While the video doesn't have good production value, and it's kind of meandering, I can FEEL your joy through the camera. It made me smile. I love your energy.
I remember running MERP back in the 90s, when a character lost his hand to a lion in the White Mountains. That one roll on the critical tables ended up driving an entire storyline in the campaign that I hadn't seen coming, but it added a lot to the story.
Thank you for commenting. I had more than a few storylines changed by the critical tables. I think it's the best part of the game. The GM and players are forced to live with the consequences no matter how brutal they may be.
I had this back in the 90s and loved it in theory. Getting to play it with all the rules was fun when it worked. It was just so crunchy rules-wise. I haven't seen the books since then, so seeing this video was nice to reminisce to.
Playing it years ago, I was running a character that carried a puppet around and talked to it. The character was charged by a lion, not being setup as a melee character he could not do much. I declared that he stuffs the puppet into the mouth of the lion. The GM has me roll on a non weapon attack table. Roll a hit with a critical. Then the GM has me roll on the Tiny Critical table. The roll came up that the lion took an unbalancing critical that caused him to choke and die. So the character killed a lion with a puppet.
I played Rolemaster very actively from the beginning of 90ies until 2002. It impressed me so much I can't describe. Rolemaster inspired me to get into worldbuilding. A Hobby I still do. If I will get a new group of players (maybe sometimes?) and start playing pen&paper again I will for sure use Rolemaster 2nd Edition Revised.
I'm amazed your books look as well as they do. We/I tore our books up through years of hard gaming. Eventually, I made copies of everything and combined them into a GameMaster binder, which included everything a GM needed to run a game - combat charts, crit tables, experience, supplies, treasure, etc. We were poor kids and copies weren't cheap, but it was cheaper than buying new books all the time.
Thank you. Considering I played the hell out of this game I have no idea how. For Arms Law I used a photo copy so I could pass it around the table without having to worry about Cheeto fingers.
Rolemaster was our go to system when I was playing regularly in the mid to late 80s. Definitely a system for a group of committed players, you needed to be into the system to be able to play smoothly, i don't think it would work well with a group of casual or brand new players. However despite it's 'crunchiness' once you got used to it the system was great and didn't feel at all cumbersome and gave players the freedom to really customise how your character played, fighters didn't all need to be wearing full plate and fighting with a sword, you could actually create a fighter relying on weapon skill and mobility and it worked! Magic use was also cool as the customisation options meant every magic user had a unique list of magic available , if your players had the appetite for the game and reading up on their various options open.
I agree. It was a game for a different time I think. Today people have to have 3 jobs just to pay rent. Few people have the time required to run a game like this. Thank you for commenting.
Rolemaster is one of my two favorite Game systems along with the HERO system. I also modified the Experience to increase by 10,000 needed to level for each 10 levels of experience gained. I had people start at the equivalent of 3rd level, tho still called it 1st level, by having them create the character first with their background or adolescent level, then a level 0, and finally first level.
Still playing it right now! Best system and I played A LOT of them. Brutal at low level but oh so rewarding. No systems fleshes out the PCs through the levels like this one. ALL characters are unique because of the skill system. The spells are easy to learn and no-nonsense, no min-maxing really possible, combats are ALWAYS terrifying. A++ game.
My favourite ttrpg! The magic system was the best! One thing that I was expecting - or hoping - that you would mention was the genre books, and all their amazing detail for their specific settings: Mythic Greece (bronze age), Mythic Egypt, Pirates, Arabian Nights, Robin Hood (mediaeval), etc.
Ah, fond memories. I really liked the system. After running one campaign of Space Master and one campaign of Rolemaster (and a few shorter games of Cyberspace) I sadly got tired how hard it was to handle NPCs. It really would have benefitted from having more NPC archetypes or something. Good times, still. Thanks for bringing out all those memories again!
@@mstephenjoy back then at least I didn't have so many other things to take care of and even though combat etc. took a bit more time, it was ok because we could set up multiple sessions per week :) Still, I could very well use Rolemaster or Space Master for a new campaign if only there was a faster way to handle NPCs. Mythras is almost as hard with multiple skills etc. but as it lacks levels, it is manageable.
Thank you !!! I love listening and learning about RPGs. RM, MERP, Basic Fantasy RP and 80s Call of Cth are some of my favorites. woW ! Your space master set is clean !!! Thats worth a lot of money !
I like RM but couldn't get my players into it. They didn't like to be on the receiving end of those critical hits. Lol. I wish I could find a group in my area ABE Pennsylvania Any place to still get those original books at a decent price?
The criticals are a lot of fun until the players start getting hit with them lol. I had a player one punch a stone golem dragon with the luckiest hit I have ever seen. I don't know where you could find the original books but I think there are PDFs available on DriveThru? Thank you for commenting :)
I've enjoyed Rolemaster for the suprising combat results, the ability to create just about any sort of charector, the MERP setting support, and the story insperation.
I started with D&D in the late 80'. Then moved to MERP. In the 90' became a GM for Spacemaster and Rolemaster. Both with French and English versions (helped a lot for my English vocabulary and grammar classes). I am in love with the system. I twiddled with the rules and had lots of fun. Thanks for the walk back to memory lane😊
I agree, Rolemaster is one of the best. I have been playing since 1985. I disagree on how week first level is. While the spell casters are pretty week, fighters and rogues can hold there own against appropriate opponents. What I like most about Rolemaster is, it is one of the very few fantasy games where a 3rd level goblin can kill a 12th level fighter with one shot if they get two lucky back to back rolls.
Rolemaster is my favourite rpg. I always come back to it. "My" Rolemaster is RMSS. While there's certainly an argument to be made that RMSS wasn't really necessary to create given it's increased crunch (!) over previous editions, I'm so glad it was made. There's really nothing like it.
Loved playing Rolemaster in the 90's and early 00's. Had a friend that ran away from the cityguard. Started running up a wall. They shot him in the right arm with a xbow, the crit broke his arm. He fell down on the ground and that crit broke his left arm. We laughed so hard. Think he has like -90 or so to everything.
I recall my older brother picking up Rolemaster. But he returned it because there were so many tables he called it Rollmaster. A while back, I was able to snag a few boxes of Spacemaster... the critical hit tables are hilarious. I may borrow them for other games... my older brother is a jerk anyhow, he stole all my AD&D stuff.
Every time I hear people complain about D&D being too crunchy, I just think "have you heard of Rolemaster?" I played it a few times in the 80's, and we found it extremely deadly. One time, the party was tpk'd by randomly rolled badgers that got pissed off by the intrusion. We didn't always have a lot of time to play, so we didn't play it much anyway. It has a long slow start-up and we were too scattered for campaign play. I really liked it tho. Especially those fumble tables. I'll tell you who loved it tho. The author of the Poison Elves indie comics, Drew Hayes. The series is about his RM character in a fantasy world. Idk if he's still making it but it was great in its day.
Thank you for the comment. I didn't know that about Poison Elves! That's the fun thing about RM: nothing every goes as expected and you always walk away with a great story.
@@mstephenjoy- A computer version? You mean the 'Starfleet Command' series of old PC games. The pair of SFC2 standalone games used the SFB system, such fun. As for the tabletop SFB, the publisher released a newer, more streamlined version years ago called 'Federation Commander'. It still uses the same system but has cut out some of the extra stuff such as ECM and reduced the number of turn impulses, for a few examples. It also offers the option of two different scales for the ships so there is also basically half-sized SSDs for quicker games and/or better management for higher numbers of ships in a game. Still a crunchy game but as much as SFB. I thought it an improvement.
@@mstephenjoy- I think the Starfleet Command 2 PC games are sold by a small company, but you can find a full (patched) install somewhere around the net. I got both a few years ago, although the native aspect ratio is 4:3 so a bit small for modern day with the hi-res mod; they came out in the early 2000s. As for the Federation Commander TTG, it's still available in a few places. Think I got my Fed/Klingon/Romulan Commander sets from NobleKnight, along with one of the alien expansion folios.
@@mstephenjoy- Also.. IIRC, the FedCom game includes rules for using minis with/without a hex map. I could have that mixed up with something else, but my memory isn't bad just yet. Probably easy to do with the various Star Trek ship minis floating around. The included ship counters & hex maps in FedCom were better than the old SFB stuff though and included two different sized sets.
We started playing MERP back in the late 80's and gradually added pieces of Rolemaster to the game as time went on. From the very beginning, through mistakes and deliberate decisions, we never played _right_, and as such, we'd probably get beat up by "real" Rolemaster and MERP gamers, but we had a lot of fun over the years. I still prefer our system to most of the others out there.
The thing about the spells is, you kinda have to divide the number by five or ten to get the actual number of different spells. There's multiple levels of the same spell to increase the effect.Verse says the effect is based upon your level or the amount of power you put into the spell. And then sometimes you need three or four spells to get the same effect that one spell in another game would give you. For example, in most games the heal spell heals your damage, regardless of what it is. In rolemaster, there's specific spells for healing burns, torn tendons and ligaments, broken bones, bruises, slivers, stub toes, hang nails. I'm being a little bit silly, but if you get the game and look, you'll get the point. So the 2000 spells is like 150-200 in most other games.
Oh, and the expereince system really opened up the roleplay. Travel expereince, expereince for avoiding combat, planning, and overcoming obsticles transformed the party from murder hobos to some epic adventurers, scholars, Heros, scouts.
The 10k experience points needed to level up are not a problem if you take into account that characters gain xp for every mile of territory traversed, and there is a x5 multiplier on every "first time". The only pain about the Xp/Levelling system is the maths and log keeping. I tend to make the players fill their xp log during combat while logging xp for travel distance and good roleplay, etc... and then do the maths in half an hour after the game. I love the attack tables. It looks daunting if you're not used to it, but it really works quite well once you comprehend how it works. It is great how lower Armour Class requires better attack rolls to do any damage at all, but if damage is done, it is near-guarantied critical, while heavier armour makes you easier to hit but needs better rolls to crit. For more types of weapons, you don't need to modify the weapon tables, you just add a bonus or malus to the weapon against certain armour classes and on the crit tables. That is how the official expanded weapon lists do it. I used to have a lot of the 2nd edition books, but lost them all in the move. 3rd edition is also quite good. I love the 3rd edition Castles&Ruins book and Martial Arts Compendium. I was really really lucky five years ago, to find a copy of Martial Arts Law at a Bring&Buy. You can't really get that one as pdf, since even the official pdf version published by ICE on DriveThru is competely unreadable on most of the tables. Of course, Rolemaster is not perfect. There are some aspects that I strongly disagree with. I tried to houserule those parts, but it snowballed out of control. So, I started making my own system.
Awesome, thank you. I never played RM correctly so I'm sure your xp/levelling comment makes sense. I'm definitely the kind of DM that house rules instead of looking things up. I have to because I really can't remember too many rules and procedures. Today I make checklists for myself but I didn't know to do that when I played RM.
@@mstephenjoy yeah looking at the lists of books was Mainly RoleMaster a couple HARP and Shadow World books as well as a few of the MERP books was likely closer to 1 foot of Rolemaster but all the Add ons and Supplements bulked it out (was my best friends books) I covered the Palladium Games books myself which is a bigger stack (Rifts, Robotech, TMNT, BtS, NinjasNSuperspies, etc) but I loved I.C.E. Games for the depth, Palladium for the Sheer Versatility
What attracts me to Spacemaster, despite its difficulty/crunchy, is precisely the detail. Even in Traveller, at least in this latest MGT 2E edition which is the one I've been getting into the most, there are many things that don't tell you how the character does them. Like cloning for example, or placing a robotic arm in the body of someone... your character cannot do it even if he is at the maximum in medicine and robotics skill, the rules are made thinking about only being able to go to a hospital and pay there to have done the service of placing your arm or making a clone. There are even machines/robots that can create a clone, but again... your character doesn't do anything, the machine does it automatically. In Spacemaster there are rules that detail the process of creating, for example, the clone... even if you want to do genetic engineering to change certain things to that clone. That's super immersive because you see how your character does it. Even in D&D 3.5 or Pathfinder 1e there is the Craft skill with the rule about how the process of rolling dice is to accumulate a score each week until after a few months you create the armor or weapon you were making. I love those things, because it may not be the "most convenient or fastest" for the impatient player, but it is super immersive for roleplay. I love that there are so many skills (like in GURPS RPG) because that's how reality is, you can't know everything, plus with a technology like the science fiction story "We Can Remember Everything For You" an editing/implantation technology could be used/implemented of memories to insert skill scores by removing skill points from another... then with that you could for a while focus on the ability to pilot a specific type of spaceship (because it makes sense that each model of ship requires a specific skill) but later it doesn't serve you that much anymore so the character decides to go to one of these centers and pay to have the skill pack loaded into his brain to pilot another ship model or some other skill.
Thank you for this comment. I've always wanted to combine Rolemaster and Spacemaster. I thought it would be a crazy sci-fi/fantasy He Man kind of campaign.
@@mstephenjoy Mmm... or maybe something like DC's Kaliman comics, or Pirates of the Dark Waters. I also have the project of making my own setting/system combining the best of Traveller, Spacemaster, GURPS and Starfinder. But, yeah, is a lot of work.
Yeah I was feeling nostalgic about tabletop roleplaying times and thought that does anyone play rolemaster anymore, since it's the best I've played. Googled and boom!! :) We combined it with shadowrun later on. Well mostly the critical tables were very useful on that system too.
Very interesting system. I think Against the Darkmaster is a bit more approachable? That's probably where I would start, being new to all of this, as I am. Also, am I wrong in thinking that GURPS has a comparable level of details and crunch?
Hello. I see that the books you show here are from the first edition of Rolemaster, and some from the second edition, is 1e the one you consider the best? Or is the 2e? And how you think about the fourth edition?
Back in the late 80's, before I took up the mantle of a DM myself, I used to play in my HS group where we were playing AD&D (1st ed.), and my DM would use only the "Arms Law & Claw Law" manual and incorporated those descriptive (and crit.) hit tables into our AD&D gaming sessions. That definitely spiced up our more-boring AD&D generic combat system and made our game a hella lot more fun, so much so that every single player in our group was ONLY looking forward to combat more than anything else every time we played. Everybody suddenly wanted to be a fighter class character (like Fighters, Paladins, Rangers, Barbarians, and Cavs) lol !!
Thank you for sharing this. My experience using Arms Law with 1st edition was very similar but holy crap did it make an already dangerous system even more so! That being said we all loved it.
So, genuine question, what’s really the appeal of a high lethality game? I get the theoretical appeal of it, but also at the point of detachment I’d have to be to play a high lethality game I don’t understand the draw as opposed to a board game like Spirit Island or Betrayal at House on the Hill or something, since those are much faster to set up so are less disruptive if the players catastrophically fail.
Great question! I think it's that the stakes are a lot higher. There is a real rush of endorphins when your hero is overwhelmed but somehow manages to overcome their challenges. It's less about wish fulfillment and more about beating challenges. That's my guess anyway.
A high lethality game is basically for people who don’t mind the longer set up time as a trade off for the possibility of more story. The story (if you can call it that) of your time in the haunted mansion is the 30 to 60 minutes of play time. And it can be fun to play the game a lot but the story never truly evolves. Plenty of people don’t mind that (I quite like Betrayal as a game) but some do. For the people who want the story to keep going, there are games like this one. High stakes and potential high reward of fun moments in a cool story
You spent a lot of time developing the character and it's a big deal if he dies. Real suspense and tension. It's hard to imagine these days because the expectations on GMs have changed and players can just get a different GM. Players would often have to take a break from the game to emotionally heal before they where ready to make a new character. It's a lost aspect that we'll never get back. But the new ways have their advantages too. RIP Sonya, Dian, Weslock...
Same applies to other similar games, like Cyberpunk 2020. To me the appeal is that the stakes are high when you enter a combat. You will do your damnest to stay alive, especially as it has taken quite a bit of time to create your character. Another thing is that as the combat is lethal, combat is often over quite fast. Last and probably the most important part of it is that it encourages players to find ways to solve their problems without violence or at least not through face to face combat. Granted, it is not very heroic but perhaps that playstyle is best served using some other gamesystem.
I am a military historian with a past in the Danish armed forces. High lethality is authentic. I like that. And I like high stakes. I really dislike the D&D "sleep eight hours and your ruptured lung is healed".
Games are designed to be played. A book that is marked, scarred, ripped, smudged, and labeled is a book well loved. You shouldn’t feel bad about leaving marks in them.
Thanks for the insights into RM. Back in the day Dnd Blew our minds wide open in 1980, and then a friend brought Roll Master into our group and we never looked back. I found the artwork and rules of ADnd silly, compared to the Grimdark realism of RM. I wanted a mace to actually feel like a bludgeoning death bringer, not some silly d8 damage. We played the hell out of RM, then life took over eh. I still think RM Has a lot to draw from, but is unplayable in a modern context, for a modern audience. I looked into the New RMaster rules set, however the complexity of the action economy simply repulsed me. Instead of streamlining martial dynamics, they decided to double down on simulation...... But, as we know to each their own. If you are having fun, then it's all good. The challenge is finding a group of people who want this intensity of ruleset...
Fantastic, thank you for commenting. I wonder how many people still play RM or how many younger people do ? I think you are right. Nobody has time for so many rules these days.
Iron Crown Enterprises (ICE) is releasing a new Rolemaster Unified edition. I played the original and the RMFRPG rules. I still keep going back to original. My biggest complaint is the character sheet with soooo many skills that will never be used in an adventure. But ICE went for realism over playability. My group found it best to just ignore most of the skills listed. Photocopying the weapon and skill tables and giving them to the players for the weapons they were using made the GM job a lot easier.
That was RMFRP/SS, that is the Edition that has a really overblown skill system. RM2 (the one in the video here) lets you easily customize the skills to fit your style.
it`s not that the combat system is complicated, it`s that it is too complicated for what it is actually achieving which is comparing numbers plus modifiers.
In retrospect I can see what you mean but at the time it didn't feel that way to me. Just the amount of content this game offered and the critical system were amazing. Thank you for the comment.
Ah, back when it was ok to start your "players handbook" (Character Law) with "soul departure in 10 rounds", and content was almost arbitrarily positioned throughout the books. I loved Rolemaster (though struggled to run it). I always loved H.A.R.P, which seemed to me to be a great modernisation of the RM ethos.
Man I am generally with you, but thank you for convincing me I'll never use Rollmaster. Because I'd much rather have a formula I can consistently apply, for when my players want to do a thing, rather than a system trying to encompass everything.
I played RM (1st edition) for a few years before making my own game. It had a lot of good to it but it was, as written, unplayable. Take the character traits: *10 traits that could go up and down every level. *All your skills were affected by an average of 2 or 3 traits' bonuses. *All skills needed recalculation every time you gained a level and levels came VERY fast. If you did it by the book you would spend every other game session just updating your character sheets and this was far from the worst of this sort of thing. Also in the companions they added classes like "Fisherman" and 'Farmer." You could be the best farmer in the world but, I'm sorry, you're never going to be a 20th level farmer... We house-ruled the living hell out of this game to make it playable.
Great game no doubt about that but it seems that the mainstream people who approaches rolegames look for simple systems or just simplicity, thing that make me think or not to think :) nice video
I’m an 80’s DnD to Rolemaster disciple! Please buy the new RMU; ICE took the best aspects of all the previous versions into this new version. I was steadfastly an old RM/Merp guy but RMU is great!
I played Rolemaster for 10 years then stopped because people were never available. I have not played Rolemaster for about 20 years. Last year I pickup up D&D 5e and have been running a campaign for 6 months now. I also play in 4 campaigns with other game masters. It feels to me that going from Rolemaster to D&D 5e is like going from the university to high school. D&D just doesn't have the depth and realism of Rolemaster. The combats are also very boring compared to Rolemaster. I have convinced my group to change the combat rules and I have basicaly made a much simpler version of Rolemaster to use in D&D. I have a crit table for slash, pierce, bludgeoning and one for each of the elements. I am only using the equivalent of A crits, I always felt crits were way too lethal in Rolemaster but the A table is not so bad. I also added the fumble table which is a lot of fun ;) Replaced the attack roll then damage roll with a unified roll like in Rolemaster. We tried it last night and it was fun. Eventually I will try to migrate back to Rolemaster, it's such a better system! The issue it trying to recruit player for a game they don't know and with a reputation of being complicated will be very difficult. But I think my approach of slowly changing the rules from D&D will work.
Great comment thank you. I had a lot of fun using the tables from RM in D&D too but found it made the game so much harder. Everyone at the time enjoyed it though. Good luck with convincing your group to change over. If I were to do it today I'd change the D00 over to a D20. People are really in love with that die for some reason.
@@mstephenjoy I think it's the fact they can roll a 20 and get a crit that they love. I decided to keep that in my system. Personaly I think D100 are much better but since people love the D20, I kept it. Also it makes the transition less steep. They feel they are playing a modified D&D system when in reality they are playing a simplified Rolemaster system. It's all a matter of perception ;) Eventually I think I can convice them to try a game in the Rolemaster system and they will feel familiar with many aspects as I introduce new rules in my games that are Rolemaster based. Converting D&D players, one at a time LOL
@@Calendyr I really love the idea of a RM converted over to D20. I personally like the D00 better but when in Rome right? Well good luck, it is a worthy project.
The system its a completely mess. No sense of one table per weapon its absurd. Just put 4 players vs 6 orcs and for resolving a combat its like 3 hours. That with a player taking care of attack table. No sense realy. You can play the same in a smart way with dnd 3.5
@@mstephenjoy i did in 2006 like a campaign for 2 years in the second edition version. I remeber a fight of my 6 players vs 6 orcos mounting wolves in a bridge... was more than one session just for the fight. Even allways we have a player with the combat manual helping. But RM gave us a lot of good moments
rolemaster is easily one of the most frustrating and pointless game system i have ever played it completely removes the player from the game how you find it this great is bizarre. get help.
I don’t know how you can say that as it has one of the most dramatic character creation of all. As to decision making there is nothing you can not try to do. I guess he’s right. It’s not a game for you! 😮
@@1918Camel the word you're looking for is tragic, not dramatic. that there are so many rules to create a character and not fewer is proof of a tragic character creation system, not a dramatic one
It’s all about choices. I Guess you just need like 5 or you get confused. I understand where you’re coming from. He was right it’s not your game. You like to be railroaded.
While the video doesn't have good production value, and it's kind of meandering, I can FEEL your joy through the camera. It made me smile. I love your energy.
Thanks for commenting
I remember running MERP back in the 90s, when a character lost his hand to a lion in the White Mountains. That one roll on the critical tables ended up driving an entire storyline in the campaign that I hadn't seen coming, but it added a lot to the story.
Thank you for commenting. I had more than a few storylines changed by the critical tables. I think it's the best part of the game. The GM and players are forced to live with the consequences no matter how brutal they may be.
Yup, I played it too around the same time, really enjoyed it. I remember one of the crits ending with "any ear wax is removed"
That is the classic RM/Merp experience. Those crits make it feel so real and create such deep immersion.
@@rikwilliams6352 Yes, they stole that one in Dungeon Crawl Classics.
I had this back in the 90s and loved it in theory. Getting to play it with all the rules was fun when it worked. It was just so crunchy rules-wise. I haven't seen the books since then, so seeing this video was nice to reminisce to.
Thank you for the comment. It's definitely a top contender for the crunchiest ttrpg ever made. I'm glad it brought back memories.
Playing it years ago, I was running a character that carried a puppet around and talked to it.
The character was charged by a lion, not being setup as a melee character he could not do much. I declared that he stuffs the puppet into the mouth of the lion. The GM has me roll on a non weapon attack table. Roll a hit with a critical. Then the GM has me roll on the Tiny Critical table. The roll came up that the lion took an unbalancing critical that caused him to choke and die. So the character killed a lion with a puppet.
Thank you for this comment. This is exactly why I love Rolemaster so much.
Awesome!
Why let common sense interfere when you can be a slave to tables and make unnecessary rolls?
I played Rolemaster very actively from the beginning of 90ies until 2002. It impressed me so much I can't describe. Rolemaster inspired me to get into worldbuilding. A Hobby I still do. If I will get a new group of players (maybe sometimes?) and start playing pen&paper again I will for sure use Rolemaster 2nd Edition Revised.
Thank you for saying this. I feel like that unless you play it you can't really understand how great it is.
I'm amazed your books look as well as they do. We/I tore our books up through years of hard gaming. Eventually, I made copies of everything and combined them into a GameMaster binder, which included everything a GM needed to run a game - combat charts, crit tables, experience, supplies, treasure, etc. We were poor kids and copies weren't cheap, but it was cheaper than buying new books all the time.
The condition of your books is absolutely incredible.
Thank you. Considering I played the hell out of this game I have no idea how. For Arms Law I used a photo copy so I could pass it around the table without having to worry about Cheeto fingers.
Rolemaster was our go to system when I was playing regularly in the mid to late 80s. Definitely a system for a group of committed players, you needed to be into the system to be able to play smoothly, i don't think it would work well with a group of casual or brand new players.
However despite it's 'crunchiness' once you got used to it the system was great and didn't feel at all cumbersome and gave players the freedom to really customise how your character played, fighters didn't all need to be wearing full plate and fighting with a sword, you could actually create a fighter relying on weapon skill and mobility and it worked!
Magic use was also cool as the customisation options meant every magic user had a unique list of magic available , if your players had the appetite for the game and reading up on their various options open.
I agree. It was a game for a different time I think. Today people have to have 3 jobs just to pay rent. Few people have the time required to run a game like this. Thank you for commenting.
As a weapons and armor nerd, I loved the tables.
I love this "games for GMs" kind of TTRPG
It also means that you can run it, without the players being burdened by the detail. The GM does that. The players just roll the dice.
Rolemaster is one of my two favorite Game systems along with the HERO system.
I also modified the Experience to increase by 10,000 needed to level for each 10 levels of experience gained.
I had people start at the equivalent of 3rd level, tho still called it 1st level, by having them create the character first with their background or adolescent level, then a level 0, and finally first level.
Awesome, thanks for the comment. I have some Hero books but never had a chance to play it. I always wanted to. It feels even heavier than Rolemaster.
Still playing it right now!
Best system and I played A LOT of them. Brutal at low level but oh so rewarding. No systems fleshes out the PCs through the levels like this one. ALL characters are unique because of the skill system. The spells are easy to learn and no-nonsense, no min-maxing really possible, combats are ALWAYS terrifying. A++ game.
I found customizing and creating monsters was immense fun as a GM too. Thank you for commenting.
My favourite ttrpg! The magic system was the best! One thing that I was expecting - or hoping - that you would mention was the genre books, and all their amazing detail for their specific settings: Mythic Greece (bronze age), Mythic Egypt, Pirates, Arabian Nights, Robin Hood (mediaeval), etc.
Ah, fond memories. I really liked the system. After running one campaign of Space Master and one campaign of Rolemaster (and a few shorter games of Cyberspace) I sadly got tired how hard it was to handle NPCs. It really would have benefitted from having more NPC archetypes or something. Good times, still. Thanks for bringing out all those memories again!
Thank you for the comment. NPCs are definitely a big hassle in RM. It makes me wonder how we all had so much time for these huge complex systems.
@@mstephenjoy back then at least I didn't have so many other things to take care of and even though combat etc. took a bit more time, it was ok because we could set up multiple sessions per week :) Still, I could very well use Rolemaster or Space Master for a new campaign if only there was a faster way to handle NPCs.
Mythras is almost as hard with multiple skills etc. but as it lacks levels, it is manageable.
Thank you !!! I love listening and learning about RPGs. RM, MERP, Basic Fantasy RP and 80s Call of Cth are some of my favorites. woW ! Your space master set is clean !!! Thats worth a lot of money !
Hey, thank you for commenting. I bought it new. Idk what it might be worth. I'd never sell it anyway 😀
I like RM but couldn't get my players into it.
They didn't like to be on the receiving end of those critical hits. Lol.
I wish I could find a group in my area ABE Pennsylvania
Any place to still get those original books at a decent price?
The criticals are a lot of fun until the players start getting hit with them lol. I had a player one punch a stone golem dragon with the luckiest hit I have ever seen. I don't know where you could find the original books but I think there are PDFs available on DriveThru? Thank you for commenting :)
I've enjoyed Rolemaster for the suprising combat results, the ability to create just about any sort of charector, the MERP setting support, and the story insperation.
Thank you for the comment. I loved the MERP book. It reminded me of a Basic Rolemaster (I know it wasn't).
I started with D&D in the late 80'. Then moved to MERP. In the 90' became a GM for Spacemaster and Rolemaster. Both with French and English versions (helped a lot for my English vocabulary and grammar classes). I am in love with the system. I twiddled with the rules and had lots of fun. Thanks for the walk back to memory lane😊
Your welcome and thank you for commenting.
Playing Rolemaster with Fantasy Grounds really makes things move along quickly.
Thanks this is good to know. What about Roll20?
I agree, Rolemaster is one of the best. I have been playing since 1985. I disagree on how week first level is. While the spell casters are pretty week, fighters and rogues can hold there own against appropriate opponents. What I like most about Rolemaster is, it is one of the very few fantasy games where a 3rd level goblin can kill a 12th level fighter with one shot if they get two lucky back to back rolls.
Thank you for the comment.
"I love this game. That's why I changed everything about it."
I've made an Excel to keep track of all the skills, it has all the skills and professions of the 2nd rolemaster with all the companions
Very cool. Thank you for the comment.
Rolemaster is my favourite rpg. I always come back to it. "My" Rolemaster is RMSS. While there's certainly an argument to be made that RMSS wasn't really necessary to create given it's increased crunch (!) over previous editions, I'm so glad it was made. There's really nothing like it.
We played a ton of MERP but no RM. Now we've added MERP crits & fumbles to our Castles & Crusades game.
That's awesome. I did use the RM criticals in AD&D and it made the game so much deadlier. It was a lot of fun.
This was fun to listen to. Saving to rewatch later, and sharing with some tabletop friends. 👍
Thank you for letting me know.
Loved playing Rolemaster in the 90's and early 00's. Had a friend that ran away from the cityguard. Started running up a wall. They shot him in the right arm with a xbow, the crit broke his arm. He fell down on the ground and that crit broke his left arm. We laughed so hard. Think he has like -90 or so to everything.
You do know that an important day of a chimney sweeper is to clean your hands before touching an awesome relic like this…
I recall my older brother picking up Rolemaster. But he returned it because there were so many tables he called it Rollmaster. A while back, I was able to snag a few boxes of Spacemaster... the critical hit tables are hilarious. I may borrow them for other games... my older brother is a jerk anyhow, he stole all my AD&D stuff.
Thanks for sharing that. Spacemaster is an awesome game by itself. I'm sorry to hear that your brother stole your D&D stuff.
You are clearly a man of refined taste.
Why thank you 😊
Every time I hear people complain about D&D being too crunchy, I just think "have you heard of Rolemaster?" I played it a few times in the 80's, and we found it extremely deadly. One time, the party was tpk'd by randomly rolled badgers that got pissed off by the intrusion. We didn't always have a lot of time to play, so we didn't play it much anyway. It has a long slow start-up and we were too scattered for campaign play. I really liked it tho. Especially those fumble tables. I'll tell you who loved it tho. The author of the Poison Elves indie comics, Drew Hayes. The series is about his RM character in a fantasy world. Idk if he's still making it but it was great in its day.
Thank you for the comment. I didn't know that about Poison Elves! That's the fun thing about RM: nothing every goes as expected and you always walk away with a great story.
I played RM in the late 80s. We always started at level 5 too.
StarFleet Battles is an awesome game. Loved it back in the day. Never want to play it again. 😅
It is an awesome game, I agree totally. I also don't intend to ever play it again. That being said a computer version might sucker me back into it lol
@@mstephenjoy- A computer version? You mean the 'Starfleet Command' series of old PC games. The pair of SFC2 standalone games used the SFB system, such fun. As for the tabletop SFB, the publisher released a newer, more streamlined version years ago called 'Federation Commander'. It still uses the same system but has cut out some of the extra stuff such as ECM and reduced the number of turn impulses, for a few examples. It also offers the option of two different scales for the ships so there is also basically half-sized SSDs for quicker games and/or better management for higher numbers of ships in a game. Still a crunchy game but as much as SFB. I thought it an improvement.
@@NefariousKoel I think that's what I was thinking of but now I'm really intrigued. I'm going to look into it. Thank you for commenting.
@@mstephenjoy- I think the Starfleet Command 2 PC games are sold by a small company, but you can find a full (patched) install somewhere around the net. I got both a few years ago, although the native aspect ratio is 4:3 so a bit small for modern day with the hi-res mod; they came out in the early 2000s. As for the Federation Commander TTG, it's still available in a few places. Think I got my Fed/Klingon/Romulan Commander sets from NobleKnight, along with one of the alien expansion folios.
@@mstephenjoy- Also.. IIRC, the FedCom game includes rules for using minis with/without a hex map. I could have that mixed up with something else, but my memory isn't bad just yet. Probably easy to do with the various Star Trek ship minis floating around. The included ship counters & hex maps in FedCom were better than the old SFB stuff though and included two different sized sets.
We started playing MERP back in the late 80's and gradually added pieces of Rolemaster to the game as time went on. From the very beginning, through mistakes and deliberate decisions, we never played _right_, and as such, we'd probably get beat up by "real" Rolemaster and MERP gamers, but we had a lot of fun over the years. I still prefer our system to most of the others out there.
The thing about the spells is, you kinda have to divide the number by five or ten to get the actual number of different spells. There's multiple levels of the same spell to increase the effect.Verse says the effect is based upon your level or the amount of power you put into the spell. And then sometimes you need three or four spells to get the same effect that one spell in another game would give you. For example, in most games the heal spell heals your damage, regardless of what it is. In rolemaster, there's specific spells for healing burns, torn tendons and ligaments, broken bones, bruises, slivers, stub toes, hang nails. I'm being a little bit silly, but if you get the game and look, you'll get the point.
So the 2000 spells is like 150-200 in most other games.
Oh, and the expereince system really opened up the roleplay. Travel expereince, expereince for avoiding combat, planning, and overcoming obsticles transformed the party from murder hobos to some epic adventurers, scholars, Heros, scouts.
Thank you for this comment.
The 10k experience points needed to level up are not a problem if you take into account that characters gain xp for every mile of territory traversed, and there is a x5 multiplier on every "first time". The only pain about the Xp/Levelling system is the maths and log keeping. I tend to make the players fill their xp log during combat while logging xp for travel distance and good roleplay, etc... and then do the maths in half an hour after the game.
I love the attack tables. It looks daunting if you're not used to it, but it really works quite well once you comprehend how it works. It is great how lower Armour Class requires better attack rolls to do any damage at all, but if damage is done, it is near-guarantied critical, while heavier armour makes you easier to hit but needs better rolls to crit.
For more types of weapons, you don't need to modify the weapon tables, you just add a bonus or malus to the weapon against certain armour classes and on the crit tables. That is how the official expanded weapon lists do it.
I used to have a lot of the 2nd edition books, but lost them all in the move. 3rd edition is also quite good. I love the 3rd edition Castles&Ruins book and Martial Arts Compendium. I was really really lucky five years ago, to find a copy of Martial Arts Law at a Bring&Buy. You can't really get that one as pdf, since even the official pdf version published by ICE on DriveThru is competely unreadable on most of the tables.
Of course, Rolemaster is not perfect. There are some aspects that I strongly disagree with. I tried to houserule those parts, but it snowballed out of control. So, I started making my own system.
Awesome, thank you. I never played RM correctly so I'm sure your xp/levelling comment makes sense. I'm definitely the kind of DM that house rules instead of looking things up. I have to because I really can't remember too many rules and procedures. Today I make checklists for myself but I didn't know to do that when I played RM.
The Full set of RM Books was over 2ft tall in a stack ( they had more skills, Spells, Weapons, Classes, And Races in each book)
Thank you for this. Does the 2' include MERP books?
@@mstephenjoy yeah looking at the lists of books was Mainly RoleMaster a couple HARP and Shadow World books as well as a few of the MERP books was likely closer to 1 foot of Rolemaster but all the Add ons and Supplements bulked it out (was my best friends books) I covered the Palladium Games books myself which is a bigger stack (Rifts, Robotech, TMNT, BtS, NinjasNSuperspies, etc) but I loved I.C.E. Games for the depth, Palladium for the Sheer Versatility
What attracts me to Spacemaster, despite its difficulty/crunchy, is precisely the detail. Even in Traveller, at least in this latest MGT 2E edition which is the one I've been getting into the most, there are many things that don't tell you how the character does them. Like cloning for example, or placing a robotic arm in the body of someone... your character cannot do it even if he is at the maximum in medicine and robotics skill, the rules are made thinking about only being able to go to a hospital and pay there to have done the service of placing your arm or making a clone. There are even machines/robots that can create a clone, but again... your character doesn't do anything, the machine does it automatically. In Spacemaster there are rules that detail the process of creating, for example, the clone... even if you want to do genetic engineering to change certain things to that clone. That's super immersive because you see how your character does it. Even in D&D 3.5 or Pathfinder 1e there is the Craft skill with the rule about how the process of rolling dice is to accumulate a score each week until after a few months you create the armor or weapon you were making. I love those things, because it may not be the "most convenient or fastest" for the impatient player, but it is super immersive for roleplay.
I love that there are so many skills (like in GURPS RPG) because that's how reality is, you can't know everything, plus with a technology like the science fiction story "We Can Remember Everything For You" an editing/implantation technology could be used/implemented of memories to insert skill scores by removing skill points from another... then with that you could for a while focus on the ability to pilot a specific type of spaceship (because it makes sense that each model of ship requires a specific skill) but later it doesn't serve you that much anymore so the character decides to go to one of these centers and pay to have the skill pack loaded into his brain to pilot another ship model or some other skill.
Thank you for this comment. I've always wanted to combine Rolemaster and Spacemaster. I thought it would be a crazy sci-fi/fantasy He Man kind of campaign.
@@mstephenjoy
Mmm... or maybe something like DC's Kaliman comics, or Pirates of the Dark Waters.
I also have the project of making my own setting/system combining the best of Traveller, Spacemaster, GURPS and Starfinder. But, yeah, is a lot of work.
Yeah I was feeling nostalgic about tabletop roleplaying times and thought that does anyone play rolemaster anymore, since it's the best I've played. Googled and boom!! :) We combined it with shadowrun later on. Well mostly the critical tables were very useful on that system too.
Best game ever. Thanks for the video.
That's how I feel about it too, and my pleasure, I'm glad you enjoyed it.
Very interesting system. I think Against the Darkmaster is a bit more approachable? That's probably where I would start, being new to all of this, as I am. Also, am I wrong in thinking that GURPS has a comparable level of details and crunch?
Hello.
I see that the books you show here are from the first edition of Rolemaster, and some from the second edition, is 1e the one you consider the best? Or is the 2e? And how you think about the fourth edition?
I only have the 1st edition so it's all I have played. Thank you for the comment.
Around Companion IV is where the companions started getting weird. The Criticals could be brutal but amusing.
Thank you for commenting. I love the critical tables. They are very entertaining.
Back in the late 80's, before I took up the mantle of a DM myself, I used to play in my HS group where we were playing AD&D (1st ed.), and my DM would use only the "Arms Law & Claw Law" manual and incorporated those descriptive (and crit.) hit tables into our AD&D gaming sessions. That definitely spiced up our more-boring AD&D generic combat system and made our game a hella lot more fun, so much so that every single player in our group was ONLY looking forward to combat more than anything else every time we played. Everybody suddenly wanted to be a fighter class character (like Fighters, Paladins, Rangers, Barbarians, and Cavs) lol !!
Thank you for sharing this. My experience using Arms Law with 1st edition was very similar but holy crap did it make an already dangerous system even more so! That being said we all loved it.
Please do a vid on War Law!!! Never got around buying it. Lost a bidding war on eBay for it some 20 years ago.
Sure, I can do that, thank you for commenting.
So, genuine question, what’s really the appeal of a high lethality game? I get the theoretical appeal of it, but also at the point of detachment I’d have to be to play a high lethality game I don’t understand the draw as opposed to a board game like Spirit Island or Betrayal at House on the Hill or something, since those are much faster to set up so are less disruptive if the players catastrophically fail.
Great question! I think it's that the stakes are a lot higher. There is a real rush of endorphins when your hero is overwhelmed but somehow manages to overcome their challenges. It's less about wish fulfillment and more about beating challenges. That's my guess anyway.
A high lethality game is basically for people who don’t mind the longer set up time as a trade off for the possibility of more story.
The story (if you can call it that) of your time in the haunted mansion is the 30 to 60 minutes of play time. And it can be fun to play the game a lot but the story never truly evolves. Plenty of people don’t mind that (I quite like Betrayal as a game) but some do.
For the people who want the story to keep going, there are games like this one. High stakes and potential high reward of fun moments in a cool story
You spent a lot of time developing the character and it's a big deal if he dies. Real suspense and tension. It's hard to imagine these days because the expectations on GMs have changed and players can just get a different GM. Players would often have to take a break from the game to emotionally heal before they where ready to make a new character. It's a lost aspect that we'll never get back. But the new ways have their advantages too. RIP Sonya, Dian, Weslock...
Same applies to other similar games, like Cyberpunk 2020. To me the appeal is that the stakes are high when you enter a combat. You will do your damnest to stay alive, especially as it has taken quite a bit of time to create your character. Another thing is that as the combat is lethal, combat is often over quite fast. Last and probably the most important part of it is that it encourages players to find ways to solve their problems without violence or at least not through face to face combat. Granted, it is not very heroic but perhaps that playstyle is best served using some other gamesystem.
I am a military historian with a past in the Danish armed forces. High lethality is authentic. I like that. And I like high stakes. I really dislike the D&D "sleep eight hours and your ruptured lung is healed".
Games are designed to be played. A book that is marked, scarred, ripped, smudged, and labeled is a book well loved. You shouldn’t feel bad about leaving marks in them.
A classic though I never played beyond first edition. I would say it’s a top three RPG
I loved MERP, so RM-lite. I still use Crit Hit and Fumble tables when I play D&D with my kids now.
You like the games that I like, but with one exception. I never got to play Rolemaster.
Thank you for commenting and I hope you get the chance to play it one day.
Thanks for the insights into RM.
Back in the day Dnd Blew our minds wide open in 1980, and then a friend brought Roll Master into our group and we never looked back.
I found the artwork and rules of ADnd silly, compared to the Grimdark realism of RM. I wanted a mace to actually feel like a bludgeoning death bringer, not some silly d8 damage.
We played the hell out of RM, then life took over eh.
I still think RM Has a lot to draw from, but is unplayable in a modern context, for a modern audience.
I looked into the New RMaster rules set, however the complexity of the action economy simply repulsed me. Instead of streamlining martial dynamics, they decided to double down on simulation......
But, as we know to each their own. If you are having fun, then it's all good. The challenge is finding a group of people who want this intensity of ruleset...
Fantastic, thank you for commenting. I wonder how many people still play RM or how many younger people do ? I think you are right. Nobody has time for so many rules these days.
Iron Crown Enterprises (ICE) is releasing a new Rolemaster Unified edition. I played the original and the RMFRPG rules. I still keep going back to original. My biggest complaint is the character sheet with soooo many skills that will never be used in an adventure. But ICE went for realism over playability. My group found it best to just ignore most of the skills listed. Photocopying the weapon and skill tables and giving them to the players for the weapons they were using made the GM job a lot easier.
Thank you foe commenting. When I played I didn't use many of the skills either. I wonder how true to the original the new version will be?
That was RMFRP/SS, that is the Edition that has a really overblown skill system. RM2 (the one in the video here) lets you easily customize the skills to fit your style.
The best TTRPG of all time. Check out the most recent version "Rolemaster Unified".
it`s not that the combat system is complicated, it`s that it is too complicated for what it is actually achieving which is comparing numbers plus modifiers.
In retrospect I can see what you mean but at the time it didn't feel that way to me. Just the amount of content this game offered and the critical system were amazing. Thank you for the comment.
Ah, back when it was ok to start your "players handbook" (Character Law) with "soul departure in 10 rounds", and content was almost arbitrarily positioned throughout the books. I loved Rolemaster (though struggled to run it). I always loved H.A.R.P, which seemed to me to be a great modernisation of the RM ethos.
Man I am generally with you, but thank you for convincing me I'll never use Rollmaster.
Because I'd much rather have a formula I can consistently apply, for when my players want to do a thing, rather than a system trying to encompass everything.
Thank you for the comment and I'm glad I could help :)
I played RM (1st edition) for a few years before making my own game. It had a lot of good to it but it was, as written, unplayable. Take the character traits:
*10 traits that could go up and down every level.
*All your skills were affected by an average of 2 or 3 traits' bonuses.
*All skills needed recalculation every time you gained a level and levels came VERY fast.
If you did it by the book you would spend every other game session just updating your character sheets and this was far from the worst of this sort of thing. Also in the companions they added classes like "Fisherman" and 'Farmer." You could be the best farmer in the world but, I'm sorry, you're never going to be a 20th level farmer...
We house-ruled the living hell out of this game to make it playable.
Thank you for the comment. It's a great game, but it does take work. :) What game did you make?
@enjoy "Ashes and Empires" which can be found on DT. Have finished another which I'm prepping for a print version.
Great game no doubt about that but it seems that the mainstream people who approaches rolegames look for simple systems or just simplicity, thing that make me think or not to think :) nice video
Any love for RMU?
Do you have any thoughts to share about the new RMU edition?
I don't, really. I haven't played it yet, sadly.
I’m an 80’s DnD to Rolemaster disciple! Please buy the new RMU; ICE took the best aspects of all the previous versions into this new version. I was steadfastly an old RM/Merp guy but RMU is great!
I figured you battled with a printer. Fountain pens are real old school.
I like to draw with them, but they sure can get messy.
Chart-Monster. Spreadsheet the game.
Pretty much, but it's a good game. Maybe I was an accountant in a past life?
@mstephenjoy Won't deny the crit charts cover nearly any situation and I carried around spell law and I think claw law for a good number of years.
Only if I love charts more than my friends.
Thanks for commenting. What if your friends like charts too 🤔
I played Rolemaster for 10 years then stopped because people were never available. I have not played Rolemaster for about 20 years. Last year I pickup up D&D 5e and have been running a campaign for 6 months now. I also play in 4 campaigns with other game masters. It feels to me that going from Rolemaster to D&D 5e is like going from the university to high school. D&D just doesn't have the depth and realism of Rolemaster. The combats are also very boring compared to Rolemaster. I have convinced my group to change the combat rules and I have basicaly made a much simpler version of Rolemaster to use in D&D. I have a crit table for slash, pierce, bludgeoning and one for each of the elements. I am only using the equivalent of A crits, I always felt crits were way too lethal in Rolemaster but the A table is not so bad. I also added the fumble table which is a lot of fun ;) Replaced the attack roll then damage roll with a unified roll like in Rolemaster. We tried it last night and it was fun. Eventually I will try to migrate back to Rolemaster, it's such a better system! The issue it trying to recruit player for a game they don't know and with a reputation of being complicated will be very difficult. But I think my approach of slowly changing the rules from D&D will work.
Great comment thank you. I had a lot of fun using the tables from RM in D&D too but found it made the game so much harder. Everyone at the time enjoyed it though. Good luck with convincing your group to change over. If I were to do it today I'd change the D00 over to a D20. People are really in love with that die for some reason.
@@mstephenjoy I think it's the fact they can roll a 20 and get a crit that they love. I decided to keep that in my system. Personaly I think D100 are much better but since people love the D20, I kept it. Also it makes the transition less steep. They feel they are playing a modified D&D system when in reality they are playing a simplified Rolemaster system. It's all a matter of perception ;) Eventually I think I can convice them to try a game in the Rolemaster system and they will feel familiar with many aspects as I introduce new rules in my games that are Rolemaster based. Converting D&D players, one at a time LOL
@@Calendyr I really love the idea of a RM converted over to D20. I personally like the D00 better but when in Rome right? Well good luck, it is a worthy project.
Wow... This is precisely the type of game I avoid! Thanks for the review!
No problem, I'm glad to be of help. It's not a game for everyone, I understand that.
Lord of the tables LOL.
Such an overcomplicated system with few good modules and adventures
Was always intrigued by the system but no one wanted to play it.
It can look intimidating all right. Thank you for commenting.
The system its a completely mess. No sense of one table per weapon its absurd. Just put 4 players vs 6 orcs and for resolving a combat its like 3 hours. That with a player taking care of attack table. No sense realy. You can play the same in a smart way with dnd 3.5
@lucifervivo3272 The game isn't for everyone that's for sure. Thank you for leaving a comment.
@@mstephenjoy i did in 2006 like a campaign for 2 years in the second edition version. I remeber a fight of my 6 players vs 6 orcos mounting wolves in a bridge... was more than one session just for the fight. Even allways we have a player with the combat manual helping. But RM gave us a lot of good moments
I am sorry this game has far too many charts and dice rolls to slow down combat. I still have ptsd from being in 2 of these games.
Lol, well fair enough. It does get easier with practice I promise.
Sorry dude, Like I'm happy your happy don't get me wrong, but this looks worse then math homework.
Lmao thank you and I can see that for sure
Ah, “chart” master. The primary motivation for converting TTRPGs to computer games.
rolemaster is easily one of the most frustrating and pointless game system i have ever played
it completely removes the player from the game
how you find it this great is bizarre. get help.
Don't be an a-hole
I guess it isn't your kind of game lol
I don’t know how you can say that as it has one of the most dramatic character creation of all. As to decision making there is nothing you can not try to do.
I guess he’s right. It’s not a game for you! 😮
@@1918Camel the word you're looking for is tragic, not dramatic.
that there are so many rules to create a character and not fewer is proof of a tragic character creation system, not a dramatic one
It’s all about choices. I Guess you just need like 5 or you get confused. I understand where you’re coming from. He was right it’s not your game. You like to be railroaded.
Unplayable
I completely understand the sentiment but I assure you it is playable, thank you for the comment.