Posted on

Bloody Hell! RMU Bleeding

So assuming we stick with the 2 second house ruled round, which I would like to, we don’t want people to bleed out too fast.

I really like Hurin’s suggestion that bleeding 1-3hits/round will clot. If we can keep that I will be happy. The criteria would be that the character much be inactive for the clotting to start and the wound reopens if the move.

This will stop the a solo character from dying after the very first fight they have almost every time (assuming the GM doesn’t intervene to save them).

So…

  • 1 hit/rnd stops after 10rnds of inactivity. (10hits received)
  • 2 hits/rnd stop after 20rnds of inactivity (40hits received)
  • 3 hits/rnd stop after 30rnds of inactivity (90 hits received)

3 hits per round will most likely still be fatal in most cases so it is the 1 and 2 hits of bleeding that we are really talking about here.

Bleeding in a 2 second round environment is a lot more dangerous than a 10 second round environment, five times as dangerous at first glance.

That is not actually strictly true because that assumes endless combat. In my game I find that unless I intentionally set an encounter up to be longer then most combats are over in about 4 rounds.

With the RMU beta 2 as written then they took a lot longer but in RMC and RM2 four rounds was about the average. I will assume that once the final Arms Law is out then the weapons tables will be delivering more damage. I think it has been increased by 1.5?

So if fights are short, as in sub 10 rounds then the actual bleeding is not going to be the deciding factor most of the time. If it is heavy bleeding of 5 to 8hits per round then yes, that can finish a character or villain off but that is outside the scope of these changes anyway.

The point is that the duration of a round is moot if you are counting time in rounds.

So our upper bound is that if a character falls unconscious and is bleeding 3hits per round or more then they will probably die. So that is pretty much rules as written.

The lower bound is that a character bleeding 1 or 2 hits per round that falls unconscious may survive taking either 10 or 40 additional hits from bleeding.

It was suggested, JDale I beleive, that outside of combat bleeding be treated as hits per minute not hits per round. This allows for people to die up to an hour or more on the battle field if no help is forthcoming. I like this and would like to accommodate it.

What that does is mean that bleeding in combat is no different regardless of the round length. Bleeding when the character will get no help is not always 100% fatal. Bleeding out on a battle field may take minutes or hours.

The times provided by Aspire suggested 10 to 30 minutes for bleeding out. If you are unconscious and bleeding 4 per minute then that will kill most characters in that sort of time frame. It is much easier to die from loss of hits in RMU than previous versions of RM.

The only thing I would like to add is compression.

I personally would allow a character to half the blood flow on a round by round basis if they forego their action and apply compression to a suitable wound. Obviously you cannot apply pressure to internal bleeding. I would do this without the need for a first aid roll. If it were fire damage then a character can drop and roll without a skill roll. I would think that anyone who has trained in using a sword would most certainly have hurt themselves at some point so the most basic idea of stopping the blood coming out would be known.

So compression would work on the rounds when it was applied. It does not count as inactivity for clotting purposes unless the character is actually inactive while doing it. The minimum bleed remains at 1 hit/round.

The compression rule becomes a tactical decision. Which now makes me think of concentration and mental focus. If I am told to keep hold of something and not move and my mind wanders I am quite likely to let my hand drift. So can you keep compressing a wound if you are maintaining a spell?

Taking all of that into account does that seem fair? I feel that bleeding per 2 second round in combat and per minute out of combat is roughly equal to Aspires ‘per 10 seconds’ if you averaged it out. The clotting does only cover the lightest of possible bleeding and is touch and go at 3hits. Compression forces characters to make tactical decisions. Characters will still die from blood loss.

So over to you. Can we make this better?

Posted on

Public Playtest:Devil’s Staircase Wild West Role Playing

So this is completely off topic and probably of little interest to Rolemaster players but…

I have been mucking around with my Playing Card powered wild west game. Well, this week I have released the public play test version. What I need is constructive criticism. The more feedback the better the game should be.

I do not expect this to be of much interest to Rolemaster players. It is fast and loose and doesn’t have the RM grittiness and realism. On the other hand if you know gamers that like ‘lite’ rules then maybe you could pass on the url?

The play test version can be found here… https://www.rpgnow.com/product/256932/Public-PlaytestDevils-Staircase-Wild-West-Role-Playing

Please feel free to pass this around as much as you like!

Posted on

HARP Read Through – Combat

I am going to start with a summary, taken from the rules of the HARP combat sequence…

1 Make an attack roll. This is an open-ended percentile roll.
2 If the initial roll is within the fumble range for the weapon,
the attack stops and you roll on the fumble table. If the initial
roll is within the open-ended range (96-100), you roll
again and add the two rolls together. If the second or any
other subsequent roll is between 96-100, you roll again and
add it to the previous total.
3 Add your character’s OB (Offensive Bonus) to the final
die result.
4 Subtract your foe’s DB (Defensive Bonus) from the adjusted
die total. This is your Total Attack Roll.
5 If the Total Attack Roll is 1 or higher, then you have hit
your foe. Now that you have determined that you have hit,
adjust your Total Attack Roll by adding or subtracting the
size modifier for the weapon that your character is using.
This is your Adjusted Attack Roll.
6 Look up your Adjusted Attack Roll on the proper Critical
Table, as determined by the Attack Type for the weapon
that you are using. This is the damage that you have done
to the foe. All damage is applied immediately.

The first big difference is No Attack Table.

That is slightly disingenuous as ever group of related weapons has its own attack table which combines caps for attack size, mods to differentiate the weapons and weapon specific critical tables. There is an example of one of these below so you can see how it works.

But without an attack table how do we account for armour?

Armour

Armour is modelled using a combination of DB bonus and Maneuver penalty. So heavier armours are more protective but more restrictive. Armour can be bought as full suits or accumulated piecemeal. Armour also comes as fitted or unfitted.

When armour is fitted to the character is has a massively reduced maneuver penalty. Unfitted armour is no where as easy to wear. All unfitted armour has double the maneuver penalty of fitted armour including doubling the minimum maneuver penalty. These penalties apply to all skills that have QU or AG as a stat.

I really like that last restriction. It is really simple and clear and should more skills be added in other books it is immediately obvious whether there are penalties or not.

HARP details 12 types of armour and 9 location specific elements and/or two complete sets (either with a shirt/hauberk style or breastplate style). 

I personally find the Armour system to be incredibily easy but also detailed. The only flaw of course is that if the protective value of a suit is a flat DB bonus against all attacks then you cannot differentiate between a blade and a hammer which of course individual attack tables, that we are used to, can reflect.

The biggest flaw in the combat system is the criticals. There are only 19 specific criticals for each weapon. What this means is that the same criticals come around again and again.

Imagine you have 5 orcs using scimitars and the PCs are using a mix of broadswords and longswords. Basically every attack is going to do a critical every time. You could easily dish out 40 criticals (8 combatants over 5 rounds is not unreasonable for a common encounter). Statistically every critical would come round at least twice and two or more more than twice. (40 occurrences of 19 possible outcomes). Combat becomes very samey. The strength of Rolemaster combat is that those ‘special’ criticals are rare enough to be special.

The strength of the system is that the entire combat runs off of one page so there is no page flipping between weapons charts and critical tables so it goes quickly but a cost, in my opinion.

It always seems to me that HARP players hanker after RM combat tables the same way that RM players look at HARP magic is a certain envy. That is not an imagined thing either, there is a replacement HARP combat system under discussion on the forums if you agree to the NDA.

Combat Actions

  • The combat chapter lists 18 common combat actions over and above just hitting ot shooting your oponent. Along with each are the rules need to resolve each. This is far more extensive than any I remember seeing for Rolemaster but I could be mistaken. Either way for these to be in the standard core book is a great inclusion.
  • Blade Slap
  • Charging
  • Disarm Foe
  • Disengage from Melee
  • Dodge
  • Fencing Slash
  • Full Parry
  • Hold at Bay
  • Knockdown
  • Move & Attack
  • Multiple Parry
  • Parry
  • Press & Melee
  • Power Strike
  • Stave Jab
  • Shield Bash
  • Sudden Dodge
  • Weapon Bind

So that is a round up the the combat chapter. HARP is a lighter game than Rolemaster and I think this is one area where that lighter ruleset is most apparent. I don’t think any RM player is going to ditch Arms Law for the HARP combat system despite there being a lot of great stuff here.

Next time it is Spells and Magic!

Posted on

RMU Combat and My House Rules

So this time I am really wide open to suggestions!

What I have done in the past and certainly want to keep is the 2 second combat round. I use this in RMC and it works perfectly.

I have eliminated all notion of flurry of blows. Every attack is discrete. Short combat rounds have a few knock on effects.

Movement

Obviously in 2 seconds you can move 20% of what you could move in a 10 second round or now 40% of what you would move in an RMU round. I have never like the notion of the detailed 1AP count down in RMU but I think this is because my 2 second rounds provide almost exactly the same granularity but with out flurry of blows you don’t have to start an attack 5 seconds before you even see your target.

Shorter rounds make things naturally more tactical as it is entirely possible to get peppered by bullets/arrows/spears if you try and cross an open space without covering fire.

Spell Casting

RMC doesn’t have the fast and penalty free casting of RMU but 2 second rounds comes close to emulating that. If your mage is being charged down then because movement is 20% as fast they have more time to prep and cast. So I kept the requirement for 2 rnds prep, cast on the 3rd round despite the rounds being shorter, so 3 x 2 second rounds not 30 seconds.

This has produced some fun situations where one member of a charging party chose to accelerate faster to get to a spell caster that was prepping a spell hoping to get there before the spell was cast. The fact that the players’ plan was kind of dependent on the entire party arriving simultaneously went completely out the window. 

Spell Effects

I do not adjust the spell effects to take into account the shorter round. This does change things. Spells that last hours, minutes or seconds are potentially more powerful especially ones that have a combat usefulness.

Spells that last for rounds/level or rounds/ 5 or 10 RR failure are possibly weaker. If you wanted to blind an opposing magician while you all charge then the charge will take more rounds making Sudden Light less useful in that situation.

On the other hand shorter rounds make ranged spells more powerful as it is harder to get out of range or you need to spend more rounds in range if you are trying to close distance.

I have been playing these rules under RM2/RMC for something like 7 years and this has never been a problem, but it does have an impact of spell selection sometimes.

The impact under RMU should be half that as it was under RM2/RMC as the spells are all set up for 5 second round and not 10 seconds. I don’t think this is going to be an issue.

Bleeding

I do have a house rule that bleeding 1 hit per round will stop on its own after 50 rounds of inactivity. the reason I have this is because I spent a few years when I only had one player and multiple times they were knocked unconscious and bleeding 1hit/round. There was no chance of me being able to justify bringing in an unexpected NPC so they should have bled out. This happened just too often for my liking so once the character is unconscious, and therefore not moving, if there is no one around to save you or finish you off that 1 hit of bleeding will stop.

I mention all of that as bleeding is more dangerous with shorter rounds. I don’t want to halve the bleeding in all the criticals but there is another solution.

The first is the natural clotting I mentioned above and the second is staunching the flow.

Staunching the flow takes 1 hand to do and basically means the character is applying pressure to stem the flow of blood. No First Aid or medical skill roll is required. The character can choose on a round by round basis if they want to apply the pressure. The down side is that you cannot use that hand for anything else while staunching the flow of blood. So no shield or just shield by no attacks.

The effect of staunching the flow is to half the blood loss for that round. I tend to round down so staunching 5hits/round will result in bleeding 2/rnd.

This gives characters a way of mitigating the more dangerous effects bleeding in the 2 second rounds without having to make changes to every critical table. It also makes another tactical choice available for characters.

Action Points

I have never used an Action Point system. I am a big fan of the RMC percentage action system. I have just viewed AP as blocks of 25% activity.

If you eliminate the AP by AP tactical round then lots of the problems with the Action Point system disappear.

I know Hurin has suggested in the past adopting a D&D 5e approach to what can be done in a round but I don’t know much about what that entails now. The last time I played D&D it was in about 1993 and it was 2nd Ed. I think.

So what is the best solution to stay as compatible as possible to RMU but using a 2 second round?

Posted on

THE GREAT G+ RPG EXODUS

I doubt if many of you ever used Google+, it doesn’t seem that many people did. Having said that they did have half a billion regular users so it is a sign of the times when I can use ‘not many people’ when referring to half a billion.

Anyway, from an RPG perspective it was actually quite active with indie game developers and minority games. There were/are 18 Rolemaster related communities (groups) on Google+ of which I was a rather inactive member of about six of them.

So Google has announced the winding down of Google+ and its eventual closure in 2019.

There is another social network that has been waiting in the wings and now is welcoming the RPG community from Google+ and that is mewe.

They have a dedicated group called The Great G+ RPG Exodus and that is what the point of this post is all about. If you never bothered with G+ then it may be worth taking a look at the new mewe RPG groups. If you were a user then you should be able to hook up with your previous contacts if the exodus gains enough momentum.

MeWe is not without controversy. It is very pro free speech and as such has, in the past, welcomed some alt-right groups. On the other hand it is ultra pro-privacy. It has a promise of no ads and no tracking. It intends to make its money from offering premium services. You can read about their ethics and business model on their FAQ.

I have joined mewe and created a Rolemaster group. If you want to join the network then you can connect with me or just join the group.

mewe.com/i/peter.rudin-burgess

mewe.com/join/rolemaster

If it all works out for them then great, if it withers away and dies like so many upstart social networks then too be honest I would not lose any sleep over it.

Posted on

RMU House Rule #2 Skills

Before we start I want to set out two core concepts.

  1. These rules are based around No Profession.
  2. Characters will only be buying skills once. (Thereafter training and experience will take over.)

So I am quite happy with the RMU cultures rules and free skills ranks. I do think that GMs should tinker with the ranks both number and distribution to fit their game and play style but apart from that I am cool with cultures.

The biggest bone of contention is the category cost vs individual skills costs.

The individual skills cost for professions is rather moot if you don’t have professions. The hang over is that I can see why people would want to differentiate their characters.

I don’t want to go down the Training Packages route which of course would put a ‘skin’ or ‘build’ over the top of the No Profession.

The No Profession has the nice feature of being able to choose where to place your professional skill bonuses. That guarantees that each player can customise their character.

The best solution so far is Intothatdarknesses variable skill costs.

So there is a standard skill cost progression which I assume will not change again. So I am think that in each category each player may reduce one skill cost by two steps and one skill by one step.

I was concerned that assigning skill costs up front may mean that should a future skill be introduced that characters are then unfairly penalised. I am thinking about RM2 and when Two Weapon Combo was introduced in RoCoII.

On the other hand if the players are only adjusting two skill costs in each category they are not actually locking themselves out of any skill.

This solution also solves another potential problem. The default number of DPs had has been increased from 50 to 60 but the No Profession profession is less efficient than most others so I have been upping the number of DPs 70. Now if each player can reduce the cost of their preferred skills that will redress that balance between the inefficiency of the No Profession and the off the peg professions.

RMU Skills

I like the RMU skills and I like the way combat expertise works. On the other hand I don’t like passive skills and passive bonuses. In all versions of RM each and all skill has been optional and I cannot see any real reason why I cannot simply drop the skills I don’t like, or more the case of redefining the skills. Just dropping the passive skill bonuses solves a lot of my issues.

So I think with just those two house rules I am good with the RMU skill system.

Posted on

Against the Darkmaster

I don’t know how many of you know of this game? To cut a long story short what Against the Darkmaster (vsDarkmaster for short) is is MERP plus house rules rebranded and launched as a new game.

It is so new that we only have the public play test, quickstart adventure and pre-gen characters to play with so far. The kickstarter is not even ready yet.

What is also interesting is that vsDarkmaster also has a marque called open00 under which they are going to release an SRD, system reference document, so any indie developers can release their own material for the system.

Even more interesting is that my own attempt at free to use monsters, under the brand of Open100 appears very close to the open00 and vsDarkmaster. By very close take a look at this.

StatOpen100vsDarkmasterDifference
AT3(1-20), 2(1-10) or by armour typeRigid Leather
DB5 + shield30 inc shieldnone
Hits5560+/-5
OB67 weapon60 weapong+/-7
Level33none
CriticalMnormalnone

You can see that there is barely a gnats whisker between the two versions of the same creature. In one you get a slightly higher OB but less hits but they pretty much trade off.

vsDarkmaster vs RMU?

So right now both games are technically in public play test. The difference is that vsDarkmaster is actively looking for play testers and engaging with bloggers and reviewers. I have emailed them and got a personal reply within hours, which considering the time difference is as prompt as you could wish for. They are also building a contact list of everyone who has play tested the game, you need to register to get the free version of the game. This is good marketing sense. 

The Kickstarter will also create a bit more buzz around the game. It gives them something else to talk about and share.

I would be shocked if there are less people queuing up to back vsDarkmaster than there are firmly committed to converting to RMU right now. The real uphill struggle for RMU is the ‘U’. RM2 players are reluctant to give up the RM2 way of doing things and the RMSS crowd are reluctant to give up the RMSS way of doing things and neither really want to give up their mass of companions, supplements and house rules.

vsDarkmaster does not have that fractured community. They have a whole new bunch of gamers waiting to play this new game.

vsDarkmaster also has a release date of 2019. I hope that RMU has the same release year but I would not be overly shocked if that slipped into 2020.

vsDarkmaster also has a sense of momentum. There is a public play test edition. That play test will end and it will be followed by a kickstarter campaign, and that will end and the game will be released in 2019. There will be stretch goals published as part of the kickstarter so we will know what future publications are in the pipeline.

With RMU we live in hope of the ‘singularity’ we don’t when that will be and we don’t know how long the post singularity period will be.

*IF* vsDarkmaster hits the shelves first, and that is certainly possible then what unique selling point does RMU have? Open ended rolls? Criticals? Weapon specific combat tables? Point buy skills? Spell lists? Sorry but vsDarkness has them all.

The real killer will be open00. I can honestly see 20, 50 or 100 publications for vsDarkness for every one for RMU. You could claim that the RMU publications will be more substantial or higher quality than all the indie releases for vsDarkmaster but that misses the point. Rather than spending $20 for an RMU supplement that you may use some, none or most of you can spend $0.50 or $1 on a booklet here or a booklet there that fill a particular need at that precise moment. It is a different world and a different way of selling gaming material.

Referring to Brian’s last post there is nothing to stop either Brian releasing Priest-King of Shade or Jengada releasing Nomads for vsDarkmaster, they could even combine the two and set Priest-King in the world of Nomads. 

I am not advocating that we all give up playing Rolemaster and play vsDarkmaster instead. What is viable is to use vsDarkmaster books, adventures and all the other weird and wonderful supplements as and when they arrive with RMU as the games are close enough. Once that is established we can write and sell our own adventures as compatible with any open00 system.

I don’t want it to happen but I could see vsDarkmaster being the death of Rolemaster. The cliche is ‘not with a bang but a whimper’. I think that will be the case. We won’t move over and abandon Rolemaster but I can see vsDarkmaster swallowing up all the new players who would be interested in RMU but discover vsDarkmaster instead. Without new players and new members coming to a community it will wither and die. If vsDarkmaster and RMU have to share the market and sales for this sort of game how viable will they be? Who knows but open00 gives the publishers,  
The Fellowship & Sego | Games, a revenue stream that ICE do not have. I know how much money ICE makes each year and it is not a lot. Also most of that is likely to disappear as ICE must withdraw RMFRP and RMC from sale when RMU is released as you cannot compete against yourself and the reason for developing RMU was to get away from the IP restrictions hanging over the older games and to unify the market so they did not need to support two versions of the same game. Supporting three versions of the same game makes even less sense.

If you have a look at vsDarkmaster you will see it is no RMU. It is not intended to be. It claims to be an evolution of MERP and it is true to its word. The thing is that we know how easy it is to drop a new spell law or an arms law into a MERP game to expand it. It is easy and it doesn’t break the game.

Take a look and see what you think.

Posted on

The Priest-King of Shade

Back in 2013 I submitted to I.C.E., and they accepted, my manuscript for “Priest-King of Shade”. There was no formal agreement, but at the time, product output was slow, RMU was just getting rolling and Terry was open to third party submissions. Nicholas gave the go-ahead and both he and Terry gave it a few editorial passes early on. Then things slowed down. For years.

Over the ensuing years, I continued to refine and add content, edit my own work and found various artists and others to help with floorplans and layouts. I continued to submit my new updated versions until I was told not to work on it anymore until a complete editorial pass was finished. 

That was several years ago. In a few weeks I’m turning 49 and staring down the barrel of 50! I have 3 more comprehensive modules nearing completion plus all the other RMBlog stuff I’ve been working on. Terry has announced he doesn’t have time to edit my project and I haven’t heard that anyone else will take on editing duties. The product needs artwork, layout, floorplans and probably another 20 pages to really polish things up. While I was really looking forward to having an “official” published ICE/SW module, I have no interest in waiting forever. My brother Matt (Vroomfogle) did all the work on the Shadow World Players Guide and was the lead design on RMU, so I’ll let that be our family’s official testament to our long standing commitment to I.C.E.

With that said, I’m attaching an early version of Priest-King in PDF format. It’s rough, the charts don’t quite fit on the page, these floorplans are shite and it just needs a lot of work. However, I have complete versions of all charts in excel, clarifications and can provide them if you email me. Since I never had a formal contract with ICE and I’m offering this for free I can’t imagine anyone will care.  Let’s call this PK.v.2. My most recent version has several more adventures and is hitting 180 pages. With professional artwork, layouts and newer material there is still a publishable product here. 

If you haven’t followed my blogs here, Priest-King is actually Chapter 2 in the middle of my extended “The Grand Campaign”. Chapter 3, The Empire of the Black Dragon segues into one of the Dragonlords storylines and injects the PC’s into the world spanning battle with the Jerak Ahrenrath and the Eyes. Heady stuff in my campaign!!

So while this is rough, it’s also free. How about this as an idea? If you want to contribute to this, help with one of the floorplans, or insert an idea etc, let me know. We can crowdsource this a bit and make it even better. I’m open to that and can focus on all my other projects!

Posted on

RMU House Rule #1 Stats

So here are the three uses I have for Stats…

  1. Stat Bonuses, this is the normal use for stats in RM. I want to keep the RMU magnitude and the addition of stat bonuses for finding the total bonus for skills.
  2. Fixed Body Dev, I will be using the Con Stat plus 1/2 SD plus Base Hits (From RMU Character Law).
  3. Unskilled Tests, I use the whole stat for unskilled tests. So if you want to know if your character can remember some random fact, for example, you would roll d100 OE and add your ME stat. 101+ to succeed. This means I can apply the full range of difficulty factors for these single stat unskilled tests.

So this means that I want and need a stat on the 1-100 scale. It also means that having a stat of 100 is better than having a stat of 98 even if the bonus is the same.

I also want point buy in some description.

I quite like Hurin’s suggestion of 3d10 – 15 has a lot of merit but that isn’t point buy. My objection to dice is simply the situation where a player that rolls well will forever out perform a character that rolls poorly.

RMU has a point buy option where all stats start at 50 and you get 10 points to spread over the 10 stats. You also get the option to buy down a one stat to have more to spend.

So how about…

  1. All stat bonuses start at +/-0
  2. All characters get 3 +1s they can share between the ten stats
  3. A stat can be bought down so taking a -1 on one stat can add a +1 to a different stat.
  4. No starting stat can have a bonus of more than +15
  5. Once all bonuses and penalties have been assigned Temporary States equal 50 + (Bonus (or penalty) * 3)

So with this mechanism I keep my ‘no dice’ preference. There is no need to have any tables of bonuses.

There is an effective cap at 95 so the stats are not truly d100 but the 100 stat is impossible as +16 equates to a 98 and +17 is 101 which doesn’t exist in RMU.

The 3 +1s equate to 9 points of stat and RMU gives 10 stat points for free so that is pretty close.

I like to share my house rules as I think many eyes make problem spotting easier. We could add in the Hurin option of 3d10 – 15 as a diced option. the dice option gives a range of -12 to +15 which is skewed slightly in the characters favour but I think that is a good thing. The point system does the same but only on a smaller scale by giving the initial 10points/ 3 +1s for free.

Fixed Concussion Hits

Fixed concussion hits is a bigger difference between my rules and RMU beta and almost certainly RMU RAW. Joe public would get typically 100 #hits from a 50 Con + 25 (half SD) plus 25 for race.

Off the shelf RMU characters seem to be starting at level 2 or 3 because of the age analogy so that is probably 8 ranks in Body Dev (+40) plus their stat bonuses plus race so +65 #hits.

The difference then is about +35 #hits in favour of the house rules at the start of play.

The difference balances at about 10th level.

Stat Gains

So stat gains are tied to skill usage or training. When a character successfully uses a skill in a meaningful way or gets specific training in a skill or stat then the applicable stats get ‘ticked’. So if you used the Influence skill successfully, stat bonuses from Em, In, Pr, this would ‘tick’ Empathy, Intuition and Presence.

When the GM chooses to allow experience gains, I know different GMs have different ideas about requiring down time or training time etc, then the player rolls d100 for each stat that is ticked. If the roll is equal or less than the current stat then there is no change, rub out the tick.

If the roll is greater than the current stat then the stat increases by 1. We can now use the genuine Stat -50/3 for the Stat Bonus! We can also get stats up to 100 through stat increases.

The advantages as I see them are that the most used stats are the ones to increase, we don’t need dice for the stat gain amounts and we don’t have to look up that dice on a table. We still don’t need a table for the stat bonuses.

Characters with poor stats tend to increase quicker but stat gains become less frequent as the stats get higher.

The RMU max stat of 100 preserved.

Over to you…

This is what I want to achieve and if you like, my first draft of the rules. Can you improve? Are there other options you would suggest?

Have I broken anything? Would this work just as well in a modern or sci-fi setting? This last question will be a recurring theme as I would like one unified set of house rules with the maximum of utility.

Posted on

RMU House Rule #0

OK, so I thought I would take a break from my HARP series today and write about RMU for a change.

This is inspired by the comment made by Aspire2Hope on the post RMU to Infinity and Beyond.

So as you all know my RMC house rules do not use levels or professions. I also use point buy for stats and fixed concussion hits. Basically my entire character creation is dice free so I am perfectly happy to allow players to create their characters away from the gaming table. As long as we have discussed character background and motivations and that is all acceptable then the GM is no longer needed.

What I would like to start is another occasional series of posts where I/we:

  1. take what we know of the state of RMU
  2. for each aspect I state my intended goal
  3. We marry the two together to get a coherent house rule

So for example stat bonuses are neither linear nor exactly bell curve. I would like stat bonuses that don’t need a table to work out so I would throw out there (Stat-50)/3 gives a range of 0 to +/-17. That is slightly more generous than RMU as written with the rate of bonuses increasing and at the top end bonus, +15 vs +17 but it also does away with a table.

I don’t really want my house rules to break the compatibility with RMU too much. I would still like to be able to use off the shelf ICE products but at the same time I would like to promote my ideas of simplicity and speed of play at the gaming table.

Things that I think will cause the most debate will be what to keep in and what to throw out. So we could have a set of simplified house rules and a set of optional house rules that plug in things that I don’t feel the need to use but others do. Allegedly, I am not always right and if that is the case then having alternatives would be good.

This is also an opportunity to build things that are missing like dedicated two handed weapons tables and fix their lack of stopping power.

The big one will be magic. I have never been really happy with Spell Law but it was always too big a challenge to fix but committing myself to doing publically may force me to get the job done.

So that is my intentions. The first and foremost task will be to completely rebuild character creation.

Anyone up for a challenge?