The Rolemaster Blog

I wrote an article about this for this month’s Fanzine at the weekend. This month’s fanzine is all about adventure writing and I was discussing three approaches.

The first is what I am dabbling with at the moment. Having every encounter multi statted for low, medium, high and very high level groups. That is what we did with the city of forgotten heroes. I also like relative encounters so the number encountered is based upon the number of heroes.

The second option is the traditional way of writing adventures of writing to a specific level and number of heroes. If one were to write a series of adventures this can work. If your party is not the right level right now then eventually they will reach the right level or if they are too high then one day you will start a new campaign.

The third way that I was discussing is writing for a fixed level, I picked 7th level as it gives a nice balance between competent PCs yet not too powerful. Every adventure is written for 7th level but it also comes with a selection of pregen characters.

The reasons I am suggesting this is because RM is incredibly hard to write for. There are just too many optional rules the shift the power level up or down that a stock NPC will either be totally out classed or will wipe the floor with the party. If each GM is having to rework the adventure anyway to make it work with their house rules then they are just as well off with a well fleshed out adventure concept as they are with a statted adventure. On the other hand if you had a collection of adventures with pregen characters any GM could run an introductory adventure for new players off the cuff. We all know that RM is really easy to play but using RAW character creation is a real chore. So starting everyone off with pregens means that new players get a good sense of what a rounded character looks like, what skills are useful and how stats and skills interact. This means that you end up with well informed new players when it does come to their turn to make characters.

Another nice thing about packaging pregen characters with adventures is that you get suitable PCs for the adventure. Think of a pirate based adventure and a normal PC group and half the party will have drowned in their platemail before the adventure is half way through. If the next adventure is all camels and desert ruins then knights and lances are still not really suitable.

I would like to see packaged adventures with both pregen characters, say eight or ten potential PCs along with a suitable adventure. This overcomes another ‘new player problem’. If you are not used to RM then rushing into combat and not parrying is a great way to end up dead. If there are spare pregens to hand then the unfortunate player can be reintroduced quickly and easily without having to go though the whole char gen process.

So my answer is that RM needs a culture of bundling pregen characters with EVERY adventure. It makes it easy to introduce new players, it sidesteps the house rule problems and it is justt as functional for experienced GMs as a fully statted adventure.

Today’s answer is not Rolemaster related. I was looking at different games for a different blog earlier this year and I came across the FUDGE system.

So strictly speaking FUDGE is not a game but a toolkit from which any game could be created. FUDGE aims to be universal and it achieves this at a level way above many other games that claim to be universal but in truth are just genre neutral.

FUDGE Characters can literally be created just by writing a paragraph of text and all the characters would be balanced and quite possibly as detailed as any RM character.

I really didn’t expect to like the FUDGE system but I have to say it is impressive. I have mainly pkayed modern-day stuff but I have read fantasy rules. None of the fantasy stuff has the brutality of Rolemaster (yet) but creating such a system would be relatively easy. It is also a back burner project on my to do list.

So how has a system surprised me? By being truly universal and elegantly simple. At the same time great fun to play.

This is something I can struggle with in my face to face game. When you have played so many campaigns with the same players over decades it gets hard to get that feeling of excitement and feeling that the the results really matter.

Our game is very hack and slash and in consequence most of the stakes and crisis points are combat related.

I don’t need to tell anyone here that in RM the odds in combat is that someone is going to get hurt. I think that does up the stakes somewhat and I don’t use FATE points or fudged results in my combats. The die fall where they fall. My solution to the lethality of RM is to have life keeping and lifegiving available to the characters.

With this group right now they are carrying a rune of lifegiving but once that is gone they are a long walk away from further help. If you die in my game it is your turn to make the tea while the remaining characters work out how to save you.

Every once in a while I like to throw in an encounter where the ideal outcome for me is for the characters to lose the fight. The players don’t know this but I want them to lose, to be captured or end up fleeing into an area that was way outside the plan. I hope this does trigger that feeling of increased stakes. There is a point in the fight where it becomes obvious that things are really not going to plan.

So I think my answer is to avoid the binary win/lose style of fights where the characters need to win to progress the story.

I am going to start with an anecdote before I answer this as it will give my answer a little more context.

In the world of horseback archery there is a brilliant and very popular french coach. Here in the UK we tend to try and be all inclusive and use supportive language. When I was training to be a coach it was emphasised that you shouldn’t structure your feedback to students in a positive BUT negative format such as “That was much better BUT try and not drop your hand after the shot.”. We would turn the feedback around so that you end on a positive. At a training camp in France on of the best British youth horseback archers did a run down the track and then turned the coach and got this feedback…”Do that again but be less shit.”

So my answer to Day 6 is that the players should be less shit.

What the French coach meant was that there were obvious things that the archer had done wrong and we all knew they could much better and normally would be much better but sod’s law says that when the coach is watching you for the very first time everything goes wrong.

As it is with players. They can create brilliant characters with great back stories that entwine with the setting and campaign histories. They hand craft their cultural background and influences and carefully pick their character race and profession to bring this concept to life. Then you start play and what you get is not Forgin the Dwarven apprentice safe cracker from the slums of Waterdeep but Bill from Sales playing the same thief he has played for 20 years in all your games but with different stats and name.

At the end of the day if everyone is having fun it doesn’t matter if Bill plays exactly the same thief with the same attitudes and personality (probably Bill’s personality) in every game. The flip of that though is that if the players really do weave their characters into the world then the world will seem more real for everyone. If when I am playing my character I turn and speak to Forgin and I get Forgin’s opinions on the plan that will be more fun than if I am talking to Bill and getting Bill’s opinions.

To try and keep people ‘in character’ more I have each player write just a single post-it note do describe their characters personality and it lives on the front of the character record in dayglo colours. There are no stats or skills for personality and no numbers or bonuses but they are vitally important to actual role playing and a tiny box labelled “Demeanour” and space for a one word answer is not sufficient.

So there you are… be less shit.

Sorry, I am already playing catch up on this. I was kind of hoping to post every day and sometimes multiple times a day.

So my most memorable NPC was probably a Spacemaster mercenary, “Doc Murray”. He used a lot of the character enhancing meds, so he could haste pretty much on demand and could ride out stuns and bleeding criticals, if I remember correctly. The character was originally inspired by Rogue Trooper from 2000AD but without the blue skin.

He was pretty much a tour de force of heavy weaponry with the light machine gun and grenades as his weapons of choice. There were times when he joined the characters as a mercenary and they needed extra muscle and he returned to hunt the PCs down as it was known that he knew them and could get close.

Despite appearances he was not an Armsman profession but a Criminologist. This was before I had moved over to No Profession but I found myself gravitating towards using Criminologist more and more for NPCs as they were simply the best ‘all rounder’ and if you wanted to put an NPC into multiple adventures the generally low skill costs across the board made the Criminologist a good choice.

I think there are two elements to this but they could be rolled into one, ‘playability’ but I want to break them out into ‘characterisation’ and ‘compulsion’.

The real answer is probably “A great GM” as that can make any shit really enjoyable just as a crap GM can make the best game unplayable but I don’t want to go there.

Characterisation

What I mean by characterisation is the ability for the player to play exactly the character they had envisioned. This is one thing that I think RM does extremely well as there are very few hard limits. If you play ‘no profession’ then there are even less limits than stock RM. By that I mean in RM2/RMC a fighter can only learn spells from open lists and up to level 5. There is no fireball or even shockbolt on those lists so now if you really wanted fireball then you needed to look at a different profession and for that you are looking at importing companion professions and before you know it you are in massive bloatiland. This is not a NP rant but the case is still true that RM really allows you to build your character the way you want it to be. There are no arbitrary rules like magic users cannot wear armour or clerics cannot use edged weapons and all that stuff.

If the players are really invested in their characters then I think they are more likely to really buy into the world and the story. If the players want to keep on playing to find out what happens then that will give the game staying power.

Compulsion

Some games or actually settings or even just campaign concepts just have to be played. They are so compelling that they bring out the best in GMs and players alike. Games like these I think come with a certain amount of ‘scaffolding’ in that the players just know how their characters should act or speak. I mean things like a pirate based game has such an iconic central theme that everyone knows how a pirate should behave, you can almost smell the salty sea air and the seaweed encrusted docks. The same can work with oriental adventures as the whole culture and customs thing is so easy to envisage. If the game experience has just the right balance or elements to make the game compelling then the players will keep on coming back.

For me there are two ideal components.

1. A compelling setting, either a world I want to explore or a genre that I can get excited about. Right now when I am not playing RM I am dabbling with Ghost Ops. In actual play it is super light and fast to run but is miles apart from RM in just about every way.
2. The absolute minimum of rules. I have a brain, common sense and imagination. I can fill in the blanks once I know the flavour of the game. I know many GMs and even players dislike it when things come down to arbitrary GM decisions but I quite like that. I would never simply decide that an attack hits or misses but on the other hand there are times when I don’t want the characters to drown just because the rules say they do, I want them washed up on strange foreign shores.

So I think my perfect game is one that absolutely demands to be played so much that it is all you can think about when I should be working on other stuff but has a rulebook I can memorise and run without referring to. That may be a tall order but I have played a few of them. To be honest even RM fits into that definition if you have a setting you love. All the heavy lifting is done during character creation, resolving most skill checks and role play situations require no rules. It is only combat that chains you to tables. (I am assuming here that each player has their spell lists printed out as part of their character record)