Rolemaster Unified – Page 16 – The Rolemaster Blog

July 4, 2016

RMC House Rules – My Experience System #2 Stat Gains

I have touched on this before in an earlier post (http://www.rolemasterblog.com/rmc-house-rules-character-creation-2-potentials-stat-gains/) where I said that the stats you are using are the ones you roll for.

What I want to do is break the connection between every time your skills improve you also do your stat gain rolls. This is one of the things that I feel sloows down the character maintenance in Rolemaster.

The problem is that went a stat changes a whole host of skills change with it. The problem is even slightly exacerbated by my use of the smoothed stat bonus. Where there were only 5 real break points where stat bonuses change (+5 through to +25) now there are dozens.

What I have found works quite nicely is to tie stat gains to periods of intense training/study and to periods of healing. This breaks the link between skills and stat gains but also makes paying for training in game directly result in tengible benefits for the characters. If you are paying to study with a tutor then you can roll your stat gains for the mental stats. If you are laid up with a broken leg then that also can give you time for reflection. Likewise characters may find a period of enforced rest brings with it long term benefits.

That is my basic logic. The mechanism is the same, roll d100 and roll higher than your temp stat to get a +1 to your temp. you are stil restricted to rolling for stats that you have actually applied to skills. It is just a case that they are now out of sync with the skill gain rolls.

The fact that stat bonuses are additive rather than averaged for skills makes the book keeping a bit quicker as well.

Next time I will cover Spell Lists.

July 2, 2016July 2, 2016

The Essaence: Thoughts for magic in Shadow World.

As we gather here, of primary importance is to answer this question: what is this “Viir”, as we now call it, this seeming essential force that permeates our planetary system? Let us review. It’s been almost 75 years since our orbital sensors first detected these energy emissions. Tachyon detectors, plasma traps, electron screens and a variety of other particle shields all registered this force—all of them. Is it all of these? Or is it something altogether new to our reality?

We are close to locating its source within our system—perhaps in the gravity well between the planet and its second moon. What do we know? It’s unclear if this energy is modifying and transmuting our physical laws or subsuming them. The “Viir” seems to fundamentally change both ionic and covalent bonds for molecular and macromolecular structures. In practice this energy field is also distorting chemical interactions and material structures most acutely—its effect on life forms and our planetary biome is still under analysis.

…Perhaps most perplexing and disconcerting is that the background level of the field seems to be growing….

…..We are now monitoring two dozen subjects that have exhibited unusual sensitivity to the Viir. We have yet to isolate the specific epigenetic mechanism that allows for this, but our experiments lead us to believe that the subjects are increasing their sensitivity through time and effort. It is our belief that sensitivity acts as a feedback loop, allowing these subjects to conversely manipulate these fields to some unknown effect.

Notes on the “Viir”

Excerpts from Emergency Meeting,

Althan Imperial Science Committee

Like every fantasy game setting, Kulthea is a world of magic, bathed in energy flows (Essaence) which provide the underpinnings for magical abilities. Unlike many other settings however, the Shadow World is also identified as being in our “known universe”, (the planet Ceril VII). This makes Kulthea somewhat unique: a fantasy setting within our real world with an aberration of the physical laws of existence. Of course this is a game, so a bit of hand waving can gloss over any logical discrepancies.

For those that play a cross-genre setting (other Sci-fi and fantasy) or want a consistent framework for the magical systems then some more details need to be considered. Over the years we’ve put together a framework during our own rewrite of Spell Law and for arbitrating Essaence effects during gameplay.

We’ve also posted up some basic rules for magic and technology on the RM Forums here.

What is Essaence?

The Essaence is a fifth energy along with the Strong Force, Weak Force, Electromagnetism and Gravity and interacts with and modifies our physical laws. Unlike these other forces which are normally produced or manipulated with technology (depending on technology level), the Essaence is also “bio-manipulative”; able to be controlled by living beings who have or developed sensitivities to this energy. Because this is a non-native energy, alien to the established physical rules of the universe, it interacts with the other forces in unusual ways.

Source. Where does the Essaence come from?

Per the MA, a rift was created by interdimensional travelers allowing energy to seep into the Kulthean system. But what does that mean? The Kulthean planetary system is moving through the galaxy—is the source a fixed point? If so, where? The Essaence gateway is a keystone between dimensions that allows the continual seep of Essaence. This object (asteroid) is at the Lagrange Point between Orhan and Kulthea—providing a continuous stream of energy to the planet and the moon. Depending on their orbital positions, the Essaence will also interact with other moons/planets. (Most notably Charon, Essaence power there will wane and wax. The Night of the Third Moon coincides with the greatest amount of Essaence energy reaching Charon.)

Is Essaence unique to Kulthea?

Apparently. A group of Ka’ta’viir left Kulthea in the 1^st Era looking for other manifestations of the Essaence. (the Old Ones-who later came back in the Interregnum as the Earthwardens). This means that Essaence powers will not work outside the Essaence envelop around Kulthea, Orhan and on occasion the other satellites. However, unique Essaence imbued materials and alloys (Laen, Eog Ethloss etc) will retain their material qualities, (i.e. pure crystals that are fabricated in zero g).

Fundamental Impact.

The Essaence is a physical force but non-native to our plane of existence. On Kulthea this means it has changed reality on a quantum/physical level. We see two obvious effects. Chemical interactions and material changes. Both of these shoe-horn well into the established SW narrative. Chemical reactions and associated technologies are both rare and unreliable in SW. Also, Kulthea has a number of native “magical” /superior materials and alloys beyond normal material science. Changes to the established physical laws on Kulthea are the result of the Essaence interacting with the other 4 forces.

Spell Casting.

The Essaence was first discovered by a handful of sensitives and then explored by Althan scientists. Over the millennia, the Essaence has become fully immersed in the biology of SW. Humanoids, creatures and flora have absorbed this power, imbuing special natural abilities and/or the ability to willfully shape the Essaence into unique effects (spells). Now, almost all native flora and fauna have developed Essaence sensitivity to some extent, although the ability to manipulate it may take training.

The Realms.

Spell casters draw Essaence directly from their surroundings and into their “well”—through practice their ability to hold more power and draw it more quickly grows. The standard RM “Realms” are just different mechanisms to call upon the Essaence and manipulate the physical world. Therefore we don’t differentiate between energy sources by realm: multipliers, adders etc. are Essaence. There is no need for pools of PP’s for each specific realm, or averaging PP’s for hybrid users. Channelers provide their own power just like Essence or Mentalism, but the spell formation is drawn from their patron God.

Foci and Flows.

Casters can tap into both Foci and Flows but there are dangers as well as benefits. Adventures taking place after the loss of the Northern Eye should see an increase in Essaence fluctuations, spell failures and other random effects of spell casting.

Treating the Essaence as the “fifth force” gives us a solid framework for creating new spells, set unclear parameters on spell effects and provides a solid framework for magic in our campaign.

June 17, 2016July 1, 2016

RMC House Rules – Character Creation #4 – Cultural Background

Cultural Background is another element of RMU that I really like. The mechanism is really simple. There are a number of predefined backgrounds such as urban, nomad, coastal and sylvan, plus 4 others in RMU, and there is a mix of skills that are typical for people growing up in that culture. So you choose your culture and you get free skill ranks to assign into skill categories defined by your culture.

This has two immediate effects. Firstly it replaces at least in part the adolesence level for buying skills. you are just given a few ranks in some or all skill categories and regardless of the cost you just pick the skills that you want. The second effect is to force every character to have a good balance of background skills.

Avoiding Meta-Gaming?

I have a player in my face to face game that has only spent development points on weapons, magic, body development and perception and a couple of other skills that I insisted on. For hobby skills I give away 13 ranks that you can assign to secondary skills and he always tries to assign some or all of them to combat and magical skills. Compared to all the other characters he has the most hits, the biggest OB and the most magic. On the other hand he gets very upset when the challenges facing the party require tracking, lore or any of the other useful skills he eskewed in favour of big weapons.

I will confess that every now and again I take great pleasure in seperating him from he rest of the party by a wall, pit, door or whatever and give him a really simple challenge that everyone on one side of the door could easily do and he is completely perplexed by.

It is also no surprise that this player is the biggest meta gamer in the party who most of the time is using his own knowledge to decide his characters actions rather than what the chracter knows.

How Cultural Backgrounds Work

Anyway back to cultural backgrounds! Each background in my variation comprises 35 ranks spread over 13 different skill categories. The average skill costs for a single rank is about 2DP so that equates to about 50DP as an apprentice level although the single biggest block goes to languages which are traditionally cheaper.

The point of these character cultural background ranks for me is two fold. It is both faster and easier to just pick skills from a list than to try and spend exactly a fixed number of DPs. We have all been in a situation where you have to trade off one skill against another to make everything fit into your budget. Secondly it will make a Barbarian from the Frozen North significantly different from a Warrior from Chult and that difference has an impact on those characters which will last a long time into the characters careers.

Actually implementing this I have skewed everything to fit my world setting of the Forgotten Realms. If you are from Thay then you will have a significantly different skill set than if you are from Chult. On the other hand I have not really split it alone national lines. Both Waterdeep and Thay are magically very rich places and the citizens will both have a great amount of day to day experience of magic.

Cultural Background Skills Table

	Cosmopolitan (Waterdeep)	Coastal (Sword Coast)	Harsh/ Tundra/ Waste (Frozen North)	Highland	Nomad	Rural (Dales)	Sylvan (Chult)	Underground (Underdark)	Urban
Athletic	1	3	2	2	1	1	1	1	1
Awareness	1	2	3	2	2	1	2	1	1
Body Development	1	1	2	2	1	1	1	1	1
Combat Maneuvers				1				1
Communcations	13	10	6	8	10	8	10	10	12
Crafts	5	6	4	5	5	7	5	6	7
Influence	2	1		1	1	1	1	1	2
Lore	4	4	5	4	4	4	4	4	4
Martial Arts	1	1	2	1	1	1	1	1	1
Outdoor			3	2	5	3	2	1
Scientific Analytic		1	1					1
Subterfuge			1	1			1	2
Technical/Trade	7	6	6	6	5	8	7	5	6

When assigning these ranks the same rule applies as with buying skills. You cannot buy ore than 2 ranks in a single skills unless the skill is listed as 1*, 2* etc., such as languages. This forces players with say 7 ranks in Technical/Trade skills to buy a range of skills.

You will notice that there are no weapon skills or armour skills in here. That means that all of your OB has to come from your 1st level development points.

June 13, 2016July 1, 2016

RMC House Rules – Character Creation #3 – Rolemaster Races

I am not suggesting many changes to the Rolemaster races in my RMC variant but first a bit of background on the long running ‘issue’ of Elves and Self Discipline.

Elves and Self Discipline

Most elves in Rolemaster based games get a -20 on the Self Discipline (SD) stat. SD happens to be one of the stats used to determine your Stalk & Hide skill and Meditation skill.

When most people see that -20 they assume that elves have no self control or discipline which is not the way Tolkien’s elves are generally portrayed. Rolemaster elves are the direct decendants of Tolkien’s elves as the roots of Rolemaster are set in the world of the MERP (Middle Earth Role Playing) franchise.

Furthermore when you notice that when you read about the stalk and hide skill the elves -20 should be treated as +20 and that elves get a natural +20 to meditation. It strikes me that if you are having to ‘fix’ the figures because of something you did earlier then the initial thing was wrong.

Elves are not irrational and impulsive and clumsy. You firstly have to remember that all stat bonuses are relative and not absolute. Originally the common man had no penalties or bonuses at all and that all the tables were constructed as the common man being the absolute norm. From that point races are describe relative to a common man so if a typical dwarf is stronger than a common man then it gets a strength bonus. In this way elves are seen as being less disciplined than a man. Not bad at discipline, just less discplined than our common man. This idea was prompted by the idea that elves being immortal have all the time in the world to complete tasks and most problems tend to resolve themselves if given a few centuries to bed in. Your common man with a short and often hard life has to act now. An elf could spend several thousand years building an empire, a man probably has no more than 30 years if he wants to have any time to actually enjoy it!

I have no problem with this concept of ‘relative’ stats. I do have a problem with the elves -20 because obviously this is the wrong implementation if the rule has to be applied only some of the time or additional fixes have to be put in place to fix the problems that the rule introduces.

I would argue that although elves may not be as hasty as humans to interfere in affairs their long view almost breeds more self discipline in that they are inherently patient and this builds tolerance. If you have to cancel out the penalties for mediation and stalking then why not just forget the whole thing?

In my rules there is no SD penalty for any elves including half elves.

Base Hits

There is a table known as “04-01 RACE ABILITIES”, on that table it tells you the hit dice used for each race. Common men get a d8 as do some elves and halflings. Other races get d10. Why? Rolemaster is a d10 based game. The only places where you get all the other polygon dice used is in the variable amounts of healing from some herbs.

My first reaction was to say everyone gets a d10 hits but then I decided to go in a completely different direction.

The way hits are calculated in RMC is your Con stat/10 plus the accumilated dice rolls plus your Con stat bonus as a percentage. Almost every race gets a con bonus so most people get a few extra hits from this. So if you have a Con of 76 and a total of +10 Con stat bonus and you bought 4 ranks in Body development as an High Elf you would have 8 hits from your Con (76÷10) plus 4x1d10, lets say that comes to 28 plus 10% of the total from your con bonus. So 8+28=36 plus 10% = 40 hits.

Some GMs I have played with say re-roll hit points if you get a 1-3 on the dice and others have given out maximum hitpoints at first level. Letting the characters have a decent number of hit points gives the GM more freedom in what he or she can throw at the party.

With that in mind I am going to give a little, take a little and simplify things a little.

In my rules you always get maximum hits, so 8 for a human, 10 for an high elf and so on but you no longer get the con bonus percentage. So under my rule the above character would get 48 hits being (76÷10)+4×10=48. So we now have diceless body development. In fact as you will see all of character creation is now diceless.

Background Options

In table “06-01 RACE BACKGROUND OPTION TABLE” each Rolemaster race has a number of background options ranging from 2 to 6. I personally feel the options in Character Law were a bit limited and those in Companion One were too powerful. I like the HARP and RMU talents and I nearly included them but at the end of it they just seemed a bit ‘wrong’ to me. Instead I am going to steal another RMU feature and that is Knacks. In the RMU beta rules all characters get to pick to specific skills that get a +5 bomus. this makes a character just a little bit better than their peers in that particular skill. It is a one time only bonus and is always fixed at +5 and cannot be doubled up. I am going to replace the background options with knacks but each character will get between 2 and 6 knacks depending on race.

Race	Background Options
Common Men	6
Dwarves	5
Halflings	5
Orcs	5
High Men	4
Half-elves	4
Wood-elves	4
Greater Orcs	4
Trolls	4
High-elves	3
Fair-elves	2

This does reduce the impact of background options but then I never liked the way that some good rolls could turn a character into an almost superman and likewise a bad roll could cripple them or destroy the players concept of the character they wanted to play. This solution puts the player in charge, is non-random and always give the character a slight advantage without making a massive impact. They are far easier to administer than Talents and Flaws.

June 10, 2016July 1, 2016

RMC House Rules – Character Creation #2 Potential & Stat Gains

On Monday I covered how I intended to use a point buy system for generating characters stats. The point is to enable the player to play exactly the character they want whilst still being balanced.

When it comes to potential stats I was quite taken with the idea of giving the players an additional 100 points with which to buy their potential stats but the temptation to just dump that all on the prime stats for the character would be too great. That makes total sense to do that but in the end every ranger would end up looking pretty much the same as would every fighter and so on.

Turning to RMU again, with the point buy system they advocate every character has a potential of 100 in every stat. The player then has to choose which stat to improve. This would I think lead to exactly the same situation of the players being swayed towards improving the stats the give the greatest gains. What I did like was the generosity of the concept that all characters had the potential to be 100 in every stat.

In my system You will have a 100 potential in every stat but the players do not get to choose which to improve. That decision will be made by the skills they have used or the training they have undergone since they last made a stat gain roll. (There are no levels as you will see later so it is not a case of one stat gain roll per level.)

So if a character has been stalking, disarming traps and picking locks then they will get a chance to improve In, Ag and SD stats as those three stats govern those skills.

Making a stat gain roll will be a case of making a D100 roll and if you roll MORE THAN your current stat then the stat goes up by 1. There are no adjustments to that roll so a character with a 99 Strength would have to roll a straight UM 00 to get the stat gain but it is impossible to go above a 100 stat.

Under the old RM2/RMC rules a stat gain roll could yield up to +15 to a stat if you had a big enough difference between your temp and potential stats. In my version the gain will always only be a +1. This is intentional. The smoothed stat bonuses mean that even going up +1 at a time will bring regular increased in stat bonus. Secondly as all stats have a potential of 100, too rapid a stat gain process would even everyone out to exceptionally high stats too quickly. Because of the point buy system guaranteeing well above average stats anyway there is no need to advance low stats more quickly.

One of the objectives here was to take all the dice rolls out of character creation. The total process should be about the players vision of their character and not dictated by good or bad dice rolls.

These stat gain rolls should be made at the ‘end of each chapter’ of their adventure in the sort of same space that giving out experience occupies. As you will see later skills will also improve at the same time.

June 9, 2016March 31, 2017

RM Combat Hack: Simplified armor & encumbrance

While both encumbrance and fatigue are critical elements in our game it’s always added an extra step of record keeping that was onerous. We’ve played around with several mechanisms but found that the new piecemeal armor and fatigue rule in RMU work great but we’ve taken it one step further.

First, we’ve eliminated the Maneuvering in Armor skill. I’ve always had an issue with it in concept and it unnecessarily complicated encumbrance rules by having this “dual path” calculation of min/max armor penalties, encumbrance by weight and the Quickness penalty. Since MnvArm is a skill that basically ties a characters ability to wear better/heavier armor to their level. I’ve heard the argument that it’s “for game balance”—I think that’s absurd. Can you imagine a game system that says a fighter can only use a dagger at 1^st level, then moves up to a short sword, than a long sword and finally at higher level can use a 2-handed sword? That’s the same thing.

I’ve always seen armor as a “handicap”—it adds weight and restriction of movement. There are benefits (protection) and negatives (penalties) that a player has to balance out. I don’t think it’s something that’s “trainable” like other RM skills. Getting rid of MnvArm eliminates a skill (good) and eliminates the dual process of armor penalties & encumbrance calculation.

Second we’ve adopted the RMU encumbrance calculation as a % of body weight and applied adjusted %’s to armor pieces. I’ve inserted the table below. For example, a character wearing full plate would have an armor encumbrance penalty of 66% (Plate 40, Plate Sleeves 8, Plate Leggings 12, Full Helm 6). We’ve also added some armor penalties for Perception and Missile weapons. This simplified armor/encumbrance also makes it easy to create new armor types for cultures or materials.

With armor simplified, encumbrance becomes a pretty easy calculation. Tally total weight, convert to % of body weight, add armor encumbrance % and reduce by the weight allowance. I like encumbrance to have a real impact and armor should have appropriate draws backs to reduce the incentive for everyone to wear the heaviest armor. For weight allowance we use a much lower threshold than RMU: 10% + str bonus. So a character with 100str could carry up to 25% (10 + 15 assuming no racial Str mods) of their body weight before incurring penalties. That makes sense to me—a 200lb person could carry 50#s without penalty. If anything that’s still too generous. If that character were wearing Full Plate and carrying nothing else they would have a 41% (66-25) encumbrance penalty. For GM’s that want to lessen the impact of encumbrance just use a higher weight allowance: 10% + Str bonus x2 or even x3.

Finally because we have one simple encumbrance number that represents carried load and armor it can be applied in a variety of ways.

Encumbrance Penalty (Load – weight allowance)

Modifies MMs or any action where weight is a factor.
Modifies fatigue rolls.
Reduces pace/distance. (replaces the encumbrance/pace chart)
Cancels Quickness bonus for DB or optionally reduces DB.
Total encumbrance % is used to modify Essence SCR.
Calban, a 5^th lvl fighter with a 100 str weighs 200lbs. His weight allowance is 25% (50lbs). Calban decides he’s going to wear Full Chain/Mail armor and a half helm. His armor encumbrance would be 47%. He’s also carrying 30lbs of gear (15%) for a total load of 62%. His encumbrance penalty is 37% (62-25).

Calban attempts to somersault over an opponent. In addition to difficult modifiers and his acrobatic skill bonus the attempt will be modified by the -37% encumbrance penalty.

Calban is required to make a fatigue roll—it’s modified by -37%.

Calban wants to sprint x5. His base rate is 20’rnd so he’s attempting to move 100’ but the distance moved is reduced by 37% (63’) due to his encumbrance penalty.

Calban has a -10 DB which is cancelled out due to his encumbrance. Optionally, if a GM wants encumbrance to have an even greater impact than his DB would be -27 making him easier to hit due to his lack of maneuverability! (does that sounds harsh? Keep in mind that he’s basically carrying a 134lbs load).

For our game these rules work great.

The reduce skill bloat.
They disconnect the idea that heavier/better armor use is tied to character level.
Creates one encumbrance number that can be applied in a variety of situations.
Eliminates encumbrance pace chart, min/max armor penalties.
Allows us to incorporate strength buff spells and weight reduction spells in our Spell Law which have a real impact.
Creates advantages/disadvantages to armor that fits into our “free market”, “no-profession” game.
Creates a quick way to generate new armors for cultures/tech.
Easy to adjust. A GM can change the armor %’s, the weight allowance calculation or both!
Utilizes RMU piecemeal armor rules which we like!

To aid in record keeping we have a game work sheet for each player that tracks encumbrance, hits, damage etc, In the margin of the worksheet we include a chart to convert total weight to % based on the characters body weight. We usually round off the penalty to simplify even further. Most of the players can separate out their kit so in combat they can drop a pack or sack and immediately have and know their adjusted encumbrance.

Armor	AT	Type	Percept	Miss Pen	Enc.
None	1				0
Heavy Cloth	2	VL			2
Soft Leather	3	VL			5
Hide Scale	4	L			10
Laminar	5	L			15
Rigid Leather	6	M			20
Metal Scale	7	M			25
Mail	8	M			30
Brigandine	9	H			35
Plate	10	H			40
Leather Sleeves		VL			1
Hide Sleeves		L		5	3
Mail Sleeves		M		15	5
Plate Sleeves		H		20	8
Leather Leggings		VL			3
Hide Leggings		L			7
Mail Leggings		M			10
Plate Leggings		H			12
Leather Cap		VL			0.5
Half Helm		L	5		2
3/4 Helm		M	10		4
Full Helm		H	15		6
Target	15				2
Normal	20				5
Full	25		5		10
Wall	30		15		20
Reinforced Cloak	5				5

June 7, 2016June 7, 2016

In Search of the Unknown: Reintroducing caution to your players.

After decades of GMing one of my greatest challenges has been to consistently invoke the feeling of surprise, wonder, fear and even caution into gameplay. While they may not be “jaded”, my gaming group have seen it all: there is no plot device, game trope or foe that will truly surprise them. We will probably never replicate the wonder and surprise we felt gaming when we young teenagers but I would still like to instill some caution into my players—they often make decisions based on the assumption that every encounter is perfectly balanced or that they will get bailed out by “greater forces” if they get in over their head.

I think a number of factors have contributed to this:

Simplified combat systems. Starting out on d20 game systems reinforced combat by attrition. Battles were a methodical race to 0 hits with no real impacts. You were either combat capable or unconscious. At mid to higher levels it was easy to keep a running tally of average hit damage; combined with players knowledge of monster stats combat became an exercise in simple math. The introduction of criticals in Rolemaster changed that calculation—combat could be decisive—quickly—and accumulated damage had a real impact on characters performance. Nonetheless there are still a great number of players who never parry, preferring all offense all the time.
Assumption of “Game Balance”. There is a lot of lip service paid to game balance but let’s be clear—as long as there is a human arbiter (the GM) there really is no such thing as pure game mechanics ruled by random number generation. GM’s will often put their influence on the scales of balance. Players know this and rely upon the GM to tip encounters and balance in their favor to maintain the storyline. No GM wants to be considered heartless—this is after all a game, played for enjoyment—and allowing PC’s to die can be a fun killer. As a GM I want adventures to challenge, but I also want my players to act rationally.
The Heroic Journey. Characters/players see themselves as the central characters in a storyline—and main characters don’t get killed. Heroes don’t retreat, don’t surrender and never take prisoners!
Inside Baseball. Most experienced players are well versed in the rules and the monster stats. Combat becomes a quick calculation of abilities, offense, hits etc. Knowing what’s behind the curtain can take some of the fun out of the game and combat choices becomes a calculation of odds rather than true “role-playing” of the character.
Magical Healing. Making most injuries healable, often instantly takes some of the penalty out of reckless behavior.

To counter these player mindset’s I use a number of strategies:

Upend Tropes. I love using my player’s bias’s and assumptions against them. The “mysterious old man in a tattered cloak”: Disguised god? Powerful enchanter? Nope, he’s exactly what he looks like—a low level bum. The “red shirt” city guard: Low level fighter? Throw away nobody? Nope—he’s a retired army commander of considerable skill.
Random Encounters. I use the random encounter table quite a bit without adjusting for the group’s level. They will encounter powerful beings or situations but they’ll have a chance to talk, parley, hide or run. Shadow World is a dangerous place and the players are a “tiny fish on a big hook”.
Ancillary costs of losing. I don’t want my players to die but I’m not rewarding foolishness. There are other potential costs to losing a battle: being captured, losing possession/favorite items, temp stat loss from injuries or even more serious permanent stat loss or loss of a finger/limb/organ. Most damage be fixed with magical healing and items replaced but it’s going to cost the players time and effort.
Personalize opponents. I think players react different when their opponent is personalized a bit more. Fighting “4 mercenaries wearing leather armor and wielding short swords” is antiseptic and anonymous. However, when the players are confronted by “3 men and a women wearing worn and dirty leather armor, all with long unkempt hair, dirty faces and rusty swords approach the party hesitantly but with a desperate look in their eyes…” the players will not only visualize their adversaries but perhaps react differently as well.
Have foes behave rationally. Whether humanoids, animals or monsters, my foes behave to their nature. They don’t fight to the death; they flee when injured, surrender when beaten or call for the PC’s to surrender when triumphant.
Most opponents are NPC characters. Our Shadow World is “monster lite” and we use a “no profession” system so it’s difficult to gauge the powers and abilities of NPC’s. My players have to be cautious when engaging with NPC’s and they can’t assume typical abilities implied by the profession system when a NPC utilizes a distinct skill or spell.

Over time my players have become naturally distrustful—mostly of my craftiness—but that translates to their gameplay. They are cautious engaging and they rely on an initial strategy of defense until they can take the measure of their opponent. They understand the importance of parrying and they know there are worse things than death! How about waking up unclothed, without any of their hard-won treasured items and missing your sword hand? Yikes.

June 6, 2016July 1, 2016

RMC House Rules – Character Creation #1 Stats

Brih has been posting some of his groups house rules or hacks. This has inspired me to put forward some of my proposed house rules for an up coming game. I have alluded to many of these in the past but I have never listed them explictily. So there is Part I of character creation namely generating some stats.

My favourist game ever for character creation was Champions (or Hero System as it is now). That gave you complete freedom of all of time and space to drw your inspiration from and all the characters were equally balanced. Hero System was a point buy system and so that is where I intend to go with character crreation.

I went through the Rolemaster RM2 companions over the weekend and none of them had a point buy system for RM2 or RMC. If there was one for RMSS/RMFRP I don’t know it as I don’t have any of those books. I have drawn my inspiration from some of the RMU beta rules.

There seem to be three philosophies with RM point buy systems. Firstly you have a big pool of points and all your stats start at 0. Second, you stats all start at 50 and you have a small pool of points and finally all stats start at 50 but you buy stat bonuses not the stats themselves. The first option is the one that my PBP Spacemaster GM has employed. There we rolled 10D10 and added that to a base 700 points to give our point total to spend. The third option is the one used by RMU. You get 10 points to spend on your stat bonuses. you can get more points by taking minuses on other stats.

I am going to use the middle option of all stats start at 50 and you get 250 points to spend on your stats. You can lower a stat to get more points somewhere else if you want.

The flaw in my system would be that in standard RM stats anything between 26 and 75 give you no bonus or penalty there is no reason why not to reduce any stats you do now explicitly need down to 26 and spend those points boosting other more important stats.

To counter this I am going to use a smoothed stat bonus table. While I am talking about stat bonuses I am also going to adopt the RMU standard of smaller stat bonuses that get added together for skills rather than the averaged method used in RMC/RM2. So what does this stat table look like?

This table discourages ‘buying down’ stats as the penalties for low stats start at just 47.

The only complications come from ‘single stat’ rolls. As an example if a player asked “Can my character remember reading anything about this legend as a student?” I would normally ask the player to roll a Memory (OE D100 roll with their Memory stat bonus as a modifier) roll to which I would add or subtract a difficulty factor depending on how well known the legends are. A character with a Me stat of 90 in RMC would have a +10 stat bonus. In this stystem that is just a +8. Your DB is normally equal to your Qu stat bonus but that too is reduced.

To address this all single stat checks will be made with the stat bonus doubled. This now makes DBs slightly higher for lightly or unarmoured characters and stat checks slightly easier. Especially as you will get a small bonus from a stat as low as just 54.

Looking at the bandings in the table here you will see the labels Deficient to Exeptional. These are used for the costings. Each +1 or -1 in the average band costs or gives 1 point. So it costs 9 points to go from the statng 50 up to 59. The Above Average band all cost 2 points so it costs an additional 46 points to get the same stat up to 83. It costs 3 points for the Superior band and 4 points in the exceptional so to get a stat up to 90 costs (9+46+21) 76 points in total.

Reducing stats works the same way.

Stats do not give any development points and I have kept all 10 stats. I was tempted to go with the HARP 8 stat version but that would lock me into the HARP skills system.

The 200 point pool means that a typical character can have two stats up at about 90 and all their other stats at around 54-55 easily within their budget.

Potentials are all 100 right across the board but I will cover potential stats next time as well as stat gains.

June 4, 2016June 4, 2016

Shadow World Cage Fight: We don’t need no stinking horses!!!

Want another reason to adopt Shadow World for you game setting? How about cool creatures to ride! From the early genesis of Shadow World in the “Court of Ardor” and the Loremaster series, fantastic mounts have been an integral part of the setting. Other game settings include the usual cool mounts: Dragons, Pegasus, Hippogriffs etc, but tying unusual creatures with distinct cultures and organizations has been a mainstay of Shadow World. Here are just a few samples from various books:

The Iron Wind. The special militia of the Udahir are the Thyfuriak; young men and women who bond with the Thyfur, a giant bird of prey. These warriors undergo specialized training and lead a monastic life of solitude in defense of their people.

Cloudlords of Tanara: Perhaps one of the best known groups are the Clourdlords. These knights, clad in gleaming armor of gold and silver fly their noble Steardan (winged horses) and wield rods of Sunfire against their enemies.

Jaiman: Land of Twilight. The Dragon Lord Sulthon Ni’shaang forces ride Gartyl: pterodactyl/bat-like creatures.

The Messengers of the Iron Wind. Both Lyak and Athimurl ride special mounts: Great Birds and Large Cats respectively.

The Golden Eye. The riders of the Order of the Golden Eye are formed into four divisions, each with it’s own special mount. Depending on which you encounter the Rider could be mounted on a Climbing Wyvern, Fire Wolf, Land Wyvern or Winged Wyvern.

The Kuluku. The mysterious people of the jungles in SE Emer have domesticated giant Dragonfly’s for pets and steeds!

Heralds of the Night. These fearsome servants of the Unlife are mounted on demonic, black unicorns.

Other cool mounts:

Uthula: Large lizards that can grow up to 20’ in length.

Kith: Who can forget Kith; the 6-legged panthers and famed for being the companion of the Loremaster Vurkanen Tyes!

Pfurgh: These ostrich like birds can carry a rider at considerable speeds over open ground.

As a GM I love to introduce mounted foes and SW allows more interesting variants than the usual warhorse. I’m not averse to PC’s with the right background having a unique mount. Most of these mounts are limited in carrying capacity, work only in certain environments and require care and maintenance often not found in towns and villages. Plus the PC will need to expend some effort in riding skill. So while it adds a great character element I haven’t found it to be “unbalancing”.

Cool mounts: just one more great aspect of the Shadow World setting!

For inspiration on interesting mounts from works of fiction I would recommend:

“The Emperor’s Blades” by Brian Staveley. The story features Valyn, an elite soldier of the “Kettral”—gigantic black hawks. Very reminiscent of the Thyfuriak although Kettral actually can carry a whole squad of soldiers. The series also has a unique take on monks.

The Malazan series by Steven Erickson. One of my all time favorite series and a triumph of world-building and fantasy trope subversion. The world includes the culture of the Moranth. While “human” they are always encountered encased in chitinous armor and riding their enormous flying insects the Quorl. The Moranth are famous for developing “munitions” which we incorporated into our SW alchemy rules. The Malazan world is covered by 20 books by 2 authors. There is an extensive Wiki that would be a great model for SW.

June 2, 2016

Thoughts on growing the RM and SW gaming community.

For those that feel like table-top RPG’s are a stagnant market or that there is no growth opportunity for ICE, RM or Shadow World I would point out two facts:

There are an average of 27 new forum members per day on the ICE Forums. That’s not a lot but that’s incremental growth. Every new member will be able to see the development of RMU, the large number of resources in terms of thread topics, file uploads and Q&A’s that are available and the active participation of product authors. Being able to get quick and detailed responses from the RMU developers or Terry himself is pretty cool—especially to a new ICE customer!
There are still gamers that haven’t heard of, or are not familiar with Shadow World! Even after almost 30 years. I recently saw this thread where several posters were completely unaware: http://www.thepiazza.uk/bb/viewtopic.php?f=44&t=13960

There are three basic ways to grow sales: acquire new customers (grow the game community), convert competitor’s customers or sell/upsell to your existing customers. Many would argue that growth in new table top players is stagnant, lost to new media and video games. But growth is occurring and RM and SW have a place in that market. Converting gamers to RM and SW is a bit easier—RM started as a modular “bolt on” product to D&D and SW has never really been stat intensive and can and has been used with a variety of gaming systems. Selling more product to current customers is the fall-back approach; what we call “low hanging fruit”. Publish a new product or revision and you’ll get a certain percentage of existing customers that will buy it—baked-in sales.

There is certainly opinions and criticisms of each of these approaches. Some argue that RMU won’t bring in new gamers; that ICE needs a simple introductory rule set. Others feel ICE just needs to push out more products in general. If there was one right answer, or if business strategy was that definitive than everyone would be a millionaire! The truth is that all three channels need to be explored and I think that ICE is doing a fairly good job given its organizational footprint and resources to bear.

There are new tools for small or emerging companies: social media, organic growth strategies, guerilla marketing etc. Putting those aside, there is one essential strategy for growing a customer base: from the ground up: “boots on the ground”. RM and SW need to be introduced locally, whenever possible. Gaming nights at the local library, game store or youth center. Tournament modules at gaming conventions etc. Other industries use “sponsorships”; this might be worth exploring. Having GM starter packs, online private forums and other tools to encourage local GM’s to adopt ICE games and use them locally builds a customer base. Reimbursing GM’s for travel and hotel costs at GENCON might pay itself off quite well.

Let’s look at another industry that has some similarities: rapid adoption, youth client base, local growth. I used to be heavily involved in the paintball industry. The sport grew rapidly in the 2000’s: tournaments were televised nationally, fields opened up everywhere, there were at least 8 glossy magazines dedicated to the sport and equipment companies had robust sponsorships for teams and local retail stores. Over time, the equipment manufacturers started their own retail websites and sold directly to their customer base. Once they captured direct sales and the associated retail margins they became less motivated to spend money on local sponsorship and player development. They became direct competitors of the local stores. While the economic crash was a contributing factor, since the late 2000’s the industry has shrunk by 80%. Yes, part of the issue was the wholesale/retail strategy of the manufacturers, but a larger part was a slower and more insidious feedback loop: there is no place to play paintball. Store retail sales suffered, which reduced player development, field investments and local marketing. Because of this, fewer players participated in paintball and store sales suffered further. Local paintball businesses closed and there were less options to play and thus less players. Overall a self-fulfilling downward spiral.

What are the analogs to the gaming industry? Local development can be an effective strategy to growing a customer base. I don’t think RGP’s will see the same boom that we experienced in the early 80’s BUT…aging gamers are teaching their kids to play and creating a new generation of RPGers. It’s a slower process that requires a broader strategy than a top-down advertising or point of sale effort. Supporting gaming conventions, creating a GM starter pack, reimbursing experienced GM’s to attend every con possible, creating a “game ambassadorships” for targeted cities/regions—these are low cost strategies to build the game base. Growing the local gaming community grows the base, which then grows company sales. A virtuous feed-back loop.