RQ II Character Generation

[mal]

Looking through RQ II after a long time away and I have character generation questions (I was mostly a RQ III person anyhow...).

It seems like from my reading that characters have no skills after completing character generation just their basic category bonuses plus the starting skill level. Is this right?

I mean I know you can go to the appendix and do training for previous experience, and that would be 4000 L of training in every skill offered by the apprenticeship, or the listed numbers for barbarians, militia, or mercenaries... 

But is that it? If so, all skills must be learned through experience or training during play... 

Yikes that means starting PCs can do very little! I know its the old school way, but  wow that's tough!

 

[g33k]

RQ2 defaulted VERY much to "zero to hero"
Realize that those characters were usually presumed to be 16ish years old, i.e. not even "graduated from high school" in age...!

There's a good blog post on RQ2 chargen here:
http://2ndage.blogspot.com/2016/07/runequest-classic-edition-char-gen.html

Our table's games usually presumed the whole "get extra training on Guild-credit" thing.
 

Edited September 12, 2023 by g33k

[Richard S.]

Yeah, you started out at ground 0 by default in RQ2, with only the skill your character developed as a kid. Honestly I don't think it was so bad, albeit it's been a few years since I played. Sure you had a lot of whiffs, but the ease of increasing skills by experience meant we were getting our weapons and other important skills up to around 40-50 pretty quickly.

[ffilz]

There is also cult and guild borrowing that gets you 100 L * POW (and other attributes) loans for training. That helped a little bit.

I use the previous experience in my RQ1 campaign PLUS the cult loan (which can be used for cult skills as well as cult spells).

But yea, back in the day, characters started off pretty weak. Yet we still had loads of fun...

I ran a campaign in the 90s and used RQ3 style previous experience and that worked pretty well also.

[Mark Mohrfield]

There are previous experience rules in Appendix H on pages 118-122. The apprentice rules are pretty convoluted, but the mercenary and barbarian rules, which presumably are what most PCs are interested in are fairly simple.

Edited September 14, 2023 by Mark Mohrfield

[Oldskolgmr]

Griffin Mountain tossed out another version of previous experience for young (Barbarian) Balazaring's, and (@ffilz's favorite) RQ 1st ed. had Noble as a skilled background. 

Edited September 14, 2023 by Oldskolgmr

[mal]

Thanks guys . All good points…

[g33k]

Our RQ GM really liked the whole "borrowing" schtick.

Sometimes you got in debt with kind of a rough crowd (e.g. if you want blade venom, certain kinds of stealth-skills, etc).
Sometimes you got in debt with two different groups, who maybe didn't get along with one another, and each wanted 1st dibs on loot to get paid back for your debt.

Lots of suck-the-characters-into-conflicts options!

Edited September 15, 2023 by g33k