In the realm of lands, under the sky so clear, Mountain casts shadows by starlight. Seeing the hidden essence, Through lakes and oceans, journey closely.
The Lord of the old world, Dreams through dwellings, where spirits rest, His heart, full of love, The healer of secrets, his love so true.
Scholars sing, their voices old, Singers of beginnings, songs of stone and sight, Islands whisper of past, of days long eternal, In green havens, where guardians build.
Believing, the mind’s fate, destiny bound, Loving beyond the mist, beneath the hill, Keys to unlock hidden gates, Darken the path where travel once turned.
In shallow waters, where wet meets water, The creator of souls finds his cause, Snow falls, cold to the golden ancients, Finding the lost, believes, the divine.
Through the wild heights, where thirsty dragons soar, To the tall high, where ugly echoes, Believing, forgiving, and finally seeing, The golden secret, destiny—his fate.
For those “Shadow World Scholars”, I think this is a great poem for Kydak Dûm, the Gold Dragon and head of the Dragonlords (if such a title were to exist). You can read my own thoughts on the subject HERE.
I know this topic might not be necessary for anyone who frequents the Rolemaster Blog, but, as I’ve moved from an Original “Skill-less” style of play back into an RM derivative, I’ve made some observations that might be of interest to some of us here.
In case anyone needs a reminder, Original Dungeons & Dragons (often referred to now as the Original Game) doesn’t contain rules for Skill use. AD&D (1e) might have something in the Dungeon Masters Guide (since I’m currently a player in a Classical 1e game, I’m willfully not privy to this) that provides the option of Secondary Skills, though it should be noted that these are not the detailed “Secondary Skills” we as RMers know but something fuzzier about what a character might have done before leading a life of adventure—a background that might prove relevant for roleplaying in-game situations. I’m going to breeze over AD&D2e, confessing I know nothing about this system, right on to 3e, which is the first version of D&D I ever played. Since my own initial rpg had been Middle-Earth Role Playing, and since I had moved onto such skill-heavy systems as Champions, I didn’t so much as blink at the 3e Skill list and its system of developing these qualities through—wait for it—purchasing and assigning Skill Ranks. If there ever had been any dispute among the more factious in the gaming community, then it would appear that RM had “won”*: Skills were the way to game.
But it appears that something started to happen at about this time, a quiet movement that—at least for me—didn’t make itself known until Pathfinder had taken over for 3/3.5. Many gamers were discovering that they preferred the “old” way of roleplaying. Many were utilizing the Open Game License to write and distribute “retroclones” or revisions of pre-3e iterations of the d20 system. Whether these systems are “simpler” than other forms of gameplay is debatable. Certainly many of them present a less granular and sometimes entirely absent Skill system.
Why? Well, the thesis of Matt Finch’s Swords & Wizardry (which is Finch’s version of OD&D) is that all questions outside of the core rules (and even those very core rules) as presented in 1974 should be settled at individual gaming tables according to the preferences of the participants in those groups. It is understood, I imagine, by most of us here that this is precisely the process through which Rolemaster was birthed. Many people have a preference for granularity in their gaming, and, for many years, this appears to have been the direction of the core industry. The Old School Revival is a standard for those who began to say, “We liked it better before.”
A particular power gamer at my table while I was running Pathfinder caused me to look with more interest at the OSR. “[B]ring the balance back”—a lyric from Led Zeppelin—adorns the back cover of S&W’s second printing. The Pf culture was my first experience with a gamer who actively researched “builds” to defeat the GM. Defeat the GM, you say? Since a GM is often described as the “God” of the rpg, how can that even be possible? Well, some of the standards in Pf appear to protect gamers from bad GMs. It’s generally considered uncool—or the equivalent of a “broken game”—to present the PCs with a combat encounter in excess of Epic rating (CR+3). Noncombat encounters, you say? Well, now we’re back to the subject at hand: Skills.
With problem players (and I don’t intend for this to be a rant about this unsavory topic; we’re leaving this in a moment) Skills can “break the game”: “Well, my Perception is +32. Can I get a roll?” “I want to leap over that wall. My Acrobatics is +28.” As a GM, I wanted my power back. I wanted to decide if it made sense for a character to notice something. I wanted some walls to be unclimbable. I wanted this because I wanted a satisfying story and because I wanted my players to feel challenged.
This can be accomplished without removing Skills altogether, of course. My point is that I explored a Skill-less game in order to start from scratch, to “make the game my own” at its Origin. I quickly found myself reintroducing Skills through mechanics of my own devising. Then, in the course of moving from a “homegrown” system to the MERP derivative Against the Darkmaster, I realized—with a bit of surprise—that Skill systems can encourage better roleplaying.
Skills define the character. This seems obvious in hindsight, but, without that list of capabilities in front of them, some gamers have difficulty making in-game decisions. A list of skills provides ideas and parameters for the gamer, shows the player what his character is good at, and telegraphs goals towards which the character can work through skill development. If the gamer imagines that her character should be good at picking pockets, then he sees that as a clear goal and puts points into that at Level advancement. Perhaps, more importantly, say that within the midst of a campaign a character realizes that she really should be better at tracking. Well, he makes a note and at Level advancement puts ranks into that Skill because, in game, the character realized that skill was important enough to work at it, to improve it.
What shouldn’t be forgotten is that, even if Skill attempts are resolved at the table with die rolls and modifiers, the action should be roleplayed. A criticism that is made by some in the OSR community—most of the time unfairly—is that later, Skill-heavy rpg systems replace roleplaying with mechanical resolution. Even if a Skill Test is involved, a player should describe specifically how a character is performing an action, taking into consideration the GM’s scenario, then the dice should be rolled with modifiers subject to how competent or ludicrous the PC’s intention might be. This isn’t as obvious as it might sound. About a year ago, a friend of mine played in a Starfinder game at a con. He said that the experience felt like a lot of “roll to see what you get.”
Skill rolls should drive the story. This one might be less obvious than the previous considerations. It only came to me after I adopted VsD and started using its Action Resolution Table. There are two very important results in VsD’s chart: Critical Failure and Partial Success. Critical Failure means that a character made the situation worse. For example, in my play-by-post game, a character trying to talk a horse-trader into a good price for his steeds actually convinced the businessman to attempt to steal all the PC’s stuff and hold him hostage. In my tabletop game, a PC led an NPC into the city and then tried to lose him: Partial Success. Okay, maybe on the way back the PC is mobbed by an excitable crowd who never has seen an Elf before, or a nefarious somebody else notices the maneuver, or the dodge brings the PC through an ominous back alley. All of these are exciting, spontaneous, new features in the narrative.
Pf, as written, has a Pass/Fail mechanic. The Original rules set I most recently was using had no mechanic. VsD Skill resolution introduces opportunities for plot complications and narrative twists. I’m not sure if I would be GMing this way had I adopted the RMu playtest instead of VsD. The language in the RMu Maneuvers table, despite its variation, reads very much like Pass/Fail—except for that magical 66, of course!
Anyway, those are my thoughts: Skills give players something measurable to define their characters by and Skill resolution mechanics should contribute to meaningful storytelling.
*I’m not sure that there had been factions: the pre-Internet late-80s/early 90s seemed to be a different time, and all the D&Ders I had known were politely interested in and perhaps secretly envious of how I claimed to understand and play something as arcane as MERP.
Now, in this ongoing series exploring the QuickStart rules for Against the Darkmaster (VsD), we cover Vocations and Skills.
The QS is but a portion of everything the designers have written for the game, and often the tables in the QS give some hint of what else is out there, since, I suspect, to avoid having to make all new tables specific to the playtest, the QS charts have been repurposed from master documents. The Vocation Development Points and Vocational Bonuses table contains listings for Warrior, Rogue, Strider, Wizard, Animist and Dabbler. These essentially are the six Professions from Middle-Earth Role Playing with a difference: recently the designers decided to axe the Strider from their game. Their reasons why are long and interesting, and I agree with them, but I won’t give them here. Also, though everything needed to play a Dabbler (MERP’s Bard) is on the table, the QS gives no deeper description of the Vocation, and it becomes uncertain what boundaries—if any—there are to a Dabbler’s access to Spell Lores (Spell Lists). And again we see an unstated assumption that gamers will playtest certain characters.
Moreover, as a reflection of the total game, in this case the Vocation options on the table are misleading for a reason besides the recent deletion of the Strider: I hear there are other Vocations in development, and one of them is something called the Champion. Anyway, this table, as expected, provides per-Level Development Points (DPs) to be spent on Skill Ranks. As the title of the table indicates, this chart also identifies one-time Vocation bonuses that players add to Skills at Level 1. The DPs specified are distributed at every Level. There are eight categories of Skills for which various Vocations receive DPs. Four of these categories—Combat, Adventuring, Roguery and Lore—neatly contain five Skills each.
Converting DPs into Ranks is fairly simple. It costs 1 DP to raise a Skill by 1 Rank (in its appropriate category). No one Skill can be raised by more than 2 Ranks by this method every Level. DPs may be transferred from one category to another with a cost of 2:1. While I’m on the topic of transferring DPs, an additional Magic Point (the table provides Vocational Magic Points per Level) can be purchased at a cost of 3:1 once per Level.
There are some observations about this table that should be of interest to Rolemaster gamers. Armor is a single Skill category and consists of a single Skill, Armor. The same is to be said for Body and (to a degree) Spell Lores. Basically the Armor Skill is used to erode any Armor penalties. The penalty for any Armor never can become positive from 0, so I imagine that those Vocations comfortable with lighter Armors will be looking at transferring these DPs at later levels. Only Wizards and Animists don’t receive DPs in this category. The Body Skill results in 5 HPs per Rank (added to a Kin’s starting HP and possibly bolstered by a character’s Fortitude Stat). But as one of the designers, ToM, recently shared with me in a comment last post, the Body Skill sometimes has applications outside of calculating HPs and, yes, if a character’s Body ever is reduced to 0, then that character dies instantly. Wizards and Animists (unlike the way in which they are treated in the rules for MERP) are not awarded any DPs in the Body category. After a first read, this concerned me. I asked the designers if they had not created a “tax” on magic-users because I couldn’t imagine any player being comfortable with not increasing HPs at every Level. The developers disagreed. They said that, in their play experiences, magic-users tended to be comfortable with their starting HPs. I have yet to see if magic-users will be similarly comfortable with this arrangement in my own games.
Spell Lores, technically its own Skill category, I’m discussing separately from the above, and the way Spell Lores are handled in VsD I think should have a similar application to the Cultures Skill, which is contained within the Lore category of Skills.
To begin with Spell Lores, these are developed in a manner that BriH has told me is how the BASiL spell system works. In VsD, DPs buy Ranks in particular Spell Lores. These lists follow MERP in going as high as ten (though, considering all I’ve been learning recently about the “full game,” I would not be surprised if in manuscript form they reach higher than this). For example, a character with 4 Ranks in a Spell Lore would be able to cast spells up to Level 4. At the same time, the total bonus resulting from Ranks and other considerations in the Spell Lore would be applied to the Spell Roll. Each Spell Lore is attributed to a variable Stat—sometimes a different Stat even within a specific “realm of magic.” For example, in the Wizard Lores, the Stat associated with Eldritch Fire is Wits, whereas with Detections it is Wisdom.
Since the QS is a “living document,” in one area the Skill Cultures is erroneously identified as Languages, and this suggested to me that the Cultures Skill should be handled similarly to Spell Lores. Also, here is the Cultures Skill description:
This skill represent the general knowledge that the character has of a specific culture. This skill can be also used to try to establish communication with another culture by using specific knowledge of that culture which includes spoken, written or signed language.
p. 26
Cognitive dissonance here results from two uses of the word “specific” for a Skill which appears to be generalizable. Even though such a discussion isn’t in the QS, we all can assume that (to continue with my favorite example) our Deep Dwarf understands his Dwarven language and everything but, perhaps, the most particular specifics of his Culture (in my own American culture we might not all understand the lore behind certain Christmas traditions). Now the Deep Dwarf encounters a Fey Halfling (that’s a startling combination of Kin and Culture!). The Deep Dwarf has 4 Ranks and +5 in Wits. The player rolls and succeeds with, let’s say, a 125 for her Dwarf to understand this puckish little creature’s chirps and whistles. What now? Are we to believe that the Dwarf simply understands the Fey Halfling? Can that make sense? And what’s to be done going forward? Does this Dwarf now permanently understand the Fey Halfling language? Should the player write this down on his sheet? What strange, good luck!
Instead I propose that (borrowing from MERP) some Kin and all Cultures should begin play with Ranks in specific Cultures. The player can develop these Skills and others through the expense of DPs. In a manner similar to how Spell Lores operate, Ranks in a Culture should give a measure both of how well the character speaks that Culture’s primary language and a bonus on any Skill attempts to understand/remember something specific about that Culture’s heritage. To hew close to the Spell Lores precedent, 10 Ranks should be absolute fluency in a language.
To get back to the Skills as written, every Skill, of course, is associated with a Stat, but some—if not all—can be associated with more than one. I know that this isn’t a problem unique to VsD, so at my table I prefer for my players to keep Stat bonuses out of their total Skill calculations. Instead we add them at the time the Skill is being used, and the Stat used is determined through how or with what application the Skill is being employed. In tactical combat, of course, this allows Swiftness, rather than the default Brawn, to be applied to small, fast weapons. The designers have said that the possibilities for this kind of play shall be made explicit in the full rules.
In the Skills section is a table with a short list of Secondary Skills. These are given without elaboration, and descriptions for these are highly desirable, particularly for such Skills as Battle Frenzy—how does that work?
Finally, the section on Vocations states that Vocations enjoy special abilities specific to the Vocations. Unless these are the one-time bonuses on Skills, though, these are not described in the QS.
I had more to say about Vocations and Skills than I thought I would! Next up: Backgrounds, Passions and Drive.
