Runequest vs D&D

[Trifletraxor]

My players once met an opponent with such a high shield that they were unable to harm him. Some minor damage with a critical hit from the guy who dealt the most damage, but that was it. What they ended up doing was grappling him and drowning him in a bucket of water. :twisted:

SGL.

 

[Twigman]

Disclaimer: All systems have advantages, disadvantages, blah, blah, blah, good GM, blah, blah, played RuneQuest for years, blah, blah, Role-play!

I think D&D3.x gets a bit of unwarranted criticism for the number of rules it has. They tried to provide rules for whatever you might need, but there is no rule in D&D3.x that says you have to use them!

In fact in the DMG it specifically says that you DON'T need to use them. In the DM's Best Friend Rule it suggests that the DM just pick a roll that seems appropriate and then assign a +2 or -2 for each situation modifier, if any. Make it up! Don't worry about the specific rules, just keep the game moving.

To suggest that a game that does not have rules that cover everything is superior to a game that does because it is more "Free Form" is ignoring the fact that you don't have to use the rules. But if you want to, you can!

Considering that Mongoose is constantly publishing books with more and more rules in them it may not be long before they are as rule heavy as D&D and in my opinion that is a good thing. It gives you an option to use their rules if you want to. As a matter of fact I believe a lot of these rules are called "Optional Rules" for just that reason.

 

[Utgardloki]

In converting Iron Kingdoms to Runequest, I was thinking about steamjacks and other opponents that do massive amounts of damage with a single attack.

In D&D, a low level character vs an opponent who does a lot of damage with one hit = a dead low level character. Even a high level character is likely to get seriously hurt and weakened by an encounter with a mighty hammer wielded by something that can wield a mighty hammer.

In Runequest, even a "low level" character can high a high Dodge skill, hero points, and a good Resilience roll to avoid dying from a powerful hit. Unfortunately, in MRQ a weapon still does minimum damage even after a successful Dodge, so your RQ hero is likely to get pummelled. I've houseruled that no damage is taken after a successful Dodge, which provides for a much different play experience.

Your hammer-wielding giant will be wanting a mob of zombies to help him kill Runequest PCs.

 

[Kagan Altar]

That being said, and fully accepting that this is totally influenced by the persons involved, RQ was ( ? one of ? ) the first systems to actively encourage true roleplaying. It's all over campaign packs like Griffin Mountain, it's there in the Ransom system, it's right up-front in the Foreword to Borderlands, and it's implied in a rules system that was loose enough to allow for it from day one. At the time, the AD&D vogue was very much strict interpretation of the rules as written.

I completely disagree.

First, you have to define what "true role-playing" exactly means in this context. You haven't defined the term, so I am left with the impression that this is the old dead beaten horse of "role-playing vs. roll-playing", that somehow there are "mature games" and well, others, for the "immature gamers", which is, well, elitist crap, in my humble opinion. Here's hoping that's not what you meant.

Second, if I define your "true role-playing" as being an insistence on the character and the immersion into the game-world as opposed to the gamist/tactical aspects of the game, the first system to actually support this was OD&D (1974), particularly through Supplement II: Blackmoor, by Dave Arneson.

Then again, for me the whole argument doesn't have a point, since it is based on the false premise that there is such as thing as "role-playing vs. roll-playing".

 

[Mikko Leho]

In Runequest, even a "low level" character can high a high Dodge skill, hero points, and a good Resilience roll to avoid dying from a powerful hit. Unfortunately, in MRQ a weapon still does minimum damage even after a successful Dodge, so your RQ hero is likely to get pummelled.

Actually this is not the case after the Player's Update. A successful dodge roll is going to degrade a successful attack roll into failure if the former is higher than the latter. This with fact that one adds skill percents over 100 to rolls make highly skilled dodgers very difficult to hit by lower skilled attackers.

 

[Rasta]

Kagan Altar wrote

Then again, for me the whole argument doesn't have a point, since it is based on the false premise that there is such as thing as "role-playing vs. roll-playing".

My thoughts exactly. Other then entertainment purposes. :lol:

 

[AKAramis]

I do feel that there is a distintion between Role-play and roll-play. The latter is merely a character scale wargame. The former is in character narrative and improvisational acting.

A good game is in the middle of the two.

 

[Twigman]

In Runequest, even a "low level" character can high a high Dodge skill, hero points, and a good Resilience roll to avoid dying from a powerful hit. Unfortunately, in MRQ a weapon still does minimum damage even after a successful Dodge, so your RQ hero is likely to get pummelled.

Actually this is not the case after the Player's Update. A successful dodge roll is going to degrade a successful attack roll into failure if the former is higher than the latter. This with fact that one adds skill percents over 100 to rolls make highly skilled dodgers very difficult to hit by lower skilled attackers.

Unless of course the Dodger criticals his dodge against the powerful hit, then he will get pummeled.

 

[Kagan Altar]

I do feel that there is a distintion between Role-play and roll-play. The latter is merely a character scale wargame. The former is in character narrative and improvisational acting.

Just like with the "true role-playing" expression, I do feel that "role-play" and "roll-play" are terms which mean widely different things for different gamers. Hence, these terms are IMO useless when we try to compare them.

When saying "role-play vs. roll-play" I understand "playing to be someone else against rolling dice". Where I'm saying this is a fallacy, I am not saying that, as a designer, you can't make a difference between elements of the game which are acting and immersive behaviour on one hand, and tactical, mathematical concepts on the other. You can make such distinctions, obviously.

Where I think it is a fallacy is that there is no such thing as role-play VERSUS roll-play. The rules of a role-playing game are not the opposite of immersion and acting. These are different elements of a game which, in the best of conditions, support and intensify the pleasure each other gives to the players.

What I am saying in clear is that tactical situations in the game and rolling dice are not opposite to immersive role-playing.

You can do both at the same time. You can have Shakespearian dilemnas right in the middle of a Dungeon exploration, if you and your gaming buddies want to. Sure, you can prefer one to the other. That doesn't mean that these elements of the game have to be opposed to one another in and by themselves on a conceptual level.

Further, the notion that a game system impacts the type of role-playing going on around the game table is highly debatable. As examples, Champions is a the wet dream of guys who love crunching numbers. I know of some groups (like the designers of the game, for instance), who actually were role-playing high drama with Champions. In the opposite camp, I guess the World of Darkness rules are recognized as "supporting role-playing immersion" - I can't tell you how many number-crunching, optimizing min-maxers I've seen playing WoD games. Ergo, the actual impact of a game system on the type and intensity of role-playing immersion going on at the game table is way overrated, to not say a pure marketing illusion.

What really matters IMO is what the GM and players are looking for at the game table. What type of entertainment do they want? What will provide the most fun for them? When these demands in terms of entertainment are understood by the GM and players, they can reach a compromise that satisfies everyone's needs. For me, the amount of role-playing has little to do with the rules being played in fact. It has way more to do with GM and Players' expectations regarding the game being played, and it's thus more about them than the rules they use.

I hope this is clear. :?

 

[Nickbergquist]

The real difference between the two systems is that even though a RQ Rune Level will easily turn any amount of zombies into mincemeat (well, mince-preserved-meat, to be precise), there is still a chance that a very lucky blow can knock him down, so the hero, in this case, must use some tactics to ensure against bad luck.

Actually this is not true under MRQ. In MRQ a critical does maximum weapon damage and does not bypass armour. Taking the equivalent of "level 1 zombie" in MRQ from the rulebook it does 1d3+1d4 unarmed damage. Assuming 1 rune level warrior type with the usual armour and protection then you're looking at at least 8 points of protection and there is no way for a zombie to do enough damage to penetrate armour. 1 Rune Level hero against 100 zombies will take roughly 100 combat actions in order to chop off enough heads. Most danger he's in is from fumbling and stabbing himself in the eye.

Do the zombies have an answer? Not really.
You could allow them to make precise attacks to bypass armour but at that point, the idea of a zombie precisely measuring it's unarmed attack is rather ludicrous.

You could do grappling. Eventually enough zombies will stick and you hit stalemate because they can't bite through the protection.

I don't know D&D but I assume that any zombie still has a 1/20 chance of hitting and doing some minor damage. If so, A D&D hero is likely to take proportionately more damage. (This is not calculating in any sort of magic that prevents all damage from undead).

Now don't get me wrong; I've been playing RQ since 1982 and have played d&D twice and didn't really enjoy it. I think what RQ has is an ethos that has been fostered through the publications that encourages players to take combat seriously in a way that D&D never used to you. As far as I know the various d20 systems can be tuned but I do find a certain elegance in RQ that appeals to me.

I would assume the zombies would attack the armor and tear it off. Large mobs can tear apart a car (flip it over, pry it open) in the real world so I'd say zombies could open up plate armor.

No rules that I could find cover this situation exactly so the GM would have to extrapolate from existing rules. I'd think plate armor wouldn't get full AP against a mob attack while the wearer is prone because the mob could pry at joints and straps not normally vulnerable to a normal attack.

Page 49 in Runequest main and page 80 in Hawkmoon covers this. Hawkmoon elaborates, changing it from the text of Runequest to specify armor in general. And actually I could easily see a zombie going for a precise attack, trying to bite the bits of chewy filling exposed at joints inside the hard outer shell..... :twisted:

 

[Mikko Leho]

Unless of course the Dodger criticals his dodge against the powerful hit, then he will get pummeled.

I am sorry I am not following you. Degradation happens only when the contesters roll both the same success level. So if a dodger rolls critical and an attacker scores normal success then the attack fails even if the attacker's roll was greater.