In my recent post (‘Looking for a Spiritual Home’) Johnkzin made loads of constructive suggestions and asked a few questions.

The problem with Pathfinder and 5e for that matter is that I have suggested both these systems to my players in the past and they are definitely not interested. I think to some extent they have closed their minds against all things D&D. I have been playing with this group since the early 1980s so I am not about to abandon them and try and find another group.

I have never played Pathfinder or even read a rulebook so I have no valid opinion.

5e on the other hand I have a strange relationship with. I have never played it but 5e and I keep crossing paths. I was one of the two editors in the 5e to d100 conversion project 5e x5. More recently than that I am doing a port of all the 5e SRD monsters to a generic form compatible with all versions of Rolemaster including the old RM2 right up to the forthcoming Rolemaster Unified and taking in HARP along the way.

There are two reasons for doing this. Guild Companion Publications jealously guard their IP. This means that you cannot publish any home brew adventures that use their monsters or the spell lists. I personally think that this closed shop approach has damaged the Rolemaster game community. If there are no free or pocket money price adventures out there or even throw away home brew supplements, then the system appears dead or worse unsupported. GCP have a terribly slow rate of production.

Rolemaster started life as a set of house rules for AD&D so there is a kind of symmetry in reintegrating the open attitudes of WotC and the 5e SRD back into Rolemaster. This gives independent supplement writers like myself a complete set of monsters with which to create adventures.

The other sticking point is spells and spell lists. I have future plans to write up my house rules for magic in Rolemaster and reintroduce the 5e SRD spells back into Rolemaster. That is a potential project for another day. I have already written up and sell my house rules for character creation. I have also fleshed those same rules out into a full on standalone rulebook.

The reason for the character creation and magic system is an insurance policy. One Rolemaster Unified comes out GCP are not going to support either current version of the game. It would be madness to release a new version of the game and still produce material for older versions. If, heaven forbid, the new version is a failure then there could be no future support for Rolemaster players. On the other hand, if there was a 100% compatible system out there released under the OGL and free for anyone to take, use and change then all these over versions can be supported. I will write more on this at a later date.

So back to my gaming investigations…

I do like my games on the light side of crunchy and more simulationist than narrative. This coming week I am going to start with looking at Mini Six: Bare Bones Edition by AntiPaladin Games. I have not checked but I guess that Michael reviewed this years ago. I will give my thoughts next time.

The featured image is obviously me, setting out on my quest for a new game system!