Topic: rolemaster/spacemaster verse Harp/sf

[area51games]

so I bought HARP and Cyradon and College of magic, and I started reading and I picked up HARP SF AND EXTREME and HARP IS good and Crunch -" i 'S LIKE IT WHEN IT CUTES THE ROOF OF MY MOUTH TYPE"
but I got courous with the play test and I found the play test, and really like the system and I jUST BOUGHT THE FIRST BOOK TO SPACE MASTER 2ED . I think I like rolemaster better then harp.< IT'S THE LITTLE MARSH MELLOWS that got me. > Iam near convert phase, because I have played Traveller all editions and feel there still not close, played space opera and found it is so out dated and clanky that it made to much noise. star frontier is "ok" , but a little weak and imature, leaving Blue planet and gurps and eclipse is ok if I had 50 $ a book , which i do not!
 so you guys may be my new game, do you guys take I OWE U'S ? lol!

so the question is what is some other wiegh- ins on the version you like and why and what other games you had experience with ?

[Wolfhound]

Let me preface this by saying that I hope I don't come across as being too insulting to a couple of the people who were involved in Rolemaster/HARP in the past, and that this may be a little long as I tend to ramble too much (as mentioned below my writing skills still need some work and editing).

I come to this from kind of an odd point, as the first time I saw one of those hand-drawn black and white ads for Rolemaster back in Dragon Magazine in the early 80's it intrigued me, so as soon as the local gaming store owner made his first purchase to sell I was one of his first customers and had been a loyal RM fan ever since.  I purchased just about every ICE product he carried in that store as well as many others after I moved away including MERP (Middle Earth Role Playing) and eventually Spacemaster when it came out.  Had played D&D as well as AD&D for a few years prior, as well as Traveller, and a few others of the early RPG's; but Rolemaster/Spacemaster in my opinion were and still are the best system out there.  The details, the flexibility, the customization options;  it was the most realistic system out there and simulated how real-world weapons and armor interacted far better than anything else I had seen (the next best was the very first board/rpg game I ever played which was Magic Realm, which was still a hell of a lot better than D&D or AD&D or anything else).  Maybe it is my engineering background and mindset that cause me to have such an opinion and to take that viewpoint, but that is the case in my opinion.

It just so happens that the originator of HARP (Tim Dugger) was a player in an email-based Rolemaster game that I ran for about 3-1/2 years back in the late 1990's.  So when he came up with the idea for HARP I served as a sounding board for his ideas and suggested several of the aspects that went into the HARP mechanics even before he submitted his proposal for the system.  I also ran one of the play-test groups that play-tested it somewhat extensively. 

When he submitted the proposal for HARP, it was after the original ICE had filed for bankruptcy and the IP rights had been bought by the current owner, and licensed to Moljinor or something like that (which was being run by some of the previous managers that in my opinion hadn't done a very good job the first time around and continued to do a poor job the second time around under the supposedly "new management" that was only a thinning of the old management). 

The goal with HARP was to create basically a game that was different than RM but had a similar feel while being simpler and easier for new players to learn, but at the same time having enough similarities to the various versions of D&D that the D&D crowd might be willing to give it a try.  In that respect HARP was well done, but personally I still prefer Rolemaster due to its greater depth of detail.  While HARP is closer to a "Simulation" of how an RPG mechanics system should work than most of the other RPG's on the market, it still is not as good as Rolemaster in my personal opinion.  However it is still much better than most of the other systems out there on the market. 

I think that the later version of Rolemaster (RMSS/FRP) was a definite improvement over the original version of Rolemaster, however I still own those original books and still reference and pull information out of them now and then.  Likewise with Spacemaster, I liked the mechanics behind the later Spacemaster Privateers (which were based off of the later RMSS/FRP mechanics), but liked the earlier Imperium (sp??) setting for Rolemaster better than the Privateers setting, although the privateers setting was still better than a lot of the sci-fi settings I've seen in the RPG industry (again, only my personal opinion).

Likewise HARP SF was intended to be a sci-fi version of HARP in the same way that Spacemaster was the sci-fi version of Rolemaster (in both of its previous incarnations).  When the concept was first discussed before Tim found a writer for it (which was Nicholas Caldwell, whom I'm happy was the chosen writer) with me, before it was even announced that they were thinking about it he and I had several discussions about it.  Tim had even approached me about writing it prior to any mention to the public about such a product even being considered, but my writing skills are not that great and I don't think I could have done anywhere near as good of a job with such a massive project as what Nicholas did.  And the concept that Tim had as the basis for the setting used a lot of my ideas and suggestions, even though I suspect Tim probably claimed most of my ideas as being his (as publicly I didn't get any more credit than as a play-tester for any of the HARP products), similar to how he had with HARP.  ... Don't mean to sound bitter or anything as that is not my intention and I now realize that it might be sounding like that is the case, as that is not the case, as I am happy to have been able to contribute and be involved with the development process, after all as stated I still prefer Rolemaster/Spacemaster to HARP and HARP-SF.  But I'd have to say that HARP and HARP SF would be in a toss-up with FUDGE as my second choice for both fantasy and sci-fi game mechanics. 

But the setting that I use (and have been using and developing since the early 1980's) was very heavily influenced by Rolemaster and its level of realism and its mathematical simulation style of mechanics.  If it were not for Rolemaster I probably would not have spent the thousands upon thousands of hours developing the setting/world that I've been pouring my soul into for the last 30 years.

[Cory Magel]

Much simpler answer here.

I like RMSS better simply because HARP is not detailed enough for me.  In a nut shell what it comes down to for me is that spell selection and attack results are too generic.  If I run a Sci-Fi game it WILL be with Spacemaster, no matter what the setting.

[NicholasHMCaldwell]

Martial Law goes quite some way to increasing critical variety and College of Magics (and the future Something Wicked and Construct Toolkit and doubtless more still to come) increase the spell selection.

I've played many game systems, GMed quite a few, written for several professionally and read a lot more. The HARP/HARP SF and Rolemaster/Spacemaster family of games are my gaming home and what I want to GM / play / write for. HARP/HARP SF suits my players better in terms of flexibility,  playability,  complexity,  and detail.

Best wishes,
Nicholas

[Cory Magel]

Martial Law goes quite some way to increasing critical variety and College of Magics (and the future Something Wicked and Construct Toolkit and doubtless more still to come) increase the spell selection.

One of the biggest reasons we left 2nd Ed AD&D back in the day is because various groups of professions selected (all of) their spells from the same pool.  We love RM because you have your OWN base lists, then can opt to select from Open/Closed in addition if you like.  That's my main beef with the spell setup in HARP.  I do, however, absolutely love how the spells themselves are setup (scaling).

[NicholasHMCaldwell]

Martial Law goes quite some way to increasing critical variety and College of Magics (and the future Something Wicked and Construct Toolkit and doubtless more still to come) increase the spell selection.

One of the biggest reasons we left 2nd Ed AD&D back in the day is because various groups of professions selected (all of) their spells from the same pool.  We love RM because you have your OWN base lists, then can opt to select from Open/Closed in addition if you like.  That's my main beef with the spell setup in HARP.  I do, however, absolutely love how the spells themselves are setup (scaling).

HARP professions do have their own sets and the degree of spells shared across the professional spheres is less than you might think, looking at HARP Fantasy only

Cleric and Harper share 1 spell
Cleric and Ranger share 5 spells but that's the traditional Druidic/Animist and Ranger overlap that you see in Rolemaster
Harper and Mage share 8 spells and are the worst offenders
Mage and Ranger share 1 spell
Mage and Warrior Mage share 2 spells.

The new spells in CoM for Harpers, Rangers and Warrior Mages are not shared, and the variant mages were essentially only borrowing life/nature and death/undead spells from the Cleric. I'm trying to keep professional spheres as distinct as possible but even Rolemaster spell lists have overlapping spells.

Best wishes,
Nicholas

[Cory Magel]

We played one full campaign using HARP, but it was years ago, but went back to RM after it.  If I remember correctly at the time if you were a certain realm caster you picked spells from the same pool that all caster from that realm picked from.  I do recall there being some slight differences in costs, but it had a much more generic feel to it than RM.  Rewrites maybe have changed it since.

Granted RM has a lot of spell cross-over between the lists, but the way it's setup gives (imo) a far more specialized feel to the characters.

[Thom @ ICE]

Your memory still applies. All Harpers pick from the same pool, as do all Mages, etc.  Clerics are the only ones with diversity in their selection.  But just because they all have access to the same pools doesn't mean they can all cast the same spells.

Not every mage needs Elemental Ball: Fire - but everyone (in that profession) has the opportunity.   Add in Arcane Power and Arcane Circle Talents and any character can cast any spell... but it may be costly to do so.

Key point that I picked up in what you wrote is "back to RM" indicating that you came into HARP from after an RM experience.   I came to HARP from an AD&D2e background and found HARP spellcasting provided greater options and once you add in Spell Scaling your spellcasting could be taken to an even greater spread of opportunities.

[Cory Magel]

That's completely how I look at it.  There are a few things that top my list as to why I love RM, but profession uniqueness is #1 and HARP chips away at that a little.  HARP is more detailed than D&D, but not as much as RM.  Pretty much why I look at it as RM-Lite.  In a way it kinda replaced MERP, which was pretty much RM-Lite previously.

I think HARP is a good system, it just isn't as detailed as we like.  Lot's of gamers out there want something that fits between D&D and RM though.

I like the combined attack charts, but our experience resulted in capping attacks too often.  While that's partially an issue of play-style it was still a problem that wasn't going away (we could just have removed the cap, but went back to RM anyhow so the point was moot).  I also really like how the spell learning system works (how spells scale), just not the move towards a more generic selection than you appear to get from HARP.  I don't know as if breaking down RM's spell lists would work however... because I suspect it would result in almost exactly what you have in HARP.  Spells would seem to become more generic in selection and you'd differentiate the power level of spells/lists by differing the costs then.