Tabletop Roleplaying Games
Rolemaster
High-Fantasy
English
Complex
Rolemaster is a fantasy tabletop roleplaying game known for its percentile dice, detailed skill system and graphic, table-driven combat, published by Iron Crown Enterprises (ICE). It began in 1980 as a set of rules grown out of house rules developed by Pete Fenlon, S. Coleman Charlton and Kurt Fischer for a Middle-earth Dungeons & Dragons campaign at the University of Virginia. Rolemaster Unified (RMU) is the newest edition. It was released in December 2022 after a long public playtest, and it draws on the Rolemaster Classic (RMC) and Rolemaster Fantasy Role Playing (RMFRP) lines. It is issued as Core Law, Spell Law, Creature Law and Treasure Law, with a Character Companion and an Arcane Companion alongside. ICE still sells the older RMC and RMFRP lines too.
The game has a reputation as one of the hobby's most intricate fantasy rule sets, and a reviewer of the Unified core book called it extremely complex and described it as "at a fundamental level the same game" as the 1980 original. Its setting-neutral rules have an official setting in Shadow World, and ICE's older lines also include Middle-earth Role Playing (MERP) and the simplified HARP.
Description
Players create adventurers from a wide menu of races, cultures and professions, and the Game Master (GM) runs them through a fantasy campaign in whatever world the table prefers. Every skill is open to every character. A profession decides how cheaply a character can develop each one, so two characters can be built very differently from the same pool of points.
The game asks a table to accept a lot of numbers. Combat is built on tables and a hit can end in a gruesome critical result, so players have to weigh how aggressively to fight against the risk of a death-dealing blow. It rewards groups who like building a character in detail and don't mind looking things up, and it is hard going for those who want to run a game from memory.