Topic: The Argument Against Character Classes in Rolemaster. PT 1.

[intothatdarkness]

I always preferred adjusting professions through the use of modified level bonuses, as that was easy for players to understand and use and also allowed them to "tailor" their characters without having a major impact on game balance.

As for adjusting professions, I think you can do that without creating a whole series of tables and formulas. If that system works for your game or process, great, but I also think there are easier ways to do it. Complexity, IMO, shouldn't be a goal in and of itself.

[GrumpyOldFart]

There.
You just put out exactly why I'm against removing the professions. Now, each player has to spend hours (and probably more) creating himself his own class and skill costs.

That's why I tried it in HARP and not RM. Skills cost either 2 per rank or 4 per rank, no other variations. You have _____ favored categories, whose skills will cost 2. Which ones do you want those to be?

There, you're basically done.

[VladD]

The thing with this is that players will come up with a way of skewing the system. Even with diminished returns (as per RAW) and increasing costs I'm quite afraid of getting very one dimensional characters.

All melee with supporting spells
All spell attacks with high spell lists and directed spells
All melee ALL MELEE AAAALLLLL MELEEEEEEEE

It looks rather ok and the DP costs might look balanced but the potential for abuse will mean players will abuse it.
Professions make people distribute their DP more in line with their character idea. This creates believable characters instead of Conans, and his spell casting variant and his all spells variant.

Game On!

[GrumpyOldFart]

All melee with supporting spells
All spell attacks with high spell lists and directed spells
All melee ALL MELEE AAAALLLLL MELEEEEEEEE

Those kind of people get badly screwed over in my games.

Consider that with what you've defined:

They can't feed themselves outside of town.
They are social cripples.

And those are only the obvious issues that occur off the top of my head, at the end of a long and grueling day when my brain and imagination are basically "turned off" already.

For many years, it's been a rare time when characters leveled up (at least ones played by players new to my game) and didn't find at least one or two skills that "Hmm, I better get some of that, I didn't realize I was going to need that..."

Now granted, if the guy's goal in life is to be a master thug who ends up being tracked down and filled with arrows by the local cops, then brought back to life so he can be hanged, drawn and quartered, and then the pieces burned... hey, I'm okay with that. Of course, players in my games find out early that cops tend to be mid-to-high level ex-military types, too. They're rather difficult to just shrug off.

That said, I've long been fond of telling players that I do chargen from concept. I don't want to hear what he is, I want you to figure out who he is.

[VladD]

I totally agree with you there, GOF. I'm trying to get them to take skills like origami and like it!
But if you have one guy in the group that takes care of the social stuff and one that gets the survival skills, then the others tend to focus on combat more.
As a GM I still have plenty of influence during character creation and levelling up, but I know people will want to "max out" on combat skills, just to be able to beat anything I throw at them. Combat is a stressful time in any game and dying in RM is always one critical roll away, so if they can whip up 2-3 ultra combat guys, then the rest of the group can be more relaxed about it.

[GrumpyOldFart]

I totally agree with you there, GOF. I'm trying to get them to take skills like origami and like it!
But if you have one guy in the group that takes care of the social stuff and one that gets the survival skills, then the others tend to focus on combat more.
As a GM I still have plenty of influence during character creation and levelling up, but I know people will want to "max out" on combat skills, just to be able to beat anything I throw at them. Combat is a stressful time in any game and dying in RM is always one critical roll away, so if they can whip up 2-3 ultra combat guys, then the rest of the group can be more relaxed about it.

Sure. I once did that with a Warrior Mage, just to show my players how it's done. When others foraged, or looked for traps and treasure, or talked to the merchants, or whatever... he in effect stood sentry duty. That's pretty much all he was good for.

I'm okay with that. You face a variation of the same problem when there is a druid in the party and everyone else wants to go spend days in some large town. My only condition as a GM is that you allow character concept logic to trump the desires of your inner power gamer. If you are able to fully reconcile the two, both in how you develop the character and how you play him, congratulations, you've successfully met all my requirements. As the guy says,

Game On!

[VladD]

The thing with my players is that want to beat the game AND have a veneer of roleplaying over it. So they actually tend to stress the differences, instead of trying to become soloing characters with plenty of cross over skills. Thus the druid will want to roleplay his survival around the city the party is in, the fighter likes to stand guard a lot because then he gets to start combat with encounters wearing his AT 16.

One reason I could think of why my players think that way is because they came from D&D. Some played AD&D (the original) even. D&D has roles that are set in stone. So they are used to having completely separate abilities and capitalizing on them to beat the game and even using the differences between the classes to roleplay their characters.

One thing they do keep in mind is that there are several skills that are useful when multiple characters posses them: observation, attunement, stalk, hide, etc, so they can have plenty of chances when needing to roll for detecting ambushes, reading items, and such. I labored to make them see it that way.

To get back on track: This is why I am having no trouble fitting my games and gamers to the profession/ class system. It limits in way the skill choice (so magicians are not the most perceptive people around) and they force people to lack in some areas and enable them to excel in others and all this according to a more or less balanced concept. It is this balance that is far more agreeable for me that having a system where there is one character class that can do what he likes.

Versatility should come with the natural penalty of not being able to be the best in even 1 one or two skill (area) s. This is something that is not incorporated in the meta classes as designed by bhanson because of the more than 2 costs. The versatility vs specialty in RM is handled by having the cost of the second skill rank for that lvl being dramatically higher than the first cost.

I'm not sure about other people following the thread, but I'm quite curious about the 18 classes/ professions you came up with, as per option 4. I'm guessing it is along the lines of the normal professions: so they have a few areas of expertise and a few areas of weakness; balancing the power of the character.

Why I am hammering on the balance is because RM games tend to get unbalanced at the higher levels. This occurs between the levels 5-10 where the magic users gain a marked advantage and after lvl 10 a party of coordinated casters and fighters can take on almost any foe, except the major ones such as major drakes and demons. I need to have a big hand in controlling skill choice, spell availability and item distribution, because I want my games to go beyond the lvl 10 mark, perhaps even beyond the lvl 15 mark.

[Marc R]

IMO you always have a choice. . .I've played campaigns in which we were all "No profession" and campaigns when we could play any profession, and both worked quite fine, in the sense they were loads of fun.

[pastaav]

1.   Modified Skill Rank Bonus as discussed in step 1 above

Your idea for modified skill bonuses is as far as I can see just a complicated way to make the level of DP needed to get a usable bonus calculated in a different way.

Obviously it is possible to customize this kind of system to arbitrary level of detail. At least if you lots of time to experiment. How to construct the bonus increment sequence and the skill purchase sequence to give a comparable cost as the current professions is far from trivial to guess. I think lots of experimentation would be needed to get even close.

For me it seems it much easier for the game designer to evaluate the effect of "spend 2/7 dp" than to understand the impact of changing the third of fourth number in the skill purchase sequence. Additionally, suppose we have somehow got the system working...how are players to get an intuitive feel for the impact of buying a certain number of ranks for a skill during a level up? Will not the player be forced to repeat the design process at each level up since the bonus sequence is so very nonlinear that his evaluations from the last level does not apply anymore.

2.   Unlimited Rank Development with a cost escalator in step 2 above

Why keep levels at all if you remove the level cap? For me one of the big selling point of levels is exactly that they give a benchmark for how good a character is. The player must spread his points since he can't focus only on the favorite skills (like happens in skill only games).

Food for thought, in my game I do hand out DP instead of exp so players who are so inclined can do partial level ups at any time. On the other hand the restrictions for ranks during a level up do apply. If I decided to tie RRs to skills instead of level then level would never matter except at level up. My point is that to what degree RM is level based system is up to you. If you don't feel the need for limits how many ranks a character can buy in his broadsword skill before he must buy something else then the levels are not doing you any benefit and you can run a RM like game without levels. For those of us that do care about massive focus on the weapon skills the levels make sense and dropping them as concept from the game would be a sure way to make it impossible to use this new material in our existing games.   

[Marc R]

I always viewed professions as optional, if you want to dispose of them, play everyone as a no profession. . .but if you write the game as no profession, you can't really optionally introduce them so easily.

[OLF, i.e. Olf Le Fol]

Sure. I once did that with a Warrior Mage, just to show my players how it's done. When others foraged, or looked for traps and treasure, or talked to the merchants, or whatever... he in effect stood sentry duty. That's pretty much all he was good for.

To be honest, it's hard for a RM2 Warrior-Mage to be good at anything yet be half-good at his own business because everything is expensive for him! 
With 5 Directed Spells at 3/6, weapons that start at 2/7, spell lists at 4/*, relatively expensive armor costs and quite a necessity for Transcend Armor at 2/5, a Warrior-Mage is quickly out of DPs to spend elsewhere! 

[yammahoper]

Rolemaster would work very well as a classless system.  Variety could still be found by basing skill cost on race, sort of a modified early DnD.

Common Men would be the base race with skill cost of 2/6 for all skills and a 1*/2*/4* spell progession in RM2, or 1/1/1, 2/2/2 and 3/3/3 in RMFRP.  All characters could declare 6 spell list that are innately easier to learn ( or realm stat mod in base list).  If a stat based approach is taken to determine number of base list, then the same approach should be taken with open and close list.

Talents of couse would center on bonues to skills, stat mods, items, etc, allowing each PC to be unique.

Such an approach could easily be level less, with all level based contest determined by skill rank totals.  Knowing Sleep Mastery to level 8 means when casting the level 3 SLEEP VIII, all targets resist attack against an 8th level.  PC's resistance woud be based on realm stat mod and resistance training ( I would have a seperate skill for each level, but I would have talents that allow resistance to be bought 1) at all, 2) combining realms, such as the temple of the Stout Heart, which resistance skills cover chan AND ment, but not ess.

Creating new races woud mean figuring new skill cost, stat mods, dev progression for spell learning/list typically learned/etc.