cyocum / merp

Middle Earth Role Playing Utilities

Middle Earth Role Playing Utilities

This is a project to create tools to help players play Middle Earth Role Playing Second Edition.

Much of the Rolemaster system is comprised of tables which are consulted during play. However, rolling, searching, and reading the tables is a cumbersome process. As the tables are mostly static, they fit a relational database very well. This small project is to create a SQLite3 db and maybe some surrounding utilities to make playing MERPs easier for me.

Getting Started

The database script for creating the current database for the charts is located in the db directory. This will need to be loaded into a SQLite3 instance. See the SQLite website for instructions on how to install SQLite on your platform. It is particularly lightweight and will work on even low powered computers which is why it was chosen for this project. If you know SQL, you can adapt the database for your database engine of choice.

Once you have SQLite, you read the database into a memory based database thus:

.read db/merp.sql

Once you have that the database is structured around the various charts.

Database Tables

Many of the tables will have a roll_value_min and roll_value_max columns. this makes it easy to use the SQL BETWEEN keyword. For instance,

select routine from open_ended_roll where 55 between
roll_value_min and roll_value_max`.

MT-1 Moving Manoeuvre Table

In the MERP DB, this is named open_ended_roll table. In this is the roll_value_min and roll_value_max, as described above, then each difficulty level has its own column. Choose the appropriate column for the difficulty set by your GM. For instance for a roll of 55 on a light difficulty:

select light from open_ended_roll where 55 between
roll_value_min and roll_value_max

On the original MT-1 table, anything less than -151 is an F. This is not represented in the DB so you will need to remember that when using this table.

The difficulty list is:

• easy
• light
• medium
• hard
• very_hard
• extremely_hard
• sheer_folly
• absurd

Static Action (ST-11)

This is named static_action table. Each type of static action is represented. For instance, for a roll of 70 on an interaction and influence static action:

select interaction_and_influence from static_action 
where 70 between roll_value_min and roll_value_max

The columns avaliable are:

• disarming_traps_and_picking_locks
• general
• interaction_and_influence
• reading_runes_and_using_items
• perception_and_tracking

Attack Tables (AT 1-9)

All attack table are structured similarly. each type of armor has a corresponding column and a critical modifier column to go with it. For instance, for a roll of 100 on soft leather:

select taca.soft_leather, c.critical_type, c.critical_roll_mod 
from tooth_and_claw_attack taca 
inner join criticals c on taca.soft_leather_crit_mod = c.critical_id 
where 100 between taca.roll_value_min and taca.roll_value_max

This is a bit more complex than the proceeding. What is happening here is that there is a criticals table which stores the critical type and the critical table modifier. Additionally, the criticals table also stores the "Attack Failure" information so if you get a 'F' in the critical, the attack has failed. This table is linked to the Tooth and Claw Attack Table via the *_crit_mod column that goes with the armor type. In the example above, to make that link, you inner join the corresponding soft_leather_crit_mod column to the critical_id column in the criticals table. This will return for the above:

12|A|-20

Which means that the attack did 12 points of damage and returned a type 'A' critical which gives the attacker a -20 on their roll on the critical table.

However, the "max results" for each type of attack are not incorporated at this time so you will need to remember that when doing the search.

The current attack tables avaliable are:

• tooth_and_claw_attack
• grappling_and_unbalancing_attack_table
• one_handed_slashing_weapons_attack_table
• one_handed_concussion_weapons_attack_table
• two_handed_weapons_attack_table
• missle_weapons_attack_table
• bolt_spells_attack_table
• ball_spells_attack_table

NB: There is an exceptional table called the base_spells_attack table which only has a few of the usual armor types: plate_and_chain, leather, no_armor.

Critical/Fumble Tables (CT/FT)

The critical table has the resoultion for the various kinds of criticals. To use this table, take the critical modifier from the appropriate attack table then roll and apply the modifier. To search this table, do the following:

select unbalancing from crit_attack_table
where 120 between roll_value_min and roll_value_max;

For criticals, the various categories are columns and are thus:

• crush
• slash
• puncture
• unbalancing
• grappling
• large_creatures_physical
• large_creatures_spell
• heat
• cold
• electricity
• impact

For fumbles, the various categories are columns and are thus:

• hand_arms
• missle_weapons
• spell_failure
• moving_maneuver

SQL GUI Tools

There are various SQL tools which have a GUI for working with the database. The one I would recommend is DBeaver. For DBeaver to work with SQLite, you will need to create a binary of the db. On Linux/Unix systems, you can do the following:

cat db/merp.sql | sqlite3 merps.db

which will create the merps.db file that you can use with DBeaver. For Windows, you can read the SQLite documentation "Double-click Starup On Windows".