All or Nothing, and Deviants

In his latest entry, Tales of the Rampant Coyote's Jay Barnson blogs about the absence of "all or nothing" mechanics in modern role-playing games. You know, the kind of stuff that used to make us smash our keyboards:
* Clerics + Undead: This was generally better balanced in computer RPGs than their pen-and-paper grandfather. But undead encounters were often either party-killers or trivial depending upon whether or not you had a cleric that was on the ball.

* (Save or die) spells: These have been largely scrubbed out of the latest version of the pen-and-paper version of Dungeons & Dragons.

* Just the likelihood of missing, or having a spell fail entirely, tended to be pretty high in these older games. When an enemy could be felled in just a couple of hits, a string of misses could make a radical difference in combat.