Frp Posted January 23, 2022 Share Posted January 23, 2022 (edited) On 1/20/2022 at 1:55 PM, Rick Meints said: While you are welcome to chat about any gaming related topics you wish, including dice, please start your own thread. The last comments have all wandered far away from the original topic. Sorry to have contributed to thread drift with my previous comment. My first exposure to Runequest was run by a GM that regularly massacred each and every PC, using Melee. He branched out once and ran a session of Runequest. Every PC lived and we saved our community from a dire threat. A community was built in from day one in Runequest. I'm here 40 years later. Edited January 23, 2022 by Frp 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hendrik Posted January 31, 2022 Share Posted January 31, 2022 Can't even explain what a revelation RQ was to me coming from AD&D as a ten year old in 1983. I was a tag along with my brother at a wargame (ww2, napoleonics etc) convention and some guys were kind enough to let me sit in on a 'new' game called Runequest. (It took a while for this stuff to get out back in the day and this is in New Zealand.) We played Apple Lane. All I remember is trying to demorilise a baboon and shooting an arrow at it, and that this was the best game ever. A year later I got it the rules as a present and never looked back. This thread seems to focus on the skills based aspect, which is fair enough, but it was WAY more than that. I won't even go there with the nonsensical saving throw system, a mage unable to pick up a sword to defend themselves, thief skills that are made obsolete by magic before you get them to a useful level, arbitrary lines between good and evil, monsters with(out) motives, xp for gold, magic that eclipses all else at 'high level'....oops, I'm going there! More importantly Glorantha represented a real break from the Tolkienesque tropes and opened up a compelling world integrated by its magic system, giving it an internal logic and reason to exist. It really felt like the world shaped the rules, rather than the other way around. That is the thing that makes RQ what it is, IMO. 6 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JRE Posted February 1, 2022 Share Posted February 1, 2022 As probably others, my first exposure to skill based games was Call of Cthulhu, so when I encountered RQ2 in 1984 it was already well established in my mind, so RQ was instead the game where everybody used magic, and magic really was everywhere, specially outside combat. I only started playing when I got RQ3 Gods of Glorantha. Erocomatose lucidity for the win. The plentiful CoC scenarios compared to the scarcity of RQ was the biggest advantage of CoC. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ffilz Posted February 1, 2022 Share Posted February 1, 2022 On 1/30/2022 at 9:14 PM, Hendrik said: This thread seems to focus on the skills based aspect, which is fair enough, but it was WAY more than that. I won't even go there with the nonsensical saving throw system, a mage unable to pick up a sword to defend themselves, thief skills that are made obsolete by magic before you get them to a useful level, arbitrary lines between good and evil, monsters with(out) motives, xp for gold, magic that eclipses all else at 'high level'....oops, I'm going there! More importantly Glorantha represented a real break from the Tolkienesque tropes and opened up a compelling world integrated by its magic system, giving it an internal logic and reason to exist. It really felt like the world shaped the rules, rather than the other way around. That is the thing that makes RQ what it is, IMO. 9 hours ago, JRE said: As probably others, my first exposure to skill based games was Call of Cthulhu, so when I encountered RQ2 in 1984 it was already well established in my mind, so RQ was instead the game where everybody used magic, and magic really was everywhere, specially outside combat. I only started playing when I got RQ3 Gods of Glorantha. Erocomatose lucidity for the win. These points are definitely notable, and points to the revolution not being any one thing, but the whole, though "everybody uses magic" is actually a first for RQ and is actually still pretty unique because it contrasts even to games which are all about the PCs being magic users of some form (like Ars Magica). Non-tolkien fantasy of course had already been done with Empire of the Petal Throne (which was otherwise pretty close to D&D), though RQ was only the 2nd non-European/non-Tolkienesque fantasy RPG (well, third if you want to count Bunnies & Burrows). It was also among the first or truly the first game to stat up everything the same way as PCs. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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