Desperately need mentoring

[Frunobulax]

Hi - I'm about to start an FG/RMC campaign, and I thought I understood how FG works, but I am failing badly in my testing before the campaign starts. I'm having serious trouble with simple things like setting up encounters, adding creatures and players to the map, and running a simple combat. The only videos available are so old that they are more or less useless since they do not match the current version.

I thought I knew what I was doing, but I was wrong. I have a campaign that I promised to start in a few days! Is there anyone who knows the RMC ruleset well enough to walk me through setting stuff up and running a basic combat? Who might be willing to spend an hour with me showing me how to do this stuff? I'd be seriously appreciative! I'm pretty confused, the simple things i expected to work, like dragging monster onto a map, are not working.

Please help! Thanks!

[kevinbalentine]

I think I might be able to help you with some of this. I've been able to successfully do all of those things for a campaign I'm running soon.

[Trenloe]

I'm pretty confused, the simple things i expected to work, like dragging monster onto a map, are not working.
The golden rule for Fantasy Grounds - drag monsters and PCs to the combat tracker first. Give them tokens, if they don't have them already. Then drag the assigned token from each creature on the combat tracker to the map.

Everything needs to be linked through the combat tracker, so make sure you follow the above process.

Hopefully kevinbalentine will be able to provide a session to go through things in more depth, but thought I'd mention this golden rule. :)

[JohnD]

One more thing to note. RMC is probably one of the most memory intensive ruleset FG has. Taking the same approach to running a game as you do in other rulesets may be problematic. So, this means not piling on a lot of shared maps, minimizing your tokens, etc....

I will also note that the ruleset has aged a little poorly over the past 3-ish years IMO as it does not have a lot of the advances that other rulesets based off of CORERPG and/or more popular rulesets, which I personally think is a shame.

My experience/opinion anyways... back to lurking. :bandit:

[Trenloe]

I will also note that the ruleset has aged a little poorly over the past 3-ish years IMO as it does not have a lot of the advances that other rulesets based off of CORERPG and/or more popular rulesets, which I personally think is a shame.
Yes, it's a shame it's missing some of the CoreRPG bells-and-whistles, but this should not put people off. It's perfectly playable and will save you hours - literally, with the automation of table lookups, etc.. It makes playing RMC a joy!

I make this statement because I've been seeing more and more posts from people saying a ruleset is "unplayable" because it doesn't have things that people are used to in CoreRPG based rulesets - like resize handles on windows (use CTRL+drag to resize), no encounters, etc., etc..

[hawkwind]

it is certainly playable still and once you get the hang of it its quite easy run and prep for but the memory issues johnD mentioned are are continual problem, just save your campaign regularly and don;t have tomany maps or token modules loaded or the ruleset will crash on you

[Frunobulax]

Kevin did in fact help me out a lot, in fact he joined my new campaign. Thanks Kevin!

[Frunobulax]

Well I have 16GB of memory, but most of that won't be accessible until the 64-bit Unity version comes out. Thanks for the tip. I certainly agree that it is far from "unplayable" - what's there is great and works fine. But yes, it does lack a lot of the bells and whistles of other rulesets. I don't blame Dakadin, he seems to be working very hard, and only has a limited amount of spare time to do it in. If I "blame" anyone it is Smiteworks for not having at least one full-time employee/developer working on it and instead depending on a volunteer. After all, this is something you sell - for money. This is an actual product and not a shared/community thing. Thus players have a reasonable expectation that it will get some official support and improvements from the company. I'm not angry, but I admit I'm disappointed. Why not just Hire Dakadin, or someone to help him?

[Trenloe]

@dglinder - the response I've given you already remains the same: https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forums/showthread.php?38706-BASH-Scripting-Help-Request&p=344250&viewfull=1#post344250

As I mention in that post, hiring someone full time is just no feasible, for RMC or any of the other non-mainstream products. If the RMC ruleset was broken (i.e. errors, the original functionality doesn't work, etc.) then SmiteWorks would take steps to remedy that. But it is not broken. The issue is that it needs some documentation updates and the expectation of new purchasers managing.

Changing the RMC ruleset to be layered on top of CoreRPG (to get a lot of what people now think is the "norm") would take well in excess of 100 hours of work. This ruleset, and most others, will *never* give a return on that.

If SmiteWorks changed it's model to use professional, not community developers, then they'd either go under, or all you'd see is D&D 5E or Pathfinder products. That is the simple truth. If you want to continue seeing non-mainstream products in Fantasy Grounds, then the current model of using community developers who get a small royalty on sales of the FG products they convert is the only way. Unfortunately, what this does mean is that community developers can't devote large amounts of time to the work, or their real-life situation changes and they move on/spend less time doing FG development.

[Frunobulax]

Trenloe, thank you for your response. I understand. Running a small game company is hard and you do need a return on your investment. If I knew Lua I would help out! Dakadin did mention to me that he is working on changing the ruleset over to CoreRPG. I hope he is able to move that along.

[Trenloe]

Just in case you didn't realise - I don't work for SmiteWorks in any capacity.

[Frunobulax]

I gathered that from your responses ;-)

[Dakadin]

Trenloe mentioned in his linked thread that he would be surprised if the RMC ruleset sold more than 100 copies. In the 5 years I've been working on it, it has definitely sold more than that. But to put things in perspective, working one hour at my regular job is about the equivalent of what I get quarterly for developing the ruleset. This isn't something you do if you are trying to make money. It just isn't feasible. Smiteworks community developer approach gives a small bonus for those helping with official products.

I do it to try to make RMC games run smoother. The ruleset is the best way I've seen to actually play Rolemaster. It doesn't have the character creation tools of something like ERA but actually playing it speeds up most of the tedious things related to running Rolemaster (Yes, there are a few of those still in the ruleset). I would like to to be as smooth as possible for GMs to run their games.

I am not a professional developer. I only really have scripting experience and it was a slow process figuring out this ruleset. I just started out developing an extension that help myself and other doing things a little bit better. Eventually I ended up being the official developer because they didn't have one.

The switch to CoreRPG is essentially a complete rebuild. You can use some of the existing code but most of it needs to be cleaned up and redone. The items in particular have given me headaches because of how they were originally implemented. This complicates things because I have to maintain backwards compatibility.

Hopefully this helps.

[vodokar]

For those that have never volunteered in doing an FG ruleset, a thousand words of explanation will not suffice, and for those that have, no words are necessary. We grok the sacrifice given and simply give thanks.

[Trenloe]

Trenloe mentioned in his linked thread that he would be surprised if the RMC ruleset sold more than 100 copies. In the 5 years I've been working on it, it has definitely sold more than that.
I'm very pleased to hear that. :)

[Frunobulax]

I am not a professional developer. I only really have scripting experience and it was a slow process figuring out this ruleset. I just started out developing an extension that help myself and other doing things a little bit better. Eventually I ended up being the official developer because they didn't have one.

The switch to CoreRPG is essentially a complete rebuild. You can use some of the existing code but most of it needs to be cleaned up and redone. The items in particular have given me headaches because of how they were originally implemented. This complicates things because I have to maintain backwards compatibility.

Dakadin, we are super grateful for any work you do. I'm so glad there is at least one person working on it. Whatever time you can squeeze into your life for it is appreciated. Real Life(tm) comes first!

[Ardem]

Your talking too much Dakadin, get back to working. Doing rulesets are easy, 5 minutes is all you need:p

On a side note I think Dakadin is easing off from doing it at the moment because every time those upstarts :D doing Core make a change, then 3/10 your going to have to modify the ruleset to accommodate the change (or at the very least pour over the code testing it). I would not be looking at porting RMC until they eased off the Core changes (although that might be never). I rather see them go into quarterly cycles now not adhoc cycles.

I love Moon and the guys for what they do, but there is a little of me that hates them too ;)

[Dakadin]

Your talking too much Dakadin, get back to working. Doing rulesets are easy, 5 minutes is all you need:p


LOL. Good point. I probably could have completed the ruleset in the time it took me to write that post. ;)

[GunnarGreybeard]

At some point, before I get too old, I would love to be involved in an RMC game but not something time will allow these days. RM was my goto game back in the 80's and I still have my original paper rules somewhere.

[Dakadin]

At some point, before I get too old, I would love to be involved in an RMC game but not something time will allow these days. RM was my goto game back in the 80's and I still have my original paper rules somewhere.

I hope you find a game and the time to play it. Some of your posts were what convinced me to purchase Fantasy Grounds. :D

[GunnarGreybeard]

I hope you find a game and the time to play it. Some of your posts were what convinced me to purchase Fantasy Grounds. :D

Wow, who knew that would pay off into having someone do work on the ruleset. :bandit:

[vodokar]

5 minutes is all you need:p



Actually, "All you need is Love!" ;)

[Baron Von Mandrick]

I had some materials for Rolemaster when they came out in the 80's but never had the chance to actually play or really learn the system. I always loved the idea, but just never had the opportunity to play.

Fastforward to now with a schedule which frequently has no offtime and occasionally has an exceptional amount of freetime, I decided I would use one of my periods of freetime to try and figure out RMC. I bought the system and a few of the supplements through Fantasy Grounds. It took me a little bit, but I was actually able to figure out character creation with the help of published tutorials, and videos. It wasn't as hard as I thought it was going to be. Then I tried to set up a few test combats and encounters to see how combat worked. It was a blast. I was able to have characters target creatures and play out a combat. I loved it.

I did that without being anywhere close to an expert at FG or anything computer oriented. I'm really greteful that I was able to have my first exploration in RMC, and it was because of the work done here. That's what made it possible giving my schedule and limited technological ability.

I haven't played in an actual campaign yet, but I will say that from my limited experience, the existing products make it easier to play RMC. I am excited by the idea that there will be more features available at some point in the future.

I understand that not every feature in some of the other systems is available in RMC at the moment. But that doesn't in any way take away from how advantageous it is to use what already exists. What does exist is a big help, and makes things easier, in my opinion. Maybe it isn't perfect, but nobody should be turned off from using what exists.

Of course, since I have only done things that I've set up myself and not really played in a group, yet, I'm not 100% positive I've done it exactly correct. But even if I have made mistakes they are much fewer and more minor than they would have been had I only used the physically published materials.