Hi everyone. I’d like talk about some issues I’ve found over the years, first with MERP and then with RM, hear what your experience has been, how you have dealt with them.
Experience has shown me that there are basically 2 types of fights among players: who gets to choose first among the magic items and who delivers the killing blow. Of course, this depends on the relationship of the players, but even among good friends, the second one still moves the mood. They don’t care that much about the prestige of killing a powerful enemy as they do about the experience they will receive; this derives from the experience distribution system. If the party travels together, traveling experience really don’t count since everybody gets the same. HP received don’t really matter after level 5 (although they still like to get critical received experience… assuming they can survive the critical roll). It doesn’t matter how many spells you cast, eventually you will run out PP. MM are good, but they cannot compare to killing enemies. In the end, everything comes to who kills the most, who gives the fatal blow. Even if you can keep track of the experience that you receive for each critical delivered (in large battles, we just ignore that), a fighter usually gets more xp, and they get angry when someone else arrives to help you kill an enemy when they already have weakened it because, technically, your are stealing their xp. I know it totally makes sense that you get the xp of what you kill, but I’m thinking here more from the gaming experience point of view (with difficult gamers), keeping the best possible player environment with good balance among professions, even among just fighters.
A friend of mine who plays AD&D told me that the only fair system to assign experience (the one they use) is to equally divide it among all the characters present during the fight (something like Diablo II). Otherwise, lower level characters, specially spell casters, wouldn’t be able to keep the pace with the rest, and you will have fighters 3-4 levels above the others… not that funny to use any non-fighting profession. I tried this option, but then then the fighters got angry that they started getting behind (they don't cast spells).
If the RM standard rules work for you and this has never happened on any session, congrats. If you have experienced something similar and somehow achieved some balance, I’d really like to hear about it.
Thanks.