Why do you play runequest ?

[The Greek]

I have enjoyed Runequest for a long, long time (My first ed boxed set still sits on my shelf in a somewhat battered condition...).

My reasons for doing so are varied but generally they include

Flexibility for characters - the %age system in skills that everyone can use.

A more logical and deadly combat system (no "Oh look, 100 Kobolds.
Wait here lads, I'll be back in just a jiffy whilst I give them a good bosh, tally-ho!").

Magic being not the preserve of a few individuals but anyone (makes more sense this, IMO), but some can get really good at it.

For Glorantha:

Trolls. Loved them, the ultimate monster race.

Weird Chaos things that everyone hates and fears. Especially fears......

Weird chaos things that seem as if they have come from the imagination of someone on some seriously mind altering substances.....

Cults and religions that mean something other than the generic 'Oh great one please provide me with healing spells for my not so devout (in fact they probably worship somebody else or no one at all) companions so they can continue to pound the living snot out of (fill in blank)'.

Having a real big bad that you can only hamper (the Lunars....boo hiss...)

The ransom thing.

Morocanths and their herdmen....ew! Intelligent tapirs running around herding unintelligent humans.

Gonn Orta's obsession with ducks. Having been around gamers for a LONG time I can empathise.....

I will probably add this and edit my post as I think of more things I like about RQ........

 

[TRose]

I like the fact any encounter canbe dangerous and forces players to think.
In D& for example a party of 4 mid level char meet 6 goblins, 3 of them canstop for a quick snack while 1 deals with the goblins. In Rq 4 Rune Levels meet 6 Trollkins and the players have to think about what they are going to do
An advatage to the above is that players often think befor they act and even avoid fights if they can at times. The above r
Rune levels might try to bluff, bribe or otherwise deal with the trollkins in a method besides combat.Which is better role playing then just kill it and loot it.
Things are not as black and white as in most games. In most games the bad guys do nothing but kill ,murder and torture puppies. In RQ Glorantha at least many times the so called "bad Guys" have their own way of looking at thing but are not just evil cannon fodeer.Trolls have their own culture and can be loyal friend s .And even as enemies trolls can love, be generous and honorable. Even a Zorak Zorani Berserker can be a loving father to at least his dark troll children

 

[fruitsoftheforest]

As has been said - character creation. There's a real sense of development from rolling the stats to moving through previous experience before play even starts. You spend 20 minutes or so growing into the character.

Realism is clearly the wrong term to describe a fantasy RPG but there's a logical coherence to the way things happen - even if the things that happen are magical/illogical.

Also - I remember friends who had AD&D - the books smelt of vomit. RQ books have never smelt of vomit.

 

[Voriof]

As has been said - character creation. There's a real sense of development from rolling the stats to moving through previous experience before play even starts. You spend 20 minutes or so growing into the character.

...without dying. That's important to anyone who ever played Black Book Traveller.

Jeff

 

[Quire]

Also - I remember friends who had AD&D - the books smelt of vomit.

Bloody hell, yes, they did, didn't they? I'd completely forgotten that. How bizarre.

- Q

 

[weasel_fierce]

...without dying. That's important to anyone who ever played Black Book Traveller.

Jeff

At least the game provided a way of getting rid of characters with poor stats. Join the scouts!

 

[Voriof]

...without dying. That's important to anyone who ever played Black Book Traveller.

Jeff

At least the game provided a way of getting rid of characters with poor stats. Join the scouts!

Or become a Belter. That 8+ survival roll on 2d6 was always fierce. But you got a cool ship if you survived long enough.

Hmm. An MRQ adaptation of some sort of gritty space opera might work. Something Firefly-esque, perhaps...

Oh, and I've been playing RQ/BRP since 1981, usually in Glorantha.

Fake map from Treasure Trove Hubri: 100 L. Genuine dragonbone Klanth: 2000 L. Getting to write about Glorantha? Priceless.

Jeff

 

[ShawnG]

I will preface this by saying that I haven't played Runequest, but I wish I could. It has the distinction of being the game that I have spent the most money on, despite never playing.

The reason I like runequest is that in its soul it is not a medieval game. Iy has an ancient bronze age myhological mojo that is hard to beat. I like the fact that Glorantha has a "mythology as fact" basis, and I like that it forces you to have that same mindset, and doesn't just slap modern morality and thinking on a pseudo-medieval world and call it a day, It has some depth to it.

I would like to actually play it one of these days though, anybody know of any decent RQ PbP games out there?

 

[Yoda300]

I played RQ because of Glorantha.
At one time, I would have said it was the sole and enough reason. Then came Heroquest.
I could not manage to immerse myself in character with Heroquest. There was not enough parameters in the system (that is, AP is the sole parameter) and the broadness of keywords doesn't picture precisely what your character is able to do. With RQ, it comes intuitively and easily. MRQ has revived my interest for Glorantha.

 

[tkdmitch]

As has been said - character creation. There's a real sense of development from rolling the stats to moving through previous experience before play even starts. You spend 20 minutes or so growing into the character.

...without dying. That's important to anyone who ever played Black Book Traveller.

Jeff

Could be worse, you could play Space Opera.

I say "Play" but I mean "generate a character"; it took so long nobody ever got to actually play the game.

To echo earlier posts, I play RuneQuest because it doesn't feel like I'm actually playing a system most of the time, it's more that we're interacting with a rich background. On the few occasions the system intrudes, it's fun and reasonably realistic to try and turn it to your advantage. I used to write long and detailed D&D scenarios with lots of room desriptions. Then I wrote short outlines of RQ situations and enjoyed watching players freeflow around and beyond them.

Mitch

 

[ninthcouncil]

There's two aspects to RQ that need to be disentangled for me to answer this question- setting and system.

In terms of setting, Glorantha remains both one of the richest of FRPG backgrounds and one of the most distinctive; most FRPG's boil down to an attempt to reproduce some mixture of Tolkien, Howard and Vance - fiction, as opposed to myth. The Gloranthan sensibility is rather different and gives the game a whole flavour of its own, which isn't to everyone's tastes, but is to mine.

As far as the system goes, I'll answer this from the perspective of 1982. At that time, I'd tired of D&D, and was playing mainly Traveller. When I encountered RQ, quite apart from having a wonderful setting, it had a rule system which was, though not without its quirks, based on a unified, comprehensible mechanic and divorced from the increasingly unsustainable straightjacket of D&D classes. It was a situation which D&D wasn't even able to flirt with for nearly two decades. Furthermore, the way magic worked was entirely different

That situation has, I think, changed slightly. Core D&D still encourages a "Kill, steal, level" mentality which suppresses story telling in favour of the accumulation of mechanical advantages. Nevertheless, the newly rationalised d20 mechanic is, via the magic of OGL, available for modification, and it is much more possible to get somewhere with it that I want to go. Conversely, I'm less fond of the roll-under percentile mechanic of BRP than I once was (though it works well enough in a game like Call of Cthulhu, where attainment of high skill levels with a long-lived character is in some ways antithetical to the setting). I know that MRQ has made clear attempts to overcome the scaling problems, but I'm not 100% sure they've succeeded. I'd actually have been happier with a more radical reimagining of the system.

Sharp intake of breath from all around, as you see where this is leading... In short, I'm likely, when I get a Glorantha game moving in the New Year, to be running it with a slightly house-ruled version of Malhavoc's Iron Heroes d20 rules set. This is intended to retool d20 so that characters are less defined by their equipment than by their abilities, and to allow a more cinematic style of play, which is in the direction I want to be going. MRQ magic will be bolted on in place of IH's rather ropey system; I've been experimenting with this over the last couple of weeks and I've been quite pleased with the results, though it has yet to be tested in anger. I'm furthermore looking to expand the critical hit system into such RQ-friendly areas as limb loss and to make it possible, in the favoured example, for a lucky trollkin to take down an unlucky Runelord by skewering him in the eye with a sharpened stick.

Cheers, and don't flame me too hard - I've left the fire-retardant suit at college in case I get collared by Islamists... :wink:

 

[weasel_fierce]

Naw, no flames. To me, personally, there's not a single element in D20, that would make me use it over RQ (or just about any version of BRP), but thats me

If you get a good game going, then obviously your choice was the right one for you and yours.

 

[Enpeze]

Great, after several decades we finally see 12th level duck/halfelf ranger-wizards with a a +3/+5 longbow. Must have been a lot of work to convert the rules.

 

[Blackyinkin]

Weird chaos things that seem as if they have come from the imagination of someone on some seriously mind altering substances.....

So you have met the old Chaosium crew I take it then? Sandy Petersen and Ken Rolston don't need the substances, trust me...(Laughs out loud and runs away)

Simon

 

[ninthcouncil]

duck/halfelf ranger-wizards with a a +3/+5 longbow.

Wrong on all counts, I'm pleased to say. Iron Heroes has a competely different class set, tends to emphasise skills rather than magic, and has no racial mechanics.

Must have been a lot of work to convert the rules.

It's only the magic, and most of that converts without too much difficulty. The abandonment of the resistance table mechanic in favour of Persistence/Resilience/Dodge skill checks (which map very obviously to Will/Fortitude/Reflex saves in d20) makes it much easier to port across RQ magic mechanics. I won't derail the thread by going into to much detail here.