The Rolemaster Blog – Page 103 – Articles and discussion on Roleplaying including Shadow World, Forgotten Realms.

August 14, 2015August 13, 2015

More On Pre-Gens

I have been thinking about how to best handle pre-gen characters and my conclusion is that there are two ways of making this work.

You either create maybe 30 characters, several of every profession (if you are a full blown RM2 GM then several of every kind semi’s, pures, arms users etc) and then give every player a choice from the full spectrum of characters or you hold a Q&A with each player in advance and then develop the character they described to you for them.

Either way the player gets the character they want, the GM gets the characters at the level they want to start the game at, with the skills the party need to complete any specialised tasks and with the GMs prepared for the mix of characters in the party so the adventure can be tweeked to best challenge the players.

I would always give the player the final choice of weaponry and if possible the spell lists. As a GM you can determine how many lists the character has learned but the choice of which specific lists they are should really fall to the player at least in part if not totally.

There is another consideration that can make the difference between whether a player enjoys their character or not and that can be how many skills the character has. I like characters with a wide skill base and I am happy to accept that each skill will be weaker as a trade off. Most of my players prefer few skills but all of them developed to the maximum possible. That choise generally means that you know only one third as many skills. The average skill cost is something like 2/5 so buying 2 ranks costs 7DPs. With 7DPs spent just buying single ranks you can get up to 7 really cheap skills to 3 typical skills.

Characters how have fewer fully developed skills also ed up with less skills that round a character out, less languages and less flexibility outside of combat. I say that as it is normally the combat related skills that suck up all the development points.

I have recently had to create two pre-gen characters and I used the Q&A method both times and I hope that both players got what they wanted. I have taken copies of their character sheets at 1st level and I will be interested to see how many of the skills I bought for them they carry forward and continue buying as they level up and how many new skills I hadn’t thought of buying they pick up.

I will feed back.

If you use pre-gens what do you do to make them as good as they can be for your players?

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August 10, 2015August 9, 2015

Do Pre-gens need a strong GM Hand?

This is the first of two posts about pre generated characters or pre-gens. I have been thinking about them a lot recently and thought I would get some ideas down.

In a recent game it started out as being intended at a one off session and set at about 10th level. The GM then took four characters from Heroes and Rogues and modified them slightly to fit his idea for the party. He stripped out skills, changed weapons and armour skills and other modifications. He like me feels there are too many skills in RM2 but that is a different can of worms.

When we came to play he was going to dish out the characters and the impression he gave was that he was going to put characters to players in such a way that the person who never plays a spell caster was the magician, the one who always wants to be the elven mage would be the human fighter. The most agressive in your face player would be given the subtle thief and so on. This was met with horror by most of the players.

The one who never plays a magic users did so because he didn’t like magic users, had never read spell law, never intends to read spell law. The one who loves mages has always hated fighters and only realy roleplays because of his love of magical fantasy and so it went on. Most of the players only play in the single group whereas I play with several groups. The GM thought that I and a dyed in the wool fighter because with him I played a very successful fighter for may years. In reality one of my favourite characters was a Lay Healer but I never played it with him.

Anyway the GM gave in and everyone took the character they most wanted to play of those on offer. The sessionn got under way and everyone had a great time. When we next got together everyone wanted to carry on the game and the GM said yes, fine. At this point it became apparent that some of the skills that the GM had stripped out to make the characters really easy to get to grips with in session one were actually really important to an ongoing campaign.

So we started to add skills back in. Some skills the characters had in the original book really didn’t exist in the GMs version of Shadow World and so we asked could we reallocate those development points into skills that the GM does use and the character/player wanted. “Yes, fine” said the GM. When I say ‘we asked’ I mean two of the four players had thought of this. The other two either didn’t have the rules or never read their copy of the rules. So at this point the characters started to form into two tiers. Those that had full use of their development points and those that had lost out on abut a quarter of all their development points because they had been stripped out and not reallocated.

The other change the GM had made was in creating the pre-gens was to choose their weapons and armour to suit his vision. Some of the combinations were far from practical. The rangers prime weapon was a bow and he only used a soft leather jacket for protection. The thief was given thrown Dagger as his main weapon, again just with soft leather. The Fighter was given greatsword as his prime weapon and Frenzy as a skill to go with it. Put the party in confined quarters for a fight and they were as likely to kill each other as any of the enemy.

Because of the way the skills system works in Rolemaster it is really really difficult to learn a new weapon at 10th level so you are kind of stuck with what you have. Also your weapon really defines everything about your character in combat. An archer is not going to charge into battle, a frenzied greatsword wielder is not going to go for subtle sword play and stealth and if you only have a dagger you are not going to live very long.

I think leaving the actual specific choice of weapon down to the player would be been a better option. That is not the same as having to roll up a character. I also think that reallocating the development points should have been all or nothing. Either the GM says to all the players you can have X points to spend on any skills to personalise your characters or he says ‘No’ across the board and you start learning those missing skills from the minute play starts.

I don’t know which would have been best but what happened in the end was that the mage was one of those that got the extra development points and ended up about 8 levels higher than those that didn’t and the thief who likewise got the extra DPs spent them on learning two weapon combo and adrenal move speed and was the walking, talking Shadow World gattling gun. He ended up the highest level character in the party.

At the start of the game none of these problems were foreseen but with hindsight they are glaring but would we still have had problems if the GM had insisted on no character changes and a level playing field?

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August 7, 2015August 6, 2015

Favourite Monsters

Every GM must have a favourite monster. I have played under GMs that loved Orcs and another that loved dragons. In the later’s case in any ‘benefit of the doubt’ call chances are the GM would side with the dragon. With dragons I think that is fine, they are meant to be the top of every food chain and you should take fighting one very seriously and relying on Luck is not a good plan.

One of my favourites is the humble Kobold. I kind of like the concept of ‘monster’ and underdog both concepts are definitely present with these little chaps. Life is cheap when your No. Appearing is 3-300. (Actually it is 5-20, 3-300 is for their slightly tough Urd cousins who have 2-5 hitpoints.)

At the other end of the scale I quite like Pit Fiends. they add a certain je ne c’est quoi to a battle field as only a Lawful Evil Genius can. With one of those at the back it gives otherwise easy cannonfodder a bit of backbone and an excuse to out smart the players, they are geniuses afterall.

I don’t think I show bias towards my personal favourites afterall is it not as if you need to keep them in tip top shiney condition as I have as many of them as I want, as often as I want. It is not the same as having a favourite PC in which case every one is an endangered species and the last of its kind. If a horde of kobolds kill the party it does not enhance the game or add to the fun. Having an uber tough fighter crying for help and parrying for his life and then being rescued by the party healer; now that is fun and everyone lives to tell the tale and fight another day. If the fighter is less arogant and the healer feels a bit more involved in the game then that is cool i my opinion.

But what about you? Do you have favourite monsters? If so why?

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August 3, 2015August 30, 2015

Canon ends where the table starts

There is a massive canon of work to support a GM using the Forgotten Realms setting. The minute play starts (even before the players enter the game) it becomes my world and what I say goes. I am god(s) and I have the ultimate authority.

What brought this thought to mind is that I finally started play in my PBP game last night and created about 150 civilians, several named individuals and several locations within ‘my Waterdeep’ that exist in no other.

This was not a “set ’em up to knock ’em down” cannon fodder creation exercise, it is entirely possible the players may well grow to care about some of these people. The beauty of having an entire city to play with is that you can create and destroy quite a lot before you start to change the nature of the location but at the same time you can take just a small area and give it real flavour. That is what I am trying to do at the moment.

I am a little surprised at how long it took to get characters created. The first is now actually in play and I hope to have a second ready for play by tonight but a third is still in a work in progress. It is a general misconception that RMC is RM2 and that may well have been the idea when the reborn ICE tidied up RM2 and re-released it under the RMC banner but the reality is that RMC is not 100% compatible out of the box. Even without a lot of optional skills, optional rules, and companions it has taken my players a while to adjust to the RMC ruleset. Character creation is one of those areas where differences can be most acute.

So the idea of Canon vs Play has become apparent in the rules as well as the setting and in making the rules fit the setting. This is pretty much another manifestation of what I was saying in Roleplaying Games Do Not Exist everything is just a framework from which to hang the stories we want to tell from and everything is up for evaluation and has to earn its place in the game. If it doesn’t work for the GM and players it is gone.

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July 31, 2015

We love our Giants

I have spoken about giants and the local legends before in When is a rock not a rock? Now it just so happens that I encountered a couple more giants last weekend then they deserve a bit of an honourable mention, especially as they stood still long enough for me to catch them in a photo.

It appears out first giant has just woken up and could be in a bit of trouble. I think I read somewhere that the head represents about 1/7th of the entire body so the bit you can see was about 5′ and was half his head making him approximately 70′ tall if he stood up straight.

Out second lady giant is considerably smaller at a meer 35′ tall and somewhat more shapely than her male kin. Obviously both giants have been slumbering sor quite a while which is why nature had almost entirely concealed them.

Giants are cool. They make a complete mockery of most parties battle formations. For most spells if you are close enough to fire a spell at them you are close enough to get hit with a pretty big rock by return post.

In my world I get to choose from a whole host of giants from the Arcane and Cyclops which are fairly distinctive to (and this is a pretty give list) Cloud, Desert, Fire, Fog, Formorian, Frost, Hill, Jungle, Mountian, Reef, Stone, Storm and Wood Giants plus Ettins, Firbolg, and Verbeeg.

In the RMU Creature Law (I know, I just couldn’t keep away!) you get a selection of the most common eg Cyclops, Cloud, Fire, Frost, Hill, Mountain, Stone, Storm, Forestand Water Giant plus three known as Minor, Normal and Major. In RMC you get same cast as RMU.

So who has the toughest giants? The answer has to be RMU giants kick arse! The reason being is magic. In AD&D giants did have inate abilites and there was always a chance that a giat has a low leve cast with them. In RMC wach giant has a couple of spell lists (up to four lists for Cloud Giants) but RMU Giants are incredible spell casters with the king of the heap being the Mountain Giant with 14 spell lists to pick from all to the giants level.

Reading the RMC and RMU giant monster descriptions I am reminded somewhat of the original Greek myth variatons of the giants rather than their Norse brethren but most of all I was really impressed with the reworking they have recieved in RMU.

But what about the missing giants? The Jungle Giant, Firbolg and Verbeeg etc.? These are going to be pretty easy to convert over for my game if and when I need them but now I have refreshed myself with the Rolemaster image of giants I think I may be giving them a bit of a shot in the arm and a general beefing up. Now that has to be a job for a lazy summer afternoon.

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July 27, 2015

Forgotten Realms, Not In the Ghetto

One of the things I like about the Forgotten Realms setting is that unlike so many other settings the non-human races are not ghettoised.

Take middle earth for example, if you are looking for a dwarf then they are pretty much allowed to live in Erebor or the Iron hills. Need and elf? That will be Lorien or Rivendell. If Hobbits are your problem then head to the shire.

Pretty much the entire planet is human with just these little nature reserves or enclosures for the non humans. Greyhawk was not much better with elves being found in Celene, Highvale, the Lendore Isles, Sunndi, the Duchy of Ulek, the Valley of the Mage, the Vesve Forest.

Faerun is more cosmoplitan and racially integrated than either of these and more than most other settings. Take Waterdeep as an example, the city itself holds almost every inteligent race capable of living in a civilised society and that includes races normally associated with the tag ‘monster’. As long as they are kept in check there is no reason not to employ Orcish bodyguards.

This integration does not only extend along racial lines. Your magic users are not all holed up in their towers. Every spell caster who can manipulate fire or water can find a place in the cities version of the fire brigade. It is one of the ways that spell casters can make their living if they are not the adventuring type.

From an adventuring perspective what this means is that for the starting player every race is available without having to come up with some tenuous reason why they are where they are. If you want to be from foreign lands then great but if you want to be local but still be a dwarven berserker then that is cool too. If you need someone who can read dwarven runes then chances are there is going to be a dwarf in your local tavern at some point. Whether that causes more problems than it solves is one of the day to day hazards of adventuring. (Getting a dwarf to translate the runes of a grave piece from a noble dwarven family can be a bit dicey!)

The whole Dwarves don’t like Elves and Elves being patronising to Dwarves is a bit cliched and totally unnecessary in an integrated society.

This doesn’t mean that you don’t get ‘homelands’ for these races. In fact within Faerun you get elven homelands that have been abandoned (Myth Drannor), those that are in their ascendancy (Evereska) and those timeless lands that have always been and always (to the inhabitants perception) will be elven lands.

The same is true with the Dwarves. There are enough dwarves around that are looking for clues of their lost family halls that they are almost queuing up to repopulate former dwarven halls and strongholds.

So when you are adventuring in the Realms just remember there is no place for ‘human supremacists’.

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July 24, 2015July 23, 2015

Broadcryers

Broadcryers are part of the fabric of life in Waterdeep. These are the newspaper hawkers that we know selling the single page ‘broadsheet’ short scrolls that are popular in Waterdeep.

Short scrolls are a single sided scroll maybe 20cm by 30cm (8″ by 12″) that pass for a newspaper. There are several available and each is printed within the city. The most popular are ‘The Vigilant Citizen’, ‘The Blue Unicorn’, ‘Daily Luck’ and ‘Northwind’.

As a rule they carry tabloid style tittle tattle, scandle and rumours as much as any real news. The writers of the short scrolls are a mix of anonymous perveyors of rumour, often in reality scribes who become privy to private affairs through their work or through overhead snippets of information and semi professional reporters of news. The concept of ‘Journalism’ does not exist but chroniclers of events have been around since the dawn of the written word.

As a GM I absolutely love the short scrolls. Based on the premise that with all tabloid journalism 99.9% is made up crap designed to sell newspapers I can use Broadcryers to bawl out headlines which could be ‘rumours’ fit for investigation by the party of PCs, complete fabrication, events spun off from different PCs operating in the same area or a way of introducing colour and flavour into the world, names of important NPCs and what they are up to.

In the same way that Freddie Starr never consumed any hamsters I am in no way constrained by the truth.

Something that is interesting though is that according to all the official Forgotten Realms publications (City of Splendors: Waterdeep, Blackstaff Tower and Downshadow) these are printed not hand written. The printing press revolutionised fifteenth century Europe. As soon as you allow printing presses into the world you open a pandoras box of potential uses for this technology. If you look through Spell Law ways of mass duplication is something that is not are covered by the normal spell lists. Possibly you could use a Prosaic list for this or research a suitable spell but as it stands this is something that technology can do that magic cannot.

The reason Broadcryers and their short scrolls came to mind is that all week I have been making up stories to fill the short scrolls for my PBP game. When rules, reality and even truth are all optional it is really good fun creating little newspaper stories.

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July 20, 2015July 20, 2015

I am avoiding RMU! (and the missing subterfuge skills!)

You may have noticed that I have not mentioned that much about RMU. The truth is that I have had a collegue on annual leave, I have had to go on 6 sessions of full day training, I have been away my self (a paintballing weekend) and various other demands on my time (blame the Greeks). I simply have not had time to read the books in the detail they deserve and conversely there is a really detailed discussion going on on the ICE forums that is far better than anything I could write with the added advantage of feedback from the actual authors.

If you want to know more about RMU then head over here http://www.ironcrown.com/ICEforums/. I will deal with each book in turn when I have the time to do it justice.

RM2 vs My brand of RMC

One of my PBP players today asked me where have all the subterfuge skills gone. RM2 players are used to having dozens of skills detailing the minituae of every aspect of life it seems. For example they have Build Trap, Set Trap, Detect Trap and Disarm Trap in addition you can learn Trap Lore to give you a knowledge base to work from.

In my world I still have Trap Lore but the only skill for traps is Disarm Trap. As I explained to the player if you are looking for traps and it is a trip wire or pressure plate sort of affair then Perception is the skill to use. Just tell me what you are looking for and roll the dice. If it is a complex lock mechanism that you are studying in detail and you want to know if it has an embedded trap then the Disarm Trap skill is suitable.

What about the building and setting of traps? As I see it if you are relying on a trip wire or noose then I would use rope mastery, if it is a snare to all intents and purposes then why not use a foraging roll? If it is none of those but you can explain to me how you want it to work and how to set it up then I am good wth that. Not everything has to have a roll but if there is a chance of failure then we have 10 stats we can use. I am inclined to use a different mix of stat bonuses from case to case depending on the design of the trap. Some will require a more reasoned approach others nimble fingers and a steady hand. Trap Lore would come into this as well. If the principles are well know and obvious then a knowledge of Trap Lore will warn you of some of the common reasons for failure and tips to aid success.

So is this Build Trap, Set Trap or Foraging?

So the most important thing is what are you trying to catch? If the answer is a rabbit then using the trap above is without a doubt foraging. If you want to catch an Orc then under RM2 you would need two completely different skills (Build and Set). Why is that?

Why Remove Skills from the Game?

I am not on a mission to remove skills from the game. What I noticed was that with every companion there were new skills being added. This puts pressure on the GM to give more Development Points each level, makes leveling up slower, makes each RM2 Character incompatible with any other game that didn’t use the same mix of companions and as almost every skills is coloured by how much scope each GM gives it makes playing the game under two different GMs potentially confusing.

Thieves are one of the nicest ‘skills based’ professions there is. They have good combat skills and their skill costs are pretty cheap normaly 1/3 for most subterfuge skills. RM2 then breaks this by adding so many skills that just to build and then set a trap requires two skills (effectively make a cost of 2/6) and two chances of fumbling (a net 10% chance or two attempts at not rolling 1-5 of an OE down roll).

It is not just thieves and subterfuge skills. Spell casters have Spell Mastery but also Spell Trickery. Why? I have rolled both these into one skill. We have different difficulty penalty gradings from Routine to Absurd for a reason. There is no reason as far as I am concerned to constantly break everything down and down into ever more granular skills.

There was a debate on the ICE forums about how many development points (DPs) do GMs give. Up until this current game I have always stuck to the original core rule for development points but I did used to give six free ranks as ‘hobby’ skills. This time I have tried using 25% of the characters normal DPs as hobby skills instead. Chances are I suspect that it will even out as pretty much the same but I would not be surprised if the the characters end up more limited by this method. I am thinking that if a character has just DPs to spend they are more likely to buy skills that are cheap for their profession. With a flat 6 ranks to allocate then you can pick from across the board of secondary skills irrespective of cost.

Rolemaster Lore

Rolemaster has ample scope for individualising a characters knowledge and learning from any possible background or upbringing. You can have as many Lore skills as you like and as many Craft skills as you like. This I do not have a problem with. I think it is one of the great things about rolemaster that every character cn be so unique AND true to the players vision. What I do not see is a cnstant need to add ever more skills or bloat to the a game system that already allowed heroes to be exactly what the players controling them envisioned.

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July 13, 2015July 12, 2015

How loud is your campsite?

I was thinking about your typical party campsite the other day. We assume both as players and as GMs that a lot is happening during those hours camping that we do not normally play through. The fighters are practicing, repairing bits of armour, food is prepared and pots washed and so on.

It is easy for a typical PC to be ‘learning’ 15 to 20 skills each level and all of these will require a certain amount of practice time. I used to work in adult education and we would allocate about 20hrs for a student to grasp a basic skill. It is also generally bandied about that it takes 10,000 hours to master a skill.

I imagine some campsites get quite tense with the characters trying to learn academic skills getting really hacked off with the fighters shouting, grunting and clashing weapons all evening. Combat practice is really hard to do quietly. I was at a fencing competition on Friday and there you have steel weapons but cloth armour or polycarbonate breastplates. The sound of the combat carried maybe 300meters or more. Imagine steel weapons against iron bound shields and steel breast plates. The typical ‘off guard’ or off duty party could probably be heard half a mile away on a still evening and that is without the swearing when the character fumbles a smithing roll whilst hammering out dents in his armour.

If your party, as I often do when playing, says they are going to make camp away from the road so they are not obvious you are in reality talking a very long way if they are going to carry on the normal business of maintaining their skills and equipment. This doesn’t even take into account particularly keen ears of non-human races.

I think this is one of those things I have just taken for granted ever since I have been roleplaying back when I was 14 or so and that has just always been the way parties camp. In future I think unless other precautions are being taken you will be looking at an active zone nearly a mile in diameter when a full on PC party makes camp. No wonder orcs, trolls and goblins wander into camp so often!

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July 10, 2015

RMU Beta 2 Spell Law

Now this is a different beast!

Everything I disliked about Creature Law does not apply to Spell Law. It looks like a professional, high quality product and give or take the odd rough looking table, it is. It is still a weighty tome but you have to look at it from a players point of view and a GMs’ point of view. As a player you could easily print off just your spell lists and you would have one page (sometimes two) per spell list and you get all the parameters, spell descriptions and any applicable notes that are important. Every spell list stands on its own two feet. This necessarily means that the spell list section if physically large but you do not have to read it all back to back.

As a GM the supporting material for magic has to be great enough to actually be supportive. Rolemaster illusions are absolutely amazing magic and much better in RMU that it was in RM2 and RMC. If you are coming from the D&D world then you need that detail on illusions as they are nothing like you are used to. This spell law still has the utterly rediculous rule that the weight of the illusionist specifies the weight that can be bourn by the illusions. Never trust the halfling illusionist but the obese guy in the corner may be in danger of a heart attack but his illusionary bridges are amazing. Under the RM2 creatures and treasures there was a most potent artifact (slippers) that allowed illusionists to stand on their own illusions, now illusionists have this ability for free!

I am pleased to see ritual magic wrapped into the core magic rules. I love rituals and having a coherent set of rules that apply to both players and evil villains alike is cool.

All in all I would say this book is a natural progression from Beta 1 and a marked improvement. There are lots of little changes, each quite minor but the sum of all of them is significant. There are bits of RMU I have already adopted into my normal play because they quite simply were good ideas well executed and this holds true.

The thing I am most interested in seeing is how Action Points work. they are briefly mentioned in Spell Law but are part of Arms & Character Law which I am only just starting to read now. It sounds to me like the initiative rules have take a major revamping!

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