rolemaster – Page 15 – The Rolemaster Blog

October 6, 2017

‘Well sir, if I were you, I wouldn’t start from here’

This is my reply to Brian’s http://www.rolemasterblog.com/rmu-mission-accomplished/

Well here is a real bunch of thoughts for you…

Firstly, I don’t think the RMU devs have any intention of attracting new players. Through their inaction they have proved their intention. If they had reached out to any one of the other games systems communities and looked for play testers they would have got fresh eyes on the rules. They would have found out if the rules as written are enough to engage those new to RM. They would have started the discussion about the new version of RM with the wider gaming community. They would have raised ICE’s profile all over the world and the on going conversation would have drawn in more people.

They didn’t do that.

There was never any hope that RMU would really unite the RM2 cohort and the RMSS cohort. There are things in each version that do not appeal. None of us ‘need’ RMU as we all have bought and paid for games that fit us like a glove. We have nations of NPCs that would all need recreating and ploughing thousands of hours of work just to get back to where we are now. On top of that there are bound to be parts of RMU you don’t like compared to the version you play now. I don’t like the size rules but the experimental tables on the forum get rid of most of the problems, the complete rewrite of creature law to get rid of normalised stats get rid of more. I have never liked talents and flaws and that is for the most part the last bastion of the size rules. That is just my perspective. Hurin, not to put words in his mouth, will not be using the skill category system. He wants individual skill costs and the RM2 professions. I like his 5AP variant of the combat round as well.

The point is that the existing community are so used to house ruling and the modular design strength of RM that none of us are going to play RMU, we are going to play a personalised variation of the rules. As you say above, you have already decided what will make it into your game and what won’t.

RMU has been designed for people who want a new RM but they want it to be just like the old one but better. The problem is that those people already have a game that is just like the published RM but better, that is their own house ruled version.

Look at us… Brian has his own character law (SWARM), his own spell law (BASiL) and working on his own arms law (that I think should be called BAAL Brian’s Alternative Arms Law).

Intothatdarkness has the modern weaponry rules and unique variation of character law.

Hurin is the most dedicated to RMU but will also the biggest issues with Character & Arms Law.

Edgltd doesn’t even play RM.

We haven’t seen Warl on the forums for a while but I have played in his game and it is very heavily house ruled when it came to Character creation, combat and magic. What else is there?

RMU cannot and will not meet all these peoples’ needs. It cannot be a unifying force.

So here is a hypothetical question for you.

If you sat down at the gaming table and your character has the right stats in the right range (1-100). They had the right magnitude of stat bonuses the right number of skills and those skill to the right level of competency do the rules that creating the character matter?

We all have our own hybridised versions of Character Law and yet all our characters fight the same monsters in Creatures and Treasures in the same numbers, deliver the same criticals and take the same wounds. Do the character creation rules actually matter?

Brian has SWARM, it sounds like OLF on the forums and I are going down the same road with Spell Law and the open and closed lists. Spectre711 on the forums does not even use spell law, they exclusively use Elemental Companion, then does it matter what the source of the characters spells are (from a rule book perspective) as long as they are all on the same power level regarding ranges, durations and effects?

I am creating a new monster book based upon creating all the D&D 5e SRD monsters into Rolemaster compatible monsters. This will mean that I can produce completely statted out adventures without using any ICE intellectual property. I can also share that document so other adventure writers will be able to do the same. The book will be published under the WotC license as I am using their intellectual property. Edgltd said himself in a comment only this week that RM could go back to its roots and engage with the 5e and Pathfinder community.

Long ago I used to write this blog completely on my own, producing two posts a week, week in week out. In 2015 I produced this post http://www.rolemasterblog.com/roleplaying-games-do-not-exist/ and I still hold to that idea. The problem for RMU and ICE is that if the experienced players do not need Character & Arms Law, Spell Law and Creature Law and none of these have been designed to be attractive to new players nor to draw in players of other same genre games then who is going to buy into RMU?

I think ICE are going to have to do the most outstanding marketing task I have ever encountered and I am a lover of marketing, both in my professional life and privately. I would love to be in charge of marketing RMU. The problem is that I would have wanted to start 5 years go. There’s a well known joke about a tourist in Ireland who asks one of the locals for directions to Dublin. The Irishman replies: ‘Well sir, if I were you, I wouldn’t start from here’.

Things I would have done…

I would have posted invitations to the first beta on every major gaming community. To give you an idea scale I rarely ever see more than 7 names and as many as 15 guests as being active on the ICE forums. Right now there are 3 registered users and 11 guests the best ever was 276 back in 2006. On the first D&D forum I look at there were 191 members and 398 guests right now and the best ever was in March this year 18344. The first War Hammer forum I looked at had 600 users online at that time.

I would have bundled up a play test set into a single zip file and put it on RPG now as a public play test. By letting people download it that way you can automatically send out updated version and you are immediately building a marketing contact list for when you want to sell them the finished rules (at a hefty discount but everyone appreciates a thank you).

I would not have produced multiple hundred page PDFs for each book. Each chapter would be a separate document so they are easy for the tester to read and digest. You can then hold a separate discussion on a chapter by chapter basis with your testers. That sounds like a Dev action but it is actually marketing. The more people you engage with the more good will you will engage.

There should be a playtest adventure and playtest pregen characters as a single download. This will get people actually play testing your game without having to read and understand 1200 pages of text. Play first and look under the hood second. You can commission some great evocative art for that first adventure and the characters to fire the imaginations of these first play testers. Art does not have a short shelf life. You can reuse it in the final paid product so nothing is lost.

That art is the only expense in everything I have just outlined. You can pick up some great art on Deviant for $20 a piece so there is no real need to spend more than $200 in total. I would set myself the aim of getting 300 active play test groups. That then would show up the flaws in the system but also bring in 300 advocates for the new game. That isn’t a limit either 300 would be my failure test. Any less than that and I would have considered my efforts a failure. There is no real maximum limit for the number of testers you could reach. Over time that community is likely to grow as more people discover the game. The more testers you get at the beginning the bigger their online footprint becomes.

With a large testing community the flaws will be found faster, the rules refined faster and the game would have been brought to market faster. I would have expected it to be on the shelves back in 2013. By now we should have SMU and some companions out!

I don’t think that is overly optimistic. I do recognise that this is a rambling mess of a post. I think the nub is that RMU isn’t really for us, it is for the next generation. That is its mission. Whether it is accomplished or not remains to be seen.

September 29, 2017

Community Created Content

Following on from Brian’s post about the 80/20 rule I have been thinking about Rolemaster’s attitude to community created content.

Right now, community created content is the ‘big thing’ in games publishing. The big names are shown below but OneBookShelf hosts 18 community content schemes.

The way they work is this…

The rights owner, the publisher, makes available some or all of their intellectual property and with it a set of guidelines about what can and cannot be done with it. In return anyone can take that IP and their own ideas and publish their own adventures, addons and supplements. The whole thing is managed through a single portal so the publisher has the final say over what is published and what isn’t and they control the revenue split between themselves and the content creators.

The granddaddy of them all in this is WotC. They have made available the core rules of D&D 5e, a selection of the most common monsters and the Forgotten Realms setting. Furthermore if you create something amazing then there is an option for WotC to adopt it as official and put their resources behind it and your content can end up in the WotC licensed games.

So now WotC have an army of content creators working purely on commission so it costs them nothing. They can cherry pick the best to include in future books and the gaming community gets a regular free flow of new content. On average there are 7 new products released for D&D 5e each day. Many of them are free or Pay What You Want. In the past week 20 of the 49 new releases had prices ranging from $0.50 to $14.95.

For Traveller, the TAS programme, there have been 20 community releases this year so this is not just a WotC and the OGL phenomena.

ICE maintain two avenues for community created content. The forum and the Guild Companion. You can publish your ideas on either but with different restrictions applying to both. On the forum you cannot lists spells, but list names are OK. You cannot quote substantial parts of the rules and the like. What ICE do not want to happen is for people to be able to play RM by collecting the rules piecemeal from posts on the forum.

The Guild Companion on the other hand will allow you to post entire spell lists of your own creation and most recently Nicholas has been posting excerpts of forthcoming books presumably to whet your appetite.

You can publish adventures, new professions, monsters and so on but everything has to go through Peter Mork and his team of editors.

None of these options give the creator an opportunity to get any compensation for their efforts. The Guild Companion has been limping along for a couple of years now with no or just a single community created article per month.

There is a misconception amongst many people that see things like the OGL (open game license) as taking revenue away from publishers. Community Created Content Programmes do not require games to be published under the OGL or anything similar. There is just a simple agreement between the rights holder and the community about what can and cannot be released. The publisher in return is earning probably 30%-40% of the revenue from all the sales for virtually no effort. The community gets a steady stream of new content and as the prices can be so low that they can buy things for less than a Dollar just to use it for ideas.

ICE struggle to put a single new book out each year, mainly because of the bottle neck created by RMU. A new system is a massive undertaking for a small company of part timers. That is one of the reasons why community content should, in my opinion, be embraced. Just how long will it take for Kevin to update all the Shadow World books to RMU? Years? A decade?

I think most of us think that there should be a ‘lite’ or ‘quick start’ edition of RMU to encourage people to give it a try.

I think Shadow World should be made open to a Rolemaster Community Created Content programme along with a core RMU reference. Let the gamers contribute and get something in return.

September 25, 2017

Fleckles and Hip Action?

I may be making some assumptions here but I am guessing most of the readers here are English speaking. That most English speaking territories have some sort of TV shows along the lines of Strictly Come Dancing, Dancing with the Stars, Dancing on Ice. I also assume that as roleplayers we do not watch Strictly Come Dancing, Dancing with the Stars, Dancing on Ice.

Bear with me, I am going somewhere with this.

So whereas the fans of those sorts of shows are avid watchers of fleckles, hip action and correctly pointed hands and feet we are more interested in different sorts of moving manoeuvres.

Now, last week Brian brought up the old topic of No Profession and his idea of the free market economy for skill costs. Another element of making Rolemaster more accessible and faster to play is meta skills.

One of the arguments against meta skills was put something like this. Meta skills are fine for fantasy and historical settings but in modern settings subjects are far more specialised.

I am not saying that meta skills are right and a multitude of specific skills are wrong. I do not believe in right and wrong at all in rpgs. We make and play the games we like in the way that we like them. This is all about an idea I had on Saturday evening when Mrs R was watching one of those dance shows!

So in a RM2 game every typical farmer that the players meet probably have the a cross section of or even the majority of this mix of skills.

Animal handling Pig
Aminal handling Cow
Animal Handling Chicken
Animal Handling Donkey
Aminal Handling Dog
Animal Healing Pig
Aminal Healing Cow
Animal Healing Donkey
Animal Healing Dog. No farmer can afford to lose live stock and this includes animal midwifery.
Herding Pig
Herding Cow
Herding Chicken
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Driving Cart
Flora Law for crops
Wood working for repairs around the farm
Rope Mastery for repairs around the farm
Weapon Skill (spear encompassing pitchforks etc) as someone has to deal with foxes, coyotes, mountain lions and join the lynch mob to drive undesirables away.
Perception to spot foxes, coyotes, mountain lions and undesirables.
Body development as farming is hard work.
Trading to buy and sell seed and produce.
Weather watching to know what tomorrow brings.
Singing
Dancing
Musical instrument. These three are essential social skills for finding a wife and making your own entertainment.
Time Sense.

So that is not an exhaustive list. You could add in a lot more Lores depending on how the farmer manages their land. If they have water wheels, a smithy or a tannery on their farm then that comes with a skill burden. If they have farm hands beyond the family then they may need some public speaking or people management skills.

If the typical secondary skill has a cost of 2/6 then my snap shot of skills requires 52DPs per level or straight 70+ in every stat. Or the alternative is that some of the skills come from culture and hobby skills ranks and they do not have all the animal skills, if a cow goes sick they call on the neighbour that does know about cows and people come to them when their pigs are sick and so on.

So the idea that modern settings do not fit in with meta skills as modern skills are too specialised does not work. Portraying historical farmers in RM2 are just as detailed.

Now going back to our Strictly Dancing on Ice with the Stars their are often athletes, sports personalities and former Olympians as contestants. These people almost invariably do extremely well. The reason they do so well is partly down to the fact that almost all sports require a combination of hand/eye coordination, core strength, balance and footwork. All of these translate well to dance apparently. Some of the people who have done well in the past have been gymnasts, rugby players [rugby is like American Football with the training wheels taken off 🙂 ], and track and field athletes.

In my vision of the Athletic Games meta skill the list of hand/eye coordination, core strength, balance and footwork is almost the skill definition. Taking these dance programmes seem to say that all forms of athletics provide a great level of cross over.

The way I handle unfamiliar situations is by using higher difficulty factors which would mean that as the weeks and months (although it feels longer) that these shows go on for the contestants would be able to apply more of their full skill to each routine and the Difficulty diminishes.

I do not really want to reopen the argument on Meta Skills. I think we have done that to death but this came to me this week as I was writing whilst Mrs R was watching the show and I noticed that one of the highest scoring contestants was Jonathan Peacock who is a para-Olympian and amputee.

Finally, I think it is a damn sight easier just give Vocation:Farmer as a skill and move on to doing something more fun.

September 22, 2017April 17, 2018

Wicked Witches

I want an wicked witch for my next game session and I have been playing with the RM2 RoCoII witch profession.

This is quite easily one of the most powerful professions I have ever seen!

In my world spell multipliers are as rare as hen’s teeth. This means that power points are not overly abundant. Permanent magic items are not common either including rune paper. It does exist and the characters do have a few runes (they are all about 5th level) but there is not much of it about.

The witch can create their own potions, spell infused candles and as they are hybrids they can use Symbolic Ways to create standing stones and Rune Mastery to create runes. One ton stones are not actually that uncommon if you live out in the wilds. That gives the witch access to some home made daily items even if they are low level and not movable.

The runes as I have said are hard to make without the rune paper but if they have some then they are easier to make than standing stones and more potable.

Candles and potions though are easy to manufacture and carry around.

I am extremely tempted to give the witch some candles of Sleep V or Sleep VII and let the characters walk off with them. That is going to do their heads in for a while as I am making them roll resistance rolls almost every evening!

This profession can easily have almost unlimited low level magic. Power points can be burned using their most powerful magic as they will have tons of low level stuff just lying around.

I am thinking along the lines of a pretty high level witch as a sole adversary against 5 5th level characters. I am now thinking that I may have to tone down my NPC or they will eat the party alive (you can interpret that last sentence as you wish).

Have any of you use the Witch as a single Foe?

p.s. The boggle-eyed witch is back just because she freaks BriH out!

September 20, 2017September 19, 2017

More Musings on Professions: Are they Necessary in Rolemaster?

For a game system that was predicated on “no limitations” for player characters, I still find the need to cling to Professions curious. More importantly–beyond PC creation and occasionally leveling–do Professions serve any other purpose? Is a Professional label important for NPCs–the most generally the predominant characters in a game world?

Besides acting as a general trope label, NPC’s in ICE products still list out all skills, skill bonuses and spell lists. Unlike D&D, there are no intrinsic skills or abilities imparted to professions at various levels in Rolemaster. The Profession listed on an NPC stat might give a GM a “sense” of that character, but what really matters is the stat block itself. There is really no need to know a Profession for an NPC–only their stats and abilities. That’s the whole point of a skill based character system.

In Shadow World Terry pretty much throws away strict adherence to Professions; in my mind this an acknowledgement of the creative limitations such a system produces. Loremasters and Navigators are clearly a Profession, but due to RAW, are first assigned a standard RM Profession and then given extra base lists. The Steel Rain, Priests Arnak etc are all given extra lists on top of the Profession (whether it be Mentalism, Channeling or Essence) with NO REGARD to realm limitations.

As a GM do you build an NPC from the ground up? When creating a 22nd level NPC do you go through all 22 levels of character build using Profession skill costs?? I don’t, I just fill in stat blocks based on a general sense of power level and the narrative needs the NPC serves. Have you looked at any NPCs in MERP or Shadow World and analyzed whether the skill stats have any relation to Profession skill costs, ranks or bonuses?

My point being that “descriptors” are more useful to me than some arbitrary Profession assignment in an NPC stat block that serves no other purpose in the game mechanics. Unless PC’s know the NPC’s Profession and then make meta-gaming decisions based on that, they serve no purpose.

That means, in practice, that Professions only serve a purpose for a handful of people; the 2, 3 or even 5 players in your group. All those rules, all the arguments about skill costs and the nitpicking about whether Weather Watching should be 2/3 or 2/4 for a Animist seem complex for complexity sake.

I’m building a city in Shadow World: Nontataku. Like any RPG city, this is an NPC intensive environment. Per RAW (RM2), I need to assign a Profession to shopkeepers, blacksmiths, porters, etc. Obviously giving them a RM Profession is absurd. Assigning a shopkeeper the Profession of “Figher, Thief or even Mage” is pointless. Some versions of RM do add non-adventure tropes as additional Professions (craftsmen, laborer and even “no-Profession”) but, for me, that is just another example of “Rule for Rules”.

For me, simple descriptors like “Shopkeeper” or “Loremaster” or “Merchant” work better than some arbitrary, and limited, Rolemaster profession.

September 15, 2017

Seconds ticking away

Following on from my last post about movement and mounted combat I have been thinking about combat rounds.

There are three combat round lengths in the ICE world. RM2, Spacemaster and I guess RMSS use the 10 second round. RMU uses 5 second rounds and HARP uses a 2 second round.

If was obvious that the 10 second round didn’t work for modern day and Sci Fi. There is no way you can only squeeze the trigger of a gun once every ten seconds. The fix was to introduce fire phase 1 and 2 into the standard RM2 phased combat round.

If everyone was using firearms, which was not unusual in modern settings then it left anyone who had to move wading through molasses. If you could not get from cover to cover in a single move then you would get ripped to pieces.

Splitting the round into two five second rounds does improve things slightly but there is always going to be a disparity between how long different tasks take. Picking a lock could be seen as a 10 second activity for a skilled thief but it becomes more of a stretch at 5 seconds and surely for the typical PC two seconds is not likely?

Is it better to have some actions take multiple rounds compared to some actions happening multiple times in a single round?

I think I am inclined to go for the very short round and things just take as long as they take. We are used to bows taking rounds to reload. I think those times are a little exaggerated in RM2/RMC but that is because they have been rounded to an easy number of whole rounds. I know that I can shoot five arrows in twenty seconds from a galloping horse and be on target. That does not marry up with one arrow every 2 rounds for a short bow in RM2. One arrow every two rounds in HARP is closer to my observed reality.

But lets ignore combat for a moment. A real dramatic plot device is the hero in action movies defusing the bomb with 3,2,1… seconds to go. If you are in combat time, the rest of the party are keeping the enemy at bay while you are defusing the bomb then ten second time chunks do not fit well with this staple of the action genre. If you treat bomb disposal as a static action you really want to avoid partial or near success as either of those leave you with having another go 10 seconds AFTER the bomb went off.

The more I think about this the more I think the 5 second round is not the right choice for RMU. 2 seconds is tried and tested in HARP and works without compaint. Sure it means rejigging spell casting, durations, movement and critical results (bleeding) but they are rebuilding all of RM anyway so now is the time to do it and not in a future companion as an optional rule.

What do you all think? 10, 5 or 2?

September 7, 2017

RolemasterBlog Fanzine Issue #0005

So issue 5 is out on both RPGnow (http://www.rpgnow.com/product/220906/Rolemaster-Fanzine-Issue-0005) but more excitingly it is also on Kindle (https://www.amazon.co.uk/RolemasterBlog-Fanzine-September-2017-Issue-ebook/dp/B075D79LH7/)

I also hope that by the time you read this it is also in print on Amazon (https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1549678930)

I find the simple fact that anyone can write, publish and distribute a book now in virtually no time and at virtually no expense is very democratising.

This month I am trying to train myself to try and write 2,000-3,000 words a day on RPG related stuff. The fanzine is about 7,000 words but it also includes an adventure and a monster complete with stats. These take longer than just writing an essay or prose.

My guilty pleasure is the other game I have written, 3Deep, which is also available in print on both Amazon and RPGnow. I have both books on my bookshelf and I get a lot of pleasure just to pick them up and flick through them.

We have touched on something a few times recently and that is that you cannot truly divorce setting from rules. The rules exist to bring the setting to life. My game is billed as ‘generic’ and is sold without a setting. The fact that I am one of the ones who says that you need to have setting and rules in harmony how have I squared the circle?

My core rulebook is intended to be used with a setting companion. Each setting has its own companion that not only gives background and flavour for the GM wanting to play with that genre but any necessary rule tweaks. In this way the core magic system can be tweaked to create super powers for a Marvel style game or Mental abilities for Stranger Things.

So rather than being truly generic what I have built is something I conceive to be adaptive. The rules are only half the equation. Referring back to my challenge of writing 2k-3k words a day, my core rulebook is about 26,000 words in length but by the time you add in the obligatory tables and art that turns into an 80+ page rulebook.

3,000 words a day gives me about 20,000 words a week. I have nearly finalised my page layout style by begging, borrowing and stealing from the best looking books I have seen recently. So I theory I can write an entirely supplement in a week to ten days. Give me another week to edit it and another to do the page layout and I think I can publish a 60 to 80 page companion at a rate of one a month.

To make that even more impressive is the fact that I only really write this stuff while Mrs R is watching crap on TV. She rather likes period dramas such as Poldark, The Queen and Downton Abbey as well as Strictly Come Dancing. If you are not in the UK none of those may mean anything to you but the point is that I am just making use of time I would otherwise be wasting in front of the TV.

So far I have only hit the 3k target a couple of times but it is getting easier each day to get in the writing ‘zone’ and start getting productive. This week I wrote less but I did have to read a game for a review for a different blog.

I know that none of you care about my game or my insane desire to produce supplements but this does relate back to Rolemaster as well.

As long as we steer well clear of ICEs intellectual property we can, between us, produce non canon companions. ICE are not going to support RM2 any more but we could. Our 50 adventures are one such project. Brian has a wealth of projects on the go from adventures to SWARM to BASiL and I even tried to tempt him with another cute acronym the other day, anyone fancy an alternative to Arms Law called BAAL?

So, in theory(!) if RMU turns out to still be one to two years away, and that is entirely possible. What bits of the companions did you find the most useful?

For me it was probably new open and closed base lists for the three realms and new base lists for the core professions.

What about you?

September 3, 2017September 1, 2017

Assorted Musings! Rolemasterblog, Rolemaster and random topics!

So I’m heading to Spain for some vaca time but wanted to get a few blogs scheduled to post while I’m gone or getting prepped. I still have some work to do on 50 in 50 adventures so I thought I would post misc. points for thought and/or discussion. In no particular order:

Noble Games has a “cloth bound” edition of Spell Law for $195 and a “leather bound” edition for $95. I have the a copy of the leather bound Rolemaster book which has SL, CL, AL. Anybody remember these Spell Law products? Did ICE do leather or cloth bound versions of other products?
Why/how is the BASiL Essence Pt 1 being downloaded at a ridiculous rate? As of Thursday its averaging 50 downloads/day. It’s hard to imagine RMBlog has tapped into a secret reservoir of RM players. Some sort of ‘bot’ doing this?
In reference to a recent blog post on Summoning. Peter, the idea that summoning a creature means drawing a concept or consciousness from a alternate plain that then manifests in a physical form is a powerful concept. For me it raises some setting issues: in reverse, how can players visit these alternate plains? Do they DeManifest there physical form while visiting these plains and then reconstitute upon returning? (btw: read the Punch Escrow for some thoughts on this via a technological solution).
Following up on #3, we are confronted with the setting driving the spell mechanics. Yes, once RM was a bolt-on for DnD, but those days are long gone. RM needs to pick a setting (Shadow World by default given the amount of existing material) and build the rules around the physical and meta-physical world described.
New games are as much about the setting that they create, or imply, than the actual game mechanics. NO ONE is really choosing RM first and then selecting a non-conforming game environment, barring an experienced minority. The new reality is that rules and setting are synonymous. Based on some ‘googling’ many RM users initially adopted RM to play MERP. Since MERP is no longer an option, my advice is to put resources into a setting and then adjust a default rule set to support it. That’s what I have done with BASiL(Brian’s Alternate Spell Law) and SWARM (Shadow World Alternate Role Master). Much of what I did with those projects was to adjust RM to integrate with Terry’s SW. Shadow World sets meta-physics for magic and death, diverges from standard RM profession standards, incoporates hi-tech, connects with Space Master etc. My theory is that creating a great adventure setting drives rule adoption. I’m not sure continually rewriting rule sets (planned obsolescence) drives new customer growth.
50 in 50 is starting soon. Many of these are simple ideas than full fledged adventures, but I’m excited that RM Blog will be publishing real content.
I’m even more excited for the RM Blog 50th level adventures.
One profession that really struck me when I first started with RM was the Astrologer. It was quite different than the D&D tropes we left behind, and IIRC, city maps in the early MERP products had color keyed buildings for Astrologers. I’m not sure if Astrologers fit into the Tolkien world, but by integrating them into the world build, it inferred the profession with social context. Interesting.
I’ve read a lot of good blog posts about waiving the need to roll dice for simple actions as well as simplifying rules to reduce dice rolls. I agree with the former but not the latter. Players like to roll dice! They are chomping at the bit to make rolls during combat! Is that just my group?
After “50 in 50” and “5 of 50” I had a few other themed adventure challenges: “5 Adventures for Evil Groups”; “5 Grand Heist Adventures”, “5 at 50′, (underwater adventures)”.

August 11, 2017August 11, 2017

#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.

July 24, 2017July 25, 2017

If you cannot stand the heat…

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.

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!