rolemaster – Page 22 – The Rolemaster Blog

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.

June 3, 2016June 3, 2016

Rolemaster Professions – The Bard

The Bard is one of the nicest semi spell user professions in Rolemaster. It has a nice combination of magic, stealth, combat and social skills to make them really useful in all situations. Obviously there is no one profession that can do it all without any restrictions or everyone would choose it and no one would play anything else. The bard profession is not like that, it is nicely balanced whilst at the same time capable.

A fantasy role playing Bard — Really cool looking bard although I prefer my bards armed with axes.

The D&D bard is often quoted as the Leader Profession and the Rolemaster bard also fits into that niche quite nicely. In fact leaving all game mechanics and rules aside the cultural role of the bard means that doors open to them at all levels of society and their access to ‘behind closed doors’ information is unparalelled. In fantasy culture bards are the bearers of news as well as entertainers. They are welcome in lordly halls but get to eat with the servants and so on. As a leader the bard has the social skills to inspire and motivate groups and instill morale.

So what makes the (Rolemaster) bard so good? The first element has to be their magic. The Bardic base spells fall into two camps, magic relating to songs and magic relating to knowledge. Their songs give them the equivelant of charms, sleep and fear type spells and as they progress in levels they can effect more targets and at greater ranges. Their knowledge based spells influence how they learn languages by doubling or more the rate that skills are learned for the same points cost. They can also magically assess mundane and magical items. The ability to learn skills more cheaply and to magically emulate ‘lore’ type skills gives the bard the option to devote more development points to other areas of character development.

Bards are not restricted to just their base lists though. They can also learn the 1st to 10th level open Mentalism lists. These include self healing, illusions, detections, invisibility type spells, a variety of defensive spells and even a bolt style attacking magic (shock bolt). The truely great thing about the realm of mentalism is that magic can be cast whilst wearing any armour all baring helmets.

So magically they are really good all rounders. The only thing they cannot really do is movement, no flying or teleporting. This great flexibility is tempered by the fact that spells are expensive to learn for bards so they have to pick what is important to them.

Skills-wise the bard the bard gets professional bonuses in just about everything except directed spells (spells such as shock bolt and lightening bolt) and body development (hitpoints). The bard only has one directed spell in their entire repetoire and that is only if they choose to learn the open list of Brilliance so this no real disadvantage.

The Bard’s primary skill costs are pretty generic with nothing too expensive but nothing being particularly cheap iether. The primary skills are things like weapons skills, spell lists, magical skills, climbing, swimming and so on. the core of what an adenturer would need to do. The Bard has about the most expensive magical skills of all the spell using professions but that is the balancing fact with having the best possible mix of spells and being able to use them in nearly full armour.

It is in the secondary skills that bards really start to shine! All of the social skills from acting and singing to public speaking and seduction are all coming in at just a single development point for the first rank and most secondary skills right across the board are only 2DPs for the first rank each level. Remember that higher level bards can use their magic to learn languages at upto five times the regular rate means that spending a single development point could get you two to five ranks in language.

All RPGs have some element of combat in them. The bard as an all rounder is never going to be a stand out warrior. They are somewhat restricted in that their first weapon skill is affordable but it all gets very expensive after that. If you are restricted to just a single weapon then that generally suggests spear, shortsword or hand axe as your weapons of choice. It really depends on the game and setting as to which one I would go for. In my opinion the spear is the best weapon in the game in terms of flexibility being similar to staff, club, polearms and the lance. It can also be thrown giving a ranged option. They are also a lowest common denminator weapon requiring very little metal manufacture so are widely available. If you are washed up on a beach you can find a big stick and use half your spear skill with it as a big club. If you are a swordsman you are unlikely to find one of them on he beach.

You cannot chop down a tree with a spear in a hurry. If your game is a bit more out in the wilderness then the hand axe comes into its own. It is a practical tool as well as a weapon. It can be thrown to give you a ranged attack and it is similar to short sword for when nothing but a sword will do. I you are in a hack and slash type game then you can learn it left and right handed and two weapon combo to give you two attacks a round. Bards can be pretty good at adrenal moves so combine Adr. Speed with a pair of axes and you are up to four attacks a round or two attacks with axe and shield.

The third option is the shortsword. Again it works well as a two weapon combo, it is throwable and of these weapons it is the most consealable. It is also similar to all the most common longer blades such as broad and long sword and smaller weapons such as daggers, dirks, sais and all the short axes.

All of these options give you a range of weapons you can turn your hand to in a pinch all using just the one weapon skill.

Armour-wise chain is the best option. You do not need much skill to get away with the lighter chain armours, the heavier ones give good protection and cost wise it is certainly affordable. I would probably get fully trained int he first fiew levels and then turn those development points over to more spell lists as soon as you are fully trained.

So there is the bard. They are the smooth talking all rounder and leader of men who can in theory at least do everything from hurling magical bolts, slay dragons and play the wise old sage, all in a single profession. That is not bad going.

May 30, 2016May 29, 2016

Rolemaster Level Bonuses

There seem to be three philosophies when it comes to level bonuses. I bring this up because I have always used the first method below, I have been seriously considering moving to the second option but following a discussion on the ICE forums and on the RM2 g+ community I think the third option may be the one for me. So let me explain the three options for level bonuses.

Each level characters get a +1 to +3 bonus to all the skills in a selection of categories. So a fighter would get +3 per level in combat skills and +1 per level in outdoor skills. A magician would get +3 in magical skills and directed spells. The bonuses go up to 20th level to give a maximum bonus of +20, +40 or +60 with only one exception.
In this option the bonuses do not apply per level but either per rank but to total bonus has the same cap.
In this version to total bonus is given to the characters at first level but are capped at +10 to +30, half the bonus in the other two options.

The advantages to option two are that the maximum bonus is reached sooner which helps out lower level characters and that it stops a high level character from buying just a single rank in a skill and then adding a huge level bonus to it making the almost a master for just one or two DPs.

The third option has two effects. It makes low level characters very distinctive. Getting all of you level bonus in a single hit means that rangers are really good at rangery things and fighters are really good at fighter type skills and so on. The other effect is when you are leveling up. In option 1 every skill in all the categories that your character has will improve by at least +1 to +3 regardless of whether you spent any points learning those skills. In option 2 only the skills you bought get the professional bonus added to them so that is not a problem. In option 3 you never have to recalculate level bonuses as that done during character creation once and for all. It does make a tiny simplification to the leveling up process and to character creation.

Having spelled all this out I cannot really decide which option out of 2 and 3 I like the most. Option 3 certainly gives the most competent beginning characters and the greatest differentiation between the professions at the lower levels.

May 23, 2016May 22, 2016

Prepping for Atmosphere

I have one player who loves maps and mapping any and all dungeons and buildings the party enter. There is nothing inherently wrong with the party mapping. In fact the character has bought copper plates and a stylus exactly for mapping their route.

My issue is that mapping the parties progress kills the atmosphere in the game. It can become almost mechanical, the party enters an area, everything stops while the player updates the map, play continues, rinse and repeat.

I am considering using preprinted map sheets with a black card overlay. The card will have a circular hole cut out to represent the light shed by a torch or lantern. It the player then wants to sketch what he sees then that is fine. I may need a couple of extra bits of paper to mask off bits that the top page may reveal that the players don’t know but it all seems extremely easy to do. Part of the problem is, in my opinion that it is too easy to fall into the trap of describing interiors in a location by location way. It seems natural to describe somewhere right up to the closed door, knowing that the door will stop the parties progress and line of sight. Once they have opened the door then they can see what lays beyond and react to it.

If on the other hand one started to treat both sides of the barrier as a single location what happens when the party approaches the door can be scripted in to the adventure notes.

The same thing happenso of course if the GM knows the entire map and every location off by heart but I cannot retain that amount of information.

So what I am starting to do is insert additional locations into the adventure modules with this overlap information incorporated into it. The first time I did this it occurred to me that my style of describing the location was different to TSR’s. So to make the thing more consistent I then rewrote all the location descriptions.

Now if you are writing descriptive text you may as well pour on the atmospherics at the same time. I have nearly finished updating every location in the next module the party are going to tackle and I seriously think it is much darker and atmospheric than the original which considering they are going to be investigating a tomb is just about right.

What struck me is that the original texts had very little mention of smell and sound. They would tell you how a room looked but little else unless it had a direct impact on the plot. No mention of dripping water, creaking timbers or the sounds of rats scurrying overhead. Likewise the frequent bodies found in rooms have obviously been recently given the once over with a monster sized bottle of fabreeze.

So this week I am going to have to set about redrawing all the maps to a larger scale to use at the gaming table.

May 20, 2016May 20, 2016

Different GM-ing Styles

I am a bit of a minimalist in almost everything I do. Below is a picture of my gaming table.

At this end of the table you can see the adventure, one set of dice, a notepad, tablet PC for the PDF rules and shades. What else does the modern GM need? Tea, but you can see liberal cups of tea around the table so that is sorted as well. (Actually through the tea is in Brian’s honour as that is what he thinks British roleplayers only drink!)

(The creatures & treasures on the table is not mine, the cleric is into summoning beasties to fight for him.)

You can also see the post-it notes on the players character sheets that I wrote about recently. I really do not like having to rummage through rule books, companions and supplements while I am playing because if I am doing that then I am not playing. The game has to stop while I try and find the answer the players asked for.

I am not the only GM in our group and bearing in mind that both of us had to ship our games half way across the UK to get to the hosts home this is what GM#2 brought as a minimum….

The Sorcerous GM's game notes. — The Sorcerous GM’s game notes.

The most amusing thing here are the ring binders on the left. They are the RMC PDF rules! The blue clipboards are our character sheets and everything in between is either companions or plot notes.

The only way I can get away with my ultra light gaming is in the pregame preparation. It doesn’t really take that long to make sure that each character has their spell lists printed out with their character sheet. I also try and preempt and rule questions. I look up the rules and the copy and paste the actual wording into a Word document. I then have a single compendium of the rules at hand with the book and page numbers in case we want to look further. In this game there was a risk of characterskills falling, drowning and being poisoned so I had all those rules to hand.

I also maintain a pdf of the charts and tables I use the most. This takes the place of the GM’s screen. I have found that there is one chart that I had not added to it that we have used twice recently so I have updated my PDF to include it.

None of these things take very long. I am pretty sure every GM reads through their game notes before a session and at that time to just check any rules that you cannot remember takes but a moment. What it saves though is at least an hour of lost game time when you add it all up over three days of gaming.

Another plus point is that combat runs really quickly now. In a RM game I played in for 15 years or so each combat round used to take up to 45minutes and we were not a massive party. In one day my players had seven combats and fought 18 creatures ranging from a couple of osquips through half a dozen skeletons and an 8th level Hook Horror.

I know my game is combat heavy, it is a consequence of playing so infrequently, but there is no way we could have done so much in a single day running from the crate of dead tree.

But then that is just how I am happiest doing things.

May 13, 2016May 12, 2016

The NPCs of Daggerdale

My players have been working their way through the Doom of Daggerdale module. This was one of the things I have converted over to Rolemaster. Not only did I have to convert Hook Horrors and the Nightshade/Wood Wose creatures but there are three significant NPCs in Daggerdale. These are Randle Morn, Caldoran The Razor and Tren Hoemfor.

The first that the Players meet is Randle Morn the displaced Constable of Daggerfalls, the traditional ruler of the town and Dagerdale. According to the module Randle is a 7th level fighters/6th level thief. In my conversion I have made him a 10th level Rogue. This gives him the strength in combat as well as the breadth of skills. You can use the standard generic NPCs for him and just give him +5 Chain mail (AT14), +10 full shield (+35/+25), a +5 long sword and a +10 long bow. In my world these are all superior quality non-magical weapons. I chose to give him the leadership and public speaking skills required to inspire a band of 200 men to continue to fight a partisan war against the Black Network.

Tren Hoemfor is a D&D 7th level fighter. This translates into a Rolemaster 10th level fighter with Chain (AT13), a +10 broad sword and two interesting magic items.

The first is a Cloak of Displacement. I have made this a Daily Item that casts Displacement I once per day (5th level Guises, Illusionist Base). I made this decision because I did not want to introduce a magical item into the game that I would regret if it fell into the players hands!

The second item is a Ring of the Ram. This ring in D&D does 1, 2 or 3d6 damage in the form of a ramming attack depending on how many charges are used. My version is again a daily item embedded with Vacuum I (3rd level Gas Destruction, Sorcerer Base) three times a day this delivers a single impact critical severity B. I thnk the damage it delivers is slightly less than the D&D version but it does not have a limited number of charges so on balance I think it is on a par.

The third and final NPC is Caldoran the Razor. I am not going to give you his complete stats but a general outline. In D&D he is a 6th level Mage. I have made him a 10th level human Archmage. The interesting thing about archmages is that they can pick their ten base lists from any profession and any realm. I this case I chose the Alchemist list Liquid Gas Skills that enables him to create potions. The eaty of this list is that it allows him to create potions. I have then given him a substantial stock of potions from his own spells (1st to 3rd level and those of his allies. What I have aimed for is to massively extend his pool of powerpoints and therefore how dangerous a foe he is without having to resort to giving him powerful magic items. Potions are inherently single use and in someways force players into making choices. If they use the potion now then it is gone or save it until they really need it. As it is they have no way of telling what any of these potions do without testing them the most basic way of holding your nose and swallowing it down.

I am a big fan of low level spells. I think there are some really cool powers in there that often get over looked by bigger and more powerful spells. Another option is of course you can give potions to somebody else and there is no skill involved in use it. In Rolemaster you need a certain skill to invoke a rune or scroll. Potions are just glug it down and hope for the best!

As it is Calderan is still alive and kicking and a danger to the PCs so I cannot go into much more detail. Once he is done for I will share what his stock of potions was and how he used them.

May 9, 2016

It is Game Recovery Week!

I am back from my weekend of gaming and these long weekends take their toll on this poor old GM. I feel this is game recovery week when I try and get over the effects of too little sleep and the diet of a 18 year old student. Gone are the days when I could game until 3am night after night!

The game went well, the evil magician escaped but following the antics of the players he is going to have to do some serious remodeling at home! The party are all spell casters and when faced by their third locked door resorted to using a pair of lump hammers and entering rooms like some kind of police raid. What was interesting was how often some of the situations turned on a single lucky dice roll.

The first instance of this was a situation where the party were bottled up in a small chamber, arrowslits and murder holes pointed into the room and before them were some heavy stone doors. Out side the room firing in were skeletal warriors under the control of our villain.

The priest tries casting repulsions and on a roll of 97 (base spells roll) destroys every single skeleton at the first invocation of his gods name (Torm, if you are famiiar with the Forgotten Realms panthion). That gave the lump hammer wielding front row the break they needed to get at the doors. I had expected that killing zone to pose a real problem for the players. Their first attempt was them getting as close as they could and then casting Sleep and waiting for the sounds of falling bodies. Two spell casters wasted sleep spells before they spotted the archers were undead.

The second dice roll was a perception roll. The bad guy was on the run and trying to make his escape with his more precious posessions. In the romm next door the party were searching for any sign of him, believing they had killed everything in this part of the underground chambers. At the first attempt one of the players made an open-ended perception roll of over 320! So much for the quiet get away.

It was not the slickest ‘dungeon’ clear out I have ever seen but I am beginning to see the start of the party gelling together. Several times they failed to communicate and we had people either casting completely contradictory spells. The Warrior Mage cast sleep on one foe just as the Sorceress cast Vacuum on the same target. In the next fight the same two clashed again by both preparing can casting Sleep VII and a Sleep VI on the same target. These at least started the conversation about working together.

It also highlighted the weakness in that the party have no real healer, the cleric doesn’t have any serious healing spells, just concussion ways, and the seer who has been playing the role of healer only has first aid and some herb lore. The party also lack a scout or thief. This time they got away with using lump hammers and they had left locked doors alone until they had probably killed all the other minions. Their approach is not so good if you are worried about maybe trying stealth for once!

The only creature left alive as far as the players know was a huge worm type creature trapped at the bottom of a pit. It looked somewhat like this…

The party managed to gather up all the evil magician’s healing herbs, that comprised most of the ‘treasure’ in the adventure, and throw it down the pit. They knew the magician was performing dark rituals to create animated wooden effigies to do his dirty work. When they found his ritual chamber they gathered everything including the herbs, threw it in the cauldron and tossed the lot down the pit.

I suspect the party could do with a better herbalist as well!

May 6, 2016

It is Game Day! (The Post-It Revolution)

I have packed up all my game notes and rules and I will soon be on the train to Faerün (so to speak).

The biggest difference in the game this time will be that I have adopted some advice I was given last week. For each major NPC I have given them a post-it note with a mini-flowchart of their tactics and or favoured spells. The idea is that as soon as I pick up a character sheet I can see at a glance what they are most likely to do in the first combat round without having to delve any deeper into the paperwork to look at skills or spell lists.

All it needs is what and the applicable skill total eg “Adr.Spd +70, Sp.Sudden Light” tells me that the NPC will attempt to prepare Adrenal Move Speed and their total skill is +70 whilst also casting the spell Sudden Light. (That is a spell that can stun everyone within its radius if they are not prepared). It is a 5th level spell and in this casters case can be cast in a single round without preparation.

The NPCs objective is obviously to try and create some confusion amongst their opponents whilst also giving themselves options (the adrenal move speed is a like Haste) for the following round.

The next section is split into two, being fight or flight. So having cast that spell I hav enow noted down two options depending on whether the NPC is going to fight on or try and get away. SO in this case it is either “Sp.Invis, Stalk+30” (cast invisibility and then creap silently away) or “Sp.Blur, att.Shuriken +35” (cast a spell that make them harder to hit and then attack with a thrown shuriken with a total attack bonus of +35). So there are two definite different strategies here. I have only sketched out two rounds because if the fight lasts longer than that then any pre-made plan will probably fall to pieces and any NPC that does not react to what the players are doing probably will not live very long.

At the bottom of the post-it is a note of the most significant items then NPC has such as weapons, wands, staves and potions etc.

The point is that from the moment the two parties meet I can tell at a glance what is likely to happen immediately. If the NPC is a criminal mastermind then chances are he or she will know what their best tactics are. By spending a new minutes before the game session to look at what their best options are then you will do them more justice in the game as well as make the opening sequence fast paced and exciting.

There are additional benefits to this I have noticed. If I am under pressure to decided the NPCs attack I am more inclined to reach for the lightning bolt. Given more time I find that there are some much more interesting and varied spells to use on the same lists. This makes the NPCs power points go further if you are casting a 5th level spell instead of a 12th level spell and they are tossing it off in a single round.

I ran a fight not long ago and after the fight was over I discovered that the, now dead, villain was carrying couple of powerful healing potions. He didn’t use them and it would have changed the nature of the fight if he had and to make it worse he did have an opportunity to do so. In the actual fight he tried to flee but was brought down by the PCs. I removed the potions from the inventory but if I had known immediately that he had them then the nature of the fight would have changed as would the rewards.

So now with the NPCs covered in green personality post-its and orange fight or flight post-its it is time to get my train. I will let you know how it goes.

If anyone can think of a good (roleplaying) use for my blue post-its then please let me know!