Topic: RMGMC: Seeking volunteers

[jaranka]

I've been working on a program for my gaming group, but our GM has recently decided to take a break in favor of being a player for a change.  Our new GM has decided to do an Earthdawn campaign though, so I've lost my tester and only other source of new ideas.

Before I go on I'll quote the "About" page I just wrote for the program:

RMGMC is a set of tools designed to facilitate the play of a face-to-face Rolemaster campaign, particularly in regard to the multitude of calculations and modifiers involved with combat and maneuvering.

It was originally just some simple forms that aided in remembering and applying all the different modifiers to a roll, that could then be looked up in a book to find the outcome.  But it quickly became much more as I strived to find ways to make the process more efficient and more intuitive, as well as incorporating other aspects of Rolemaster to the program.

It was originally inspired by a post I happened upon on the ICE forums, introducing a program someone (draven1) had made for his gaming group, but it became apparent that it would not become available to the rest of us.  So I decided to make one for my group.

It is not intended to be a virtual table top system to be used by players over the internet. Some day? Maybe. You could still use it to great effect I'm sure over the internet, but it's not a central hub where you can see other players' dice rolls and share maps.

There is so much more to Rolemaster that could be affected by this program.  I have more ideas than I can list here that I can't wait to get to, but I must circle back often to make sure the foundation remains solid and flexible enough to accommodate the future.

The Rolemaster GM Companion has been designed thus far around SS and FRP rules.  There is no intention in the near future to make it otherwise.  I've only ever played SS/FRP so I don't really know most of the differences, other than what I see in pieces on the forums sometimes.

I only started playing Rolemaster for the first time near the end of last year, and have actually played very little for the past few months as summertime and work travel have kept our playtime limited.  I play a magent, he's level 5 .  I started with D&D about 25 years ago now and haven't seriously played anything else until now.  Rolemaster has a very solid foundation and probably way too many rules, but I found it a wonderful system, and wanted to use everything it had to offer - and so RMGMC came about.

I took some screenshots, which you can view at http://rmgmc.silkforge.com/gallery/.

Now to the point.  I've been told it would be all right to ask a couple people from the forums if they'd like to use the program for their GMing purposes, and let me know of any bugs that pop up or ideas they have to improve it.  You'll need a laptop or computer with a browser capable of running Flash (sorry no iPads).  This is a very casual deal. I'm only one person and this is a pretty big project, so I'm in no rush.  My ultimate goal with this has always been to GM my own Rolemaster campaign with the assistance of the program.

So hopefully I've provided enough information.  If you are interested, please PM me.  Any questions or comments are also welcome here on this thread.

Thank you for your time,
Aaron

[mistrornge]

The program rocks. I cannot imagine not using it now. This game's weakness is the number of books/rules and this program minimizes them as much as possible.
Now I feel a bit guilty for stopping GMing

[VladD]

Looks awesome. Just enough graphics to satisfy people that love it and not too much numbers to scare off people.
I'd at least like to take a look at it and give it a little spin.
-does it roll out the new question/ results windows as needed?
-does it support heavy house ruling?
-did you really program those attack tables in the database?

Take care,

Joeri

[Marc R]

Are you looking for face to face testers, or online testers?

[jaranka]

@VladD

I'm not sure what you mean by question/result windows, but probably. e.g., when you attack, you'll get a few events: damage, crit, experience. These come up on the side of the screen much like, say, Civ 5 events come up in the side of the screen every new turn. As soon as you click the button, the event is applied. If it's damage, that damage is dealt to the defender. If it's a crit, the crit window pops up already populated with attacker, defender, crit severity and crit type.  Just input a number and it'll look up the crit, then hit the apply button and it'll apply any extra damage/stun/bleed/modifiers etc to the defender which will then automatically be taken into account when that character is used in the future. If a character dies as a result of any of it, another experience event will pop up.

For house rules, the only customizing you can do right now is to make your own weapons, creatures, skills, and races. There is an options screen however which has plenty of room to grow. So far the only options pertain to rules that were used by my GM or by me, so I'm sure there are lots more that could be added. That's part of why I'm asking people to give me ideas for it so I know what kind of other rules people play with. If they're not too far out of scope with the rules they should be a cinch to add.

And yes there are about 100 weapons in there now, just a few of which don't have their table in the database (Mullet, Nodwick, and a couple others).

[jaranka]

@Mark R

Either one would be fine, there's really no difference when it comes to the program. If you haven't been using any program to aid you thus far, I'm sure this one will help tremendously. It doesn't have any functionality built in to accommodate its use online specifically, but there are other options available for communication which I'm sure you use already. I do have ideas about including things like that in the future, but it just hasn't been a priority since we haven't needed it thus far for our group. If others start using it with those needs I'm sure it will help motivate me to proceed in that direction as well.

[Usdrothek]

Your program looks very nice. Quite a bit of work has gone into it.

My group meets once a week for face to face RM gaming, and several of us have laptops which we bring (at the moment just for character spreadsheets and pdf rules.

We would be happy to test/ bug report your program.

I've sent you a PM.

[markc]

I have been a bit busy but I am looking forward to digging in to it on Mon or Tues.
MDc

[VladD]

Thanks, you got it spot on with the question/ result windows. I'm looking forward to testing it!

Prog on!

Joeri

[jaranka]

The program rocks. I cannot imagine not using it now. This game's weakness is the number of books/rules and this program minimizes them as much as possible.
Now I feel a bit guilty for stopping GMing

It's all right, making it available to people who I couldn't be there with to help when problems arose really motivated me to give it a much more solid foundation. And it'll be even better when you get back around to it

[markc]

  Just reading the info above gave me a idea about a new exp system that would be easy to implement with software. You could do a level less system where you could track exp by category.


MDC

[jaranka]

  Just reading the info above gave me a idea about a new exp system that would be easy to implement with software. You could do a level less system where you could track exp by category.


MDC

Ya I was thinking about something like this, where it would keep track of how many times a skill was used by a character.  I'm not really sure how to translate that into development points though, as I've never done a levelless system. My idea was really just to give the GM an idea of what skills a character used so he could limit or require points be spent in those skills when a character leveled. But none of this has been implemented. I'd love a more detailed breakdown of how this sort of system would work from someone who has experience with it. It can be specific to skills or categories.

[markc]

  Just reading the info above gave me a idea about a new exp system that would be easy to implement with software. You could do a level less system where you could track exp by category.


MDC

Ya I was thinking about something like this, where it would keep track of how many times a skill was used by a character.  I'm not really sure how to translate that into development points though, as I've never done a levelless system. My idea was really just to give the GM an idea of what skills a character used so he could limit or require points be spent in those skills when a character leveled. But none of this has been implemented. I'd love a more detailed breakdown of how this sort of system would work from someone who has experience with it. It can be specific to skills or categories.

 I agree that some work would have to be put into the idea as well as play testing or some serious analysis. I for one am not really a fan of levels less games but I would like to see someone do a good one with RM. With the type of program above I believe it would be easier to implement.
 One of the problems I see is general Exp for just things such as travelling, living, etc. The bonus would be IMHO that training with a teacher would be put to better use.
MDC