Re: Quick summary and opinion of various RPGs

From: Liam Quin <lee_at_SQ.COM>
Date: Sun, 26 Nov 1995 15:25:11 EST


Grip G. Grip <grip_at_NETCOM.COM> wrote:
> Sandy, I wonder what you think of the ICE systems. A friend seems to
> swear by them but after trying it for three months in a campaign, I just
> dropped out.

I amn't Sandy, more redbrick :-), but...

I used Rolemaster maybe 10 or 12 years ago, in their world (extremely odd!) and also in Harn.

It doesn't work as well on Harn as Harnmaster, but HM wasn't released then.

The RM character creation is lengthy -- it took me an average of over four hours to create each player character, in a one-on-one session. I think the longest was over 12 hours.

I use a similar scheme with HM, though: you start with (say) an 8-year-old boy, and advance him a year at a time, occasionally stopping for a brief mini-adventure or describing people important to him at that time, and giving the player lots of opportunities to affect character development. The result is players with strong and intimate knowledge of their characters.

The RM skill system and combat are very good. Using RM with the Harn Magick system wouldn't be too hard, I suppose, although Ars Magica has a lot of promise in this area too.

RM has a lot of rules and rules supplements.

My own game system, A4, that I have used for my own world, has almost no rules at all -- just some guidelines for creating a character. But then, I've never had a combat in that world :-)

There's a lot of background for RM, but a lot of it is specific to the ICE worlds. The artifacts, for example, are at best things that a mage might read of in an Earthmaster library, were such things to exist. The castles are utterly pointless, in that you can't get in, they are impervious to magick, or are guarded, have traps that wil kill any beginning character (and most intermediate characters) immediately, etc. You need to run their scenarios with careful, paranoid players and a lot of intrigue, I imagine.

There are some very good ideas, though, in the game mechanics: * skill improvement is good, as is the combination of character classes and   proficiency costs; it's a little complex, though, trying to model the   idea that learning related skills gets easier. * the open-ended success rolls, where if you get a 95-00, you re-roll   and add, and if you get 95-00 again, repeat... same with 01-05, except   then you go -ve...
* the combat tables do have little pieces of detail on them, which can help.

Frankly, though, it's relatively hard to extend the system, and anyone with enough imagination to GM well can invent the combat details, especially with a system like HM that gives hit locations.

I'd say that there is no question in my mind that the best system for use on Harn is HM, but where you are prepared to ignore any rules that happen to be incovenient at any time. The rules are to help the GM.

Lee


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