Blog – Page 9 – The Rolemaster Blog

November 25, 2017February 27, 2018

My Experiences in RPG Self-Publishing – Part 2

This is Part 2 of an article series on self publishing in the RPG industry. Also see Part 1 and Part 3.

Setting the Price

Price is a tricky one. There is a temptation – which I fell into – of undercutting the competition, but in the long run, this really doesn’t help anyone. OneBookShelf (OBS) tend to say don’t sell for under $1 (although $0.99 can help sales and makes little realistic difference). If the supplement includes artwork, especially artwork which you are unlikely to be able to reuse but costs money to buy, this can mean that a higher selling price is necessary.

OneBookShelf also allows for Pay What You Want supplements, where the purchaser chooses what price they think the supplement is worth. I prefer doing this to out and out free. Naturally, the price most choose is nothing, but some may come back and then pay more than you would have priced the supplement for. Plus, these customers may also be added to your mailing list, a potential future source of income.

Some publishers offer most, or all, of their material for free. Often, this is because they have a Patreon campaign that generates the money in another way.

Where to Actually Sell

The OneBookShelf network is by far the biggest player in the niche. There is also the Paizo store, the Open Gaming Store and Warehouse 23 from Steve Jackson Games. Amazon, through Kindle and CreateSpace, is another. There are also other more specialised sites such as Fantasy Grounds and Roll20, which sell material for tabletop software systems, which tend to require knowledge of how to create or adapt material to these. Such content can also be sold through OBS as well. OBS do offer a 5% exclusivity bonus, if you only sell on their sites, but many of the bigger players cover multiple markets, so it’s likely that there’s a definite advantage to doing so, if you can. There are other print on demand publishers, such as Lulu too.

A final option is a store on your own site. Although this will likely give the highest percentage – after all, you won’t need to pay a percentage to another store’s owner – it can also be the trickiest to do.

Sales & Marketing

OBS has tracking codes, which they call source codes. These can be used to track where a sale came from (if the person creating a link used them; the codes you see in a marketing source report are not solely the ones you create yourself, but all relevant ones), although these do get overwritten when another is clicked.

My highest sales numbers come from the various OBS internal codes combined, especially from the front page and also purchased (these, being listed as FrontPage and also_purchased, are very easy to spot); however, over the past year OBS changed the ranking algorithm so that it ranks by money made from a supplement, not number of supplements sold. This generally benefits the bigger publishers – who tend to create more expensive products; smaller publishers who make the occasional pricey supplement also benefit – and OBS, who make more money from larger sales, but it’s not so good for the smaller publisher who has lots of pocket-money priced items. This was notable in the past couple of OBS sales, when products were selling in numbers of about a tenth of what they did in similar sales last year, because they were no longer at the top of the sales listings.

My next major source of sales is through emails to my mailing list through the OBS email system. I send out emails when new products are released, and I give discounts on some new releases, to keep people interested in subscribing to the list, and link to other products and sales as well if they are appropriate. I used to always send an email out at the start of a sale as well, but just prior to the Black Friday/Cyber Monday sale OBS essentially asked publishers not to do this, as they had already notified customers (although this was stated before the customers were actually notified). Not that surprising, because it wasn’t unknown to get a lot of emails from many different publishers, but telling my customers and potential customers about site sales always generated product sales, and a generic one by OBS does not have the same effect.

The footers on the OBS sites can be used to promote similar items, and this is probably the next largest source of combined sales. Not every product has a footer, as yet, but I add footers with other relevant products when I see some that are related.

I also sell a few through my own site, although this doesn’t sell that many as yet; it probably pays for the domain name at best (the hosting is basically paid for elsewhere). The site needs more useful content in order to attract people who then might click through and purchase products.

The sales generated by social media are harder to quantify. I only know of one sale that came through social media, Facebook in its case, but that customer purchased about 50 products! Update: I have just started getting results from Pinterest after quite a few years of posting on the site. My pins have just started being reposted a lot (both my own supplements and reviews of other peoples) and this has resulted in an uptick in views and a number of definite sales.

Another area I have got a few sales from is ads in products themselves. I’ve added links to related products in the back of a few recent supplements, which can also fill up empty space! This has generated a few sales, but nothing significant as yet.

Probably the most important lesson to take from the source codes is to actually use them, every time you create a link.

Continued in Part 3

November 24, 2017November 23, 2017

Relative Adventuring

This is not my idea but one I have borrowed from the Conan game by Modiphius.

Imagine you are reading an adventure module for Rolemaster. The adventure describes an ambush by goblins at a river ford. In the details it says ‘There will be two goblins for every character’. In the next encounter, in an outer chamber of the goblin lair the numbers are ‘There will be three more goblins than characters.’

Every encounter describes the strength of the encounter relative to the strength of the adventuring party.

We all know in RM superior numbers can be the critical factor in a battle. Even a first level character can open ended and kill anything in the first round if they are lucky enough.

My party of 5th level characters got into serious trouble against a raiding party of kobolds. The same raid against D&D characters would have been a non-event.

So the idea is that the level that the adventure is pitched at is highly flexible. If you write an adventure and the main bad guy is a 70th level drake then that is not a starting adventure but more middle of the road stuff just flexes to meet the strength of the party, not by level but by threat.

This has never really been an issue before now, but as the number of monsters available grows and now eDGCLTD is sowing the seeds of self publishing, BriH is asking about short form monster stat blocks all the pieces are coming together for unofficial RM modules.

So what are your thoughts?

November 23, 2017November 28, 2017

My Experiences in RPG Self-Publishing – Part 1

So, Brian asked me to write a post on some of my own experiences with self-publishing RPG supplements, which I’ve been doing for about three years, although my first and second supplements were five months apart! All but one week since the second supplement was published has had a new one released every week (although some were art packs, not written), and recently two have been published weekly. This post wound up being rather longer than I expected, so it’s been split into three parts.

Part 1: How I Started Self-Publishing, How to Know What Will Succeed and Art & Layout

Part 2: Setting the Price, Where to Actually Sell and Sales & Marketing

Part 3: Do Reviews Help or Hinder? and What Return to Expect?

How I Started Self-Publishing

I discovered the OneBookShelf sites (the OBS network consists of many different sites; perhaps the most important for RPG supplement writers are DriveThruRPG and RPGNow, and perhaps Dungeon Masters Guild and Storytellers Vault) some years back whilst looking for material for a phpBB forum based game called Advanced Dungeons & Rabbits. Some years later, as I mentioned elsewhere, I looked at things being published and thought “I could do that.”

At the date of writing this, I have published 136 of my own (written) supplements, totalling 403,857 words. One of these has been published in a Pathfinder edition as well, adding another 4,294 words (I plan to convert some others to Pathfinder and probably other systems too). I have also published 3 outsourced supplements, totalling 13,574 words, and adapted two of those to system neutral versions from Pathfinder, another 10,520 words. With Brian and Peter here I have also published 4 supplements, totalling 2,639 words, as part of the 50 in 50 adventures that are being released at the rate of one per week. I also have a few bundles and art-related items on sale, the latter either images created for my own projects or experiments done whilst creating images to use.

How to Know What Will Succeed

It’s difficult knowing what will be successful in creative matters. Consider that big companies get this wrong all the time. Think of Hollywood box office flops with budgets of hundreds of millions of dollars or, on the other hand, books by unknown authors that the publisher only prints a couple of thousand copies of to start with, because that’s how big they think the market is (think J.K. Rowling and the Harry Potter franchise).

A starting point would be to do what you like, or want, or need for your own game, as odds are there will be at least a few people with a similar opinion. Looking through my portfolio, you will notice quite a lot of supplements connected to books, books being my own particular area of interest. If something does seem to be working, try to produce more of the same, or similar.

Writing for popular systems such as Pathfinder and D&D 5E specifically also increases the potential market but it often also increases the potential competition, and there is some third party competition out there that produces material of a higher quality than the big companies. There are a lot of systems that can be written for under the Open Game License, and there’s nothing to stop you creating your own (as long as it is your own). Pathfinder and 5E might have the biggest potential markets but, if you don’t enjoy writing for those, don’t do it. Not many people get rich in this market which makes enjoyment very important.

Art & Layout

Great Race of Yith — Publisher’s Choice Quality Stockart © Rick Hershey/Fat Goblin Games (http://www.fatgoblingames.com)

Art and layout can be a big problem for the small publisher, due to the expense of software and material.

Regarding layout, there are options for those with a limited budget. Scribus is free desktop publishing software and Microsoft Word is another option; however, I recently purchased the entire Adobe CS6 package – including InDesign – for under £20 from a seller on eBay. According to them – and they’d sold a lot of this and other software – it’s legal in the EU to resell second hand software from scrapped computers. Given that you couldn’t link it to your Adobe account, I’d say technically legal but Adobe really doesn’t like the fact that it is (the seller doesn’t currently have it for sale). Another alternative is that you can also always partner up with someone else who has skills or software you lack.

Nicer looking supplements can sell better, and do tend to look more professional, but remember that the supplements being well written, with few errors in the text, is the most important starting point. Good looking rubbish is still rubbish. Such can still be damaged by poor layout or appearance of course – the most likely cause of this is from poor font choices; remember, people need to be able to read the finished product. Odd fonts can work for headings but don’t have an entire supplement in some weird font. I have seen supplements which were a pain to read because the publisher had used a difficult font throughout. If you have good material, you don’t want to hide it behind a poor font, but picking good fonts is a skill in itself and professionally made fonts are not cheap to buy either. Stick to the standard included fonts at first. Generally, I use 12 point Verdana for the text (font size is important as well) having read a suggestion to use that in the past. Boring fonts like Times New Roman are still good choices for readability.

Artwork for supplements, as Peter and I have discussed in the past, can be a problem. Some things, especially such as bestiaries, really need images for all the monsters and that, even using stock, can quickly become expensive. The lowest typical stock prices for such are a couple of dollars or so each. A bestiary of 50 monsters could be the best part of $100 just for the pictures and easily more.

My most expensive (in terms of its selling price) supplement has eight pieces of stock art in it, plus the page backgrounds, the latter being much easier to reuse (I have all of Lord Zsezse Works’ templates). These eight pieces cost over $20, and that’s only because they were bought at reduced prices – they would cost just shy of $80 to buy at full price at the moment, and these are stock images, not custom. Custom images can cost a lot more. $40-$50 each is not unreasonable for a single monster or similar.

There are ways of creating cheaper artwork, by doing it yourself. I’ve used photos, either my own or others that are legal to use, and tweaked them using filters so that they look more like illustrations. I’ve also created some images from scratch, using such as Photoshop, Blender (free) and GIMP (free). These ways may not always look as good as those done by professionals (unless you have skills that way yourself) but they do save money – although generally not time.

Continued in Part 2

November 22, 2017November 21, 2017

Rolemaster Profession Review: The Many Flavors of Magic-Users.

I got a couple emails on my last blog regarding Shamans so I thought I would expand the conversation to include “Magic-Users”.

First off, my over-arching point about Shamans is an extension of my discussions on Clerics and Priests in general. The Rolemaster Cleric is really just the Channeling archetype; there are numerous variations that could be treated as “sub-classes” or unique Professions (like Shamans or Animists). Herein lies a systemic problem with Rolemaster–what determines whether a class idea needs a whole new profession with base lists and individual skill costs or whether it can just be a variation of skill selection using an established profession? Why have an Animist/Druid and not the Shaman? Why should there be a “Barbarian” profession and not a “Mercenary”?

The same could be said for Essence users–why is there just a “Magician” and an “Illusionist”? To fit into the D&D system? Instead, let’s flip our viewpoint–there are just Pure Essence Users, but their title (professional name) is dependent on the class or type of spells they master. Since I’ve expanded the elemental lists with BASiL, there are now enough spell lists for each elemental type that there at least half a dozen Magician types. Add in a few other tropes and the Essence Caster can be expanded just like the Channeling Caster.

Here are some templates that I use in my SW campaign:

“Elementalist”. This a broad term for a Mage that has mastered one or more of the Elements: Wind, Water, Earth, Cold, Fire, Light, Dark. Depending on that focus they may have a more specific professional name: FireMage, Windlord, Earthcaster, Dark Magician, Light Wizard etc. (In our campaign, “Elementalist” is the moniker for a Mage who masters 3 or more Elements and an Archmage is a caster who masters 3 or more “realms”).

“Aspected Mage”. This is Mage whose core powers are focused on an aspect or discipline: “Sound”, “Defense”, “Dimensions”, “Necromancy”, “Magic”, “Demonology”–really the sky is the limit. Generally I like to have at least 3 similar spell lists to define an Aspect or Focus; otherwise I’ll just throw the list into open or closed. Obviously, I stick to BASiL, but with the various Companions including Elemental Companion, Guild Companions and user generated lists, you can put together a HUGE list of possible Mage focuses.

This process creates very diverse but specific Mage types; each with their own strengths and weaknesses. Peter has discussed rolling Channeling into Essence–doing that would greatly expand the various Mage disciplines: you could have “Healing”, “Creations”, “Weather”, “Flora and/or Fauna” aspects for Mages along with the traditional elements and other standard RM Essence lists.

Now, imagine if you will your players encountering their opponent: a Mage surrounded by his minions for the final battle. They know the Mage is an Essence user…but what else? Now it’s not just a binary choice between a Magician and an Illusionist. Do they buff themselves against heat? cold? electricity? What if the Mage has mastered the Shield Law spells (BASiL). He would be able to buff his followers and himself from Elemental attacks, spells and missile and melee damage to a great extant. That’s a whole different tactical situation than what the PCs may be use too!

By simply broadening the spell lists and grouping them thematically, you can create dozens of distinct Mage types. This is not the same as allowing players to cherry pick the very best lists for their BASE. This doesn’t ‘break’ the game but adds a tremendous variety to it.

November 17, 2017November 15, 2017

A trailer for RMU? Yes please!

Is this the most awesome trailer for a role playing game you have ever seen?

To be honest I had no idea that people even made CGI trailers for rpgs! You can download a free sample of the game giving you character creation and an introduction (41 pages in total) here http://bit.ly/MutantFree.

The publisher must have thought of that too. So not only do they have the 41 page intro book but they also have a 66 page MUTANT: Year Zero – Starter Booklet.

Surely, that creates a funnel to draw people in? Hook them with the movie, give them a range of free material to get them hooked, let them play the game. Only then do they need to actually pay for the game book. At $24.99 it is hardly the most expensive game in the world and you do get a 269 page rule book for your money. So M:YZ is not a light game by any standards.

Since the original release in Oct 2015 there have been 11 releases for M:YZ, so what is that, once every two months? Strip out the freebie intros and you are looking at 1 every 3 months. Oh yeah, there are just two writers and everyone else works freelance.

Here is something else. This is the hook or vignette as BriH blogged about…”She had wandered too far into the Zone. Tula had walked through the dark forest, followed the old rail tracks between crumbling ruins and rusting train wrecks, towards the glimmering silver disks by the horizon. She wanted to reach them so bad. Become a hero of the Ark. A famous stalker. Now, she would be a dead stalker. If the thirst didn’t kill her, zone ghouls or the rot would. That’s when she saw them. Scattered across the ground like metallic rag dolls. Machine beings. Dead for decades. Tula had heard stories of them. What had happened here? Suddenly she heard a noise. Growls. Voices. Tula drew her scrap pistol and got ready to fight for her life.”

A strong female lead to promote your game? Welcome to the 21st century!

I think ICE etal. could learn a lot from M:YZ. How to entice people into trying the game, about 21st century marketing, about feeding the desires of the fans.

Now for a funny thing. M:YZ was first written in 1984 as a Swedish language game. It was somewhat niche due to the language barrier but it is of the same vintage as RM, has just gone through a reinvention, just like RMU and needs to reach a broader audience, just like RMU.

Are there lessons to be learned?

I personally don’t see the need to put character creation in the free sample or quickstart rules. I fall on the side of give them pregens and get people playing. That is about the only thing I would have done differently.

Finally, this is slightly worrying, the highlighting is mine but look at the feature list.

269 page full colour core RPG rulebook – everything you need!
Create a unique mutant player character – including skills, talents, mutations, gear and relationships – in mere minutes.
Push your character’s skills to their limits, releasing amazing mutant powers in the process.
Fight fast and furious battles, making every bullet count and using a detailed list of gruesome critical injuries.
Set your game in one of the Zones provided – The Big Smoke and The Dead Apple – or create your own Zone, based on your home town.
Develop the Ark – your settlement in the Zone – by undertaking Projects, building a new society.
Explore the Zone using the grid map and the unique sector generation system that populates the Zone with mutants, monsters and phenomena.
Experience the five Special Zone Sectors – scenario locations that can be placed in any sector of the Zone.
Search for the mysterious Eden bunker in the Path to Eden campaign frame provided, which includes an epic finale.

November 15, 2017November 14, 2017

Rolemaster Spell Law Deconstruction.

If you follow the Rolemaster threads or the RMU threads you’ll see people asking for clarification on a certain spell, list or spell mechanic. With so many spells, various realms and lots of companion spell lists, it’s not surprising that the Spell Law edifice is showing a few cracks after 30+ years. For me that started the process of “deconstruction”–tearing down Spell Law and looking at it from a unbiased and objective mindset.

Examining RM from an outside perspective is hard, especially after playing it for almost 35 years. Us older players perceive Rolemaster through “incrementalism”: a slow gradual process of accepting new rules, add-ons, discussions and analysis that occurred over decades. Rolemaster now is the result of layering new rules onto older accepted ones–even if the original rules don’t stand up to new scrutiny or are not needed since RM has transitioned past its role as a D&D bolt on.

Every time I sit down and work on spell lists, I discover some new issue, opportunity or conflict that I want to tackle to rebuild my spell system to something newer, better and more consistent. I have 5 rough spell law “issue groups” that I have pinned to my work space for easy reference. These are:

Thematic or mechanical inconsistencies
Exceptions to established rules.
Bonuses for compound actions.
Realm incompatibilities.
Form vs function.

I use these to test spells and lists. What Realm should they be assigned? How does the spell work? Is it structurally consistent? What is the casting mechanism? Does it work using Rolemaster rules or does it require a one-off rule?

What are some examples of “broken” spells? (this is just my opinion!)

Bladeturn. Few spells garner as much discussion as the Bladeturn spells. But rather than contort mechanics to make the spell actually work in the game, how about we examine the spell fundamentals. Here are a few issues:

Do the various Bladeturn spells work with the Shield or Blur spell on the same list? Clearly Turn/Deflect works as some type of telekinetic process, while Shield is a energy manifestation and Blur is a visual distortion. So while they can be grouped thematically as a “defense list”, I would argue they don’t quite fit together mechanistically.
Spell Law spent a lot of rule making energy establishing class I-III for casting times and makes a case for a vocal and nonvocal components to casting. Given that, how do you then justify “instantaneous” spells? Essence casting requires 1-3 rounds, vocalization, hand gestures to cast…except a handful of spells littered throughout the Essence lists. That’s consistent. The reason Bladeturn is instantaneous is that it HAS TO BE, for the spell to work as intended.
Even accepting the rule exception of instantaneous Essence spells, RM describes a melee roll as representing a “flurry of blows”. How then does an instant, specific bladeturn work when there is no discrete, single swing or stroke of a weapon that can be identified as “the one that hits” within an abstract combat round?

Solutions. I have come up with my own in BASiL, but a couple of quick ideas: incorporate Bladeturn/Deflect spells into the Essence Hand list where they belong; change its mechanistic underpinning. For instance, call it “Slow Blade” so it works within the context of a “flurry of blows”.

How about Charm, Sleep and the whole Spirit Mastery list? I’ve commented on this before, but if you look through the Essence lists there are few, if any, other lists that work on the “spirit”, “conscious” or “mind” of a target. Does this list even belong in Essence? Of course the answer is that D&D established the principle that Magic-Users were to have Charm and Sleep spell, and so too Rolemaster.

How about Lofty Bridge? Does Leave/Jump/Teleport work on the same principles as Flying, Landing or Leaping? Again, half the spells work as “gating/teleporting”, while the other through telekinetic or motive energy. While they are arguably both types of “transportation” spells, it seems illogical to have a spell list comprised of spells using very different mechanics.

What about spells that give bonuses to skills or actions? How does this work mechanically? Combat is a compound action–a confluence of skill (ranks), natural ability (stats) and other modifiers. What is this spell affecting? Does the spell guide the hand that holds the sword? Does it make the sword sharper? The swordsmen’s strength higher? Their agility improves? Any one of these could be a good mechanic, but aren’t explained. Why make spells that require so much hand-waving when Rolemaster is a system that rewards realism?

A few other ideas to improve Spell Law:

Consolidate Spell Reins and Spell Enhancement. Spell Reins has 11 open slots, Enhancement only has 12 spells. Both deal with manipulating spell effects.
Combine Physical Enhancement with Living Change but dump the “Merge” Spells.

Peter has blogged about his own spell system–basically it allows players to organically “grow” a list from 1st level using spell research. I’m assuming Peter requires some internal consistency when players develop a list, otherwise why wouldn’t they just build one dream list of: 1. Sleep 2. Shock Bolt 3. Fly 4. Charm. 5. Fireball 6 etc….

So interestingly, while I like how Peter approaches spell development, I think it would be difficult to encapsulate into a rules system–it’s too loose. However, Peter’s system is basically how I write new spell lists!

Once you start deconstructing and re-examining Spell Law, areas of improvement are both numerous and fairly obvious. But in the end, few people have the time or energy to fiddle around and make large revisions to Spell Law.

November 13, 2017November 13, 2017

How Low Can You Go?

I spent the weekend playing a different RPG(!)

We ran a session of d6 Fantasy from West End Games. It was interesting from the point of view of having never played the game before and ignoring the loads of pregen characters provided and diving straight in to character creation we were still up and playing in less than 30 minutes.

I was expecting a really simplistic game with none of the detail of RM but I was pleasantly surprised.

I was playing a thief, I like thieves as initial characters for a game as they can do more than just a fighter but typically you are handy with a sword as well.

So we had 7 stats to play with, six covering mental and physical attributes and one for magic. To all intents and purposes stats are point buy as you have 18 dice and you assign them to each stat. So I ended up with 4 dice each in the strength and dexterity departments, three dice in the intelligence and acumen and only 1 dice for magic.

There was an option to get more dice to spend on skills by taking disadvantages or to spend some of you skill dice on advantages, think talents and flaws and you would not be far wrong. This time I avoided this as I didn’t really want to pick a disadvantage and find out that what I thought I had and what the GM thought I had were two very different things! For a first character I wanted to keep it simple.

Having assigned those dice we then got seven more dice to assign to specific skills. The game offered about 50 skills. You can add no more than two additional dice to specific skills. I those to add one dice to seven skills.

The mechanics are really simple. Mostly you have to roll 10+ to succeed. You roll the number of dice you have in the governing stat plus any additional skill dice. So for example I had 4 dice in Coordination and 1 dice in lock picking so I would roll 4d6 for each coordination skill test except when lock picking I get to roll 5d6.

One dice in each roll is exploding when you roll a 6, so just like an open ended you keep the 6 and roll again adding to the total. Get another 6 and you add and roll again. Maybe in was my inner rolemaster but getting an open ended roll on average every 6th roll felt like bonanza time!

The adventure was an old school dungeon crawl where we fought Hobgoblins in the upper levels but they had disturbed an undead horror when they had set up their camp.

The whole thing was every enjoyable and I don’t often get to play which also made a pleasant change.

So what about combat? Well we were using the wounds system so basically I could sustain 5 levels of being wounded and the better the damage roll the more wounds you sustained. One wound stunned you, three was a severe wound, five was potentially mortal. The exploding dice thing happens with damage rolls as well as skill rolls so if you were lucky you could one punch a beasty with an open ended damage roll.

The damage was described using location and severity. I killed a hobgoblin and the GM said that I struck the hobgoblin in the chest causing a mortal wound. It was no ’66’ on a critical but it was definitely better than doing 8 hit points damage.

So what did I think?

I like my games simple and fast to play. I liked the speed with which we got down to actual play. There were more skills available in this game than I use in my RM campaign. The way that stats play an important part in the game is something I had independently arrived at for my own game.

The combat was no Rolemaster. It was actually slower to resolve than my house ruled RM. In D6 Fantasy you roll to hit, and you roll damage, the defender gets to roll a physique roll and add their armour dice to that. If you did more damage than their total of physique plus armour then you deliver a wound. The ‘units’ digit of your attack roll gives the location and the GM rolls 2d6 for a graphic damage description such as lacerations, gashes and broken bones. How much you exceed the defenders physique+armour tells you how severe the wound is. Just like Rolemaster wounds confer penalties to skill rolls.

That is much more convoluted than roll your attack, add OB deduct DB, roll your crit.

There are some nice elements. They have something called Character Points, you start with five and you can spend them after you have made a roll to add additional d6 to the roll. If you are dodging and you do a terrible dodge roll you could spend a character point to add an additional d6 to your dodge. You can keep spending them until you have no more points or you are happy with the result. If you rolled that terrible dodge and spend a character point and roll another 1 then you may want to spend a second point to add another d6 and so on.

I don’t use Fate points to let players dodge the bullet, so to speak, but the Rolemaster equivalent I suppose would be to give each character a pool of 5 +20 modifiers. If they make a bad roll then they could spend one of their 5 to boost the rolls.

These character points then form part of the experience system where they can be used as described or spent to improve skills.

The game also has Fate points. These are less dramatic than more Rolemaster implementations. They double the number of dice you get to roll for a skill roll for just that one roll. Character points you can declare after you know your final roll, Fate points must be declared before you roll the dice.

During our game session I did use character points, I assume I was going to earn some in experience, but not my Fate point.

Can Rolemaster Learn from WEG D6?

The number of template or pregen PCs featured in the core rules was a definite plus. I didn’t use one but I did look at one and learn what I should be aiming for.

The other striking thing was that WEG (West End Games) D6 was very much aimed at welcoming new role players. The text said it assumed that everyone knew what an RPG was but that was all that was assumed. This was a stark contrast to RM that likes to think of itself as an ‘advanced’ system. I suppose if you call yourself ‘advanced’ or for ‘experienced’ players then you have an excuse for excessive complexity. If players or GMs don’t like then they can go play something else. I am not sure that is a positive attitude, but it fits with much of the discussion on the boards.

I personally would love it if ICE sat down with some late teen/early 20s, inexperienced role players and hand guided them through RMU and then revised the text accordingly. I am not saying make it childish. What I would like them to do is make it accessible and welcoming to new players. That is the lesson that RM can learn from WEG.

November 7, 2017November 7, 2017

RMU and Kickstarter

I’ve mentioned Kickstarter, and Patreon, a few times in the past. For those who aren’t that familiar with them, what both of those, and others like Indiegogo, do is reduce the risk for making products. Essentially, you are getting a guaranteed income rather than a potential one. The guaranteed income may be lower – but if a product doesn’t work out it will actually be higher. So, lower risk.

Now, I don’t actually think that it would be a good idea running a Kickstarter to complete RMU. The process is simply taking too long, and depends too much on freelancers with variable time, that running a Kickstarter would have a very high risk of simply annoying the backers due to how long it takes. There’s a great article on running regular Kickstarters by a very successful one man band in The Sandbox #1.

OneBookShelf and Print on Demand

What I do think Kickstarter could help with is getting RMU out there. Sure, OneBookShelf is a great network for electronic and print on demand books, but it doesn’t really work for getting the books in bricks and mortar shops. OBS does offer a discount for bulk purchases, up to 20% for 250+, but that’s a lot of books, a lot of investment and the margins aren’t really that great. 50-99 books only gives a 5% discount and 100-249 10%. The smaller amounts will work for conventions and similar, but not really for distributing to shops.

Making Money

In such a case you need a margin that’s high enough that both retailer and publisher makes money. Supposedly TSR was losing money on its boxes in the 90s; no matter what you think, if every product loses you money, you cannot make it back on volume. All that does is simply cost more money.

To really get into bricks and mortar means dealing with traditional printing and distributors, and that has problems itself – especially as, for books, the U.S. has an appalling concept whereby retailers can get back everything they paid for books even though they haven’t returned the product but destroyed it. I can’t think of anywhere else where you would be given a full refund for a product you’d chucked away. RPGs might not be classed as books, but as games, but it’s still a potential problem. Again, with TSR and, I think, the old ICE, both wound up with problems due to traditional distribution.

How Kickstarter Could Help

So, you want to get into bricks and mortar shops but you can’t afford the risk – which could easily destroy the company – of paying for up front printing and distribution of books, which may never make the money back. That’s where I think that Kickstarter could help. If a successful campaign was run that could pay for this, the risk would be greatly reduced. It would also be possible to reduce the risk for retailers, by offering books on sale or return – they may well not want to risk money on inventory that they have no definite interest in.

Setting up such a campaign would need some careful planning to make sure the numbers work, and might not get a huge amount of support to begin with, but, if done successfully, it could get RMU out there in front of a wider audience – and, by having physical books for sale in shops, make the system look like it’s here to stay.

October 30, 2017

…and another Happy Halloween!

Brian got in there first with his Happy Halloween From BriH post. He signs off by saying that “I know all of us at Rolemasterblog have a lot of work in store for the coming year.” This was timely as on Saturday we released our first mini supplement. I say mini as it is a single page adventure hook. This one was written by BriH and edited by Edgcltd, published by Azukail Games and sold on RPGnow. Now it only costs 50¢ but that is not the point.

Spires Reach is the first of 50. All 50 are already written and cued up. If we were allowed to give you NPCs in all their detail, Monster stats for the encounters and so on then these would not be just a couple of pages of adventure hooks, or locations or outlines of adventures. These would be much more substantial adventures.

You may ask who is going to pay even 50¢ for an adventure hook like Spires Reach? I don’t know the answer to that but they are selling as I can see the royalty reports.

I spent yesterday evening writing the next edition of the fanzine which looks like it is going to be the biggest issue yet. I am full steam ahead on converting monsters. These free to use monsters will mean that anyone can start to create adventure modules for any version of RM.

I am convinced that if there were a 3rd party industry for producing adventures and supplements for Rolemaster then the system would be more attractive to the gaming community. Right now RM is just a game people used to play in 80s. If anything Rolemaster is a bit like Latin, yes, sure a small number of people can still speak it but to most they think of it as a dead language. Rolemaster is not dead but it is going take a small band of plucky adventurers to take on the quest to save Rolemaster, especially if RMU is not going to be on the shelves until the 2020s!

If the RPG year starts now then the next year is going to be really exciting.

October 23, 2017

Thought Experiment Update

I huge thank you to everyone that sent me character sheets!

The brief was intentionally vague to give everyone creative freedom. Most people produced a non spell using rogue or thief which is what I has sort of expected. My Xan is exactly in that vein.

Things that really stood out were that I got three RMU characters. Seeing as RMU is still in play test and the experiment was for people who had house ruled character creation I had only expected one RMU character and that was Hurin’s who uses individual skill costs.

An interesting aside here but RMU is not yet published and the developers are pretty determined to stick with category skill costs. On the other hand there is already one ‘officially sanctioned’ optional rule in the form of Hurin’s individual skill costs published in the Guild Companion completely undoing the developers work. Only in Rolemaster eh?

The fact that RMU character creation is being house ruled while still in play test make one wonder about what is being tested? My personal intermittent play test is still RAW but with JDales new tables applied.

Back to Xan

I have distilled the character down to just a few really basic numbers. If you were reading a module or adventure and she was an incidental NPC then you may just get a one liner.

The ‘average’ Xan taking every sheet I received looked something like this.

#Hits 64, OB (shortsword) +59, DB +14, Perception +28
She typically has 18 additional skill including primary and secondary skills.

If you compare that to the off the peg NPCs in Character Law (RMC version) you get

#Hits 20, OB (shortsword) +30, DB +0, Perception +15.

The house ruled characters are far more functional than the off the peg NPC. In addition nearly every Xan has a secondary attack and either multiple attack or two weapon combo and many have given her a thrown dagger as well.

Interestingly, one came back with a single spell list.

I do want to look at the characters in more detail later but I thought I should really do something immediately as you all took the time to send them to me.

So the immediate take away is that all these Xans are more functional than RAW characters. I make my starting characters more functional as it is more fun to be capable than not. There is more fun in being able to survive more than one hit with a sword, all baring the critical, than not. These heroes are more heroic than RAW player characters.

The impression I have got so far is that house rules in general are making RM more survivable for starting characters than the rules a written.

More to follow…