Off the Shelf: HARP

If you like Rolemaster, but you do not want the complexity, there is always HARP. With the HARP implementation of Martial Law, you get a good 75-85% of the Rolemaster experience with the crit tables, and you can always make up results similar to have more variety. But the rules are far easier to understand and manage than those of Rolemaster, especially for character creation.

What does playing Rolemaster gain you? You get the full crit tables, all the spells in Spell Law, and the original game experience. The characters are more flexible, and the system is far more robust and classic. Most players, I would say 90%, do not have the time to put into Rolemaster and enjoy the complexity and depth. Most players, especially those coming from OSR games and B/X, will enjoy HARP far more than Rolemaster. If you picked up Rolemaster, bounced off character creation hard, and gave up, give HARP a try. If you do not have the time for Rolemaster, honestly, play HARP.

Rolemaster does the best job of simulating the effects of specific weapons versus specific armors, whereas in HARP, this is all abstracted. If you crave that "weapon X versus armor Y" style of combat,  and having the effect or crits change depending on that interaction, play Rolemaster. There are optional rules that add this depth in HARP Martial Law, but they slow down combat somewhat and force adjustments to the numbers depending on target armor.

If all you want is to grab a sword and wander the hills to battle orcs and collect their loot, where story means more than simulation, play HARP. You will see the benefits of a more engaging simulation game than a B/X, and have the best parts of Rolemaster without the complexity. HARP is a good middle ground between B/X and Rolemaster, and perfectly captures that Tolkien-style adventure and storytelling, far better than 5E, which has lost its way and become a planar superhero game.

If you want the OG, mace versus chainmail, hard realism game of simulation combat, play Rolemaster United. If you don't want the complexity and just want a close-enough experience, play HARP. Both have a place, given your interest levels and time.

And HARP is a complete game, ten books (plus an adventure), and you have a nice-sized library. The secret to enjoying HARP is just starting with the core book, which has everything: monsters, treasure, magic, and more, and ignoring the rest of the library. The crit charts in the core HARP book may get repetitive, so pull in the expanded tables from Martial Law if you want a little more variety and complexity; otherwise, they are not needed, and you can just make up similar results.

The criticism of the original HARP book's crit tables stems from the fact that it lists 19 results per attack type. It sounds like a lot, but in large combats, the same critical results can happen twice. For example, a result of 51-60 on a crush attack gives us, "You broke his collarbone. Foe takes 15 Hits, is stunned 1 round, and is at -10." Keep rolling that versus orcs, and you have a lot of broken orc collarbones, and you start to break immersion. But we can avoid breaking immersion by simply choosing to break other things.

HARP, Hit Location optional rule, page 99.

Now, if we use the optional hit location rules, you have 10 locations to factor in on top of that. We could simply change that "collarbone" to "whatever we hit and break that." It does not matter too much; just reinterpret the result and perhaps force a roll to keep hold of a weapon or shield if a hand or arm is hit, or to avoid falling down on leg or foot strikes. Now, we have possibly 190 results per attack type, and the problem is far less than we imagined.

You could even add a d10 qualifier to the word "broke" to allow for a variety of interpretations, such as grazed, bruised, crushed, broken, broken open, or completely smashed. How bad is it really? Roll a d10; let 1 be the most forgiving, with 10 the least. Now modify the result by ±50 %, and you have 1,900 results per attack type, and you are starting to eclipse Rolemaster (and you are inserting your imagination into the tables). Perhaps the bruise is 8 extra hits, no stun, and a -5. Perhaps the smashed result is 23 extra hits, 2 stun turns, and a -15.

With 1,900 results per attack type, I would say that is an insane amount of damage results. Mind you, I am only talking about using the base book. I do not need Martial Law to do this. I am not adding in any of the expansion books, and the combats are already this good.

Perhaps the result of a 1 is that the blow is deflected and no damage occurs at all, or it hits an enemy next to the player, sending that insta-killing head blow meant for you into the nearest orc. Perhaps that 10 result is not even damage at all, but the blow sends the magic shield the fighter is holding flying off a cliff and is lost forever. Maybe the attack sails into the party's light source and smashes the lantern, spilling flammable oil all over the holder (or a nearby ally). "The worst possible thing" on a result of 10 can be interpreted in many ways, just as the "best result of 1" can be as well.

That d10 qualifier roll is a tool to introduce environmental, situational, material, physiological, story-based, or even psychological factors into the damage equation.

Just by adding a few drops of our imagination, and only using the basic game's "supposedly limiting" tables, we are beating Rolemaster in both variety and outcomes in combat crits, adding in environmental and situational dependent elements, while keeping HARP's simplicity. HARP was designed to be flexible like this, and it did not take me much tweaking to craft critical results that excite me to play this game.

Let Rolemaster be the wargame-like, X versus Y, medieval simulation game.

Let HARP flow with the story, and leave much of the interpretive work to you.

ERA for Rolemaster

The ERA character creation system for Rolemaster works. It is a strange system, a batch file that pops up a webpage where you can create your characters, but I give them credit for making this cross-compatible and even including a Linux launcher. I tested the Linux version, and it works.

With Windows dying on the vine, seeing more indie devs embrace Linux and character-creation tools that run natively on it is encouraging. Not a day goes by that Windows isn't trying to steal and hide my files from me, and it sucks. I hate this new world, and I can see Microsoft banning local file storage one day.

There will be a day when I walk away from Windows, and that day is coming.

You can't "go back" once your character sheet is finalized, and you get a template sheet that you can "level up" and allocate skill levels. This is how Rolemaster works: you do a lot of work in character generation, "setting up a sheet" where the costs of different choices will be predetermined, and when you level, you will be spending CP to fill out those choices as you gain them.

Unlike GURPS, where the cost for skills in different categories is the same for everyone, in Rolemaster, your class and culture determine the costs you pay for different skills. You can go outside your build, but it will just cost you more points, so your fighter can learn magic. In that sense, Rolemaster is very similar to GURPS, but character creation sets up the cost for every skill in the game based on choices made. GURPS assumes every character is a blank sheet of paper, and a medieval fighter can go on to be an astrophysicist - you just have to spend the points. 

In Rolemaster, the cost for those science skills will be prohibitively high, and that fighter will struggle since that is not "who they started as in life," but they can do it, just not as easily as someone trained from a young age to do that task. The "class system" in Rolemaster defines what is easier for you in terms of future progress, but it does not completely control it.

GURPS is more in line with modern educational thinking, where anyone can retrain for anything at any age, whereas Rolemaster emphasizes the importance of early childhood education. In my opinion, your early schooling will determine much of your life, and it only gets harder the later you go in life when you try to retrain and do something new. Rolemaster understands the basic human condition and uses class and background to model a character's "early years" quite effectively.

This is why we can't shortchange education, nor allow it to be used as a trust fund for the greedy among us to raid and live off of. If you are not creating doctors and engineers at an early age, decades down the line, everyone will suffer, including those who stole from the system for short-term gains. You steal from education today, and there goes that doctor you will need 20 years from now.

Philosophically, I am more in line with Rolemaster's view of education, the traditional method of younger minds learn easier, and setting up those neurological pathways where a young mind can be trained to think in ways that make their career and later progress in their life in the areas their minds have been well-experienced in.

Rolemaster models early education as the character's "class choices," and those are the areas you are deciding: "I want to be great at these things later." The "Role" in Rolemaster is not for role-playing; it is more for the characters' "Role" in the world and life. The "Role" you set yourself up in for the story, and the "Role" you will take in a life on the stage built by your choices.

The ERA software does a good job building your character sheet and then letting you level up your character. You can create printable sheets with this software, and that helps a lot. Rolemaster is a d100 game with many skills, but it's simple to play; creating characters is a major hurdle.

The ERA software also serves as a "training tool" for character design, walking you through the steps and explaining what happens next. It helped me get a handle on the character creation method much more easily than reading the books.

Click on a spell list, and it tells you the known spells in that list. The HTML files it creates are nice for a basic reference sheet, but the "view character sheet" function feels more complete and useful during play. I like the spell lists in the character sheet view for my casters. Like GURPS Dungeon Fantasy, Rolemaster's spell lists start off in the "magical tricks" realm, and they gradually move into the more fearsome magics. GURPS does this through prerequisites, while Rolemaster does leveled spell lists.

They have modules for RMU, RM Classic, RM FRP, and Spacemaster Privateers. Some of the games are better supported with the books than others, and each book is a separate purchase.

This is a must-have for Rolemaster players, and it walks you through character creation slowly and lets you understand each step along the way. There is even a helpful system that explains what is happening on each screen. A strong recommend for Rolemaster players, and it gives you that confidence in character creation to start imagining characters in the game, and in your worlds.