5) ... First of all, I don't like the Personal/Party goal distinction. Not only it's an unnecessary complication, but it also seems an attempt to drive the system towards too many different directions.
The reason that party goals are rewarded more heavily is to encourage teamwork and cooperation between PCs. It makes sense from a gamist perspective of trying to keep multiple strong personalities under the same sky. I'm normally a little less formal about XP-- tend to hand it out by fiat, based on rough ideas of RP and accomplishment-- but the HARP system makes sense to me.
3) Skills: It's not that I don't like skills, it's that I feel that skills in HARP need a better organization. For example, I don't understand why the physical and general categories need to be separated, since evrry profession get the as favourites, wouldn't it have been easier to make them a single category?
Agreed. Though if I did so, I'd be inclined to move Jumping into Athletic. (Then again, I prefer much more superheroic jumping than the HARP rules allow.)
In addition, some categories include very few skills, while others have a lot of skills under them: this gives more potentialities to some professions and less to other, wiìhich imho is not a good thing.
My pet peeve is Influence. I understand the intent may have been to emphasize in-character roleplay over skill checks, but the lack of such key adventurer-style interactions such as Intimidation and Interrogation frustrates me to no end. A Gossip skill and possibly a separate Investigation skill wouldn't be out of line, either-- though the latter could easily be a function of Interrogation.
There are also some skill that seems out of the scope of the game to me (like the crafts skill), and a few somewhat overlapping skills (medicine and herbalism, to make an example).
Same category, same Stats. Takes all of a simple sentence to House Rule them into a single skill.
Far as Crafts... yeah, I don't see it having a big role in any given game, but it's good character background and can be surprisingly useful in certain types of game-- or even certain scenarios that develop over the course of a normal game. Think about the knife-crafting scenes from
The Hunted as a marvelous example of how they might fit into a HARP game.
Finally, I don't like very much the trend of introducing new skills with new supplements, I'd prefer to see new uses for old skills than this.
I'd say that I agreed with this, but overall I'd say the new skills I've seen introduced have been needed-- especially the new skills in
Martial Law and
College of Magics. Much as I love HARP out-of-the-box, and the ability to
play it out-of-the-box, those two supplements make the game so much deeper. The two different two-weapon styles represent a real tactical difference for two-weapon fighters, and the new skill options for magic-users are very nice.
Playtesting:
I don't know if I can consider this a valid complaint--at least not for my self. It could be very well if somebody likes the system the way it is. And I think an important thing to keep in mind is the company that's producing this. This system really falls into standard ICE affair.
There are a number of things about HARP that I'd like to see changed. None of them stand out to me as things that would have necessarily been "caught" and changed as a result of playtesting-- I agree with you, that chances are things are the way they are because someone wanted them that way. Since it's my game, I'm just going to go right ahead and play it however I damned well please. Don't reckon it picks the pocket or breaks the legs of the designers for me to do that.
2) Skills. I think it's GREAT that the number of skills is so small (compared to good ol' Rolemaster, of course). And then HARP began falling into the Rolemaster problem of adding skills with new expansions. The problem with this is then we have to get a new character skill sheet, but it includes all the skills, not ONLY the ones we want.
Even worse when you make extensive House Rules that add or remove skills. I've been experimenting with drastic expansions of the Monk based on the mystical Monks in Harper's Bazaar, including the use of new Chi skills. I flesh out the Influence list. I rework the skill end of the magic system. It all adds up to a great deal of difficulty using the standard character sheet, and I'm finding myself increasingly in need for an alternate for my House Rules.
Certain skills seem to overlap in my mind, such as Animal Handling and Beast Mastery. So my solution was to make Animal Handling a skill, and Beast Mastery a talent that--when acquired--allows a character to use Animal Handling as Beast Mastery as well.
I think that's a gorgeous solution.
Crafts/Lores are also painfully vague. There's no comprehensive list for me to show my players what the Crafts and Lores are. I made one (admittedly, Lores is easier than Crafts), and find that the rules will refer to a craft that I didn't think of.
A list is good. Figure most specialties that come up can either be fit into your existing list, or your list needs expanded.
My only other serious gripe: I don't like that DP are based on stats. Encourages munchkinism. I've noticed that LOTS of us house rule that - fixed DP, usually about 40+1/lvl.
I've seen it. I've used it. Personally, I like the idea of a hybrid system where you get DP based on your stats that can only be spent on skills (and possibly talents) based on that stat, and a fixed (40 at 1st, 10 + 2/level afterward) pool that can be spent on anything, including stat increases. More points, but taking training packages out of the picture and imposing limits on where DP can be spent goes a long way to balancing that.
I also have conflicted feelings about training packages (can also encourage munchkinism), but I think they could be OK if used sparingly.
I actually like Training Packages. My only complaint is that they're tricky to complicate because their point value varies from profession to profession-- and I'd rather see fixed prices. Probably not hard to fix.