A few weeks ago the characters encountered the nemesis who has been behind the situation since the beginning. And it has me thinking about how “The End” of a situation / adventure can affect the prep and Play in a game. I will also muse a bit on how System Matters.
The final confrontation between Jon, Robbie, and Rod’s Rolemaster characters happened a few weeks ago. At least the end of this situation, and possibly an end to one or more of the characters. The play has progressed as we have re-learned the game and its deadliness has claimed the life of one of the characters. We have not really discussed if this will be the final bit of play no matter what happens, but it will be an end of sorts.
Quite a bit of inspiration for this has come from Bob Pepper’s art for the Dragonmaster game and M. Scott Rohan’s Winter of the World series. And I think the play has been suitably epic in its feel, if sometimes also disconnected and random.
In some games play ends almost immediately while other times it goes on for quite some time. Over the years I have worried less about when a specific instance of PLAY is going to end. Like many I often started a game with the idea of a long “campaign”. Now, it is much more we will play until hitting a natural ending spot.
Does a need exist, perhaps only in my own head, for wrapping up a game with some kind of mutual satisfaction? After all, the end of play is not necessarily the end of the emergent fiction. The “story” could continue on. The desire for a neat and tidy end of play could subvert the experience.
Long term play was part of the goal when we started, but an exploration of the situation via Rolemaster was the prime motivator. It started off a bit slow, too slow in terms of engaging the system I think. Diving in head first should have been the plan, as it turns out play improved (I think) when we did. To be clear, I used a few of the more modern and easier options at first, but Rod requested, I think smartly, that we use the full system as it was written. Lesson learned? I think so in general though there may be places where optional rules do work better or an easier path to the system exists for a good reason. In this case I did not have to re-write anything of the rules, these were official rules adapted later to streamline aspects of the game. Most notably how a round played out. We never did get to use the Magic Orientation phase, but I made sure it got included every time.
The characters made their way to a volcano to perform a ritual to summon the demon Marghoul. Marghoul had been around since the firs city was built in the north. An Ice Demon, Marghoul slowly collected the power of the Glacier over thousands of years until fully powerful enough to harrass the world.
In the end, with powerful allies sacrificing of themselves, one fatally, the characters took on a much weakened Marghoul. He’s now banished for a hundred years or so. The End.
We ended right at our ending time. after two hours of play. No one seemed to want to discuss more of the game and I chalk that up to a number of factors or potentially so. I do feel like next time I run Rolemaster, I will do better. When you have a big idea, with lots of inspiration its tempting to overplay things. The opening of the entire situation had a murder, a funeral, a widow, an assassin, and constant downer of snow and ash. So we got to the end I did want the players to have some payoff for all the complex pieces. I was conscious of not trying to force an end, but to create a framework where a satisfactory ending could happen.
Con games constrain hours. You have 2,3,4, or 6 hours to play a session. Content can be cut down for that purpose. For longer form play there is always a chance that the play will end not on a planned note or natural conclusion of a given situation. In this case I have done all of these:
- Tried to find a way to continue.
- Saved the files but never went back.
- Sought to do a sequel.
I am not sure any of those options were good ones. But it is human nature to want to finish what you started or wonder if you could have managed to continue on.
I enjoyed Rolemaster, largely because of the players, but also getting a chance to weave some favored fantasy into play. I think there are better systems that might fit with Dragonmaster and its art, as well as Rohan’s fantasy world. But maybe not the same system this time.
10 responses to “Climax & Endings & Rolemaster Thoughts”
Exciting! I’ve in the start up of thinking really hard if I’m gonna dive into MERP once more, but then Rolemaster started to play around in the back of my head, questions like why not go the full stretch and use that old box you got lying around?
I did run MERP a while back and came away feeling very strongly about it. I loved it as a kid, got the swedish translation of it at around nine and then we played the hell out of it, probably not using a quarter of the rules as written but it was something that made me play that thing much much more than Drakar och Demoner (the old thing the new Dragonbane uses as a jumping off point). My new experiences with MERP made me love it even more and there’s something in there that I feel is pretty strong. One of the strongest parts was the default ordering during tactical time. We had a lot of situations that popped up during combat that was suprising and felt emerging straight our from in between us as players using the system to resolve things.
I was kind of amazed looking at all of the companions and how much different takes Rolemaster has regarding how ordering could be done when the main rules is so strong! But then I remembered Rolemaster presents itself pretty close to MERP but it’s kind of a bit vague on when and how to announce actions. If I remember correctly one reading of it is everybody announces what they do (free and clear style) and then we go through the sequence of spells, missiles, movement and maneuvers, missile b and finally melee where we use the initiative to see who attacks first etc. The other interpretation is that you go through the list and everyone can announce what they do as we proceed through the sequence. But never thought the last one made any sense as the book also states you can use a maneuver to get out of the way from an incoming melee attack and cancel a announced maneuver etc. How did you play this once you switched away from the simple ordering solution? And can you or any of the players compare any two instances of combat using the different ordings mechanics?
MERP changes stuff around a bit so movement and maneuvers are different phases and static maneuvers are put back in the end of the sequence (spells > missiles > maneuvers > melee> movement > static maneuvers). We had some awesome combat scenes with maneuvers to get out of the way when spiders attacked from above, or to reach a dropped weapon, some so successful that they could continue on straight into melee to build upon their success. But MERP doesn’t have the rules about dividing your actions into percentages and attack with x percent and move with y percent etc. Did this come up a lot and how did those parts feel?
I certainly tried to be diligent about paying attention to movement and melee activity percentage, as the player of the main “get stuck in and fight” character throughout the campaign. There’s a lot of situations where this can influence your decision making — for instance, you might weigh whether to move into contact this round or maybe try to stay a little out of range and go in next round more safely and effectively. Alternately, if your opponent clearly wants to come to you, it makes a lot of sense to stand still and wait for them to contact. With this kind of thing happening not in a vacuum, but in a bigger strategic situation where you have to think about the potential of other attackers surrounding you, or whether your teammates need your help somewhere else on the field etc., it’s a fun piece of the puzzle to deal with.
One more thing to follow up my last comment: Exhaustion Points. Briefly, in this version of Rolemaster you can spend Exhaustion Points to boost your movement allowance on a round-by-round basis, up to a multiple of five if you’re willing to pay a huge chunk of your points. Reading about this got wheels turning in my mind: if you’re 50 feet away from your opponent and it’s 50% of your activity to get to them — what if you just sped up? If your move allowance for the round is quintupled, then it’s only 10% activity to get to that same enemy, and that OB penalty is looking a lot more bearable. I have no idea if this was intended use — at least one later Rolemaster version specificially says you can’t attack if you’re sprinting or dashing or whatever — but it makes perfect sense in the logic of the system and has become a core feature of what I, at least, am interested in doing when I play Rolemaster.
Cool! Great insight into being the one to move into contact or hold your ground and wait for them! We had some of that in our MERP-game as well but as you do 100% there you’re sort of stuck with only one thing. The use of maneouvering to position yourself was a thing I tried to emphasis a lot, like you want to hold your ground and wait for the attacking orch but you also want to move to the side and not have the precipice just behind you, and how we solved this was each did a maneuvering roll and seeing who came up with the best result and that result could be used for bonus/hindrance later on. Using movement and maneuvers a bit to get into position to get in a good strike later on!
Interesting about exhaustion as well! That part is one of those that’s cut from MERP and it was so long ago I played Rolemaster I don’t even remember if we used it or not. Will dive into reading about those aspects this weekend!
I last played Rolemaster in 1987, not GMing it and with only brief encounters with the text. Although I have some texts now, they’re not a full rules-set, and I’m realizing now that I genuinely have no idea how combat works. We clearly didn’t do it when we played. I just followed what the GM told us, and it seemed like a standard wait-your-turn, go (“hit” “cast spell” “do something else”), wait-your-turn.
I’m actually reading up for playing some Rolemaster in the near future so dove deep down into the text to see what could be found. I don’t really care playing it rules-as-written or try to find the correct way of playing it, but the ordering has felt a bit off, and how things are described in Arm’s law and has always bugged me a bit. But, from the depth of examining things I found a throwaway line in Spell Law that hints at how things at least at that point (second printing of RM2, punk-elf-angus-mcbride-mawhawk-era) was ment to be played.
“Usually player characters are required to declare their “action” for a round at the beginning of that round.”
– From the paragraph about Cancelling actions, page 14 in Spell Law, Rolemaster 2 Angus McBride-cover printing.
So what’s been left out from the structure is a declaration stage! Or at least that’s what they put in to this edition. For me it fits perfectly cause then it also lines up with how MERP works and cancelling actions finally makes sense.
Excellent catch regarding the declaration phase and typical of all sorts of things being assumed, but not spelled out!
I’ll be sure to remember it if I ever get to re-engage with my first love… (Not my first game, mind you.)
This conversation sent me back to the rulebooks and I had totally forgotten that there’s not an official “declaration phase” in Arms Law (I checked 1982 and 1989). I must have also extrapolated it from MERP and/or that line in Spell Law.
“Does a need exist, perhaps only in my own head, for wrapping up a game with some kind of mutual satisfaction? After all, the end of play is not necessarily the end of the emergent fiction. The “story” could continue on. The desire for a neat and tidy end of play could subvert the experience.”
I never thought about it in this way before, but it strikes me now that the very RPGish desire for a super long story that satisfyingly wraps everything up at the end is less about ending a situation or even a series of situations and more about the desire to have all possible situations that are available to us gone through and finished. An abstract level of thinking.
I read a Gene Wolfe short story last night that dealt with one very small situation. The situation resolves and the story ends, even though the resolution of the situation very clearly means a MUCH bigger new situation is at hand.
Prose fiction and role-playing are different mediums, but I think sometimes the role-playing impulse views the thing above as not complete enough because we haven’t gone into the new situation.
I’ve been thinking about applying the discussion in Monday Lab: How Long … to the questions raised here.
Length of play may be an issue with thorns of its own, but in this case, it might not be the issue so much as the planning, regardless of length. If an ending is conceived as “the ending,” especially in terms of a smooth landing with a sense of planned execution … that’s a problem.