Warning:it's a bit long
I'm not really sure that I understand the question? My experience is that RM does give you more than pretty much any other RPG out there? Sure we could use a "GM Law" and a "Player Law" which could make it even better but RM is far from lacking. If you think my answer is fuzzy or confusing, please refrase the question since I most likely missed the point?
Yes, I think that it's better for me to reformulate what I said to make it a bit clearer:
What I'm trying to say here is that I think that RM rules system has a flaw in its internal logic: it's basically trying to do two things, each of them being the opposite of the other.
It tries to simulate a fantasy world, to be a set of "physical" rules of that world, to which
all characters must obey at the same manner. A world where what the characters (and, more importantly, their players) want doesn't mean anything, as they're just like all others inhabitants of the world.
And,
at the same time it tries to have you use your characters to tell a story where they are the protagonists, the most important people in the world (again, by important I don't mean powerful! You can be a simple farmer doing ordinary things all day, but if you're the protagonist of a story, you're the most important person in it!).
In other words, RM tries to be both a sort of "google earth", which let you see all the world at the same time and gives you the same amount of detail for everything (yes, you can zoom on something with google earth, but that's just an example...)
and a detailed biography on your characters' lives.
I've got nothing against both of things, but I think they're mutually exclusive. And this sort of "schizophrenia" IMHO is the cause of a lot of problems that we often complain about or try to find a solution to here on the boards.
I'm talking of problems like:
- skill bloat: I realized that the number of skills is a false problem. The real problem is not the number of skills, but their importance (I can hear you say:"well yes, we already knew that!" but let me finish
).
If you're trying to simulate a world then it's quite logical to have an almost infinite number of skills and it's also logical that some skills will be less useful than others.
OTOH if you want to make your characters the protagonists the system should make sure that all of your character skills are equally important. If you spend ranks in cooking it's probably because it's an aspect of your character that you think is important and you'd like to explore. So the rules should give you a way to do that, to make stories about your character cooking.
- randomness of criticals: again, if you're trying to simulate a world, then critical randomness isn't a real problem, the problem is that you spend 30+ minutes making a sheet for your character, which maybe will die after 5 minutes of play...
If instead you're trying to make your character the protagonist of a story... well, then such randomness is a problem! I'm not saying that your character shouldn't die at all, but just that he shouldn't die doing things that you think are meaningless (like, you know, fighting that kobold just before the Big Bad Boss
).
So, I'm NOT saying "hey guys, let's scrap realism and make all PCs invincible heroes above all others characters in the world!".
I'm saying: "let's find a way to be sure that RM does what we want it to do!".