Today I'm pontificating on the problem of skills in RM: more particularly, the issue of consolidated skills (of which RMFRP is the paradigmatic
version, and which appears to be a certainty in the new version, although with
far less skills) or individual skills, each with their own development cost, as
was the case in RM2. Again, let me nail my flag to the mast: I am in favour of
individual skill costs, primarily for the tremendous variety and granularity
they offer. You simply can’t get that under the skill category system (although
the RMFRP rules do allow a certain amount of tweaking, and my rather
freewheeling interpretation of the talent rules enabled more).
Further to this is the issue of the dreaded skill bloat. It
seems that many folks object – quite reasonably, I feel – to the tremendous
explosion in increasingly fine-grained skills introduced by the RM2 companions
(and carried over to RMFRP, although restrained and managed by the category
system). I understand the objections: if you have, say, 300 skills and 50
professions, that’s a lot of trawling through tables in order to generate a
character, and a lot of skills to study up on, in order to decide whether your
Burglar is better off taking Defensive Manuever, Feinting or Tumbling Attack,
or just ignoring it all and retiring to a farm after buying ranks in
Horticulture, Herding, Animal Handling, Animal Healing and Weather-watching.
All I wanted to do was play Rolemaster!
But, and here’s the thing, I love having that range of
options – ridiculous though that may seem – simply because of the ways in
which, as a GM, I can fine-tune races, cultures, professions and NPCs. I can
understand how you might justify having a Prepare Herbs, Herb Lore and Using
Prepared Herbs skill, or a Using/Removing Poison, Poison Perception and Poison
Lore skill. I can imagine a rough-and-ready soldier who knows nothing of herbs,
but has grown used to applying unguents to wounds. I can equally imagine a
scholarly-type who has learned a bit about poison but has never handled it – or
even considered using it! That argument makes sense to me, although there is,
conceivably, a limit beyond which realism need go.
There are ways of managing skill bloat without consolidating
or eliminating skills. The last RM2 campaign I ran I divided skills into Core,
Professional and Extra-Professional skills. Everyone, regardless of profession,
race or whatever had instant and permanent access to the Core skills. Then,
each profession had 25 professional
skills to which they had access. All skills outside that group of Core +
Professional were restricted, requiring the expenditure of Character Points (which accumulated as the character reached Prime
Levels, of which more on another occasion).
I’ve included a table below showing an example of what I did
in my attempts to manage skill bloat whilst maintaining breadth and diversity.
This is the RM2 Hunter from the Arms
Companion. I’ve not included the development point costs for copyright
reasons, but the table is hopefully sufficient to demonstrate the idea. The
listed skills show those available to the Hunter at level 1. They can’t
consider new skills until reaching their next Prime Level (i.e. level 3). At
each Prime Level, a character gains Character Points equivalent to 3 + the
modifier derived from their Prime Statistic (the first appearing of their Prime
Requisites, in this case Quickness), as
if it were a Power Point stat, rounded down. (For example, if Bhorg the
Hunter has a Qu stat of 95, he’d gain an extra 2 Character Points, giving him 5
in total. Bhorg could then spend his Character Points unlocking access to an
Extra-Professional skill, or buying talents, or saving them for later).
I thought it a reasonably elegant solution, although like
all my solutions, it generated a fair amount of work to get it up and running.
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