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#RPGaDAY 8th, 9th, 10th and11th

So this is my third instalment of #RPGaDAY. Most of the questions this week seem to be about different systems so it will be hard to relate them Rolemaster.

8th What is a good RPG to play for sessions of 2hrs or less?

This depends on how you read the question. I think RM is a good candidate for this. One of the cool things about RM character sheets (booklets?) is that they hold just about everything you need to play. This is especially true if you include combat tables and spell lists in the character sheets. Bolt on things like Combat Minion and you get a game that you can get into and start playing very quickly. If you need to create characters in that 2hrs then having the first session exclusively dedicated to character creation will get all the characters made with time to spare. So my answer is RMC.

9th What is a good RPG to play for about 10 sessions?

This time I don’t think RM fits the bill. As a rule of thumb is seems that most GMs are levelling characters up every 3 sessions or so. In a mini campaign of 10 sessions that would advance the characters three or 4 levels. There is not really that much difference between a 1st and a 4th level character. At those lowest levels fighters are king and even the pure spell users have little more than shock bolt. Looking at the time, some players take forever to level up their characters so levelling up 3 times in 10 sessions takes a fairly big chunk out of your available playing time. So RM is not a good option for this particular format.

What does work well (shameless plug!) is my own game 3Deep. The game is set up for emulate TV series and episodes. With that in mine you can easily turn a 10 session mini campaign into 10 related one shot adventures and the whole into a ‘season’. Character creation is fast (roll five stats, pick a culture, spend 7 skill points and then flesh out the backstory) and there are no levels, experience is handled by improving stats and/or skills. While I am blowing my own trumpet the latest version of 3Deep will be available to buy from RPGnow and Drivethru from next week!

 

10th Where do you go for RPG reviews?

For me, my favourite RPG blog is http://www.stargazersworld.com/ which gives me a mix of reviews, news and opinion. they have a small team of bloggers and interestingly they like to experiment. Right now the blog is experimenting with being sponsored by Patreon.

11th Which ‘dead’ game would you like to see reborn?

Do games die? If that were true then there would be no RM2 players. The game is going on for 40 years old and has not had a new book published in decades and yet it is still probably the most popular version of RM there has ever been with many actives groups. Even in my previous answers I harked back to Car Wars with is a game from my youth. I honestly do not believe games die as long as people want to play them.

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Random Musings. Thoughts on RM Spell Law high level spells.

My last post mused on the impossible goal of designing balance into a high level adventure. Among one of the issues I touched upon was the lack of effective buffs in RM Spell Law. But the problem is much broader than that–there is a breakdown of spell design at higher levels. Perhaps the original designers didn’t see much game play use for high level spells?

When I deconstructed and rewrote Spell Law I reviewed every single spell, spell list and compared similar spells between the realms. There are tons of inconsistencies, useless spells, redundant spells or spells “out of order” in power level. I started a detailed commentary on the RMU Spell Law forums, but there was so much pushback I just went ahead and started uploading my own version of spell law!

Rather than go analyze all of Spell Law, I wanted to comment specifically on high level spells. And to keep things shorter, let’s just tackle Essence open and closed in the post and only in the context of combat and not general purpose spells. (I’m using 6503 RMC Spell Master for reference btw.)

Elemental Shields. The 50th lvl spell combines the 15th, 17th and 19th spells Lightning, Fire and Ice Armors. These are good spells, but not great spells. Each is +20 to, 1/2 hits and decrease of crits by 1 severity. Fine for 15-19th lvl spells, but for a 50th just combining them, limiting them to 1 target seems inadequate.

The 20, 25 & 30 level spells are Mass–but in game use to buff 25-30 targets is limited. There are a few blank slots, but in my mind the real issue is trying to differentiate the same spells into different categories. Having Resist Light, Lightarmor, and then Lightning Armor is confusing and doesn’t allow much progression.

Overall, the list can be consolidated, improved protection at high levels and needs a good increase on the 50th lvl spell; either make it 1 target/lvl or increase the protection a bit.

Essence Hand. Calling Seal Team 6 Sniper group. The 50th lvl spell, Aim True is perhaps one of the most deadly spells available to Essence users! The spell automatically does max damage, “E” crit with a missile attack. (for large or superlarge it does a slaying crit) Sure the caster has to touch the shooter, but a group against 1 opponent or just a few opponents could make swift work of any adversary. Too powerful?

Spell Wall. The definitive list for protection v. magic. How good is it? The 20, 25 and 30 lvl spells provide +50 v a specific realm magic. Not too shabby…but…it’s 1 target and concentration only. Sad. Or the caster can just utilize Protection V which provides +25 RRs v. ALL REALMS and is 1 min/lvl. Which one would you choose?

Dispelling Ways. A far better list than Spell Law? Dispel XX Sphere creates a moving barrier around the caster that causes any inbound spell to make an initial RR before proceeding against a target in the Sphere (and then requires another RR). Those are good odds…but the caster has to concentrate the whole time. The 16th lvl spell creates a sphere with a RADIUS of 100′!!!! These need some work I think. The 17-19 “Un” spells strip spell casting ability from casters and items for 1 day. That’s pretty good.

Rapid Ways. The 50th lvl Mass Haste provides 50 rnds of Haste (no after penalties) of DOUBLE action. This one is a no brainer! Use this with Aim True and you have a killing machine.

Shield Mastery. Putting aside the issue that Essence Hand and Shield Mastery are doing the same thing (telekinesis), and that the instantaneous but contingent use of these spells creates huge game mechanic issues, is this even a good spell list? I think a lot more can be done. The 50th lvl spell is cool, but how practical for actual game play? Will the caster encounter that much missile fire? Will they be willing to cast this spell every round to the exclusion of all else? A better 50th lvl spell would be 1 rnd/lvl duration vs missiles within 5′ of caster (or target). That would be a great player buff and worthy of 50th lvl.

Spell Enchancement. Rubbish and breaks spell mechanics. Easier and more logical to scale range, radius or duration by PP expenditure than some “spell for a spell” list.

Spell Reins. Not many spells on this list, and really should be combined and improved with Spell Wall. Some good spells, but the 50th lvl, like Shield Mastery only works 1 round. How many possible spells would be directed at a caster during actual game play? Sure in a battlefield with tons of mages it might be useful…this spell needs a duration.

Spirit Mastery. The 50th lvl spell allows you to cast 1 spell/rnd..but only 10th lvl or lower. So this is really only a “economics” spell–it just reduces PP cost but locks the caster into only casting these spells.

So out of those lists, the 50th lvl spells for Essence Hand and Rapid Ways are awesome, but the others are either good spells but too limiting or just not very useful. Feel free to check out BASiL lists for my solutions to these spells and lists.

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#RPGaDAY2017 5th, 6th & 7th

This is the next instalment of my RPGaDAY month.

5th Which RPG cover best captures the spirit of the game?

For me it has to be the original Call of Cthulu from way back in 1981. For someone whos entire experience of RPGs at about that time had been D&D and a bit of Boot Hill CoC was like nothing else!

6th You can game every day for a week. Describe what you’d do!

I am a big fan of ‘bitesize’ rpgs. When my PBP game was running I would dip in an out of that two or three times a day updating players posts and in the game I was playing in updating my actions.

My main Face to Face game I don’t think I could play that every day. There are just too many alpha male personalities in the group. We play for long weekends normally and that is about the limit before we get conflicts forming. We have been friends for over 30 years so everything gets forgiven and forgotten but a week would be too long.

Running this blog and all the other RPG related projects on the go makes it feel like I am almost playing at or with something every day.

So if I was to play every day then it would be an experiment of playing via Facebook messenger with an almost real time where the characters had a week to save the world. The players would be able to update their story at any time and I would do my best to reply as fast as I could. For me it would be most probably a week of sleep deprivation but it would be a memorable experience!

7th What was your most impactful RPG session?

This was a session where almost nothing happened, action-wise. The characters had been tricked into killing the dwarven queen of the iron hills and her bodyguard. We had then landed in a dwarven jail awaiting execution. As characters were were immensely powerful and could pretty much have walked out of there at will. The characters started a debate, it was obvious we were going to escape as we were on a quest to save middle earth but what do we do if confronted by dwarves? We were guilty of the crime we had committed but we were innocent of criminal intent and the world needed us. Do we take any more lives? What if it became unavoidable. We had an excess of righteous paladinic characters in the group alongside some rather more pragmatic characters.

The debate raged on for several hours, never once did anyone break from being in character and we had no NPCs with us. The party had only male PCs and female NPCs and the cells were split along gender lines. The GM did nothing for all that time except sit back and occasionally  correct a factual error in someones statement if the character would have known the truth but the player had forgotten.

Eventually the escape did take place and only one dwarf died and that was an accident, quite literally as a result of a failed moving manoeuvre.

That was pure ‘role playing game’.

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#RPGaDAY2017


I was tempted to try and post every day for August but that would have crashed a lot of other people’s posts so instead I am going to do a few days at a time in my normal, regular slots.

So here goes.

1st What published RPG do you wish you were playing right now?

I have had a hankering for a while now to play Car Wars, the Steve Jackson Games game from the 80s. I know it wasn’t released as a RPG we we always played it as one. The original rules are available for free. All I am lacking is another player or 5. It is one of those games where you could while away a lot of down time just designing and building cars. Fast and simple mechanics, what not to love?

2nd What is an RPG you would like to see published?

This has to be RMU. I think all of us would like to see the finished product and to see that particular production bottleneck cleared so ICE can get on with releasing more and more varied products.

3rd How do you find out about new RPGs?

For me it is from other bloggers. In particular http://www.stargazersworld.com/. I don’t have enough players that meet often enough to try every game I would like to play. Like most of us we have shelves of games we have bought and played a handful of times, if at all. I find it more interesting to read the opinions of people who have actually played a game rather than the marketing hype put out by the games designers.

4th Which RPG have you played most since August 2016.

This has to be Rolemaster Classic. In a close second is my own game, 3Deep, which is due to be released in print as a 2nd edition. There was a lot of play testing of that in the last year.

Third in line is RMU.

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Random Musings. Very High Level Adventures. Is “Balance” even possible?

This coming Tuesday (last night when this post is published) I’ll be running the final chapter to my 5 part series: Legends of Shadow World. The last chapter could be a stand alone adventure but is the denouement to the adventure path, typing up a lot of loose threads and presenting the group with an incredibly powerful adversary.

I’ve been parsing some data from the previous 4 sessions and feedback from the other 2 test groups (chapter 1) and will probably run my group through the series again. It won’t have the surprise/reveal elements from their first iteration, but we’ll be able to have a more open analysis during game play.

I’m using RM2 RAW, something I haven’t done for a VERY long time but want to maintain continuity with Terry’s ongoing SW material. The lack of our own house rules (combat maneuvers, multiple opponent rules, missile parry and initiative) makes RM melee feel very restraining. Most players are stuck with simple OB/DB split decision, although this becomes paramount when fighting high level foes.

RM has always been tricky in balancing encounters. DnDs Hit Point attrition system made matching groups and opponents more linear. Rolemaster criticals are the joker in the deck–a wild card that can immediately upend any possible balance a GM designs. This is not to say that the RM rules are broken at higher levels, but there are some immediate issues that are even apparent at lower levels.

  1. Outnumbering. Many, much lower level combatants can overwhelm powerful creatures. A dozen Warrior Monks (15 lvl) annihilated a 50th level character. Easily. The chance of at least 1 in 12 of scoring a potent crit result each round is quite high. Once a PC is compromised by a critical it’s “game over”.
  2. Lack of Buffs. RM2 Spell Law is really lacking in effective buff spells. People have commonly criticized my BASiL and Orhan lists as being too powerful (of course I disagree), but original Spell Law lists are pretty ineffective at high levels.
  3. Spell Attack/Counter Attack. While RM2 melee feels too simplistic, Spell Casters have SO MANY spells to choose from that strategic casting feels arbitrary. (a 50th lvl caster can have 300-500 spells!!)  Casters rarely have the luxury of countering a specific incoming spell, and to do so, would require them to forgo an offensive attack.
  4. Mixed Abilities/Protections. A hostile mixed group of NPC’s can be very deadly to a party. Even a small group comprised of a: creature immune to normal weapons; creature with high magical immunity; creature that is blinding fast, and one that is super strong could decimate a group. Each creature will require a different strategy or spell suite to counter effectively–basically dividing the groups economies of scale.
  5. The well balanced party….just does not work at high levels in RM. One effective critical against the M-U or Cleric will pull the rug from the whole group. Optimally the group needs to be almost all semi-spell users or have magic items that can allow each player to attack/defend/heal independently.

Let me end by saying that my players have had a blast with these high level adventures. They get to play known personalities, utilize spells they only have ever read about in Spell Law, encountered some CRAZY opponents and adventured in very unusual environments.  But no matter how I adjust the encounter levels in these adventures, I’m not sure there can be anything like “Balance”.

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Three Wheels On My Wagon

I am intrigued by ITDs critical tables. I have never seen them but it came up recently in a discussion on on armour by the piece that there are different critical tables by location and only three locations; limbs, head and body.

For me the only piece of RM that has to be retained is the critical; everything else has to earn its place at the table. If it is more effort that it adds to the game I am inclined to cut or replace it.

Despite my slash and burn approach to rules I am mostly still following the roll your dice, find the right table, look up the roll and roll your critical procedure.

In all the companions and discussions I have never seen a superior system. I don’t care about the #hits, the rounds of stun, the bleeding or whatever. It is the wit and dark humour I like and the graphic descriptions of wounds. You will never get that with 1d8 damage. Decades ago rolling a 20 and getting double damage used to excite me but “Your bolt goes right through his temple and stands there quivering. Astonishingly enough, he’s still standing. But any attempt to remove it will kill him instantly. +25 hits, stunned no parry 2 rnds and bleeding 12 hits/rnd.” is a level above.

I have a half formed diceless RM combat system and I have an outline for HARP/FATE bastardised system. That uses the HARP critical tables and FATE dice and has a working title of FART.

FART is really good fun and fast to play. It just needs some time spent on it writing it up and putting it out there to the FATE community. The mission objective would be to hook FATE players into trying RMU once it is released. It is my understanding that FATE is one of the most successful games of recent years but despite that you will never get to put your crossbow bolt into someone’s head.

So we have ripped just about everything apart recently on here. What, in your perfect combat system, are the absolutely non-negotiable elements?

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RMU – to infinity and beyond!

There was a comment to my last post that read:

The challenge I see with RMU as opposed to RM2 is the apparent lack of willingness to look beyond fantasy (and even then it’s their definition of fantasy). RM has always suffered (IMO) from the lack of a solid, accessible setting, and RMU just seems to accelerate that trend. They also took steps (especially in the combat system) to render it almost useless for non-magic settings if you leave it RAW. The flexibility that came with RM2 (and even RMSS in its own way) seems to be disappearing.

In addition in a recent comment Hurin had noted the amount of HARP that seems to have found its way into RMU. There is nothing wrong with HARP but HARP is not Rolemaster and definitely not RM2!

That got me thinking. Last year I bought HARP Fantasy and HARP SF. I bought them because I want to run a SF game soon and as I have said many times before I have lost my Spacemaster books.

So HARP is certainly not locked into a fantasy setting and not into one single fantasy setting. Shadow World is statted out for HARP and HARP has its own core setting of Cyradon. HARP SF plays out in Tintamar but by default it also shares the same setting as Kulthea and Spacemaster because of the Shadow World connection.

One of the things I like about HARP is that the last release was to truly unify the fantasy and sf rules and make them interchangeable. I only needed the fantasy rules as monsters make great aliens.

There is a massive gulf between RM2 and HARP and I agree there is a lot of HARP in RMU. The skill system is the same, character creation is very similar. The move in RMU to less combat tables is almost a single step towards the HARP way of thinking and that I think is the problem with RMU. The only weakness as I see it with HARP, looking from a RM background point of view, is the combat system and the criticals in particular. The same old critical comes around again and again way too often and even in the same fight. The rest of the combat system works really nicely as far as I can tell.

Another interesting thing is that the HARP forums are far busier than the RM forums if you exclude the BETA test forums. If you include them then you also need to include the HARP development forums as well. I see a far greater variety of voices in the HARP debates than in the RM ones these days. There is an active HARP community around the game and new HARP books are eagerly awaited,even if most of them are just re-releases to bring them in line with the unified Fantasy/SF rules.

Whether HARP’s firearms are as good as intothatdarkness’s firearms is a completely different question but the fact remains that HARP does have viable settings and it does have modern day and SF elements that make it go well beyond the fantasy genre.

I think RMU is trying to learn from HARP but is struggling to take the old guard with it to some extent. Which is a pity as we are the old guard.

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Is Rolemaster Worth Saving?

This is a bit of a gloomy post but if you don’t like it skim down to the ‘…and finally’ which hopefully is a bit more fun!

Over the decades I have bought a great many role playing games. Many of them, or most of them, got played once and are now just on top of a wardrobe. The death blow for all of these games was either I didn’t enjoy running it or my players didn’t want to play it.

It doesn’t matter which side doesn’t want to play, if either withdraws their support the game is dead.

My first RMU play test ended when my players didn’t want to play it anymore. These are all players that have played RM2 and RMC since the early 1980s.

My second play test is going a bit better especially since I have adopted JDales new tables.

Now what happens if the RPG community treats RMU as so many of us have treated other games, that it is condemned to the top of the wardrobe? What if the existing RM community condemn RMU to the wardrobe of oblivion?

The first reaction is to say “stick to RM2/RMC/RMSS/RMFRP (delete as applicable)” but that is not going to work. If ICE is committed to RMU then there will be no more legacy publications. All the new Shadow World material will be HARP or RMU compatible. There will be no more companions and no more guild companion articles. I guestimate that 95% of all the forum discussion is about RMU in the beta boards. If you are not playing RMU then the ICE community will wither away for you.

The second option is to house rule just about everything you don’t like in RMU so you get a working system that your players will play. That fixes it for you but not for the RPG community.

This is a rather gloomy look into the future but it is a real possibility. The RM community is not big. RMSS did not convert all the RM2 players. RMFRP did not convert all the RMSS players. RMC is the most recent version of RM that you can buy and none of the RMSS and RMFRP players will have converted. Very few RM2 players have converted to RMC. It was recently revealed that the core books have only just achieved Silver status on RPGnow. What that means is that 250 copies of the core rules have been sold up until 2 weeks ago. 250 copies in 4 years is not a lot of sales!

Given the really negative impression touted online about chartmaster, rulesmaster and rollmaster any new version of RM has to overcome these prejudices and misconceptions and go on to enthuse a new generation of players. That is not going to be easy in this world of thousands of free or almost free games and in a time when OSR and simplified games are rising in popularity.

I suspect that ICE have a massive marketing challenge ahead if RMU is to be a success. Given the effort so far in getting RMU as far as beta two and the current ‘behind closed doors’ changes, I think that the greatest effort is yet to start for the RMU team.

…and finally

My adventures regardless of whether I write them for my own game or for publication always have a title. I frequently take a film title or a song title or lyric. I was on a long journey recently and one song stuck stuck in my mind. The song was Here Goes Norman by The Undertones.

My gut reaction was when hearing the song was a sort of Bates Motel style of adventure but then I thought what if Norman was the victim in the story? Think along the lines of The Hunchback of Notre Dame with the outsider vilified by the public. So with the title of There Goes Norman what adventure hook does that inspire with you?

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Project BASiL: Mentalism Spells & Misc.

Most of my emails and forum messages have been asking about when I’m going to post the Mentalism spells for my Spell Law re-write. While Essence and Channeling were fairly straight forward, I’ve ended up re-working Mentalism several times–and now I’m doing it again! Part of this was a desire to really differentiate the realms: Essence is manipulation of the physical world and elements, Channeling is driven by the God’s aspect, “life forces”, and miraculous effects, and Mentalism are spells of mind and will. But what does that mean? What should Mentalism spells encompass for powers?

While Mentalism was never proffered as being Psionics, it was a good reference point for me to re-organize Mentalism spells, clarify their limits and group spells accordingly. Interestingly, I found that like Essence and Channeling, new spell lists and groupings created new profession possibilities.

Here are my initial power/ability groupings and associated lists/powers (same as Base lists). Most of them are just a single or a couple of lists to create a mental “Discipline”–most Mentalists might focus on 2-3 Disciplines for specialization.

Body Enhancement: Body Control, Self Augmentation, Body Weaponry, Self Healing, Body Resistance

Clairavoyance:  Item Visions, People Visions, Place Visions (yes those names are pretty bad–suggestions?)

Glamours: Phantasms/lllusions, Hallucinations, Visual, Sound, Smell, Touch

Mesmerization: Mind Control, Enthralling, Suggestion

Mind Enhancement: Mind Shields, Mind Lore (Absorption list)

Precognition: Future Visions, Awareness, Dreams

Pyschokinesis: Move Objects, Manipulate Object (heat, bend, reform, break)

Pyrokinesis: Control Fire, Manifest Fire

Sense Projection: Astral Projection, Remote Sensing

Subterfuge: Cloaking, Distractions

Telepathy: Absorb Lore, Read Mind, Sense Minds, Mind Speech, Mind Attacks

Right now I’m around 30-35 “Base Lists”, 10 Closed (which are lesser/consolidated versions of base)  and a handful of Open (limited to 10th lvl). Similar to the other BASiL lists, you can easily move things around: “Telepathy” becomes the Mentalist Base, Pyschokinesis and Subterfuge becomes Mystic Base and Body Enhancement becomes Monk base–the rest drop into Closed and/or Open.

My goal was 50 total lists which I think I’m at, but it needs another pass through. If anyone has any ideas, thoughts, spells, spell lists etc feel free to comment. After all the Companions, Guild lists, and add-ons I have no illusions that anything I’m doing is truly original. For me it was re-organizing, filling in blanks, eliminating redundant and or useless spells etc. Happy to hear any suggestions!