Editing Middle-Earth Role Playing (section)

===Combat===
M.E.R.P. goes for the simulation approach: combat is detailed and rather messy and as you may have come to expect, involves an unholy number of tables.

Weapons and armour are used in a pretty clever way: instead of ''"you hit with X, your armour absorbs Y damages, your Hit Points go down to Z"'', you had to go for a trip down the merry lane as follows: When you attacked you roll a D100 dice, added your Offensive Bonus, substracted your target's Defensive Bonus and cross-referenced the final result with the armour your opponent was wearing on the appropriate table - 1 handed slashing weapons, 2 handed weapons, magic bolts and so on. If you were using the expanded rules Rolemaster provides, EVERY single weapon ([[What|down to and including raw fishes and thrown henchmens]]) and offensive spell had its own damage table, that gave you different results against 20 different types of armour. Anal retentive much? This process gave you a code like 8A, 30E or similar, and the fun was just starting.:<br />
* The number was the quantity of damage you had inflicted, that was subtracted form you opponents hit points.
* The letter - if present - was the severity of the '''Critical Hit''' you achieved, meaning that you've done additional damage. You the rolled ANOTHER D100 dice, applied a modifier based on the code and looked up the result (you may have guessed it) on another table where the damage - that varied accordingly to the type of critical you were inflicting - was described in gleeful details, like "Blow to upper legs, +5hits", "Minor forearm wound, +2hits, stunned for 1 round" or "Strike through ear destroys brain. The unfortunate lummox dies instantly, and ''any ear wax is removed"'' or "Blast annihilates entire skeleton. Reduced to a gelatinous pulp. Try a spatula". Something tells me that [[Dwarf Fortress|The Toady One]] played this game at one point of another of his life.

The tables actually made sense: quick and light weapons caused damage stating from lower rolls, but it was harder to achieve a critical hit, while heavy weapons started to be effective with higher rolls but caused heavier critics. In the same way it was harder to hit a person with light or no armour, but critics were a lot worse, and with heavier armour you started taking damage earlier but it was harder to get a good shot. 

This mechanism made fighting interesting but slow, and while in games like D&D you win by grinding down the hit points of your adversary, M.E.R.P. fights tended to be won by getting a good critical hit to land. It also meant that you were always at risk of being butchered, as it was possible - albeit unlikely - for a low-level character to one-shot a strong adversary with a lucky roll - or vice-versa.