Posted on

My Take On Spell Lists and Spell Casters

Rolemaster Logo

I don’t watch much TV but one of the programmes I do like is The Good Wife. There is an episode called Goliath and David which centres around copyright and derivative works. Bear with, I going somewhere with this. In the TV programme one group of musicians had covered another artists song with permission, so that was fine but they had changed it considerable musically, the melody etc. A third group, a major TV station had then taken the derived work and used it in a TV show and then released it on iTunes and made $2.3Million dollars.

The TV lawyers argue back and forth with the defence for the TV network being that their song writer was inspired by the same original song and arrived at the same melody just by chance. The Judge at that point cannot possibly rule as to who was inspired by what and the story moves on.

Now does it not strike you as strange that four magicians, all of who have an interest in fire leave the guild/academy/their master with exactly the same spell, being Boil Water. To make it worse these four magicians come from very different places, races, cultures. One comes from Middle Earth, one from Shadow World, one from Shadowdale in Fearun and one from the world of Greyhawk but they still all only know the one boil water spell. If a similar melody in two different cover versions of a song is suspicious then what is going on here?

Anyone who wants to play a spell caster in either my face to face game or my pbp game is going to discover that learning magic is hard. I do not allow you to add any stat or level bonus to spell gain rolls. I do not allow more than one list to be learned at the same time (unless you buy 20 ranks in the first list of course) and I do not use the ‘magic as a skill’ rules. You will probably get one list per level with a some people investing a lot in spell lists getting a slim chance of learning a second list (spend 21DP on magic gives you one automatic list and 5% chance of a second list). Typically PCs get 35-40DPs a level so 21 is a huge investment at the cost of everything else.

You would think that if a first level spell caster only has the two lists (one at apprenticeship and one at first level) then they are even more likely to be exactly the same.

That isn’t true. In another game I am just creating a character for magic is more common and my first level character has 5 lists, two learned at apprenticeship and three at first level. I will be starting with almost all of the professions base lists. Any other person under the same rules and the same profession would be severely tempted to learn all of the base lists as well.

This does of course change with the profession. All the healers would be silly to not buy all their base lists. Who wants a healer who looks at the main fighter in the group and then tuts and says “Sorry mate, I don’t do bones.” Illusionists are the same, you cannot use your Major Illusion base list unless you already know all the seperate ‘mirage’ spells so they must learn all bar one of their base lists.

Magicians are different. Every base list basically has a mix of offensive and defensive spells. Shockbolt is the lowest level directed spell but you have to wait until much later to get lightning bolt, the most powerful directed spell. Firebolt comes much later than Shockbolt but you then get Fireball soon after. Wall of Fire doesn’t offer any protection but does hurt your opponent, Wall of Water adds 80 to your DB. They are a group of comparable spell lists rather than complimentary spell lists. If you had five lists at first level then maybe two of your base lists are worth having but also start to learn the invisibility list, the flying list and the detection spell list.

Now this is where my rules start to create more variety. Rather than everyone knowing all their base lists by second level, you have to start to make those choices. What is important to YOUR character? You can meet two different first level magicians and have them know different spells and that will change their approach to all the problems faced by the party. The magician with detection and scrying magic is just as important as the Fireball thrower.

Restricting lists is only part of it. On its own it could be seen as taking some of the fun away from playing a low level spell caster. Afterall, two spells and you are probably done for the day.

I actively encourage  and almost insist on spell research. I imagine it as the spell casters right of passage from apprentice to being their own man/woman. Now you may have only two lists but you should be on the way to learning a new, unique to you, first level spell. This spell gives you (at first level) as many spells as someone with three lists and if you learn more first level spells then the same as four lists or five lists. There is no reason not to have three first level spells on each list if you have the inspiration.

A DnD first level magic users has the choice of charm person, magic missile, burning hands and sleep. All of which give them an offensive capability. A rolemaster magician can make the tea. It is not quite the same. Of that list of DnD spells the only one open to a first level magician is Sleep. Do you as a GM want every single magician to learn Spirit Mastery and then cast sleep at the start of every encounter?

I have written a lot recently on spell research both here and in articles for the Guild Companion. I feel really strongly about it being the missing link in the chain that that stops the ‘spell list’ model from producing jelly mold or cookie cutter spell users.

If you are going to play a spell caster in any of my games prepare to get creative!

Posted on

Who Am I? I’m 24601!

OK, So I am not Jean Valjean. I’m not even French. Here is a little story for you that got me thinking about NPCs in the world around the party and could be useful to DnD DMs moving over to Rolemaster.

I took up fencing with Sabre and Epee after the London 2012 Olympics. I started with Sabre but after six months or so I tried Epee and for me it was everything I was looking for in a sword fight.

Three months ago I took up horse riding again. I did it for a few years as a teenager but gave it up when I was about 14. They say that at that age boys either give up horse riding or turn super competitive. I obviously was one of the former not the latter.

Tomorrow I am going running, just for fitness. I swore I would only go running when I saw a happy jogger. They always look in pain to me but I am getting fatter by the week and need to do something as I am 47 in three weeks time and staying fit is not getting any easier.

Back in February I was going to a gaming weekend with a friend and I commented that with the fencing and new horseriding hobby, if I could find an archery club near me I could be a first level fighter by the time I am 50. My friend replied that I was probably higher level than that as a Computer Technician (a SpaceMaster profession).

He was probably right but what level am I and what level are the normal people in the world around the player characters?

In DnD most people are 0 level human, 1d6 hit points, AC 10 as I remember. Things are a litte different in Rolemaster. Rolemaster has a profession (class) called ‘No Profession’ and that is a sort of generic person. If you really needed to detail someone because they have become important to the story then unless they are one of the player character professions (or an evil variant) then the No Profession is where you would start.

But at what level? For most people that the party meet, who cares? You do not need to roll every waiter and barmaid the players meet nor every blacksmith or horse dealer. I would only consider creating NPCs that are going to have a direct impact on the players story and will have to make skill rolls or combat rolls and the like.

I normaly work on this schedule. People who are just living their normal lives whatever that may be with no significant threats, I give them one level for every five years beyond the age of 16. for people living a harder life or with regular existential threats then it is one level for every four years. This is where I would put your normal gate/town or wall guard and even farmers living on the very edge of civilisasation. For people who are actively going into dangerous situations on a daily basis such as caravan guards, sell swords or tyrants bodyguards then it is one level for every three years.

So here are some concrete examples.

A courtesan, early 20s, would be 2nd level with a couple of skill ranks in performing arts type skills such as dance or playing an instrument, social and political history, heraldry and etiquette. I imagine that would take up most of their development points but you may want to buy a single rank in dagger if it is that sort of world. The character would be useful to the party in helping them navigate the dangers of a political campaign and may have skills they lack.

A farmer, 56 years old, raising crops and live stock. Here we have an 8th level NPC with skills in various ‘Lores’, herb lore, flora lore (so he knows what to plant where and when), fauna lore (so he knows what to feed each animal and what predators are local), animal handling, loading, driving, some animal healing. Some performing arts, a bit of dance and a musical instrument, useful for attracting a wife and a few ranks in weapon skills. There probably have been a few instances of banditry in the area, joining a posse or driving off or hunting wolves and that sort of thing. He may even have served in a peasant levy at some time. I doubt he has a sword but spears are good all round weapons, easy to make and do not need much metal, bows are likewise and both are good for hunting.

The guys stood at the city gates or patrolling the walls could vary. In a war torn area a guard in his early thirties could be 5th level in a peaceful region just 3rd. If the same guard had been in the rank and file of an army in a protracted war then he could be as high as 6th level.

In these three examples I would make the courtesan and the farmer ‘No Profession’ but the guards would be fighters. Character Law has a table of all the core professions with typical armour types, and skills and even the typical number of spell lists and to what level.

So what am I? Well I’m nearly 47, living a peaceful not particularly stressful or dangerous life so by my own reckoning I would be a 7th level No Profession or IT professional (in RM parlance that would probably make me a rogue or thief depending on your opinion of IT guys)

Posted on

Creating a Rolemaster Golem (or “In just 7 days I could make you a man”)

I am still trying to read as much Realms Lore as possible and one of the things that struck me was that Golems are a fairly common magical defence for the spell casters of Faerun but there is no mechanism for their creation in Rolemaster (that I know of).

Under the ‘good old days’ of Rolemaster 2nd Edition (RM2) there should have been a whole companion dedicated to Golems and at least a profession of Golem maker.

What I like about Rolemaster Classic (RMC) is that it does not come with that huge canon of companions and expansions. Just three pages from Spell Law are about all you need to introduce a coherent set of spells needed to introduce Golems into your world.

Firstly lets have a look at a Golem. A flesh golem is a 5th level creature. The description is pretty much what you would expect if you are familiar with the D&D creature, a sort of Frankenstein’s monster inbued with a spirit. I don’t see this as an inherently evil act, it is not particularly pleasant and not to be done on the kitchen table but I do not want to restrict the construction of flesh golems to the evil magician profession.

Here is how I want to approach it. I am assuming that creating the flesh golem is not that different from creating an undead. Rather than having to have a whole dead body the body may be constructed from different parts but the body needs to exist and is not created by the spell. The Golem is 5th level and a Type III undead is also 5th level. To create a Type III undead requires an 11th level spell (Necromancy, Evil Clearic Base List). I think this is just about the right level and 11th level is a bit special. Hybrid and Semi spell users cannot cast 11th or higher level spells unless they have chosen the list as one of their base lists. This will keep Golems on the rare side and not something that everyone seems to do. Below is the description for the Create Undead I spell, Create Undead III just allows upto type III udead to be created.

-5. Create Undead I – Given a body that has been dead less than 1 week, the caster can turn the body into a Class I Undead. The Undead will attempt to attack the closest living being (if uncontrolled), but can take no other activity other than moving to the being and attacking. If controlled, the Undead will do anything (within its capabilities) that the caster wills. The Undead can be Dispelled, Repelled, or just smashed into little pieces.

So to create my spell I can use this as a model so we get

-11th lvl, Create Flesh Golem, Area varies, Duration P, Range 10′, Type F.

Given a suitable body the caster can turn the body into a Flesh Golem. The Golem will attempt to attack the closest living being (if uncontrolled), but can take no other activity other than moving to the being and attacking. If controlled, the Golem will do anything within its capabilities.

So what list does this belong on? I could create a ‘Golem Ways’, or Golem Mastery list as I am not going to stop at just flesh golems and that is a real possibility but the key here is that the golem is a body inbued with a spirit and one of the cornerstone spell lists for nearly all essence spell users is Spirit Mastery. So I am going to put this on the spirit mastery list.

We still have an outstanding problem though. Our golem is uncontrolled. We need a way of controllling it. On the spirit mastery spell list, the stock 11th level spell is Quest

-11. Quest – Target is given one task; failure results in a penalty determined by the GM (task must be within capabilities of target). If the target ignores the quest, they will suffer the same effects as for failure.

This is perfect! As soon as the Golem is created you then have to give it a quest, the quest being its purpose. This means that the purpose must be defined at the time of creation. This will stop a player from creating an army of golems to do act as general purpose soldiers. The failure condition I would rule will release the spirit from the golem effectively killing it.

The three pages of spell law are pages 52-54, Spell Research. Our spell right now does not exist. For a spell caster to learn it they will need to do the research. To research an 11th level spell takes 8 months 1 week. (33 weeks) assuming 8-10 hours a day, 7 days a week. (in RMU it will only take 18 weeks as a different formula is used for spell research durations.) As a rule of thumb that is not something that most PCs are going to do but they could if it was that important. The spell could be taught to another spell caster who knew Spirit Mastery already in 8 weeks. Now that is short enough to fit into most campaigns. I have seen characters with wounds that took longer to heal than that. This even is beginning to sound like a reason to go on an adventure to find someone who has already researched this sort of magic and so on.

What  have described is the process to give this spell to essence users but there is no reason why this does not appear on the necromancy list or at a stretch on the Life Mastery list (Cleric Base). On that list 12th level is the first time a Cleric can actually raise the dead so binding a soul into a flesh body is still viable if the clerics god would allow that. The 11th level Sorcerer Soul Destruction list acutally has a spell that can transfer part of a soul into an organic object. If they are already moving souls around this could then fit in here as well. These other professions may lack the Quest part of the process but then they just need to research that if there is no suitable spell available.

Flesh Golems are all very well but you wouldn’t want to take one home to meet your parents.

A Stone Golem is 10th level and a Type IV undead is 10th level. I think we have a match there. I would put it on the Earth Law list for the Magician but equally it fits on Solid Manipulation. The matching Create Undead spell is 15th level so I would put Create Stone Golem at 15th level. It would still need the 11th level Quest spell to control it. Iron Golems are 15th level and the matching undead spell is 25th level.

The question is, is it worth creating an entire list of for creating constructs? There are all sorts of things that could be created this way from stone gargoyles, living statues and animated suits of armour. You could dot the spells around on suitable lists such as animate object spells on the Essence Hand or Telekinesis lists or bring them all together.

It is my preference, and nothing but preference, to dot them around the other lists. If I put them all together and a player learns that list they are going to want to use it, logically enough. Whilst golems are no more powerful than undead social convention prevents them [the undead] from being used excessively. Stone Golems on the other hand could be placed around the formal gardens of a house with a purpose of protecting the inhabitants in great number. Suits of armour could line every hallway ready to leap into action and so on.

If you are familiar with Faerun then you will know that golems are use a lot as protectors of magicians towers, bank vaults and the like. Now I have the mechanism for their creation and control.

Posted on

Rolemaster Rogues, Thieves, Burglars and the Nightblade

Rolemaster Logo

I have covered a lot about the different spell casters and fighters so here is something about rolemaster thieves.

We have a sliding scale with the more violent at one end and then less violent the other. On that scale then the thieving classes pretty much fall into the order that I listed them in the title. The rogue is almost a cross over between fighter and thief, they get the best (cheapest) weapon skill costs at the expense of some of the subterfuge skills. They can still learn them but they are a little more expensive.

The thief is also called the scout and is the best all round adventuring thief with passable combat skills albeit with a limited range of weapons, good subterfuge skills and the outdoor skills to rival a ranger. Your burglar goes the other way with the best subterfuge skills but weaker in combat. Where the burgular really excels is in acts of concentration and at climbing. The official dummary of a burglar reads “He is similar to the normal thief except he has avoided almost entirely the awkward encumbrance of armor, and instead dodges and ducks very much like a martial artist.”

The final member of this team is the Nightblade. The nightblade has worse weapon and armour costs than the straight thief but has similar subterfuge skills. The big advantage is that the nightblade is a semi spell caster. As a mentalist a nightblade can wear any armour as long as he/she does not wear a head covering such as a helm but given the points cost it is going to be a bit of a hard slog to learn armour.

I have never played a nightblade so all this is theoretical. With semi spell users generally what works best is to avoid buying any magic or invest a minimal amount of development points into magic and just let it ride for the first five levels. At about fifth level something happens and that is that your core skills that you have been developing start to hit the first point of deminishing returns. Secondly some skills are ‘finished’ by that I mean some skills like armour only needs to be learned to a particular point and after that no further bonus is gained. So if you have been learning armour then you no longer need to spend points on that so you can put them into spell lists, if you were buying two ranks in your weapon skills (12 points) to gain +10 per level that would drop to just +4. If you go to just a single rank per level it costs 3 points and gives a +2. I would settle for the +2 to my attack roll and put the other 9 points towards my spell lists. The core thiefy skills are going to cost so something like 2 points for a +2, 7 points for a +4, so take the +2 and put the other 5 points towards your spells. You get the idea I hope. Everything you need to do still imporves but you can probably find 20 or so points every level to build up your spells. Also by fifth level you should have enough power points to make use of the spells as you gain them and you may well have found a spell bonus item (that allow more spells to be cast each day) to further boost your magic. Finally by starting to learn spells when you are 5th level means that when you do learn a list at least you get a handful of spells for your effort. Learn a list at 1st level and you get one spell and barely have enough powerpoints to make any use of it. Finally if you wait until you are about 5th level to learn magic your fellow adventurers may not even realise that you are a spell user at all and it is something you can keep under your hat.

A final word on the nightblades magic. This goes for any semi spell user really but you do not have to learn all your base lists (those special to the nightblade profession) it is entirely viable to learn the open mentalism lists as these are often better than the nightblade ones. There is a nightblade list relating to poisons. If you GM doesn’t want you using poisons any way and gets fed up with you killing everything that way then buying magic to amplify that is not going to go down well. On the other hand buying the mentalist healing list is brilliant for an adventurer, being able to see into the future is useful as being able to detect magic items. There is more to nightblade magic than the nightblade base lists.

There is one thing that makes all thieves stand out and that is that they are probably the single most useful professions in all of Rolemaster. Their skills extend into combat, stealth, subtly, information gathering and even magic and healing. A well rounded thief is almost never out of options and is always an asset to his team and can slip into any role. Th eweakest thief is probably the burglar and that is only because he has chosen to move away from that ‘all rounder’ characteristic and becomes a little bit more of a specialist.

Others of course may disagree.

Posted on

Rolemaster Fighters Rock pt III

Rolemaster Logo

Question:What are the differences between a european-esque knight, a centurion, a samurai and a viking berserker?

Answer:What the player wanted to get out of the game.

In Rolemaster there are two approaches to getting exactly the PC you had in mind. The first is the hard earned cash version where you go out and buy all the Rolemaster companions and build the character to the profession as defined in those books. There will be as many companions for the new RMU as there is demand for and there are more companions for RM2/RMC/RMSS/FRP than any sane person requires (but we are roleplayers so we have them all).

The other approach is the ‘distilled essence’ approach. What makes a viking a viking? Well I would say, a bit of it is equipment, chain shirt, big shield, battle axe and a brace of hand axes would just about do it.

Skills-wise then the must have is Frenzy (bonus ‘to hit’, double damage and can take more damage before falling down), sailing/navigation/rowing and tale telling would just about cover it if you asked me.

You can have all of that with a stock fighter profession with points to spare.

The Samaurai? Well, rigid leather armour, katana, wakizashi (short sword), long bow for both skills and equipment and caligraphy as a skill. There is a useful skill called tumbling attack and a couple of combat skills such as reverse strike to attack people directly behind you and Ia strike to draw and strike in a single movement. I think that just about does it.

The knight is heavy on the weapons and armour, platemail, broadsword, flail, and lance, ride horse and some heraldry skill.

The centurion I would give a platemail breastplate (Armour Type 17 in Rolemaster parlance) and shield, shortsword, pilum (javelin) and definitely some skill in seige engineering and tactics.

Rolemaster has some really useful skills to compliment the straight weapon and armour skills. You do not need them all but you can use them to add that bit of something extra to a fighter. There are tumbling skills for evasion and attacking, reverse strike for attacking those behind you, two different ways of getting a quickdraw (by adreanal move and by Ia strike), ambush, martial arts (several), jousting and subduing to name just a handful.

I have found with some groups of players they start out with a strong sense of identity and a concept behind the character but as soon as you wave a nice magic item in front of them the concept goes out window.

Here is what I mean Player: Thrud is a barbarian from the wilds and shuns heavy armour as a sign of cowardice. 24 hours pass… GM: You open the chest and inside is a suit of +3 platemail Player: Cool I’m having that!

In Rolemaster you generally end up sticking to your original concept more because the choices you make at character design time can have a long term impact. You rank the different weapon skills so that one is easy to learn (cheap to buy with development points) and the others get progressively more expensive. If you have already chosen to learn broadsword, flail and lance then you regardless of how good that battle axe is it is going to be a major investment in time and effort before you get any good a wielding it. The same goes for the armour skills. To become fully proficient in moving in any type of armour takes an investment and commitment. Really light armours are easy to learn but your chain and plate armours will take you many levels to learn.

Going back to professions (character classes) Rolemaster Classic with no expansion of the rules has nine pure spell casters, three hybrid spell casters, three semi spell casters and only four non spell casters (realm of arms as they are called). This is not because Rolemaster is lop sided and bias towards the magical side of fantasy rolepalying it is because you can do so much realise your charcter concept right off the page with no need to define new professions. Those four are actually just Fighter, Rogue, Thief and Warrior Monk but with that spectrum from heavy armour to no armour as the default starting point you can pretty much build whatever you want.

My favourite theif character (may the gods rest his soul) wore platemail, he used a spear, hung out with knights most of the time, he had learned a little mentalism magic (attack avoidance and self healing) and was very adept at adrenal moves.  He could hold his own in a joust using a lance, which is treated as a similar weapon to spear so can use half his spear skill. When his skill is combined with adreanal move strength to get a boost to his attack roll and deliver double damage and magical protection from his spells (staking shield and blade turn) he could get pretty far in a tourney. He was even mistaken for a Paladin once and whilst he never claimed that himself he didn’t see the need to set the record straight too vociferously.

Buying Platemail for that character was a nightmare and a real drain on his development points but I wanted the character to be more con artist and confidence trickster at court and for that the armour was worth the investment. Without the amour on he was a competent thief and forger more inclined to steal documents than coin.

A different arms user I built recently was the one I described on Monday that leads with a volley of hand axes, one in each hand and with Adrenal Move Speed. He really does pile in like a ton of bricks. His weakness is that he is as stealthy as a bucket of bolts in a tumble dryer.

In Rolemaster there are so many choices beyond the “long sword, long bow, shield and plate” fighter of my D&D days but you can play that too if that is what you want.

Posted on

Rolemaster Fighters Rock! pt II

It is easy to build almost any kind of fighter in Rolemaster but you should not be blinkered, there can be a lot of cross over between the different types of non-spell caster. Is a pirate a fighter with some maritime skills who steals things or a thief that likes to fight first and ask questions later? In Rolemaster the answer is which ever you want to play it.

Armour skills are increasingly expensive as the armour gets heavier which means that if you want to play a light, nimble warrior then what you save in armour costs you can spend on other skills. A platemailed knight will spend more on armour but probably would not be spending points on acrobatics and tumbling.

Now I am dredging  my memory here but as we went up levels in D&D fighters got to do more attacks, something like:

Fighter Level Attacks per Round
1-6 l/round
7-12 3/2 rounds
13&up 2/round

In Rolemaster you have more than one option for doing this and none of them are hard and fast level based.

You really have two options which are not mutually exclusive. The first is two weapon combo or fighting with a weapon in each hand thus:

It is expensive to learn fighting with two weapons but it is open to everyone. If you are not particularly skills you will get a penalty while using this style and it has disadvantages. Unless you are seriously deformed in some way you will not be able to use a shield and I would like to see you parry an incoming arrow.

Your second option is what is called an Adrenal Move Speed, this is a skill where you take a minus in one round to ‘prepared’ and in the next round if you are sucessful with your skill roll you are effectively hasted for one round. So no you can have your three attacks every two rounds if your adrenal move speed skill is good enough.

If you really have the need for speed why not combine these two? Yes you can really get two attacks/four attacks/two attacks/four attacks but combining two weapon combo and adrenal most speed. From a game play point of view  the balancing factor is that the rounds when you are preparing your adrenal move you would be at a minus, if you failed the skill roll then you don’t get the bonus and the development point costs would limit the character in other areas. You would also be at a disadvantage compared to a shield user against bow fire or other missile weapons.

Now almost every combat system I have ever experienced has the same feature of when you start to lose it is very hard to swing the balance back the other way. In Rolemaster this is equally true. With things like criticals giving wounded characters penalties to their actions, stunning them and bleeding wounds losing can be a steep slippery slope. Figthers can use this to their advantage.

I always like to start a fight by going in hard and fast, the proverbial bull in a china shop. Most fights take place in relatively confined spaces and at short distances. If you are surprised then there is not a great deal you can do about it but if you are the agressor then heck lets give it to them! Learning skills like two weapon combo with thrown weapons like hand axes means that you can open the fight with a opening barrage before they even get into melee. Hopefully you manager to get your sword out before they do crash into you but that double hit in the opening round can make all the difference between back foot or front foot for the rest of the fight. Unlike arrows axes do not go that far so you should be able to recover them If over time you manage to build up that adrenal move speed then you will be truly scary in that first round.

In a recent game we knew there were a group of Uruk Hai guards beyond the next door guarding a staircase we had to get up. The ranger wanted me to open the door so he could take a shot with his long bow to which I argued back that compared to him I had a broadside like a battle ship in such close quarters. It was true at such short rangees and with us choosing when to open that door and open fire I could prepare everything. I killed, maimed or otherwise put down two out of four Uruks and wounded a third. There was no way the Ranger could have done anywhere near the same damage despite being better with a bow than I was and him having an item that give him haste.

So if you like your fighters big and heavy then build them to go in like a ton of bricks and you will be very pleased with the results. you may not be able to cast fireball but you can be just as dangerous all day everyday as a fighter.

Posted on

Enough about Spell Casters, Fighters Rock!

Rolemaster Logo

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.

Posted on

Magic Is One of Rolemasters Strengths pt II

Rolemaster Logo

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.

Posted on

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!

Posted on

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.