This August I will be heading to GenCon, which is one of the largest tabletop RPG conventions in the world. I am really looking forward to it, primarily to see some new and old systems being played (I’m especially eager to try out Pathfinder 2, Starfinder, and Adventures in Middle Earth). I have two questions for our RM Blog community:
For those who have been there before: Do you have any recommendations on what to do or see? I botched my first attempt to navigate the event finder system, which meant that I missed out on all the MERP sessions being offered, but there’s still lots to see and do. What would you say is a ‘don’t miss!’?
For those who aren’t going: Is there anything you’d like me to check out? I will be playing Pathfinder 2, Starfinder, Adventures in Middle Earth, probably some DnD, and I might try Numenera and/or Star Wars d6 too. If you have any booth you’d like me to check out, rules you’d like me to see in play, or anything else that I could quickly find out for you, please let me know. I will be playing and possibly GMing, but if I have time to help you out, I will.
I’m guessing that it’s not precisely “news” to readers here that the QuickStart Deluxe of Against the Darkmaster (VsD) has been released as pay what you want on DriveThruRPG. The latest articulation has introduced some changes to my game. Most radical is a reduction of five Armours (None, Soft Leather, Rigid Leather, Chain and Plate) to four (None, Light, Medium, Heavy). Most sneaky is total Success on the maneuver table has been reduced to 100 from 110.
The most radical change, however, (and I’m talking specifically about my home game now) is how I’ve undertaken to transform VsD’s entire d100 system into something that works better for the players at my table. Approaching something like this, I often feel out of place in the company I keep here on this blog. I’m becoming convinced that a “simple,” homebrewed d20 system is most comfortable for my gaming table, though I continue to be enamored with the design possibilities in Rolemaster d100 mechanisms.
And I thought I was going to revert to a d20 system and simply carry on with the campaign characters until I remembered how one player in particular appreciates VsD’s and others’ core percentile principle.
A lot of what I’m going to say here I already have shared with the VsD designers, but I think these comments might be of equal interest to RM gamers. I’m going to structure this discussion by presenting two “problems” that I have been endeavoring to “solve,” each followed by a “solution.”
Combat
At the beginning of last year I determined to run Middle-Earth Role Playing (MERP). I quickly grew irritated, while trying to track the various weapon “stats” that modified the rolls and results on the attack tables. A “solution” appeared to be to adopt RM2, but then my burden was to track tables for every single weapon.
Interjection
I’m already anticipating a response from the RM community to my complaints, so let me try to provide more context here. When I was young, my friends and I were deeply interested in the simulationist aspects of rpgs. We didn’t care at all how much time—or math—was required of us to resolve a single conflict. It was common for a combat to involve hours of our time. My group now isn’t interested as much in that. Obviously, we’re not plunging fully into story games, but we’re more interested in narrative. We also don’t believe that a lucky shot from a mook necessarily should be able to outright kill a player character.
I have received advice from RM gamers concerning the time management element. Give attack tables to the players, say some gamers. I’m certain this works for some groups, but not mine. One of my players will outright refuse. He says that I’m lucky he “rolls his own dice,” and he’s only partly jesting here. And even if the other players were willing to take on this work, as GM I’d still have to be monitoring their work. These are casual gamers.
So the bottom line is that all this, as it is with any group, is about how my players and I detail the game system that we need for our table. And our struggles and solutions might be of interest to some other groups.
VsD, cleaving more closely to MERP than RM, uses weapon stats and consolidated attack tables. I have consolidated the attack tables into a single one closely modeled on the maneuver table. All weapon types are assigned damage dice, based on 1d10 for one-handed and 2d10 for two-handed. Armours deduct results on the critical tables in increments of 10 per armour type.
Skills
“I use like three of these,” said a player, referring to a VsD character sheet that, incidentally, is significantly more compressed than any RM sheet. So we reduced Skills into general categories, and each breaks down into two types of uses or applications, and each of these are modified by two discrete character Stats. I enjoy how other versions of RM use multiple and complementary attributes to modify specific Skills. The latest version of RM uses three of its ten for each Skill, sometimes “double dipping,” when there aren’t other clear associations.
So, instead of assigning Ranks to granular Skills, in our hack, at Level advancement PCs gain bonuses in broader Skill categories.
Concluding Thoughts
My group has made changes, also, to how the GM handles NPCs, and it’s also wrestling with VsD’s use of Drive Points—in fact, we’re considering outright dropping this meta currency. But the largest consideration we have is whether we keep the d100 roll. I think most of us will agree that most bonuses in an RM game reduce neatly from +5 (on a d100) to a +1 (on a d20). So why deal with 100 numbers rather than 20? Honestly, for greater ease of roll resolution, I see no reason outside of the relative Fumble values, though these could be remedied: a second roll could follow any roll of 1 to determine if a particular weapon is fumbled. Incidentally, I see that Chivalry & Sorcery has done something similar, offering a C&S “Essence” rules set in addition to its “Rebirth.” I’m similarly curious about the news of an upcoming “lite” version of RM.
What are your thoughts? Why do we gamers want 100 numbers?
Recently, I played around with random tables for village names, industries, street plans and then a plot hook to give the PCs something to do.
Since then I have been playing with a new web-based toy and I thought you may like it.
Before I introduce it I want to explain the how and why of using it.
What it does is provide you with a couple of little pictures or icons, I use two but you will have an option for one to six at a time. These icons are completely random, sometimes vague and always open to interpretation. The way I have been using it is to grabl two icons for every NPC I am adding to an adventure, at the planning stage not during play. The icons are used as inspiration for what is in the NPCs hearts or minds.
For example. I created a Lady in Waiting for an adventure thinking that the PCs may want to use a charm or suggestion spell to turn an insider on to their side. When I created the NPC I drew a Wheel and a Shield icon. The first thing that came into my head was that a wheel can mean change or revolution and the shield could mean being defensive or hiding something. All of a sudden this lady in waiting is actually very sympathetic to a group of anti royalists but is hiding her sympathies.
The chances of this ever coming out in play is probably under 1% but if it did, if a player decided or overcast Telepathy on her for no reason I suddenly have an answer to what is going on in her head. If you charm her and now she is your friend and you raise the subject of breaking in to the castle then she is actually going to be more open to the idea than another NPC.
I grabbed two more icons for a military type and got an Arrow and Flaming breath, that immediately said typical sergeant major to me, straight to the point and will ball you out for the slightest discretion.
Since I have been using these, they add about 30 seconds to creating an NPC but they add a whole world of potential depth to people your PCs meet and can create endless sub-plots and side quests if you wanted.
So that is what it is for. The tool is called Zero Dice and you can find it at Tangent Zero. Leave the Dice Type to image and then click one of the “roll 1” to “Roll 6” buttons.
As another example I have an NPC who will be sharing a dungeon with the PCs. Let us find out more about him.
So I am seeing a deadly plant and a gift. It could be that our prisoner is a gifted poisoner but I like the idea more that he stupidly send a poisonous plant (poison ivy maybe) to the lord of the castle as a sort of protest.
You do not need to take the icons literally, there are some icons in the set that contain battery charge levels such as these…
I use these often as an indication of energy levels, or stress or even health. Not everyone you meet is going to be on full hits, some people are having a bad day even before they meet the PCs.
You just have to let your imagination be inspired by these visual prompts.
I have cleared the decks a little and last night I started to look at Navigator RPG again.
The first thing that would strike you is the limited scope of the game. So far we have three races and five professions, that is it.
My justification for this is twofold. Firstly, I am trying to follow the source material, White Star as closely as possible and that is the full set of player character classes in the book, plus one. I have added in an extra profession, the Mystic. Mystics are what Spacemaster fans would recognise as true and semi-telepaths. I thought they were an important part of Spacemaster and needed to be included.
We have stats. These are d100 rolls, re-roll anything under 21 and if you have no stats over 90 then your two lowest can be elevated to 90.
Potentials are all 101 and stat gain rolls will cost DPs.
DPs are fixed at 50 per level.
Stat bonuses are (Stat-50)/3 so no table needed for stat bonuses.
Character races or Species are built using talents. I have included six talents and one flaw. These serve as a model for 3rd party writers to create a whole spectrum of optional talents and Species.
Mixed Species are easily possible by mixing and matching the talents that define the parents.
We now have seven cultures. Each culture gives 50DPs worth of skills.
We have simple guidelines for creating new cultures.
As I said above we have five professions but we also have the rules for creating new professions. Each profession comes with 50DPs of ‘basic training’ in the professions core skills. We also get Professional skill bonuses. Every profession has individual skill costs.
Things I have borrowed is the idea of Expertise skills that reduce penalties but do not give bonuses. This has allowed me to remove the four individual moving in armour skills.
I have borrowed the fixed 50DPs and I have borrowed the method of creating ‘half races’. In effect the three races I have created could be turned into six different species.
The calculated stat bonuses comes from Hurin.
All skills are going to have three governing stats and the stat bonuses are going to be additive rather than averaged. I just find that easier.
After being given 50DPs of skills from your culture, 50DPs of skills from your basic training you will then have an additional 50DPs to spend as you wish to customise your character. This means that a starting character will be level 1 and have 150DPs of skills in place.
Limited Scope
I said there were two reasons for the limited scope. This whole project is dependent on building a community who will add to the game. The tools for creating new Species, Talents, Flaws, Cultures, Professions and Skills are right there in the core rules and just enough examples are provided to give people what they need to build what they want. A spin off benefit of limited scope is time to completion.
In project management you can decide what you want a project to achieve or when you want to complete a project but you cannot define both. You either ship what you have on completion day your you ship the completed project when it is finished. By limiting the scope of the project the time to completion is going to be much shorter. As it is I am hoping to have the game up to the point where you can create a character by the end of this week.
The most time consuming things I have to deal with this week will be calculating all the skills costs for my five professions and all the skills and then writing all the skill descriptions.
Next…
After that the next set of rules in White Star than need converting are Movement, Skill Resolution and Resistance Rolls. I am hoping that they will be able to be completed in a week although I have a busy couple of weeks coming up.
I play in a RMC game where the GM is the type to look for any excuse to punish the characters. Examples from the last session are when we paid passage with a wagon caravan between cities but the player had never asked about paying for food, just travel so the GM sprung it upon us that on the first night everyone else had food and we didn’t. Another example was that we were caring for an NPC who was in a coma. We were travelling by wagon. I said to the GM “I will tend the patient on the journey”, being a lay healer this seemed a natural thing to do. Five days later the GM comes up with “You never said you were going to give him anything to drink.” What! As far as I am concerned “tending the patient” is a modern contraction of “Attended to the patient’s needs” and I took it as read that food and water are fairly basic needs.
But, that is the GMs style. Every time he tries to trip us up like this I create a little checklist and in all future interactions I run through it. I even upset him last time as I had explicitly written on my character sheet that my tin and copper coins were in a belt pouch, my bronze and silver were in a pouch around my neck but under my shirt and my gold was in a pouch at the bottom of my pack. He told me that I discovered my purse had been stolen and to rub out the coins on my character sheet, to which I replied “Which one?” Two can play at being pedantic.
For the most part it is the GMs job to say “Yes”. We are there to help the story unfold. If the characters have a plan that they have the skills to carry out and they make the skill rolls then the answer to their questions should normally be a “Yes”. Saying “No” to your players too often is a sure fire way to stagnate your game.
In a barroom brawl my players don’t even ask me if there is a bottle they can grab as a weapon, they just tell me that they grab a bottle. How does it advance the story if there is no bottle? On the other hand if the player goes for a bottle against unarmed hooligans they have just escalated the conflict significantly and it could have consequences.
Sometimes I will add in a condition. If you want to swing of the chandelier then I will tell you where they are if they are not in immediate reach. It is then your choice if you want to go ahead.
Sometimes we just need to say “No” because that is the way the world is. “Is the castle gate shut?” is a yes/no question and if the gate is not open it is quite definitely shut. That is simply narrative and you could be starting to build the challenge that the characters need to face, how to get into the castle when it is under lockdown.
Last post I was talking about improve skills. All GMs need decent improv skills to be able to whip up an NPC as needed or to adapt the challenge as the characters make their decisions.
The improve technique I want to talk about here is “No, because…” In improv theatre a flat No is considered ‘blocking’ it prevents the other improvisational actors from taking the scene forward. It is the same in rpgs. Just saying No to your players does not normally move the story forward but even if you keep it to yourself, as will frequently be the case, the ‘because’ creates a route by which the players can turn the No into a Yes of sorts.
Take the example of trying to question a villains lackey. The player wants to cast Charm Kind on the lackey and the as best friends want the lackey to help him sneak into the villains tower. You know that this will completely defeat the point of the adventure. The villain is a red herring and it is what the characters will discover on the way to him that will reveal the next stage of their quest.
So we are faced with a charmed lackey. Will he sneak the character into the tower? No, because his life would be forfeit if it was discovered that he had breached the security.
That seems fairly normal but in fact it gives the characters something they can work with. If all the inhabitants are in fear of their lives for disobeying an order that could be used in duping a different npc, who they can put in a position of believing that if they do not do what they characters demand that the villain will be so angry they will probably not survive.
During the GM prep time or when you are plotting you keep in mind ‘No, because’ you can apply it whenever you block a route or close of a course of action. The reasons are part of the story and should help make the world more coherent.
For May’s Fanzine I needed something to fill the gap between when the previous adventure ended and the adventure featured in that issue started. With the recent posts about Lazy GMing I decided to take the lazy way out but it had some interesting spin-offs.
I started with a suggestion along the lines of have the
characters do a few random encounters between adventures. I then thought, I
hate random encounters why am I saying this?
I then came up with a table with ten entries and three
columns for a person, a action and a motivation. So three dice rolls creates a
stub of an adventure or a scene for the characters to walk in on. This seemed
good. The results would be something like Farmer + Accuses + Murder but most
GMs could work with that. The person column went from Village Elder to homeless
beggar. So we had 10 people x 10 actions x 10 motivations for 1,000 possible
random things going on in a village.
I not got a bit enthusiastic about this. These are so open
to interpretation that they could be hack and slash encounters…
Farmer: You killed by son now I am going to kill you!
(farmer hefts his scythe and advances)
Player: I prepare Shockbolt
Or they can be nice situations to role play out. The random
event, of itself, does not impose a play style.
For the GM a plot hook or random event is not really much
help if they have been told role play an entire village or string of villages.
Random Villages
Using the same basic mechanism of 3x1d10 rolls I produced a
table with three columns. The first was the first half of the village name, the
second the last half of the village name and the last the villages primary
industry. I thought primary industry was important. Once you know that it is
easy to imagine all the supporting industry. If the place is known for leather
working then the farmers are likely to have plenty of cows. Leather requires
stitching and that requires thread. Already, we have fields of cows, a tannery,
possibly old folk spinning thread in the village square. Where there are cows
there are butchers. We can now start to give the players a picture of village
life and give people employment.
The really curious thing was how I filled in the first two
columns, the name.
I seem to be developing a bit of a thing for east Asian culture
for fantasy. Here is a short list of things that I think are almost universally
cool in RPGs. Himalayan style mountains, Tibetan style monks, Genghis Khan
style hordes, Kung Fu Monks, Jungles, Ninjas, Pirates, ‘Lost Temples’ and finally
dragons. All of those are features of this Asian culture. It also breaks the mould
a bit of traditional fantasy being almost exclusively medieval European in
style.
What you lose in moving away from the standard form is knights
in shining armour.
This move to the east was never explicit or intentional. My
regular RMC game is set in the Forgotten Realms, in the Dales region. All my online
games through have a distinctly oriental feel and it is getting stronger with
every iteration.
You can imagine that the name parts in these lists ended up
as things like Phu, Dai and Ngu.
On my to do list is build my own setting. It has been there
for a while. I am filing away copies of these things in my setting folder. I
think there could be a future RMu fantasy Asian setting bubbling away somewhere
in my subconscious.
But Wait…
The ‘random encounters’ so far have a village name, industries,
actors, actions and motives but if the heroes are going to have a variety of
side quests here the typical GM is going to want some more assistance.
I have been playing with Geomorphs recently. A geomorph in
RPG terms is a fragment of a map, a bit like a jigsaw piece but one that it
doesn’t matter which way round you use it. You can even flip them over and it
will still fit. Most RPG geomorphs are for dungeon layouts but a few create
towns and villages.
In the fanzine I have provided three Geomorph dice. You have
to print them out and do a bit of cutting and gluing but at the end of it you
should have three paper or card d6 with each face holding a section of map. I
have included one here so you can see what I mean.
If you take the images and use an editor to flip or mirror
image the images you can create 6d6 each of which can have four orientations.
That is a massive amount of variations. In the example village I used three
images in a triangular formation with the bottom image half way along the two
above it.
The thing with visual maps like this is that they are open
to interpretation. In the bottom corners of the 2 face above I can see a couple
potential churches, one a western looking church and the other a ziggurat style
one. The 6 looks like a market but is that a bandstand?
What started out in the fanzine as a one liner of give the characters some random encounters ended up taking about a quarter of the entire magazine and with random people, places and maps.
On the condition that you do not roll all this stuff in
front of the players there is no reason for them to ever know that they are ‘between’
adventures at all. If the GM is good at improv, and most are, there is great
potential to turn some of these little hooks into full blown side quests.
So this is my contribution to Lazy GMing, a thousand random
villages, villagers and adventure hooks.
When I have tried an ‘ideas gathering’ set of posts in the past what has happened is that because there is no real structure in place there are almost too many options. Once discussions become circular we stop making progress.
Another problem is the transient nature of blogging. Ideas soon drift down the list of articles and away into oblivion.
So to Plan A
I am going to hammer my way through a conversion of White Star to create something that is extremely basic but both reminiscent of Spacemaster and actually playable. This will be the Navigator RPG.
Navigator RPG will be a Pay What You Want game on DriveThruRPG so you can pick it up for free or make a voluntary contribution. It is also a Creative Commons Share Alike product so no company can ever own the intellectual property and restrict its use.
The rules will be extremely modular with the intention of swapping out core rules for optional rules. In fact this swapping out of rules will be essential.
Yesterday, in my free time I wrote the Introduction, The start of the character generation chapter, rolling stats section, stat bonuses and I have just started the Species chapter. I have a pretty heavy schedule for the next 10 days or so but by early May I hope to have Species, Professions and Skills completed.
This may all sound rather egocentric. It is just me, my ideas, my opinions and my game. Why would anyone what to play my idea of a overly simplified Spacemaster?
Because it is easier to criticise something that is already there. I don’t really have to create anything new in doing a conversion from an existing game to a game with Rolemaster principles. We all know the ‘Rolemaster way’ so where there is a mechanic that could be more rolemaster then it is easy to apply that.
In addition, the design philosophy is that every single section of the rules will be replaced. I am providing just three or four races or species. Anyone can create new species, replace the provided species or anything in between. We know races are going to be primarily a collection of stat modifiers and resistance roll modifiers. You could start creating a bunch of new races now because you know what the options are going to be.
Art
There a few other things I have been working on. When I release Navigator RPG, on the same day, I am going to release three other downloads. The first will be a compatibility license.
This isn’t particularly exciting but what it does do is send a signal to the indie RPG developers that Navigator RPG is open for business.
The second is an Art Kit. A selection of art, backgrounds, spaceships, weapons, figures and so on. This is to make it as easy as possible for an independent developer to produce great looking supplements. The Art Kit exists already but it only contains three pieces of art. By the time of its release it should be a few hundred pieces strong.
The final download will be a document template for at least Word and inDesign. This is so that anyone can create a supplement and it will look and feel exactly like an official release.
That may not sound every exciting but the three, the license, art kit and document template are the three requirements to create a Community Content Programme [CCP]. You will have heard a great deal about CCPs on the ICE forums. This game will have all the required criteria to have a CCP.
Here is a curious thing…
This game will be OSR, Old School Revival. When it is listed it will be found on DrivethrRPG under HARP/Spacemaster and OSR/Old School Revival. So? There is only one other OSR community content programme and that is Zweihander. What this means is that most places where the Zwei CCP shows, Navigator RPG will show too. You have to like a bit of standing on the shoulder of giants.
So I have been thinking about my Spacemaster idea from last week. There are a few threads I want to pull together today.
Cepheus vs Whitebox
There are two potential ‘original sources’. The first, as pointed out by Egdcltd was Cepheus. This is basically Traveller with the serial numbers filed off. So the core mechanic is 2d6 + skill and roll over target number.
The Cepheus Light rules are a complete set of Sci Fi rules and cover everything from character create to starship combat and planet building. Those rule weigh in at just under 170 pages.
Whitestar by Whitebox on the other hand is a D&D in space game OSR build. It is closer to the original sources as Rolemaster was D&D house rules so this would be Spacemaster as Whitestar house rules. As a d20 system the conversion to d100 is simple and logical. The rules as sold are 134 pages all in including setting, starting adventures and the game rules.
In terms of popularity Cepheus is a Pay What You Want game that has achieved Silver metal status. Whitestar is also PWYW but is a Gold metal product. The PWYW is important as you only get metal ratings if you actually pay for the PDF/book and most people don’t pay when they can have the PDF for free. If only 1% paid then the actual number of downloads would be in excess of 10,000 and 50,000 respectively. Whatever way you cut it Whitestar appears to be four or five times as popular as Cepheus.
Collaboration
Over in Zweihander-land I have been running some collaborative projects. In principle it works like this. I suggest a title, I set up simple shared project management board where people can list the content they are working on and can then list when it is all completed. I then do the page layout and put the book on sale. Profits are shared on a pro-rata basis using page count as the unit of measure.
It works, and works well with that group of developers because there is a real sense of helping each other out. It is very non-competitive. I would go so far as to say it is very supportive.
The most important thing is to leave your ego at the door.
I am not entirely sure if the Rolemaster community could pull off the same level of collaboration. To be fair Brian, Egdcltd and I managed it with the 50in50 adventures so it is possible. Creating an entire game system is a little harder as there will always be the tug of war between simplicity and complexity. That question has never been suitably answered. That is in part why I mentioned right from the start RM2 rather than Rolemaster in general. I find RM2 fans are more open to simpler games because at the start RM2 was a rather simple game.
What’s in a name?
Finally, I have been tossing names around recently and I have rather grown to like Navigator RPG. It is a bit of a nod to Shadow World. If you use a Sci Fi type font it looks quite cool. Also, just as important there is no Navigator RPG at the moment. I say at the moment as there used to a game a Gamma World retro clone but the last update on their blog/site was eight years ago and the game never made it onto Drivethru or RPGnow.
Unless you have been living in a monastic cell for the last decade you cannot have failed to be aware of the OSR movement. You can be forgiven for not knowing what the R in OSR stands for but that is par for the course. It could be Old School Revival or it could be Renaissance or quite simply Old School Rules, who knows and frankly who cares.
The OSR movement is about trying to capture that feeling of simpler times from the 1980s RPGs but that is a pretty fuzzy idea and as such it encompasses a lot of vagaries. For example Zweihander is a thoroughly modern game but also considers itself a Warhammer retro clone and markets itself as OSR game. Curiously the DrivethruRPG categories it puts itself in are “d100 / d100 Lite”, “Old-School Revival (OSR)” and “Other OSR Games”. I don’t really know when something becomes ‘Lite’ but Zwei is a 700 core rulebook and already has multiple supplements of additional rules and is growing.
OSR often means D&D Basic/Expert set clones or AD&D 1st Ed. clones. We have seen above that Warhammer retro clones also qualify.
By every measure RM2 should qualify as an OSR game, but that is not where I am going with this.
Square one in Rolemaster terms was as a set of house rules for D&D. If there is one thing that the readers of this blog are good at is House Rules, we propose them by the bucket-load.
In my opinion RMu is moving ever further away from its D&D roots. This is not a bad thing. If you try to be too D&D then you may was well play D&D. There are enough previous editions of varying complexity to satisfy most tastes.
What I was thinking was more along the lines of a “gateway drug”. An original set of house rules for OSR D&D/clones that fix what we know to be the original flaws in the system like the implied DB associated with different armours.
I don’t want to stomp on ICE’s toes but how about a Sci-Fi OSR game. SMu is so far in the future I find it hard to envision it ever existing. Anyone with a RM2 Creatures and Treasure has all the conversion rules they need (these are also in the download vault over on the forums if you don’t have the original C&T).
Furthermore, I would quite like to put all the rules under the OGL license or even better a CC license so it will be perpetually free. I don’t have time to write it all right now but I think I could set up a shared development infrastructure (I know that sounds complex but it really isn’t). What it would entail would be a Trello shared board which would be used to control the project management and documents stored on the cloud, probably google docs so anyone can dip in and work on the project.
I will cogitate a bit more on this idea and blog again on it next week. I think it has legs. I also think that between us we could create a perpetually free RM2 retro clone that will keep Rolemaster alive forever regardless of what happens to ICE in the future.
