Baulderstone

On 8/16/2016 at 8:55 PM, Questbird said:

I agree that real hacking occurs over a longer period. The TV show Mr Robot is a good example for the modern world or near future, although we are talking about cyberspace hackers here. It's notable that the main character of that show, despite being socially awkward, paranoid and at times delusional, also has excellent observational skills and insight into character. Remember that the biggest security vulnerability in any organisation (now or in the future) is 'Layer 8' -- the people. People who forget passwords or use silly ones related to their childrens' birthdays; people who are venal and easily bribed, coerced or seduced. People whose online activities, bank accounts, daily habits, stock holdings, medical records, addresses and contact details are readily available to the determined (or these days, even the lazy) hacker, today and in the future. People who also may also hold various levels of access to your real target.

So for hackers, I guess this could still be a fun game, of research, clues and subtle infiltration. In game terms it still leaves the meatspace players out in the cold. Hacking and real-world action are still out of sync. The experts in each field cannot really help each other at the same time. There can be teamwork, but not exactly fun teamwork in the context of an RPG. The two team approach might work, not sure. The risk might be dilution of roleplaying of both characters.

I remember that GURPS Cyberpunk emphasized the value of "social engineering" and dumpster diving in hacking. It is a good way to add variety to what could otherwise just be a series of dice rolls while using a computer. 

3 hours ago, g33k said:

I HOWEVER, the time needed to get really good at "hacking" IMHO precludes most people from being really good at most physical conflicts.  Someone who has a reasonable shot at penetrating a firewall and evading malware-detection will VERY rarely also have a reasonable shot at silently eliminating an alert guard.  An entire TEAM of people with dual specializations in cyber and physical realms of conflict honestly breaks my "suspension of disbelief" even worse than magic does... or realtime-hacking.

We are talking about a genre where people plug skills into the their brains like software. I think it is reasonable for cyberpunk characters to an "unrealistic" base of skills to draw upon. 

54 minutes ago, Questbird said:

This was often the problem in our shadowrun and cyberpunk games. Hackers were useless in meatspace and powerful in cyberspace. Other characters were the reverse. Each group were bored when the game was operating in the space where they were powerless. An analogy for fantasy games is 'spirit combat', except that shamans tend to have a few useful 'real-world' skills as well.

I've come to the conclusion that hacking rules need to be simple and abstracted. Having a hacker play a whole long scene in cyberspace while they sit and watch is never fun. You can always try to cut back forth between the hacker and the party, but that is iffy. If the pacing works perfectly, it's great, but you can't guarantee it will line up well without railroading. 

This issue of hackers sucking outside of cyberspace doesn't need to be an issue in BRP. You aren't playing a class, so you can easily be good at shooting people as well.

Without classes, there isn't any reason you couldn't have everyone be of some degree of use in cyberspace as well. If it is important to have full, detailed scenes in cyberspace, have a variety of niches players can fill, just like in physical combat. Someone is good at infiltrating networks. Another guy is good at shutting down security bots and/or rival users that are opposing them. Someone else is good at whipping up scripts to make infiltrated systems do what they want. Then you have someone on defense, blocking counter attacks aimed at the PCs system. 

There is no real reason why everyone can't have something to do in both the real world and cyberspace. 

18 hours ago, TrippyHippy said:

Personally, I think many of the tropes of Cyberpunk evolved from A Clockwork Orange. One can also cite things like Cronenberg's Videodrome. Bladerunner is also sometimes referred to as the definitive cyberpunk movie, but of course it's based on Phillip K Dick's novel from the 60s. The Matrix was apparently referenced in a 1970s episode of Doctor Who. Judge Dredd had been around in 2000AD comics since 1977.

I'm not arguing that Gibson's work was not influential, but he's more of a nexus point of different influences coming together - which then inspired a genre fad to follow.

 

12 hours ago, steamcraft said:

The Blade Runner movie was from the 1982.  Gibson was actually worried about that when it came out because he thought people would think he was copying that world's look.  However, the look is because of the director. 

Interestingly, when William Gibson and Ridley Scott met, they talked about how they were both largely drawing visual inspiration from Metal Hurlant (Heavy Metal) Magazine, particularly Moebius' work. 

It should be mentioned that the short stories "Johnny Mnemonic" and "Burning Chrome" by GIbson were written before him seeing Blade Runner. "Johnny Mnemonic" came out a year earlier, and "Burning Chrome" was published earlier in the month that "Blade Runner" was released. Both stories are set in the same world as Neuromancer and even feature some of the same characters. They are truly cyberpunk. Cyber-enhanced assassins, cyberspace runs, its all there. 

I had the good fortune to get some time talking to Gibson and Sterling when they were on a signing tour for The Difference Engine. There was a huge snowstorm, and I was one of the only people that showed up at the bookstore for a signing. Gibson was very forthcoming about his influences. One big influence I haven't seen mentioned here is Alfred Bester. Bester's novels aren't cyberpunk, but you can easily see how GIbson was influenced by them. 

The one that he really emphasized was Thomas Pynchon. At eighteen, I hadn't even heard of him at the time. Fortunately, we were talking in a bookstore, so I was able grab a copies of <i>Gravity's Rainbow</i> and <i>The Crying of Lot 49</i>. I struggled with them at first, but once I got into them, they both became favorites of mine. 

Interestingly, Gibson was completely uninterested in Philip K. Dick. I can believe it. Though they touch on similar themes at times, they are very different writers. 

As for Blade Runner, aside from its look, I don't really consider it to be cyberpunk. The book was closer to being cyberpunk, yet it wasn't either. While Blade Runner is a great movie, once you get past the look of it, it's a very traditional science-fiction story. There isn't much to the story that wasn't already addressed in the the 1920 play RUR, which gave us the term "robot". The book is a lot more complex. 

12 hours ago, steamcraft said:

 

The film is very different than the short story it is based on.  The concepts in the Matrix may have existed before, but not in cyberpunk form.

Well, there is is that whole part in Neuronmancer where Case is trapped in a false virtual world by an AI.

12 hours ago, steamcraft said:

 

This isn't to say that people are not influenced by other people.  Often people are pulling together concepts from different areas and then merging them together.  It then becomes something greater than the sum of its parts.  Further, people look for a definitive example of something to serve as the model.  Gibson's work did that, and then others followed.  It is possible that one of those other writers would have put out a book even without Gibson. 

In fact, the lack of having something definitive to point to can create problems.  IBM forecast that steampunk would be a 20+ year trend.  While I can see elements of steampunk design in many different media, there is really nothing that screams steampunk.  Steampunk, to an extent, it on its way out.  It was at its peak and now has retreated.  It likely will not be coming back.  The reason it did not take off as much as IBM had forcasted is because other than a general aesthetic, there is nothing definitive to crystallize and serve as a defining media.  There is no TV show or move that has come out in the past few years to point to.  While there is steampunk 'music' the only steampunk thing about it is their look - and not even all of them.  Book publishers have used the term steampunk to refer to a wide variety of different books, making it difficult to define by example. 

So steampunk has a slap a gear on it and call it streampunk definition.  That wasn't enough. 

1 hour ago, TrippyHippy said:

Why do you not consider Judge Dredd to be cyberpunk? Pretty much all the tropes - high tech, low life - are the same, it's just the comic strip is a bit more, well, comic-strip like. You'll note that Ridley Scott worked in close consultation with Phillip K. Dick on the Bladerunner film before he died shortly after. In interviews, Dick said that this was precisely the image he had in mind. The film is different in plot to the book, but the dystopian imagery isn't. The concepts of the Matrix were largely dictated by the technology of the time. Cronenberg's Videodrome made satire about the 'video nasty' phenomena of the time, but he was still exploring the nature of neural pathways in his own way. 

1 hour ago, Vile said:

I think cyberpunk tends to be conflated with any near-future dystopian science fiction, which is misleading. To my mind the cyberspace aspect is a defining element, which is not present in Blade Runner (although it was, to some extent, central to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), Judge Dredd, Akira, or the like. It's also the aspect most difficult to capture in a tabletop RPG, where at best you tended to get a situation where adventures wer split into real-world and cyberspace elements, with each of the characters taking part in one but not the other.

One thing that makes cyberpunk hard to define is the line some fans have put up between cyberpunk and transhumanist science fiction, which is a division that the original cyberpunk authors seem to have ignored. Sterling's early cyberpunk work included the Shaper/Mechanist stories, where mankind has split between factions evolving themselves by either cybernetic or genetic engineering. 

On the whole, the authors that were labeled as cyberpunk early on had a less limited view of what cyberpunk was than gamers did later on. Most gamers I have met have never really read much in the way of stories by Gibson, Sterling or John Shirley. They are working purely from RPGs that came later. Of course, an RPG needs to more specific to model a particular setting rather than a whole literary movement. 

But, none of this is really helpful to rsanford, so let me get back to the point. Think CP2020 is probably a good choice. I owned the original edition just called Cyberpunk, which was set in 2013. It's on the over-the-top end of the cyberpunk genre, but that isn't a bad thing at all for an RPG. I also like the various GURPS Cyberpunk books as well. They had a very good grasp of the genre. They also have the notoriety of causing the Secret Service to raid Steve Jackson Games. 

I never really cared for Shadowrun. I only bought books for it during first edition, then gave up on it. It's built tightly around the concept of freelance teams doing dirty work for corporations. At the end of each job, their corporate patron screws them over. The book actually said to always do this, and every adventure I bought for it adhered to this model. 

A larger problem I had with it was that mixing magic and cyberpunk seemed like a colossal case of not getting it. Magic in Shadowrun involves the Astral Plane, and is kind of a parallel the Matrix, Shadowrun's version of cyberspace.  

My issue here is that, going back to Gibson, he was clearly already playing with magical symbolism. He called his first novel Neuromancer. The rogue AI's in the sprawl series act like voodoo loa at times. There is a feeling of spiritual yearning attached to characters interaction with technology. Rather than explore the technology as magic vibe, they throw them both in the same setting, completely undermining the almost mystical feel of technology in cyberpunk. In cyberpunk, cyberware and cyberspace are a way the people in a dingy world try and aspire to existing on a higher place. It's like a kind of magic. In Shadowrun, cyberware inhibits your ability to use magic. 

On 8/9/2016 at 6:08 AM, Mankcam said:

Most players I know just refer to it as 'The RuneQuest System' or 'The Cthulhu System'. Occasionally I have seen it referred to as 'The Chaosium System' and sometimes just 'The D100 System'. Despite all it's years of existence, the name 'BRP'  is not on the tips of many gamers tongues, even if product titles like RuneQuest and Call Of Cthulhu are widely known.

It was always 'The Chaosium System' to my group back in the '80s, perhaps because the other company house system we knew was 'The Palladium System'. 

My first three RPGs were all TSR: D&D, Gamma World, and Star Frontiers. All three had a unique system, so the concept of a house system wasn't something I automatically expected. It was boxed set era too, so you couldn't just browse through the book and notice it. The fact that Stormbringer, Runequest, Call of Cthulhu and Ringworld were all "the same game" was a slow reveal to us. Palladium never did boxed sets, so it was immediately clear they were all the same system, if no other reason that all portions literally copied and pasted from one another.

I honestly can't recall ever seeing the BRP name. Maybe I came across it, but it was just too generic to register as an actual brand.

"What are you playing?"

"Basic Roleplaying."

"Yes, I can see you are roleplaying, but what game?"

Basic Roleplaying is a flat, unexciting name, but it isn't actively bad. I think trying to rebrand would do more harm than good at this point. Ultimately, it's continued success is going to depend on the game released using the system. Focusing on the system as a brand too much might have held BRP back, as it might have encourage more out-of-the box compatibility instead of bending the system to each game. 

11 hours ago, steamcraft said:

I would not say that D20 is American.  I think it was a poorly thought out attempt to bring D&D play style to other genres.  It basically failed and IMO has hurt D&D because it allowed Pathfinder to exist.   

BRP is a skill based system, which almost all non-fantasy RPGs are in the US.  It may be more popular in the EU than the US, but CoC is popular here.  So I am not really sure what about it would make it an EU style game. 

I think D20 is simply the result of corporate committee thinking. They made a big list of things that people wanted in D&D, and they shoved them all well, whether they fit well with the other things on the list or not.

People liked skill systems, but the class/level system was still a sacred cow to many. You got a skill system where your skill were linked to your class and could only rise so high based on your level. That added a lot of complexity to character generation for very little freedom.

People wanted more customization. People felt characters leveled too slowly. They decided to fix both these things. They added Feats, and Class Abilities and Skills, and they made space between level gain much shorter. The result was overkill for casual players with characters being saddled with too many new abilities too quickly.

Another disconnect was Prestige Classes. Adding cool specialized classes that you could move into later was a cool idea. However, it clashed with the fact that the whole system had otherwise designed to open up player choices. Prestige Classes had strict requirements for entry. You needed to pick out the Prestige Class you wanted at character generation, then every character progression choice you made was dictated by getting to that Prestige Class. The whole character generation and progression process was made a lot more complicated to give you choices, then Prestige Classes were thrown in there to trap players into strict path. Organic character growth based on events of the campaign was discouraged. 

Then there were monsters and NPCs. Someone had the idea early on to make monsters work just like PCs. Great idea! Except that idea clashed with the fact they had just made PCs incredibly more detailed and complicated. Just statting up a room full of orcs became a chore. 

Moving onto Pathfinder, obviously part of Paizo's success was based on rejection of 4E. I also think a big part of it was that they had a better understanding of how to help GMs. WotC didn't give a damn about GMs during the 3E era. They had crunched the numbers and realized that there were more players than GMs, so why bother making things for GMs? Just keep cranking out books loaded with Prestige Classes and Feats every month, not really thinking through the fact that players really only can use so many build options over the course a of a campaign. 

WotC made a half-assed effort at making a few modules early on, but otherwise didn't show a lot of interest in giving GMs things to run. This was a real issue as the 3E, as it made being a GM much harder, as NPCs were so much more complicated to build and run. 

Paizo, with it's license for Dungeon, was knocking it our of the park with its adventure paths. While WotC was making books that were jumble of new mechanics for an already complicated game, like Sandstorm, Paizo was making things that a GM could just read and use at the table with relative ease. I think that earned them a lot of goodwill with GMs that came in handy when they released Pathfinder. 

23 minutes ago, Stormwalker said:

I think it's obvious that the terms "RQ4" and "Adventures in Glorantha" are cursed, and should never be mentioned again, lest we attract the attention of the Gift-Carriers

You just mentioned them both in the same sentence! You've doomed us all!

5 hours ago, jux said:

Where was RQ5? You cannot find it if you are new to the game.

Sure, but people casually looking are usually looking for the latest, current edition, not looking for the last edition they have heard of minus one. That's a fairly contrived issue. 

26 minutes ago, styopa said:

With the plethora of material spanning 35+ years of gaming out there, I'd say it's absolutely imperative to make it as clear and simple for new players what is new material consistent with the new rules, and what will take some massaging to make work.  Those of us that have played forever can do it almost effortlessly, so I think it's easy for us to trivialize it, but for a new DM having just bought the new RQ rules, he or she stumbles on a website and sees "ah, look character sheets for "Runequest"!  Sweet, I'll download these...wait, wtf is this?  Where do the rune values go?  Why are there attack AND parry skills for each weapon?  Bleargh..."  Confusion is the BANE of the new player experience.

MOB feels it's going to be what it's going to be.  Jeff insists for a plethora of reasons it's RQ4.   Some people say it should be RQ2.5 because it's mainly (90%) RQ2.  Some people say RQ7 because it's the 7th iteration of the rules overall.

I'd say that Chaosium would be well-served to set the tone of the discussion to 'guide' general usage ahead of release, but there seems to be resistance (or skepticism) over calling it 4.

So I think we're as clear as we're going to get.  Book = Runequest.  What it's going to be referred to?  Nysalor only knows.

 

This is the best stated form of the issue so far. We live in an age where games live and die based on Internet fan support. Looking up that support on the Internet requires clear tagging and clear search terms. 

Currently, we have a situation where the book itself will simply say "Runequest", which will be the obvious term you use to search for resources. On the other hand, we already have a character sheet in the resource section here for "RQ4". What newcomer is going to connect that character sheet to the book they just bought? 

3 hours ago, g33k said:

So true!

But... RIck Meints & the MD crew...  Add the Great Old Ones' return, to a Chaosium slimmed-down enough to j-u-s-t keep continuity....   Not a combo that I want to bet against; ymmv, as may your Glorantha, of course.

I'm not going to bet against MD. I want this project to succeed. Rick Meints seems pretty capable, even if I think the naming thing is kind of ridiculous.

Mainly, I am not a fan of the idea that only people that have designed a role-playing game are qualified to have an opinion on them. I sold RPGs at the retail level for six years, so I feel fairly knowledgeable about the kind of things customers can get hung up on. 

50 minutes ago, g33k said:

But <carefully examining my resume> I find that I do not seem to EVER have successfully marketed a RPG.  Upon examining the combined credentials of the Chaosium / MoonDesign staff, I am chagrined to discover myself rhetorically paraplegic:  without a leg to stand on, if debating this topic with them.

Then again, Chaosium and Runequest aren't brands with the most spotless business history. Just sayin'.

1 hour ago, Jeff said:

We don't call this RQ7 because we find that very misleading. MRQ1, MRQ2, and DM's RQ6 share a common design thread from MRQ1, and going on to MRQ2 and DM's RQ7. The new RQ is simply not from that line of development. It stems from RQ2 (with elements of RQ3) and then moves on, but does not build off the MRQ line. Calling it RQ4 (or RQ2.5) makes that point. Calling ti RQ7 is, in our opinion, more confusing.

If you have to understand the history of a product line to understand why a name isn't confusing, then it's too confusing. 

7 hours ago, g33k said:

I will go ahead and speak up in favor of (at least some kinds of) story-telling mechanics...

Fate points?  Like in the "Fate" game system?  Frankly, I'm just not sure... I think they wouldn't be as "broken" (if imported more-or-less wholesale into BRP) as has been suggested... but, I admit to having played little-enough Fate to not be positive.  Here's how the usage might play out, in RQ/Glorantha:

• Orlanthi Player:  "Using my Blacksmith skill and a Fate Point <offers token to GM>, I'm making the Declaration that I recognize the BigBad's Tulwar as being a certain style, which if struck right will break... and *I* know the Secret Weakness, how to hit it juuuuust riiiiiight!"
• GM, case-1:  "OK... I'll take that FP!"  (the PC now has an easier time of it, in attempting to break the BBG's weapon)
• GM, case-2:  "Hmm.  That's a valid Declaration, but I have valid reasons why it's NOT gonna work.  So instead of TAKING your FP, I'm gonna GIVE you a FP, and the weapon doesn't break when you DO manage to 'hit it juuuuust riiiiiight!'   Sorry... NOT! <heh,heh>"  (but then the player not only doesn't spend that FP, s/he gets another FP, for later use!)

I just don't see that this is gonna break the BRP system, thought it does offer some "agency" and "control" and such-like sorts of player goodies.  I'm not sure if the advantages are sufficient to justify bringing it in... mileages, like Glorantha's, may vary!

Then there's stuff like Ars Magica's Virtue/Flaw system.  Some of them just grant mechanical stuff -- abilities (not otherwise available), advantages, disadvantages, etc.  Not really the BRP style (although it's an interesting mechanism if you DO want a gateway/limitation on some kinds of skills, FrEx).

I think that Fate Points (in the Fate System sense of the term) are intertwined with a Virtue/Flaw system. You need traits that are both positive and negative, which skills aren't particularly useful for. 

11 minutes ago, Zit said:

I have the feeling by reading all this that you all consider that narrativist = the players can influence the background. Is this really what narrativist means ?

If you want to understand the term "narrativism", you need to understand its context by also understanding what the terms "gamist" and "simiulationist" mean in the GNS model. Once you see how stupid the GNS model is, you will never want to use the term narrativist again. 

For a game to be gamist, there needs to be set win conditions, and there need to balance between all PCs and their opponents. Almost no RPGs fit this category. 

A narrativist game is one is which the PC have defined motives, and it is the GMs job to put those motives in conflict. If a PC is a samarai dedicated to his lord and his family, it is the GMs job to create a situation where his lord orders him to kill his son. Ron Edwards declares the purpose of this is to create situations where there can be no set narrative, as they revolve around unpredicatable choices by players. Yes. Narrativism means a game with no clear narrative. 

Simulationism is any game that emulates a genre or source. It's so enormously broad a category as to be useless. Toon and Runequest sit side-by-side in this category. In fact, almost every RPG ever made fits in this one category. It's because the only purpose of this model is to show that narrativism is the only real form of role-playing, so it dumps all other games in one meaningless category. 

As a rule, taking about story in games or narrative in games can be useful, buy once add that -ism on there, you are getting into some flawed terminology. 

44 minutes ago, jux said:

To me "narrative rules" are not story-controlling meta rules, but rules that provide more flavor.

So if 'simulation' rules are the bare-bones dry physics engine of the game, for narrative rules I consider and look forward to stuff like sanity rules, corruption, combat (we have physics like armor/hp/dmg, but there can be narrative rules like courage/cowardness, moral, combat maneuvers, etc).

I wouldn't consider any of those things to be narrative elements. A characters mental state is an actual thing within the game. Corruption is an actual thing. Combat maneuvers are actions the PC carries out. Narrative elements occur on a meta level. An example is Preparedness skill in GUMSHOE, where you can use it to pull something out of your backpack that you hadn't previously decided you had. It's a kind of tinkering on the authorial level to change the story. 

Hero Points could be seen as narrative too, granting plot immunity to the PCs for being the main characters. You can define Hero Points in a non-narrative way though. If you declare them to the favor of the gods, for example, they now represent a force acting within the game world. 

I don't think a generic modern book is needed at all. I agree it would date quickly. In any case, it's not like CoC is that detailed a system. The 1920s are still within the modern era with guns, cars and telecommunications. You can use the same basic shooting and driving rules without issue, and communications, whether by telegram or Twitter, don't really require a great deal of mechanical support. 

Call of Cthulhu is also more of an implied setting than a specific setting. While Delta Green has specific NPCs and organizations carrying out specific plans that the PCs can be involved in. Call of Cthulhu has always been much looser. It gives you rules for Lovecraftian monsters and magic, then lets you decide how to use them in the era you are playing in. If Chaosium wanted to do a modern setting book, it would need to be something along the line of Delta Green where it presented a specific campaign model. I'm not saying such a thing is absolutely needed though. It's just the only kind of modern setting book that seems interesting to me. 

As for future supplements, I'd like to see something new. I haven't gotten around to picking up 7E. It's not any form of protest. I just haven't felt motivated to at this point. Updated versions of adventures that I already have aren't going to motivate me. Something new that gets everyone excited might get me interested. 

23 minutes ago, g33k said:

My big problem with loving niche games is that I live in a low-population area; few groups play my preferred games...

That's fair enough. I mostly play by Google Hangout these days. 

11 hours ago, styopa said:

While part of me would love to see that vibrant an RQ community, I don't really want RQ to be so vanillified that everyone plays it.

Same here. I used to lament most of my favorite games languishing in the shadow of D&D, but now, I simply don't care. As long my games survive, I am fine with them remaining a niche. 

I'm not concerned about the matter. Nothing about the current design team makes me think that they looking to sacrifice flavor for maximum appeal. 

9 hours ago, g33k said:

I note that with 5e, D&D returns to the topspot.

An interesting trivium:  when I looked into the 5e PHB on Amazon, the #1 complaint was low physical quality -- spine breaking, pages falling out, etc.  My 2 closest FLGS'es deny seeing any greater 5e complaints; I wonder if the 5e market is big enough for low-quality knockoffs to be worthwhile?  I know that it is for, e.g. some textbooks...

I doubt it. RPG books are expensive, but not nearly as expensive as textbooks. Combined with the existence of a captive market for textbooks, it seems like making knock-off D&D books would involve smaller margins with less guaranteed sales. There is also the fact that 4E was a relative disappointment, meaning that 5E knock offs are not a guaranteed thing. 

Also keep in mind the volume of books that Amazon deals in vs. what your FLGS sells. If a small fraction of them are faulty, your FLGS might never even see one of the faulty books, while Amazon will sell dozens of them. 

Book of Quests would definitely be lower prep than Monster Island. I like Monster Island better, but it is a sandbox, so you need to have a decent grasp of the whole book when you start. Book of Quests contains a series of individual adventures that form an overarching plot. You only need to read the brief setting chapter, then the first adventure, and you are all set to begin. You can read each additional adventure later on as needed. 

I've run Sarinya's Curse as well, and it is a nice introduction. It's suitable for beginning characters. It's structured but still has room for a variety of approaches. It even has pregens if you just want to jump in and play, letting your players get in a session of the game before making their own characters. 

Shores of Korantia has three adventures. They can each be run alone, but they are links between them that allow them to interwoven for a more complex story. I haven't run them yet, but they look good. 

I think they need to be careful with striking a balance with any "story" mechanics that are added. They can be a divisive issue, with purists on both the "Story" and "Simulation" sides. 

There is already HeroQuest as the Glorantha RPG which takes a story-focused approach. Glorantha gamers that are allergic to story mechanics have stuck with RQ. If you put too many story elements into RQ, you could turn off a lot of fans. On the other hand, it's possible that they might bring in new players. It would be a gamble, especially as there are plenty of other BRP options around for players to flee to. 

Personally, I like both story and simulation elements depending on my mood and the group I am playing with. I'm not sure if I want them in RQ, but I might be sold on them if they were interesting enough. I'm not going to lose sleep over it, as Mythras is still around if RQ 7 doesn't win me over. 

Thanks for sharing this, Clarence. Maybe leading with the question about the issues he had with BRP might have been a misstep, but it's an interesting interview, and seems an entirely worthwhile thing to discuss here. 

27 minutes ago, Simlasa said:

Yup, Zak has the right of it.

Also, just because something IS art that doesn't make it good or a thing that I'll like. It seems like something various mediums grasp for though... like the whole discussion of whether or not video games are 'art', as if being 'art' carries some assurance of a higher level of quality and importance.

Exactly. A game session can also excel by just being good, dumb fun or being an interesting tactical exercise. Being artful is simply one way in which a session can be considered a success. 

I think an RPG session can be art at times, but usually isn't. There are some sessions I have been in where everything came together in a transcendent way and people were moved in the way that art moves people. More often, it's just a bunch of friends hanging out and having a good time. 

It's like asking if writing or painting are art. Writing can be <i>Hamlet</i>, but it can also be a shopping list. Painting can be The Starry Night, or it can be something you do to your living room wall to cover up the marks the kids have made all over it. 

I agree with Vorax that Zak S. has the best answer there. 

I think people tend to overstate the '70s as the hangover from the 60s. The popular image of the 60s really doesn't get started until the very end of the 60s, and continues on for a long time into the 70s. The world-changing optimistic vibe didn't just disappear with Watergate. That's not to say there wasn't a lot of cynicism in the 70s, but it just co-existed alongside people who were deeply into finding themselves with crystal power or self-help books. You've also got the wave of patriotism around the bicentennial as well. Even Watergate, with Nixon resigning in disgrace is seen as a victory by a lot of people. 

Why do you want to dwell on positivity in a horror game? I think you can get the most mileage out of the 70s if you make sure to hit both the optimistic and cynical sides of the 70s to give it complexity. Portraying the 70s as an era already best by cynicism isn't as fun as having hope turn to cynicism over the course of your campaign.  New Age peaceniks seeking enlightenment from ancient wisdom and confronting the stark horror of the Lovecraftian universe, to give one obvious way. 

1 hour ago, smiorgan said:

A bit on a tangent on these designer notes...

WHO does not love Jar-Eel the Razoress? 

http://www.chaosium.com/blog/designing-the-new-runequest-part-5/

 

 I certainly do love this picture. Is the other hand Harrek's? It should, given the bear claws.

 

Can we, please, have Jar-eel on the cover of the new Rune Quest?

 

 

 

 

It is Harrek. It's from a really nice two-page spread in the Guide to Glorantha.

Never mind. I just tried again, and it downloaded in less than a second. 

I've tried downloading this repeatedly both last night and today. Every time the download has failed. Is anyone else experiencing this, or is the issue on my end?