So I am running behind schedule again. I have two days to catch up and I have a post that I want to share that has nothing to do with RPGaDay.

So how has my play evolved?

It is convoluted answer time….

When we started we were terrible role players. We were more roll players than role players. Our games were lots of kick in the door, kill the orcs and then repeat.

As we grew up a bit our games became much more sophisticated, character became much more important and I think I was probably 17yrs old when I actually created a character with a personality radically different from my own. Our games were more to do with political intrigue, world spanning politics or world saving high adventure than kicking in doors to kill orcs and steal their two copper pieces.

These days with my face to face game we have sort of regressed to hack and slash. The reason being that our games are so infrequent that we cannot keep all the subtle facts of a political intrigue game in our minds in the months between sessions.

In my play by post games I play much more sophisticated characters. As one has the time to really craft your responses you can be always in character. More than just speaking with your character’s voice you can pepper your responses with mannerisms and body language. As a GM you can layer on setting details to keep the world ever present in the players mind. You can use a palette of materials and textures when describing scenes much more often that you would when describing things to a group around your table. So my PBP gaming is much more sophisticated than my gaming table ever was.

The third kind of gaming I do is solo. Solo gaming is a way of playing that takes  a lot of practice. It is really hard to start but once you get the hang of it it is great fun. My solo play has also opened up a whole raft of games systems. If like me you have shelves of games you have bought but never played then solo play is a great way of getting them off the shelf and run an adventure. I have played games I never thought I would get to play. Some games I had read and thought sounded great on the page have proved really slow and uninspiring in play. The opposite is also true, games I had dismissed as ‘not for me’ have turned out to be great fun to play.

There is also a different sort of answer to this question.  How has my play evolved? It has become ever more simple. I settled on Rolemaster in the late 80s first with the red MERP book and then 1st edition RM. Since then we added every single companion, profession and skill but then came my maturing as a GM and I started removing that which I didn’t feel added anything so I would keep the new spell lists but one channeling/essence hybrid is pretty much like another so I would skip the professions. I found the constant subdivision of the skills into ever more specific just slowed down character creation and made the characters less proficient. Originally a character may have had Medicine or Surgery as a skill but once all the skills were in the game they probably needed Medicine -> Surgery -> Ear, Nose & Throat -> Nasal -> Left Nostril and of course if the critical has blocked the right nostril the character was down to using half skill as the left and right nostrils are only similar but not the same.

This quest of simplicity is what lead to my abandonment of levels, professions and development points and the querying of realms of magic. I have pretty much abandoned Arms Law for having too many tables and so on.

So it is not just how I play that has evolved but what I am playing.

I have been looking back at some of my previous PCs and actually the concepts behind them all are rather tame. The stand out character in recent years is probably my illusionist.

Silas by game profession was an illusionist but was employed most of the time at the Nomikos Library as a freelance researcher. When not helping people find what they were looking for in the library he lead an Indiana Jones style double life as a hunter of dark wizards, warlocks and witches and anyone who used magic for evil purposes.

I was quite surprised how effective he was taking out evil magic users. Illusionist make great spies as their have amazing powers of disguise. The essence open and closed lists give good functionality for spying. He tended to take out the spell caster using Gate Mastery to summon creatures to fight for him whilst remaining invisible and out of harms way, in the dead of night, with surprise and when his target was sleeping.

For a profession that lacks a lot of fire power at lower levels he really punched above his weight.

This character is one that snuck up on the GM in that he became incredibly powerful. Right from the off I made a point of collecting Rune Paper. Most of the magic items I collected in my adventures were inherently evil and I took these back to the Nomikos Library and gave them to the library staff to dispose of. Obviously I kept any spell bonus items but I also collected Runes and Rune Paper. I think the GM started to compensate me for all these great but evil items I kept giving away.

I made a point of telling the GM when I created a new rune and as my ability to store higher level spells increased I would revise the spells I had stored as runes. As anyone who knows Spell Law will know that there are some truly brilliant low level spells. I ended up with nearly 60 sheets of rune paper and these represented something like 300 powerpoints worth of my most powerful low level spells bound into a  ‘working spell book’.

So Silas the Witch Hunting Illusionist is my rather tame ‘Wildest Character Concept’

I am guessing you can all do better.

I am struggling with this question. In the RPGaDay set up there are alternative questions in case you don’t like a particular question and I nearly plucked one of them out instead.

I have been gaming since I was about 13 or possibly 14 years old. I have never stopped. I gamed at school both literally, in lunch breaks, and during my school years. At college I found a new group to game with and I still migrated back to my home town and gamed with my school group.

After college I found a group of roleplayers where I worked and introduced them to RM and that was the last time I played D&D, probably 1993 and I think it was 2nd edition. I still migrated back to my home town to play with my school years group.

It was in the early 1990s that I discovered PBP which was snailmail back then and in 1993 I discovered dial up bulletin boards which allowed for daily updates or sometimes even more frequent updates. We used to download a text document, type out your characters actions and then upload it to the board to post each move.

That has turned into web based/forum based games. I pretty much game at least for a couple of minutes every day. That is on top of writing games, writing about games, writing adventures and blogging.

I do not think gaming changed me in so much as it is an integral part of me and has been since those important formative years. Gaming is not the be all and end all of everything for me, I am also a serious company director, and I compete at an international level in currently two sports but if things go well that will be three sports although one of them is as a ‘veteran’. I have a family, dogs and horses all of which take up a lot of my life. I am not one of those people who can only express themselves though their gaming or their social circle is entirely made up of gamers.

So I don’t think gaming has changed me or if it did it did it so long ago that I was not mature enough to notice the change. So that is my far from satisfactory answer.

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.