Blast from the past?

Not long ago I stumbled upon this old post of Unified Rolemaster Playtest. Obviously I am interested in people opinions of Rolemaster as a house ruled version of Rolemaster is my system of choice.

My only gripe is that Rolemaster has a legacy poor reputation for complexity and bloat, but if you look at Pathfinder by comparison Rolemaster is rather slim. That reputation can be a barrier to introducing new players. All of that is by the by and not particularly relevant to this post anyway. What really struck me was Johnkzin’s comment about the wargamer’s challenge “if I need more than 1 sheet of paper (4 pages) for rules, for a war game, then that was too many“.

I was a little confused by the 1 sheet/4 pages limit, The paper I normally buy comes in 1 sheet/2 pages format but possibly I am buying old fashioned paper or wargame rules are printed in landscape/A5 so you are getting two small pages, sideways on each side or the paper.

Anyway, this year I have a lot of travelling to do so with a home brewed GM Emulator I thought I could do a bit of solo gaming to pass the time. To make things even better I created a 1 sheet/2 page version of Rolemaster to go with it.

There are a few caveats to go with this. Firstly, it is generally accepted in the Rolemaster community (or so it seems) for players to have printed/photocopied pages of all their spell lists as part of their character sheets. This is because characters can have so many spells that they have loads of options and the Spell Law book becomes a bottle neck at the gaming table. Give everyone their own spell lists and you remove that bottle neck. I have assumed the characters have their spell lists. Secondly, These rules are using a good healthy dose of the new RMU rules along with a pinch of the old MERP rules and a bit of 2nd Edition mixed in for good measure. Lastly, there are two notes that should have been included but as I wrote these for myself and I know how this works I didn’t write them down. These are, where you see ### you should insert an appropriate ‘simile’ so that swords slash and cut but maces strike and blow. The location 1-10 is the units die from the attack roll, so an roll of 78 on the d100 uses the ‘8’ and equals abdomen. I hope that makes sense, if not then comment with your questions and I will elaborate.

So with that out of the way, the following two PDF documents, cover a basic combat system with criticals, skill resolution, and spell casting.

http://www.rolemasterblog.com/download/2-page-rolemaster/

http://www.rolemasterblog.com/download/2-page-rolemaster-page-2/

If you don’t have any Rolemaster characters then you can basically get by by using a D&D or PF character just start them at 2nd level, every +/-1 on the D20 is a +/-5 on the D100 and give all characters 10 additional hit points. Oh and shields and Dex bonuses do not change your armour class, they get subtracted from the attackers attack roll. Finally, if you get a natural 20 then roll again and add the second roll to the first!

If you have never played Rolemaster and you have a few spare minutes then why not have a play around?