Quote from: One Horse Town;350968Never used Shadow World myself, although i transported the sourcebooks into my own campaigns. Curse of Kabis was the memorable end-game to one campaign.

The saddest thing is that while I have all the rule books I never did collect the Shadow World books, because at that time I never GM'd, just played. I'd love to get them, but not at the price that they go for on ebay (with International shipping). I scour old gaming bins at all the FLGS for a lucky find though.

Quote from: One Horse Town;350935Now that WFRP has fallen off the table for me big time, i hereby pronounce RM as the King of games.

Relate your stories, good or bad, with this bad boy.

Don't be silly! Stone Horizons is the King of Games!

At least until For King and Country comes out...


-clash

A guy on my flgs forum asked what we'd play if we could only play one from now on. I opined that I would want a generic, flexible, scalable system with good ancillary products (like War Law and Silent Death) so I could play war games or fleet games with the same essential product. I wanted a system you could play light or go deep if you wanted. After all that, Rolemaster was the only game left. I love all kinds of games, and I haven't played Rolemaster much lately, except for a Rolemaster Express demo on a bet to prove that it wasn't so complicated. But it's a terrific, often overlooked game. I think some edition confusion/conflict contributes to that, but maybe not much in the grand scheme of things.

I have a bunch of pretty typical game stories about it, but nothing weird or particularly illustrative. It's just always been a good, solid game.

We migrated to Rolemaster after we had played AD&D. My friend liked it because of the Middle Earth sourcebooks. I liked it because of the freedom to create any type of character. We played a couple of years and I mainly played rogues (good armor and good weapon costs). I also wore a chain shirt (AT 13) and used a long sword. And played a high elf.

I never shifted any of my OB to DB. I just attacked and it was wicked fun. The crit charts were a blast and we abused the heck out of the weapon kata rules.

We did not use the standard Rolemaster initiative system. Instead we rolled d100 and added the Agl bonus with the high roller going first.

The world was principally my friend's homebrew with material from the Middle Earth sourcebooks  thrown in for good measure.

Our Rolemaster days lasted a couple of years (1983-1985 or so) and then we shifted gears to RQ2 and Stormbringer.

My Homebrew Rolemaster campaign is probably in my top three favourite games ever run.

The highlight is probably the Players charging a Cthuonian base only half way to have on of them scream... 'Hang on, these are Mind Flayers! We are attacking a city of Mind Flayers!"

Quote from: One Horse Town;350935Now that WFRP has fallen off the table for me big time, i hereby pronounce RM as the King of games.

Relate your stories, good or bad, with this bad boy.

Soooo just to be clear your proclaiming one dead game to be the king of games after you've decided you no longer like another recently dead game?

Yeah - that makes sense.  

As far as Chartmaster goes we dropped it for something simpler and converted the campaign over to Champions (Fantasy Hero) which we then also got bored off and started playing WFRP 1s ed which lasted for well over a year when that group broke up as people moved away for college and what not.

Yeah, I don't get why WFRP has "fallen off the table" for you...
Is it just cause there's that nasty new thing coming out?

Nah, 1e AD&D is the king of games.

But I will tell you a couple of great Rolemaster stories.

First one's shorter...

We were playing a rolemaster game set in middle earth (not MERP) and were trying to find out why an elven lord "from the east" had apparently gone insane and ridden out with an army of easterlings and elves, sacked Rhun, and was poised to storm across southern Mordor and into Gondor.

Anyway, without too many details, we got close to the king in question and wound up in a close quarters fight with the guy.  He's some 5000 year old cat who saw the first dawn, was around when the Simirils were forged, etc. etc.  Cuts a swath straight for my character.  I hold everything back except one point of offense and just barely parry him back.

My die roll.  99.  Followed by 00.  Followed by 98.

That was some damn great luck.

The other one is a long, long story that involves a nearly ten year long revenge plot set in motion, totally unknown to me and on my behalf, by my friend Kevin against our mutual friend Rob.

The ultra compressed version is that Rob's character slew a character of mine in the first hour of the first session of Rolemaster (again, middle earth setting) that I'd ever played, and like 5 years later Kevin arranging it so during a game I'd just popped by to "guest star" in with my rip-off of Subotai, I'd have an equal chance to do unto Rob.  I did.  By piercing his (2 years' run) character through one side of his jaw and out the other with an arrow.

Someday I'll tell the full version which is much more funny.

Quote from: thedungeondelver;351020Nah, 1e AD&D is the king of games.

1E AD&D is a good game but BECMI D&D is better.

As for Rolemaster being the king of games, I'd believe it in a world without D&D, Champions, TFT, etc.

I played MERP / RM in Middle Earth with my crew for many years, and it always was a blast. The best thing about the system is that I don't have any unusual story involving the system apart from the streaks of good / terrible luck you can find in any other RPG. As it usually happens with BRP (king of games for me) the system blends with the background, which is great.

We found that the grittiness of combat was great for Middle Earth, where a well placed stab would end your day or anyone's day. One - hit kills are totally tolkienian IMO. We were not so fond of the magic system, but we solved it through cool descriptions. And those rules for being detected by the Shadow each time you cast a spell are golden.

Quote from: jadrax;350997My Homebrew Rolemaster campaign is probably in my top three favourite games ever run.

The highlight is probably the Players charging a Cthuonian base only half way to have on of them scream... 'Hang on, these are Mind Flayers! We are attacking a city of Mind Flayers!"

Ha!

Quote from: kryyst;351005Soooo just to be clear your proclaiming one dead game to be the king of games after you've decided you no longer like another recently dead game?

Yeah - that makes sense.  

Never underestimate the power of the badwrongfunnians!

Any one thought about replacing the RM crit system with a deck based one.
So decks for Thrusting, Slashing, Bashing et al. and then you save on the table cross checking malarky which did slow the game down.

I have been thinking about a toally deck based combat system in which each player has a deck based on their skill/weapon etc and hit and damage are determined by a draw and compare from both sides. I used something similar in a CCG and it was pretty effective in a simple abstracted way.

Quote from: kryyst;351005Soooo just to be clear your proclaiming one dead game to be the king of games after you've decided you no longer like another recently dead game?

Rolemaster a dead game? I thought Rolemaster Classic was in print.

I never played Rolemaster, but I have a lot of Rolemaster/Space Master/Shadow World supplements, and I was always able to find things to export to other games. For example I used the space and ground combat rules ("Star Strike" and "Armored Assault") in my GURPS Space Campaign.

However, the best thing about RM still remains (IMHO) the critical hit/fumbles descriptions: "You kill yourself in an amazingly creative way. Allies and enemies looking at you are stunned for three rounds" or "You internalize your spell's energy. Your body explodes in a billion of blinding particles. Allies and enemies within 10 yards take YX damage, and are blinded and stunned for six rounds".

Sadly, I never found the time to adapt these tables for other systems.