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Message: <blockquote data-quote="SableWyvern" data-source="post: 9826175" data-attributes="member: 1008">My experience was with MERP and Rolemaster, but fairly closely matches this.The issue for us was that, not only was RM dangerous, the Middle Earth regional modules were not level-gated in any way. The sample adventure in the MERP book involved kids kidnapped by trolls, which 1st level PCs could not meaningfully oppose in combat. The random encounter tables had fell beasts, giants and other such creatures appearing and these were generally treated by me as combat encounters.As a result, from when my first MERP campaign started at age 13 and for the next couple of years of play, there was regular PC turnover. As I had also not yet learned to be generous with "first time" experience multipliers, advancement was incredibly slow, and reaching level 2 was a huge achievement.The thing is, after a couple of years of play like this (where we were all having fun, I might point out), we recognised that to continue having fun, some changes needed to be made. So we started a new campaign with characters at fifth level (this seemed almost like absurd power-gaming to us, but also an exciting change of pace) and I had clearly learned a bit about telegraphing threats, having encounters not automatically result in combat and the like, because, while there was still some PC turnover, that "high-level" campaign is the most memorable couple of years of play we had in our teenage years and the frequency of PC death was vastly lower than it had been.And, again, this is why I cannot believe people in the past were somehow incapable of seeing past a few paragraphs by Gygax and working out for themselves what works for them and what doesn't. If my friends and I could manage this as 15 or 16 year olds, it really can't have been that hard.</blockquote>

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