Quote from: Arioch on December 08, 2022, 11:11:20 AM

Quote from: Angry Goblin on December 08, 2022, 08:27:46 AM
For someone who isn´t familiar with Darkmaster, would it work well as a replacement for the WHRP rules? I like the world but the career system does it for me...

Author here: I think it's relatively easy to make it work, you could set the gods of Chaos as your Darkmaster, the rest is pretty straightforward. The biggest obstacle would be the lack of guns, but someone made a third party supplement that takes care of that: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/354181/Black-Powder-Guns

Hey bro, many thanks for this!

What's character creation like in Against Darkmaster? I always thought it was rather dull in Rolemaster.

Quote from: David Johansen on December 07, 2022, 11:31:43 PM
If you have MERP and all its sourcebooks you don't need Against The Dark Master.  MERP is amazinly tight.  Personally using Arms Law would be good because the MERP critical tables get a bit dull after a session or two.

Totally agree.  I picked up "Against the Darkmaster" thinking to run it for MERP.  And while it has cool vibe for sure, once we got into doing character gen there were enough fiddly little things that we scrapped it and just went back to MERP.  I flipped my rulebook online.  If you have your old MERP stuff, just keep it.  But if you don't Darkmaster is probably a better option than the new Rolemaster.

That being said, I've also done lots of MERP conversions to B/X and Castles & Crusades and it's not hard.  If you get creative, you can also port the crit charts over.  Depends on your group.  I can't convince my current players to do anything too complex so we've tended to bounce between OSE, C&C, and DCC, though I still like reading other systems for inspiration.

Quote from: Trond on December 09, 2022, 01:42:16 PM
What's character creation like in Against Darkmaster? I always thought it was rather dull in Rolemaster.

I found it rather slow.  A bit faster than RM but there's lots of flipping back and forth through the book and you're doing the same basic thing, checking boxes for bonuses.  It doesn't help that some of their sample PCs have errors in the calculations.

While I enjoyed the MERP comparisons, how does Against the Darkmaster compare to that other simplified Rolemaster in print, HARP.

Quote from: Trond on December 09, 2022, 01:42:16 PM
What's character creation like in Against Darkmaster? I always thought it was rather dull in Rolemaster.

The backgrounds really spice up VsDM character creation, especially when compared with MERP or RM2 (the only ones I have experience with). And they allow for very thematic characters if you want them. I like how they can vary up the vocations (classes) without adding new vocations.

Quote from: KingofElfland on December 12, 2022, 09:24:42 PM

Quote from: Trond on December 09, 2022, 01:42:16 PM
What's character creation like in Against Darkmaster? I always thought it was rather dull in Rolemaster.

The backgrounds really spice up VsDM character creation, especially when compared with MERP or RM2 (the only ones I have experience with). And they allow for very thematic characters if you want them. I like how they can vary up the vocations (classes) without adding new vocations.

I liked that more in reading than in actual character creation.  In the end, it was just more background noise, literally.  Give me a single d100 roll for a background and I can take it from there.