Rolemaster has a reputation as an impossible game to play. There are too many charts, the characters are way too complex, everything takes so long to do, and the game delivers far too much complexity and depth for what it is trying to do. For every bad thing I can say, there are so many good things to say.
First, the crit charts are fantastic. I love these so much. They give combat a danger and depth that no other game has (outside of GURPS) and create unforgettable moments during the game session that elicit strong emotional reactions. Could they get repetitive? Not really. Suppose I get something too similar to a result that happened recently. In that case, I will change it up and invent something similarly scaled and gruesome to make the chart always produce interesting results.
Next up, the spells are amazing. You get so many lists and fun things you can do, and the spells are far different from those in D&D and other games. Spells can crit on the charts, and the system is unified and makes logical sense. We had a game with a character with paladin-like powers, and she was awesome. People were blown away at how cool this paladin was, and it seemed like a superhero had just walked into the story.
We play ultra-rules-lite inside EQ2. I have a page for that, and we play without character sheets. There is only so much time inside EQ2 and outside of a VTT, and you need to make a lot of assumptions to get the game working in a chat window, with no die roller, on the fly, with no maps, no character sheets, and no visual components. My rule is, if a class "has it," then "they have it." In any game, fighters will always be strong, hardy, and have the most hit points. They will have all the fighting skills. They will roll the best in melee combat.
Dedicated spellcasters will be the best at casting spells. They will have the best lists, the most powerful casting, and the typical caster skills that their class should have.
Hybrid classes will have a little less on both sides, but they will have both sides at a reasonable level.
So, I made percentages that reflect that and put names on the levels. Epic is always +80% and will let you succeed most of the time. You don't need a character sheet. You just say what you are and go with it. There is no character creation or progression. We can't do that inside the EQ2 game and have it work well, or not take up hours just to walk down a dungeon hall in the game and reference sheets on another site.
Spellcasting needs to be slightly different and simplified, so I have made a system that does that and makes things fair. You can still cast awesome spells, but can't spam the level 50 spells in every encounter.
I have the books, and we play from those for most of the game. Most table results and attacks are authentic, and the spell effects are very close to those in the game. The skill and maneuver rolls are also very close to what you would experience at a Rolemaster table.
Best of all, anyone can walk up to our gaming group, ask to join, say what they are, and join our game. Two people did last night, and they jumped right into the game without knowing much more than "if your class can do it, try it!" Things your class doesn't do well, they won't. Don't expect your fighter to be as sneaky as a rogue. Your druid most likely won't know a thing about repairing metal armor. Bards will be the best at singing and playing musical instruments. Magicians will be the Gandalfs. Mentalists will be the psionics. Monks will be the masters of self-control and physical ability.
Would I play this "for real?" Maybe someday. It depends. It would have to be on a VTT, with character sheets and pre-generated characters, so we could jump into the fun. Like GURPS, character creation is the hard part, and when you get into the game, the rules for both Rolemaster and GURPS are far easier and more straightforward than D&D. You are not messing with different "action types" and "what you can and cannot do with them and when." Like all older games, you just do one thing a turn and move onto the next player or monster.
In D&D, someone is always sitting around with a bonus action or reaction, waiting to trigger it or combo it with other action types. In some D&D games, players will spend 30 minutes deciding what they do just for one turn. In an EQ2 venue, we do not have that much time to waste. We are 100% in text. People are waiting. You can ask questions before acting to get the best information, but I like to keep the game moving and fun.
In this system, using my quick-play mod, we fought a druid against 8 goblins pretty quickly, just in chat. You have to know what can be simplified and say, "It is what it is," and not get too lost in the weeds.
Also, there are not all these types of healing and recovery options compared to D&D, so knowing when to head back to safety to rest and recover becomes simpler. In D&D, you have all these different things that can be used X times per long rest, or they recover every short rest. Every character has other abilities that recover in various timeframes, and you go through everyone's sheets and say, "Okay, this is a short rest. What do you all recover? What do you not?"
It is a headache. In my spell system mod, you have: as many as you want, three times per encounter, once per encounter, once per day, and so on. It is easy. You don't need to track much.
The straightforward action and resting economy make playing inside EQ2 easier and faster. The tedious and record-keeping parts of the game are simplified and assumed away, while the fun parts, like the spells and charts, are kept.
It creates a system where everyone feels their choices matter, but the slow parts of the game are cut away, leaving us with a high-performance, "best of the system" game we can play together in chat.
