Hi,I'll make this post my introduction to this Forum - I've been a lontime gamer (more than 30 years now) and played a lot of MERP back in the day (which was our main game next to Stormbringer, Call of Cthulhu and two German rpgs that most people here wouldn't know). I had kind of left MERP behing many years ago, mainly because I felt that the system did a very bad job emulating Tolkien's world (even though the sourcebooks and modules were often great!).
Anyway, recently I felt a wave of nostalgia for my "old" rpg systems, including BRP and MERP - leaving aside the queston how middle-earthly MERP was, it was just fun! So I've been eyeing HARP for a while, since it looks in many ways like a slightly modernized MERP rules-wise (which also gets rid of the spell lists, an element of RM I never really cared for).
My question: I ended up finding a free pdf of HARP lite on the internet a while ago, about 100 pages published in 2004. Is this still a valid document to try out and get a feel for how HARP plays? Or are the changes from that version just too big?
And as an aside: does:
•Flat 50 Development Points is the default for calculating Development Points
mean that in the current Version of HARP, everyone simply gets 50 DP flat per level? Because deriving DP from the characteristics, as it is in HARP Lite, didn't seem to make a lot of sense to me in terms of game balance (if you have higher characteristics, you get more DP, which you can even use to buy more characteristics Points to get even more DP next level!).
I'll probably be buying the current HARP and HARP Folkways (the Supplement that really re-kindled my interest in ICE products) anyway, but still, can't hurt to ask some questions in advance.
Thanks and see you!