires me to dive into book after book to try and find the right ruling for this or that situation is not really my thing. I think that drives my style of GM prep where I insert the rules for each situation/hazard into the game notes and my desire for an ever more minimalist ruleset. I want to reach the Lagrange point between a full RM experience and no rules. I was once told that the car brand JEEP was an old army acronym for Just Enough Essential Parts. That is what I am looking for in a game and the ones that I find the easiest to run, for me at least.

23rd What RPG has the most jaw dropping layout?

I have the advantage of seeing other people answers to this question and there are some brilliant page layouts around now. By contrast Rolemaster, every edition from the originals to the newest core rulebooks for RMC are boring! The most attractive book  in the RM stable I have seen is the Shadow World Players Guide. I don’t know if all of Terry’s Shadow World books look the same but I suspect they do not. Somehow I think RM’s design is stuck in the 80s.

I personally hate the FATE rules. They are just not my idea of fun but look at this page. There is no art, which is often sighted as one of the real barriers to having great looking books. Art is a real expense I admit. We have discussed that many times and at length.

First and foremost the most striking this is that they have rejected the ‘norm’ of the two column layout that just about every RPG rule book I have ever seen has used. The box outs are  striking and add both to the clarity of the rules and the visual impact of the page. The useful navigation in the margins is an excellent addition making it easy to find related sections.

I am certainly going to adopt many if not all of these features into my future publications. I have always been a bit of a revisionist. I create things that are probably a bit crap but then I go back and improve and improve. I am no designer but I can recognise good design when I see it and I am not above borrowing other peoples great ideas and using them to improve my own work.

So on the basis that FATE has made me change the way I am going to create everything else I think FATE has to get my nomination.

24th Share a PWYW publisher who should be charging more.

My answer to this is Nemo Works. I think the effort they put into their products is superb. I simply cannot draw so anything that allows me to create layouts and floor plans is an absolute god send to me. Their core product is just $8 but they have a number of PWYW addons that you can use to expend the core product into many different genres.

Pay What You Want serves a couple of different purposes. For many of the bigger games such as FATE and Shadowrun it is a loss leader. They are prepared to give away some products to get you hooked. For smaller and independent publishers they are not really in it for the money and may not even know how much to charge. I put out my house rules using PWYW so I could say I was not charging for a RM product. I see any payments as donations and entirely voluntary. I typically get between $1 and $2 per download and that is fine. I wanted to share the rules not make my fortune. If I wanted to make money I would be selling to the D&D audience not Rolemaster.

25th What is the best way to think your GM?

I think leave your lawyers hat by the door on the way in. I am certainly not perfect and I do not remember every rule, word perfect every time. We all make mistakes and we are all human. Most of the time I am super prepared and as I said above I actually include the pertinent rules in my game notes. The most likely  cause of needing an on the spot decision or adjudication is going to be a player trying to bend the situation, spell or skill in a way which was not how it was intended. I don’t have a problem with this. This is the beauty of table top RPGs and what a computer RPG can never match. You can do anything you can imagine in that situation to survive or succeed. Sometimes that is going to stretch the rules. I like to think of myself when GMing as being on the players side. We are all their to have fun, the game was created to help them have fun. What I don’t like is when the game breaks down because a rules lawyer decides to argue with the GM. I don’t care if I am a player having to stop playing while the argument takes place or if I am the GM having someone disrupt my game and the other players. So the best way to thank the GM is enjoy the game and don’t go out of your way to break it!

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#RPGaDAY2017 19th, 20th and 21st

I am sure that bulk answering these questions twice a week completely misses the point of #RPGaDAY but to be honest I don’t care.

Yesterday Sparta commented on a post I wrote at the beginning of July. The significance of that is that we are obviously reaching new people and they are looking at what we are writing. This is a good thing. I have no idea but it is entirely possible Sparta and others found the blog through the #RPGaDAY hashtag.

Insidentally one of the most most common good search phrases that brings people to the blog is [shadow world amthor]. The busiest day so far this month was the day that Brian mentioned the fanzine on the RM Forums!

Anyway, I digress.

19th Which RPG features the best writing?

This is a really subjective question. What is best writing anyway? The D&D Basic box set (red cover) that got me started had a life long impact on me so that must have been pretty good I would say.

I am actually going to put forward Champions as my answer though for this question. That was a brilliant system and the rulebook was a pleasure to read. It also changed the way I thought about RPGs and character generation forever.

20th What is the best source of out of print RPGs.

The only sites I have ever looked at for these are ebay and amazon marketplace. I guess the point of this question is that if you scanned twitter for the answer to this question then you are going to find a few gems of sites that are little known but will worth knowing about.

I bet scribt has a load of old RPGs uploaded as illegal copies, you seem to be able to find just about anything on there!

21st Which RPG does the most with the least words?

I assume they do not mean shortest rule set. I know there are tons of one page ‘rulebooks’ out there. I am going to answer with CarWars again. We used to role play it ans I think the game has a single character stat for your life which was 3 if you were healthy and maybe three skills driving, combat and mechanic if I remember rightly. So your entire character sheet was 4 words long and 4 numbers. The vehicle character sheet was a box with maybe 6 sets of initials, MG for machine gun, RR for recoiless rifle, PR for puncture resistant tyres and so on. It has to be the game with the least vocabulary of them all!

That was a brilliant game and we spent months playing a CW campaign with just these couple of skills. The next game I played after that was champions and the game after that was RM2. Champions and RM2 were all about skills (and powers), that is what what defined your character, that is what allowed you to craft exactly the character you wanted to play. But that was the impression I got with just Character Law and shortly afterwards Companion I. So at that point there were maybe 45 skills. Over the years we added every companion and all the Laws but with 200 skills the characters were no more unique. In fact I think the most skills that were added the more similar the characters became. Some of the skills became essentials such as tumble attack and tumble evade, two weapon combo and iai strike, at least in our games. The same was true of herb lore and sense ambush.

I suspect that that experience of playing CW with the 3 word (4 words if you include the characters name) character sheets may have stayed with me and gone some way towards inspiring my super light RM variant. You never know.

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#RPGaDAY2017 15th to 18th

I am having a frustrating week this week. I had so many plans, my wife is away at the Edinburgh Fringe so I could really dedicate loads of time to just writing (and horse riding whenever I get stuck). As it happens I have spent the week mostly in the car going from one place to another and have achieved very little and I have the same in store all weekend! This was supposed to be the week I tackled my Rolemaster for young players project (GameMaster Kids). For a bit of light relief I was going to put some more meat on the bones of my HARP/FATE hybrid under the working title of FART. I am way behind with my 50 in 50 adventures and that just about sums up my week.

This weeks questions for #RPGaDAY 2017 could be answered in just two words. I am not a hoarder of games and books and nor do I buy stuff I have no intention of using. When you see the questions you will understand…

15th Which RPG do you enjoy adpating the most?

Well Duh, that would be Rolemaster.

16th Which RPG do you enjoy using as is?

That would be Rolemaster and more specificaly RMC.

17th Which RPG have you owned for the longest but not played?

This would be HARP that I bought last Christmas and is still as yet unplayed.

18th Which RPG have you played the most in your life?

Anyone for Rolemaster?

So the answers were either Rolemaster or HARP. I think RMC specifically works well as is and without any house rules if you want a pretty generic fantasy RPG. I have dropped wholesale into the Forgotten Realms without modification and as D&D was equally generic it just works. I could just have as easily dropped it into Greyhawk and had the same results.

My adaptation of RMC into my own game is a result of wanting to make the rules invisible during normal play. If I had may way there would be no need to pick up a rulebook from the start from the session to the end. I haven’t achieved that because of Arms Law or which ever flavour of combat system you prefer. About 50% of the effort went into adapting the rules to what I wanted and the other 50% went into adapting my prep time. The better organised I am the less time is lost at the gaming table. That is true of every GM but as you all probably know I go so far as to copy and paste sections of the rule books from the PDFs into my game notes so that if someone were to be at risk of drowning then the rule for that is the next paragraph in my notes, if you may fall off a cliff the next page in my notes is the Fall/Crush table from Arms Law and so on. I have merged rules and adventure notes so I need no other documents beyond characters sheets, my notes and the combat tables (and even those I have as individual sheets that I sort so that I only have the weapons/attacks I need for that session to minimise the number of pages. The less pages then the less page flipping to find the right table!)

So there you have it. I fairly uninspiring set of answers this week. Next week is more about publishers and different games so the answers will not all be RM & HARP.

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#RPGaDAY2017 12th, 13th & 14th plus more!

So I am continuing with the #RPGaDAY but I have more exciting news!

The August issue of the Rolemaster Fanzine is now for sale on RPGNow and this is the Shadow  World special.

This issue has a reprint of two of my favourite BriH Shadow World articles from the blog, the interview with Terry and chapter one of the Loremaster Legacy, Terry’s novel.

Whilst not RM related I am really pleased to be able to link to my game on Amazon. This is my latest achievement and it is really nice to see the book in print. The PDF and print version should be on OneBookShelf this week and the Kindle edition the week after.

So with that out of the way here are my RPGaDAY questions.

12th Which RPG has the most inspiring interior art?

One of the funny things about these questions is that it makes you think about things that you may otherwise not given a thought to.  I think the original MERP art was probably the best I have ever seen and was definitely in keeping with the original LotR books.

13th Describe a game experience that changed how you play.

I think I have told this story before. We were meeting for the first session of a spacemaster game. Rather than all sitting around creating characters together we were split up and the GM started us playing our characters, describing the scenes and we started role playing before the characters were rolled up. The GM shuttled between us nipping from kitchen to living room and I had drawn the short straw and had the bathroom! This was the first time I actually knew my character before I put pen to paper and picked skills. Now I always have that really strong concept before I even start. Incidentally, that was the shortest campaign I ever played in as we all accidentally killed each other at the first meeting after only one character uttered just one word. There had been a sort of cat and mouse game going on with each character thinking they were being followed or were following a bad guy. We ended up in a mexican stand off but with concealed weapons in a taverna until one character who seemed to be oblivious to all of this walked in, came to our table and said “Hello” at which point everyone opened fire. I was using an assault blaster at point blank range and I remember rolling a straight 66 for my critical. I also ended up bleading about 8hits a round from several wounds by the end of the round, stunned and about to pass out. I don’t think anyone survived beyond fire phase A of the first round.

14th Which rpg do you prefer for open-ended campaign play?

This has to be Rolemaster and RMC for me and to further clarify my level-less and profession-less variant. I am not going to bang on about it because you have all heard it before.