The Inside Scoop on Gaming

Hmm... where to start...

Well, I suppose I could start off by saying that I have purchased a number of other ICE products, including Nightmares of Mine, And a Ten Foot Pole, and Dark Space, and found them to range from satisfactory to quite good in quality.

Or, I could say that, while I pride myself on having some experience with most of the major game systems put out over the last 20 years, I have never played Rolemaster, and was curious to give the system a look.

Or, I could say that the back cover blurb of the book gave me certain expectations of what I would find inside that I feel were not met, and were I to review the rules on their own merits, I might give a Substance rating of at least a 2.

Maybe I'll go for a little bit of all 3.

***

A bit over a month ago, I was browsing the racks at my local hobby shop when I spied a copy of Rolemaster Fantasy Role Playing. I had heard a bit about this compendium edition, and I thought it might be a nice way of getting into the system without having to figure out which of the various 'Blahblah Law' and 'Nth Companion' books might be useful. I dimly recalled that earlier reviews of the product had not been entirely glowing, but many of those were written by Rolemaster veterans who didn't seem to like the presentation of information. Besides, my previous exposure to ICE products had been pretty favorable, and the book did say that it had 'all you need to play the game'.

Bah.

Style:

Rolemaster Fantasy Role Playing (RFRP for convenience) is a nice hardback book, fairly hefty, with a color illustration by Angus McBride on the front. I'm not sure I care for the elf with the mohawk, but that's just my opinion. Being a hardback is a nice touch, and shoots the Style score up a notch. It's also a well-bound hardback, and does not appear to be prone to the 'pages slipping out' phenomenon that some poorly bound hardbacks suffer from (such as the good old Champions Big Blue Book...).

Opening it up, we see many many pages of rules, all fairly densely written. There are no color illustrations, but there is plenty of black and white line art. Overall, the quality of the illustrations are pretty average. There aren't any eye-hurtingly bad ones (1st Edition Monster Manual, anyone?), but there aren't any really good ones, either. What does drop the score for the artwork is not its fanatical devotion to mediocrity, but its lack of association with any part of the text or the world.

Oh, there are a few illustrations that work... the depiction of the over-equipped adventurer on page 32 in the Outfitting section is humorously appropriate, but in general the illustrations have very little to do with any nearby text. Furthermore, the artwork fails to portray any kind of coherent world-view. Good artwork, or even mediocre artwork used well, helps to breathe life into the setting of the game. The artwork in RFRP looks as though it was randomly assembled from a large collection of gaming-related clip art (and as I peruse the artist credits, it seems it probably was...).

Of course, according to the back cover blurb, this book was intended as a generic rules set, so perhaps the lack of coherent vision in the artwork is appropriate. However, that gets at the basic contradiction inherent in this book, which I will discuss more under Substance.

In addition to visual presentation, the next component of Style is the organization of the information. RFRP does benefit from having both a table of contents and an index. However, there are a lot of peculiarities that betray its age. For one thing, chapters are organized numerically, with subheadings denoted by decimal points. This was (and perhaps still is) an organization system popular in wargames from the '70's, and extensively employed by companies such as the now-devoured Avalon Hill in its rulebooks.

Another oddity is the categorization of all the 'background' information into Appendices... namely things like races, professions, skills, spells, equipment, and so forth. By my count, the actual core rules of the Rolemaster system take up 84 pages in this book, with the remaining 172 pages devoted to more setting-specific and generally useful material. Personally, for a truly 'generic' rules set, I would move the skills list and attack system (the infamous critical hit charts) into the core rules.

The acid test of an RPG book's organization is character creation. This is where RFRP lost out big. I think I can, without undue pride, consider myself a reasonably intelligent person. I mean, it's relatively difficult to be a professional biochemist and a moron at the same time. I have nearly 20 years of experience playing, GMing, and writing (unpublished [as yet ;) ]) roleplaying game systems. Nevertheless, it took me hours to create my first (and so far only) character. As a rough estimate, I spent between 6 and 12 hours, divided across three days, trying to get my character together. This was a process that required constant reading, re-reading, and searching for information throughout the entire book, while taking copious notes and penciling details into the four separate pages of a Rolemaster character sheet.

As the back cover blurb says, apparently this is 'easier than ever to understand'. Yikes.

Substance:

I shall begin with a few quotes from the back of the book.

'the most flexible rules around'

'the system which tells your story your way'

'all you need to play the game-combat, character creation, and spell casting-can be found in the pages of this one book!'

'all the required rules are here'

RFRP is clearly being presented as a set of generic rules for fantasy role playing. In my mind, this creates a set of requirements which the rules set must fulfill to be what it claims to be.

First and foremost, the rules must be adaptable to any fantasy setting. I think we can agree that most 'fantasy' settings involve people running around with swords and spells, so the basic requirements for a fantasy rules set would be the ability to portray combat using medieval weapons and some sort of magic system. Furthermore, there should be rules for constructing a number of fantasy races (ranging from the common elves and dwarves to more exotic beings such as lizardmen, centaurs, etc.) and using skills appropriate to a fantasy milieu. Also, most modern games provide ways of varying the 'power level' of a system, allowing players to portray characters ranging in ability from the average citizen of Thieve's World to the god-slaying power of an Eternal Champion.

Prolonged Tangential Diatribe: Generic Rules, Setting-Specific Rules, and Destinations Between.

As I mentioned above, a generic rules set should have certain attributes. Basically, it must be easily adaptable to any setting, providing guidelines on how to use those rules to meet your requirements. No perfect 'generic' set of rules exists. For my money, Champions is the best generic rules set. It's main flaw is that it does not handle gradations in power at low levels very well. For those familiar with the system, this flaw is best summed up thusly: Why would I buy a STR of 12 for my character, when for 1 character point more, I could get a STR of 13? 13 is a benchmark number which provides certain things for the character that a 12 does not. For example, for that one character point, your character gets a better PD, better REC, and better STUN.

Another good generic rules set is GURPS. GURPS was actually an intentional effort at designing a generic set of rules for roleplaying. However, it fails to achieve its goal because it breaks down at high levels (where Champions is difficult to use at low power levels, GURPS is utterly unworkable at higher power levels). It also lacks the elegance and cohesiveness that makes Champions one of the landmark systems of the industry. You could also look at this as a strength, as it is easy to 'tack on' rules to the basic framework of GURPS, as is best exemplified by the many different magic systems available for GURPS (including the basic magic system, the Voodoo system, etc.).

Essentially, however, both these systems fail to be perfect 'generic' systems because they have innate biases about what sort of game should be played with them. GURPS caters to gritty, low-powered gaming, while Champions was originally designed to emulate the high-powered action of comic book superheroes, and naturally does better at that end of things. It's also worth noting that both systems have a very tactics-intensive combat system, and don't make many allowances toward simplifying combat, which can leave many 'dramatic' players cold.

This brings us to setting-specific game systems. A good example of this is the World of Darkness. The various WoD 'race' books present separate games for portraying the struggles of a specific breed of supernatural creature trying to survive in a dark, gothic version of our Earth. While the core mechanics are the same between each book, the specific rules for creating a character and using the powers of the various races are different for each book. No attempt is made to suggest that these rules can be employed for portraying any other sort of game, certainly not without substantial alteration. A measure of the specifity of each race's rules is provided by the difficulties inherent in running a game where players play different species in the same campaign.

Ah, well, now that that's over with, back to RFRP.

The first of my criteria was whether a system provided rules for combat and spell-casting. Here, RFRP does meet expectations. It provides rules for combat and adventuring in a fantasy milieu. Many rules. Many many rules. Rules and rules and rules. Rules and rules and rules and rules and rules and...

SLAP!

Err, sorry.

Examining the combat system, RFRP starts off simply enough... combat is handled in 10 second rounds, during which a character can take 3 actions. Actions are, of course, things like making attacks, casting spells, etc. Unfortunately, this perfectly straightforward approach is rapidly spoiled by the inclusion of % Activity. Essentially, each character has a total percentage of activity one may perform in a round, this being 100%, unless the character is under the influence of something like a 'haste' spell, which might give the character 200% activity during a 10-second round. Every action you take during the round takes up some percentage of this total. I presume this % Activity idea began as a way of keeping track of actions that required several rounds to complete, such as cocking a crossbow. However, it seems to have developed into a truly anal layer of extra complexity for something which is already the most complex and time-consuming part of any RPG system. There is a table giving guidelines for % activity of various actions, and another table detailing how many percentage points an activity may take and still be considered a single action during a round. Whoopee.

Well, that's basic sequencing of actions during a turn. The combat system makes use of an 'open-ended' d100 system, where rolls of 96-00 allow you to add and re-roll, while a roll of 01-05 forces you to roll again and subtract. When you actually make a combat roll, you roll an open-ended d100, and add various modifiers and penalties determined by your skill, the combat environment, and other situational modifiers. Very high rolls entitle you to rolls on the critical hit charts, low rolls force you to roll on the fumble tables. Your basic weapon damage is determined by the type of weapon you are using with the type of armor your opponent is wearing: higher attack rolls let you inflict more damage.

To a certain extent I like some of the logic of this system: a character's body can take a fair amount of normal 'damage' without being too badly messed up. It's the possible critical effects that really determine the outcome of the fight, although the nickle and dime effect of accumulated damage will eventually bring a warrior down. However, the system used to attain this is incredibly cumbersome, and not without other flaws. For example, the attack tables, of which there are many, only list opponent armor values from 1 to 20, making no concession to attacking targets that are better armored or completely unarmored (logically, shouldn't someone without any armor have an armor of 0, instead of a 1 through 4?). There is other apparently arbitrary weirdness on these attack and critical hit tables, but I won't go into it.

Before we head into the dangerous territory of magic, I'll mention the distinction between Static and Moving Maneuvers. Basically, these are other types of actions one might take during a round. The main difference is that if you fumble a Moving Maneuver, you could potentially tear a tendon or fall and break your head open. Yep, Moving Maneuvers have their own critical fumble chart. This sort of reminds me of the section in Hol on skills, where if you roll a natural 2 while trying to tie your own shoes, the Holmeister is entitled to tell you that your head just exploded. I guess I know where they got that, now...

Well, on to spells. I have to admit, there are a ton of spells in this book. Spells are divided into Lists... there are at least 96 Lists in the book, and each list averages half-a-dozen spells, so that's nearly 600 spells listed. The problem though, is that these spell lists are incomplete. I know for a fact that Rolemaster spell lists go up to Level 50, and the spell lists in this book only go up to Level 10. Even if I didn't know that, specifically, it would still be fairly obvious that these spell lists are incomplete. Take the promising list of Life Mastery spells. There is a spell called Preservation on this list, which prevents a corpse from decaying. Why prevent a corpse from decaying unless there was at some point a spell for putting a departed soul back in the body and reviving it? And yet, while there are numerous low-level physical repair and healing spells, there is no actual resurrection spell listed.

In fact, the apparent wealth of different spells is illusory: many spells in the same list are the same spell with a different roman numeral attached... for example, Channels I through V allow a spellcaster to send spells to other spellcasters... the roman numeral merely indicates the maximum level of spell which may be thus transmitted. There are similar spells where the variable is duration, or choice of effects (level I spells may allow one choice from effects A, B, and C, level II lets you choose two, etc.).

Casting spells is fairly simple. Spell casting counts as a static maneuver (which is surprising... I would have thought they'd take the opportunity to include a fumble table for spellcasting allowing the poor caster to accidentally summon a hostile demon... oh well), with high rolls giving better results, even bonuses to further spellcasting, while low rolls cause spell failure and even additional penalties. One arbitrary decision was to limit spell casting to once per round, even if a spell takes less than 100% effort to cast. Why? Because they say so...

From the perspective of my requirements for a generic system, RFRP still fails. While it provides many, many spells, it does not discuss how to create new spell lists or how to properly balance spell power, let alone how to create different magic systems entirely. I can only assume that the existing spells were the result of arbitrary decision making on the part of the creators, and they don't trust players of the game to make such decisions themselves.

Well, I'm starting to get tired, so I'm going to shorten this up a bit.

Next Criteria: Races. RFRP gives us a number of races, including High Men, Commen Men, Wood Elves, Halflings, and Dwarves. No information is provided on how to design or balance new races for other settings, and these races themselves are rather incomplete. One indication of this is that in the back of the book, they provide some templates for players interested in sketching their characters. Among these templates are pictures of a male Orc and Half Orc. However, no information on playing Orc characters is provided at all in the book, not even in the (short) monster section, nor is there any explanation of why these races don't have females...

Skills: Here is one area where Rolemaster redeems itself slightly. The skill system was extensively detailed, very customizable, and seemed as though it would work reasonably well. I just wish it were easier to determine starting skills when creating a character. Unfortunately, the development point system is still tedious at first, and the rules are somewhat confusing at first on the racial skill packages and the difference between skill category and skill bonuses.

Character Types: RFRP gives 9 Professions and over a dozen Training Packages. The Professions are the same as AD&D 'classes', comprising Fighters, Thieves, Magicians, Clerics, and Rangers, and adding in Bards, Mentalists, Rogues, and Dabblers. The basic problem with this approach is that RFRP's definition of what a certain Profession is capable of may not be the same as a player's or GM's definition. For example, suppose you wanted to play a woods-wise fighting man. You might be far better off playing a Fighter than a Ranger, and simply selecting a number of outdoor skills. A truly generic rules set ought to describe how to create new Professions, or tinker with existing Professions so that they more nearly approximate what is desired in the way of a character class. Training packages, while seeming to reflect a certain 'profession' such as Hunter, or Knight, are actually just ways of attaining a group of related skills more cheaply than buying them all separately. They give a cost break to players in exchange for flexibility of skill selection.

Power Level: RFRP blows it on this one too. The rules make an assumption about starting power levels, and stick to to that assumption. While it would be easy enough to alter the starting power level of characters by giving them more stat points to distribute at first and advancing them several levels, the rules don't bother to suggest this option, and don't make any sort of distinction between different types of fantasy settings and what sort of characters would be appropriate to them.

Useful Stuff:

Well, there is a sheet of photocopyable hex graph paper in back. Unfortunately, it's in a weird 2.1 cm scale. Whatever happened to 25 mm/1 in. paper? The skill system is really the best and most easily adaptable/stealable portion of these rules. The extremely large spell list might be useful for some, although it doesn't really present anything truly novel, and is rife with the sort of anal, finicky attention to minute details that plagues these rules. I mean, do you really need to worry about re-attaching severed tendons, one by one when you cast a healing spell? Finally, some people might choose to take adapt the critical hit charts, although it might take some work to convert the wound points and armor ratings over to another system. I understand that ICE has actually released their combat system separately with conversion notes for most major systems, so the work has already been done if you are interested in that.

Other Thoughts:

Ye Gods, I'm tired of thinking about this thing. Anybody wanna buy a copy of RFRP? It's in excellent condition, near mint even, and I'm selling it cheap... $15 plus the cost of postage. My email address is on the review.

Style: 3 (Average)
Substance: 1 (I Wasted My Money)

Rolemaster Fantasy Role Playing
Author: Coleman Charlton, John Curtis, Pete Fenlon, Steve Marvin Category: game Company/Publisher: Iron Crown Enterprises Line: Rolemaster Cost: 30.00 Page count: 256 ISBN: 1-55806-550-4 SKU: #5800 Capsule Review by David Rhode on 02/15/00. Genre tags: Fantasy	Hmm... where to start... Well, I suppose I could start off by saying that I have purchased a number of other ICE products, including Nightmares of Mine, And a Ten Foot Pole, and Dark Space, and found them to range from satisfactory to quite good in quality. Or, I could say that, while I pride myself on having some experience with most of the major game systems put out over the last 20 years, I have never played Rolemaster, and was curious to give the system a look. Or, I could say that the back cover blurb of the book gave me certain expectations of what I would find inside that I feel were not met, and were I to review the rules on their own merits, I might give a Substance rating of at least a 2. Maybe I'll go for a little bit of all 3. *** A bit over a month ago, I was browsing the racks at my local hobby shop when I spied a copy of Rolemaster Fantasy Role Playing. I had heard a bit about this compendium edition, and I thought it might be a nice way of getting into the system without having to figure out which of the various 'Blahblah Law' and 'Nth Companion' books might be useful. I dimly recalled that earlier reviews of the product had not been entirely glowing, but many of those were written by Rolemaster veterans who didn't seem to like the presentation of information. Besides, my previous exposure to ICE products had been pretty favorable, and the book did say that it had 'all you need to play the game'. Bah. Style: Rolemaster Fantasy Role Playing (RFRP for convenience) is a nice hardback book, fairly hefty, with a color illustration by Angus McBride on the front. I'm not sure I care for the elf with the mohawk, but that's just my opinion. Being a hardback is a nice touch, and shoots the Style score up a notch. It's also a well-bound hardback, and does not appear to be prone to the 'pages slipping out' phenomenon that some poorly bound hardbacks suffer from (such as the good old Champions Big Blue Book...). Opening it up, we see many many pages of rules, all fairly densely written. There are no color illustrations, but there is plenty of black and white line art. Overall, the quality of the illustrations are pretty average. There aren't any eye-hurtingly bad ones (1st Edition Monster Manual, anyone?), but there aren't any really good ones, either. What does drop the score for the artwork is not its fanatical devotion to mediocrity, but its lack of association with any part of the text or the world. Oh, there are a few illustrations that work... the depiction of the over-equipped adventurer on page 32 in the Outfitting section is humorously appropriate, but in general the illustrations have very little to do with any nearby text. Furthermore, the artwork fails to portray any kind of coherent world-view. Good artwork, or even mediocre artwork used well, helps to breathe life into the setting of the game. The artwork in RFRP looks as though it was randomly assembled from a large collection of gaming-related clip art (and as I peruse the artist credits, it seems it probably was...). Of course, according to the back cover blurb, this book was intended as a generic rules set, so perhaps the lack of coherent vision in the artwork is appropriate. However, that gets at the basic contradiction inherent in this book, which I will discuss more under Substance. In addition to visual presentation, the next component of Style is the organization of the information. RFRP does benefit from having both a table of contents and an index. However, there are a lot of peculiarities that betray its age. For one thing, chapters are organized numerically, with subheadings denoted by decimal points. This was (and perhaps still is) an organization system popular in wargames from the '70's, and extensively employed by companies such as the now-devoured Avalon Hill in its rulebooks. Another oddity is the categorization of all the 'background' information into Appendices... namely things like races, professions, skills, spells, equipment, and so forth. By my count, the actual core rules of the Rolemaster system take up 84 pages in this book, with the remaining 172 pages devoted to more setting-specific and generally useful material. Personally, for a truly 'generic' rules set, I would move the skills list and attack system (the infamous critical hit charts) into the core rules. The acid test of an RPG book's organization is character creation. This is where RFRP lost out big. I think I can, without undue pride, consider myself a reasonably intelligent person. I mean, it's relatively difficult to be a professional biochemist and a moron at the same time. I have nearly 20 years of experience playing, GMing, and writing (unpublished [as yet ;) ]) roleplaying game systems. Nevertheless, it took me hours to create my first (and so far only) character. As a rough estimate, I spent between 6 and 12 hours, divided across three days, trying to get my character together. This was a process that required constant reading, re-reading, and searching for information throughout the entire book, while taking copious notes and penciling details into the four separate pages of a Rolemaster character sheet. As the back cover blurb says, apparently this is 'easier than ever to understand'. Yikes. Substance: I shall begin with a few quotes from the back of the book. 'the most flexible rules around' 'the system which tells your story your way' 'all you need to play the game-combat, character creation, and spell casting-can be found in the pages of this one book!' 'all the required rules are here' RFRP is clearly being presented as a set of generic rules for fantasy role playing. In my mind, this creates a set of requirements which the rules set must fulfill to be what it claims to be. First and foremost, the rules must be adaptable to any fantasy setting. I think we can agree that most 'fantasy' settings involve people running around with swords and spells, so the basic requirements for a fantasy rules set would be the ability to portray combat using medieval weapons and some sort of magic system. Furthermore, there should be rules for constructing a number of fantasy races (ranging from the common elves and dwarves to more exotic beings such as lizardmen, centaurs, etc.) and using skills appropriate to a fantasy milieu. Also, most modern games provide ways of varying the 'power level' of a system, allowing players to portray characters ranging in ability from the average citizen of Thieve's World to the god-slaying power of an Eternal Champion. Prolonged Tangential Diatribe: Generic Rules, Setting-Specific Rules, and Destinations Between. As I mentioned above, a generic rules set should have certain attributes. Basically, it must be easily adaptable to any setting, providing guidelines on how to use those rules to meet your requirements. No perfect 'generic' set of rules exists. For my money, Champions is the best generic rules set. It's main flaw is that it does not handle gradations in power at low levels very well. For those familiar with the system, this flaw is best summed up thusly: Why would I buy a STR of 12 for my character, when for 1 character point more, I could get a STR of 13? 13 is a benchmark number which provides certain things for the character that a 12 does not. For example, for that one character point, your character gets a better PD, better REC, and better STUN. Another good generic rules set is GURPS. GURPS was actually an intentional effort at designing a generic set of rules for roleplaying. However, it fails to achieve its goal because it breaks down at high levels (where Champions is difficult to use at low power levels, GURPS is utterly unworkable at higher power levels). It also lacks the elegance and cohesiveness that makes Champions one of the landmark systems of the industry. You could also look at this as a strength, as it is easy to 'tack on' rules to the basic framework of GURPS, as is best exemplified by the many different magic systems available for GURPS (including the basic magic system, the Voodoo system, etc.). Essentially, however, both these systems fail to be perfect 'generic' systems because they have innate biases about what sort of game should be played with them. GURPS caters to gritty, low-powered gaming, while Champions was originally designed to emulate the high-powered action of comic book superheroes, and naturally does better at that end of things. It's also worth noting that both systems have a very tactics-intensive combat system, and don't make many allowances toward simplifying combat, which can leave many 'dramatic' players cold. This brings us to setting-specific game systems. A good example of this is the World of Darkness. The various WoD 'race' books present separate games for portraying the struggles of a specific breed of supernatural creature trying to survive in a dark, gothic version of our Earth. While the core mechanics are the same between each book, the specific rules for creating a character and using the powers of the various races are different for each book. No attempt is made to suggest that these rules can be employed for portraying any other sort of game, certainly not without substantial alteration. A measure of the specifity of each race's rules is provided by the difficulties inherent in running a game where players play different species in the same campaign. Ah, well, now that that's over with, back to RFRP. The first of my criteria was whether a system provided rules for combat and spell-casting. Here, RFRP does meet expectations. It provides rules for combat and adventuring in a fantasy milieu. Many rules. Many many rules. Rules and rules and rules. Rules and rules and rules and rules and rules and... SLAP! Err, sorry. Examining the combat system, RFRP starts off simply enough... combat is handled in 10 second rounds, during which a character can take 3 actions. Actions are, of course, things like making attacks, casting spells, etc. Unfortunately, this perfectly straightforward approach is rapidly spoiled by the inclusion of % Activity. Essentially, each character has a total percentage of activity one may perform in a round, this being 100%, unless the character is under the influence of something like a 'haste' spell, which might give the character 200% activity during a 10-second round. Every action you take during the round takes up some percentage of this total. I presume this % Activity idea began as a way of keeping track of actions that required several rounds to complete, such as cocking a crossbow. However, it seems to have developed into a truly anal layer of extra complexity for something which is already the most complex and time-consuming part of any RPG system. There is a table giving guidelines for % activity of various actions, and another table detailing how many percentage points an activity may take and still be considered a single action during a round. Whoopee. Well, that's basic sequencing of actions during a turn. The combat system makes use of an 'open-ended' d100 system, where rolls of 96-00 allow you to add and re-roll, while a roll of 01-05 forces you to roll again and subtract. When you actually make a combat roll, you roll an open-ended d100, and add various modifiers and penalties determined by your skill, the combat environment, and other situational modifiers. Very high rolls entitle you to rolls on the critical hit charts, low rolls force you to roll on the fumble tables. Your basic weapon damage is determined by the type of weapon you are using with the type of armor your opponent is wearing: higher attack rolls let you inflict more damage. To a certain extent I like some of the logic of this system: a character's body can take a fair amount of normal 'damage' without being too badly messed up. It's the possible critical effects that really determine the outcome of the fight, although the nickle and dime effect of accumulated damage will eventually bring a warrior down. However, the system used to attain this is incredibly cumbersome, and not without other flaws. For example, the attack tables, of which there are many, only list opponent armor values from 1 to 20, making no concession to attacking targets that are better armored or completely unarmored (logically, shouldn't someone without any armor have an armor of 0, instead of a 1 through 4?). There is other apparently arbitrary weirdness on these attack and critical hit tables, but I won't go into it. Before we head into the dangerous territory of magic, I'll mention the distinction between Static and Moving Maneuvers. Basically, these are other types of actions one might take during a round. The main difference is that if you fumble a Moving Maneuver, you could potentially tear a tendon or fall and break your head open. Yep, Moving Maneuvers have their own critical fumble chart. This sort of reminds me of the section in Hol on skills, where if you roll a natural 2 while trying to tie your own shoes, the Holmeister is entitled to tell you that your head just exploded. I guess I know where they got that, now... Well, on to spells. I have to admit, there are a ton of spells in this book. Spells are divided into Lists... there are at least 96 Lists in the book, and each list averages half-a-dozen spells, so that's nearly 600 spells listed. The problem though, is that these spell lists are incomplete. I know for a fact that Rolemaster spell lists go up to Level 50, and the spell lists in this book only go up to Level 10. Even if I didn't know that, specifically, it would still be fairly obvious that these spell lists are incomplete. Take the promising list of Life Mastery spells. There is a spell called Preservation on this list, which prevents a corpse from decaying. Why prevent a corpse from decaying unless there was at some point a spell for putting a departed soul back in the body and reviving it? And yet, while there are numerous low-level physical repair and healing spells, there is no actual resurrection spell listed. In fact, the apparent wealth of different spells is illusory: many spells in the same list are the same spell with a different roman numeral attached... for example, Channels I through V allow a spellcaster to send spells to other spellcasters... the roman numeral merely indicates the maximum level of spell which may be thus transmitted. There are similar spells where the variable is duration, or choice of effects (level I spells may allow one choice from effects A, B, and C, level II lets you choose two, etc.). Casting spells is fairly simple. Spell casting counts as a static maneuver (which is surprising... I would have thought they'd take the opportunity to include a fumble table for spellcasting allowing the poor caster to accidentally summon a hostile demon... oh well), with high rolls giving better results, even bonuses to further spellcasting, while low rolls cause spell failure and even additional penalties. One arbitrary decision was to limit spell casting to once per round, even if a spell takes less than 100% effort to cast. Why? Because they say so... From the perspective of my requirements for a generic system, RFRP still fails. While it provides many, many spells, it does not discuss how to create new spell lists or how to properly balance spell power, let alone how to create different magic systems entirely. I can only assume that the existing spells were the result of arbitrary decision making on the part of the creators, and they don't trust players of the game to make such decisions themselves. Well, I'm starting to get tired, so I'm going to shorten this up a bit. Next Criteria: Races. RFRP gives us a number of races, including High Men, Commen Men, Wood Elves, Halflings, and Dwarves. No information is provided on how to design or balance new races for other settings, and these races themselves are rather incomplete. One indication of this is that in the back of the book, they provide some templates for players interested in sketching their characters. Among these templates are pictures of a male Orc and Half Orc. However, no information on playing Orc characters is provided at all in the book, not even in the (short) monster section, nor is there any explanation of why these races don't have females... Skills: Here is one area where Rolemaster redeems itself slightly. The skill system was extensively detailed, very customizable, and seemed as though it would work reasonably well. I just wish it were easier to determine starting skills when creating a character. Unfortunately, the development point system is still tedious at first, and the rules are somewhat confusing at first on the racial skill packages and the difference between skill category and skill bonuses. Character Types: RFRP gives 9 Professions and over a dozen Training Packages. The Professions are the same as AD&D 'classes', comprising Fighters, Thieves, Magicians, Clerics, and Rangers, and adding in Bards, Mentalists, Rogues, and Dabblers. The basic problem with this approach is that RFRP's definition of what a certain Profession is capable of may not be the same as a player's or GM's definition. For example, suppose you wanted to play a woods-wise fighting man. You might be far better off playing a Fighter than a Ranger, and simply selecting a number of outdoor skills. A truly generic rules set ought to describe how to create new Professions, or tinker with existing Professions so that they more nearly approximate what is desired in the way of a character class. Training packages, while seeming to reflect a certain 'profession' such as Hunter, or Knight, are actually just ways of attaining a group of related skills more cheaply than buying them all separately. They give a cost break to players in exchange for flexibility of skill selection. Power Level: RFRP blows it on this one too. The rules make an assumption about starting power levels, and stick to to that assumption. While it would be easy enough to alter the starting power level of characters by giving them more stat points to distribute at first and advancing them several levels, the rules don't bother to suggest this option, and don't make any sort of distinction between different types of fantasy settings and what sort of characters would be appropriate to them. Useful Stuff: Well, there is a sheet of photocopyable hex graph paper in back. Unfortunately, it's in a weird 2.1 cm scale. Whatever happened to 25 mm/1 in. paper? The skill system is really the best and most easily adaptable/stealable portion of these rules. The extremely large spell list might be useful for some, although it doesn't really present anything truly novel, and is rife with the sort of anal, finicky attention to minute details that plagues these rules. I mean, do you really need to worry about re-attaching severed tendons, one by one when you cast a healing spell? Finally, some people might choose to take adapt the critical hit charts, although it might take some work to convert the wound points and armor ratings over to another system. I understand that ICE has actually released their combat system separately with conversion notes for most major systems, so the work has already been done if you are interested in that. Other Thoughts: Ye Gods, I'm tired of thinking about this thing. Anybody wanna buy a copy of RFRP? It's in excellent condition, near mint even, and I'm selling it cheap... $15 plus the cost of postage. My email address is on the review. Style: 3 (Average) Substance: 1 (I Wasted My Money)