Runequest

Aww, I ment to write their

I have no experience but here is bump for OP

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>>53769377
RuneQuest is the result of people playing oldschool D&D and going "..eh, this is not how we want shit to work" and cobbled together their own game. The major difference between RQ and countless ripoffs and heartbreakers is that the people behind RQ were competent. It's a good, simmy low-fantasy game, the kind where you don't want to grow too attached to your limbs and such.

If you're the kind who wants to actually pay for pdfs, you want Chaosium and/or The Design Mechanism. if not, one of /tg/'s unsung heroes might drop an archive if the thread is spotted.
Have a no longer official RQ-starter while you're here.

>>53770040
What is It good at doing? What sort of campaing is better at this system than in any D&D edition?

>>53770343
It does the Glorantha-setting better, as it was tailormade to it. Besides that, it doesn't force you to wring setting concepts into classes and levels, and has much less "big damn hero"-vibes than D&D with dangerous combats and consequenses that can haunt you.
If you want to run a historical game or a grim and gritty GoT-type game, RQ works. If you want your game to be balls out power fantasy instead of running on a baseline human powerlevel, it doesn't work so well.

>>53769377
It's a good system, and was the original basis for both Stormbringer and Call of Cthulhu rpgs.

>>53770040
This doesn't look too bad. Now, just to be sure, this is the same setting that King of Dragon Pass takes place in, right?

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>>53771791
Yes and no. RQ goes hand in hand with Glorantha, where you find, among other things, Dragon Pass. The RQE-pdf is mainly system with an sprinkle of worldbuilding tips attached. The parent game - RQ 6 - is setting neutral, and was lost in licencing deals before they could get their Glorantha books out. It keeps chugging along under the new name of Mythras, but is officially completely uncoupled from Glorantha.
The original RQ-greybeards are releasing a new edition soon filled with ducks, chaos, cow rustlers, weird gods, flat earthers and giant bats.

>>53770825
>GoT-type game

Any social mechanics besides "roll your skill"?

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>>53772403
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.

>>53770040
>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.

>>53770825
>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.)

>>53772807
>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?

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>>53769377
I too am interested in this system OP. Has anyone played Apple Lane? It was the introductory adventure in the 2nd ed. box.

>>53772807
>>53772855
Dammit Wayne! Take your pills and go to bed!

>>53772865
Seconded.

Is this some OSR meme ?

>>53772865
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.

>>53772925
NEVER!
It's 7:30 PM, Jeff

>>53773062
Sometimes you just want D&D with house rules.

>>53773062
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.

>>53773062
Guess that makes sense. I just have no interest in being a murderhobo I guess.

>>53773062
Sounds to me more like a GM not having any imagination.

>>53773062
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.

>>53769377
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.

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>>53774179
>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.

>>53772909
Oh yes!
Gringle's pawnshop...
Baboons...

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>>53769377
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.

>>53776811
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...

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>>53777487
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.

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>>53776811
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.

>>53778259
>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.

>>53782037
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.

>>53782037
Can you give us any specifics why you enjoy it over your previous systems (and what those are)?

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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.