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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8188439" data-attributes="member: 42582">[USER=54364]@DrunkonDuty[/USER]'s post made me look up the Endurance feat. That in turn reminded me of a PC in the first long RM campaign I GMed, who was (in D&D terms) an archer/mage specialising in illusion and charm/deception effects. This PC was also a very able runner and skier. (The player is an amazing athlete/hiker/adventurer who ran under two-and-a-half hours in his first marathon, in his 30s; the PC resembled the player.)I'm not going to try and explain the intricacies of RM's build rules, but one feature of them is that, after maxing out on your "core" elements (like archery and spells for this PC) you generally have points left over for other stuff. So this PC wasn't choosing between core competence and athletics/endurance. (What I've just said isn't quite true for spells, which is a problem - but that problem tends to manifest at higher levels, where some spells start to crowd out some skill options - in this case, teleportation spells crowd out athletic travel abilities. But this PC was mostly played from 1st to around 12th level and these spell issues didn't manifest at those levels.)In 3E, on the other hand, it seems that just about every feat option (I'm not sure about skills) can be spent on the "core" area of expertise, making something like Endurance a waste of time.There may be a further issue about expected gameplay: there are features of D&D (even 4e displays this tendency, at least in my experience) which tend to make dealing with immediate issues of foes and of local architecture/topography more salient, in play, than dealing with travelling and getting tired and having to get from A-town to B-ville in a hurry. Whereas Rolemaster is a bit different in this respect, as is (say) Burning Wheel and (I would say, though based on a bit less experience) RuneQuest. I would expect needing to go a long time without eating, or to have to march or run or swim for a long time, to come up more often in those non-D&D systems than in default D&D play. And of course every session it doesn't come up is another session in which Endurance was a pointless part of the PC build.</blockquote>

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