Quote from: Eirikrautha on January 22, 2025, 04:05:36 PMFor example, CoC is not designed as an action-oriented or combat-heavy game.  Generally, if you're fighting the eldritch horror with weapons, you've already lost.  As such, high lethality is an expectation, but not as something that will occur five times during a session.  Catastrophic sanity loss takes time (unless you are running houserules), and usually doesn't happen within ten minutes of the game starting..  CoC works best at the table as a slow burn.  On the other hand, D&D is an action-oriented, combat-heavy game (as is Rolemaster).  The standard dungeon-crawl might see the players engage in a half-dozen fights of varying scales each session. 

So, while both Rolemaster and CoC can be said to be highly lethal, there are different rates of lethality.  You probably don't expect your CoC character to survive the campaign (yet many do).  You probably don't expect your Rolemaster character to last the week (and many don't).  So complicated and involved point buy systems may "work" for CoC, and still be terrible design for a combat-oriented RPG like Rolemaster.

This is an interesting point, but this doesn't dismiss Call of Cthulhu as an example. The topic isn't just about D&D and Rolemaster. It's about deadliness of systems in general. The original claims - that my OP was responding to - about the problems of skill-based chargen weren't qualified as "only for D&D-like combat-oriented systems".

I agree with the generality that combat-oriented systems will have different priorities than investigation-heavy or exploration-heavy systems. But I don't think I agree with the point about Rolemaster or combat-heavy systems.

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I played two short campaigns of Rolemaster in the 1990s. The first was in college, a fantasy campaign set in Renaissance Italy, where I played a overpowered sympathetic healer. The second was a segment of a friend's fantasy campaign ("Land of Neng") where he was experimenting with different systems, where I played a mentalist. Neither of them was combat heavy - they were both fairly immersive with detailed worlds, more like Pundit's "medieval authentic" than like dungeon crawls. I never had any PCs die. We were pretty careful about combat in both cases, and in the first, I was amazing at healing.

Rolemaster is a bit of an oddity, and I'm not sure what the bigger community was like. From the books, RM was intentionally broader in focus than D&D. It gave XP not just for combat, but also for things like ideas and miles travelled. The sample adventure in Campaign Law, "Vog Mur" looks more like a Harnmaster adventure than a D&D adventure, with many pages of background and detailed description. The end challenge is about finding a rare herb to awaken a golem.

So first of all, I'm not sure I'd class Rolemaster the same as D&D. And after that, there's the question of whether the detailed chargen of Rolemaster works. I'm not a big fan of it, but I can speak more to Harnmaster - which also has detailed skill-based chargen, and that I think does work.

Quote from: ForgottenF on January 22, 2025, 11:32:43 PMThe day-to-day adventure was fun, equipment didn't matter much, character creation is fast and relatively enjoyable, there was little ongoing plot, and starting characters in that game aren't much weaker than experienced ones.

A reasonable set of potential factors there.  A good argument can be made that all of them play some role.

Any player in any game I've ever participated in was permitted to and capable of rolling up a backup character ahead of time.

The idea that anyone has to sit out for the rest of an entire session if their PC dies is nuts. In my experience, that's invariably on the player for not creating the backup PC ahead of time.

But if I ever encountered a DM that just refused to bring a character in because "story" or something, I'd find a new game right quick.