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Enough about Spell Casters, Fighters Rock!

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I have spent most of this month telling you how Rolemaster spell casters are streets ahead of their D&D couterparts… wait until you see a Rolemaster figher in action.

My memories of playing D&D fighters was something like:

Round 1, Kobold hits you, take damage, roll to hit, roll damage, kobold is dead.

Round 2, Kobold misses you, roll to hit, roll damage, kobold is dead.

Two to one odds, kobolds vs first or second level fighter and the kobolds have little or no chance. Try that in Rolemaster and I wouldn’t like to say which way the fight is going to go. It is not that Kobolds are dangerous it is just as soon as anyone starts waving swords around people are going to get hurt, that is just the way of things.

One of the really nice things about Rolemaster combat is that a 1st level character can take on a 10th level one and the result is not a forgone conclusion. The rolemaster rules have two mechanisms to faciitate this. the first is the ‘open ended roll’.

Open Ended Rolls

Ever since I played D&D there was always some rule in place that if you rolled a 20 on your to hit then you got some sort of bonus be it double damage or you did max damage. Open ended rolls are Rolemasters answer to that. As RM is played with D100 and not a D20 the magic starts when you roll a 96+. You then get to roll another D100 and add the result. This can go on forever if required. There is a bad version of this and roll 01-04 and you have to roll again and deduct the second dice roll. Once the direction is set, open ended up or open ended down then that is set. So roll and 01 and you are going downwards, roll a 96 and that is another open ended roll so you roll again but the result continues going downwards. If the third rol was a 50 the result would be 01-(96+50) = -145. That is never going to be a good result.

In RM the attack roll and damage roll are one and the same so an exceptionally high roll not only is going to guarantee the hit but also do pretty good damage. Now anyone who has heard anything about any flavour of RM knows about the critical tables. There is a second D100 roll that you may get if your attack was good enough and that is your critical. For the most part these range from A to E with E being the most likely to kill you.

The way that the combat system works (Arms Law) is that with light armour you are hard to hit but take a lot of damage and more severe critical, with heavy armour you are easier to hit but take little damage and less severe criticals. An A or B critical will not kill you even on a roll of 100 but they could knock you out cold. An E critical will probably kill on a roll of 80+. Delivering E criticals is good taking them regularly is not good.

To tell you more about critical, they often give the location specific details, the gorey details of the strike and additional damage. Slashing and puncturing weapons may cause bleeding, crushing weapons are more likely to stun you, you can have muscles and tendons slashed and lose the use of your weapon or shield arm and so on.

Being stunned is really bad, you cannot attack when stunned*, you are easier to hit and find it harder to parry and to carry out manouveurs.

So lets glance back to our 2 on 1 kobold fight and each kobold has a 1 in 20 chance of getting that open ended attack roll and as there are two of them that is a 10% chance that one of them at least will be lucky. Should one of our lucky kobolds manage to get a critical strike in and stun the fighter then he is immediately on the defensive. he becomes easier to hit, cannot easily attack back and finds it difficult to defend effectively, our kobolds suddenly have the upper hand regardless of what level you are and that is something that almost never happens in D&D.

Creating a fighter in RM is just a case of picking that profession and then buying the skills that you want. Moving in armour is a skill so you can pick the type of armour that you fancy, weapons are learned individually and then there are lots of other combat skills that allow you to quickdraw, blind fight, reverse stroke, dodge opponents attacks and a multitude more. It is very easy to build your vision.

Fighters are balanced in the game mechanics by a system of deminishing returns on skills so the more skill ranks you buy eventually they start to add less to your skill bonuses. Th emore different classes of weapon that you know the more expensive the skills are to buy so it is harder to be really good with swords, bows, polearms, crushing weapons like maces and thrown weapons. You could of course be that jack of trades but you would pay for it elsewhere in your character development.

Now just like the spell casters there is more to the RM fighters than sword, shield, platemail and big muscles. Next time I will highlight some of the features that can make a fighter a really scarey foe.

* There is a skill available to learn called stunned manouveur that allows you to attempt to overcome the effects of stun but it depends on how hard you were hit and good you are at the skill.

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Magic Is One of Rolemasters Strengths pt II

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I think that the variety of spell casters that Rolemaster provides makes the system very flexible. The profession you choose defines not only the spell lists available but the skills that profession is inclined to buy, illusionists are observant, mystics subtle, mentalists are a bit gungho. The spell lists open to each profession also help define that profession, obviously. If Rolemaster stopped there then it is possible that all magicians would end up the same, all clerics the same and so on.

That is the situation with D&D last time I played it. Every magic user was desperate to get to 5th level so they could cast fireball. If you made that that far then finally you had the fighters’ respect and could do something they couldn’t. Rolemaster doesn’t stop there though. The magic is only just beginning.

There is a really important part of the Spell Law rule book on magical research. What this relates to is creating your own spells to fit into the spell lists you have learned. Most spell lists in Rolemaster do not have one spell for every level. There are gaps in the spell lists so you may have a 1st level spell, a 3rd, 4th, 7th and 10th but no spell available for the other levels. Illusionists for example have no spells at all between 15th and 20th. With spell research you can either fill in the gaps in your spell lists or define new spells to sit alongside the existing ones. There is really no reason not to have two 5th level spells.

It is quite a good starting adventure for a new spell using character to have his master send him some where to complete some research and give him a spell that no one else has. There are loads of really simple things you could do with just first level spells. As an example if the player wanted to play a fire based mage and has Fire Law then researching a Detect Fires spell. Give it the same parameters the other detection law/mastery spells but allows the caster to detect fires through walls, floors and ceilings. This will teach the player the mechanics of researching spell and open them up to the potential.

I have one player that always misses not having ‘magic missile’ in Rolemaster. I think Shockbolt is meant to fulfill that roll but it is not the same. This is one of the things that spell research is meant to address. You want it your way? You got it! As the advertising slogan says.

Researching spells takes a week per level of the spell for spells 1st-5th level and 2 weeks a level for 6th-10th and so on if you are researching a spell to fit into your own lists(in RMC, RMU uses a different formula). In addition to the time you need access to research materials; books, ancient scrolls, other mages research and so on. Here in is the basis of a first adventure, get to a library or another spell caster’s personal library and complete the research, that is the reason for the spell user to leave his master and set out in the world.

With spell research in play you can have two spell casters of the same level and profession, knowing the same spell lists and even freakishly having the same stats and number of power points but playing completely differently and having different abilities because they have researched different aspects of their spell lists.

The rules (in RMC) literally take up less than two pages in Spell Law so this is not a complex, advanced players option despite the fact that many GMs and players treat it that way. The sooner you get your players creating their own spells the sooner you will have them putting their own stamp on their characters. Then of course you have the option of having players teaching spells they have learned to other characters. This only takes a quarter of the time but does make player cooperation really interesting.

Now even with professions, spell lists and their own custom spells Rolemaster has even more to give the magic user. I will continue with that next time.

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Springtime for Magic Users

Interestingly I have noticed that my fellow GM and I have been discussing magic users of all varieties and how they get their spell lists and on the Rolemaster forums there has been a rather heated debate on the new RMU and about how the spells that spell casters can cast define the archetype of that magic using profession and whether they should be able to learn lists normally reserved for other types of spell caster.

In Rolemaster spells are learned in lists and these lists fal into three strata, Open lists are open to anyone, even a fighter could attempt to learn some spells from open lists. Closed lists are reserved to the pure and hybrid spell casters. Base lists are defined for each profession or character class are are reserved to that profession. So an illusionist and a magician are both pure essence users so they could choose from the same open and closed lists but the magician can choose from up to 6 magician base lists and the illusionist from the illusionist base lists. The magician does have access to a lesser illusion list so illusions are not the sole preserve of the illusionist and the illusionist can manage some minor elemental attacks (Shockbolt and much later Lightning bolt) utilising his light based list. A cleric has clericy base lists and a ranger has rangering base lists and so on…

In the flavour of Rolemaster I play (RM2/RMC) a spell list does not necessarily have a spell for every level, some do but most do not. I have encouraged my players to research their own spells to fill these missing spells. This makes each spell caster unique. Also I make learning each spell list difficult and relatively expensive. This gives spell users less lists to choose from and as a consequence they ake better use of all the spells they do know and makes researching your own spells even more important. My fellow GM is more generous with learning spell lists so spell casters have more spells and more higher level spells and spel casters tend to throw more higher level spells piking from the top strata of each list. It is not uncommon in the other game for a spell caster of high level to know every possible spell that that character could possibly cast. This has never happened in my game and almost certainly never will.

Getting back to the RMU discussion the starting point is somewhat different. In RMU you do no learn an entire block of a list at once but spell by spell. You learn as far up the list of spells as you want and you can learn from multiple lists at once. You can also learn at least in principle spells from other professions base lists. Another difference is that list has no empty slots. The basis of the argument was that the base list system built very high walls between the different magic using classes and that as a consequence all mages were going to be pretty much identical and if you had a visiion of playing a mage that could control the weather, a spell list normally reserved for channeling users such as an Animist then you simply could not mix and match that within the core magician profession.

I think the real flaw is the way in that the spells are learned. In RM2 it would cost you 20 development points our of probably pool of 35 points to learn the list that gives you invisibility , and another 20 points to learn the list that allows you to fly and another 20 to learn the list that allows you to detect magic. These are three pretty core magic user abilities. As the character goes up levels then the invisibilty gets more powerful covering greater areas with the cloak of invisibility, flight get faster and starts to encompass teleport type spells and the detection spells get greater ranges and the number fthings that can be detected such as curses, living things and so on.

In RMU on the otherhand you only need to learn the first 4 spells to be able to go invisibly, the 5th level spell to fly and the 1st, 2nd and 3rd level spells to be able to detect all three realms of power. The total cost would be 24 development points and a character gets 50 points a level. The option to get a really wide base of just enough spells from every possible list means that characters hit these walls defining the profession really quickly.

Because the primary way of defining a spell casting class in rolemaster (all flavours) is through the base lists available to them in RM2 we ended up with about 70 professions if you used every single class in every single rolemaster expansion and companion. I suspect that RMU will rapidly go the same way.

It is interesting, I thought that the most heated discussions on magic both occured at about the same time but as they say Spring is  meant to be the most magical time of the year!

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Khelben “Blackstaff” Arunsun

Khelben “Blackstaff” Arunsun is a major player in the culture of Waterdeep. He is described in the source material as interfering in events often years into the future. To this end ‘my’ Blackstaff is going to be a Seer.

The sourcebooks describe him as just a ‘magic user’ but Rolemaster gives you plenty of different types of magic user to choose from. There are three realms of magic. The Eassence is Mystra’s Weave, Channeling is power derived from your god or deity and mentalism is that inner magic controlled by the mind of the caster. We are in Jedi territory with the mentalists!

Eassence is proably the most overtly powerful magic, this is where you will find your fireballs and lightning bolts and such. The three core magic users of this realm are the magician, illusionist and alchemist.

Channeling includes your cleric, animist (druidic type) and the healer. All Channeling casters have access to some level of healing magic with Clerics being able to raise the dead and healers instantly healing the wounded by taking the injury on themselves and then healing themselves with their magic.

Khelben
Khelben “Blackstaff”Arunsun

Mentalists focus on the mind and bodily control for the most part. Their magic rarely effects more than one target at once and can be more subtle. The mentalists have a healer called a Lay healer and a Seer who can work with past and future knowledge. This is where I want to put Khelben Arunsun.

Don’t think for one second that a Seer is a push over. Mentalists are great ones for Telekinesis and he can easily pick up objects and throw them across the room with devastating effect (don’t think vase of flowers, think ripping up a cobble stone and throwing that 300′).

There were more options for my Khelben. In addition to those nine options Rolemaster has three ‘hybrid’ magic users that straddle different realms to give us a sorcerer, mystic and astrologer. These are really fun to play and Mystic was a really strong contender when considering this NPC. In Rolemaster terms Khelben is 39th level which does give a lot of scope.

It was while I was developing Khelben that it occured to me that although creating NPCs is a great way to learn the basics of any roleplaying game, for a new game master creating a 39th level character is not the best way to start. I would strongly recommend creating a fist full of lower level characters before tackling anything like these more powerful NPCs.

I would also say for NPCs don’t fall into the trap of always going for Magicans and Clerics as stock magic users. If you mix it up a bit and use the entire spectrum then you players will never know quite what is going to hit them next.

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Creating Waterdeep’s NPCs

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Probably the most significant NPCs for any game set in Waterdeep has to be the Lords.

SPOILER ALERT!

I am going to talk about the D&D and Rolemaster levels and classes for some very significant NPCs so if you don’t want to know don’t read it.

We really have to start with Piergeiron. According to the City of Splendors source books he is 14th level or higher Paladin. So translating this into Rolemaster speak and you are looking at a 21st level character. That seems fitting as 20th level in Rolemaster is sometimes referred to as “Lord Level” so that was easy enough. Now the Paladin bit gives you a number of choices. The core rule books do not provide a Paladin class. The reason being that the flexible approach to character design does not really need to define every possibe flavour of possible PC. Now two of the Rolemaster Companions (Rolemaster Companion 1 & 2) do define the Paladin profession. General consensus seems to be that the Paladin profession is best reserved for a high powered campaign although I do not have a problem with them. The question is do we really need a Paladin class? There are three ways of creating a Paladin…

Option 1: Use the defined profession, problably from rolemaster companion 2, being the most balanced version.

Option 2: Use a cleric and spend more development points on the arms side and less on the magic.

Option 3: Create a fighter and invest in some slepp lists.

Options 2 & 3 require a slightly higher level of roleplaying as it would be very easy to abandon to the archetype of he Paladin and just buy the skills and spells etc that are the cheapest for the base profession.

In the game I am in the process of setting up I am not using the professions from the companions so option one is out any way so that only leaves me with 2 & 3 to play with.

For Piergeiron I am going down the route of the Cleric based Paladin. The only things I need to do is make sure I buy just enough Transcend Armour skill (a skill that allows the caster to overcome the penalties for wearing, in this case metal, armour and casting spells) so that our chap can wear his platemail and of course Platemail as a Maneuvering in Armour skill. Both of these skills are skills that can be built up little by little every level just s single skill rank every level. So what you get is a Competent warrior imbued with the power of his God. that pretty much is the very definition of a Paladin to my mind.

So lets look at the third option…

To be the classical Paladin of RPG yore you need to be able to lay on hands to heal people and scare the undead. There is pretty much it. There are really three spell lists that the character would find desirable. Light Ways, Purifications and Concussion Ways. Learning Magic is not going to be easy but with Rolemaster you can start to learn a spell list and let that investment of development points ride until you are successful.  I would suggest that you buy just 2 skill ranks in the first spell list and then roll the spell gain roll every level until you get it. Two ranks equates to a 10% chance of success. Given those odds our 21st level Paladin would probably have made 22 attempts (characters get a chance at 0th level before starting play) so statistically getting those three lists is not impossible or even that improbable. As a player I would most likely be quite disappointed if I had not learned at least two by then.

I would also say in my reinterpretation of the Realms that if a group of Paladins, such as the knights of the round table, rode out on a quest, to find the holy grail, that it would be made up of both types of Paladin with neither seeing any distinction between themselves. Every group is made of individuals of differing strengths and weaknesses. Going back the Waterdeep and the Lords Piergeiron is not the only Paladin on the council. Texter is 17th level (D&D)/27th (RM) and also a Paladin. Taking into account Texters feats then I would certainly make Texter a fighter based Paladin.

Whilst my versions of the Paladin are definitely less powerful than the Companion profession it does not suffer from the accusation of being over powered. If anything I would say that those characters would suffer for their convictions but as a GM I would compensate for that giving the characters access to support from their order and opening doors that may not otherwise be open to them. I have always rewarded good roleplaying and the Paladin definitely does give plenty of opportunities for that.

It also goes to show that although the companions do define some 70 or more additional professions you do not need to rush out and buy all those books and then read 1,000 pages of rules just to play the game.

Paladin or scary cleric?
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Giving Waterdeep the Rolemaster Treatment

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I am very pleased that my game will be going from two long weekends a year to three weekends. Furthermore rather than my game being the Friday night/Saturday morning game it will be moving to the Saturday afternoon, evening and Sunday morning slot. In real playing terms that will mean 16hr+ hours of actual game play rather than about 10hrs. Over a year we are talking 48hrs play compared to 20hrs. The game is going to get bigger in another way as well. I am starting some players in Waterdeep this summer.

As you know I am primarily a face to face, paper and pen roleplayer. I have been dabbling with play-by-post (PBP or PBM) gaming and  I have been enjoying playing that game. It is my intention to start a PBP game this summer set in Waterdeep but still in the same campaign as my face to face game. Geographically the centres of action will nearly 1,000miles apart so they should not interfere to frequently but there is always the chance that news will flow in both directions about significant events. What I do have to do is get Waterdeep ready for the players.

I am a GM that likes to have everything prepared. One of the really nice things about the forgotten realms materials is that it gives the race, level and class of all the significant NPCs. So right now I am creating all these NPCs as Rolemaster characters.

If you are new to rolemaster then creating characters is one of the best ways to become familiar with all the rules. As a GM it will be your responsibility to assist your players to create their characters so the more NPCs you create the easier it is to help other new players get started. It also helps, I think, to create many NPCs to make you faster at creating characters. It can take inexperienced players and GMs the best part of an evening to create their first characters if they do not know the rules.

I would have said that the biggest single difference between the systems (Rolemaster and D&D) is the way that magic magic is handled. It would definitely be to the GMs advantage to have created a few magicians and clerics before trying to help a player create their first PC magic user.

 When you are converting the significant NPCs from the Forgotten Realms source materials then as a rule of thumb you should multiply all levels by about 1.5 so that a 12th level fighter in the D&D rules such as Helm Dwarf-friend, Master of Sundabar would be an 18th level warrior in Rolemaster. For a more powerful game you would make the NPCs higher level but as a rule x1.5 works pretty well.

Right now  have a number of sourcebooks to re-read to refresh my self about this location and maybe fifty important NPCs to create before I can let any innocent PCs loose in the city. All the new players will be running around as solo characters initially, probably for the first couple of levels, ‘enjoying’ adventures created especially for them to let them bed in and get a feel for the setting. As always I will share as much as I can here.

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PC Perils #5 Is that a burial mound I see before me?

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So our intrepid heroes have fought their way through the abandoned mines/hill giant village, defeated what ever was was being resurrected in the pyramid and defeated the angry Active Tree.

Surely that is not a Barrow or burial mound just off the path?

Phot showing burial mound
Burial mound lost in the woods.

If you cannot quite see the mound here it is highlighted.

Can you tell what it is yet?
Can you tell what it is yet?

One of the scary things about this is quite how hard it is to see. It would be quite legitimate to camp just within meters of this and not ven know it is there. As a monster, everyone loves the undead, the seem to transcend every genre and every world setting from from Tolkien’s Barrow Wights, Forgetten Realms Wights and Spectres right through to a good old Zombie apocalypse in modern day campaigns.

From a Rolemaster point of view, just look at that undergowth! I would had to make some MM rolls to get out of the way of anything big and scary coming at me through there!

These past ‘Perils’ posts, the abandoned mines, the pyramid and this one are genuinely fell within a single 1hr dog walk. The active tree and the seal beach were all within 8 miles from home.

I will be on the look out for more ways to scare the bejesus out of your PCs soon!

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Rolemaster Classic PBP

I haven’t posted anything for a while about my dabbling in play by post (PBP). The game I am in is ticking along quite nicely. I have nearly killed myself at least once due to massive over confidence in my own meagre abilities and, I believe, technically I am no longer a combat virgin. It was not a traditional fight and whether my oppenent was actually intent on attacking me or not is probably up for debate. The important thing is that I ‘won’. I cannot share any more details both to save my own blushes and just in case I inadvertantly give away a spoiler for some of the other players.

I am 99% certain that I am going to run a PBP game of my own based upon nearly pure Rolemaster Classic rules. The only optional rule I will truly miss would be the expanded character background options from Rolemaster Companion I.

The game setting would be the forgotten realms, of course, around the city of Waterdeep and the North. This would be exactly the same world/campaign that my face to face game would be taking place in. That party are in the Dalelands right now.

The only PBP gaming site I have used is RPOL but there are other sites I have not even looked at but seem frequently mentioned such as Fantasy Grounds. For this first foray I think I will stick with RPOL and what I know. I think I have grasped pretty much has the game administration works from what I can see from the game I am playing in.

I still need to do a lot of preparation before I could possibly run a game and I would like to get more experrience of this style of gaming. There are certainly some aspects that are better than face to face gaming [NPC interactions for one] but at the same time some aspects are lacking [the social aspect and banter]. This will remain a work in progress project for the time being. As it happens my face to face group will be meeting again in early May so that is the perfect excuse not to launch into anything new before then.

Going back the the PBP game. I think the next big evolution I am waiting for is when the party starts to form. Right now I am almost entirely surrounded by NPCs. I suspect that I have encountered another PC at least in passing but one cannnot be sure. While it is just me and the GM and we happen to be both awake at the same time then the posts can come thick and fast. How the game works when you are waiting for the input from several people remains to be seen. I am sure it will be fine, if it wasn’t then I do not think PBP would have such a large fan base as it appears to have.

 

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An update on Rolemaster Character Design

I have been creating some rangers and monks this weekend following on from last week’s post on non-random spell list acquisition. Character Design is a very personal thing. Some players like to have a few skills to as high a score as possible whereas others like a nice wide skill base but accept that they may fail more often. I am in the second camp and I build characters with many skills.

When it comes to semi spell users there is another issue to consider. Do you lean towards your magical aspect or the physical? I think the strength in the semi spell users really lies in their magic use when combined with their non-dependence on magic. What I mean is that if you can fight all day and all night just using sword, armour and shield, you get through doors using your skills with a lock pick and tools, and track your foe back to their favourite haunt just through tracking and observation then you are an effective member of the team. If on top of that you can heal wounds, always find the fastest path and slip by even the most observant guards then that is over and above what a meer mortal can do. My rangers almost never run out of power points because they are just using their magic to accent their existing skills.

Another question is when to start learning magic. I like to leave it for the first four or five levels. Get a good solid skills base in place, learn to use your armour and sword. Learning magic is expensive but once you have 10 ranks in a skill you are in the realms of diminishing returns so it makes sense to spend less on those skills and divert those saved points to your spell lists. Probably the to most useful spell lists for a fledgling ranger are not the ranger base lists at all. I think they are concussion ways and detection mastery. The simple act of being able to heal your own hits and keep on fighting or even restore some hits to the parties primary fighter can make all the difference. Detection mastery is excellent for scanning a room or hoard and looking for magical items, If you cannot carry it all then you may as well take the best. You can also use it to sweep for a hidden magic user if you know what realm you are looking for,

So results of my testing were that it really depends on how many points you want to put into spell lists. That may sound stupidly obvious but it isn’t. Under the pure rules as I call them (5% per rank and no stat bonuses) you can only find 12DP per level then you will learn spell lists faster than a character using non-random learning. If you can muster 20DP then it makes very little difference. The pure rules character generally learns a list a level sooner than the non-random counterpart but a couple of unlucky rolls can wipe that out. It is not reliable. Statistically you will learn lists faster under the pure rules but in my testing I only created six characters (three monks and three rangers) and worked them up to 10th level buying the skills I really would have wanted. The character with the least magic did have rigid leather armour, spear and a decent ambush skill and decent subterfuge skills. The most magically able version just had soft leather armour, no ambush skill and could not pick locks or detect traps.

It all comes down to choice and the type of character you want to play. It even depends to some extent to the initial stat and potential stat rolls. I used the same stat rolls for all six characters and the character started with 33DP and went up to 40 by 7th level and then down to 39 where it stayed through to 10th. Your DPs are variable but the cost of buying that magic 5 ranks a level is fixed at 20DP. Poorer stats can make a huge difference to the other skills you can buy. This was doubly true for the monk characters. Rangers have a lot of useful skills that cost just a single DP and you can round out a character with a handful of those skills. The monks have very few one point skills which limit them significantly.

I am not sure what my conclusion is. I would have said that if you are in a skills heavy game then pure spell list acquisition will give you more magic in the long run but if the GM is looking for characters to be proficient at magic then non-random will only give you that if you are prepared to spend at least 20DP a level and every level to get those spell lists. I am not convinced this is a good thing and would rather not tie my players hands that way but each GM is their own boss.

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How optional rules affect character design

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The other GM and I have been doing all this optional rules checking and testing over the last two weeks. Where we differ the most is over magic and the implications that has for character design.

My setting is what I am calling Community Magic. By that I mean that every community will have some access to magic. It coud be that there is a mad witch that lives in the woods that can arrange everything from love potions to revenge to healing or it may be the local priest. In towns and larger settlements than more ‘respectable’ magic users may be found. In Shadowdale, which is where the party are still hanging out there are at least six suspected magic users including a seer, a bard, a cleric, an alchemist and two monks. The bard is itinerant and the monks are part of a different adventuring party and as such are just passing through. That still leaves three resident magic users in a town of under 1,000 people.

The other GM is using what I call Family Magic in that most families will have at least one magic user. The whole fabric of society is interwoven with magic and its use is common place and unsurprising.

These two world views have an impact on our character creation or design rules. I do not allow stat bonuses to be added to the spell acquisition rolls meaning that spells are harder to learn and everyone has less spell lists. Two magic users of the same profession are likely to have different lists and may have very little cross over. There are far more lists than most magic users will ever learn. The other game has magic as something that is much easier to learn.

There is an option for non random spell list acquisition. You buy a number of ranks and when you have enough you get the list automatically. The threshold is set to 10 ranks to learn a list to 10th level (what is called a ‘b’ list). In my game you would have to buy 20 ranks to guarantee to learn the same list.

excerpt from spell law showing the optional rule.
excerpt from spell law showing the optional rule.

For pure spell users each rank costs one development point and most PCs have about 30-35 available. It is not unreasonable for a character to be able to spend 10 points per level or even a few more on magic.

So for pure spell users in my game after three levels worth of spending a magic user would probably (statistically speaking) two spell lists and maybe if the dice had been particularly kind a third one. In the other game the same character would have three lists and would be on the way to a fourth list. Not a huge difference really if the character is a well-rounded one with two-thirds of their points spent on other things than just spells.

If the character is a  hardcore magic user and spends 20 points per level and sacrifices most other skills then i my game they are guaranteed the three lists but in the other game they have a guaranteed six spell  lists. It is certainly possible to build such a focused character. The remaining 15 points you spend on some body development (hit points) perception and maybe stalk and hide. Everything is fine as long as you never run out of spells and have to try to fight for your life as you will have sacrificed all your combat training. I think this would be a fairly selfish character relying on other party members to carry them figuratively speaking.

If we look at what are called semi spell users, these are your rangers, monks, paladins etc. Their spell lists do not cost one point but four points a rank. If we dedicate 12 development points to spell lists then under my rules statistically the character would have a 90% chance of one list, a 30% of two lists and 5% of three lists or there about. Under the other rules system the character would have a 0% chance of any lists at all (three levels at three ranks per level equals nine ranks, one short of the magic 10).

It appears to me that an optional rule designed to make magic more common actually makes magic harder to learn unless everyone is a pure spell user which seems unlikely.

I am going to design a bunch characters under this optional rule to see if what I suspect is actually reflecting in the reality of the characters created. I will feed back next week.