MrFilthyIke said:
I'll chime in and give my praise of Rolemaster (because no one else among my friends would), but I only own the copy that was three soft back/staple-bound individual books (I'm at work, can't tell you which edition). I got them so I could run MERP using the more complex rules, and nothing more. But still love that system.
For those of you who like the RM mechanics, yet have trouble finding folks to play because of the rep it has gained over the years (chartmaster, rulemaster, etc...
), you might want to check out HARP.
HARP uses the same basic mechanics as Rolemaster, but it is much simpler and much more streamlined. There are a few additional changes as well.
For example: combat in HARP still has critical tables, but it does not have those huge attack tables. Combat is resolved with a single dice roll, both determining if you hit and how much damage you do. You only need to consult the critical table IF you actually hit (which is determined without a table at all). Also, if you do not like the critical tables, HARP contains an option that still allows you to resolve combat with a single roll, and not do any table look-up. This option is called Life Points. In either case, the amount of damage done is tied to how well your attack roll is. I am sure many people, in many games found and/or find it frustrating to make an excellent attack roll and then do squat for actual damage. HARP takes this into consideration and ties the attack and damage together so tha the better the attack the more damage done.
Magic: In HARP, you do not have huge lists of spells. Each magic using profession has its own sphere, and each sphere contains a number of individual spells. Spells in HARP do not have levels either. They have a power point cost. The HARP spells are scalable. This means that at the time of casting, you can change differenct aspects of the spell depending upon how much power you put into them. Magic using characters in HARP can also wear armor as well. Wearing armor makes magic harder to cast of course, and it means that spells require more power points (the two are tied together), but casting spells while wearing armor is possible. Additionally, there is a Universal Sphere of magic. ANY character may learn spells from this sphere, even your fighter or rogue. Of course, for them, it costs more to learn them, but in HARP, you can always buy any skill....
Another big difference between RM and HARP is that you can use your development points to purchase talents (think feats for a D&D correlation) and for improving your stats, as well as a few other things besides skills, every time you go up in level. This gives the player the maximum flexibility in defining and making his character (and personally, I think that this is much, much better than how D&D forces you to plan out characters several levels in advance in order to gain a PrC - sorry, but this lack of flexibility is one of my very few pet peeves with the d20 system - which is a pretty good system otherwise).
Experience Points - in RM you get these for killing things, or have to follow complex instructions for gaining them from other sources. Unless 3.5 changed things, in D&D you get them for killing things only. In HARP, it uses a goal and difficulty based system. Each adventure has a primary goal, and can have any number of minor goals. You get xp for accomplishing these goals, which do not have to be combat oriented. Also, once the goal is complete, the GM determines how difficult is was for the characters to accomplish, and this raises or lowers the xps given.
For example, a group of first level characters might have an Extremely Hard time fighting a couple of trolls, while for a group of 5th level characters it might only have a difficulty of Hard. In this example, the 1st level characters would get more XP from fighting the trolls than the 5th level group....
Whew! enough of my rambling..... hehe
