Runequest

Being a skill based system, "roll your skill" is a large part of it. If you're angling after hard rules for running kingdoms, leading mercenary bands, and managing mistresses then no. RQ6/Mythras has a set of generic task rules that can be extended to such things, but all editions place an emphasis on cults, brotherhoods, the cultures that made them and the PC's place in them.

>The major difference between RQ and countless ripoffs and heartbreakers is that the people behind RQ were competent.
LOL, no. Runequest is broken in the same way most non-OSR games are broken: there's no real game loop no functioning incentive structure, no "here's what this game is about" built into the rules.

The nicest thing that can be said about it is that the mistake was made for a different reason than normal -- Steve Perrin and all the others had gotten into RPGs the only way possible at the time, OD&D, and learned the functional structure that way, so that it was implicit in their minds and they didn't realize they should put it in. Newer games are generally written by people who don't really realize there ought to be anything there at all.

>It does the Glorantha-setting better, as it was tailormade to it.
Also inaccurate. Runequest started life as the Perrin Conventions, a set of house rules for D&D which spread widely and became popular in California. Steve Perrin was encouraged by their success to put together his own game. Glorantha was written by an entirely different guy, Greg Stafford, and Perrin stapled it onto Runequest because he wanted a setting for the game. (Glorantha was previously known, but not under that name, as the setting for a board game called White Bear and Red Moon, but IIRC it started life as Stafford's D&D setting.)

>broken in the same way most non-OSR games are broken: there's no real game loop no functioning incentive structure, no "here's what this game is about" built into the rules.

Eh..wut?

I too am interested in this system OP. Has anyone played Apple Lane? It was the introductory adventure in the 2nd ed. box.

Dammit Wayne! Take your pills and go to bed!

Seconded.

Is this some OSR meme ?

See? Most people don't even realize there's something missing.

It's like this: D&D originally caught on because it had an addictive and functional basic gameplay loop: you quest for treasure (in early D&D, monsters are not worth much XP), so that you can become more powerful, face greater challenges, and so on until you become powerful enough to lead armies in miniature battles.

A lot of people regard this as limiting or just plain boring, and that's fine. But the point is it works, and it's right there built into the rules. There's an incentive structure and as such an immediate effortlessness to picking up the game: players know what they're after and referees know what to prepare.

Runequest (and almost all new-school RPGs -- there are exceptions, notably Shadowrun), on the other hand, doesn't have that. You make you characters, and then _____? The GM has to effectively write a whole part of the game as part of setting up a campaign. This wasn't a problem for Perrin and the others who used his house rules; they had already learned to play OD&D, and in an important sense, in their minds were *still playing OD&D*: for instance, they saw XP-for-gold as "unrealistic" so they changed it to skills getting better from practice, but then they kept having their characters do the same things they were doing before. The incentive was removed, but they continued to iterate the behavior. This is classic psychology; it's like teaching a dog a trick by using treats or anything like that.

The problem appears when people pick up the game "blank": since these people haven't learned to play from a "complete" game, they don't really know what to do with the rules. How many times have you had that problem? You read a game and it's amazing and fires your imagination, but then you can't figure out agood campaign to run in it so you just shelve it and look at it wistfully now and again? Happens all the time.

NEVER!
It's 7:30 PM, Jeff

Sometimes you just want D&D with house rules.

Aha. If you had said this instead of the gobbledegook, we might have had a discussion. So the issue here is that the rules do not dictate the gameplay, nor immediately reward you for playing?
Opinions and all that, but I don't see an issue with the former as
a) freedom, yay!
b) RQ has almost always had a well defined setting(s) as incentive to lean on .
As for the latter, I'm fine with the story, the entertainment and the snacks.

Guess that makes sense. I just have no interest in being a murderhobo I guess.

Sounds to me more like a GM not having any imagination.

You talk about RPGs like they're board games or video games with things like "gameplay loops" and such. It's clear that that's what you play them like, which isn't bad or whatever, but it doesn't mean that a game with freedom is automatically bad, or somehow "broken." The gameplay loop, as you call it, is the story and setting of the campaign, which are wholly or in part GM creations. The system just needs to support that with whatever mechanics the campaign requires.

It's my current fascination, well, Mythras is, which is essentially RQ6 with even more Glorantha removed, and attempting to be more universal and less Bronze Age Fantasy.

Also M-Space, which essentially takes Mythras and uses it to do Sci-Fi. If you lower access to tech and include mundane guns(free RQ6 supplement) it actually will run an extremely gritty Fallout Campaign quite well.

>extremely gritty Fallout Campaign quite well.

I'm a bit miffed that we haven't got rules for infected wounds and gangrene for that extra grit.

>25 replies
>half are about D&D
Yeah, Runequest definitely still has a fanbase.

Oh yes!
Gringle's pawnshop...
Baboons...

Alright folks, this thread needs some help, so I'm gonna bring up the one thing that NEEDS to be discussed in this thread: MotherFucking DUCKS.

Yeah, Anthros, but not the Furry(Downy?) kind. No, Glorantha features straight up imports of Ducks a la Ducktales, Daffy, or Howard... and it TRIES TO DO IT SERIOUSLY.

It's honestly kind of brilliant. When it comes to RuneQuest you've really got two kinds of Duck players. The ones who play the duck as they appear in the aforementioned media... and the ones who try to defy the whimsical tropes by playing the duck as serious as possible.

It's amazing really. It's the first time I've really seen a character species that, well, sets an original dynamic you can't find codified across the whole fantasy genre. And I do honestly believe it does so without managing to be too furry.

Hard to be considered Furries when your race has mystical links to the cults of certain war/death gods, and enough members in those cults that some have achieved positions of responsibility...

Not to mention the spectacularly bad attitudes and big axes. Pic related.

On the one hand, it's combat is really nice. On the other, skills can be kind of too spread out and I hate how sometimes a skill you think everyone should or could have access to is a professional skill (seduction comes to mind.) Furthermore, size is a cool concept but the point buy system makes it so either your character is normal sized but mediocre at everything else or pretty good but 4 feet tall.

Bringing ducks doesn't help. It has never helped. A bunch of feathered, foul-beaked bastards, the lot of them!

Actually, I don't much care one way or another. I really like RQ and BRP in general, but Glorantha hasn't managed to tickle me in the right places.

>a skill you think everyone should or could have access to is a professional skill (seduction comes to mind)
There is a difference between seducing someone and chatting up a horndog.

>point buy system
Roll in order is the only true way.

I ran a mythras game a few months back that went really well. Honestly one of my top systems now, looking forward to running it again soon.

What was the most difficult for players to learn? I presume they started with DnD or pathfinder, si anything after that is pretty easy to learn.

Can you give us any specifics why you enjoy it over your previous systems (and what those are)?

Should someone fairly new to RPGs who wants an old school Low Fantasy/Sword & Sorcery vibe, but wants to avoid the crappy stuff that has gotten into DnD pick up RQ?

If not, are there other systems I might look into?

I'm a huge Mythras fan. I ran a high fantasy game and a Star Wars game with it and it works great for extremely potent PCs that still have to use their heads. The actual grittiness still requires a lot of bad luck to get fucked, and it has the same danger as a mid-single-digit D&D where you can get horribly fucked and die quickly from some bad crits going against you.

However, the danger remains constant even when you can channel an elemental spirit of the storm and throw cyclones with your attacks. Very rewarding as a player or GM, and allows for bad at combat characters.