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<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 3840104" data-attributes="member: 42582">In my experience there is a big difference between dying and dead. I GM a lot of Rolemaster, and while &quot;dying&quot; is a very common result in RM combat (due to its notorious crit charts), PC death is comparatively rare, because (under the RM rules) soul departure does not occur until several rounds after physical death, and there are various spells, many of which are reasonably low level, that can be cast during that window to prevent soul departure. The existence of those spells, plus the reasonably widespread availability (under the RM rules) of self-healing abilities, means that &quot;dying&quot; results introduce a lot of tension and thrill into the game (and don't even necessarily take the player out of it, if s/he is able to make decisions and rolls pertaining to self-healing).On the other hand, save-or-suffer-soul-departure effects (in RM, the spell that does this is called Absolution Pure, and the demonic ability is called Ordaining) tend just to suck, for all the reasons that are being given. Fortunately, they tend to be high level, and as a GM I tend to be able to come up with in-game logic for why NPCs prefer to use other effects: because casting a spell in RM precludes parrying (and not parrying is a good way to get hurt badly) NPC spell casters have an incentive to use their weaker-effect but AoE spells rather than their single-target Absolution Pures - because from the point of view of victory in an encounter, multiple PCs hors-de-combat is better than a single PC who has suffered soul departure.There is only one foe in my current game who has at will, AoE Absolution Pure, and the PCs have learned quite a bit about this foe and are currently on a mission to learn more - so the final encounter with this foe will have more of the flavour that Geron Raveneye and DMRocco have talked about.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 3840104, member: 42582"] In my experience there is a big difference between dying and dead. I GM a lot of Rolemaster, and while "dying" is a very common result in RM combat (due to its notorious crit charts), PC death is comparatively rare, because (under the RM rules) soul departure does not occur until several rounds after physical death, and there are various spells, many of which are reasonably low level, that can be cast during that window to prevent soul departure. The existence of those spells, plus the reasonably widespread availability (under the RM rules) of self-healing abilities, means that "dying" results introduce a lot of tension and thrill into the game (and don't even necessarily take the player out of it, if s/he is able to make decisions and rolls pertaining to self-healing). On the other hand, save-or-suffer-soul-departure effects (in RM, the spell that does this is called Absolution Pure, and the demonic ability is called Ordaining) tend just to suck, for all the reasons that are being given. Fortunately, they tend to be high level, and as a GM I tend to be able to come up with in-game logic for why NPCs prefer to use other effects: because casting a spell in RM precludes parrying (and not parrying is a good way to get hurt badly) NPC spell casters have an incentive to use their weaker-effect but AoE spells rather than their single-target Absolution Pures - because from the point of view of victory in an encounter, multiple PCs hors-de-combat is better than a single PC who has suffered soul departure. There is only one foe in my current game who has at will, AoE Absolution Pure, and the PCs have learned quite a bit about this foe and are currently on a mission to learn more - so the final encounter with this foe will have more of the flavour that Geron Raveneye and DMRocco have talked about. [/QUOTE]

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