On another thread, I was discussing whether racial bonuses should be added directly to the stats or to the bonus. It made me think of something that has always struck me as significant about character generation in Rolemaster compared to AD&D--the fact that d100 gives a uniform distribution of results (all results are equally likely) as opposed to a normal distribution like 3d6. However, the effectiveness of the statistics--the bonus, which is more important than the raw stat--is normally distributed because it has a non-linear relationship with the statistic.
In the combat tables, however, the relationship of the score to the amount of damage, severity of critical, etc. is largely linear above a threshold. For example, a broad sword against AT 10 does B criticals from 96-109, C from 110-125, D from 126-140.
What this means is that regardless of whether your bonus is +50 or +90 your chance of getting each type of critical is approximately the same. Once your bonus goes above +90, the frequency of B criticals starts to decrease very sharply. I've never found this particularly satisfying. I'd prefer to see each critical type become more and more likely up to a certain point and then less likely as the character's bonus rises to a point where he tends to do something else.
I think it might be interesting to try playing the system with combat rolls decided by 2d100 divided by two, so that mid-range rolls would be most common (open ended rolls on one of the two dice would still be possible however). In addition to revamping the result distribution, it would reduce some of the randomness of
Rolemaster combat. As entertaining as the freak critical can be, the "death by house cat" effect can be a little extreme. Another alternative might be to drop the open ended rolls and simply have 2d100-50 which would allow rolls up to 150 and a fair degree of randomness, while still having a peak in the middle.
I haven't actually tested this at all. I suspect the combat tables would probably need to be rewritten or some adjustment be made to the die rolls. It was just a thought--what do people think?
