Rolemaster RMFRP Skills

I know all the attention is on HARP, either that or Rolemaster Classic (RMC). Still, Rolemaster Fantasy Roleplay (RMFRP) version is my high-water mark for presentation, and the designers trying to explain how the entire game is supposed to work. I still prefer Rolemaster Classic, just because this version went crazy on skills and spreadsheets needed to fill in skill values.

If filling out one spreadsheet for skills wasn't enough, the game has you fill out TWO for each character. Compare this to an average Rolemaster Classic character:

Um, we are talking at least an order of magnitude easier character creation for Rolemaster Classic versus Rolemaster FRP. The difference is that RMFRP became a skill-based system in the 1990s and tried to move beyond the combat and dungeon play of the 1980s RMC. If you want to "do more" and have fun skill challenges as a part of an adventure, I will lean towards RMFRP because the skill list support is there.

But be prepared to pay a hefty time and amount of work getting these skill values calculated, unless you spend time working up a spreadsheet that does all the work for you.

RMFRP's system lets you raise a category of skills by a level and increase several in an area, versus focusing directly on one skill and leaving the others alone. Do you really need that level of detail, though? It is like the difference between raising a base animal handling skill versus raising one skill, such as animal handling/dogs or animal handling/horses. We felt like rolling "animal handling" was enough in my games.

Plus, anytime a skill list got longer than a quarter-page, we felt the game was bloated on the number of skills the game expects players to manage. We always felt 9-12 skills on a character was a good number that should cover most of their primary and secondary specializations. Over 20 skills were a nightmare to manage, level up, track, and find during play.

It feels strange, as RMC feels too skill light, and in RMFRP, it feels like they way overdid it with skills.

Against the Darkmaster

I like the choices they made in Against the Darkmaster for skills. They kept the original simple skill level calculations but added skills that we have come to expect for various classes and backgrounds.

The skill list is tight, but it covers a lot of ground. There are five in most skill classes, and I can see uses for these on almost any adventure. There aren't narrow specializations under a category, such as acrobatics/tightrope. One thing the game does is it has optional specialty skills.

These optional skills are more accessible for non-magic-using classes to buy at cheaper rates of progression and for magic-using classes to buy at a more expensive cost. They offer a balance to high-level spellcasters with the rogue and martial classes. High-level mages can cast powerful magic, and high-level non-magic classes will have high levels of specializations.

And this list is just a sample; the game says you can make up your skills. Want a unique combat move, art skill, winemaking, rope tricks, dancing, bartender, seduction, juggling, camouflage, farming, wine-making, or another skill type? Get GM approval and add it to your sheet. I like this model of skill lists, a core list of skills the game supports, an optional list to get you started, and leaving the rest open to whatever your group wants and what your game would be enhanced by.

This avoids the "complete-ism" problem that RMSS and GURPS have, where every skill in the universe needs to be written down and rules created for, even if your group has no use or interest for 90% of the skill list. This also allows players to use unique skills to customize their characters, such as the group's blacksmith (or even blacksmith specialty skills, such as blacksmith/horseshoes, and forcing everyone's character to have that as an entry on their character sheets).

Massive Skill Lists are So 1990s

When the desktop publishing revolution came around in the 1990s, game developers could write forever, and we got a lot of games with bloated skill, power, spell, and gear lists. One of the problems of classic games is dealing with this bloat, and I like it when modern clones and games take serious looks at the skill and spell lists and pare things down to "what is the most essential and fun" for the game. Does the game need a dozen mind-control spells or just one?

While I love options and lots of choices, there is a point when meaningful outshines more.

The D&D Style of Fantasy and Skills

One of the criticisms during the Satanic Panic of the 1980s against D&D was one we actually agreed with, that D&D was mostly about killing things. We sort of grew bored with D&D's combat-focused gameplay and shifted away to more skill-based games such as Aftermath, Space Opera, Traveller, Star Frontiers, and others. We liked the idea of characters being more than just hit points, attack bonuses, an AC, and a pile of spells and magic items.

To be fair, classic D&D is more about problem-solving than combat, and combat is best avoided anyway. The stigmas stuck though, and we saw a lot of other games with a better skill resolution mechanic, so we jumped ship on both D&D and AD&D by the late 80s.

The game got stigmatized by a lot of religious and parent groups, and to be honest, a lot of wounds were self-inflicted. You try to push a game with devils, naked demons, spellcasting, thievery, evil, and the concept of killing things for their money - to kids - and you are going to get some heat. College kids? Okay, fine. Yes, we played this game heroically, and it was about defeating evil, and our mom got it and loved our hobby.

There was this shift back to "story XP" and "roleplaying XP" in AD&D 2nd Edition that attracted us back to the game, and that seemed like a huge innovation for us at the time. There were non-weapon proficiencies, but still, they did not hold a candle to fully-robust skill systems in other games such as GURPS, Rolemaster, Runequest, Palladium FRPG, and others. Still, the notion of a more story-focused D&D had us playing back in the OG Forgotten Realms (pre-novels) and having all sorts of pulp action adventures there.

Skill is a one-syllable word. Non-weapon proficiencies are seven. Why they just didn't call them skills is a mystery. I know, because they had weapon proficiencies, but it is a terrible name. Do people really need to be told these are like weapon proficiencies but for these, they don't require weapons? I swear these games were so much about killing things even the internal logic was screwed up, but I digress.

Our game ended in over-powered wizards being nearly invincible, so the same old problems came back to haunt us in this edition as well. The changes they made to make the game less "killing things" oriented and more "story and roleplaying" oriented were a success for us.

More Skills

With D&D 3 and Pathfinder, a skill system was back in the game, and we had fun with this. We did not like that some classes got fewer skill points, but it felt like a step in the right direction. I am still having fun with the Pathfinder skill system, and I am always pumping up those INT scores to get more skill points per level. Skills are fun, but Pathfinder is still a legacy D&D-style game, and skills do not feel like the central focus of the game. They are still very much an add-on system, and there is a balance between killing, looting, story, and roleplaying that feel well-represented with XP awards.

Skills are very fun. With my Aquilae solo playthrough, I found that skills are most of the fun of my game. Social skills, survival, figuring things out, searching, managing towns, crafting, navigating, and using skills to get around the world and live within it are how I interact with the world.

Without skills, it is hard to do solo play and figure out, "What happens next?" Solo play is what is really giving the skill system a workout, and it always feels good to improve a skill you are using heavily, you are developing through interacting with those in the town, or you need just to survive.

And this is where Pathfinder sort of falls short. The game has a good skill system, but it isn't a great one. I sit at my game table with my solo play rules and wonder what a great skill system could do for me, and I start looking for alternatives.

It is hard to give up on Pathfinder, as I have two shelves full of toys to play with there. However, a lot of those books introduce parallel systems that could be done away with if the game's core was a cleaner design. I look for a game with a great skill list and a unified core design mechanic and I am considering switching to GURPS or Dungeon Fantasy for my playthrough now.

Why?

Well, do I need all those toys? I can convert monsters in pretty easily. Classes and powers have parallels in Dungeon Fantasy. A lot of the books, if I were to really sort them out, I don't need once my system is unified. Books that add class options? Not needed. Books that add horror or occult systems? Not needed, I have these rules in the base game. Magic items? Dungeon Fantasy has plenty. NPC stats? Got them. Honestly, really just monster stats and variety are the things I need.

If I need this much.

There are times Pathfinder feels like too much information.

But with GURPS/DF, I get an advantage and disadvantage system that affects solo play directly with strengths and weaknesses. These can change social interactions. I can pick and choose them. I also get one of the most detailed skill systems to play with, so my fun of picking skills, improving them, and letting a character develop naturally is about 10 times better than in Pathfinder, since this is a point-buy system. And if a character gains magical mutations and extra powers? Bio-Tech or superpowers can be added to a character easily. I don't need to hack it or say it is so, there are already rules support for all of it, and no extra books are needed beyond the few I have.

The D&D 4 Tangent

While we liked D&D 4, one of the odd notions is the skill system got massively simplified and also shorthanded. The whole notion of "passive" skills got rid of rolling as this assumption of atomic failure was ignored. We always assumed atomic failure for skill rolls in our games, if you failed the skill roll once, that was it, no retries for the day. With d20, there is this "roll until I do it" assumption built into the game, which ignores critical success and failure by "taking a 10" or "taking a 20."

Pick a lock? You should roll, because a critical failure may mean you break your tools or the lock itself and no further tries can be made. We hated the whole "take a..." rules and never used them since they seemed to justify bad player habits and weak DM-ing.

I don't need to think of another way around this problem, I will just keep rolling this d20 until it is round and I get the number I want! And I cannot critically fail! You do not get to break that lock or my tools!

So as a result, we disliked passive perception and passive everything else. If you failed, you failed, and these were our Vancian skill checks, one try, for one thing, per day. Miss something and you do not get to re-search until you find it. Blow a social skill roll, and that person is likely not going to listen to you if you keep repeating the same argument.

"But I wanna! But I wanna! Give me a discount shopkeeper! Come on! You are being unfair! I wanna!"

The above happened at our table once. A player thought with each thing they said, even if it were just drivel or repeated statements, they were entitled to a skill roll. To us, the entitled player rolling until they got what they wanted, became the poster child of taking a 20.

Vancian Skill Checks & Fail Forward

From that day on we instituted the Vancian skill check rule. Skill levels mean something. A die roll means something. There should always be a chance of critical failure or success. And we saved just as much time since we were not allowing dozens of rolls.

And we didn't design our adventures so a missed skill roll created a dead end. We did the fail-forward thing, where a failed check usually meant things got harder or more complicated, but it never stopped progress.

You absolutely need to pick that lock to continue and you failed? Perhaps you picked the door, but when you open it you failed to notice the ear-deafening screech the rusted hinges made. Maybe you opened it but busted your tools. You get a dead-end skill check in a poorly-designed adventure, and you automatically fail-forward it, roll once, and move on. It is not worth killing your game over and pissing your players off.

In fact, fail-forward eliminates the need for passive anything and is a simpler rule. You don't have six players at a table with a bunch of passive skills each acting as a radar for the DM to miss something, and then you are rewinding the session multiple times because "we shoulda..." If they did not think to make a check, they did not think to do it. If there is a secret door in a hall they walk right by, they miss it. I know, then players will be wasting time searching everything! Well, no, the adventure could just suck for putting a secret door there with no clues. Make a clue yourself and throw it into your description of the hall, "A long hallway with many loose flagstones on the walls."

D&D 5 continued and expanded passive skill checks, and we were not really impressed by that part of the game all that much. We did not like offloading all of the skill tracking onto the referee with the passive system (X skills times Y players), and it began to remove player agency with a person deciding, "My character does something..."

System vs. Content

If I continue with Pathfinder for my Aquilae campaign, I have Hero Lab, tons of content (spells, classes, monsters, and items), and a rules system that works good but is less focused on skills and character building. The sheer quantity and variety of content are amazing, and the system is good. Part of me feels I have so much content I will never use it all or hope to. The ability to solo is good. I know the system well and it works.

If I use Dungeon Fantasy, the character is king. I have GURPS Character Assistant 5, and while not as easy to use as Hero Lab, it has far more power. There is still a lot of content, and probably more than I will use, but Pathfinder 1e dwarfs that with a metric ton of things to play with. I would put the system on par with Pathfinder 1e in complexity.

Where GURPS-based systems shine is in versatility. I have infinite options to put together a unique character, and I can go the structured Dungeon Fantasy route or completely freeform - or mix and match. The advantage/disadvantage system (not the same definition as 5E) for character building is mind-blowing. The skill system is huge and one of the best - not the easiest or simplest, but your skills define you.

That last statement, "your skills define you," makes a huge difference in solo play. A lot of the time when I am soloing I ask the solo-oracle questions directly related to skills:

• Is the door locked?
• Is the NPC hostile?
• Are there guards nearby?
• Is the device broken?
• Is the weather turning bad?

A lot of these questions directly set up skill rolls. Yes, there are guards, what is your stealth skill? Yes, the door is locked, do you have lock picking? If the machine is broken can you fix it? If the weather is turning bad do you sense that with your survival skill?

A solo-play system takes a deeply skill-based system and makes it ten times better. Without solo play, my brother and I liked systems that aggregated skills into broad categories, because at the table we wanted faster play and simpler resolution. For me as a referee, more general skills and less of them were easier to manage.

Solo Play

When I am alone, my tastes change. I tried solo play with B/X and it did not captivate me. The characters felt too simple, and I was asking broad questions with easy answers - are their goblins patrolling? Yes! Fight. The answers were mostly, do you fight something or not - since the game's roots are mostly in combat and combat resolution.

With a skill-based system, I am asking questions like, is this a problem related to a skill I know? You just don't want to be narrowly focused on your character sheet, there are problems out in the world my characters will know nothing about - and they will need to find NPC experts. If the problem is in my character's set of skills, what logically is it?

With Pathfinder, the solo play was way better than B/X because all of a sudden problems relating to specific knowledges started to come up. My character started to feel like an expert, and I wanted to start buying and improving skills related to the problems they were facing.

GURPS has advantages and disadvantages, like being hunted by enemies. These can create more solo-play situations easily, the chances are built into the character sheet, and they come in all types and categories, even social situations. GURPS also has a deeper skill system, and I can imagine my solo play getting even better as these items come up and I am problem-solving with them. I get that excitement of being able to drill down, improve my character in specific ways, and spend points on new skills and abilities as I go.

I do have less content by an order of magnitude, but what I gain is a depth and flexibility of character building that the solo play will feed into and enhance.

Super Massive Skill Systems

Once upon a time, game companies wrote huge, voluminous games, with skill systems covering hundreds of skills. They hid basic rules for movement, combat, and social interactions in lengthy skill descriptions. Character power was defined by how many skill points you could accumulate, and the largest portion of a character record sheet was the character's skill section. Some skills replicated ability score checks, so if you wanted to lift a boulder, your character used the Heft skill and not the Strength ability score. Character design required you to know how much a particular skill cost to raise a level, which skills you could buy, and calculating the rates at which you could raise them.

Oh wait, they still make these games.

Seriously, there is little reason nowadays to hang on to skill systems that look like phone books, and operate like tax laws. These skill systems promise the holy grail of complete character customization, but too often put such a huge burden on players for knowing how to work them and manage the record-keeping they create.

Take for instance D&D 3.5, with its collection of class skills (which you have to buy with starting skill points), cross-class skills (which are bought at half rate), and different maximum levels for each. Take for instance a bard from this game, here are the class skills, reprinted from the SRD:

Appraise (Int), Balance (Dex), Bluff (Cha), Climb (Str), Concentration (Con), Craft (Int), Decipher Script (Int), Diplomacy (Cha), Disguise (Cha), Escape Artist (Dex), Gather Information (Cha), Hide (Dex), Jump (Str), Knowledge (all skills, taken individually) (Int), Listen (Wis), Move Silently (Dex), Perform (Cha), Profession (Wis), Sense Motive (Wis), Sleight of Hand (Dex), Speak Language (n/a), Spellcraft (Int), Swim (Str), Tumble (Dex), and Use Magic Device (Cha)

Now a typical bard gets (6 + INT mod) x 4 skill points to start, so let's assume a +2 INT mod for 32 skill points to spend on 25+ skills (plus 8 every level); and also on cross-class skills (the rest of the 3.5 skill list). All well and good, but this is an extremely complicated system to teach to new players. Many times around the table, new players would have endless questions on skills and purchasing them, asking if a skill was important, how much a purchase cost, if a skill was in their class or not, and what the maximum level was for a skill given their class. When characters got higher level, the skill lists grew exponentially, with some characters taking an entire column of a book to record their skills.

To be fair, D&D 3.5 is not the most complicated skill system out there, but it is a great example. Also, they greatly simplified the skill system in D&D 4, which helped matters in some ways, and over simplified in others, but it was still a good step towards simplicity. Other good examples of large skill systems are Space Opera, Aftermath, the Star Frontiers reboot Zebulon's Guide, Palladium, and many other systems. Some of these systems don't use a skill point metric, but they do feature long skill lists with a significant record-keeping requirement.

When you design a role-playing game, think about the skill list. What purpose does it serve? Are there too many skills for what you are trying to do? Does it require a lot of record keeping? Is the way you buy skills complicated and require hefty math and reference? Does your game even require a skill system? Can you get the same customization effect through one of the systems already in your game, such as classes, feats, or specializations?

More is not always better, and a game that requires 20 ranks in Knowledge(Role Playing Game Skill Systems) isn't always one you want your players to understand just to be able to have fun and play the game with.