Rolemaster FRP: Skill Categories vs. Skills

One aspect of Rolemaster that I could not understand was the difference between the games' Skill Categories and Skills.

Skill Categories are broad training in groups or related skills. These are never rolled and are more like calculating a modifier for a group of skills under it. An example is the category Weapon: 1-H Edged, your character's basic proficiency in all one-handed edged weapons, from daggers to longswords. This is not your skill with these weapons since you still need to buy ranks in the individual weapons under this Skill Category, such as broadsword or dagger.

Skills are the individual skills you use. These are what you roll. You could have a Skill Category in Weapons: Missile, but you still need to buy the individual missile weapons under it and apply the category bonus to the final skill total, such as a composite bow.

Let's tear down the example in the book because there is one chart that always confuses the heck out of me:

Rank Bonus Table T-2.2! You will see I highlighted two cells on this: the level 6 Standard Category Rank Bonus and the level 6 Standard bonus. Which one do you use for what? I am confused! I often quit the game here since I kept forgetting which column was for what.

Always use the second (shaded) column for the Category sheet!

Let's start with the shaded column, the Standard Category Rank Bonus. This is only used for the Skill Category Record Sheet, T-6.2! See the highlighted green "level 6" and the "+12" bonus? That calculates our final +43 value in the red circle and applies to ALL our Weapon: 1H Edged skills that we could buy in the future. Our "category modifier" is always calculated with the shaded column for Standard Category Rank Bonuses. Okay, we got the "red circle value" that applies to every Weapon: 1H Edged skill; what now?

Always use the third (unshaded) column for the Skill sheet!

We will look at the Skill Record Sheet, T-6.3; this is our "in-play sheet" to make skill rolls! In that red circle, the "Rank Bonus of +43 " gets slotted into (red circle). Forget about the category sheet for now! Now, if we have 6 levels of a specific weapon, such as this character's broadsword, that gets a +18 (blue box). Where does that come from? This is where I panic and give up on the game.

This number comes from column three of the Rank Bonus Table T-2.2 (the unshaded one). See the blue box of +18? This is what the six ranks of a specific skill, in this case, broadsword, will add to our final skill total.

What confuses me is the "three box notation" and I get all hung up on that. There are three other skill types with special notation, but both categories and skills share that same notation type and it crosses the wires in my head. Shaded is for skill categories, unshaded is for regular skills.

Think of Rolemaster's lowest-level skills as any other game's specialty skills, and the Category Rank Bonus applies to all the specialty skills under it.

If our character tried to use another 1H-edged weapon, such as a cutlass or hand axe, but we did not have a skill level in using the weapon, we would rate it at rank zero for a -15 modifier. However, we would still get that +43 category bonus, so some familiarity would help us make attacks with a weapon we were not trained in.

Once you understand that one column of the Rank Bonus Table T-2.2 is for Skill Categories, and the next one is for the actual skills, the table becomes very easy to understand.

All the 5E players have never made it this far in the article because they saw all the math and bailed early. We loved this stuff in the old days. What else would we use the graphing calculators that our moms bought us for school? Those pieces of electronics were our toys, and we found fun ways to use them, like in our games. Hey, I did well in math, and our games helped enormously, so they were part of our education - not just our entertainment.

What else does that +43 in 1H-edged weapons tell us about our character? They grew up and were trained to fight and kill with these types of weapons to a great degree. They will be instantly deadly with any new weapons like this they pick up. D&D doesn't tell us these things. Gronk can pick up any weapon and smash or slice. The game was too simplistic. Who was this "fighter?"

This is why we played Rolemaster.

It told us who that fighter was.

And we got to play with our graphing calculators after school.