One thing anyone who follows this blog will soon learn is that your author has a tendency to promise a blog and deliver something quite different. The following post will no doubt be the first of many to deviate from predicted content. But as I was driving home from the supermarket, I fell to musing about the difficulty inherent in converting Pathfinder classes to Rolemaster professions,and decided to subject the Internet to my own particular variety of thinking out loud.
After a long-ish time away from running RPGs, I decided that I'd missed it and began to dabble again. As an indication of just how long I'd been gone, suffice it to say that I'd missed the 'edition wars', much of the OSR, the birth of Pathfinder and the end of the old independent version of White Wolf Studios. When I returned to RPGs, I rather stumbled into Pathfinder by accident and liked what I saw - in particular the tremendous creative ferment unleashed by the use and adaptation of the OGL (I'd missed the import of that in my earlier GM-ing days).
After a few months of awestruck, thumb-sucking wandering around the Internet learning about all that had happened in TTRPGs in my absence, I contacted members of my old Rolemaster group and co-ordinated the rebirth of a new campaign (held over Skype). My initial hope was to run Pathfinder, but my players wouldn't have it, despite considerable cajoling: they wanted Rolemaster, and as Rolemaster was - and remains - my favourite game, I agreed. Still, for me, the tremendous range of options available in Pathfinder could not be ignored, and so I set myself to incorporating some of what I'd found into Rolemaster, particularly the many interesting character classes.
I immediately ran into problems.
Like many problems, they proved ultimately fruitful, but for a while, the whole notion of importing Pathfinder classes into Rolemaster seemed more or less intractable: at least without losing most of what made them attractive or interesting.
The core difficulty lies in the basic mechanics of what constitutes a 'class' in Pathfinder and a 'profession' in Rolemaster. Keeping it short, despite some similarities (both advance in levels, gaining power as they do so), the primary difficulty, for me, was that Pathfinder classes unlock various special abilities as they level up. Rolemaster professions do not: at each level, a Rolemaster character spends development points to learn skills and spells (at varying costs, depending on the profession chosen), and that's it. They don't select new feats, nor do they learn new abilities contingent upon their profession.
I have no problem with this, of course: Rolemaster is the system I know best, and the one I enjoy the most. The system is actually less limited, in some ways, than Pathfinder or D&D, in that if your character wishes to develop a skill and can afford to pay the skill cost, they can do so. There is a bit more latitude for character breadth and quirky twists and turns. The only problem I had with the difference was one of translation. How to make Pathfinder classes such as Total Party Kill Games' Deductionist into viable Rolemaster templates? The Deductionist doesn't - except in rare situations - have spell-casting ability. The Deductionist's powers and abilities may be 'spell-like' but they are not spells. The obvious answer is to build their powers and abilities as if they were spells, and create Rolemaster-type spell lists for them.
The next post dealing with this topic will look into how well that works.
After a long-ish time away from running RPGs, I decided that I'd missed it and began to dabble again. As an indication of just how long I'd been gone, suffice it to say that I'd missed the 'edition wars', much of the OSR, the birth of Pathfinder and the end of the old independent version of White Wolf Studios. When I returned to RPGs, I rather stumbled into Pathfinder by accident and liked what I saw - in particular the tremendous creative ferment unleashed by the use and adaptation of the OGL (I'd missed the import of that in my earlier GM-ing days).
After a few months of awestruck, thumb-sucking wandering around the Internet learning about all that had happened in TTRPGs in my absence, I contacted members of my old Rolemaster group and co-ordinated the rebirth of a new campaign (held over Skype). My initial hope was to run Pathfinder, but my players wouldn't have it, despite considerable cajoling: they wanted Rolemaster, and as Rolemaster was - and remains - my favourite game, I agreed. Still, for me, the tremendous range of options available in Pathfinder could not be ignored, and so I set myself to incorporating some of what I'd found into Rolemaster, particularly the many interesting character classes.
I immediately ran into problems.
The core difficulty lies in the basic mechanics of what constitutes a 'class' in Pathfinder and a 'profession' in Rolemaster. Keeping it short, despite some similarities (both advance in levels, gaining power as they do so), the primary difficulty, for me, was that Pathfinder classes unlock various special abilities as they level up. Rolemaster professions do not: at each level, a Rolemaster character spends development points to learn skills and spells (at varying costs, depending on the profession chosen), and that's it. They don't select new feats, nor do they learn new abilities contingent upon their profession.
I have no problem with this, of course: Rolemaster is the system I know best, and the one I enjoy the most. The system is actually less limited, in some ways, than Pathfinder or D&D, in that if your character wishes to develop a skill and can afford to pay the skill cost, they can do so. There is a bit more latitude for character breadth and quirky twists and turns. The only problem I had with the difference was one of translation. How to make Pathfinder classes such as Total Party Kill Games' Deductionist into viable Rolemaster templates? The Deductionist doesn't - except in rare situations - have spell-casting ability. The Deductionist's powers and abilities may be 'spell-like' but they are not spells. The obvious answer is to build their powers and abilities as if they were spells, and create Rolemaster-type spell lists for them.
The next post dealing with this topic will look into how well that works.
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