Runequest vs D&D vs Gurps vs D6 vs Exalted vs everything

[Utgardloki]

I've been thinking lately, why play one role playing system rather than another one. The question of whether D20 is garbage or not has seemed to have taken over a number of other threads, so maybe a thread where we can discuss the merits of Runequest over the others is a good idea.

So what are the alternatives to Runequest, and how good are they? Why (or when) choose one over the other?

 

[Lieutenant Rasczak]

I've been thinking lately, why play one role playing system rather than another one. The question of whether D20 is garbage or not has seemed to have taken over a number of other threads, so maybe a thread where we can discuss the merits of Runequest over the others is a good idea.

So what are the alternatives to Runequest, and how good are they? Why (or when) choose one over the other?

I (personally) find D20 to be weak in many areas, the REALLY funny thing is that the D20 system seems to work better in modern and sci fi settings than the original setting it was meant for. I (again personally) prefer 1st Edition AD&D (and still on occasion DM it), it was clunky - but its fun! The only game I REALLY enjoyed thats system was based entirely around a D20 was TORG - I really enjoyed TORG.

GURPS - too Generic for me, and for me even the individual setting books can't save it. I'm not a big fan of D6's at the core of a Roleplaying system personally - so that also writes off the D6 System (although the Bloodshadows D6 book is excellent). But oddly enough I love Shadowrun (in spite of having to roll HORDES of D6).

Exalted, its OK. The system works well as its pretty much down to the GM to keep the flow of the action. Nothing really special (although the background - in specific the idea of the Dragon Blooded, has some nice touches to it).

I am a big fan of Percentile dice based systems personally. I find them flexible and give more options and scope for both player and GM.

My two cents

 

[Wulf Corbett]

So what are the alternatives to Runequest, and how good are they? Why (or when) choose one over the other?

To me, the secret of a good RPG is that the system should get the hell out of the way, and let me get on with the game. The less intrusive, the simpler, and the more streamlined (specifically, systems with a single universal resolution mechanic), the better, so long as the game still gives the impression that a specific action is taking place. Some games go too far - HeroQuest, for instance, has an excellent core mechanic, and some flashes of brilliance (especially the Augmentation mechanic), but the system as a whole just feels bland. They should also give me sufficient guidance to create a character, without being too intrusive and restrictive in creating the one I want. Again, HeroQuest goes too far, leaving no clues at all how to create a good character. Lastly, I need some sort of 'Hero Point/Drama Point' system to allow players and GM alike some freedom from the dictates of random die rolls, without simply arbitrarily deciding on results.

So, my choices at the moment would be:
True20 (played a bit, it gets rid of most of the annoying bits of D20 but keeps the simple core mechanic, and indeed extends it. BAB and leveling up still annoy me)
New World of Darkness (a bit doubtful over the combined attack/damage roll, but essentially it's a good system - I intend to convert Tribe8 to use this system)
Unisystem (one of the best systems to get out of the way, one of the simplest resolution mechanics, and one of the best-supported systems around. Personally I prefer a mix of Cinematic and Full Unisystem, essentially Cinematic with more skills, and drop the combat maneouvres. Certainly my favourite at the moment)

RuneQuest has always sat too far on the crunchy side of these requirements. It was the best thing since sliced bread when the alternatives were AD&D and the like, but a lot of new designs have come & gone since then, and my own tastes in gaming have changed.

Wulf

 

[Lieutenant Rasczak]

HeroQuest, for instance, has an excellent core mechanic, and some flashes of brilliance (especially the Augmentation mechanic), but the system as a whole just feels bland.

Wulf

I am SOOOOO with you over Heroquest, it had so little colour or flavour it was scary!

 

[Wulf Corbett]

I am SOOOOO with you over Heroquest, it had so little colour or flavour it was scary!

Yup. And yet it had so much to offer, so many great ideas. It's like someone created a fantastic game mechanic then forgot to write the actual GAME...

Wulf

EDIT: seems to be my day for typoes...

 

[Lieutenant Rasczak]

I am SOOOOO with you over Heroquest, it had so little colour or flavour it was scary!

Yup. And yet it had so much to offer, so many great ideas. It's like someone created a fantastic game mechanic then forgot to white the actual GAME...

Wulf

Oh god yes, great background and fluff.

It was like a Chinese Meal for me.

Great to read - but when you played it, you still felt 'hungry' afterwards.

 

[sexy_davey]

Seconded. Or thirded. Or whatever. HQ never grabbed me in the way RQ did. This may have something to do with age, however...

Also, the point about the system getting out of the way is well made. I found when playing RQ, that we'd all been playing it for so long, and knew it so well, that this more or less happened. No-one really thought about the mechanics of conflict resolution, and an ad-hoc can I/can't I do this particular thing fell intuitively to hand.

D20 system (usually 1st Edition D&D) felt to me like 'starter RPG'. Learn the ropes on something simple, then move on to the main course.

Please don't kill me, D&D fanboys!

 

[Lieutenant Rasczak]

Seconded. Or thirded. Or whatever. HQ never grabbed me in the way RQ did. This may have something to do with age, however...

Also, the point about the system getting out of the way is well made. I found when playing RQ, that we'd all been playing it for so long, and knew it so well, that this more or less happened. No-one really thought about the mechanics of conflict resolution, and an ad-hoc can I/can't I do this particular thing fell intuitively to hand.

D20 system (usually 1st Edition D&D) felt to me like 'starter RPG'. Learn the ropes on something simple, then move on to the main course.

Please don't kill me, D&D fanboys!

Du mean Basic D&D or the new one?

Its not to do with age I don't think (IMHO).

I have been a Doctor Who 'Fan Boy' since I was a Kid, and was REALLY worried I wasn't going to like the new series - and I love it!

If something is right for you, its right kwim.

I REALLY like the look of the new RQ (and I was worried prior to the previews).

 

[Urox]

HQ never grabbed me in the way RQ did. This may have something to do with age, however...

HW/HQ never grabbed me either, but I don't think it's an age thing.

I transistioned from AD&D to RQ2, and I am pretty sure that features that really jumped out at me initially in RQ2 were the lack of character classes and univeral magic. Add in to that the faux class system of cults and a world where all these rules directly applied, and we were hooked.

HQ is really just an abstract conflict resolution system -- it probably works okay for story-telling games, but I think RQ had it's base in a combat simulation fans.

There are lots of games that have reduced conflicts to a single die roll and base the outcome on the quality of the roll, but that is not RQ. RQ is rolling to hit, then hoping not to be parried/dodged/blocked, then rolling for a hit location, and then rolling for damage, and then reducing the damage by the armor of the location, and then updating the game state to reflect this change.

I think you need to go back and look at the RQ renaissance for what made it successful, and why it ultimately failed and hope MRQ is modeled on the good parts and avoids the pitfalls.

In case you missed it earlier, I am pretty sure it was the marriage of the rules and the setting that made RQ2 tick. Sure, you could play RQ in settings outside of Glorantha, but the system rules were crafted to apply directly to the system (Divine Intervention anyone?)

 

[Lieutenant Rasczak]

I prefer Glorantha, always have.

I even ran a (very unsuccessful) AD&D 1st Edition Glorantha Campaign!

 

[Finarvyn]

To me, the secret of a good RPG is that the system should get the hell out of the way, and let me get on with the game. The less intrusive, the simpler, and the more streamlined (specifically, systems with a single universal resolution mechanic), the better, so long as the game still gives the impression that a specific action is taking place.

This is what makes 1974 "borwn book OD&D" so neat. The system is really simple and character generation is nearly non-existant, so you can go right into the "play the game" part. Once AD&D came along and tried to make the rules all encyclopedia-ish, the game began to go downhill, in my iopinion.

For example, look at any game that has a huge skill list. In the old days, if a player wanted to try something the GM could determine if it seemed to fit the type of character and let them make a stat-check type roll. In today's RPG world, the player looks at his sheet to see if he has put points into the particular skill. Skill systems tend to be lists of things you can't do rather than things you can attempt.

Also, simple rules like OD&D mean more campaign options with minimal effort. I've used the basic OD&D rules to play Barsoom, Star Wars, Dune, James Bond, and dozens of other campaigns. The secret is that you need to come up with a list of a half-dozen weapons, armor if appropriate, a couple monsters, determine if there are any special abilites or spells from that world, and then play. I could run Star Wars from scratch with maybe an hour prep time, since I already know the NPCs and my players already know the setting.

I'm not sure who first decided that complex = better, but I have always found that simple = more fun.

Just my two cents.

 

[atgxtg]

This is what makes 1974 "borwn book OD&D" so neat. The system is really simple and character generation is nearly non-existant, so you can go right into the "play the game" part.

I'm not sure who first decided that complex = better, but I have always found that simple = more fun.

Usually simple leave some major problems that can requie a lot of work on the M's prt to deal with when they crop up.

For example, the orginal D&D had a problem with thieves passing fighting men on the combat charts. The thieves used to level faster. AD&D was written to plug a lot od design flaws in the orignal game (mostly created because the people writing it didn't know how to write an RPG, as no one had ever done it before).

It was just that Gygax sort of overcomplicated things, especially by writing up a different set of rules for every aspect of the game (want to attack something? roll a D20, want to lift something? roll a D100 want to listen for something? roll a D10, want to surprise something roll a D6, or maybe a d8-way to complicated). He also wrote up a lot of stuff that no one would use. AD&D probably has the most compreshensive list of pole-arms imiaginable, but the only ones worth using are the spear and the halbeard (the rest do pathethic damage).

 

[GbajiTheDeceiver]

I'd be more inclined to say that it's a balancing act between "simple" and "simplistic". Tip too far into "simplistic" and you have real problems on your hands.

I favour things that appear simple on the surface, but have massive depth for those who want to go there. That's what I got out of RQ. The lack of classes and levels blew my mind at first, but over time it began to make sense, and eventually I wouldn't touch anything else.

 

[atgxtg]

I'd be more inclined to say that it's a balancing act between "simple" and "simplistic". Tip too far into "simplistic" and you have real problems on your hands.

THat is the key to the science (art?) of RPG design. A trade off between the deree of accuracy in simulating reality (at least the "reality " of the setting), and ease of play.

Somewhere between calculating the chance to hit using quantum mechanics and unified field theroy on one end , and "I win!" on the other.

 

[Lieutenant Rasczak]

I'd be more inclined to say that it's a balancing act between "simple" and "simplistic". Tip too far into "simplistic" and you have real problems on your hands.

I favour things that appear simple on the surface, but have massive depth for those who want to go there. That's what I got out of RQ. The lack of classes and levels blew my mind at first, but over time it began to make sense, and eventually I wouldn't touch anything else.

Yes, the old 'Basic Roleplaying' was simplistic. Whereas I (personally) found RQ simple (and fun)!

 

[Adept]

I prefer a bell curve to percentiles any day of the week. Hârnmaster does well with a d100 with the four tiered success system, but even there the d100 is just too random. People with high skills (70% is pretty high in most d100 games) fail way too often.

My favourite so far is Unisystem. a d10 a terrible die to base a game around, but once I changed it to an open ended 2d6 the system really came into it's own. Basically Unisystem is like GURPS (from which it borrows a lot) but it works better and much faster.

(And like the makers of GURPS the makers of Unisystem can't do their basic math. Still, it was easier to fix than GURPS. Things like character generation, point costs for skills and stuff like that.)

I played GURPS for a long time, and I appreciate what it tries to do. Unfortunately the new edition seems to be a step in the wrong direction if anything.

Lace & Steel is a brilliant game, and one I warmly recommend people to try. The card deck fencing & magic duelling system makes for the most exciting combats I've ever played through (game mechanics vice, that is).

 

[andakitty]

Basic Role Playing is a good base from which to build, well, anything you want. I wanted D&D without the classes, levels, etc. So I took BRP and Magic World and mixed Stormbringer and a homebrew setting and came up with just what I wanted. And ran it for over 12 years with the same core group. That's the real beauty of BRP: it naturally lends itself to whatever degree of complexity you want without a lot of fiddling. I have high hopes for MRQ, but if doesn't work out I will be all over the new BRP rulebook(no, I'll be all over that in any case).

Someone else was extolling the virtues of OD&D without skills...you can do the same with BRP and have a simpler and more logical system to boot, without skills or with them. To each his own.

 

[kpmcdona]

I want to add one thing to the "get out of our way" requirement for a good RPG. A second requirement for a good RPG is that, while being mostly invisible, it does a good job supporting the particular theme, style of play, etc. that it is designed for. Doing a particular job is much easier with the right tool.

I really don't think there is any such thing as a truely generic RPG. Sure, you can use one RPG to play in a bunch of different settings/genres, but any set of rules is going to encourage certain things over others. Trying to do creepy horror or hong-kong style action in AD&D can be done, but you are swimming against the stream if you try. Besides that, a system that runs pretty much the same way in every type of game gets old pretty quick in my experience.

From my point of view, Call of Cthulu isn't really the same game as RuneQuest. They both share some rules, but each has a fairly large body of customizations to support their particular style of play. Sanity in CoC, for example, or the cults in RQ. RuneQuest (1st & 2nd ed) did a great job of encouraging "gloranthan atmosphere" through the cults mechanic. Every cult had specific skill requirements and magic offerings that supported the mythical theme of its deity. To me, that really made the world come alive and it did that without feeling forced or restrictive.

That's pretty darn cool in my opinion.

 

[andakitty]

BRP makes a good base mechanic, which can be built upon using different enhancements. That is not the same thing as a 'generic system' such as GURPS or Hero. In my experience, there is a vast difference in feel and play between CoC, RQ, Stormbringer, and my homebrew, say. Very familiar and very different at the same time.

 

[Cobra]

I want to add one thing to the "get out of our way" requirement for a good RPG. A second requirement for a good RPG is that, while being mostly invisible, it does a good job supporting the particular theme, style of play, etc. that it is designed for. Doing a particular job is much easier with the right tool.

From my point of view, Call of Cthulu isn't really the same game as RuneQuest. They both share some rules, but each has a fairly large body of customizations to support their particular style of play. Sanity in CoC, for example, or the cults in RQ. RuneQuest (1st & 2nd ed) did a great job of encouraging "gloranthan atmosphere" through the cults mechanic. Every cult had specific skill requirements and magic offerings that supported the mythical theme of its deity. To me, that really made the world come alive and it did that without feeling forced or restrictive.

That's pretty darn cool in my opinion.

RQ3 was always my favourite mechanic for a fantasy game. But I thought that the version of BRP used for Cthulhu made more sense for turn of the century games.

I liked the original WFRP for for it's colour and atmosphere, and I also enjoyed it's class type system for a while (remains the only game I've played where all players desperately wanted to start their careers as rat catchers - that's got to be worth something. But otherwise I found the mechanic, esp. combat and magic, to be clunky.

But for character creation and development the best I've played was Ars Magica. I only ever played the first ed. which had some clunky mechanics, too, but the character creation system had some interesting ideas that could easily be incorporated into RQ. I'm not saying these are for everyone, but I found them interesting.

1. First of these was Virtues and Flaws (similar to Ads and Disads in Gurps) which could help flesh out a character if handled properly. I'd suggest making your own virtues and flaws up that would work for your players and game world, though.

2. Personality. You could define up to 3 personality traits for your character, for instance stubborn, relaxed, blatherer, etc. Translated into RQ, you would then assign a strength to these traits (say 5-15%) and could add (or subtract) that trait to a roll when appropriate during play. Now I know that some (Wulf, at least) would rather see that role played than put in as a mechanic, however I mention it as an interesting idea that might be appropriate for some.

3. Confidence points (different from personality). Say you had 3 confidence points - each one would allow you to add 20% to a roll if you choose to use it. If you acheive a regular success or failure, you lose that conf. point for a certain amount of time (a day, a week, a session, and adventure? whatever). If you acheive a critical, you don't lose it at all. A fumble and you lose it permanently. New conf. points can only be awarded by GM. This might work in place of Hero Points.

Cobra