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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6097849" data-attributes="member: 42582">I'm certainly not going to try and offer a rationale for my taste in RPGs - I can barely grasp the reasons myself, and don't think I could explain them satisfactorily to anyone else!Rolemaster is a strange game. I'm not 100% sure what RAW Rolemaster would look like - it seems set up around fairly standard D&D-ish violent fantasy tropes, but with this intricate character creation constantly in danger of being thwarted by the crit tables. I don't spend as much time at the ICE forums as I used to, but when you go there there are two main forms of RPGing apparent: 2nd ed AD&Dish "I must set up situations that will teach the players not to get into fights" story-railroading; and heavy heavy process sim where it's hard to get a sense of exactly what the play consists in.The actual GMing techniques I still use today - flexible scene-framing based around backstory that is light-ish but not fully No Myth (so it can be fleshed out as needed in play); following player leads in PC building and play to run my game, and building up the campaign around that in a synergistic fashion (the GM taking the lead on backstory detail, but the players having a key role in shaping the broad parameters and concerns) - I first started using GMing AD&D Oriental Adventures in 1986-87. Before that I had been running a standard AD&D game that suffered in part because of alignment issues, and in part from poor dungeon construction on my part (I can't do Gygaxian Gming at all). Once I read an article in Dragon 101 about ditching alignment, and started my OA game without it, things changed dramatically. OA had PCs with built-in hooks (family, history, honour etc) and monsters who related to that (the Celestial Bureauracy, etc), but without alignment as a pre-determiner outcomes were unpredictable, and so the way things unfolded was unpredicatable too.I took this same approach into RM - what I've tried to get better at over the years is cutting out cruft that traditional RPGs tend to throw up, and cutting to the interesting stuff.What I loved about RM was the detail of the PC generation, and the mechanical heft of its combat rules (both for melee and spell casting - archery gets fairly short shrift in RM). It offers a mechanics-grounded immersion that is one hallmark of purist-for-system play; but unlike Runequest its melee and casting mechanics are metagameable, at least within limits, which gives it a capacity for player expressiveness that is absent in some other purist-for-sim systems. What I came to find frustrating was the lack of non-combat conflict resolution mechanics. (There are bucketloads of non-combat skills, with their DCs and tables etc, but the resolution is pretty unsatisfactory.)If I was 20 years younger, or had time to do more RPGing, I imagine I'd be doing BW or Dungeon World or something else modern rather than 4e, but when you have an established group with developed tastes and legacy expectations you sometimes just end up where you end up. But being a bit conservative by default isn't a reason to be reactionary! - Which is why I'm happy to take advice and techniques from other games (and from the Forge, etc) where that looks like it can add something to my game and my GMing.</blockquote>

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