Rolemaster Ruleset In action
No, I do not have a Youtube video, or any desire to make one. But here is my review of the Rolemaster ruleset after making characters and running through a pair of adventures with my normal gaming group.
I picked up a copy of the Rolemaster ruleset at GenCon. My first RPG was Rolemaster, at the time I was coming from a historical wargaming background and the rules did not seem very complex - relatively speaking. Having said that, I still remember the pen-and-paper game sessions that were nothing but character creation, or the 5-rounds of combat that took several hours to complete. In college I was introduced to AD&D and the Rolemaster books were retired to gather dust for a long time. I first read about the Rolemaster ruleset about two days before GenCon, when I checked on these forums to see if Smiteworks/Digital Adventures was going to be there. Nostalgia swept in and I decided that the Rolemaster ruleset was on my "Gencon must buy" list.
So how does the Ruleset work:
Character Creation: When you first start a character, I recommend you open "Character Law" and follow the "Character Creation Walkthrough." This is a single point of reference for almost every chart and table you will need to create a character. This speeds up the process immensely. It had been probably 15 years since I had made a character using the Rolemaster ruleset and thanks to that one section I was able to crank one out in less than 30 minutes.
Follow the instructions on the character creation guide. The one thing I have to stress the most is * take advantage of the automation.* If you type in your profession name correctly when it comes time to fill in skills, you can drag and drop them from the skill charts and it will fill in the development costs and stats for you. Better yet, just drag and drop the profession and race from the chart over to your character sheet and watch everything fill in for you.
Once stats have been generated, development points are calculated for you. Assuming you have followed the "drag and drop" advice from above, you can bring up the skill sheet and just drag and drop the skills from the sheets onto your character sheet. The only skills you will need to change at all are your weapon skills, by picking out the appropriate skill and putting in the stats as appropriate for that type. For instance, if your cheapest weapon skill is going to be "One Handed Slashing" you need to change "Weapon 1" to "One Handed Slashing" and type in the stats that it uses. One important thing here is that all the skills you "drag and drop" are locked. You cannot edit them until you unlock them by clicking on the skill name and toggling the "lock" icon in the upper right hand corner between "lock" and "unlock."
So you have made it through the stat gain, adolescent skill development, apprenticeship development, picked up your power points, hit points, and so on. Now what?
Well, this is where the nice Character Creation guide fails you somewhat.
On the "Combat" tab you can insert your armor type and it will fill in the rest of it for you, which is nice.
In "Arms Law" you can find the weapon tables, so you can drag and drop the weapons from the Arms Law charts to your character sheet. Two really important things to note here:
(1) After getting used to all the automation in the ruleset, it does not fill in your offensive bonus, so you have to do that yourself.
(2) If you are planning on using your new shiny weapon in combat you must check the "Use" button on the far right hand side.
Spells can be dragged from "Spell Law" onto your character sheet and they will fill in as appropriate, there is a convenient column for spell gain and a double click will roll the die for you.
Inventory can be filled in and you are ready to go. There is no convenient drag and drop or automation for inventory as yet.
Non-combat situations:
The ruleset works just like any other Fantasy Grounds one in this regard. I did not see any fancy bells and whistles, but everything works.
Combat:
Combat works great. There are a few tricks to get it setup, but being able to one click resolve attacks with Rolemaster is a huge benefit. If I had a pen-and-paper Rolemaster group I would probably use Fantasy Grounds and the Rolemaster ruleset to resolve combat over manual chart lookups.
When a character targets a token (monster, etc.), in the combat tracker that token becomes their new target for all their attacks. (What attacks does a character have...well, remember that statement about "Use" on the combat tab during character creation? If your character has no attacks, you probably forgot that step.)
Tricky part #1, as of right now it seems that the only way for characters to make attacks is if the GM shares out the Combat Tracker sheet. Fear not! The default is that only friendly (Green-face) characters show up on the version of the combat tracker the players see. This usually means that the players can all see each others' combat data, but they cannot see any combat data for neutral or enemy creatures.
Tricky part #2, it seems that every time the GM changes something on the combat tracker and hits the "Update Shared sheet" button, it resets all the non-friendly tokens in the area to "invisible." So if you are the GM and hit the "Update Shared Sheet" and the players all claim the monsters went invisible...this is why. You only have to update the shared sheet if a new friendly creature is added, a token changes, or some oddity occurs. Most items on the combat tracker update automatically and do not cause this problem.
Awesome part #1: So the character clicks on the appropriate attack against their selected target and the program rolls the dice. The ruleset will automatically make any adjustments for fatigue, injury, combat penalties, and whatever else and then give you a result.
Awesome part #2: On the GM screen, the attack chart will pop up, cross-reference the attack result against the target's Armor Type, and give you a nicely highlighted result showing the damage and critical, if any.
Tricky part #3: The table lookup may take a long time. I was able to drop the table lookup time from 15 seconds per roll down to 3 seconds per roll by changing the GM preference to "Yes" for the option "Resolve Clears Stack" and then using the radial menu to do a forced-lookup of the result.
Tricky part #4: I will call this a "feature." Sometimes (so far less than 10%) combat rolls will not propagate correctly on the attack chart. In this situation you sometimes have to manually look up the results in the Arms Law tables because I have not figured out a way to transfer the missing attack roll to the attack table.
Awesome part #3: You scored a critical! Great! The GM uses the Radial menu to "Resolve X crit" This will pop up the appropriate critical chart. You can then roll against it and drag and drop the results onto the chat log. The GM can fill in any penalty, bleed, must parry, stun, etc. results right into the combat tracker. Why is this important? Because at the end of the round the ruleset will automatically apply any bleed damage, reduce any durations, and will also apply any attack or other penalties to a character's (or monster's) actions.
So you have made it past the tricky parts and are really enjoying the awesome parts? Great. You will be amazed at how fast combat flows in Rolemaster with the ruleset.
I ran a session with myself as the GM and 3 players. We did the good old RPG trope of "make characters, have them all meet in a tavern, bar brawl breaks out" for our first session. The fact that we made all of our characters, went through the process of setting up the bar scene, and fought a 10 round combat between the 3 PCs and a series of random NPCs in about 2 hours should tell you how helpful and easy this ruleset makes the Rolemaster system to use.
The ruleset also comes with the complete text of Character Law, Spell Law, Arms Law, and Creature Law. Meaning that if you are interested in the ruleset but do not have the books, or you have since lost your Rolemaster books, you can still play because everything you need is a few mouse clicks away. The easy access to charts and sections of the books makes playing - in my experience - much faster than the old pen-and-paper days of Rolemaster.
I recommend it for all the Rolemaster fans or anyone interested in the system, it is nicely self-contained. The few quirks are more than offset by all the benefits. If nothing else, having the critical hit and fumble charts on hand for easy adoption into your normal system is fun. After all, scoring a "C" Crush crit with your mace tends to be much more satisfying than just rolling an extra damage die or two.
