Starkjade wrote on Nov 18
th, 2013 at 2:17pm:
Famous last words. The person who was constantly pushing that game on our little group kept saying the same thing; he didn't mention excel, though, and didn't describe anything as "fluff." He did keep mentioning that we could die at any moment, no matter how powerful we got, which was kind of counter productive...
Really, Rolemaster once you're past the
I love Tables stage is easy, you can play it with the following tables :
- The Generic Moving Maneuver Table
- The Generic Static Maneuver Table
- A Fit them all Attack table
- A Fit them all Critical table
Characters with 10 to 15 Skills that are important to adventuring. ( Hide, pick locks, disarm trap... you know the usual suspects )
( Yeah I know you can also call it MERP if you want

Though there's still more tables in MERP )
Excel sheets are just useful if you want to bother with all the fluff ( it avoids the painful hours of recalculating everything every time you level ), but if you don't care about the fluff and just bother with the mechanic, you don't needs much.
As for the death ( or similar) at any time yes, it can happen, it's rare though... Extremely rare
In 30ish years of RM I've seen it happen twice.
One time one of my player threw a Trident while climbing a stair ( just the right weapon to do such a thing

) at my evil NPC Sorceress that was casting an Instant Death spell on one of the party...He rolled high enough in the hit and in the critical that the Trident ended in the Sorceress throat, ending the spell before it was cast. ( and getting me into Full Adventure Damage Control mode as they shouldn't have been able to kill her, especially at that stage )
At the other time, it was in Spacemaster ( Rolemaster in Space ), I managed to get my hands on a piece of extremely high tech called a starship ( it was a small freighter, but of a technology so advanced that it was worth... A lot ). I was trying to sneak through a Star Fleet with that freighter... in Full Cloaking, with so much Electronic Warfare running that it was almost impossible to see me... Much less manage to lock a weapon on me... My wicked GM stole my dices and started to make the rolls in front of me... He rolled 514 to see me ( even after the -200+ he had to do it due to all the ultra advanced tech that freighter had ), then he rolled a 416 to get a lock on the ship. And the crowning, he rolled 614 to the attack roll... Lets just say that my nice invaluable freighter had just become a huge piece of scrap and that I was lucky to manage to actually land with the wreck that was left. [ Yes I STILL remember the rolls, because the probability to get those rolls is so remote that our GM went straight to get a lottery ticket when we took a break [ out of 22 Rolls he rolled 19 Rolls over 95 on a D100 ] ]
And last... Death has always been something relative in Rolemaster. ( Resurrection is such a useful spell )