Last modified on 16 MAR 1999.


ROMERP



All right, the situation is this: I have started a major work with a friend of mine to renew the whole concept of role playing. The working title of this new project (game to be) is NGRG (Next Generation Role-playing Game). NGRG is so much more complicated (realistic/entertaining/challenging/fun) that it requires a computer program in its aid. However, as this program makes life much easier for the game master, the game can be played without all those nagging restrainers that sometimes make the game a bit boring.
Before the NGRG project I had already modified the original MERP and Rolemaster into something quite different. The results of my previous work can be found here with some things (eternally?) under construction.

Thank you for visiting these pages. Remember that if you have anything to ask me about anything in here, I am just an email away.



Introduction

Far back in the golden days of our youth, while still in the Senior Secondary School, we bought a new role playing game "MERP" or Middle-earth Role Playing by Iron Crown Enterprises, Inc. (ICE). Most of us were J. R. R. Tolkien fans and some of us had been playing simple games such as Dungeons & Dragons. When a role playing game situated in Tolkien's world came available we just had to get it. We bought it and played it... we played a lot of it. I was chosen to be the gamemaster (GM) or god or Eru as we called this position.

We played MERP for a couple of years and then I had to leave my friends as I went to Texas as an exchange student. By then I had already made a more functional character sheet than the one in the MERP rule book. When I came back I returned to my omnipotent role but only for a short while as we were soon dispersed around the country to do our military service and to begin our university studies.

Years later we noticed that many of us had ended up being in Turku and therefore decided to return to Middle-earth. In the mean while some of us had played Rolemaster by ICE and some other games as well. And being university students we were more demanding than before. Some changes to the actual rules were made by others and I completely recreated the whole game engine. I also made more improvements to various sheets the players had and a friend of mine made an MS Excel workbook to aid the GM in his colossal task of running a world. The workbook has now been revised and there are about twenty different sheets the GM has to keep players and the whole world in order. More renovations are constantly on the way.


The New Game Engine

I inherited two important features of the new game engine (game engine being the rules if you didn't guess that already) from a friend who used the more complex rules of Rolemaster strictly in the environment of MERP and added another series of stats. The new stats were soul stats that controlled the development of skills.

My first objective in changing the MERP was to make it more realistic and the second was to make it easier to play for the players and easier to lead for the GM. I am satisfied with the outcome what comes to the first objective. However, the game is far from being easier - it is different, but not easier. As I reduced the time and effort needed to do one task I added new features so that the overall time consumption remained the same. Well, you can't get everything - especially if you are a perfectionist.

All right, here are some improvements I made to the game engine. Starting from character creation, as I got bored with running a game for a bunch of first level adventurers who were slain by a single demented orc, I made a system of creating a background and professional career for the character. See a separate abridged page for Character creation. Note that there are NO PROFESSIONS in the new system. Everyone is a sum of their skills (just as in real life). As I got rid of professions I started to question the meaning of levels and changed the system a little bit. The LEVELS still REMAIN but instead of the tedious task of collecting experience points and using them to raise one's level (a totally non-realistic idea) the new system starts from getting experience as one does something with a skill and thus raising the skill level AND when the total sum of one's skill levels reaches certain numbers the character's level rises.

Magic being as incomprehensible for most ordinary earthlings as it is, I added an eleventh stat "Magic" that affects magical skills - sometimes together with other stats. Using magic is somewhat different from standard MERP or Rolemaster. I abolished the untouchable division between realms so that everyone still has a realm of their own but is, nevertheless, able to learn spells from other realms as well. It is just a bit harder. Casting spells is not just as complicated either as it was before.

Battles are another thing that obviously needed revisioning. As you can easily waste two hours of real time on playing a two-minute battle I tried to make the process faster. First I just changed the attack tables into easy-to-use graphs but soon noticed the advances in making the computer to do the work for me. I created a whole new computerized (or Excelized to be accurate) battle system that is based on determining the actual striked area (on opponent's body OR elsewhere) relative to the targeted area and the strength of the strike. This requires two rolls to be made in the beginning, both of them determine the clockwise angle of the strike relative to upward direction from targeted area. The first roll determines the distance from targeted area into the direction determined by the abovementioned angle. The second roll determines the strength of the strike. With this system you are able to hit other opponents (or friends) if you miss the actual target or you may miss the target but strike so hard that your weapon gets 20 centimetres (sorry, Americans) stuck into a wooden beam above the opponents head (just imagine how awkward the situation is when you are almost hanging by your battleaxe in front of an enormous uruk-hai with evil smile rising to its lips as it realizes that it has the next move...).

The rules of combat are changing but I can already comment that the above-mentioned uruk-hai does not have the 'next move' any more. Operations during a round are simultaneous from now on.


The Character and Other Sheets

The original character sheet in MERP is supposed to contain all there is to know about the character. In addition there are sheets to mark down experience and lost hits etc. Well, with general experience gone and new features introduced it is clear that the old sheets have to be replaced. The main character sheet includes the general information of who the person is and what he looks like. There are both body and soul stats and their normalizations. There is a part for the character's defences, money on person, and extra abilities and disabilities. About half of the sheet is reserved for the most important skills. See an example of one of my NPC's character sheet: Erwil Curadhel.

Of course there has to be an additional sheet for more skills as there are hundreds to choose from and a restless player may end up being in several lines of education or employment during his character creation. It is a blank sheet where the player can fill in new skills as he learns them (I used to have all the skills listed in three additional sheets but that makes it a bit too confusing when trying to locate the skill a player is about to use). See an example of Erwil's extra skill sheet.

Then there are the sheets for keeping track of one's possessions. As it is important to know exactly where an item is and when a person, his horse, or an transport item can not carry any more, I made the sheets to visualize the location of every item with the weight of item listed as well. Here is an example of Erwil's items on person, her backbag, and her horse.



The MS Excel Workbook

A Canadian astronomer I used to work with once said that Excel is just about the best computer program there is. After I learned how to use it I must agree that it is the most useful program I have ever seen. Not to mention all the other immensely useful workbooks and work sheets I have constructed with it I concentrate on telling about the one that revolutionized gamemastering in ROMERP.

First of all every character is included as a work sheet in my workbook. Excel calculates the normalizations of stats, inserts the correct race bonuses (according to the name of a race in the race cell), and calculates the sum of the two to produce the stat total. Then Excel uses these totals to calculate the average Body and Soul Totals for skills (average of the specific stats that affect each skill). These values are then used together with user-inserted values for Skill Level, Item [bonus], and Special [bonus] to get the Total skill value to be used in the game (cf. Erwil's skills). Excel Character Sheets also calculate the characters' levels (based on the sum of all skill levels), hits (based on Constitution Body and Soul Totals and Body Development skill), Development Points, Basic Defensive Bonus, DB with armour and with shield, and various other values that Excel needs but the player doesn't as a rule.

Game Master's main sheet displays the most important of characters' numerical values at all times and any skill total required. ...

Addenda

Lists of items to purchase
All 404 skills




Created by Rami T. F. Rekola