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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Rel" data-source="post: 2435561" data-attributes="member: 99">My group played Rolemaster almost exclusively for 12 years.  One of the guys in the group (who is also a board member here - Speaks With Stone) wrote the Castles and Ruins book for RMSS and together he and I wrote The Essence Companion for that system.  With those as my credentials, I'll say the following:We quit playing RM and switched to D&D 3.0 because we had reached the point where the system was getting in the way of the kinds of games we wanted to run.  Even the simplest combats would take hours to resolve thanks to the combination of the Maneuver Charts (which had been split up into almost a chart for every skill), the Weapon Tables, the Critical Charts and the biggest culprit:  The combat system.The Snap/Normal/Deliberate phase business combined with the various maneuvers you were required to select from (Full Attack, React&Melee, etc.) the percentage actions and all the modifiers that applied had just become oppressive to us.  When combined with the maneuvers that often gave bonuses to actions taken on subsequent rounds and the complexity of the magic system (which we ourselves had contributed to bloating with our own book, The Essence Companion), combat was a sluggish nightmare full of "Oh damn, I forgot to add the X modifier!"  And it was all too easy for a single random crit to turn a well crafted character into a dead well crafted character.It got to the point where our campaigns became almost entirely roleplay focused because combat was extremely deadly and also extremely slow to resolve.  At first we were patting ourselves on the back at somehow having evolved beyond being "hack and slash" type players.  But as time went on we understood that we actually had a lot more fun when there was a healthy dose of smiting the bad guys mixed in with our mystery solving and courtly intrigue.I'll go off track here for a moment to say that I feel that many of these same problems are, at least to some extent, inherent in D&D at high levels where powerful magic is imposing large modifiers for long periods of time.  But we generally don't play at those levels.  And RM had us contending with these issues right out of the gate with 1st level characters.  It was just the nature of the system.I don't know if RM could be redesigned in such a way as to retain its fanbase and yet pare down the combat system into something a lot simpler (and therefore more quickly resolved).  But I do know that it would be impossible for our group to return to anything resembling the combat system in RMSS and have fun with it.  Again, I have less of a problem with the resolution of a single attack (I too like the way that armor interacts with the various weapons and the Crit charts are a Good Thing) and more of a problem with how the flow of the combat round works.For what it's worth, we tried several innovations in an attempt to make the combat system more workable.  We had a method where we wrote down our actions in silence on sheets that divided them into Snap/Normal/Deliberate and instituted cyclic initiative rather than re-rolling every round.  It helped a bit but fell short of making the situation bearable in the long run.  After I got D&D3.0 in the Christmas of 2001, we played it, scoffed at the idea of returning to D&D, gave it some more thought and then did exactly that.  We've never really looked back and I know that several players in our group actually tossed or sold their RM stuff.  I didn't but I'm a total pack rat. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />I hope that some of that might be helpful to you, Tim.  Despite some less than pleasant dealings with ICE in the past (before the current administration), I hold great fondness for the system and I wish you guys the best of luck.</blockquote>

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