House Rules – Page 9 – The Rolemaster Blog

November 16, 2016

ROLEMASTER SKILL CONSOLIDATION PT. 4: ATHLETICS

I was going to go back to my long simmering Shadow World Spin Cycle blog topic, but since there is so much discussion around “meta-skills” I thought I would continue with rolemaster skill consolidation.

We’ve been using the RMU fatigue rules for several years now and before that used a simplified version of the optional fatigue points rules. As I’ve mentioned before, I think fatigue is a critical component of our campaign and a major narrative point in fantasy literature. (Frodo’s walk towards Mt. Doom as the penultimate example). Given that we had included “Endurance” as an important, primary skill. At first, the skill bonus was used for fatigue points and then later using the RMU beta the skill bonus was used for fatigue checks (rather than body development). I saw endurance/cardio fitness as distinct from body development and wanted to separate the two to allow for non-fighter types to have good endurance without the automatic benefit of more hit points.

In the past year we’ve further consolidated skills and rolled the “Endurance” skill into a meta-skill: Athletics. We refer to this as the “Bruce Jenner” skill–think ancient Greek athletes and the decathalon. Athletics includes cardio endurance, hand/eye coordination, throwing (for distance not necessarily accuracy), jumping, running, hiking and even feats of strength.

While it could be argued that many of these subskills should use varying stat bonuses, I generally use Str/Ag/Co. The meta-skill is meant to be a broad indicator of general athleticism and physical games. Certainly a few of these lose some “realism” by not having more specific stat bonus assignments but for this one, simplicity wins out!

November 14, 2016November 13, 2016

Meta Skills

Brian and I both share the same philosophy when it comes to skills, less is more. Meta skills are a way of having less skills that enable your characters do more.

More is less

The more skills you have in your game the less capable the characters are. If there are only 40 skills and a character can afford to buy 10 plus some body development, weapons and perception then they have 25% of all the skill bases covered.

If you have 100 skills in your game and they can afford to buy 10 skills then the character has only 10% of all the bases covered.

If you have 200 skills then 10 skills covers just 5% of skills.

As you up the total skill count one option is to increase the number of development points each character has. This was introduced with the firs set of secondary skills in Character Law. They added 45 secondary skills and recommended adding 25% more development points. So by the time you get to 200 skills you need to be giving the characters double development points just to stand still.

I can agree that if you have more skills you should give the characters more development points to compensate but this brings with it its own problems. If your character starts off with relatively few DPs because he or she has lowish temp stats (but decent potentials) then your fellow characters are going to be able to do more than you in more situations. This is already a problem but now the effect has been quadrupled (it was doubled by doubling the demand on the limited DPs and then exacerbated by doubling the difference between a character with high stats and one with low stats). Your fellow characters have more opportunities to earn experience so they level up faster and get more DPs and so the problem gets worse. What you have is a vicious circle.

The other option is Meta Skills. Brian has a Survival skill but does not have Foraging or Region Lore or tracking. If you hae a full set of survival skills for a particular region then that includes where to find food, water, the lie of the land. You can also build a fire and probably tie knots covered by rope mastery.

RMU shows some of its strengths

This is where RMU shows some of its strengths. Firstly you get a fixed number of DPs per level, the default is 50 so having great stats or poor is no handicap but also it has the Vocational Skill.

Vocational is the ultimate meta skill

Vocational is the ultimate meta skill. If you take Vocation:Knight then you gain all the minor day to day skills that a knight would know from recognizing the devices and standard of other noble families to etiquette to handling hunting dogs and birds of prey. A character can have multiple Vocation skills so you could have Vocation:Squire and Vocation:Knight if your character came up through the ranks, so to speak. You can pretty much define your characters back story skills in terms of Vocational Skills. Vocation does not supersede any specific named skills, you cannot use Vocation:Knight in place of Riding:Horse by claiming that riding is a knightly pursuit.

This is how I think all skills should work. I don’t use the Survival skill but I do have Foraging and Tracking. Brian and I have identified the same problem arrived at the same answer but we started from different places. In my gaming group my players love the Tracking skill so it was not on the cards to remove it. It would have been missed too badly to take it away. On the other hand no one bought the survival skill, in those survival moments the players turned to foraging for food or tracking game (animals have to drink so follow the tracks and you will find water).

In both cases, Brian’s Shadow World campaign and my Forgotten Realms game we have both arrived at a total skill count of about 45 skills. The characters are going on similar adventures, facing similar challenges and coming to similar solutions I assume as people the world over are all the same. As long as the game and skill system gives the players the levers they want to pull the players are happy.

The reduced skill count actually makes the players happier as their characters are more capable and more of their ideas are successful ‘on the round’ as the characters are able to put the plans into action. It reduces the need for quite so many NPCs and so on.

As I get older I find I can retain the definition of 40-50 skills easily enough but on the other hand trying to remember 200 skills when about half of them ‘break the rules’ (things like the way that stunned maneuver works, or iai strike that have unique rules for just one skill). I am never going to retain that many skills and rules and I don’t think new players will either.

I kind of hope that RMU resists the urge to bolt on more and more skills a the system matures. There is no need to repeat the mistakes of the past when there are so many new ones we can all make!

November 13, 2016

Rolemaster Skill Consolidation. Pt. 3: TRICKERY

Welcome to Pt. 3 of my blog on Rolemaster Skill Consolidation. In this blog series we explore the creation of “meta-skills”—broader skills that roll up lesser or secondary skills to reduce skill bloat and better skill equality across the board. You can see Pt. 1 Channeling and Pt. 2 Survival here. Both “meta-skills” and “skills as lore” allow for PCs to act within the game rules and me to focus on the narrative flow without resorting to highly technical refereeing calls. As Pete discussed in an earlier blog, I prefer meta-skills for the balance between “rolling it” (via skill bonus) and “role-playing it” via the broad scope of meta-skills.

Today I want to focus on our meta-skill “Trickery”. I’ve played around with a number of names for this skill including “Subterfuge” and “Mummery”, but right now I’m sticking to Trickery although it lacks a certain gravitas. Our trickery skill was inspired by “The Lies of Locke Lamora”—a fantasy book about a group of thieves. The story includes great details on the thieving profession from a simple cut-purse to the skilled “long-con”. The book really inspired me to think about urban adventures, adventure narrative and mystery/detective style adventures.

The Trickery skill rolls up a number of interesting and useful secondary skills into one more comprehensive skill: pick-pockets, sleight of hand, mimicry, ventriloquism, forgery, disguise, hand-signals, and misdirection. While each of those sub-skills are cool with great potential for game play, I don’t think they stand up on their own as a primary skill. Rolling it into a meta-skill really gives it some punch and allows for creative use by the PC. Rather than having a “rule-lawyer” argument about a questionable application of the pick-pocket skill, the PCs action will fall under the broader skill subject to their skill rank and my ruling on difficulty.

November 2, 2016February 4, 2017

Revisiting Spell Law. Spell casting mechanisms Pt. 4 Mentalism.

The changes we made to casting mechanics for Essence and Channeling seemed obvious (to us) and were fairly straightforward, but we really struggled with the Mentalism realm. It could be argued that mentalism is the least restrictive of the realms: no armor penalties, a broad range of spell abilities and not much for casting requirements. One of our goals with Project BASiL was to increase the differentiation between realms and build some specific advantages and disadvantages for each.

Based on how we saw Mentalism working we kept the basics and then added 1 major advantage and 1 major disadvantage

The basics:

Helmets or head coverings interferes with casting. There are no other armor or encumbrance penalties for casting Mentalism.
Spells don’t seem to require a verbal or gesture component. Mentalism casting is purely a thinking exercise of forming “mental frameworks”.

Major Advantage: Casting Time. Since Mentalism spells can be formed and cast at the “speed of thought” we’ve made all Mentalism spells casting time either Instantaneous of 1 rnd. That may sound extreme or unbalancing but this is offset by the disadvantage.

Major Disadvantage: Concentration Requirement. While Mentalism spells are quick to cast, those that work over a duration require the caster to maintain concentration while the spell is in effect. Concentration is a -50% to all actions, so maintaining a spell can have a real impact on the caster.

We made Magical Language skill a requirement for Essence Casting and Prayer skill a requirement for Channeling. For Mentalism we use “Mental Focus” skill. This skill allows the caster to not only offset the concentration penalty, but “partition” their mind to allow concentrating on multiple tasks. That means that Mentalism spell casters can cast and concentrate on multiple spells (not to exceed -100% and total spell levels not to exceed Mental Focus skill ranks).

As an example, Caylis the Monk 10 ranks, +60 in Mental Focus. He decides to cast Nightvision (3^rd lvl) and then Waterwalking (5^th lvl). Since he is concentrating on 2 spells, he would be at –100 to all actions, but the penalty is offset by his 60 skill bonus. Therefore Caylis is at -40 for the duration of the 2 spells.

Overall, we’ve been happy with our revised casting mechanics. The various realms offer real plusses and minuses for the players and greatly changed the calculation when choosing spells.

October 30, 2016

Rolemaster Skill Consolidation. Pt. 2

This is pt. 2 of an ongoing blog segment on Rolemaster “skill consolidation. The first part on the Channeling skills can be found HERE.

While character differentiation is important, the absorption of secondary skills into primary skills caused not only skill bloat but also a huge disparity in the value of various skills. For our game, one of the most effective consolidations is the use of the “Survival” skill. Depending on the environment, the Survival skill rolls up quite a few useful, but minor, skills: foraging, fauna or flora lore, bribing, hunting, tracking, weather watching, trap/snare, fire starting, shelter building, etc. None of those skills are learned in a vacuum, but are part of a larger survival skill set. Since we use cultural skill sets for adolescence, PC’s will have several ranks of Survival skill which encompasses the environmentally appropriate sub-skills.

At first, one of the biggest push-backs from my players was the elimination of the Tracking skill. Tracking has long been a main-stay in RPG’s, a core skill for a Ranger and a primary skill in the original RM rules. Probably a result of the Arathorn’s tracking the Uruk-hai and Gollum; key plot points in the story. In fiction, the tracking skill is used to great effect as an expository device but I’ve never found it of great use in any of my campaigns—at low levels the skill is somewhat ineffective and at higher levels spells can replace the skill.

But again, we didn’t eliminate the Tracking skill, just de-emphasized it as a stand-alone and made it part of a broader skill. There is still a bit of an arbitrary nature in our survival skill but as a few examples:

Survival: Desert/Wasteland. Finding Water, Navigation, Foraging, Assess Terrain, Build Shelter etc.
Survival: Woods. Tracking, Snares, Foraging, Fauna/Flora Lore, Field-dress, Fire Starting, Build Shelter
Survival: Urban. Gather rumors, Bribery, Street Navigation, Barter, Assess Terrain, Contact Underworld etc.
Survival: Ocean. Fishing, rowing, sailing, weather watching, navigation.

Much of this is common sense and the PC’s efficacy will of course be driven by their skill level. Any of course with “Meta Skills” there can be cross over with other skills like vocations: “Huntsmen” or “Sailor”.

What I’ve discovered is that even with very tightly defined skills, players will still make situational arguments in the game to broaden out the scope of that ability. As a GM that can be frustrating—you either get one or the other, not both: broad skills that allow for flexibility or specific skills that shouldn’t have any flexibility. I’d rather user fewer meta-skills that give PC’s the room to be creative.

October 19, 2016

Shadow World Creature Ideas: The Soulless.

While I’ve posted up quite a few files, bits and excerpts from our Shadow World campaign over at the RM Forums, I put many of them up with minimal explanation or background. Since we are in the Halloween season I wanted to go back and discuss one of my posting in more detail: The Soulless or UnMen.

We’ve always run Shadow World as “monster-lite”, preferring the unique creatures (Shards, Gogor, Kaden etc) over the traditional ubiquitous fantasy RPG monsters. But generally my group is dealing with human/humanoid adversaries rather than fantastical ones. Shadow World does have one over-arching “foe”, the Unlife, but that tends to be an abstract malevolence that also raises quite a few questions. In our own campaign, we’ve made a distinction between good/evil and the Unlife and eliminated the entire “anti-Essaence” concept that further muddied the waters. We also distanced the Charon pantheon from the definition of “evil” to a more “chaotic” one.

But I did want a better mechanism to manifest the Unlife to my players and I also wanted to replace the traditional D&D Undead that can genericizes a SW campaign. Thus the “Soulless” (“UnMen” to some societies) so named because the hosts eyes turn black. The Soulless can occur in 3 ways: the animation of a dead body (“zombification” which replaces some Undead types and allows for Unlife Necromancy), the possession of a living host (replaces Demonic possession and ties into corruption of a person accessing the Unlife) and in some cases the Non-Corporeal manifestation of the Unlife (replaces Wraiths, Spectres etc).

I like this solution because it shoehorns into the existing spell system, ( “Turning Undead”, “Possession”, of Slaying “Evil”, detection of “Evil”), while it also replaces known, generic Undead with a setting specific adversary. Like Undead, we’ve built the Soulless into “Classes” I-VI with powers and abilities that increasing accordingly. Both Unlife animation and possession touch upon common tropes popular in culture: Fear the Walking Dead, Ash v Evil Dead etc, but add unpredictability and even paranoia to the group. Anyone or anything could be “infected” with the Unlife. Even better, it unifies differing and problematic mechanisms created by the “gap” between the RM ruleset and SW setting.

In this Halloween season, maybe it’s time to introduce your players to the “new and improved Unlife”: the Soulless Continue reading “Shadow World Creature Ideas: The Soulless.”

October 16, 2016

GM’ing Navigators in your Shadow World campaign: Stick to the Code.

I like to use Navigators in our campaigns. Like Loremasters and Essaence Flows, Navigators can allow the GM to inject direction and narrative changes into the game. Plus SW is a dangerous place–and Navigators give the party added insurance when travelling through the wilderness.

It seems like some GM’s are reluctant to using Navigators. Reading posts on the RM Forums there are a few main areas of concern that people post about:

Cost. Navigators are expensive–and forget about using them for a Jump (teleport)!

From a game perspective, having the PC’s teleport everywhere can certainly expedite things and save a lot of hassle of normal travel (and work for the GM!). But the high cost of Jumping may make it prohibitive for lower level players. Keep in mind that the Nav Guilds are a “for profit” business and while they may have a monopoly they need to set their prices low enough that people will use them. Don’t be afraid to adjust pricing, up or down! Navigator fees are also a great money sink for groups overflowing with cash.

Which Navigator responds to a summons?

Most Navigators in the Atlas’ are immortal, well equipped and quite powerful. That lends to the perception that Navigators are high priced or inaccessible to regular players. But the organization has to train new guild members and not every Navigator will be high level. Our common Navigator level range is 8th to 15th. These are not omnipotent characters able to fight off powerful servants of the Unlife. They are just specialized guides with extensive local knowledge and some spells that allow them to tackle unpredictable Essaence effects and barriers. Like any professional there is no guaranty of success once hired. If they players see Navigators this way they may be more inclined to utilize them–just like they would an Astrologer, Alchemist, blacksmith or other special profession.

What will a Navigator do in the normal course of their duties?

Most of our exposure to Navigators are the short vignettes Terry sprinkles throughout his books and many of these depict major events or significant characters. What’s not quite clear is the limits of Navigators services. Combined with the perceived power issue and it’s easy to assume that Navigators can and will extract the group from almost any danger or threat. Much of this decision will depend on the GM, his game style and use of the SW environment but to help guide NPC decisions we refer to the “Navigator Code”.

We are still playing around with some of the wording and eventually will order them according to importance.

The Navigator Code

To Complete my task as expediently as possible.
To Protect my wards to the best of my ability without aggression.
To Avoid interfering with my clients goals.
To Ensure my clients confidentiality.
To Maintain the confidentiality of the guilds.
To Provide options but not advice to my clients.

Navigators can be a great ingredient to your Shadow World campaign!

October 12, 2016October 12, 2016

REVISITING SPELL LAW: SPELL CASTING MECHANICS PT. 3: CHANNELING

In Casting Mechanics Pt. 2 we discussed our reworking of the Essence spell lists. In this post we’ll tackle our deconstruction and rebuild of the Channeling lists. Recent posts by Peter talked about his difficulties with the Channeling realm. For Project BASil we rewrote Channeling spells (rather than eliminate it), but I agree that the Channeling realm presents some problems. In short, the Channeling realm is dependent on the setting, world build and presence and type of Dieties. D&D and Spell Law deal with this by making Channeling spells fairly generic and “vanilla”—it took the Channeling Companion to really dig into “Aspect Lists” and rules for more flexibility for Clerics and other Channeling Professions.

First, let’s look at Channeling in the original rule set:

Casting Time. Like all realms, spells take 1-3 rounds to cast.
Metal armor interferes with casting.
Spells require a verbal and hand gesture component.
Spell Powers. Spells cover a very broad range of power but generally exclude elemental attacks spells.

Our deconstruction of Spell Law forced us to look at each aspect of Channeling spells and casting mechanisms.

Spell Access. If the very nature of Channeling implies access to, or permission from, a “higher power” than that also implies that not everyone can access Channeling spells. Unlike Essence where even a non-spell user could make an effort to learn an Open list, we must assume that the potential caster must at least worship a god and that the god allows that person to cast. (an atheist couldn’t learn Channeling spells) This assumption throws away the whole concept of Open, Closed and Base for the Channeling realm. Instead we reclassified/renamed the 3 categories. “Holy Believers” (Open) are less powerful, general spells available to faithful followers of the diety that put the time and devotion into studies and are granted access to some basic powers. “Holy Followers” (closed) are specialized or aspect themed spells that are only accessible to the priests and clerics or to special servants or high ranking members of the religion. “Holy Servant” (Base) spells are lists for Priests/Clerics and Holy Warriors of the religion. In short, spell access is driven by the casters role in the religion or church.

Channeling Mechanics. Given the need for a Diety to justify the Channeling Realm we also wanted to define the god’s role in actual spell casting. Spell Law touches upon the concept but it’s all a little vague. Are Power Points drawn from the Diety? If so, then why have PP limits for Channelers? Are the spells themselves drawn from the god? SL mentions that higher level spells may need tacit permission from the god or at least their awareness, but it’s not built into the game mechanics in any real way. Since we defined spell power (power points) as being single-sourced (the Essaence) and individual, it’s not the power that’s drawn from the god. Instead we see channeling as working like an app download. The caster prays and the god/diety provides the spell template to create the magical effect.

Casting Components. Given the above definition for Channeling mechanics, the channeling user doesn’t need to use a magical language or arcane hand gestures to generate spell effects. Instead, the caster just recites a specific prayer, “asking” for a certain spell effect. The prayer/spellcast doesn’t even need to be spoken but we do add a SCR bonus for praying out loud. We added a Prayer skill that is used for the SCR. The prayer skill measure the level of devotion and connection of the caster and also determines the highest level of spell that can be cast.

Channeling Spell Powers. Because the spell framework is provided by the god, we felt that Channeling spells didn’t need to be as logical or linear as the Essence lists They could manifest as more miraculous, wondrous or illogical. From a realm differentiation standpoint, channeling spells are better with the intangible: souls, spirits, auras and similar non-physical aspects. Because they are tied to a higher being, channeling is also better at divination/augury and other “fuzzy logic” spells.

Encumbrance. We eliminated the encumbrance and armor effect for Channelers. As discussed in another blog, the Transcend Armor work around is just rules for rules. I don’t see a balance issue.

Casting Time. Channeling spells can be more miraculous and powerful than other realms, we eliminated casting penalties for armor—so are Channelers now too powerful? We chose to balance these benefits with longer casting times. Since the caster needs to pray for a spell effect it might take some time. Our casting rule for Channeling is 1 rnd per spell lvl. A caster can cast quicker, by “rushing” the prayer but there are casting penalties. So yes, a 50^th lvl spell would take 50 rnds (just over 4 minutes) to cast without a penalty.

October 10, 2016

What would my perfect Spell Law look like? Pt I – A Non Channeling Druid

I am still thinking aboutChenneling magic. As far as I am concerned it is just the channeling realm that causes the problems in Rolemaster. It simply has too many D&D hangups. The idea that healing is the domain of clerics, platemailed paladins and dependence of gods or deities are just things we all grew up with if you started playing in the D&D world. So as a start I thought about the Druid. This is a typical channeling profession. Where would a non channeling Druid fit?

Essence of Mentalism?

Looking at the spell lists in Companion 1 about 80% of all the Druids base spells fall into two schools of magic, Force and Mental. The remained are Healing, Information and a few Phantasms & Illusion. So at first glance Mentalism seems the way to go.

Force Magic

Let us have a look at what the Druid is doing with Force magic and see if that could swing the balance into the Essence realm. The only Force spell on the Animal Mastery list is Animal Summons and that requires concentration. I think that still implies mentalism.

The second Druid Base List is Druids Peace and every single spell on it is a Mental spell until you get to 30th level when you get EARTH CALM (F) Within the radius, caster may “calm” a natural phenomena (quakes, storms, winds, etc) or he may cancel a magically created natural phenomena. Now that does sound a bit elemental but then by the time you get to 30th level you should expect all spell casters to be throwing around some powerful magic.

The third list is Druid Staff. This is one of those enchant your own weapon type lists and the weapon is bound to the caster. Every spell on this list is a Force spell except for three (one utility spell and 2 defensive). In these cases the magic is self only and and requires concentration. I think this still leans towards mentalism.

Natures Forms is the fourth Druid list and just like nearly all mentalism spells the area of effect is self only. All the spells on the list are Force spells bar two that are Phantasms as the druid can mask his own thoughts. This again feels like a mentalsm list.

The fifth list is Stone Mastery and this at first glance looks the most Essence like. There are three Elemental spells in the form of Stone Wall, Curved Stone Wall and Stone Spike. The rest are Force Spells. So what is going on in this list. Well the Druid can speak to animate stones (not particularly useful!). Can throw stones in a similar way to the mentalism Hurling and telekinesis. The rest of the spells involve shaping and animating stone. This list could sit in either realm equally naturally I think.

The final base list for Druids is Plant Mastery and is another Force spell list. The ranges are most touch or self and enable the cast to communicate with plants, heal plants and control their growth. He or she can also create paths though vagetation and animate or activate plants and sentient trees. This is in my opinion another list that sort of sits on the fence between menalism and essence.

The overal balance though is that Druids should be in the mentalism realm rather than essence and there is nothing in here that implies there is any need for a deities involvement. There is no communing, no divination and no cross planes summoning going on here.

Anyone could easily play a non channeling Druid using the no profession and mentalism spell lists and casting restrictions as they now stand.

October 7, 2016

What would my perfect Spell Law look like? Pt I Channeling

I am rather jealous of Brian’s reworked Spell Law. He and his group have obviously but hundreds of hours into that rebuild project. That is time I do not have at present but I am giving this more and more thought. So what would my perfect spell law look like?

Essaence as the motive force

This is one of Brian’s ideas and sums up the concept that all magic is Essence and that what changes is the way that the character taps into the essaence. Essence users manipulate the essaence around them, mentalists control their own essaence and channelers recieve essaence from some outside entity. I like this idea and want to go with it. I do have a problem with Channeling magic though. That is the realm that doesn’t work for me.

Channeling doesn’t work

The problem with channeling is that it seems to be tied into the natural world. This is where you find animists, druids and shamen as well as your clerics. If your nature magic casters are getting their essaence from nature around them are they really not essence casters? Can you have channeling without the gods?

Brian pointed out an issue with Shadow World’s gods in that if there is only one god relating to spirits, souls and the dead can any other clerics cast life giving spells?

Channeling and Armour

Mechanically Rolemaster had an issue with channelers not being able to cast magic in metal armour but the fantasy roleplaying commmunity all want their Paladins in platemail. The Rolemaster solution is to add more rules to bend the existing rules, in this case Transcend Armour as a skill.

Channeling Healers are a bit crap

Channeling Healers are a bit crap. The problem is that there is at least one open channeling list relating to healing (concussion ways), most of the closed channeling lists are related to healing and all their base lists are related to healing. They really are the stereotypical one trick pony. If you want to do anything else with your character you are pretty limited. You cannot afford to get stuck into the action as the party need you alive at the end of the fight to put them back together so fighting is out and your other magic is rather limited. So what do you do?

So what purpose does channeling serve?

Channeling is the preserve of most of the healing magic and nature magic and bizarely necromancy. Does that need an entire realm of its own? If you bumped the healing into Mentalism and the necromancy into Essence (most people think of Necormancers as mages not dodgy clerics I think) all you are left with is the nature magic. Using the definitions above of Essence using the magic from around the caster and Mentalism using the casters own Essaence then it feels like the nature magic should be in the Essence realm. The rest of the channeling open and closed lists are just duplicates of the essence and mentalism open and closed lists so they could be dumped.

So my perfect Spell Law would have no Channeling realm at all.

What about traditionally channeling professions? Well I would make Paladins mentism users. That is where the healing spells mostly live and ever realm has the basic detection spells for detecting evil. It is a 7th level Essence spell but a 6th level Mentalism spell so even the existing lists suggest that mentalism should be the Paladin’s natural home. I would put clerics in the same pot as the paladins. Animists and Shamen should be essence users. They can still get their nature magic but their open lists would actually be a bit more powerful. The channeling healer you can simply drop in favour of the Lay Healer.