[Obscure Games] Rolemaster

 Originally published as an alternative combat system for Dungeons & Dragons, followed up by an alternative magic system and finally an alternative character creation system, Rolemaster began as the individual books Arms Law and its follow-up Claw Law, Spell Law, and finally finished up in its basic form with Character Law and the GM-focused book Campaign Law. Shortly after, though, methods that helped distinguish the game on its own were published as optional rules set out in a series of Rolemaster Companions, with seven of those in the main series and several more focused on specific topics (like Elemental Companion or Oriental Companion; the latter, like AD&D's Oriental Adventures, came out before "Asian" was generally understood to be the preferred adjective for describing Asian nations and cultures, even though it seems obvious now). To my way of thinking, the first two Companions are essential for the game, with the first including the "Smoothed Stat Bonus" table and the second offering a complete listing of skills and their effects in the game. There are a number of other optional rules in the various Companions that some may like, such as alternate initiative and turn sequence systems, additional ways to use magic, more developed systems for mounted combat, and so on. All of the Companions also include new character classes, which are usually at least of interest (I'm personally a fan of Rolemaster Companion 2's Dervish class).

The game is really very simple in concept, with almost all actions resolved by rolling percentile dice, adding a bonus based mostly on skill, and either hoping for a result of 101+ or comparing the result to a table to derive a degree of effect. The dice roll, in most cases, is "open-ended", which means that a dice roll of 96 to 100 allows the player to roll again and add the result, potentially rolling more times if more results of 96 to 100 are scored (and a similar downward result subtracting additional dice rolls can begin on a roll of 01 to 05, continuing to subtract more rolls if 96 to 100 results are obtained on the negative dice, though occasionally rolls are defined as "open-ended high" which precludes such negative results). In Arms Law/Claw Law, the table for each different weapon is divided into columns representing different armor types and the result of the dice roll is cross-indexed to get a number of "concussion hits" to be applied to the target's hit points and, often, a letter result for a "critical", which is rolled by a percentile roll (usually unmodified) on a table to derive a more detailed injury result. Such "crit tables" are defined by the injury type and the letter degree, so that a critical result might be described a "B Slash", an "A Crushing", or a "C Burning" to indicate which specific critical result table and which column to reference. Most characters involved in combat will be affected by crits rather than accumulated concussion hits, especially as they move beyond the lowest levels.

Other than simple attack rolls, actions are usually defined as "Movement/Maneuvers" or "Static Actions", and rolled similarly by comparing an open-ended roll, modified by skill in most cases, to a column representing the difficulty of the action on a table found in Character Law.

The character creation rules give ten attributes to each character, rolled on normal percentile dice, rather than open-ended ones. These attributes provide a modifier, and in some cases a number of "development points" or other benefits. The player takes thee total development points and spends them on skills which are given point costs that vary by character class. Further, the number of skill ranks that can be purchased at a time varies by character class, so that a Fighter can buy two ranks in most weapon types at each level, while magic-using classes can't buy more than one rank, and the situation is basically reversed when attempting to learn spell lists, so that magic-using classes can buy as many ranks in a spell list as they can afford, but Fighters are limited to only one rank in a spell list "Pick" per level, and that one for a high cost in development points. Skill ranks and attribute bonuses, plus some other benefits, are added together to give a total skill bonus to use when attempting to use a skill. For spell list "Picks", this allows a roll during the "level-up" process to see if the character acquires the spells of that "Pick" type from that list. This is usually 5 or 10 "levels" from the spell list. Casting a known spell costs spell points equal to the spell's "level". Some spell lists do not have spells of certain levels. The "Picks" that a character is allowed to attempt to learn vary depending on the specific spell list and its relation to the character's class, such as if it is a "Base" list for the class, "Open" or "Closed" in the category of spell use for the class (Essence, Channeling, or Mentalism), and so on, as well as if the character has any previous "Picks" from the spell list, such that a "C Pick" requires a previous "A Pick", a "D Pick" has a "B Pick" as prerequisite, and so on.

So, you can see that most of the game's complexity is actually front-loaded into the character creation and advancement process, contrary to its reputation. Some people find referencing the action charts to be onerous, but that seems a frivolous complaint to me.

After the core rule books, the game has some other supplementary books of value. Creatures & Treasures provides a good list of both foes and magic items. Personally, I only think the first one is worthwhile. War Law provides a mass combat system for the game, while Sea Law gives nautical rules and equipment, like ships and such. In addition, Space Master adapts the rules for SF games, with Armored Assault giving vehicle design and combat rules, while  Star Strike does the same for spacecraft. A setting book titled Dark Space offered a setting that mixed the SF and fantasy elements with some horror concepts.

In general, I don't think that the game deserves its reputation of being particularly complicated, though there is a certain amount of system mastery that is necessary to play characters of some types, with spell-using classes being more difficult to play than combat- or stealth-oriented ones. It certainly has a very particular flavor that is different than most other games.

Tactics in Adventure Gaming

Virtual tabletops have caused something
of a renaissance in tactical
adventure game play, if only
because miniatures and terrain are
expensive and computer graphics
are less so.

 

 I'm not sure where I was going with this, but maybe someone will get some value out of it.

Adventure gaming has always had an uneven relationship with tactical play. The earlier D&D variations tended to make combat largely abstract, but this was done from the perspective that the Referee (aka Dungeon Master, Game Master, or whatever) would have a solid grasp on how combat should flow so that they could rule meaningfully on how players' actions should play out. Other games, notably including Melee and Wizard, ultimately adding non-combat-related activities as The Fantasy Trip, but also D&D-descended games like RuneQuest, laid out a tactical wargame for play and built the rest of the adventure game around it. Many would go on to imply that the wargame's actual board-play could be foregone in favor of imagining matters, and the details of matters like regulating movement were generally of varying strictness anyway, with games like RuneQuest just saying that characters would move "3 meters" or whatever and leaving the actual implementation of that to the Referee, while Melee or Champions relied on detailed hex grids to place characters in specific positions relative to each other and objects in the scenario space.

Most adventure games built these tactical wargames around the character as a basic unit. This resulted in tactical games where the unit of space was generally on that scale, so that a hex might represent one or two yards or meters, sufficient to contain about one character, or sometimes a few of them. A two-meter or two-yard hex might also contain a horse, and so that was a frequent choice. Some game designers might concentrate more completely on the human scale, resulting in some games such as GURPS or CORPS setting the scale at 1 yard or meter per hex space, or even in the case of Swordbearer at 1 "pace" of 30 inches/2 ½ feet for its tactical movement regulation. For some games, though, a tactical unit might as frequently be something other than a human being-scaled object, or even larger than a horse. Car Wars for example, while not initially intended as an adventure game, was centered on vehicular movement and combat, while also allowing for "pedestrian" combatants on the field. Since a typical automobile is in the range of 5 yards long, the game centered its maps on a scale of 1 inch on the map representing 15 feet, making a quarter-inch into 3.75 scale feet, which is close enough to human scale. A couple of years later, GDW came out with an adventure game modeling military operations in the then-near-future, after a "limited" nuclear exchange in the future war of Twilight 2000, requiring it to be similarly built from the ground up to handle vehicles. Shortly after, the company would revise its flagship adventure game, Traveller, to incorporate ideas that had developed in the intervening decade, from a different modeling of weapon characteristics that had initially seen use in the tactical boardgame Azhanti High Lightning (a development of the earlier Snapshot, intended to cover the claustrophobic tactical situations of close combat aboard spacecraft, something not well handled with the "range band" system of combat in the classic Traveller game) and then been expanded in the miniatures wargame Striker. Perhaps intending to encourage more military SF in the Rebellion scenario, MegaTraveller was also built from the ground up to handle vehicle operations, mainly by changing the earlier game's 25m "range bands" into 15m squares, which also allowed the game's combat system to be easily scaled down to 1.5m squares to match the grids of deck plans for spacecraft that had been drawn up for the earlier Snapshot and Azhanti High Lightning games, or scaled up by orders of magnitude to handle other situations like mass combat units. Some of the alternate scales, notably naval warfare and space combat, were inconsistently handled for various good or bad reasons.

Other GDW games would go on to use this variable scale in order to handle resolution as well. Space 1889 alternately used large hexes of 200 yards to handle aerial vehicles like sky galleons, taken directly from the vehicle combat games Sky Galleons of Mars and Ironclads and Ether Flyers and more abstractly handled character movement in feet per turn, regulated by the Referee much as RuneQuest had done in its first few editions, or on close quarters maps with square grids. 2300AD, originally and somewhat confusingly (as it had no relation to Traveller) called Traveller 2300, also incorporated vehicles. Then, the so-called "House System" was developed for a new edition of Twilight 2000, among other reasons to revise the timeline and scenario to incorporate the rapid changes that had occurred in the late '80s and early '90s in regard to the Cold War between the US and the then-collapsing USSR that were so important to the game's setting. That system used a variable scale of 2m individual squares and (initially) 8m larger scale squares, followed by a change to 10m larger squares in a later refinement of the rules. Before the rules were refined, they were adapted to a few other settings: the Cadillacs & Dinosaurs comic book series (and soon also an animated series) and a cyberpunk/horror crossover called Dark Conspiracy. The former did quite well, but as a licensed property was somewhat limited in scope and potential. DC, unfortunately, was badly marketed (for instance, it took quite some time before I even really knew what it was, and the advertising made it seem like a Shadowrun knockoff more than its own game in part by using the same artists as SR). The refined rules, using a d20 to resolve success instead of the earlier d10 system, were then unveiled in an adaptation of the system to the Third Imperium setting of Traveller, though that interstellar polity was entirely (and, in retrospect, inexplicably given the previously existing fan base) swept away in the New Era. This was followed by a new revision of Twilight 2000 that included the newly revised rules, known as v.2.2.

As far as I know, that was the end of the heyday of games that deliberately incorporated human-scale and vehicular scale, if they used a tactical boardgame at all. GURPS and its imitator CORPS (and CORPS was a simplification and development of the earlier system that BTRC used in its games TimeLord, SpaceTime, and WarpWorld, which was similarly inspired by GURPS; another BTRC game, Macho Women With Guns, was another GURPS-inspired system, though more in that case as a parody - the company has since gotten its GURPS-worship out of its system, as their current house system, EABA, bears hardly any resemblance to the SJG game) were built for man-to-man combat and never easily handled even mounted combat due to the awkward scale. Later editions of D&D were similarly focused on human-scale in the tactical combat system at the heart of those games, though some effort was put in to handle such things as giants. Interestingly, they tend toward the same 5 foot (almost exactly 1.5m) spaces of games like Snapshot and MegaTraveller. But many games just dumped any tactical matters into the hands of the Referee, usually without even providing guidelines on how combat should flow, much less how to handle tactical considerations. Some games just turned matters into "story" issues, usually with "talking stick" mechanics like the "raise" system of Dogs in the Vineyard, foregoing tactics as a consideration at all.

It has become somewhat fashionable among "old school" gamers to disdain tactical combat boardgames in favor of more purely "theater of the mind", Referee-heavy combat resolution. While I do see a place for that sort of thing, I think that combat boardgames are also of value. It depends on the context, as Matt Easton might say. Tactical play, while not the only method or matter of interest in adventure games, keeps things from degenerating into resembling "JRPG" computer games, with alternating lines of combatants exchanging attacks and spells.