Topic: Code breaking

[Jengada]

Does anyone know of a secondary skill in one of the Companions that would apply to code breaking/ciphers? I see these as different from learning a language, but for lack of a better skill I would give a player a bonus on their roll for the base language of the code. (I looked at RMSS since that tends to yard up the scattered secondaries from RM2, RMC, but there's nothing applicable there, either.) Without a skill, it seems code breaking would fall to Text Analysis spells.

[netbat]

Depending on the type of code you could use either signaling or advanced math or a combination of both. Research would also help.

[Rajek Plathmos]

The way I do it is use Advanced Math (cryptography specialty) to create the cypher. Then use signaling to actually communicate the encoded message.

[Elrich Maltah]

Arms Companion has an actual Cryptography skill with DP costs as Poetic Improvisation, putting it in the Linguistic category.

CRYPTOGRAPHY (In/Re) (Static Action) – The skill at creating and breaking written codes. Character must study any of these before he may decipher them. Treat this as a maneuver roll with appropriate difficulty (i.e., for detailed languages, such as Egyptian hieroglyphics, Phenomenal; for Latin, Very Hard, etc.) When creating a code, the character makes a skill roll. The results determine the complexity. (Note, even the shortest and least descriptive codes can be insanely complex by virtue of their simplicity). The language or code can only be broken by a successful Cryptography roll of appropriate difficulty, see below.

Total Skill Roll ............................ Difficulty to break code/language
Under 1 ...................................................................... Mundane
1-25 .......................................................................... ......Trivial
26-50 .......................................................................... ..... Easy
51-75 .......................................................................... ..... Light
76-100 ......................................................................... Medium
101-125 .......................................................................... . Hard
126-150 .................................................................... Very Hard
151-175 ............................................................ Extremely Hard
176-200 .................................................................. Sheer Folly
201-225 ........................................................................ Absurd
226-250 ........................................................................ Insane
251-275 ................................................................. Phenomenal
276+ ........................................................... Virtually Impossible

[Spectre771]

Arms Companion has an actual Cryptography skill with DP costs as Poetic Improvisation, putting it in the Linguistic category.

Beat me to it

[Jengada]

Very useful, thanks. Odd that it would be in Arms Companion, but thanks for pointing me towards it.

[chook]

Very useful, thanks. Odd that it would be in Arms Companion, but thanks for pointing me towards it.

Probably just a time and place.  Cryptography would likely have been seen as a military thing in that era given there wasn't a lot of online communication and the WWW was only about four years old in 1993 when Arms Companion was published and still not really somethign known or available to the broader public.

[Jengada]

Very useful, thanks. Odd that it would be in Arms Companion, but thanks for pointing me towards it.

Probably just a time and place.  Cryptography would likely have been seen as a military thing in that era given there wasn't a lot of online communication and the WWW was only about four years old in 1993 when Arms Companion was published and still not really somethign known or available to the broader public.

"In that era"! Having been there in that era (another one of the "Old guys who's been playing Rolemaster since the 1980s") that kinda stung   I suspect you're right, in a way, though. Perhaps no one else had thought to include cryptography in an earlier Companion, and the AC authors were savy enough about military use of codes to include it there.

[chook]

"In that era"! Having been there in that era (another one of the "Old guys who's been playing Rolemaster since the 1980s") that kinda stung   I suspect you're right, in a way, though. Perhaps no one else had thought to include cryptography in an earlier Companion, and the AC authors were savy enough about military use of codes to include it there.

Oh, we are both in the same group of RM players so that was really just my rose coloured glasses looking back to the days when the number of RM games in progress at once was three and the number of days per week they were played was all of them.  It is only with the benefit of age that I can look back on the gaming industry of the 1980's and have an appreciation that a) they were making this up as they went along; and b) probably couldn't believe they were being paid to do this.  The idea of having a career as a "game developer" was unheard of.