Wizard's Lair

I think that it is best if I repeat this here. ICE is not planning a revision of Rolemaster, nor is it even planning on planning a revision at this time.

However, this does not stop stop me from musing and thinking, and hashing out my own thoughts and ideas on the topic, and that is what this is – a mental exercise exploring possibilities.

My idea for revising RMC/RMX into Rolemaster Xpress (RX) isn’t all that radical, I think. I would take elements from both RMC and RMFRP, and the issues of Express Additions that ICE has released so far. And combine them in a method that I think would be a bit more balanced and a bit simpler than the current rules.

I guess that the best thing to do would be to give an overview of what I picture for each section.

Races

For the core races, I figured Human, Dwarf, Gnome, and Wood Elf. One of the things that I see as an issue among the races in current versions of Rolemaster is that they are not well balanced, not even closely balanced to one another. Many races have special abilities and these are not even well defined, let alone codified.

So, for the races, I would want to use the Revised Races rules from Express Additions #13. This way the races will be roughly balanced at least. Each race, even humans, would have some special abilities or features that make them unique and desirable to play.

Professions

Here is where I have the most confusion and/or indecision. The trouble is that we don’t want to over whelm new players, and I am referring to players who are new to Rolemaster in general, with too many choices, but we also don’t want to give them too few choices either.

Of course, we would have 3 non spell using professions (Fighter, Rogue, and Thief). I figure that the Warrior Monk could be saves for the “Character Law” product.

The question, however, is how many magic using professions to include. Rolemaster has 3 magical realms, so that would mean at least 3 pure magical professions. The question is, do we make them specific professions (such as Cleric and Magician and Mentalist), or do we make them generic professions such as Priest, Mage, and Mentat, and just provide a generic Folio for each of the three (in addition to Open and Closed Spell Lists for each realm)?

As for Semi-spell users, I am torn between including them or not. If we do, then we need to have the following: Either a Paladin or Champion (should be a match for the pur spell user of channeling) for Channeling; A Warrior Mage (or Elemental Warrior) for Essence; A Monk for Mentalism

The trick is going to be to find the right balance of professions and potential capabilities.

I like the idea of going with the customizable professions and Folios because that will allow for more choices overall, and requires us to introduce less actual professions. Introducing new Folios would be much easier, and we could then have a Channeling Necromancer, a Essence Necromancer, and Mentalism Necromancer, just by introduct a Necromancer Folio for each realm.

However, for Channeling, even if we do the Priest, we should limit ourselves to only a single Folio, for a priest of a powerful deity (i.e. the most common one found in the setting we make for this version of RM).

Perhaps figure out a way to create customized professions for the non-spell users as well. Give a basic type, and then allow the selection ofa background option of some sort to specialize the profession. Nick Caldwell did something like this for some of the HARP Sci Fi professions. I wonder if it could work for RM?

Skills

I figure about 30 skills will be able to cover all of the bases for what is needed. Of course, there will be a number of big bucket skills that are meantto be specialized when taken (i.e. Craft and Lore skills). But we should also be thinking in that direction in other areas as well.

Combat for example. Currently, RM has 4 skills for learning how to wear armor. 4 different skills that do the exact same thing, teach you how to move while wearing extra weight. Why not combine them into a single skill, and also allow it to cover encumbrance as well (or at least part of encumbrance).

And for the combat skills, have melee combat and ranged combat. Treat them as big bucket skills as well, where each requires you to learn a group of related weapons (this is actually how both HARP and the options from Combat Companion work). Include rules for related weapon groups, etc..

Martial Arts skills would be 2 specific skills, Basic and Advanced, and Advanced would have Adrenal Defense built into it. And both skills would have to be specialized by the type of Martial Art (Strikes, sweeps, grappling). This gives us 6 potential skills rather than RMC’s current total of 13 (since Adrenal Defense is completely separate.

Additionally, we would give every skill 3 stats, and instead of being averaged, the stats would be added (smaller stat bonuses, just like RMFRP).

Spell Lists would also be learned as skill. The issue here, however, is that certain professions will only be able to learn spells up to a given level, regardless of how many ranks they have in the spell list.

Another issue is the Directed Spell skill – with spell lists as skills, do we need this skill? Why not just use the spell list skill? Why require an additional skill at all?

Body Development would need to use the RMX version, keep things simple.

Magic

Definitely make the Base PP option part of the core. Additionally, I would also use the Fast PP Regen option, allowing for PP to be treated more like magical exhaustion points. You rest, you recover them. Of course, they wouldn’t recover as quickly as normal exhaustion points, unless we reworked those to be similar to PP in nature as well.

Why should PP be tied solely to one realm, why not have it be tied to exhaustion, and then have the “source” of this power be completely separate. Something to seriously think about…

Combat

I am all in favor of dropping the standard 20 Armor Types. They are not flexible, they are not even really needed. We could go with a smaller, more flexible set of armor rules that gives us 6 different types of armor, and still allows for most, if not all of the RMC/RMFRP ATs to be replicated.

This gives us smaller attack tables, and thus would make it easier to create a different attack table for each weapon. Critical tables could be handled as they are in RMX, or even have them done like in Arms Law. Or we could do 5 column crit tables for the different weapon groups, and still have the generics for other things Lots of options here.

For the core book, however, I think it would be best to go with something like the attack and critical table in Express Additions #14. Small, flexible, and still pretty robust as well.

Monsters

The core book should have a decent selection of Monsters. There is a set of 2 tables in the RMC Arms Law with a lot of animals and monsters on it, add a page or two of additional explanatory text, and that would be plenty to get going with.

Treasure

I like the current treasure tables from RMX. They would work almost unchanged.

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To recap, the biggest changes I am proposing are in the stat bonuses, the stats for the skills, how races are defined, and the professions to be offered.

These things don’t really change the core of Rolemaster, but they do work to update it and make it more modern, IMO.