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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8970056" data-attributes="member: 42582">Here's an example to ponder.I think everyone would accept the proposition that Rolemaster is (i) a tabletop RPG, and (ii) a high-"sim" RPG. (In Forge terms, a purist-for-system RPG.)At the start of each round, a melee combatant in RM has to assign their combat bonus to two pools: attack and defence. When we played, we had included/adapted/built on various optional rules found in various RM books to add the following additional options for allocation of the combat bonus: increase initiative; increase critical result; make multiple attacks vs multiple foes (a "sweep"); make multiple attacks vs a single foe.There is a lot of interaction here: eg if you go first, and disable or kill your opponent, you don't need to parry. Hence there are trade-offs between raw attack bonus and crit shift and multiple attacks (for trying to disable or kill your opponent; relevant factors here include knowing where you are likely to land on the attack table, so making sure you get a crit roll to buff; and of course multiple attacks gives a chance at multiple crits); and also between increasing initiative and buffing defence (success at the first tending to make the second unnecessary). And these interactions become more complex when the possibility of sweeping multiple foes (which itself interacts with the initiative rules) is taken into account (eg you might want to put enough into initiative to try and make sure that your attack against your third foe in a sweep still comes in ahead of their attack).In our second long-running RM campaign, one of the warrior players - who in real life is trained in optimisation mathematics, and who works in finance and is pretty good at his job - had modelled the bonus allocations for various possible situations his PC might find himself in, and used Excel to create graphs that showed the optimisation peaks for those situations.His graphs worked. The PC didn't win all the time, as sometimes the dice just roll poorly again and again. But the PC was a powerful melee combatant, who generally cut down his foes with little mercy (I think one of his fighting styles had the word "reaping" in it).I am not a martial artist, and so don't know how "realistic" it is to have outcomes in combat depend on making judgements about speed of strike vs placement of strike vs readying for defence etc. I'm pretty sure, though, that expertise in optimisation mathematics has nothing to do with martial prowess! But the "completely artificial restrictions" of Rolemaster mean that it does.</blockquote>

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