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Happy to bite the bullet

I have been thinking about game design a bit recently, triggered by the comments about realism vs abstraction. All game systems are inherently compromises between realism vs abstraction, complexity vs simplicity or rules ligth vs rules heavy.

I have seen a lot of articles that imply that simple rules and rules light go had in hand whereas the reality has in my experience been the opposite. If you have a very simple rule for each situation then you can easily end up with tens of hundreds of simple rules, one for just about every situation. AD&D is a prime example of this with just about everything being handled in its own unique way.

I have complained in the past that RM2 was totally inconsistent with the way it handled skills with different pricing structures for musical instruments and weapons to the way you buy martial arts to the way you buy most other skills. Some skills give +1 per rank and others +5/+2/+1/. Some skills cancel out penalties while others have built in failure penalties such as failing your quickdraw roll. The whole skill system is a hodge podge of different mechanics.

Intothatdarkness’s firearms rules sound the opposite of that in that they are based upon one core metric, the energy of the prjectile based upon muzzle velocity and mass which should mean that any and every possible firearm should be able to be modelled with just one mechanism. The firearms tables I have seen before worked on the idea of one table per ‘type’ and a mk 1 would be a very light version, mk2 would be a pistol, mk3 a carbine, m4 a rifle and mk5 some kind of support weapon. I think the idea of a table for pistols, one for rifles and so on makes more sense and most combats could be carried out with just one or two tables. so very little page flicking between combat charts.

Into is also using a 2 second combat round which is my preferred interval. Cutting a round down into such small chunks makes what is possible in a round more limited so and so player declarations become simpler. I like this as trying to protect someone while they spend 5 rounds trying to pick a lock can be quite intense under fire.

It sounds like Into has also solved the critical issue with firearms. Under bought and paid fore Spacemaster or modern day RM all projectiles were doing puncture criticals and soon enough every possible critical has been delivered and recieved and the excitement of ‘what will the critical say?’ is lost. By having a critical table by location rather than by weapon that should give loads of possibles.

I am not a fan of adding in additional rules but these sound right up my street.

Also relating to comments made this week Brian said that he had rolled all magic into essence and I am defintely heading in that direction myself the more I tinker with spell law. I definitely agree that magic is magic and the false barriers between the realms do not seem to add more than they detract.

Well, that is about the sum of my musings this week. It has been one of those weeks with no gaming on my part and the next planned session is so far away that it in itself is not stoking the fires of the imagination.

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Special skills, special spells. Gods in roleplaying.

As part of the ongoing discussion of Clerics and Channeling in Rolemaster and Shadow World I thought I would call attention to a great blog and commentary over at Grognardia.

Peter has talked about rolling Channeling into the Essence Realm and I have basically rolled all of the Realms together–only organizing them by casting mechanism.

But this blog raises some earlier thoughts I had about Clerics and Channeling in general. Before Shadow World I was running a “diety-lite” setting where Gods were mere abstracts providing the homogenous powers provided by Spell Law Channeling. Now with Shadow World, I’ve fully embraced the use of active, involved Gods and built the Orhan/Charon spells lists and organizations to better define Clerics “special skills”.

However, were I to start from scratch I might do something different. Probably further consolidate all spells into the single realm of “Essaence”, and when and if applicable utilize “Channeling” as gifted benefits or powers from Gods or Higher beings when applicable. That’s basically what I’m doing now, but in the context of controlled spell acquisition and DP expenditure.

Interesting to read D&D design theory from 1984 and similarities between providing special Diety specific skills/spells and our own discussions on Diety specific spells lists.

 

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Combat realism in Rolemaster & RMU. Good, bad, neither?

Interesting writing over on “Takeonrules”

By this time, I had been playing Rolemaster and Dungeons & Dragons, games that placed a tremendous amount of rules explanation on combat and fighting.  And I maintain that by placing emphasis on combat, combat is more likely to occur.

Blog Post worth a read. Thoughts? I haven’t spent much time on 5th Ed., but I get the impression that the focus has deliberately changed to support role-playing and narrative rather than combat. Other new games like Monte Cooks Cypher System are paving the way for new role-playing narrative forms.

Is RM and RMU chasing down the rabbit hole for ever greater combat realism?

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Time Travel in Rolemaster & Shadow World

In a recent BLOG POST, I touched upon Time Travel as a technology or mechanism that could be introduced into a Shadow World campaign. Tricky, right?

A lot has been written on time travel in RPG’s and if you have ever allowed it in your game you know it can generate great adventures but create a lot of hassles as well. Some suggested solutions are only allow travel into the past, time travel only occurs in alternate timelines that don’t affect the current one or there are side effects to encountering yourself in the past etc.

I mentioned a few mechanisms to introduce time travel or time manipulation during game play:

  1. Portals. These can be used not just to transport over distances but over time as well. Several gateways Terry describes in Emer Addendum hint at such a power.
  2. Flow Storms/Foci. Want to change things up? Add a Time jump into the effects of an Essaence effect. Not only can you send the players to another interesting time/place but you create a whole adventure path if they want to return to their own time.
  3. Spells. Spell Law never introduced Time related spells, but I think some were added in a companion? (citation needed). I posted up our Time Mastery spell list on the RM Forums. The list is a work in progress–and very powerful in some aspects and very limited in others. A couple of spells take some work and ingenuity on the GM’s part:

6. Time Jump I – Caster can “jump” 1 rnd/lvl into the past or future.

I thought of only allowing the caster to jump into the future–that’s an easy solution where the caster is basically “out of play” for the # of rounds. But that’s not really useful unless it’s just used to avoid a impending bad situation. So how do you handle a caster going back X rounds into the past? First you have to realize that there will be 2 casters for X of rounds (then the other will cast the spell and go back into time and everything is back to normal).  One option is to have the PC announce that they will be casting the spell in the future and then they can play 2 versions of themselves for those set number of rounds. One issue is that the original caster may not survive or be able to cast the Time Jump spell in the future… One resolution is to qualify that time travel creates a new timeline and that this new timeline might not end up the same way. That also means that there will be 2 casters permanently in this new timeline. Interesting…

This spell gets much simpler at higher levels when a caster can travel forward or back years or decades and thus removes the problem of 2 casters or travelling such a short time that the other “self” is present.

8. Time Bubble I – Caster is enclosed in a unmoving time singularity. He can either slow time by 1/2 or speed time by x2 during the duration. The caster cannot interact with anything outside the bubble or vice versa.(no causality). Perception is modified by the time difference(slow inside will make outside activity appear hyper fast, etc.)

Time Bubble is a more useful and less complicated time spell. Basically the Caster is demising themselves from the current timeline and either speeding up or slowing down time within that bubble. This allows the caster to create extra time to heal, prepare another spell or just get away from a dangerous situation. The bubble wall is inviolate. (Unless someone else has Time Merge to cross into the bubble.)

15. Time Stop I – Target up to MEDIUM size is enclosed in a time singularity where time is stopped. No information(visual or otherwise) can pass through the barrier.

A useful spell, it’s basically a version of Time Bubble that can be cast at a distance on a target–basically freezing the target for the duration of the spell. This does not slow or speed up time within the bubble but stops it completely. For a group, this would allow them time to prepare, heal or buff against a troublesome foe.

But Time Travel doesn’t have to be literal. Here’s the thing–one of the great parts of Shadow World is the immense timeline. It’s a great read, adds a lot of depth to the world building, but most of it will be lost on players: I’ve read it A LOT and I can’t keep track of most of it!So when people ask WHERE they should start a SW campaign I say how about “WHEN”? Want a hack ‘n slash one-off adventure? Introduce the PC’s to a battle during the Wars of Dominion. Want a mixed genre sci-fi/fantasy campaign? Start during the interregnum and have the PC’s be Worim, Taranian or Jinteni characters with technology and interacting with the fantastical creatures of SW.

So many possibilities–anyone play around with Time Travel in their game?

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Surgeons, Healers, Physicians in roleplaying.

Elisha Mancer mini.jpg

Hey, I’m on a roll with short blogs–mostly because we got hit with several FEET of snow and we are still not plowed out.

If you are not familiar with Charles Stross you should be. He’s a successful author and also writes about the intersection of technology and social issues. His BLOG is worth following and his readers offer some in depth commentary.

Occasionally Charlie will bring in a guest blogger to cover his site while he’s travelling. His most recent is E.C. Ambrose. I’m not familiar with his books, but he writes dark historical fantasy about medieval surgery–cool right?

I thought E.C.’s most recent POST about the differences between Physicians, Surgeons and Barbers was a great primer and road map for varying healing professions in RM and SW. Of course, fantasy RPG’s allow for magical healing which could usurp traditional healing methodologies, but that will depend on the ubiquity of magical healing in your game. Peter tends to rely on herbs (which while “magically” could be considered a more mundane process than spells), while others have easy access to healing spells.

My first SW Misc Material upload was a Healing Chart meant to combine magical healing, mundane healing and herbs into a simplified chart. This connects Surgeons (mundane and technical), Priests (spells but with access issues), Herbalists (witches, shamans and low tech communities) with the location of the PC’s: cities, towns, villages, remote.

Anyway, given that SW does have a past history of high tech, it makes sense that various cultures would have distinct professional paths for mundane and magical healing. E.C.’s blog post provides a historical model for your own RPG setting.

Anyone read E.C.’s books?

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Random Musings: Rolemaster & Shadow World 2/12/17

Being stuck in severe winter weather is a good excuse to get some writing and work done! I’m still polishing up my next few blog topics but thought I would write a quick blog on some misc. thoughts. This is more to clear my head and refocus my thoughts on various RPG items that are floating around.

  1. There is definitely an “ebb & flow” to the Rolemaster Forum activity. Generally, it seems like the hot topics are created on the RMU forums–intense debates on rules. Right now things just seem slow.
  2. Despite my own frequent blogs about alternate rules I’m having less and less interest in rule sets. Every time I come up with something new, Peter or some one else proposes something as interesting, valid or workable. It feels like a rabbit hole that never ends. In the end I am much more interested in game content than rules. I change rules frequently–with a small group of players it’s less game testing and more about how the rules interact with the narrative flow of the game. My players learned long ago that advocating for rules that allow for min/max, power gaming or mechanistic advantages are missing the point.
  3. Being stuck indoor has allowed me to take a deeper dive in Emer III. I read it when it first came out and scanned several times since, but hadn’t really churned through it or processed new info. I have taken each “canon” SW product and pulled out any world or overview info and added it to our Master Atlas. If you comb through all of Terry’s work and separate local and regional info from world spanning info it results in a much more comprehensive MA. Ours is heading towards 400 pages without creatures or the timeline.
  4. Emer III is fantastic. Like each new product, it continues to fill in gaps in the world building that were hinted at over the last 30 years: Jinteni technology, the Dragonlord, Tower of Vour, Krylites. At 208 pages it covers a lot of new material and straddles a difficult line of overview and specific material. Terry has always been good at that–intensely detailed NPCs, equipment and layouts with broad overviews that still convey a flavor or style.
  5. I’ve said this before but almost every Loremaster or Shadow World product could cover years of gaming. Sure, like everyone else I always want to see new material from Terry, but there is currently enough material now for a lifetime of play. Every product is dense with possible adventure hooks that would be make into a long term campaign!
  6. I’ve been working on an outline to finish the Grand Campaign. My goal was to try and include a snippet of material from each product–that way a group could experience a little bit of each product and visit or explore SW “greatest hits”. Unfortunately I think there is just too much material now! What I have ended up doing is moving several plot lines down to optional to maintain the core adventure path.
  7. My players are finishing up “Priest-King of Shade”. Ideally it would have gotten the PC’s to 12-15th lvl but they are all around 10th lvl. That’s fine–they are segueing into “Empire of the Black Dragon” (which is meant to be Pt. 3 of the series). Empire is less linear than Priest-King; more the style of “Fortresses of M.E.” so the playtesting is an important part of generating adventure layouts for the final product.
  8. I’m hoping I’ve found someone to redo my layouts for Empire. It’s basically 4 facilities, each very different in style and purpose. We shall see!
  9. BASiL Mentalism. A number of people have contacted me about putting up the Mentalism spells. I’m working on it! Unlike Essence or Channeling, I felt that Mentalism needed more work. I started formatting them and ended up making significant changes to the Monk style spells and making changes to the Telekinesis spells.
  10. It’s great to see new contributors to the RolemasterBlog. I hope that the other people that showed interest will participate as well!
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01,00,66

I missed my regular post last week as I was away on one of my gaming weekends. This time I got to play my 1st level Lay Healer as well as GM my Forgotten Realms game.

I have been accelerating my players progress so far and this time at the en dof th esession they finally broke 5th level. This is where I wanted them to be and now the game starts to get serious.

There were a few interesting things that came up over the weekend.

Firstly is the sequence of dice rolls in this posts title. I really, really try not to fudge dice rolls. roll in the open and my players know that.

Any weapon, in any combat those three numbers you really do not want to come up in that order. That was the one and only contribution to a combat by my Hobgoblin chieftain with his ‘trusty’ scimitar. You can work out for your self what happened to him.

I have been working on pushing the limits of how big a force you can throw against low level characters before the sheer number of random rolls will overwhelm them. If you have twenty archers then the odds are that one will get an open ended every single round (I haven’t done this, it is just an example).

The party were making their way up a single track goat trail into a mountain range. They were approaching the tree line when up ahead they could see a flock of monstrously large birds dive bombing something out of sight. The elves in the part could see the birds taking to the air again with dripping lumps of meat in their talons and eat rising bird was being mobbed by the other members of the flock. One character has no maths skill at all so for him there where ‘a great many’ birds. The other elf was better educated and put the number between 70 to 80 individuals.

The creatures were Gorcrows and I had used them to replace the Stirges specified in the original D&D module that was the backbone of the adventure. The birds were feeding on some horses that they had killed. The horses were an important clue for the players as they were looking for a lost patrol and these were their horses.

I wasn’t going to throw 75 beasties at the party in a single shot. I had a few Gorcrows spot the party and break away. This gave me 15 to play with against 5 characters. The birds circled a bit like your classic vulture and then first few peeled away to dive into the attack. These first few were dealt with using a sleep spell. This gave the party some confidence that they could tackle them. The next wave was 5 or 6 gorcrows and a combination of sleep spells and thrown weapons brought them crashing to the ground. Finally the third wave of 7 dived down to attack, too many to sleep even when fast casting without prep. A few got through the barrage of magic and thrown weapons but the birds didn’t stand a chance. A few hits of damage were done here and there a single A crit.

The fight and scent of fresh blood had attracted the attention of the main flock. As the party saw the cloud of birds turn into a stream angling towards them you have never seen players evaluate their options so quickly!

The used what cover they could find to hide them selves from the birds (who fell upon their fallen comrades) and made their way into the next valley where they had their first encounter with wild magic. This is not too dissimilar to an Essence storm.

Wild magic can produce a great number of different effects and have different manifestations. This particular one was very large and actually covered the entire area that the main adventure was going to take place in, several square miles of mountain range. At the first encounter all they got was tingling feelings and hairs standing up on their arms or the back of the neck but as they continued they saw the full scale of the anomaly. In game terms they started to recover power points almost by the minute. The further in they got the more power they regained. It was only when they tried to cast a spell that things were not so good. Every spell cost no power to cast but it did deliver a Stress critical equal to the spell level (1st = A, 5th = E and a 6th would have been an A + E critical).

As a GM my objective was to make the players seriously consider each and every spell they cast. It certainly did that.

The adventure I was basing the session on had two major features, the first was a terrible D&D style trap that had no connection the time or place that the adventure took place in and a collection of monsters.

The monsters were supposedly in a sealed tomb that had not been disturbed for 300 years before a landslide revealed the entrance. The doors were magically sealed so no monsters could wander in from outside.

I removed everything that should have starved to death. This left just one encounter that the players fully understood and chose not to engage in. As it was with magic doing as much harm to them as to anyone they were attacking that was probably the right answer.

I was worried that this would be an anti climax but actually the players enjoyed a relatively easy win for a change and a nice clean “we had a task and we completed it” session.

The next encounter was another mass battle. one thing had lead to another and the players know they have to meet someone in a monster infested forest. Everyone one knows this is a monster infested forest and the party are well armed and provisioned.

We had the players trying to ambush and war band of goblins and hobgoblins while they [the goblins] were trying to set up an ambush. The goblins spotted the party so decided to set an ambush. So the party were trying to sneak into position when the goblins got the drop on them.

I had about 30 goblins to play with but I decided the chief would not commit his entire force against just 5 travellers. So 12 of his toughest attacked the party. The party reverted to type again and sleep spells flew about willy nilly accounting for over half the attackers. Once melee was engaged the superior level of the party soon took its toll on the goblins.

I then allowed the party to turn the tables on goblins. The odds were 18 to 5 or more realistically 18 to 4 as one of the party is a non combatant. The result was again more goblin mince meat.

All of these mass battles were really won by the parties use of sleep. They have two casters who can cast up to Sleep VII. In addition the party are now feeling more confident in their own abilities and starting to work more effectively as a team.

The party are all now 5th level and I think at this point they are growing into their strengths, the sorcerer is starting to diverge from the warrior mage who is diverging from the elemental warrior and so on.

Next time though they will need to find a new tactic as the monsters will be getting significantly tougher!

 

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Seeing the Light—Religious conversions for Channelers in Rolemaster.

I write a lot about Clerics. One interesting phenomena, often featured in popular fantasy literature is the reluctant conversion or initiation of a character into an avatar or priest of a God. Perhaps the PC encounters the God during gameplay and creates an opportunity to pledge fealty. Maybe the God directly recruits the PC as his agent and follower or changes in the pantheons require the PC to choose a new God.

One of the limitations of RM is the inability to switch professions at later levels—precluding a PC from “converting” or choosing to enter a life of a Priest. Certainly a bit of hand-waving and rewarding the player with the appropriate Base List could work, but the PC would still have skill costs assigned by their original Profession choice. To me this is just another limitation of the Profession system; a system that was once advertised as having “no limitations”.

This also speaks to the awkwardness of emulating the Open/Closed/Base paradigm for the Channeling realm. Conceptually it doesn’t work well; was the reason I started my own re-write for Spell Law; and I suspect the need for the Channeling Companion. By its definition, Channeling ability must be given or granted by a God or God-like being. Rather than define Open/Closed/Base from an access viewpoint (a PC must spend DP’s to gain a spell list), it must be defined by a bestowed viewpoint (the God chooses which spell lists are granted–though the PC would still spend DP’s). In other words a God would likely provide Channeling spells to followers based on their need and their position in the church. So even low level admin or devout follower might have some lower level “Open” utility lists. This will just depend on the setting and as Peter pointed out, you could simplify all of this by just merging Channeling into Essence and Mentalism. My game allows for characters to access any or all of the “realms” so I end up with the same result using a different solution.

I like the idea and I like the dramatic potential of the ability to change religious loyalty and in the last few years have really embraced active gods in my Shadow World setting. As a Deux a Machina, I have more flexibility with a Lord of Orhan than a nosy Loremaster, and from a narrative standpoint I can provide unambiguous direction for the group when needed. Again, In my setting there is not difficulty in granting Channeling lists to a new convert—but how should that work in standard RM RAW?

Converting from one God to another is fairly straightforward: just replace current base lists with the lists of the new god. In regular RM this might not require any changes, as Clerics all receive the same Base spells. For people using Channeling Companion or have embraced the concept of God-aspected spell lists this would create a significant change in PC abilities. Can a PC willingly switch Gods—perhaps motivated by the powers/spells they might receive by changing allegiances? Fiction is ripe with stories about characters worshipping dark Gods for additional powers, but what about switching Gods within the same pantheon or “alignment”? Would the discarded God feel betrayed? Punish the PC? Would the new God require a Quest or some other token of loyalty before granting Aspected spells or even Power Points? I think this raises great adventure possibilities!

In the end, the narrative should drive the rules—right? But I would rather create flexibility rather than “one-off” rules to explain away system conflicts. Whether you use Professions or not, the Channeling Realm may benefit from some fluidity or tinkering in your game.