I tried HARP Saturday night

[northrundicandus]

Or at least the players made characters!

One the regulars in my Thursday night game wanted to try running HARP on Saturday evenings, so I decided to give it a shot. I bought the game when it first came out, mainly due to me liking I.C.E. and having 10 years of Rolemaster experience under my belt. I also wanted to see how the 'New Rolemaster Lite' fared. At first read I didn't like the rule set, because the designer(s) stripped out all the extra stuff that made Rolemaster unique.

Character creation is still the game's Achilles' Heel, especially as far as new players are concerned. It didn't take me too long, but I had played enough of RM to quickly make a PC. The other two players spent d**n near the whole of the four hour session making their personas.

I'll find out next session how well the game actually plays!

[bonesmccoy]

Cool! Looking forward to your report.

[The Master]

So what's HARP?

[northrundicandus]

Mistere29 said:

So what's HARP?

Here's the low-down:

www.harphq.com/whatisharp.htm

[The Master]

Ever get a chance to play it north?

[northrundicandus]

We played it a few times. The current group the GM is using is just not into I.C.E. style games, so he's converted the whole game to Runequest 3.

On the whole I feel HARP is a little too half-assed. I still love Rolemaster2. Rolemaster Standard System is still a little ridiculous. But HARP is just too watered down to be a replacement for RMSS. It's scalable magic system shows promise, but the rest of it is too 'wimpy'. One plays a game like Rolemaster because of the details. HARP kind of washes over those, leaving it feeling a little anemic. Using HARP character generation with Arms Law combat though is a good fit. PCs don't take as long to make using HARP, and that's the Achilles Heel of RMSS.

[Semaj The Silent]

I used to run a RM2 game, and wondered about HARP. Thanks for giving your opinion of it...pretty much seals mine.