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    Default Tell me about Rolemaster

    I am thinking of trying to run a game of Rolemaster. What do I need to know before I get in to it.

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    Default Re: Tell me about Rolemaster

    The system isn't bad, but combat is fraught with terrible problems (about half of which don't exist in MERP, which is a way, way, way, way simpler game with the same core mechanics). Main points:

    There are way too many tables. So many tables. There's entire books full of additional tables if having dozens isn't enough. (The amount of tables varies by edition, but basically, you have something like 20-30 tables for different weapons, and about 10 for different types of criticals.)

    You'll have to track way too much stuff for every combatant: bleeding X points for Y rounds, stun for X rounds, -X to such actions for Y rounds, and so on. Also, how much of their Offensive Bonus are they adding to Defensive Bonus (which will change when they get stunned).

    Actually, just don't use stun. It bogs down the horribly slow combat even more, because everyone will be missing half their turns, and stunlocking is way too easy and common (if you're stunned for 5 rounds, you will get hit with another crit that stuns you). Stunned enemies also tend to be harder to hit; sure, they get -20 or whatever to DB, but they can add half their OB to DB, which means it ends up higher than before.

    It's hard to get good critical results even if you get the best kind of critical. At levels 8-10, with pretty high-powered characters, they'd actually kill most enemies with hit point loss, not criticals. It got to where I tried doubling and quadrupling the hit points of big enemies (like trolls and dragons) because it felt so anticlimactic that they'd always be taken out by hit point loss rather than criticals - but that just made things worse...

    Don't have big fights. We could literally take an entire 6-hour session to run a single big fight (6 PCs, maybe 2 NPC allies, 10-20 enemies).


    Overall, it's not a TERRIBLE system - my group played it for like 10 years and we absolutely had fun (some of our favorite characters and best moments of all time were in that campaign; and hey, the most active player's character made it to level 11, starting at 1) - but I will never run it again, and hopefully never play it. The system just doesn't have any advantage over other options, and too many disadvantages.

    Character creation for the latest RM edition was fun, too. And magic was mostly nice and subtle, at least outside of the elemental control spell lists.

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    Default Re: Tell me about Rolemaster

    It's a tough, tough game. We never beat Character Creation. I can only imagine the horrors that lay beyond.

    I had a good time with MERP though. When MERP got boring (or when we memorized the crit tables), we imported the expanded versions from RM.

    To keep the table flipping to a minimum, I highly recommend giving each PC a copy of their own crit charts. Let them read out the wounds they deal. It's more entertaining for them and less looking up tables for you.
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    Default Re: Tell me about Rolemaster

    Also, photocopy relevant tables or type them up into a spreadsheet and print those, and put them in a binder with tabs. That way, you don't have to use 3 books and flip through half the book during play to find a table (the XP table, the movement action table, the combat tables, etc.).

    Also, unless you're dead set on Rolemaster, can I ask what you're hoping to get from the system? We might be able to recommend a game that does it better. (For gritty Middle Earth action, the answer would be obvious: The Riddle of Steel... too bad it's very hard to find for sale. For cinematic ME action, it would be the Lord of the Rings RPG, but that one's out of print too.)

    Edit: Also, character creation is complicated. It took me a while to get it, and my players never did it themselves. I enjoyed the complexity of it, though.
    Last edited by Aroka; 2010-07-18 at 10:42 PM.

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    Default Re: Tell me about Rolemaster

    Its a good but unfortunately complex sytem. if you understand everything it really offers alot of depth in character abilities and play.

    But the sometime need for an advanced physics degree can be a problem.

    As somone above said make sure every player has their primary chars photo copied. So Broadsword table slashing crit tabl etc.

    If youw ant to try the Game I really Recomend MERP its basically Rolemaster lite and a really good game gives you an idea of rolemaster with alot less of the complexity.

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    Default Re: Tell me about Rolemaster

    Quote Originally Posted by Guinea Anubis View Post
    I am thinking of trying to run a game of Rolemaster. What do I need to know before I get in to it.
    You probably won't enjoy running Tablemaster.

    It's pretty complex. That wouldn't be bad if you like complex realistic games, but RM isn't particularly elegant, and that extra level of complexity isn't always worth having.

    Other points:

    You'll be constantly referencing tables.
    Fights are hard to balance nicely, because ANY dice roll can kill a player. (I was once rendered comatose by a bee sting. That's a normal bee. It got me in the throat...)
    Fighting multiple foes at once is suicide. So fights with 20 goblins are horrifically dangerous.
    As a player...it's complex. As a GM... it's a complete nightmare.
    It's level based. And we know how poor level based systems can be.

    Rolemaster was a lot of fun to play but looking back; it would have been just as fun with something else. As a player I'd rate it above D&D though. As a GM, I wake up in cold sweats at the thought of running it.

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    Default Re: Tell me about Rolemaster

    And now the council for the other side.

    Rolemaster is fantastic. The criticals are a delight, the fumbles are hilarious. It's actually a very realistic system (open-ended rolls notwithstanding...) I've been running it for 20 years. it was the first "proper" roleplaying system I ever played (I jumped into it from HeroQuest), and I started in at the age of ten!

    For the players to get the very best out of Rolemaster, though, you,as DM, have to sink the work in to make it runs smoothly. (Which is why even all this said, I tend to run 3.5 for my weekly games.) It is a bugger to play if you have keep searching for the tables. So, you, as D should at least make sure you know where everything IS in the books. (I myself ended up sticking little tag to the relvant tables; bookmarks are the are a less permenant solution.) If you konw what you're doing, your players need never see any table not related to character generation. (I'll admit, I do sometimes make them look up crits and so forth; but our main RM group; which is itself about 14 years old contains a wide cast of about a dozen characters, so it can get pretty hectic if we have a fight with all of them involved!) If you've only go four to six characters, you should be fine.

    Crank your mental maths up to 11 (and if you play RM enough you WILL find that happening! Mine is now the fastest in both my groups, after 20 years of DMing it!)

    One of the big things to remember is, if using any of the source books; and indeed, the core rules - that unlike D&D everything is not only optional, but often mutually incompatible. Therefore you have to decide which variants you're going to use.

    The round sequence is a bit hazy, though; they tried numerous times. I think the one in the most recent Rolemaster Classic is about the best; while it doesn't exactly snap around the table (It's Rolemaster), it isn't too over-complicated.

    Be aware that you cannot do BBEGs in Rolemaster like you can in D&D! You will absolutely garentee that one of the ruddy PCs will choose the moment of their first strike to roll 300+ on their attack and E-crit the sod into oblivion (it's worse if you play sci-fi and the crits get even higher mor easily...)

    I can make a few more focused suggesions if you tell me exactly what edition and what books you have. (Myself, my games are a hideous mutant hybrid of 2nd, RMSS, RMFP and now RM:C, along with SM and SM:P...)

    Edit: And for what I can't suggest anything for, you can, of course, go to the I.C.E Rolemaster forums themselves for some help. (It might be worth doing that anyway, actually.)
    Last edited by Aotrs Commander; 2010-07-19 at 05:15 AM.

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    Default Re: Tell me about Rolemaster

    Quote Originally Posted by Aotrs Commander View Post
    And now the council for the other side.

    Be aware that you cannot do BBEGs in Rolemaster like you can in D&D! You will absolutely garentee that one of the ruddy PCs will choose the moment of their first strike to roll 300+ on their attack and E-crit the sod into oblivion (it's worse if you play sci-fi and the crits get even higher mor easily...)
    I put a guy off running Spacemaster ever again by doing exactly that at the start of the campaign on a self-replicating alien killing machine whose machinations were going to be the focus of the entire campaign. It turns out that AT20 300DB and -3 to all crit levels wasn't enough to keep it alive for more than a round against a lucky roll...

    [also this was my first successful genocide committed during an RPG...]


    Also: Crits and fumbles are great fun, but it's equally fun and much less hard work to just read through them all, rather than play just for the sake of funny crits.

    You can always tell RM/SM players by the way they snigger in ANY percentile system when someone rolls a 66...
    Last edited by Psyx; 2010-07-19 at 06:01 AM.

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    Default Re: Tell me about Rolemaster

    Quote Originally Posted by Psyx View Post
    I put a guy off running Spacemaster ever again by doing exactly that at the start of the campaign on a self-replicating alien killing machine whose machinations were going to be the focus of the entire campaign. It turns out that AT20 300DB and -3 to all crit levels wasn't enough to keep it alive for more than a round against a lucky roll...

    [also this was my first successful genocide committed during an RPG...]
    I made one last attempt to do a BBEG for the aforementioned party (who are, admittedly, horribly over-powered!) A 20th level Orc killing machine, cybered up to the gills, with two omega-osiris plasmatic repeater cannons, shields and Adrenal defense up the wazoo (I allow AD to work against energy weapon; yer kinda need it...) They didn't take him out in one hit, but they made quicker work than I'd have liked...

    Next time, I set two greater black reavers on them (level 80 contructs made by combining liches or vampries with greater demons, for those of you not in the know), complete with Sienetic Harbinger Anti-Proton Cannons and shields. They actually ran away from them, and managed to kill them with the starship's weapons. (After, hilariously, having to spend loads of Fate Point after getting shot down...TWICE...)



    Quote Originally Posted by Psyx
    Also: Crits and fumbles are great fun, but it's equally fun and much less hard work to just read through them all, rather than play just for the sake of funny crits.
    I'm afraid I have to disagree. It is TOTALLY worth playing Rolemaster just for the critical hits!

    Case-in-point: my favourite campaigns of all time was Rolemaster, played on Middle-Earth. One of the many highlights was use fighting with a mage on the top of a tower. Our mage cast a waterbolt and rolled a critical that knocked him back 10'...right off the edge of the tower to a watery death below. Talk about action-movie death...

    Or the time that the party were fighting evil ninja-mirrors-rivals of themselves. One character, Marius Darkblade, was facing off an old adversary from his backstory, who taunted him by calling his real name (Norman Pilsbury.) Marius' player made one shot and rolled spectacularly, blowing the poor fool in half, with the equally-action moive oneliner "Don't. Call. Me. Norman!"

    And not too mention the time everyone in the group nearly had a spate of collective incompetance or the infamous Battle of the Fumbles...


    Ah. Good times, good times...

    Quote Originally Posted by Psyx
    You can always tell RM/SM players by the way they snigger in ANY percentile system when someone rolls a 66...
    That is sadly, extremely true. Seriously, every time somebody rolls a 66, one of us says "he's killed somebody!"

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    Default Re: Tell me about Rolemaster

    Out of curiosity, would a computerized version of RM speed things up? I feel like looking up results in tables would be nearly instantaneous with the right interface.
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    Default Re: Tell me about Rolemaster

    Possibly. If you wanted to enter all the tables... Which would be a massive job in itself, even assuming you scanned and OCR'd the tables. (Don't even get me started on typing them in by hand; I did that ONCE, in the early days on my mates old BBC (I think; that or something similar) computer. Never again!

    You might manage margianlly more easily if you have RM on their official PDFs, since it might be slightly easier to copy/paste the tables. (I don't; all my stuff is hard copy and up to 20 years old (plus)). It's just not a job I'd want to undertake, myself. (And I say that as someone who had painstaking typed out a master spell list and feat list for 3.5, covering all the books we have!)

    (Also, as DM, you lose the ability to adjust behind the screen to not kill (as much) the characters. Which is no problem is you use something like Fate Points (I do nowadays). You do tend to have to do one or the other (unless you have access to shed-loads of magical or technological healing) or you do have a fairly high mortality rate if you're not careful. Depends on what sort of lethality of game you run, but that's a topic for a different thread.)

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    Default Re: Tell me about Rolemaster

    Quote Originally Posted by Aotrs Commander View Post
    Possibly. If you wanted to enter all the tables... Which would be a massive job in itself, even assuming you scanned and OCR'd the tables. (Don't even get me started on typing them in by hand; I did that ONCE, in the early days on my mates old BBC (I think; that or something similar) computer. Never again!
    Assuming you could extract tabular data (instead of just text on a page that looked like tables) automatically I don't think it would be that much work. I'm wondering more about how much it would pay off than how much work would go into it.
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    Default Re: Tell me about Rolemaster

    I might be wrong here, but wasn't HARP designed to be a streamlined and simplified predecessor to Rolemaster?

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    Default Re: Tell me about Rolemaster

    Quote Originally Posted by valadil View Post
    Assuming you could extract tabular data (instead of just text on a page that looked like tables) automatically I don't think it would be that much work. I'm wondering more about how much it would pay off than how much work would go into it.
    That's the dangerous assumption...

    But even then, there's a lot of tables to do. In just the core, there are 14-15 criticals, one fumble, plus something like getting on for 30-40 attack tables (covering weapons and spells and natural attacks and such)...

    It certainly could be done (it may even have been done; checking the RM forums is a better bet), but it's not a task I personally would bother with, considering that even with our sci-fi party of a dozen, we use perhaps ten or so attack tables in one go. Maybe a bit more (but that is out of what is probably closer to a hundred possibles once you get firearms and energy weapons in the mix).

    I think in the end, by the time you'd have typed in your OB and the DB and the AT and such, you wouldn't have gained a lot of time1; because what time you'd saved in looking up the table, you'd lose typing things in. Admittedly, you might save some time looking for the tables. But that inself might be easier to solve by collating all the tables into one source, really.



    1Remember that in the end, Rolemaster's resolution system - from the player end - is identical to D&Ds. Roll dice, add skills and penalties; the major difference is you're adding tens to hundreds, rather than one to twenties. Instead of a DC, you have a table. And instead of rolling again for damage, if you hit you roll for a critical. Aside from the table thing, it's really not much worse than reasonably optimised 3.5. (The round sequence is more fiddly in RM, I grant you, and that's the hard part.)

    But - and I say this in all seriousness - some people get intimidated by the larger numbers. They are fine with D&D's level of easy addition (say, 15+13), but ask them to add 23 and 47 and it's like a whole different school of maths. That is partly, I think, why Rolemaster gets a reputation for being complicated, more than the tables. (Which, if the DM is any good, you never need to worry about.) Strange but true.

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    Default Re: Tell me about Rolemaster

    If you want a system where you can spent 6 hours rolling up a character, only to get killed in 5 minutes in the first combat by a thug who rolls high on an attack critical, have fun. The player won't.

    This is one system I absolutely refuse to play anymore by choice by long experience. Its not fun unless the DM fudges things in your favor. Its a completely unbalanced nightmare.

    Magic is needlessly overruled and restrained with all the nice spells at higher levels you have almost no chance of getting to, shapeshifting pretty much doesnt exist (oh you can look like something but not gain the movement, attacks or traits till you're level 25.. woo, i've never seen a character make it past 13, and the DM cheated to keep him alive past many deaths.) Psionics are an absolute godmode where they seemed to have forgotten all the previous magic rules and restraints, combat is all about getting the lucky roll first nearly regardless of your level.

    IMagine this scenario.. you've just spent hours making up a rogue. You begin play, your character gets in a barfight and you think 'this could be fun, lets test out my capability'.

    Combat starts, you punch the other guy, roll very low. Fumble.. the dm rolls and says 'your charater swings, wrenches his arm out of his socket, you're stunned and take damage'

    then the guy across the bar swings a bottle at you, dm rolls, rolls again, looks up and says 'Foe smashed bottle across your head, glass shatters, shards sink into your brain causing blackout and death over 1 minute'.

    That's rolemaster.

    If your DM is happy with cheating to keep the players having fun but also wants to sit with a stack of books full of tables and charts by his screen along with a calculator, go for it.

    Just.. don't expect your player who wants to play a mage to have fun being able to boil water and create a breeze at 1st level. Don't expect the party healer to be able to heal the most common nasty wounds till a level he'll die before attaining, Don't expect anyone to survive unless you fudge dice. Take body dev.. lots and lots of body dev.
    Last edited by Skaven; 2010-07-19 at 11:32 AM.
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    Default Re: Tell me about Rolemaster

    Quote Originally Posted by Aotrs Commander View Post
    I think in the end, by the time you'd have typed in your OB and the DB and the AT and such, you wouldn't have gained a lot of time1; because what time you'd saved in looking up the table, you'd lose typing things in. Admittedly, you might save some time looking for the tables. But that inself might be easier to solve by collating all the tables into one source, really.
    If all seconds are equal I agree with you. But they're not. I have a limited number of in game seconds to waste on looking things up. I have far more free time to spend (especially since my boss is taking a class and I haven't seen him in two months) outside of game. If I can spend 2 minutes of my own time making game go 1 minute faster, that's worth it to me.

    At the moment I think a PDF with good bookmarks would be a better investment of time though.
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    Default Re: Tell me about Rolemaster

    Quote Originally Posted by valadil View Post
    If all seconds are equal I agree with you. But they're not. I have a limited number of in game seconds to waste on looking things up. I have far more free time to spend (especially since my boss is taking a class and I haven't seen him in two months) outside of game. If I can spend 2 minutes of my own time making game go 1 minute faster, that's worth it to me.

    At the moment I think a PDF with good bookmarks would be a better investment of time though.
    I would seriously check the I.C.E forums and see if anything has already been done on the lines you're looking for. I have a vague memory of their being something like that there for one edition or another; it might save you some effort.

    Quote Originally Posted by Skaven View Post
    Magic is needlessly overruled and restrained with all the nice spells at higher levels you have almost no chance of getting to, shapeshifting pretty much doesnt exist (oh you can look like something but not gain the movement, attacks or traits till you're level 25..
    Considering how broken Polymorph is in D&D, I hardly think we can hold that aspect against Rolemaster...



    Otherwise, you do have a point. Magic in RM is certainly not the same paradigm as D&D and you can't play a D&D style wizard in Rolemaster! (Something people new to the system should bear solidly in mind.)

    If anything, the caster/noncaster power disparity is the reverse of D&D's (and perhaps a wider gap). I find RM casters need as much of a boost to contribute at bottom levels as fighters in D&D do at higher ones. I find using the Extraodinary Spell Failure rules, plus giving the caster a Spell Adder means at least they can do something at entry level. (I also let them learn more than one spell list at once.)

    Certainly - though for my Spacemaster games - I have had to boost the Archmage a fair bit (lightning bolt is pretty poor once shields start cropping up; it's no better than a blaster rifle!)

    On the other hand Haste, when you get it is absolutely devastating, since it, in it's own way is kinda worse than 3.0's Haste.

    Still, no system is perfect; D&D 3.5 is the system I use most, nowadays, and that has just as many - if different - flaws itself.
    Last edited by Aotrs Commander; 2010-07-19 at 12:37 PM.

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    Default Re: Tell me about Rolemaster

    well my friends and I have been listening to a role master game on line and it sounds like a lot of fun. So my friend bought the three core book to RoleMaster Classic and asked me if I could run the game since everyone feels I am the best DM of the group.

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    Default Re: Tell me about Rolemaster

    Quote Originally Posted by Guinea Anubis View Post
    well my friends and I have been listening to a role master game on line and it sounds like a lot of fun. So my friend bought the three core book to RoleMaster Classic and asked me if I could run the game since everyone feels I am the best DM of the group.
    I'd say that's a bit impulsive, but I've never played a game before buying the books, so...

    If you're going to play Rolemaster just to play Rolemaster, I guess that's what you'll do - take note of the advice we've given (mainly re: swift access to tables), and go for it.

    Mind you, if the critical hits made it sound fun, The Riddle of Steel has a similar system (tables you roll on for wound results), but is an infinitely better game (in fact, it is the single RPG in the world that actually accurately models real hand-to-hand combat; and amazingly, it's also the smoothest and most tactically fun combat system in existence). Unfortunately, TROS is out of print and hard to get your hands on (although looking online certainly helps).

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    Default Re: Tell me about Rolemaster

    Quote Originally Posted by Guinea Anubis View Post
    well my friends and I have been listening to a role master game on line and it sounds like a lot of fun. So my friend bought the three core book to RoleMaster Classic and asked me if I could run the game since everyone feels I am the best DM of the group.
    Right, that's a good place to start.

    First off, bear in mind what we've said about spellcasters. They are emphatically not D&D-level, so make sure your players get that before they play one; especially in the core game!

    You probably want to consider using a fate point system (i.e. the blow that kills you doesn't kill you) if you plan on giving the PCs a bit of a shield from random death and providing the magic-using PCs with some bottom end magic items (say a spell adder and/or spell multiplier) when starting out.

    I strongly recommend, if you can find them floating around on ebay or something if you can, to try and acquire Rolemaster Companions I and II. The latter, in particular has a plethora of skills and a development point table for all the classes that is phemonimally useful. They will be fully compatible with RM Classic (as classic is just an updated version on the 2nd edition, which they are part of). RoCo I has some nice background options, which actually make casters a bit more viable (Aura, which adds 1 PP/level and Archtype, and integral PP multiplier are invaluable for making sure the spellcaster actually has some power points to do something!) as well as giving a few abilities or stat bonus boosts (basically, they're a bit like Feats that you only get at level 1.)

    Sadly, you might be out of luck for them (they're out of print), but it's worth a look just in case, it really is.

    With Classic, you've already got the best of the rest of the action sequences, so you're pretty set there.

    If you have a question, your best bet to is go to the Rolemaster forums here. (Though, of course, I'm open to ask as well, but I don't play as much as I used to.)
    Last edited by Aotrs Commander; 2010-07-19 at 06:01 PM.

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    Default Re: Tell me about Rolemaster

    Well I now have the books in my hands and I can say that I will be using a lot of optional rules.

    Still working out all the steps for making a charters.

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    Default Re: Tell me about Rolemaster

    Ok anyone have any tips or tricks on calculating the experience?

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    Default Re: Tell me about Rolemaster

    Quote Originally Posted by Aotrs Commander View Post
    ...player made one shot and rolled spectacularly, blowing the poor fool in half, with the equally-action movie oneliner "Don't. Call. Me. Norman!"
    *Glances up whistling aimlessly*

    Aotrs: Athough you said you KNEW that'd happen...

    Another point I might add about Rolemaster: Be prepared to spend A LOT of time setting up as the DM, generation of enemies takes much longer than in D&D (Actually - of all the systems I've played it takes the longest).

    As others have said above - it IS lethal, and can require quite a bit of 'fudging it' on the part of the DM as a lucky roll can wipe the party, let alone silly actions and fumbles on the part of other players. (Such as someone attempting to shoot an animate skeleton with a shotgun while someone on the other side of it is in melee with it!)

    To sum up my points - prepare, prepare and then prepare some more.

    Your first couple of games are likely to be slow (Your first combat alone should take quite a while), but persevere and it'll speed up - one of Aotrs and myself's groups can actually run at a decent speed due to our familiarity with it.

    It can be very rewarding to play with the fun of criticals (it is usually crits that kill - hence the lethality), giving you a warm feeling inside when you make another 'spectacular' kill due to the description...
    Last edited by korifugi; 2010-07-21 at 07:02 AM.

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    Default Re: Tell me about Rolemaster

    Quote Originally Posted by Guinea Anubis View Post
    Ok anyone have any tips or tricks on calculating the experience?
    What do you mean, exactly? Experience points earned during play? There's a lot of sources, but I don't think the calculations are difficult.

    Starting skill points? That's not complicated either, IIRC - you just get a certain number of points at 0th level and 1st level, based on your attributes. If you're creating characters above 1st level (do not do this the first time you create characters to play with), you make the ability increase rolls which may increase the skill points you get.

    Can you specify what you need help with?

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    Barbarian in the Playground
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    Default Re: Tell me about Rolemaster

    Th only thing better than RM's crit tables are RM's fumble tables! I'd advise taking those tables to your current favorite system, and skipping the rest. Or play MERP, which by all accounts is RM cleaned up.

    The crit/fumble tables really are nice though, where else can you get a fumble result like "character out 3 days with a pulled groin, opponent out 5 rounds laughing".
    Last edited by Skorj; 2010-07-21 at 02:04 PM.

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    Default Re: Tell me about Rolemaster

    Ah, Rolemaster! That takes me back to the good old days...

    A towering skeletal demon rises from the 4 foot high stone crypt that had contained his demented spirit. The party realizes their error too late: They had broken the seal, releasing the demon, and now it was up to them to lay it to rest again.

    The party encircled the demon, who stood beside it's burial mound. The whole party... save for me, as there just wasn't enough room to fit us all in around the horror at battle-range. And I had no spells, no useful missile weapons.

    No worries, I'll just fall back on my usual cinematics...

    ME: "I run in from the side, leaping up atop the burial crypt, so that I am now positioned behind the creature. Then as soon as I am foot-stable, I conduct a devastating back-attack!"

    DM: "What's your leaping skill?"

    ME: "Leaping skill?" *looks at list of 417 skills through several pages of character sheets, finds a palty skill level in a halfway appropriate skill*. "But didn't you say that there was rubble all around the crypt? Couldn't I just take a running half-step and propell myself up there? It's only 4 feet high, right?"

    DM: "Roll your leaping skill. I'll add in the appropriate penalties to your roll."

    ME: "Uh, ok.... How about if I do this a bit more careful. I'll rush up to the side of the crypt, away from the weapon's range of the beast, then I'll arm-lift myself up atop the crypt, stand up, and then move and engage the beast. How long will that take?"

    DM: "Roll your climbing skill."

    ME: ...

    ME: "It's only four feet high. And there is rubble I could use as steps to assist me up."

    DM: "Roll your climbing skill."

    ME: "You're serious?"

    DM: "Listen, this is the most detailed system out there; there's a reason for every skill in this book. If you didn't put enough skill points into climbing, then it's your error, not mine."

    ME: ....

    ME: "You gave us pregenerated characters."

    DM: "You could have requested modifications."

    *~*~*

    Yeah, so those days weren't so good after all.

    *~*~*

    Rolemaster, in my opinion, greatly reduced what a player can do by assigning skill checks to every possible situation, of which the players often haven't prepared for during character generation. Of course, 3rd edition and other modern systems pretty much followed suit, but I still find most DM's far more lenient than of the Rolemaster DM's of my past.

    If you want the good old days of cinematics, play AD&D.
    Quote Originally Posted by Swordguy View Post
    Casters effectively lost every weakness they had (from AD&D), and everyone else suffered for it. Since this was done as a direct result of player requests ("make magic better!"), I consider it one of the all-time best reasons NOT to listen to player requests.

    Most people wouldn't know what makes a good game if it stripped naked, painted itself purple, and jumped up on a table singing "look what a good game I am!".

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    Default Re: Tell me about Rolemaster

    Quote Originally Posted by Aroka View Post
    What do you mean, exactly? Experience points earned during play? There's a lot of sources, but I don't think the calculations are difficult.
    figuring out how much experience each person gets seams a little hard. Looks like you have to track who gives and takes crits, spells cast, and things done. There is also the fact it looks like there is experiance multipliers for stuff, like what race it was the PC killed and if its the first time they have done something.

    Or am I making it harder then it has it be?

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    Default Re: Tell me about Rolemaster

    Quote Originally Posted by Guinea Anubis View Post
    figuring out how much experience each person gets seams a little hard. Looks like you have to track who gives and takes crits, spells cast, and things done. There is also the fact it looks like there is experiance multipliers for stuff, like what race it was the PC killed and if its the first time they have done something.

    Or am I making it harder then it has it be?
    I just award a flat-out lump of Exp at the end of each adventure. I used to track things like crits delivered and recieved, but really, in the end, it's more hassle than it's worth to worry about, and unless you supplement the Exp with RPG experience anyway, you'll never get past bottom level. If you're running bought modules (if such a thing is available now), they'll give you some idea of what levels. As you'll note, the rules have a huge amount of eyeballing anyway. So just level 'em, up at a point you feel appropriate, or just eyeball assigning Exp for solving problems or killing monsters when you write the adventure (Baldur's Gate style).

    The Exp system in Rolemaster always recieved the least attention, because it kinda isn't really necessary. As the skill starts to plateau off at 4th level (i.e. ten skill ranks) and again at 9th (twenty skill ranks) aside from spell access, there's not so much difference between power levels at this point.

    It's really not worth the hassle of trying to do it by the book. It's lots of work for you for no gain. In all the RPGs I've personally encountered, only D&D (to varying amounts in it's various incarnations) came close to taking away what essentially boils down to eyeballing the rate of advancement of PCs anyway.

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    Default Re: Tell me about Rolemaster

    Quote Originally Posted by Guinea Anubis View Post
    figuring out how much experience each person gets seams a little hard. Looks like you have to track who gives and takes crits, spells cast, and things done. There is also the fact it looks like there is experiance multipliers for stuff, like what race it was the PC killed and if its the first time they have done something.

    Or am I making it harder then it has it be?
    Yep, this is true. Basically, you have to hand out experience points for events as they happen. When a PC gets hit, they get XP for the damage and the crit taken; when a PC hits, they get XP for the damage and crit caused; and so on. And XP for enemies killed, distance traveled, for skill rolls made, and for spells cast.

    The books have experience point sheets somewhere in them that help this tracking some, but I just kept a running tally in the .rtf file I used for combat notes. It never seemed terribly complicated to me - IIRC all the sources of XP fit on one page (and if they don't, just make yourself a cheat sheet).

    Or, you know, what Aotrs Commander says: ignore the experience point guidelines, give the PCs what you want. That way, they might go up more than 1 level per real year.

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    Default Re: Tell me about Rolemaster

    Another random question.

    Do spell casters start with there base lists?

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