Rolemaster Unified – Page 7 – The Rolemaster Blog

October 27, 2017

New Generation Orcs!

Once upon a time Rolemaster was a drop in set of house rules for D&D. These monsters bring things full circle. These are the monsters from the D&D 5e SRD converted back to an approximation for any version of Rolemaster. Some monsters will be weaker than the official Rolemaster monsters for your version of Rolemaster. Some will be tougher. As a GM you should look at the monster and decide if you need to adjust the number encountered to take account of any variation in power.

Every monster has a mini stat block. Monsters exist to be killed, out smarted or avoided. They are not there to be invited home to meet the family, you do not need full PC quality stat blocks. These mini stat blocks are there to give you a ball park figures for when you need start making rolls for the monsters. Strength is a combination of Strength and Constitution, Speed is Agility and Quickness, Intelligence is a mix of memory and reasoning, Empathy is both Empathy and Intuition, Presence is a mix of Presence and Self Discipline.

Attacks and OBs.

I am not using the rules in the original Creatures and Treasures for converting AD&D monsters to Rolemaster. As Hurin pointed out some the RM2 monsters were a bit arbitrary. Another point is that original RM did not have multiple attacks. Two Weapon Combo did not arrive until RoCo2. The way that C&T dealt with multiple attacks was to increase the OB of the creature, part of the flurry of blows style of combat round. I am going back to the D&D style multiple attacks as that is what the PCs have. It also makes monsters slightly more dangerous as the more attacks, the more chances of that open-ended up roll!

Base Rate.

There is a big change between new and old Rolemaster and that is the round length. RMU rounds are 5 seconds, RM2 rounds are 10 seconds, HARP rounds are 2 seconds. The movement rates are quoted as per second, so you can time 2, 5 or 10 as you desire.

Armour Types

This is the biggest change between version. RM2 & RMSS have 20 armour types. RMC (with the combat companion) and RMU have 10 armour types. The listing will show both but 3/20 means AT3 if you are using AT 1-20. An AT of 2/10 means AT 2 if you are using ATs 1-10. Armour in HARP is expressed as a DB modifier. As a rule of thumb if you take the AT in the 1-10 scale and times it by 10 you can add this to the DB and you will not be far off the mark. So for example an Orc in this collection of monsters has an AT of 3/10, 2/10 means AT3 in RM2, AT2 in RMU and for HARP it will need +20 DB (2×10). Any number in brackets after the AT is the creatures natural DB rounded to the nearest whole +/-5. For example the orc has a Speed of 60. That is an approximation of its Agility and Quickness. Under RMU that would give a +2 stat bonus and a +6DB. Here it is rounded to a +5DB.

Overview

Comparing my Orc to a RMC Orc and we have the same movement and the same hits. The RMC Orc wears armour and carries a shield but this something that the GM can change. My orc has a higher OB. This is in line with the sample character sheets I have that all show starting characters are much more powerful than the original characters and NPCs bundled with books like Heroes and Rogues. The NPCs I was sent all, right across the board, had higher OBs, DBs and hits. They all also had higher perception skills which is equally life saving!

So here is the ‘open’ Orc that is usable with RM2, RMC, RMSS, RMFRP, RMU and HARP.

Orc

Orc Grunt

Level 3

Base Rate 5’/sec

Max Pace/MM Bonus Dash/+10

Size/Critical M

Hits 50

ST	SP	IN	EM	PR
80	60	35	50	50
+15	+5	-10	+0	+0

AT 3/20 2/10 (+5) Leather Hide or by Armour type

Attacks OB 67 Weapon Spear or Javelin

Environment: Temperate hills

I think I have a working formula for doing a conversion from 5e to a sort of averaged version of all the RM flavours. These are not meant to be achieving a carbon copy of the Creatures and Treasures monsters but new and different versions. Many of the monsters will be completely new such as the Aboleth who simply does not exist in any flavour of RM.

I think these will be great fanzine material as that is less likely to fall into players hands. I can remember getting White Dwarf or Dragon magazine and really looking forward to new monsters that my players didn’t know. That is the effect I am after!

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…

October 15, 2017October 14, 2017

Deconstructing Magic in Rolemaster. Magical Auras.

Over the past year, I’ve touched upon some new Spell Law concepts: a different take on “Channeling“, a new way to look at “Summoning” and the concept of “Links” or “Threads”. When I work on creating new spell lists for Rolemaster and Shadow World, I tend to come at it from a different perspective. I think many new lists featured in RoCos and the Guild Companion were devised from a Profession-centric approach. ie a new profession class is generated and then spells to support the concept are created. I’ve also done that with my Hierax Guard and a few others.

However, my more favored approach is a deconstructive process: what could magic do and how should it work? I’m often inspired by the books I’m reading–especially if it contains a novel or interesting magic system. While I’m reading I try to visualize how the books magic might work in the RM system or write a few spell lists derived from the ideas in the story. Since I read quite a bit, I average one or two lists per month that I sketch out and and drop in a review folder. I have almost 75 lists that I need to finish off, assign a “realm” or discard!!!! Out of those, probably 40 will make it into BASiL in my next iteration, pushing the spell list count to well over 200.

So what are some new mechanics for Spell Law? As an example, let’s use the “Detect” spells, specifically Detect Essence (or the other two realms for that matter). The spell allows a caster to detect the presence of Essence–not the type of spell or power or even the strength of the spell. That’s simple and still useful, right? But the spell works like a telescope–the caster can examine a 5′ radius area per round–as if they are peering through a telescope at a small concentrated area. Why does it work that way? DnD. In DnD, the ability to detect magic was critical–especially in analyzing treasure to see what, if any, objects were magical. So why can’t the spell work differently? Why can’t the caster just “see” the magical auras of objects, people, PP reservoirs, Essence Flows, Foci, active spells etc. Does that unbalance the game? Does it seem too powerful?

In Shadow World, magic is everywhere and RM already introduced the concept of spell casting color manifestations and “power perception” as a trainable skill. This lends to the idea of “auras”–magical emanations that are generated by magical fields. These auras can be seen via spells, scrying (or in the case of “High” Elves, perhaps through normal visual perception)

One of the benefits of having auras is not only can you have spells to see and perceive them, but you can have a whole other set of spells to hide, distort or change them! This creates another level of caster “dueling” where aura detection and aura masking or distortion spells conflict via RR’s, caster skill or spell skill bonuses.

Like other Spell Law list progressions, detecting and viewing magical auras improves through levels. At lower levels, the caster may just perceive the presence of magic, while later spells could perceive power level, realm, type of spell or “links” between another caster and a target they are controlling or concentrating on. This visual interpretation of spell affects provides a more cinematic approach to casting, without the general solution of casting “colors” (which I feel are a bit too “Snidely Whiplash“).

More importantly, the ability to view auras can work differently between realms–further differentiating realm powers and caster ability. One idea would be to have Essence casters access to quantatative aura detection (power, type, strength etc), while Mentalists have an easier ability to see mental connection/control/concentration between two or more people and Channelers can see “channeling auras” indicating what god a caster is associated with.

Another benefit is that it creates a unified structure for detection and analytics for all types of magic. Right now, Spell Law is a hodge podge of mechanisms that often require GM arbitration. For me this is the key to Spell Law deconstruction/reconstruction. Viewing RM magic through an unbiased lense, questioning built in DnD tropes and then rethinking accepted spell mechanics can lead to clearer, more flexible and interesting Spell Law.

October 13, 2017

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

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

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

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

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

So What Is It All About?

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

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

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

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

October 6, 2017

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

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

Well here is a real bunch of thoughts for you…

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

They didn’t do that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Edgltd doesn’t even play RM.

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

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

So here is a hypothetical question for you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Things I would have done…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

October 5, 2017

RMU: Mission Accomplished?

I’ve been reluctant to comment directly on RMU; the rules are still in Beta and I’ve already decided what pieces to adopt in my own game. I think there is a lot of fantastic stuff in RMU–some of it inspired me to modify my own house rules or change the way I think of an RM mechanic. That’s a positive sign for any new rules in a system played predominantly by older games who are fairly set in their ways. Early versions of RMU inspired me to make wholesale changes to my game. In all honesty, despite the time I’ve spend re-writing Character Law and Spell Law, I was never going to tackle Arms Law. I just didn’t have the interest or patience in re-writing the attack tables–but they did need work. So thanks for that guys!

My last blog, I talked about the need for RMU to fully integrate a game setting. But let’s talk about the most over-arching criticisms of Rolemaster, deserved or not: character generation (chargen) and “chartmaster”. Do a google search: “rolemaster chargen“, “rolemaster chartmaster“, “rolemaster system” etc. Scan through the results. Read other RPG blogs that discuss Rolemaster. Putting aside comments about grittiness, granularity, verisimilitude and deadliness, the most common comments about Rolemaster are the length of time of character generation and the profusion of charts. This isn’t my opinion–it’s intertwined with the Rolemaster brand.

Here are a few examples:

“Character creation and advancement became a bear.

Significantly reduce the number of skills used and broaden their scope
Create more options for how in-game situations can be resolved
Make character creation significantly easier and quicker

However, character creation and, even more so, levelling up, is where the system’s crunchiness really shows. I think its even accurate to say that the massive crunch of the system is very front-loaded. Making a new character is a session-long endeavour, I used to dread going up in level, because it meant another 15 – 20 minutes of calculations

Now, next question….

Does RMU address or solve these 2 most common criticisms?

I’ve already blogged about a variety of ways that RM(U) can reduce or eliminate charts. I’ve also blogged about character gen in 15 minutes. Both discuss my own solutions for these two cited issues. Those are just my solutions, and per the comments, there are many people who don’t agree. So let’s just tackle the base question.

Unifying the various rules systems and updating the ruleset are great goals. But if the two most frequent criticisms of Rolemaster are left unaddressed, how does the system move forward with a new player base?

October 3, 2017September 30, 2017

Can Rolemaster survive as a generic game system anymore?

While originally designed as a bolt on system to DnD, the Rolemaster “Laws” were always unwieldy to adapt to a d20 system. That didn’t matter for long, as the full suite of rules were published in fairly short order: Rolemaster was a standalone system.

Unfortunately from there, Rolemaster became ‘bipolar’: it contained quite a bit of DnD DNA but tried to establish an RM specific setting with the Loremaster line of products. (Iron Wind, Cloudlords, Vog Mur). Rolemaster was torn between the path forward in the gritty world of the Iron Wind or the well established cartoonish tropes of DnD. And soon after that, ICE rolled out the Middle Earth setting, although there is general agreement that the first few ME books (Court of Ardor & Umbar specifically) had more the feel of the Loremaster world than Middle Earth.

In balancing out these various constituencies, ICE decided to spin off a simplified version of RM for the Middle Earth products (MERP) to better fit the system with the setting, but Rolemaster continued to be torn between its roots in DnD and its flavor and style represented by Loremaster. When Shadow World was introduced in the late 80’s it established it’s own DNA, but still drew from the standards found in Creatures & Treasures to maintain product line conformity. Third party Shadow World products were more generic, diluting the world flavor–since then most have been stamped as “non-canon” by Terry.

Now 35 years later, MERP is gone and Rolemaster has been redesigned and soon to be published. Unfortunately, the redesign only united the previous versions of RM (RM2, RMC, RMSS) and NOT united the game system with a game world. That was a mistake.

I’ve blogged quite a bit about the “gap” between the RM rules and Shadow World, and deconstructed different rule mechanics and how they are in conflict with that world setting. Rolemaster has one foot in and one foot out of the established game setting (Shadow World) leaving RM as an orphan: a generic fantasy game system in a market place that doesn’t need one with mechanical bits that are remnants of early 80’s 1st Edition AD&D.

ICE has little chance in reliving their heydays of the 80’s. There is more competition, more niche products, more OGL’s and more self published material than ever. Shadow World may not be for everyone, but it has a following, is a good setting and Terry continues to write new material and improve existing material. Shadow World needs to embrace it’s uniqueness and Rolemaster needed to fully adapt the rules to fit the setting. A comprehensive and unique eco-system can bring in new players and/or unify exiting ones.

The new rules, the creatures and the spells in RMU should have been fully united with Shadow World. That would require, among many other things, Pantheon specific spell lists, rational rules for death and resurrection, elimination of some earth/cultural weapons for clarity, expansion of unique SW creatures, Professions for Loremaster, Navigators and other SW specific organizations, clarity in Essence manipulation/perception with Essence Flows and Focuses etc etc. The rules should reinforce the setting and the setting should reinforce the rules.

There has been a lot of discussion about who the target market is for RMU. There is skepticism that the existing user base will adopt RMU entirely after decades of playing and modifying earlier versions. It’s been pointed out that many RM players are older, in their 40’s and 50’s. These are important questions and discussions–how can ICE generate a all new base of younger roleplayers?

Putting aside OSR self-published products, it seems to me that new game systems are packaged with the setting. In fact, the setting itself becomes the draw while the rule set supports the setting. This was even true in the 80’s. Gamers didn’t play Ringworld or Twilight 2000 because the rule set was excellent–they played for the setting. Numenera didn’t market it’s rule set–it marketed the unique setting (which I think Monte borrowed heavily from Loremaster/SW).

It’s not too late. RMU doesn’t seem that close to publishing that an intensive effort to adapt SW to the new system couldn’t be done. It’s not like SW would require much work to adapt to RMU–most of the work would be tweaks to RMU to conform with SW. But the roll-out needs to be a combined effort of rules and setting. If that could be executed, ICE and SW would be a multi-platform property: rule expansions, modules, fiction, graphic novels and maybe a small allowance for open license materials. This isn’t revolutionary–ICE has done some or all of that but via a fragmented strategy. RM was used for online MMORPG for a bit, Terry has started his SW novelization, fans have written comics, SW art etc.

This doesn’t mean that RMU can’t be used as a rule set for other settings. But another iteration of a generic Rolemaster isn’t going to differentiate it from other new products on the market and may not appeal to much of the established player base that have years invested in one of the past editions.

September 29, 2017

Community Created Content

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

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

The way they work is this…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

September 20, 2017September 19, 2017

More Musings on Professions: Are they Necessary in Rolemaster?

For a game system that was predicated on “no limitations” for player characters, I still find the need to cling to Professions curious. More importantly–beyond PC creation and occasionally leveling–do Professions serve any other purpose? Is a Professional label important for NPCs–the most generally the predominant characters in a game world?

Besides acting as a general trope label, NPC’s in ICE products still list out all skills, skill bonuses and spell lists. Unlike D&D, there are no intrinsic skills or abilities imparted to professions at various levels in Rolemaster. The Profession listed on an NPC stat might give a GM a “sense” of that character, but what really matters is the stat block itself. There is really no need to know a Profession for an NPC–only their stats and abilities. That’s the whole point of a skill based character system.

In Shadow World Terry pretty much throws away strict adherence to Professions; in my mind this an acknowledgement of the creative limitations such a system produces. Loremasters and Navigators are clearly a Profession, but due to RAW, are first assigned a standard RM Profession and then given extra base lists. The Steel Rain, Priests Arnak etc are all given extra lists on top of the Profession (whether it be Mentalism, Channeling or Essence) with NO REGARD to realm limitations.

As a GM do you build an NPC from the ground up? When creating a 22nd level NPC do you go through all 22 levels of character build using Profession skill costs?? I don’t, I just fill in stat blocks based on a general sense of power level and the narrative needs the NPC serves. Have you looked at any NPCs in MERP or Shadow World and analyzed whether the skill stats have any relation to Profession skill costs, ranks or bonuses?

My point being that “descriptors” are more useful to me than some arbitrary Profession assignment in an NPC stat block that serves no other purpose in the game mechanics. Unless PC’s know the NPC’s Profession and then make meta-gaming decisions based on that, they serve no purpose.

That means, in practice, that Professions only serve a purpose for a handful of people; the 2, 3 or even 5 players in your group. All those rules, all the arguments about skill costs and the nitpicking about whether Weather Watching should be 2/3 or 2/4 for a Animist seem complex for complexity sake.

I’m building a city in Shadow World: Nontataku. Like any RPG city, this is an NPC intensive environment. Per RAW (RM2), I need to assign a Profession to shopkeepers, blacksmiths, porters, etc. Obviously giving them a RM Profession is absurd. Assigning a shopkeeper the Profession of “Figher, Thief or even Mage” is pointless. Some versions of RM do add non-adventure tropes as additional Professions (craftsmen, laborer and even “no-Profession”) but, for me, that is just another example of “Rule for Rules”.

For me, simple descriptors like “Shopkeeper” or “Loremaster” or “Merchant” work better than some arbitrary, and limited, Rolemaster profession.

September 15, 2017

Seconds ticking away

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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