Posted on

#RPGaDAY 8th, 9th, 10th and11th

So this is my third instalment of #RPGaDAY. Most of the questions this week seem to be about different systems so it will be hard to relate them Rolemaster.

8th What is a good RPG to play for sessions of 2hrs or less?

This depends on how you read the question. I think RM is a good candidate for this. One of the cool things about RM character sheets (booklets?) is that they hold just about everything you need to play. This is especially true if you include combat tables and spell lists in the character sheets. Bolt on things like Combat Minion and you get a game that you can get into and start playing very quickly. If you need to create characters in that 2hrs then having the first session exclusively dedicated to character creation will get all the characters made with time to spare. So my answer is RMC.

9th What is a good RPG to play for about 10 sessions?

This time I don’t think RM fits the bill. As a rule of thumb is seems that most GMs are levelling characters up every 3 sessions or so. In a mini campaign of 10 sessions that would advance the characters three or 4 levels. There is not really that much difference between a 1st and a 4th level character. At those lowest levels fighters are king and even the pure spell users have little more than shock bolt. Looking at the time, some players take forever to level up their characters so levelling up 3 times in 10 sessions takes a fairly big chunk out of your available playing time. So RM is not a good option for this particular format.

What does work well (shameless plug!) is my own game 3Deep. The game is set up for emulate TV series and episodes. With that in mine you can easily turn a 10 session mini campaign into 10 related one shot adventures and the whole into a ‘season’. Character creation is fast (roll five stats, pick a culture, spend 7 skill points and then flesh out the backstory) and there are no levels, experience is handled by improving stats and/or skills. While I am blowing my own trumpet the latest version of 3Deep will be available to buy from RPGnow and Drivethru from next week!

 

10th Where do you go for RPG reviews?

For me, my favourite RPG blog is http://www.stargazersworld.com/ which gives me a mix of reviews, news and opinion. they have a small team of bloggers and interestingly they like to experiment. Right now the blog is experimenting with being sponsored by Patreon.

11th Which ‘dead’ game would you like to see reborn?

Do games die? If that were true then there would be no RM2 players. The game is going on for 40 years old and has not had a new book published in decades and yet it is still probably the most popular version of RM there has ever been with many actives groups. Even in my previous answers I harked back to Car Wars with is a game from my youth. I honestly do not believe games die as long as people want to play them.

This post currently has 4 responses

 

Posted on

Random Musings. Thoughts on RM Spell Law high level spells.

My last post mused on the impossible goal of designing balance into a high level adventure. Among one of the issues I touched upon was the lack of effective buffs in RM Spell Law. But the problem is much broader than that–there is a breakdown of spell design at higher levels. Perhaps the original designers didn’t see much game play use for high level spells?

When I deconstructed and rewrote Spell Law I reviewed every single spell, spell list and compared similar spells between the realms. There are tons of inconsistencies, useless spells, redundant spells or spells “out of order” in power level. I started a detailed commentary on the RMU Spell Law forums, but there was so much pushback I just went ahead and started uploading my own version of spell law!

Rather than go analyze all of Spell Law, I wanted to comment specifically on high level spells. And to keep things shorter, let’s just tackle Essence open and closed in the post and only in the context of combat and not general purpose spells. (I’m using 6503 RMC Spell Master for reference btw.)

Elemental Shields. The 50th lvl spell combines the 15th, 17th and 19th spells Lightning, Fire and Ice Armors. These are good spells, but not great spells. Each is +20 to, 1/2 hits and decrease of crits by 1 severity. Fine for 15-19th lvl spells, but for a 50th just combining them, limiting them to 1 target seems inadequate.

The 20, 25 & 30 level spells are Mass–but in game use to buff 25-30 targets is limited. There are a few blank slots, but in my mind the real issue is trying to differentiate the same spells into different categories. Having Resist Light, Lightarmor, and then Lightning Armor is confusing and doesn’t allow much progression.

Overall, the list can be consolidated, improved protection at high levels and needs a good increase on the 50th lvl spell; either make it 1 target/lvl or increase the protection a bit.

Essence Hand. Calling Seal Team 6 Sniper group. The 50th lvl spell, Aim True is perhaps one of the most deadly spells available to Essence users! The spell automatically does max damage, “E” crit with a missile attack. (for large or superlarge it does a slaying crit) Sure the caster has to touch the shooter, but a group against 1 opponent or just a few opponents could make swift work of any adversary. Too powerful?

Spell Wall. The definitive list for protection v. magic. How good is it? The 20, 25 and 30 lvl spells provide +50 v a specific realm magic. Not too shabby…but…it’s 1 target and concentration only. Sad. Or the caster can just utilize Protection V which provides +25 RRs v. ALL REALMS and is 1 min/lvl. Which one would you choose?

Dispelling Ways. A far better list than Spell Law? Dispel XX Sphere creates a moving barrier around the caster that causes any inbound spell to make an initial RR before proceeding against a target in the Sphere (and then requires another RR). Those are good odds…but the caster has to concentrate the whole time. The 16th lvl spell creates a sphere with a RADIUS of 100′!!!! These need some work I think. The 17-19 “Un” spells strip spell casting ability from casters and items for 1 day. That’s pretty good.

Rapid Ways. The 50th lvl Mass Haste provides 50 rnds of Haste (no after penalties) of DOUBLE action. This one is a no brainer! Use this with Aim True and you have a killing machine.

Shield Mastery. Putting aside the issue that Essence Hand and Shield Mastery are doing the same thing (telekinesis), and that the instantaneous but contingent use of these spells creates huge game mechanic issues, is this even a good spell list? I think a lot more can be done. The 50th lvl spell is cool, but how practical for actual game play? Will the caster encounter that much missile fire? Will they be willing to cast this spell every round to the exclusion of all else? A better 50th lvl spell would be 1 rnd/lvl duration vs missiles within 5′ of caster (or target). That would be a great player buff and worthy of 50th lvl.

Spell Enchancement. Rubbish and breaks spell mechanics. Easier and more logical to scale range, radius or duration by PP expenditure than some “spell for a spell” list.

Spell Reins. Not many spells on this list, and really should be combined and improved with Spell Wall. Some good spells, but the 50th lvl, like Shield Mastery only works 1 round. How many possible spells would be directed at a caster during actual game play? Sure in a battlefield with tons of mages it might be useful…this spell needs a duration.

Spirit Mastery. The 50th lvl spell allows you to cast 1 spell/rnd..but only 10th lvl or lower. So this is really only a “economics” spell–it just reduces PP cost but locks the caster into only casting these spells.

So out of those lists, the 50th lvl spells for Essence Hand and Rapid Ways are awesome, but the others are either good spells but too limiting or just not very useful. Feel free to check out BASiL lists for my solutions to these spells and lists.

This post currently has 2 responses

 

Posted on

#RPGaDAY2017 5th, 6th & 7th

This is the next instalment of my RPGaDAY month.

5th Which RPG cover best captures the spirit of the game?

For me it has to be the original Call of Cthulu from way back in 1981. For someone whos entire experience of RPGs at about that time had been D&D and a bit of Boot Hill CoC was like nothing else!

6th You can game every day for a week. Describe what you’d do!

I am a big fan of ‘bitesize’ rpgs. When my PBP game was running I would dip in an out of that two or three times a day updating players posts and in the game I was playing in updating my actions.

My main Face to Face game I don’t think I could play that every day. There are just too many alpha male personalities in the group. We play for long weekends normally and that is about the limit before we get conflicts forming. We have been friends for over 30 years so everything gets forgiven and forgotten but a week would be too long.

Running this blog and all the other RPG related projects on the go makes it feel like I am almost playing at or with something every day.

So if I was to play every day then it would be an experiment of playing via Facebook messenger with an almost real time where the characters had a week to save the world. The players would be able to update their story at any time and I would do my best to reply as fast as I could. For me it would be most probably a week of sleep deprivation but it would be a memorable experience!

7th What was your most impactful RPG session?

This was a session where almost nothing happened, action-wise. The characters had been tricked into killing the dwarven queen of the iron hills and her bodyguard. We had then landed in a dwarven jail awaiting execution. As characters were were immensely powerful and could pretty much have walked out of there at will. The characters started a debate, it was obvious we were going to escape as we were on a quest to save middle earth but what do we do if confronted by dwarves? We were guilty of the crime we had committed but we were innocent of criminal intent and the world needed us. Do we take any more lives? What if it became unavoidable. We had an excess of righteous paladinic characters in the group alongside some rather more pragmatic characters.

The debate raged on for several hours, never once did anyone break from being in character and we had no NPCs with us. The party had only male PCs and female NPCs and the cells were split along gender lines. The GM did nothing for all that time except sit back and occasionally  correct a factual error in someones statement if the character would have known the truth but the player had forgotten.

Eventually the escape did take place and only one dwarf died and that was an accident, quite literally as a result of a failed moving manoeuvre.

That was pure ‘role playing game’.

This post currently has 3 responses

 

Posted on

#RPGaDAY2017


I was tempted to try and post every day for August but that would have crashed a lot of other people’s posts so instead I am going to do a few days at a time in my normal, regular slots.

So here goes.

1st What published RPG do you wish you were playing right now?

I have had a hankering for a while now to play Car Wars, the Steve Jackson Games game from the 80s. I know it wasn’t released as a RPG we we always played it as one. The original rules are available for free. All I am lacking is another player or 5. It is one of those games where you could while away a lot of down time just designing and building cars. Fast and simple mechanics, what not to love?

2nd What is an RPG you would like to see published?

This has to be RMU. I think all of us would like to see the finished product and to see that particular production bottleneck cleared so ICE can get on with releasing more and more varied products.

3rd How do you find out about new RPGs?

For me it is from other bloggers. In particular http://www.stargazersworld.com/. I don’t have enough players that meet often enough to try every game I would like to play. Like most of us we have shelves of games we have bought and played a handful of times, if at all. I find it more interesting to read the opinions of people who have actually played a game rather than the marketing hype put out by the games designers.

4th Which RPG have you played most since August 2016.

This has to be Rolemaster Classic. In a close second is my own game, 3Deep, which is due to be released in print as a 2nd edition. There was a lot of play testing of that in the last year.

Third in line is RMU.

This post currently has 4 responses

 

Posted on

Random Musings. Very High Level Adventures. Is “Balance” even possible?

This coming Tuesday (last night when this post is published) I’ll be running the final chapter to my 5 part series: Legends of Shadow World. The last chapter could be a stand alone adventure but is the denouement to the adventure path, typing up a lot of loose threads and presenting the group with an incredibly powerful adversary.

I’ve been parsing some data from the previous 4 sessions and feedback from the other 2 test groups (chapter 1) and will probably run my group through the series again. It won’t have the surprise/reveal elements from their first iteration, but we’ll be able to have a more open analysis during game play.

I’m using RM2 RAW, something I haven’t done for a VERY long time but want to maintain continuity with Terry’s ongoing SW material. The lack of our own house rules (combat maneuvers, multiple opponent rules, missile parry and initiative) makes RM melee feel very restraining. Most players are stuck with simple OB/DB split decision, although this becomes paramount when fighting high level foes.

RM has always been tricky in balancing encounters. DnDs Hit Point attrition system made matching groups and opponents more linear. Rolemaster criticals are the joker in the deck–a wild card that can immediately upend any possible balance a GM designs. This is not to say that the RM rules are broken at higher levels, but there are some immediate issues that are even apparent at lower levels.

  1. Outnumbering. Many, much lower level combatants can overwhelm powerful creatures. A dozen Warrior Monks (15 lvl) annihilated a 50th level character. Easily. The chance of at least 1 in 12 of scoring a potent crit result each round is quite high. Once a PC is compromised by a critical it’s “game over”.
  2. Lack of Buffs. RM2 Spell Law is really lacking in effective buff spells. People have commonly criticized my BASiL and Orhan lists as being too powerful (of course I disagree), but original Spell Law lists are pretty ineffective at high levels.
  3. Spell Attack/Counter Attack. While RM2 melee feels too simplistic, Spell Casters have SO MANY spells to choose from that strategic casting feels arbitrary. (a 50th lvl caster can have 300-500 spells!!)  Casters rarely have the luxury of countering a specific incoming spell, and to do so, would require them to forgo an offensive attack.
  4. Mixed Abilities/Protections. A hostile mixed group of NPC’s can be very deadly to a party. Even a small group comprised of a: creature immune to normal weapons; creature with high magical immunity; creature that is blinding fast, and one that is super strong could decimate a group. Each creature will require a different strategy or spell suite to counter effectively–basically dividing the groups economies of scale.
  5. The well balanced party….just does not work at high levels in RM. One effective critical against the M-U or Cleric will pull the rug from the whole group. Optimally the group needs to be almost all semi-spell users or have magic items that can allow each player to attack/defend/heal independently.

Let me end by saying that my players have had a blast with these high level adventures. They get to play known personalities, utilize spells they only have ever read about in Spell Law, encountered some CRAZY opponents and adventured in very unusual environments.  But no matter how I adjust the encounter levels in these adventures, I’m not sure there can be anything like “Balance”.

This post currently has 8 responses

 

Posted on

Three Wheels On My Wagon

I am intrigued by ITDs critical tables. I have never seen them but it came up recently in a discussion on on armour by the piece that there are different critical tables by location and only three locations; limbs, head and body.

For me the only piece of RM that has to be retained is the critical; everything else has to earn its place at the table. If it is more effort that it adds to the game I am inclined to cut or replace it.

Despite my slash and burn approach to rules I am mostly still following the roll your dice, find the right table, look up the roll and roll your critical procedure.

In all the companions and discussions I have never seen a superior system. I don’t care about the #hits, the rounds of stun, the bleeding or whatever. It is the wit and dark humour I like and the graphic descriptions of wounds. You will never get that with 1d8 damage. Decades ago rolling a 20 and getting double damage used to excite me but “Your bolt goes right through his temple and stands there quivering. Astonishingly enough, he’s still standing. But any attempt to remove it will kill him instantly. +25 hits, stunned no parry 2 rnds and bleeding 12 hits/rnd.” is a level above.

I have a half formed diceless RM combat system and I have an outline for HARP/FATE bastardised system. That uses the HARP critical tables and FATE dice and has a working title of FART.

FART is really good fun and fast to play. It just needs some time spent on it writing it up and putting it out there to the FATE community. The mission objective would be to hook FATE players into trying RMU once it is released. It is my understanding that FATE is one of the most successful games of recent years but despite that you will never get to put your crossbow bolt into someone’s head.

So we have ripped just about everything apart recently on here. What, in your perfect combat system, are the absolutely non-negotiable elements?

This post currently has 2 responses

 

This post currently has 3 responses

 

Posted on

d20 SRD Monsters in RMU

Following on from a thought I had in response to BriH’s post earlier last week I have been thinking about creating a completely open and free to use monster book. Rather than Creature Law this would be Creature Libre.

The two parts of the puzzle would be an open source of monsters something like the the d20SRD monster index and the rules for monster creation. These we already have at least in part from Creature Law (PDF page 342).

Furthermore, by using a standard source (the d20SRD) and a public platform (this blog) anyone can contribute monsters to the project. Over this weekend I will re-read the creature creation rules and come up with a template.

The only issue will be art. Once all the content is written then I guess it worth looking at some kind of crowd funding to get the art done?

This is definitely on my To Do list and moving up the priority. If anyone is interested in publishing any unofficial RMU  material, if you want or need a monster then let me know and I will prioritise those monsters!

This post currently has 11 responses

 

Posted on

Legends of Shadow World Pt 4. The Plains of Despair.

Due to a vacation it’s been a few weeks since out last session playtesting our “Legends of Shadow World” tourney series for 50th lvl characters. Last night the group reconvened for Chapter 4: “The Plains of Despair” (or alternatively The Fortress of the Dread Lord).

Narrative wise, it felt a bit broken; the PC’s got killed or beaten badly in Chapter 3 and the few weeks off disrupted the story line. However this is playtesting, so the group was brought back to life, I doled out some moderate damage, adjusted hits, PPs and item charges etc and sent them on their way through a Portal.

This one was tricky for me–while the main encounter is between the PC’s and a small group of powerful creatures there is also this “army” that the players could confront. How do you handle 5 PCs versus thousands of soldiers? Combat mechanics aside, the good news is that all those cool high level spells in Spell Law, the ones that affect 1 target/lvl or large AoE, come in REAL handy!

The PCs actual triumphed in this one, maybe a bit too easily. Unlike the others, this Chapter ends with a victory–the group retrieved the artifact they had been chasing. Now the players get to return home, get a break and then head out. Chapter 5 ties up all the threads and puts the group in direct confrontation with the mastermind behind it all.

Now that I have run 4 chapters I can start processing issues around high level adventures. This was one of the intents of this project. Some issues and questions I am hoping to resolve:

  1. How does RM combat work between high level opponents? Is it the same as low level since high OBs are offset by high DBs, buffs, and parrying?
  2. Spells. Do spells scale appropriately or do some high level spells break the game or aren’t effective enough?
  3. Do spellcasters really have an advantage at high lvl vs pure arms users?
  4. How do you design challenging encounters for those levels?
  5. How do players roleplay a 50th lvl character? Especially iconic personalities like Navigators and Loremasters?
  6. What types of opponents are effective?
  7. What types of environments can the players handle?
  8. Do high level characters lend themselves to Rolemasters gritty “low fantasy” mechanics?

I’m collecting feedback from my other two playtest groups and hopefully have meaningful data I can post soon!

This post currently has 5 responses

 

Posted on

If you cannot stand the heat…

A Lamprey

So far we have sent the characters up the creek without a paddle, half drowned them and made them fight under water against a new and unknown monsterous race. Today, it is apt to make their day go from bad to worse!

The river they have been careering down so far has been randomly generated and designed to make it virtually impossible to swim out of or row out of.  anyone reaching the shallows would be facing swimming rolls at something like -90 and taking krush criticals should they fail.

Now, I suggest giving them a bend in the river that has formed a bit of a calm pool. The river widens here and the rate of flow slows and the characters get a chance to reach the bank.

Finally, staggering to the bank it is time to reintroduce the Orcs that we had start this whole thing off in the first place. These have been tracking the river down stream assuming the characters will be killed in the rapids and their bodies washed up in this pool or another one further down stream. This is easy pickings for the orcs which is why they hand out near here in the first place.

This pool is also the domain of a huge lamprey. Once upon a time the orcs attacked a group of adventuring heroes just like the characters now. That party included an alchemist who was adept at making potions and the group regularly enhanced themselves with these. A perfectly normal lamprey fed off of one such magically enhanced hero and in drinking the hero’s blood also consumed a potion of Enlarge designed and dosed for a human. The same thing happened again with its second victim. The second potion was one of Extension used by the hero’s magician to extend the duration of his defensive spells. The final victim of the lamprey was the monk who had cast Strength III on himself. The combination of all this magic infused blood on the poor fish turned it into a huge monstrosity and trapped it in this pool. It now spends most of its time lurking in the mud at the bottom of the pool waiting for a victim of sufficient size to satisfy its hunger.

So returning to a current party they have just escaped or slain the freshwater merfolk and ended up in this pool where they can finally emerge from the river. As they do so they will be confronted with a band of orcs in front of them who have arrived at the same time. There should be just enough orcs that the party should not be certain of the outcome. I will not be specific as this is largely dependent on how the river run went, that could easily have broken many bones on its own and the fight against the merfolk.

The orcs know full well what lurks in the pool and will not go too close. They would prefer to use slings and spears to hold the characters off. They know full well what is coming next.

A Lamprey
Lampy The Lamprey, victim of mixing too many potions.

Warning: The image at the bottom of this post is really disturbing! It is a real, but dead, lamprey. It is just to give you a sense of how horrifying a lamprey is. That is a real one, we are dealing here with a fantasy 30′ one!

Behind the characters rising out of the water is Lampy the Lamprey. This is a 30′ long, 3′ diameter blood sucking fish.

Level 8
Base Rate 90
Max Pace/MN Bonus Run/0
Speed MS/AQ SL/SL
Size/Crit Huge/LA
Hits 90
AT (DB) 3(0)
Attacks 110 HGr 100/Special ✓ *
Enc 1
Special Attack Lampreys suck blood. If its grapple attack delivers a critical it will suck 3-30 hits of blood per round, starting the round after the critical was delivered. Ripping the lamprey off yourself or off someone else will deliver 4 ‘A’ slash criticals to the victim. Fire or eletricity may (Very Hard maneuver roll) cause the lamprey to release its prey.

So as the characters face off the orcs, out of the water behind them rises the giant lamprey intent on attacking the person most in the water. It will attempt to grapple and latch on to the victim and drag them back into the pool and down to the bottom. As soon as they are dead i.e. drained of blood it will return for the next victim.

If the body is not too laden down with equipment it will just be left to float back up. As the death is probably going to be from loss of hits if enough concussion hits can be restored before the soul departs then the character can be revived without the need for life giving. That does make it rather important to finish off the orcs quickly!

This ‘misadventure’ is a potentially interesting way of weakening a party or even bringing low a very powerful party. It is unrelenting, the river is extremely difficult to fight but can deliver real harm to the characters. The orcs are do not need to be particularly numerous or high level. Many partys will almost discount an encounter with half a dozen orcs but in this case the orcs are just the trigger at the start and by the time they are encountered at the end they may be significantly more dangerous!

The fresh water merfolk and the Lampy are not things the characters are ever likely to have met before and tucked in the middle there was a Naiad. I have given the Naiad an additional power. She can rescue some of the characters by casting waterlungs on the characters. The mechanism for doing this is actually via another of the alchemists potions. The ‘drowned’ characters will not have known this at the time but the naiad had taken a draft of the potion and delivered it using a ‘kiss of life’ type action.

The anatomy of a story metaphor that we started with was put the characters up a tree, throw stones at them and then get them down again. Over the past three posts we have done the up the tree and thrown the stones. The getting them down again is the perfect time to throw the characters an adventure hook. Right now they are God knows where, beaten and bloodied. Now is a good time to kick them into a different direction.

Scroll down for the scary Lamprey photo!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A real lamprey
A real lamprey
This post currently has one response