Topic: When Does RM Break Down?

[Azaizel]

I am new to Rolemaster and am having trouble finding any information on what levels Rolemaster is designed to remain within? Does the game scale well forever or is level 50 the theoretical 'breaking point'?

[Justin]

       The concept that a character would get to lvl 20 before becoming bored with either the character or the campaign, or more likely people move away or game breaks down for one of the many other various reasons is just unthinkable to me. My first game played weekly for 1.5yrs and lvls were 8-10, the gm using in-book experience/lvling system plus bonus exp for roleplaying.
Lvl 25+ stuff is in there, but I never considered it for PC-consumption.

[pastaav]

Depends it a bit on which RM version.

Some of the older RM2 options contained options that would scale very badly to very high level. Yet those were options from supplements of much lower quality than anything published today. If using core rules and standard options I would say both RMC and RMFRP are stable enough to be scaled up forever.

As a pratical example my friends we had a campaign where the characters were level 20 to 35 without any balance problems.

Still even while the game engine doesn't impose any 'breaking point' I am pretty sure the players would like new characters sooner or later since things become boring when you have done things enough times.

[mocking bird]

High levels can be tricky - not sure about broken.  However at around 20th or so you have healers that can cure almost anything in a round and the spell casters are pumping up damage & range so combats are usually much shorter (unless you are fighting a dragon) and quite brutal. 

[yammahoper]

I have played in and ran very high level games.  They do work, but require extra attention by the GM, particularly with creative spell use.

One of the unadvoidable balances in the game is just how tough Super Large creatures are.  You can be 8th level or 80th, a SL foe is HARD to kill, and will get several oportunities to inflict pain, suffering and death on PC's.  SL foes with minion is the worse, as it prevents PC's from trying to absorb the brunt of the SL foes attacks while the others hammer on it.  Even a fairly low OB SL foe can do considerable harm, including kill, high level PC's.

I had a party of six high level PC's, Thulsa (level 80 something fighter with sorcerer base list and some closed ess), Arden-Tul (close to 90th level rogue Wose with considerable tech items, including a barrier shield from SM2), Tensen (mid level 60 warrior monk who weilded the power of justice), Alashieve (level 90+ fighter with a freaking list of artifacts), Solon (level 51 fighter northman), Will (level 48 or so healer) and Fee (level 100 mage/archmage).  All but Fee died in four melee rounds of combat with 16 Major Wights (Fee was not present, and the party engaged in a head on assualt).  They could fight the wights and seriously out matched them in OB/DB, but they had no way to counter the 30' radius C cold crits every round.  The last to fall was Alashieve on the fouth melee round, and I will never forget the hushed silence at that table.  Four years of gaming several days a week with many marathon 11am till 6am the next day sessions, and it was over.  If those foes had not been SL, that party would have crushed the wights and fast, maybe two rounds at most. 

Personally, I was glad.  We had a great run, and I was a bit tired of coming up with new challenges for such a group (a group that faced and lost to the Witch King and his minions, then beat him in the rematch, defeated TWO Black Reavers in a single combat, though I dropped three of em in the fight and sorely hurt the other three, including dropping the mage in one single blow, and even had the moxie to try to bum rush Sauron, who captured them all with one spell and had them cast in a dungeon, then possessed and used as slaves before they were freed via Fee regaining control of himself via a will contest with his demon, then having to fight the said demons once they were "pulled" from their bodies, but not before they wrought awesome damage on Lothlorien and before that, Pelagir in Gondor).

That game covered almost a century of in-game time, time travel (twice), a visit to the Undying Lands, crushing the reformed Sauron in the future after it was discovered the crack of doom was a gate and did not destroy the One Ring, travel to the Shadow World (which was a brand new release at the time)...I mean, I worked my butt off on keeping an interesting and challenging story line, something that is much easier with level 1-25th level characters.

lynn

[Guillaume]

I concur with all of the above.

- Some of the old RM2 stuff ( LVL 120 spells, some options... )  was very unbalancing at high level.
- On the whole RM in general RMSS/FRP in particular behaves quite well as you progress in level. Its only problem being finding foes that are challenging... at high level the number of foes that can be sent against a bunch of players is limited. On the other hand, a bunch of LVL 30+ characters is not supposed to go hiking in the countryside dwagon hunting, they are supposed to rule over their own piece of land. ( unless you happen to play in Shadow world... where said bunch of characters is just beginning to become powerful enough to play in the sandbox of the big guys )
- Creative spell using is the worst you will have to face. Especially when you have several spell casters that works as a group.... I've seen a group of Dansart priests slaughtered in a few rounds by a group of 4 players... One Sorceror, one Dabbler, one Paladin, one Wizard, and one or two support NPC ( a Warrior Monk and a Cleric ( Priest of Shaal )...  the Death toll was interesting. They had time to prepare, review tactics and coordination... they prepared what they were going to cast for 5 rounds... but by the end of the third it was obvious nobody was going to be alive long enough to need the spells/actions of the 5th round. And all that was with a group of characters around LVL 20. ( the fight was in proportion )
I've also seen LVL 25+ characters flee because they understood that they were unable to kill one of these SL creature before it killed the whole group.
- The really important thing is that after a point you have to be creative in what kind of quest you give your players... the "go to the cave in the wood to clear it of the orc infestation" quest don't work well with high level characters.. the stake has to be higher, and actually the combat has to be, IMHO, something that happens because somebody blundered along the way. 

Compared to many games I've played, RM is one that stay intact the longest.
True there's a few cracks at the seams ( OBs over 150 for example ), but all in all it stay quite coherent, when other systems would have completely broken down.
 

[Rasyr-Mjolnir]

I am new to Rolemaster and am having trouble finding any information on what levels Rolemaster is designed to remain within? Does the game scale well forever or is level 50 the theoretical 'breaking point'?

As others have mentioned. Using the core rules, neither RMC nor RMFRP really reach a breaking point.

Instead the GM reaches a point where creating adventures becomes difficult because you end up with a lot of repetition.

In general, I would say that levels 4-20 are the easiest levels to GM for.

RM has a tendency to be rough on very low level characters (though RMFRP is a little better at this overall with just the core rules -- RMC has a couple of options (found in the RM Express book/pdf) that also work to counter this low level weakness).

Between 4th and 20th levels, adventures are exciting and easy to come by. And your 20th level fighter best be wary when dealing with those lowly Kobolds or else he is likely to be hit by a crit and get hurt badly.

Above 20th, it becomes hard to challenge the PCs.

One word of caution though.....

Both RMC and RMFRP (RMC more so though) are balanced in such a manner that spell users require a power point multiplier in order to be able to function at all.

RMFRP has a Power Point Development skill which helps, and RMC has a couple of options (Base Power Points in Spell Law (& RMX) and the Fast PP Recovery option in one of the Express Additions pdfs).

[yammahoper]

combat has to be, IMHO, something that happens because somebody blundered along the way. 

This runs true to real life, and the only area RM does provide a sense of realism; one blow can kill you.  The cool thing is because of the law of averages, a PC isn't easy to kill in RM, providinga nice balance and keepin the game playable, as frequent PC death isn't everybodies bag of tea.  Yet, if you have lots of combats and do not have a game with lots of magic healing available, then you will go through characters.  Just how fast depends on just how many combats you like to have each session. 

I have many TONS of dead PC's I could talk about and how they died.  Ignobably for the most part

lynn

[markc]

 I have found RM2 to break down at 10th level, RMSS/FRP IMO does not break down and I do not have RMC so I cannot answer. The one week point others have talked about is at low level PC are very fragile. IMO to be considerd average at a skill you need a score 55 in it. That is so you can perform an easy task all the time without fumbling, 55+60[task mod]+roll >5 = 111; sucess. To get arounf this probelm I start char at 3rd to 5th level.

Have Fun
MDC

Edit Note:
 The sucess #'s are for RM2, RMSS/FRP I do not know if they changed the #'s in RMC like they did in HARP.
MDC

[yammahoper]

RMFRP does have much better balance at higher levels, mostly because of not using RM2's optional level bonus table found in...what is the new abreviation for Companion II...RMCII (old dog, yes, I know, let it go ya'all).  Substitute the set profession bonuses in RM2 and the balance returns, or if you like progressive growth, apply bonuses only till at +20.

lynn

[rboleyn]

IMO a great deal of RM's balance issues and perceived complexity date from RMCII's expension of the skill system, and if it's taken out the back and quietly put down they mostly go away.

[David Johansen]

Really, breaking down is something RM leaves to other game systems.

[Balhirath]

RM doesn't break down.. not really.
However, I've played a spell caster to level 35 or so and its very, VERY hard for the GM to be able to counter creative spell use when each spellcaster have a couple of hundred spells to chose from. Add to that, that while non-spell users doesn't really get much better in OB after 20th level, they have a lot of usefull skills and they too can get spells, when they get tired of pumping dev points into weapons. (A 30th level fighter with Sniping or Ambush is almost a deadly as high level spell casters.)
 

[magritte@shaw.ca]

I don't know if it ever really breaks down--never played with very high level characters, but I think the optimal levels for fun are from ~6 to 15.  You can be pitted against a fairly wide variety of opponents, the character classes are relatively balanced, and you see significant progression in your abilities with each level gained.

[Lord Garth]

We retire characters at around the 23-24 lvl mark, but I do also think that it's probably due to the extra complexity of coherently GMing a high-lvl group ... An EVIL group, I wouldn't retire that early, as it's probably then when it comes of age.

[munchy]

We had our longest running group run up to level thirty but then it became really difficult, actually it became difficult when most of the characters had reached level 20 because then it is really hard to assess what powers an enemy is allowed to have to be still beatable but not too easy to be beaten.
So, 20 is usually the end of the line for us ... and at latest by then most have found something else in their lives anyway: grandmaster of an order, ruler of a small or larger piece of land, a mage's tower :-)

[Justin]

RMFRP does have much better balance at higher levels, mostly because of not using RM2's optional level bonus table found in...what is the new abreviation for Companion II...RMCII (old dog, yes, I know, let it go ya'all).  Substitute the set profession bonuses in RM2 and the balance returns, or if you like progressive growth, apply bonuses only till at +20.
lynn

I thought that was part of the rules? Don't lvl bonuses stop at lvl 10 or 20?

[Justin]

oh, and another question...

HOW THE HECK DO YOU ALL PLAY SO LONG AS TO REACH 20+ LVL?!?!?!?!

 

[yammahoper]

There were tables to take level bonuses over 20.  One of the most used was in Lords of Middle Earth Volume I, The Imortals.  But even by the rules, a +3/lvl is +60 at level 20.

Our first RM characters, and the most successful I have ever ran, attaining levels over 50, were from MERP.  They were all level 10, were MERP ended.  In fact, Alashieve had enough exp to be about lvl 18, and when we translated to RM he was able to finally gain those levels.  I KNOW one of the main reasons this party lived as long as it did was when the MERP Animist Will was translated, he became a RM Healer.  Having a high level healer in the party is twice as nice when you also have enough herbs on hand to heal almost anything anyway.

After that group, the highest I ever GMed a fresh from level one PC was in the mid 30's (a Layman psionist using psi list from SUC).  The highest I played PC's was 27th, 23, 18th and all others lower (most dead by 12th).  This is of course after Fee, my Godling Archmage/Magician from ye ole days of munchkinism that stemmed out of MERP (actually, Runequest was the first system that made me aware of the advantages of "tweaking").

And then you play EVERY day, with marathon sessions that last 16 hours to three days, straight gaming, with breaks for pizza, and when it is done, we went to Denny's, cause back then it was the only 24hr place to hangout and eat in town.

I'm serious.  Play every day.

lynn

[David Johansen]

I wish