house rules – Page 2 – The Rolemaster Blog

January 27, 2017

Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue

Imagine for a minute a player asks the perfectly reasonable question of “Can I remember what colour her eyes were?”

What I have always done in the past was ask for a skill check using the characters Memory stat bonus as the skill bonus.

When I moved from RM2 to RMC and the threshold for success went from 101+ to 111+ for most casual stat based tests success required an open ended roll. If that was reasonable 19 out of 20 trips to the shops for me would probably end in chaos and that could not be right. For me 1 in 10 trips to the shop ends up with me bringing home the right thing.

So I started thinking about these non-skill rolls. Not everything has a governing skill. Simple tests of memory, trying to catch a plate before it hits the floor or trying to lift a portcullis.

I have often thought that Stats in Rolemaster are largely irrelevant. Once you have rolled them you only ever use the Stat Bonus and never the stat. The exception is body development that uses 1/10th of the Con stat for base hits.

In eliminating the body development skill I have previously suggested using Con + 1/2 SD to find the Total Hits. That would give a starting character a typical 75 hits. That is more than the default starting hits under the RAW but that is not a bad thing. It gives starting characters a bit more longevity and is slightly more realistic than a starting character can take 18hits and a 10th level character can take 150hits. Why is the more experienced character so much more damage resistant?

I don’t use level so there will be no levelling up. I do use a RuneQuest style skill improvement. You roll higher than your current skill total and upon success you gain a skill rank.

I use a similar scheme for stat gains. During periods of rest & recovery you can roll against your stats. If you roll higher than your current stat then your stat increases by 1. You can only roll against stats that have been used. What that means in practice is if you used the Trickery skill you would put a small tick against the skill itself and against Pr and Qu. When it came to doing the tests for improvement then you could roll against those two stats and the one skill. This means that the skills you use tend to improve and the stats you are using tend to improve.

So going back to my simple memory test, to get a result of 111+ just to remember if your girlfriends eyes are Brown or Blue seems a bit of a tough call. That is a open ended roll for most people. If as a GM you wanted to put in a difficulty factor for recalling facts that character saw or heard weeks or months ago then the test becomes almost guaranteed failure pretty quickly.

What if we didn’t use the stat bonus but the actual stat? So Joe average has a memory of 50. What colour are his girlfriend’s eyes? Roll 111+ on 1d% OE +50. That pretty much gives a 60/40 chance of failure which in my experience seems pretty realistic, or is that just me?

So what about lifting a portcullis? Now with an average stat of 50 you, as GM, have scope to put a difficulty factor in there. Sheer Folly is a -50 so trying to lift a portcullis on your own would still require an open ended roll. That also seems realistic. If the character had the Athletic skill then by all means let him or her use it but you cannot make simple tests of strength dependent on such a skill. You cannot tell me that someone with a strength of 90 cannot lift something heavy without learning to play football first?

The final missing part of the puzzle is the racial differences. High Men are about the strongest commonly played race and they get a +10 strength bonus. Elves get a bonus to Memory. If you were to roll these Stat based tests as Stat + Racial Bonus then you would retain the flavour of the races.

Using this method what you get is more competent PCs, greater flexibility as a GM to challenge the characters and Stats gain greater importance beyond just a measure for finding the stat bonus.

July 8, 2016

RMC House Rules – My Experience System #3 Spell Lists

There are really three parts to this, improving the spell lists you know, learning entirely new lists and improving your power points. I will take each in turn.

Improving the Spell Lists you know

This is the easiest bit. If you cast a spell off a list in a meaningful situation (not just rattling off a few spells at the end of the day just to tick the box) then you can mark the list as used. When you are in a situation where you can study, reflect and improve then you can roll to improve the spell list. For every rank you have it counts as 5. Roll a D100 OE and if you roll over the current total you gain a rank. So if you know Fire Law to Rank 5 (5th Level) you would need to roll 26+ to learn the 6th level spell. Progress through ranks 1-10 is pretty quick but then slows down. Once you get to rank 19 you need an open ended to improve.

Learning entirely new Spell Lists

You need to study to learn new lists. I use the same rules as are given for researching new spells for studying new lists. Essence lists require books and a teacher, mentalism require meditation and channelling, prayer. Hybrid lists need to meet all the requirements. If there is no first level spell then the time required would be to research the first available spell and at that point yu would have the number of ranks required to cast that spell.

Improving your Power Points

This is based upon improving your Power Point Development Skill. If power points are used in earnest (just as with casting spells that count for experience above) then when you get a chance to rest and improve then you can roll to improve your PPD skill.

This means that starting characters get more power points quite quickly but it then levels off, just like learning spells. That really is the intention of the entire experience system. Everyone should improve quite rapidly in the skills, stats and spells they are really using. Once they are competent then that progress slows but it never stops. Unless you are a real one trick pony each time when experience would have been dished out you will probably improve in something, a little here a little there. Having characters pay for training brings real benefits at that time, not six months later when they finally level up.

Finally, this system works really well with the new RMU spell law. The diference is that every level in RMU has a spell associated with it. RMU kind of expects characters to be higher level when they start so having characters improve quickly fits in well with that expectation. In RMC, my preferred system the gaps in the spell lists does add a bit of extra excitement when a character gets a new spell as often the rank will improve but this does not bring any new abilities. It is rather swings and roundabouts as to which you prefer.

July 4, 2016

RMC House Rules – My Experience System #2 Stat Gains

I have touched on this before in an earlier post (http://www.rolemasterblog.com/rmc-house-rules-character-creation-2-potentials-stat-gains/) where I said that the stats you are using are the ones you roll for.

What I want to do is break the connection between every time your skills improve you also do your stat gain rolls. This is one of the things that I feel sloows down the character maintenance in Rolemaster.

The problem is that went a stat changes a whole host of skills change with it. The problem is even slightly exacerbated by my use of the smoothed stat bonus. Where there were only 5 real break points where stat bonuses change (+5 through to +25) now there are dozens.

What I have found works quite nicely is to tie stat gains to periods of intense training/study and to periods of healing. This breaks the link between skills and stat gains but also makes paying for training in game directly result in tengible benefits for the characters. If you are paying to study with a tutor then you can roll your stat gains for the mental stats. If you are laid up with a broken leg then that also can give you time for reflection. Likewise characters may find a period of enforced rest brings with it long term benefits.

That is my basic logic. The mechanism is the same, roll d100 and roll higher than your temp stat to get a +1 to your temp. you are stil restricted to rolling for stats that you have actually applied to skills. It is just a case that they are now out of sync with the skill gain rolls.

The fact that stat bonuses are additive rather than averaged for skills makes the book keeping a bit quicker as well.

Next time I will cover Spell Lists.

June 27, 2016July 1, 2016

RMC House Rules – Character Creation #7 Spell Lists

There are two significant bit so to learning spell lists for my house rules.

Firstly I will be using pretty much the Spells as Skills rules. You only need to learn the 1st level spell to enable you to start progressing up the spell list. This means that for the most part you will only need to spend 5 -15 development points to get the full list at first level.

Beyond first level it will typically take a week of study from a suitable source to gain the first rank in a spell list. That is taken from the spell research rules. That would give you the first level spell and from there you need to use the list to progress in it. If we take a list like lofty movement then that has no 1st to 3rd level spells so it will require 4 weeks of study or 20DP as a first level character to learn.

The second part is the way that spell effects are based upon level. There are spells that have a duration based upon level and these are the easiest to adapt. Here you read ranks in the spell list as the level with that spell. This means that you may have a duration of 3 minutes with one spell and only 10 seconds with another but then if you rarely use the second spell you are likely to be less good at it!

The second reference to level are spells like Sleep V that effects 5 levels of target. For this I will use 2 ranks in Body Development equates to 1 old style level. So Sleep V now effects upto 10 ranks in body development.

That seems balanced to me. Of all the changes to make to Rolemaster these changes to Spell Law are the simplest but also have the greatest effect on balance and game play.

Spending just 5DP (out of 50 at 1st level) to get a spell list means that anyone wanting to play a Mage like character can easily afford possibly 5 or 6 lists and still have a range of other skills.

All the rules for learning portions of lists are now gone.

Everyone is always 1st level so resistance rolls will work the same. If you are casting a (Base) spell then the rank in the spell will be the attack level.

That all seems to work. I suspect that in play spell users will end up with more spells sooner but the self regulating nature of the experience system means that this will soon level off. As it is at the higher levels that Rolemaster seems to breakdown that point should be almost pushed back to the points where it doesn’t happen any more.

Interestingly This house ruled version should work brilliantly with the RMU spell law when the final version is released as every list in that has all slots filled. That would standardise the cost of all the lists and give beginning characters a nice range of spells.

June 24, 2016July 1, 2016

RMC House Rules – Character Creation #6 Skills

I like few skills and broadly interpreted.

What I mean is, take the Athletic Games skill as an example.

Athletic Games: (Ag/Qu or Ag/St) Bonus for playing any one game
primarily involving agility, coordination, and motor skills.

You see I don’t agree with that in a fantasy setting. In the modern world you will get footballers, basketball players, rugby players and so on and they are all specialists and have coaches to work on sport specific skills. At the end of the day though they are all about core strength and hand-eye coordination, balance and spacial awareness.

In a fantasy world you just don’t normally get professional footballers. As far as I am concerned if you have that mix of strength, balance, coordination and awareness then you could, with a little time and practice play any sport. Here is an example from our real world. My horseback archery coach decided that we (I) were going to work on core strength and balance for a session so he produced a balance ball (a big round soft ball) that I had to kneel up on and shoot arrows at the target. At first I could barely get upright before keeling over sideways in slow motion. After 5 minutes though I was kneeling up and shooting a couple of arrows. I practiced each day and at the end of the week I could shoot an entire quiver of arrows. So with less than 2hrs practice I got to grips with an entirely new way of balancing and coordinating my actions.

This is me and my first time shooting from kneeling on an excercise ball.

So I don’t beleive that characters have to buy one copy of this skill for every sport. What I say is one skill for all athletic sports but if you have never done it before then he firs time it is sheer folly as a difficulty and as you get more familiar with the sport then the the difficulty factor comes down.

All the musicians I know can play multiple instruments and they teach themselves new instruments to a passable standard in a matter of hours and certainly no more than a weekend. So I apply the same method to Music and playing instruments. The Music Instrument skill encompasses the understanding of music but the individual instruments are simply a matter of time to practice and playing well get easier over time.

This is my approach to skills. I would rather use this broad strokes approach to skills, have less skills and each one enables the character to do more then the 200 skills that give Rolemaster some of its bloat reputation.

Some skills such read tracks I don’t use at all. As far as I am concerned if you want to know more about the person you are tracking, make a harder tracking roll.

Really this is my attitude to skills. Avoid the bloat and make every skill work for its place in the game.

For my game I have cut the lost of skills down to just 43 skills.

June 20, 2016July 1, 2016

RMC House Rules – Character Creation #5 Profession

One of the problems for D&D players coming to Rolemaster is that although ‘Profession’ appears to be pretty much the same as ‘Class’ they are definitely not the same thing!

There are significant flaws in Rolemaster professions.

Once you choose a Profession in RM just about everything is set for life and is unchangeable. If your chosen profession virtually excludes magic then whatever happens in the future you will be forever pretty much excluded from magic.
There are so damn many professions. Professions define the costs of your skills and the base spell lists that can be learned. The difference between a fighter and a barbarian is just the skill costs, the difference between a witch and an illusionist is skills and base lists. Choosing profession comes down to which profession has the best skill costs for the skills you want to buy and the closest fit for the spells you want cast. I have ended up viewing it as institutionalised min/maxing as when you get up to 70+ professions there has to be optimised to give the lowest price for exactly what you want.
The professions are scattered though so many books that if every GM does not have all the same material then your particular profession simply may not exist.
Not all professions are as equally balanced as others. There are some optional rules that when combined with some of the professions either makes them unplayable or unstopable. I have seen games where one single Directed Spells skill is used for ALL directed spell attacks. In the case of the Warrior Mage profession all of their attacking spells are on a single list so with a single skill they can attack with their full OB with every attacking spell. The magician who is meant to be the specialist with elemental attacks would have to spend 10 times the development points to be equally good AND could not even start to learn the skill in Lightning bolt until twelth level. The Warrior Mage could start learning it at 2nd level.

As you can see there are issues with professions as they stand. I propose using the No Profession as the basis for all characters.

The No Profession is a standard set of skill costs that are uniform to everyone.

Normally once you have chosen your profession you have to buy skills using your development points at least twice. The first time is your ‘apprenticeship’ level, essentially 0th level. The second time is your 1st level skills and then a third time to show what you are learning at the moment. As skills are spread thoughout most of the rolemaster companion and Law books it can be a challenge and very time consuming to evaluate all 200+ skills available to you. 200 skill costs for 92 professions makes over 18,000 different combinations.

In my version there is only the No Profession, only about 40 skills and you buy your skills only once. There will be more about skills later.

Professional Magical Realms

In addition to the skill costs your profession also gives you a Realm of magic, six base lists and a set of professional level bonuses.

The realm of magic remains the same as standard RM in that you get the choice of one realm from the three standard realms (channeling, mentalism or Essence). Technically I do not insist you choose your realm until you start to study some sort of magic. On the other hand though your power points will be based upon one of your stats. This means that if you envision casting spells then you will need to ensure you have some power points from your stats before you start.

If you have spell lists from just one realm then all your power points will come from the stat governing that realm (EM), (IN) or (PR). If you learn a list from a second realm then your power points will come from the average stat from the two realm stats. If you then learn magic from the third realm then all three stats will be averaged to find your power points.

You do not need to chose all your base lists right from day one. There are 10 lists in total that you can learn above 20th level and these will be the first 10 lists you learn above 20th level. As you can only learn spells but actually using them it is logical that your ‘speciality’ will be the magic you have proven best at.

Professional Bonuses

The professional bonuses or level bonuses will be the ones as described on pg 128 of the RMC Character Law. This uses the RMSS skill categories. The only variation here is that you may swap up to 2 of the bonus categories for example you may choose to move the +1 from Outdoor Skills to the Urban category and move the +1 from Athletic Skills to Directed Spells. This allows you to customise your professional bonuses a little so if you want to play a wizardly character you can shape him or her into a more academic type rather than the athletic type that the No Profession starts out as. Once you have moved a set of bonuses they cannot be changed later.

That is it. The No Profession is intended to be a bit of a blank canvas from which you start building your character.

June 17, 2016July 1, 2016

RMC House Rules – Character Creation #4 – Cultural Background

Cultural Background is another element of RMU that I really like. The mechanism is really simple. There are a number of predefined backgrounds such as urban, nomad, coastal and sylvan, plus 4 others in RMU, and there is a mix of skills that are typical for people growing up in that culture. So you choose your culture and you get free skill ranks to assign into skill categories defined by your culture.

This has two immediate effects. Firstly it replaces at least in part the adolesence level for buying skills. you are just given a few ranks in some or all skill categories and regardless of the cost you just pick the skills that you want. The second effect is to force every character to have a good balance of background skills.

Avoiding Meta-Gaming?

I have a player in my face to face game that has only spent development points on weapons, magic, body development and perception and a couple of other skills that I insisted on. For hobby skills I give away 13 ranks that you can assign to secondary skills and he always tries to assign some or all of them to combat and magical skills. Compared to all the other characters he has the most hits, the biggest OB and the most magic. On the other hand he gets very upset when the challenges facing the party require tracking, lore or any of the other useful skills he eskewed in favour of big weapons.

I will confess that every now and again I take great pleasure in seperating him from he rest of the party by a wall, pit, door or whatever and give him a really simple challenge that everyone on one side of the door could easily do and he is completely perplexed by.

It is also no surprise that this player is the biggest meta gamer in the party who most of the time is using his own knowledge to decide his characters actions rather than what the chracter knows.

How Cultural Backgrounds Work

Anyway back to cultural backgrounds! Each background in my variation comprises 35 ranks spread over 13 different skill categories. The average skill costs for a single rank is about 2DP so that equates to about 50DP as an apprentice level although the single biggest block goes to languages which are traditionally cheaper.

The point of these character cultural background ranks for me is two fold. It is both faster and easier to just pick skills from a list than to try and spend exactly a fixed number of DPs. We have all been in a situation where you have to trade off one skill against another to make everything fit into your budget. Secondly it will make a Barbarian from the Frozen North significantly different from a Warrior from Chult and that difference has an impact on those characters which will last a long time into the characters careers.

Actually implementing this I have skewed everything to fit my world setting of the Forgotten Realms. If you are from Thay then you will have a significantly different skill set than if you are from Chult. On the other hand I have not really split it alone national lines. Both Waterdeep and Thay are magically very rich places and the citizens will both have a great amount of day to day experience of magic.

Cultural Background Skills Table

	Cosmopolitan (Waterdeep)	Coastal (Sword Coast)	Harsh/ Tundra/ Waste (Frozen North)	Highland	Nomad	Rural (Dales)	Sylvan (Chult)	Underground (Underdark)	Urban
Athletic	1	3	2	2	1	1	1	1	1
Awareness	1	2	3	2	2	1	2	1	1
Body Development	1	1	2	2	1	1	1	1	1
Combat Maneuvers				1				1
Communcations	13	10	6	8	10	8	10	10	12
Crafts	5	6	4	5	5	7	5	6	7
Influence	2	1		1	1	1	1	1	2
Lore	4	4	5	4	4	4	4	4	4
Martial Arts	1	1	2	1	1	1	1	1	1
Outdoor			3	2	5	3	2	1
Scientific Analytic		1	1					1
Subterfuge			1	1			1	2
Technical/Trade	7	6	6	6	5	8	7	5	6

When assigning these ranks the same rule applies as with buying skills. You cannot buy ore than 2 ranks in a single skills unless the skill is listed as 1*, 2* etc., such as languages. This forces players with say 7 ranks in Technical/Trade skills to buy a range of skills.

You will notice that there are no weapon skills or armour skills in here. That means that all of your OB has to come from your 1st level development points.

June 13, 2016July 1, 2016

RMC House Rules – Character Creation #3 – Rolemaster Races

I am not suggesting many changes to the Rolemaster races in my RMC variant but first a bit of background on the long running ‘issue’ of Elves and Self Discipline.

Elves and Self Discipline

Most elves in Rolemaster based games get a -20 on the Self Discipline (SD) stat. SD happens to be one of the stats used to determine your Stalk & Hide skill and Meditation skill.

When most people see that -20 they assume that elves have no self control or discipline which is not the way Tolkien’s elves are generally portrayed. Rolemaster elves are the direct decendants of Tolkien’s elves as the roots of Rolemaster are set in the world of the MERP (Middle Earth Role Playing) franchise.

Furthermore when you notice that when you read about the stalk and hide skill the elves -20 should be treated as +20 and that elves get a natural +20 to meditation. It strikes me that if you are having to ‘fix’ the figures because of something you did earlier then the initial thing was wrong.

Elves are not irrational and impulsive and clumsy. You firstly have to remember that all stat bonuses are relative and not absolute. Originally the common man had no penalties or bonuses at all and that all the tables were constructed as the common man being the absolute norm. From that point races are describe relative to a common man so if a typical dwarf is stronger than a common man then it gets a strength bonus. In this way elves are seen as being less disciplined than a man. Not bad at discipline, just less discplined than our common man. This idea was prompted by the idea that elves being immortal have all the time in the world to complete tasks and most problems tend to resolve themselves if given a few centuries to bed in. Your common man with a short and often hard life has to act now. An elf could spend several thousand years building an empire, a man probably has no more than 30 years if he wants to have any time to actually enjoy it!

I have no problem with this concept of ‘relative’ stats. I do have a problem with the elves -20 because obviously this is the wrong implementation if the rule has to be applied only some of the time or additional fixes have to be put in place to fix the problems that the rule introduces.

I would argue that although elves may not be as hasty as humans to interfere in affairs their long view almost breeds more self discipline in that they are inherently patient and this builds tolerance. If you have to cancel out the penalties for mediation and stalking then why not just forget the whole thing?

In my rules there is no SD penalty for any elves including half elves.

Base Hits

There is a table known as “04-01 RACE ABILITIES”, on that table it tells you the hit dice used for each race. Common men get a d8 as do some elves and halflings. Other races get d10. Why? Rolemaster is a d10 based game. The only places where you get all the other polygon dice used is in the variable amounts of healing from some herbs.

My first reaction was to say everyone gets a d10 hits but then I decided to go in a completely different direction.

The way hits are calculated in RMC is your Con stat/10 plus the accumilated dice rolls plus your Con stat bonus as a percentage. Almost every race gets a con bonus so most people get a few extra hits from this. So if you have a Con of 76 and a total of +10 Con stat bonus and you bought 4 ranks in Body development as an High Elf you would have 8 hits from your Con (76÷10) plus 4x1d10, lets say that comes to 28 plus 10% of the total from your con bonus. So 8+28=36 plus 10% = 40 hits.

Some GMs I have played with say re-roll hit points if you get a 1-3 on the dice and others have given out maximum hitpoints at first level. Letting the characters have a decent number of hit points gives the GM more freedom in what he or she can throw at the party.

With that in mind I am going to give a little, take a little and simplify things a little.

In my rules you always get maximum hits, so 8 for a human, 10 for an high elf and so on but you no longer get the con bonus percentage. So under my rule the above character would get 48 hits being (76÷10)+4×10=48. So we now have diceless body development. In fact as you will see all of character creation is now diceless.

Background Options

In table “06-01 RACE BACKGROUND OPTION TABLE” each Rolemaster race has a number of background options ranging from 2 to 6. I personally feel the options in Character Law were a bit limited and those in Companion One were too powerful. I like the HARP and RMU talents and I nearly included them but at the end of it they just seemed a bit ‘wrong’ to me. Instead I am going to steal another RMU feature and that is Knacks. In the RMU beta rules all characters get to pick to specific skills that get a +5 bomus. this makes a character just a little bit better than their peers in that particular skill. It is a one time only bonus and is always fixed at +5 and cannot be doubled up. I am going to replace the background options with knacks but each character will get between 2 and 6 knacks depending on race.

Race	Background Options
Common Men	6
Dwarves	5
Halflings	5
Orcs	5
High Men	4
Half-elves	4
Wood-elves	4
Greater Orcs	4
Trolls	4
High-elves	3
Fair-elves	2

This does reduce the impact of background options but then I never liked the way that some good rolls could turn a character into an almost superman and likewise a bad roll could cripple them or destroy the players concept of the character they wanted to play. This solution puts the player in charge, is non-random and always give the character a slight advantage without making a massive impact. They are far easier to administer than Talents and Flaws.

June 6, 2016July 1, 2016

RMC House Rules – Character Creation #1 Stats

Brih has been posting some of his groups house rules or hacks. This has inspired me to put forward some of my proposed house rules for an up coming game. I have alluded to many of these in the past but I have never listed them explictily. So there is Part I of character creation namely generating some stats.

My favourist game ever for character creation was Champions (or Hero System as it is now). That gave you complete freedom of all of time and space to drw your inspiration from and all the characters were equally balanced. Hero System was a point buy system and so that is where I intend to go with character crreation.

I went through the Rolemaster RM2 companions over the weekend and none of them had a point buy system for RM2 or RMC. If there was one for RMSS/RMFRP I don’t know it as I don’t have any of those books. I have drawn my inspiration from some of the RMU beta rules.

There seem to be three philosophies with RM point buy systems. Firstly you have a big pool of points and all your stats start at 0. Second, you stats all start at 50 and you have a small pool of points and finally all stats start at 50 but you buy stat bonuses not the stats themselves. The first option is the one that my PBP Spacemaster GM has employed. There we rolled 10D10 and added that to a base 700 points to give our point total to spend. The third option is the one used by RMU. You get 10 points to spend on your stat bonuses. you can get more points by taking minuses on other stats.

I am going to use the middle option of all stats start at 50 and you get 250 points to spend on your stats. You can lower a stat to get more points somewhere else if you want.

The flaw in my system would be that in standard RM stats anything between 26 and 75 give you no bonus or penalty there is no reason why not to reduce any stats you do now explicitly need down to 26 and spend those points boosting other more important stats.

To counter this I am going to use a smoothed stat bonus table. While I am talking about stat bonuses I am also going to adopt the RMU standard of smaller stat bonuses that get added together for skills rather than the averaged method used in RMC/RM2. So what does this stat table look like?

This table discourages ‘buying down’ stats as the penalties for low stats start at just 47.

The only complications come from ‘single stat’ rolls. As an example if a player asked “Can my character remember reading anything about this legend as a student?” I would normally ask the player to roll a Memory (OE D100 roll with their Memory stat bonus as a modifier) roll to which I would add or subtract a difficulty factor depending on how well known the legends are. A character with a Me stat of 90 in RMC would have a +10 stat bonus. In this stystem that is just a +8. Your DB is normally equal to your Qu stat bonus but that too is reduced.

To address this all single stat checks will be made with the stat bonus doubled. This now makes DBs slightly higher for lightly or unarmoured characters and stat checks slightly easier. Especially as you will get a small bonus from a stat as low as just 54.

Looking at the bandings in the table here you will see the labels Deficient to Exeptional. These are used for the costings. Each +1 or -1 in the average band costs or gives 1 point. So it costs 9 points to go from the statng 50 up to 59. The Above Average band all cost 2 points so it costs an additional 46 points to get the same stat up to 83. It costs 3 points for the Superior band and 4 points in the exceptional so to get a stat up to 90 costs (9+46+21) 76 points in total.

Reducing stats works the same way.

Stats do not give any development points and I have kept all 10 stats. I was tempted to go with the HARP 8 stat version but that would lock me into the HARP skills system.

The 200 point pool means that a typical character can have two stats up at about 90 and all their other stats at around 54-55 easily within their budget.

Potentials are all 100 right across the board but I will cover potential stats next time as well as stat gains.