RPGs day one: MERP
May. 20th, 2020 08:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jazzfishVia James Nicoll, my first ten tabletop RPGs in ten days, in the order in which I encountered them.
I came across the bright-red Middle-Earth Roleplaying boxed set sometime in late elementary school. It said "Tolkien" so of course I was interested.
Even at that age the spellcasting classes seemed like a poor fit for Tolkien's world, and the bestiary had delved rather deeply into the obscure corners of the mythos. (Hummerhorns and Fastitycelyn [sing. Fastitocalon] as creatures you might encounter. Yeesh.) And the idea of randomly rolling to see what various NPCs would do felt deeply off, and honestly I ended up just being overwhelmed by the sheer number of numbers you were expected to track.
I never actually played MERP. I mostly remember creating a bunch of characters, and laughing over the fumble tables ("Worst move seen in ages. -60 to activity due to a pulled groin. Foe is stunned two rounds laughing"). But I did appreciate that first-level characters had about as many hit points as tenth-level (the maximum). And it taught me useful vocabulary words like "melee."
I came across the bright-red Middle-Earth Roleplaying boxed set sometime in late elementary school. It said "Tolkien" so of course I was interested.
Even at that age the spellcasting classes seemed like a poor fit for Tolkien's world, and the bestiary had delved rather deeply into the obscure corners of the mythos. (Hummerhorns and Fastitycelyn [sing. Fastitocalon] as creatures you might encounter. Yeesh.) And the idea of randomly rolling to see what various NPCs would do felt deeply off, and honestly I ended up just being overwhelmed by the sheer number of numbers you were expected to track.
I never actually played MERP. I mostly remember creating a bunch of characters, and laughing over the fumble tables ("Worst move seen in ages. -60 to activity due to a pulled groin. Foe is stunned two rounds laughing"). But I did appreciate that first-level characters had about as many hit points as tenth-level (the maximum). And it taught me useful vocabulary words like "melee."