Punchline is, I’d love to talk to you offline Eladan as you and I are probably doing similar things and can brainstorm, even if ultimately for two different systems.
No clue how to “PM” someone on this blog thingy. My handle on the regular RM ICE forums (https://ironcrown.co.uk/ICEforums/) is knasman.
]]>Your skills spreadsheet is gorgeous. Looks like you took a lot of care in building it. Are you backing all that with scripts to automate/validate things? Do you use this in place of a VTT and use it for in person games?
As for how our skill specializations work I think it is pretty much inline with what you are doing. Our main goals were to (1) reduce the total number of “filler” skills causing players to sink dev points for no good reason, (2) allow characters, that may not have a lot of spare points to specialize, to still have a useful skill in something generic without adding “similar skills” complexity math. We only have a few of these groupings, since like you said, some skills are indeed sufficiently different to warrant a separate investment. We call those “General Skills” for lack of a better word and it includes things like Appraisal, Cookery, First Aid, Lip Reading, etc. Basically those flourishes for a player to make their character more unique if they have DP to spare.
For the ones that do stack (i.e. specialize), it is the usual suspects: Lore, Crafting, Athletics, and Perception. Our total skill count is ~60 and of these, 19 of them are for specialization only.
For Lore there is a General Lore skill that lets someone fill in the blanks of their common world knowledge or background with random facts they may have read or heard through study. Then specializations skills include Monsters, Demons, Unlife, Engineering, Materials, Nature, Poison, Religion, and Mystical. The DM/player can add anything they want if needed for the campaign setting. Each of these deep dive categories can only have 1 rank bought per level. The skill is added on top of the General one. Right now it gives a large upper hand to lower level players, which seems fine to us. But the cost is high enough no one can afford to take many of the special categories (except perhaps a Bard or someone really into lore/knowledge/history). Again, if the party came across a Demon in an ancient temple and everyone rolled double open ended high but only had General Lore, there is only so much they could possibly know without having N ranks in the specialization. The student of Demonology would then have a chance to know distinct powers and weaknesses of the demon (with a good enough roll).
For Athletics (which is also a generic skill) you can then deep dive into Climbing, Swimming, Acrobatics, etc. Again, someone who is sufficiently Athletic, can climb things fine or swim well enough. But for those certain circumstance where only specific study will do (ex: diving into a rough ocean surf near a rocky cliff to get into a cave) then specialization is needed.
The thing we haven’t fully worked out yet are detailed Tiers per general vs specialization skill. We’ve done some custom ones to see how it feels and it is tedious (for the DM) but seems to work well. We’re slowly working on solidifying the rules to make them less subjective/arbitrary.
Note for Perception, though it is a generic skill, we actually removed ALL perception related specializations for now. We had streetwise, lie detection, etc in there but we’ve slowly been moving away from RNG rolls on such things and instead forcing the players to role play it out and the DM usually rules in favor of the character’s action. It’s more fun. I never liked skills for acting, diplomacy, etc … better to make the character work for it.
Last thing I’ll say, is we went to roughly the same tiering system for skill costs as Peter uses in Navigator RPG. It’s much cleaner and makes more sense to have core (1/3), preferred (2/4), basic (3/5), unusual (5/7), rare (7/10), and restricted (12/15) skills per class. This all tied into our gutting of all classes in Rolemaster and making 12 core classes from scratch (with nearly 45 “ascendancies”). It was nice to fix a lot of the old RMC stuff. Like a fighter that can actually, easily, learn all the weapons they wish. What a novel concept! And we balanced the “roles” for classes such that the DP sinks are nearly balanced between various archetypes. It’s still all work in progress but has been rewarding. Can talk about that some other time … but all tied into the reasoning behind skill updates!
]]>The screenshot is of my the Spells tab of my character sheet for this mod, done in Google Docs. You can see that it shows the spell names with the corresponding DP costs to learn. The trees themselves I’ve been converting into a massive document from various versions of Spell Law, Rolemaster Companions, and the like, using RMU as the most recent basis for power levels. Each page has a tree with all the possible spells, as well as scaling options for each spell. Lots of work to do still, but making good progress. Only a handful of professions left to convert (plenty of “universal” lists left to do though).
I think I understand what you’re doing with your skill system and I believe mine is similar. I think it bridges the gap between the high specialization of RM and the generic feeling of D&D from just rolling “[Skill]” for anything [skill] related. Here’s a screenshot of how I laid it out:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1lv8MhO7JpzuFLrYOUKb0u9K2Tyynz0pL/view?usp=drive_link
The premise in this example is that you can develop generalized skill in Environment, augmented by specialized development in Navigation, Piloting, etc, similar to what you mentioned you were doing. Below that you can see I have the “Inspirational” (read Artistic) category, which is one of several categories with skills that don’t have generalized options because they are sufficiently different to warrant specialization (a sculptor might not be a good painter).
I’d be interested to see your examples and compare notes!
]]>I couldn’t agree more that lists with fillers feel kind of bad. It’s better to give casters the options to generalize or specialize. Seems like you are handling that well.
I’d love to here about your skill approach as well. We have homebrew’d a new skill system that uses something similar sounding. We basically have a general skill for say lore, or crafting, or athletics. Then specialization skills that “stack”. Single ranks only for the specializations per level: ex: I can have 6 ranks in general lore, but then 3 stacking ranks in demonology. In addition, the specializations make it so you can more directly access higher tiers of success (ex: in the case of demon lore, you could actually know the name of the demon you come across, but only if you specialized AND rolled success). It’s hard to explain but easy to implement.
Back to the spell system, I’d love to hear more about it. We’re also presently rewriting the whole thing in our game to make it blend better with the world setting. Which is tricky. But fun. But time consuming. Why do we all do this to ourselves!?!
]]>One question I had about pass/fail on a cast is: In your example, if Barry rolled a total of 80 (after adding all mods) does the spell “fail”, or does the defender get a bonus of +20 to their roll?
Not accounting for level is a bit odd, although your ranks in the skill by their very nature are indeed level gated so perhaps it works out. Having a “defense” skill is a nice balance too.
The one thing I battle with is “feel” in three situations: (1) low level play, (2) high level play, and (3) lower level vs higher level combat. For low level play, what is an acceptable RNG for pass/fail? Is 50-50 OK? Does that feel good for a player? Likewise in high level play does it max out at say 90-10 for pass/fail chance? Or stay 50-50? And for a low level vs high level player (in the case where that matters like a spell cast/resist) is there a certain odds one would expect?
For sure the old RMC system for Base Spells is a complete mess with huge non-linearities and odds against the player. It seems like your system is much better.
I have been leaning towards a “partial success” type system … spells do “something” (they resist your sleep but cause them to hesitate while shaking it off and suffer -25 on their next init roll), poison has “some” effect (ex: you resist but are fatigued a bit as your body fights it off and are at -10 for N rounds), etc. Mainly to keep things “dangerous” but also to let players feel like they are not blowing their turn when it finally comes around. Nothing worse than a huge battle and you “miss” and have 0 effect.
]]>Our group was often known for getting away with things that we really had no business getting away with. Flubbing a stealthy version of a prison break and resorting to simply fighting our way in and back out the front door. Stuff like that.
We’d run into a Nazgul earlier in the game and barely made it out alive by going full defensive and reteating.
So, a player who is a standard member is playing with us for the first time in the Middle Eart campaign. Warrior Monk character.
One of the characters in the room grabs the Phial of Galadriel. Two secret doors open to either side of the room and TWO Nazgul step out.
As the player who hadn’t face one before says ‘I ready my staff’ the other four players, in near perfect unison, say ‘I run.’
We’re running down stairs, teleporting, literally jumping out windows.
The pure caster we had cast fly and went out the window and I (a Rogue) just blindly jumped out after him and grabbed his feet’.
The Warrior Monk player looks around and says something like ‘Uh, on crap, I guess I run too!’
There was quite a chase and we got away in the end, but that Warrior Monks face when everyone but him just instantly bailed was classic.
]]>The group made it to the underground city of the bad guy and ultimately confronted the BBEG and his minions but they were horribly over matched. I can’t recall if they were just HP and PP depleted, but this long term campaign looked like it was going to end in a TPK. It really wasn’t how I wanted this story to end, but I couldn’t really do anything to correct course besides a blatant divine intervention.
My best friend was playing a Cleric and he was moving out of state and probably wouldn’t come back for the occasional game over school breaks or summer. I think 2 out of 3 PC’s were down and the battle was going to end in just a handful of rounds when the Cleric asked if he could do a ‘Retributive Strike”. Conceptually, this idea came out of the AD&D Staff of the Magi?, but I believe there was a high level spell that had just been introduced in RMCI that was similar. The Cleric had some type of talisman but there was no real mechanism for this at that time. It could have been a energetic release of his remaining PPs, a prayer to his God, but I allowed for the idea that a willing self-sacrifice could create such an effect. I asked him to roll and I remember those rolls to this day, over 25 years later. 00, 97, 99, 91.
I used the sum of those rolls as an attack on the Fireball table with an AoE of 25’. Divine Cleansing Fire. The Cleric was incinerated with the release, but the party was saved and the battle was won. It was a great end to that player and his character and a worthy end to that 3 year campaign.
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