All You Rolemaster Haters STFU

On the craggy battlefields of the RPG Holy Wars, no game gets as much misinformed, undeserved, and completely groundless crap as my beloved Rolemaster. To be fair, a lot of the crap it gets is well-informed, as well, but it seems to be one of those lightning rods of opinion. People who have never seen a Rolemaster book become experts at how clunky it is. People who have never heard the name Terry K. Amthor moan about how it takes twelve hours to make a character. And folks who don't know their DB from from their BMR can tell you in exquisite detail how many charts and tables must be referenced in order to pick a simple lock [Ieqo says (ding!): One--The Static Action Table--but everyone who's never played the game knows that it must take at least four!].

Verily I say unto all of you: bite me! Yesterday I talked not one, but two novice gamers through the wonders of character creation! At different times! Over Skype! Without the luxury of a shared die rolling client! And it didn't take more than eight hours...

Yes, I'm stoked. My good friends Jess and Andy (fictionalfemme and dm501, respectively, for my fellow denizens of the rpgmp3 forums) took to the quirks of old-skool RM far better than I did back in the Days of Yore. Jess even managed to make an old Power Gamer proud with her character.

She's technically a "pure spell-user", but through some wonderful rolls for background options and a killer min/max choice of races, she's completely broken in the role of frontline fighter.

Andy's pure spell-user has more of a conventional magic-user's build, but his love of the Evil Mentalist base lists means I'm totally looking forward to being schooled in how to fuck up the enemy.

And the best part so far of my current Rolemaster adventure: I managed to break Illiani by showing him the Rolemaster equipment sourcebook. For the next two hours between "this is so beautiful", we were treated to exclamations like, "Four different types of bucket...Two different types of pegleg...they have stats for a zither...I don't even know what a zither is, but I love it!" My apologies to everyone else in that conversation who was supposed to be getting needed info off of Danny during that time.

Rolemaster: you don't know until you go. And that's all I have to say about that.