Topic: Weapon Categories and styles

[Aotrs Commander]

Something has always bugged me a little about Rolemaster's weapon skills. I.e. the characters tend to be locked in to one weapon choice, especially if you have a fairly high-power (or in my case, insane-power) party. This is a bit of a downer, considering one of the fun spoils in sci-fi is Nicking People's Cool Guns. It does fall down a bit when you realise you can't actually use them very well.

(We're currently playing, by the way, what amounts to basically RM2/RMC/SM2 characters with RMFRP/SM:P combat rules and tables.) Currently, I fudge the weapon costs a bit, so that the penultimate weapon cost becomes the cost for all weapon catergories but the final one (instead of the final one for everyhting after category 5, a bit like RM VI's (RM VII's?) unified skill system did), giving everyone more options, and implementing a similar skill system that basically gives you half skill ranks for similar weapons in a category.

But it's still not that helpful, as half skill ranks is not all that high the level we play at, and may as well be useless.

What I would like to do is compact the weapon skills a bit more, so the PCs will get more flexibility for their DP.

I bought RMC Combat Companion specifically to have a look at weapons styles and to see if that would help. It might - a bit - but at the cost of pumping everyone's DP costs up, not that helpful (even after the disturbing task of trying to revise the characters!) especially for the characters with mid-to-high DP costs.

Does anyone have any suggestions about how I might tackle the situation?



I'm not so bothered about fixing melee weapons (I'm happy to accept they require a lot more effort to use different types), but especially with modern (plus!) weapons. Which are in theory 'easier' to adapt to. As a lay...er...Lich - and correct me if I'm wrong - I would hazard a guess there's much less difference between an AK-47 and a SA-80 than between, say a gladius and a longsword. Whether an AK-47 bears much resemblence to a Stormtrooper-One Blaster rifle is anybody's guess, though I would postulate that since they're used much the same way (there's not so much shooting 'styles' as their are weapon styles, no?) that they'd be perhaps more similar than I've been giving them credit for (i.e 2H projectile vrs 2H energy).



With this thought in mind (and perhaps a liberal dash of dramatic lisense even if it's totally off-mark!), a few thoughts occur.

1) Compact the weapon catergories themselves a bit more, from the current 1HE, 1HC, bows, thrown, 2H, polearm, 1H Proj, 2H Proj, Support Proj, 1H energy, 2H energy, Sup energy to something smaller (well, not the melee weapons) say, (1H modern, 2H modern, Support modern).

2) Take a leaf out of RM FRP and make the PCs develop weapon skills by catergory instead of by weapon for non-primative weapons (and by narrow categories for primative).

3) Similar to the above, but instead create weapons styles whose style focus is much broader than melee/primative (say, semi-auto  pistols, auto pistols, auto rifles, possibly seperating by energy and projectile as groups etc)



Does anyone have any other (better!) ideas, suggestions or comments?

[David Johansen]

Well, I'm really glad SPAM contracted the Melee weapons into two categories.  I think I'd probably drop it down to energy weapons and projectile weapons as well.  After all there's already individual skills inside of those categories.

Just don't ask me what I'd do about the Science / Analytic group...

[markc]

 I do not think I have a lot to add but if you find the cost of the RMC:CC to be too high adjust the cost down to where it fits.

The other thing you could do is break down the weapon categories to 1H, 2H, Missile-Thrown, pistol, SMG/Carbine, rifle/sniperrifle, assault rifle and support. Well I guess that does not work as you have 8 categories again. I guess you could lump all melee weapons together as well as the pistol and SMG/crabine cats in to 1 so you not have 6.

MDC

Note in my game I use 10 or 11 I think. It has been a while since I looked at my combined space/fantasy skill sheet. I also play RMSS-SM:P baicly by the book and let players create 2 PC's as they need them instead of NPC's.

[TerryTee]

I?ve done a twist where I let players develop a weapon category as a skill, and all weapons in that category use that same skill.

I?ve got two versions of this:
One is simple, and all categories are treated as mentioned.
The other is a bit more complex, where I let players select a few categories that are treated as above while the other categories are developed with several skills pr category as pr SM2 rules. In this second version I let combat oriented professions choose more categories to be developed as a single skill.

Both of these rule sets are implemented in my SM2 CharMaker sheet (in the Vault).

-Terry

[Aotrs Commander]

Okay, that's all given me some (okay, many!) thoughts. I'm leaning towards the following:

1) Combine all melee weapons into one single caterory. Instead of developing an individual weapon, the character develops what is currently a group of similar weapons, and each weapon within this category has the same bonus. All other melee weapons get the similar skill bonus (i.e half ranks).

2) Thrown and Missile (i.e. bows etc) are treated as each one skill category. Each Thrown and Missile group of what is current similar skills is developed seperately as a single skill and any other thrown weapon (for thrown) and missile weapons (for missiless) are treated as similar skills.

3) Divide remaining categories into Energy, Projectile and Launcher (this also matches the categories of the vehicle weapons). Within these categories, there will be groups (pistol, subassault/carbine, rifle, support). Skill in one group gives you similar skills in the other groups in the category and with the same group in the other categories. (E.g energy pistol gives you similiar skill to all energy weapons, projectile pistols and laucnher pistols.)

4) Similiar skills redefined from being my current half ranks (plus any normal skill ranks to a maximum of the primary) to:

Every 2 real ranks you have of the highest skill in any category give you one virtual rank of any secondary, to a maximum of the max number of ranks of the primary. Only the highest virtual bonus counts.

5) Weapon styles optionally used as Combat Companion. Single focus applies to the weapon group, group focus to the category.

6) If a weapon has multiple attack methods that span more than one category (e.g. an Andromeda forcelance which can fire and be used in melee, or arguably, Light Sabres which can be thrown) it can optionally be developed as a single focus weapon  style (at the cheapest of said categories) which grants it's bonus to all of the use types, but does not give any similar skills. (Or you can just develop the relevant skills as normal.) (E.g, you could develop Forcelance style and only be able to use forcelances, or develop melee and energy subbassault (which is what I classified at as - the party's archmage has one...) seperately.

7) Martial arts (currently using martial arts companions styles on top of regular RM2 degrees) re-designed to work entirely off MA styles (at Combat Companion DP costs, with a simple 3:1 conversion to bring them in line. Heck, no reason not to use the dedicated source material!). If the character possesses ranks in more than one martial arts style, the highest one counts any others the character possess as similar skills. (But you can't get synergy bonuses from your Fire Bending to Air Bending if you don't know Air Bending. Or something...) The GM could determine if some styles would count as similiar regardless.

8 ) Directed Spells develop all ranged attacks as one skill and all melee attacks as a second, each counting the other as similiar skills. (If directed spells aren't done this way, you can forget being able to contribute in sci-fi with bolt spells. (Not too mention it was pretty awful before, due the the level constraints). Let's face it, when your mate's plasmatic repeater rifle is argueably better than even a lightning bolt...at level 1 - and the bad guys have shields, you're totally shafted!



Thoughts?

[markc]

 One note: I was looking at developing a RMC CC style that included melee use and thrown use of a weapon and "he at ICE" said it was not a good idea. So that is something to think about during combat style creations.

One thought I just had reading your comments above was that you could include "thrown" weapon use in each weapons category. So in RMSS under the 1H-Edged you would have dagger skill and throw dagger skill, this lets you do away with the thrown weapon category. This also lets the category bonus in RMSS apply to throw skills and you just need to adjust the stat for the thrown weapon if you use 3-stat's to determine the bonus.

MDC

[markc]

Another thing I forgot to mention is for the GM to make some standard martial art styles such as Storn Trooper basic H to H, Storm Trooper advanced H to H, etc. So you have some basic styles that military types would have in the game. IMO You also want to create the most powerful styles in your game so as to provide a basic frame work for future styles to be placed in.

MDC

[Dax]

An artificial solution:

Treat the actual weapon as the one with the full bonus (full ranks).
If the PC changes to a similar weapon she has only half ranks at first, but get used to it over the time.
(Like need "100 Crits" = 100 % of missing bonus; A-Crit=1, B=2, C=3, ... E=5)
But as a drawback the old one drops to half bonus - not immediately, of course.

Yes, very artificial.

[Aotrs Commander]

One note: I was looking at developing a RMC CC style that included melee use and thrown use of a weapon and "he at ICE" said it was not a good idea. So that is something to think about during combat style creations.

Well, for normal RMC/RM2 weapon development, I can see why, as it would be essentially trying to get two weapon skills out of your cost. However, as that is basically the EXACT thing I'm trying to do, i.e. get more bang for your DP, I don't think it's a problem! (But I'll be limiting such styles to one specific weapon in any case.) (And we're talking about converting existing characters, rather than new ones.)

One thought I just had reading your comments above was that you could include "thrown" weapon use in each weapons category. So in RMSS under the 1H-Edged you would have dagger skill and throw dagger skill, this lets you do away with the thrown weapon category. This also lets the category bonus in RMSS apply to throw skills and you just need to adjust the stat for the thrown weapon if you use 3-stat's to determine the bonus.

MDC

The skill system we're using is 95% RMC/RM2. There's enough thrown stuff (daggers, power knives - and most importantly grenades) floating around the party I think it's justified having that category.

Another thing I forgot to mention is for the GM to make some standard martial art styles such as Storn Trooper basic H to H, Storm Trooper advanced H to H, etc. So you have some basic styles that military types would have in the game. IMO You also want to create the most powerful styles in your game so as to provide a basic frame work for future styles to be placed in.

MDC

That's mostly done! We've been using Martial Arts Companion for some time. All I'll be doing is essentially changing the cost to the RMC CC cost (as MAC (?) is 0-60 points and RMC CC 0-20 this is a simple 3:1 conversion) and tidying it up a bit.

I most add that I'll be doing basically all the work here. I'm the only one who understands the intricate workings of our Rolemaster and it's...um...more books than I can easily count! The players are just happy to turn up and play!



On an entirely unrelated note - but I'm not going to start a whole new topic for it unless I have to - what would be the best way about converting the RMC round sequence to sci-fi? Currently, we've been using the RMSS/SM:P (Blaster Law/Firearms) sequence, but it's a bit clunky, and really only myself and two other players made use of it. I'm going to try, for our Christmas game, using the RMC one (with one initative roll per combat - since cyclic initative works fine for D&D 3.5, it'll work okay here!)

Now, most if it will convert easily enough right over, but looking at single shot (and Tracking Shot/Spread Burst) at 30-60% activity. What do you think would be an acceptable value? I'm thinking 50% is perhaps too high (I think there should be a range like melee attacks have) and 30% is a bit low (I'm trying to cut back on fifteen million PC attacks per round resulting for Ambidextrous duel-pistol wielding (and sometimes Hasted) PCs!) do you think it should be 40-50%? (40-60%?) Or perhaps 50% for a single shot and 90% for two? With maybe a penalty (-20-40) to the second shot? (Or something?) Any ideas?

[markc]

 Unfortantly I use my own combat system that is very different then the one in the books so I do not have anything to comment on. In fact I have never used as a GM or player the RM combat system. I have played in a few RM games that used hybrid RM combat systems, other games combat systems or houses made combat system.

MDC