Thank you very much for actually knowing what your talking about as you review Rolemaster. Thank you for making the point over and over that it’s really not that hard and that there really isn’t that many charts! Thank you sir. Nice job🎉
Played in two awesome Rolemaster first edition campaigns back in the ’80s. One was generic fantasy and the other was based on Gor. We loved the system because combat was exciting and you could do anything with it. Many great memories.
Would definitely like to see Character Law and Spell Law for 'Classic'. Been a long time since grok'ing RM for me. Didn't have too many issues understanding it, but I recall the layout being a bit messy in the old ones. Notably Character Law, iirc.
I agree. It was the first time I had seen such a comprehensive and different approach to magic use and the first time I had seen character options for things like sorcerer and necromancer. Had me hooked.
I have been in-love with Rolemaster for 4 decades. Single best system ever in my opinion. Finding willing players has been the challenge, however. People tend to love it or hate it, but seldom have no opinion. RM has influenced so many other RPGs like D&D 3/3.5 that I count it among the most important milestones in RPG development. As with nearly everything, YMMV
I agree that people thought traditional RM was complex because they took one look at the tables and assumed that loads of big tables equals complexity, but it was actually quicker because of the pre-prepared tables, not slower.
Excellent summary! RM does have an undeserved reputation for crunchiness overall, but you must admit that XP accumulation in the RAW is fairly cumbersome. :) While my fave has been RMSS, I also appreciate the (slightly) abbreviated versions of the system found in products like MERP and CyberSpace (a SpaceMaster spin-off game). IMHO one of the RPG 'Greats' that introduced a number of rules concepts that became industry standards.
D&D's magic system is my least favorite part of a game system I don't particularly favor in the first place. There's a number of third party replacements for it.
Super timing. I'm hoping to run RM Classic in the coming couple of months. If you use Fantasy Grounds VTT it automates a lot of the "crunch" as well - not that RM Classic is that crunchy. It just runs all the dice rolls and chart lookups.
Rolemaster combat for a player wasn't too bad*, but for a GM it could be a serious pain in the hindermost parts. As a PC, you're likely to have a very limited number of weapons to use, along with the associated critical tables. As a GM, you need all the tables, and finding the right table in a complex combat rapidly becomes onerous. Further, while the first time through the critical tables was entertaining, there were too many "cute" descriptions that quickly became tedious for us. * Caveat: Games with long character creation processes and high lethality have an inherent problem unless you really like the game of character creation. And all it takes is a roll of 66 (normally a disabling hit that requires high-level magic to fix) or 100 (usually a kill "... dies after one round of intense agony" for instance) on nearly any critical table to start the character creation process again.
It's not that RM was hard to learn it's that it was unplayable as written. You had to house-rule the hell out of it to make it workable. The potential and temporary traits going up and down every level (and levels came cheap and fast) and having to average them for all your skills each time... I only played the first edition so maybe they cleaned that up later but if you went "by the book" (for 1e at least) every other session was just updating your character sheet. For the weapon tables I just picked one for each general class (1-handed edged, 2-handed blunt, et al) and made specific weapon modifiers in the margin.
I preferred Rolemaster to AD&D as it seemed more realistic to me. Some of the weapons and armor classes in D&D don't make any sense. I liked the fact that character creation covered teenage years and level 0 for example.
Thank you very much for actually knowing what your talking about as you review Rolemaster.
Thank you for making the point over and over that it’s really not that hard and that there really isn’t that many charts!
Thank you sir. Nice job🎉
Played in two awesome Rolemaster first edition campaigns back in the ’80s. One was generic fantasy and the other was based on Gor. We loved the system because combat was exciting and you could do anything with it. Many great memories.
The first RP I played was Rolemaster back in the 90's. Had so much fun. I honestly miss it.
Would definitely like to see Character Law and Spell Law for 'Classic'.
Been a long time since grok'ing RM for me. Didn't have too many issues understanding it, but I recall the layout being a bit messy in the old ones. Notably Character Law, iirc.
I agree. It was the first time I had seen such a comprehensive and different approach to magic use and the first time I had seen character options for things like sorcerer and necromancer. Had me hooked.
I have been in-love with Rolemaster for 4 decades. Single best system ever in my opinion. Finding willing players has been the challenge, however. People tend to love it or hate it, but seldom have no opinion. RM has influenced so many other RPGs like D&D 3/3.5 that I count it among the most important milestones in RPG development. As with nearly everything, YMMV
I agree that people thought traditional RM was complex because they took one look at the tables and assumed that loads of big tables equals complexity, but it was actually quicker because of the pre-prepared tables, not slower.
Excellent summary! RM does have an undeserved reputation for crunchiness overall, but you must admit that XP accumulation in the RAW is fairly cumbersome. :)
While my fave has been RMSS, I also appreciate the (slightly) abbreviated versions of the system found in products like MERP and CyberSpace (a SpaceMaster spin-off game).
IMHO one of the RPG 'Greats' that introduced a number of rules concepts that became industry standards.
I’m hopeful for a Spell Law video. I keep looking for a part or wholesale replacement for D&D’s magic system!
D&D's magic system is my least favorite part of a game system I don't particularly favor in the first place. There's a number of third party replacements for it.
Super timing. I'm hoping to run RM Classic in the coming couple of months. If you use Fantasy Grounds VTT it automates a lot of the "crunch" as well - not that RM Classic is that crunchy. It just runs all the dice rolls and chart lookups.
Rolemaster combat for a player wasn't too bad*, but for a GM it could be a serious pain in the hindermost parts. As a PC, you're likely to have a very limited number of weapons to use, along with the associated critical tables. As a GM, you need all the tables, and finding the right table in a complex combat rapidly becomes onerous.
Further, while the first time through the critical tables was entertaining, there were too many "cute" descriptions that quickly became tedious for us.
* Caveat: Games with long character creation processes and high lethality have an inherent problem unless you really like the game of character creation. And all it takes is a roll of 66 (normally a disabling hit that requires high-level magic to fix) or 100 (usually a kill "... dies after one round of intense agony" for instance) on nearly any critical table to start the character creation process again.
It's not that RM was hard to learn it's that it was unplayable as written. You had to house-rule the hell out of it to make it workable. The potential and temporary traits going up and down every level (and levels came cheap and fast) and having to average them for all your skills each time... I only played the first edition so maybe they cleaned that up later but if you went "by the book" (for 1e at least) every other session was just updating your character sheet.
For the weapon tables I just picked one for each general class (1-handed edged, 2-handed blunt, et al) and made specific weapon modifiers in the margin.
I preferred Rolemaster to AD&D as it seemed more realistic to me. Some of the weapons and armor classes in D&D don't make any sense. I liked the fact that character creation covered teenage years and level 0 for example.
Noooooo!
I fell asleep when the chart deep dive occurred.