So I was on the couch reading through my printed copies of Rolemaster Classic last night trying to understand the character creation process. I was getting impatient with the entire complicated process, choosing a profession, the two times you buy skills, a strange stat-increase between those skill buys, background development, choosing what armor and weapons you were trained with early in life (and choices that stay with you throughout life), your final bonuses, and outfittting.
Couldn't this get any more complicated? I wanted to throw my hands up, put the PDF printouts on the shelf, and go read HARP. I want my character now, darn it!
But then it hit me. This is one of those magical moments where the concept clicks with you and you start to take that first step into the Rolemaster way of thinking.
The designers of the game slammed the brakes on character creation for a good reason.
Character Creation is Class Creation
It is strange being put into a position to defend lengthy character creation. I have played many games that make you run around in circles, going from chart to chart, just to take up time for no good reason and for no meaningful impact on gameplay. I love the roll 3d6 three times, pick a class, roll hit points, grab a short sword and leather armor style of play a lot. Being able to start playing like that is cool.
When I realized there is a strategy Rolemaster my mind started to change and get the concept. In the skills you pick how you setup your favored weapons and armor, how you acquired spells (many you can't use yet), and a lot of other point costs and factors that will stay with your character through their life. In essence, you are designing the character's class - one custom to your character's upbringing and life - when you begin play.
This is somewhat like Traveller's character generation, but you get to make the choices. Your fighter or mage won't be the same as another player's character of the same class - your adolescence and apprenticeship character creation steps let you write "mini background stories" and make real mechanical class design choices during them that stay with your character.
What spells do you want to start with? What is your favored weapon? What type of armor did you train with? What are the background skills you picked up? What magic system do you believe in? The magic system is sort of important, because even non-magic users can acquire and use spells (at a greater cost later).
These choices stick with you. They will be of critical important during that first adventure. You can change your mind and later buy the skills you need, sometimes at a greater cost, but this first set of choices you make is like a customized class design step for your character before you even begin play.
Now I can see why in RMFRP they went crazy and added over 300 skills to the game (in both good and bad ways). Part of me loves that detail, but another part of me wonders if "too much is too much" and Rolemaster Classic's more focused list of 60+ skills doesn't work better and is a easier list to manage and design with. If you are a character design fetishist, I would go with the later 90's version of RMFRP. If you want a tighter design that is more focused on the adventure and dungeon crawling, I would gravitate towards the 80's Rolemaster Classic and cut out the extra information.
It is tough since I like detail and role-playing, but I am just getting started with something complex and prefer straightforward over depth.
Character Creation is Investment
Putting the brakes on character creation and slowing the process down increases player investment into their character. This is kind of an obvious argument, like a 2 + 2 = 4 thing, but it has some important ramifications later on. I put some time into creating this pen-and-paper "avatar" and invested some emotion into building him or her. I have chips on the table now, I am bought in, and I care what happens to them because the process took some time and required me to make choices. This is all good.
Now let's bring HARP into the equation, or even the old-school D&D style character generation of: 3d6 six time, class, hit points, gear, and go. Character creation is fast, and we aren't really making many decisions for our character. The character is a lot more disposable. We don't care if the character meets a quick end by stepping into a 10' deep spike-filled pit with poisonous snakes at the bottom. Again, if this is the type of game you are playing and enjoy this, all well and good.
But now consider this. Rolemaster is a game with a lot of detailed critical hit tables. Lots of bad things can happen to your character. Your character could get an eye poked out, or lose a hand from a bad roll.
Now which character would you dread rolling an attack against using these detailed crit charts?
The disposable one you took 30 seconds and little thought creating?
Or the detailed one where the player wrote stories about their background, how they grew up, and how they first trained in their class?
I would hate to roll for the second one, myself. Now there is a fun to the HARP style "this is almost like a horror movie and the characters are disposable anyways" sort of play, and that is also good if you are into that. But another part of me likes the emotional investment of a slower character creation process, and then putting all that "on the table" during combat.
It is the difference between making a huge bet at a poker table versus a smaller one where you don't care if you win or lose. Character creation is what gives Rolemaster's combat tables their punch, emotional weight, and meaning.
Horror Movies
I watch Youtube shows where people review horror movies, and in my earlier article I compared Rolemaster to a horror RPG and the game really fits in that genre of play. Some games need artificial "insanity" stats and fear rolls (and I am sure there are options for that in Rolemaster somewhere), but to me those crit charts are Rolemaster's insanity rolls. Fear exists in the mind of the player, exactly where it should be.
Do not roll on that chart against my character! Don't do it! Not with that high of an attack bonus!
A lot of games go our of their way to design a positive player experience, to make death hard, and to engineer the experience so people want to come back and play with their "comic book hero" the next time. This is all well and good, but it runs counter to the aim and feeling a horror game should deliver.
I want to stare at that dark hole in the ground in the dank marsh and wonder if my character will make it out alive. There is a million things that could go wrong, and I tried my best to design a survivor with the skills and abilities I think my character needed to survive, but I am not sure. One can never be sure.
Also, in those horror movie reviews, the reviewers often say something like "Well, the movie never showed us why we should care about this character, so why would I care if the monster gets them?" It is a dark and funny comment on human nature, but this is true in movie making. If the film maker never gave us a reason to care about someone on the screen, the tension of something bad happening is gone, and the impact of their ultimate fate has less meaning.
This ties back into character creation as investment, above. This a faster system of character creation where no histories are written, the tension and impact of a loss is lessened to a great degree.
Computer Aided Generation?
Well, let's get a computer program to design characters with! Right? Well, something says in the back of my mind, "Do this by hand." Yes, I may make mistakes, but I can fix those in the next character and read through. A computer design program takes some of the investment out, as computers can handle a lot more complexity than I can, but a part of me likes the experience of character creation to not be so complicated a computer is needed and a human can work through it. And a computer lessens my emotional investment in the final product.
I want to be able to do this on my own, and I want the designers to be forced to keep the process manageable and straightforward enough that I can do it without a computer. There is a designer-player contract here that I feel is important. We had games recently like D&D 4 where the books just felt like paper manuals for the computerized character creator, and then the books get errata'ed out of usefulness and sit in boxes in my closet, worthless.
I want the printed book to mean something, I want the process to be manageable, I don't want choice paralysis, and I don't want computers taking over the game. This is one of the huge reasons I did not choose the 90's RMFRP version and went with 80's classic - I wanted the core experience, not a more in-depth one where too many choices could distract me from the experience I came to enjoy. I can see how the 90's version was a love letter to core fans and those wanting "more" - which played to their base, but I feel ultimately was an expansion "more for more's sake" than keeping the game focused and manageable.
In a year or two when I am playing RMFRP and enjoying the complexity and depth I will probably change my mind. This is pen-and-paper gaming, after all.
But it does highlight the important pillar of design to keep the base game simple, and save the "extra skill lists" for optional expansions. If I were designing a new version of RMFRP, I would keep the core experience as close as possible to the 80's version in simplicity and focus, and make the depth added by the 90's additions completely optional. This is the professions book that adds 80 optional crafting skills! Oh, nice! Thanks for the options! Maybe we won't be using that this time since we are just focused on dungeon-ing.
Starting with everything is overwhelming.
TLDR; I am Starting to Get It
It was a fun feeling reading that printout and finally getting how all this works. I was sitting there, reading, becoming more and more frustrated with all of the hoops the game made me jump through when the light went on in my head. It was an uplifting feeling, almost euphoric as all of the gears in my head realized what was going on and why all this was here.
Oh yeah...
And then realizing how it all started to work together with the combat system and spells made more gears turn. This is a good example of a game with design decisions hidden in the system that aren't really explained, but they are there for a reason. Once you take the time to read and discover them you get it, and all of the notorious charts and reference work melts away and become the framework for which you build and explore ideas upon.
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