RQ vs D&D

[Connan]

I'd like to think both systems have their merits. My first exposure to the world of RPG was basic D&D way back in 1981 and since then I've probably played about 30 different gaming systems RQ2/3, Rolemaster, C&S, Aftermath, Bushido to name a few. I've been playing 5e for the past few years with a new group and have enjoyed it. Wizards of the Coast have produced a great product and should be applauded. That said the quality of RQG core book has set a new benchmark and I can't wait to get my hands on the slip case. I'm a huge fan of Glorantha/RQ and can't wait to introduce my group to it. The issue, as I see it is not about which system is better but is which is more accessible to the inexperienced player. To give an example I have just spent the last 3 hours going through character creation with one of my group explaining the in's and out's of RQG. He enjoyed the process yet at the same time being a little daunted by the complexity and completely freaked out with the lethality of combat. Compare that to 15 minutes character creation for 5e and the likelihood of death being an outside chance at best.      

Edited March 25, 2019 by Connan

[Mechashef]

14 hours ago, Sumath said:

There aren't really any fumbles in 5E, are there? Nat 1s are an automatic failure, but that's it, unless the GM makes something up

I agree they aren’t called fumbles, and generally are just a guaranteed failure, but iirc, rolling a 1 on a death saving throw counts as two failures.

 

The DMG does have a variant rule which encourages the DM to be creative about the affects of a natural 1 or 20.

So arguably a fumble system, even if it is mostly optional.

 

 

 

[drablak]

There were criticals and fumbles in AD&D, it's not something 5E got from RQ.

[styopa]

12 hours ago, drablak said:

There were criticals and fumbles in AD&D, it's not something 5E got from RQ.

Huh?

NAFAIK....where were crits and fumbles in AD&D?

[Zozotroll]

Playing 1st d AD&D right now, no crits or fumbles.

[drablak]

25 minutes ago, styopa said:

Huh?

NAFAIK....where were crits and fumbles in AD&D?

They weren't in the core books if that's what you mean, but there were various tables in the Dragon magazines (official TSR magazine), and also in White Dwarf magazines. We've played AD&D with crits and fumbles back in the 80's.

[PhilHibbs]

1 hour ago, styopa said:

Huh?

NAFAIK....where were crits and fumbles in AD&D?

Unearthed Arcana, I think. So, not original AD&D. It could have been lifted from RuneQuest, but I don't know if it was.

[Mugen]

Rules-wise, D&D 5e is a simplified version of 3rd with bits from 4th edition and a few elements unique to this edition.

There is nothing in it that you can trace back directly to AD&D without having been altered by later versions.

Edited March 25, 2019 by Mugen

[7Tigers]

Gary Gygax was against crits and fumbles. But fans proposed them in D&D as soon as 1975:
http://playingattheworld.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-first-critical-hits.html

[The God Learner]

Critical hits are beloved but really more of a problem for player characters. Every 20 attacks on average, you will be hit by a critical. Every 200 attacks on average, you will be hit by a critical to the face. Good luck, brave adventurers.

 

[Mugen]

There's one very annoying problem with critical failures on a 1 in combat in 5e. Fighters fighting prowess in 5e essentially comes from their number of attacks per round. And the more often you attack, the more likely you are to suffer a critical failure.

[drablak]

I've never played 5e, but back in the days in AD&D we played that if you rolled '1' (I think they call that Nat1 now?), you then rolled 4D6 and if you rolled under your DEX you were ok (no fumble). With a Nat20 you had to reroll 1D20 and if that second roll was a hit (vs AC) then you had a critical. So a Nat20 was always a hit, but only a crit if your second d20 also hit.

[Bill the barbarian]

On 8/23/2018 at 2:14 AM, Crel said:

Now, I love love love the RQ3 approach to sorcery, and it's one of the things which has kept me playing the game for some years. I love this crazy, excessively-complicated tangle of skills and spells and all that, and how flexible everything is. The first time I cast a week-long spell (coming from my 3.x background) was this amazing moment for me, personally. Kind of an, "Oh %#!$, I'm doing real magic!" moment. Plus, actually mathing out all that nonsense feels a bit... arcane. 

Thank you. I thought it was just me. Loved it, loved it, loved it!

[Bill the barbarian]

On 8/23/2018 at 12:41 PM, The God Learner said:

Everyone knows you carry a Tarrasque by the scruff of its neck.

After smiting them in the nose with a newspaper?

[Bill the barbarian]

16 hours ago, Mechashef said:

The DMG does have a variant rule which encourages the DM to be creative about the affects of a natural 1 or 20.

So arguably a fumble system, even if it is mostly optional. 

Back in those days, Gygax was a little more magnanimous in sharing HIS vision with the masses (even if only in writing the right words in the DMG) and granted DMs the right to decide how to play D&D. A little later he got on a high horse and demanded that all and sundry conform to the one TRUE PATH.

Alas.

[Bill the barbarian]

Damn, I swore I would avoid this Forum... (dam, dam. dam)

[Steve3742]

5 hours ago, styopa said:

NAFAIK....where were crits and fumbles in AD&D?

I can't quote a source, but in games I was playing in in 1976-7, we had a natural 20 do double damage. I wasn't GMing the game and the GM had all sorts of stuff that was hard to get then in the UK (like the Strategic Review and issues 1-3 of the Dragon) and we all assumed (wrongly, it now seems) that he'd got it from one of those. RuneQuest wasn't around at the time so he didn't get it from there.

Of course, prior to the printing of AD&D, there were far more house rules around - the original boxed set was so incomplete as to virtually require you to make house rules in order to be able to play at all. But I played in a few games around then and pretty much everyone used the natural 20 does double damage rule.

No fumble, though - perhaps he was being nice to us.

[g33k]

I'm pretty sure crits/fumbles originated widely in fandom, and "official" publications simply formalized the notion, gave it the veneer of being "official."

To point to any particular rulebook as the "first" would be... misleading, at best.

 

[g33k]

1 hour ago, drablak said:

With a Nat20 you had to reroll 1D20 and if that second roll was a hit (vs AC) then you had a critical. So a Nat20 was always a hit, but only a crit if your second d20 also hit.

That was the HR that I used... hrm... at least as far back as 1980; possibly a year earlier?

Also the mirror on a Nat1:  always a miss, but also a Fumble if the re-rolled d20 was also a miss.

 

Furthermore, I allowed Natural 1's & 20's to "explode" -- you could keep rolling-up a 20 to get more-and-more potent Crit's, had to re-roll 1's to get worse-and-worse fumbles.  I had someone roll 4 20s in a row, once.  And a GM (to whom I taught my HR) rolled 3 20's against one of my PC's.

 

[Atgxtg]

3 hours ago, The God Learner said:

Critical hits are beloved but really more of a problem for player characters. Every 20 attacks on average, you will be hit by a critical. Every 200 attacks on average, you will be hit by a critical to the face. Good luck, brave adventurers.

 

Yes. If a PC gets a crtical hit and kills a NPC or monster it's not a problem as the NPC/Monster was expendable. But a crtical hit killing a PC means someone might have to roll up a new character. Since PCs get into fights constantly and often have to face multiple weak opponents, and their chances of their talking a critical become a case of when rather than if. 

 

18 hours ago, Mechashef said:

The DMG does have a variant rule which encourages the DM to be creative about the affects of a natural 1 or 20.

So arguably a fumble system, even if it is mostly optional.

Yeah. Back in the day,  everybody we gamed with had a double damage on a natural 20 houserule. When I say everybody, I mean that is was so prevalent, it was in effect at all the conventions. As it was explained to me when I inquired about it, a lot of monsters in the MM had special bonuses that kicked in on a roll of a natural 20. Swallow whole for instance. 

 

[tedopon]

I run 5e for a massive group of kids at the library where I work. I prefer 13th Age, DCC or pre-3rd edition, so I tend to run 5e more like a houseruled 1e than as written. They roll damage dice twice on a 20 and something bad happens on a 1. This does favor the bad guys slightly, but it also creates chaos. This is a game targeted at younger teenagers, so the insanity is part of what they enjoy...except for one kid who quit recently because "it feels more like Three Stooges than a real D&D campaign." He's a nice kid, so he wasn't trying to offend me, but I was somewhat ironically flattered by what he said. It's D&D, it's supposed to be silly a lot of the time.

[Lysus]

2 hours ago, Steve3742 said:

I can't quote a source, but in games I was playing in in 1976-7, we had a natural 20 do double damage. I wasn't GMing the game and the GM had all sorts of stuff that was hard to get then in the UK (like the Strategic Review and issues 1-3 of the Dragon) and we all assumed (wrongly, it now seems) that he'd got it from one of those. RuneQuest wasn't around at the time so he didn't get it from there.

Of course, prior to the printing of AD&D, there were far more house rules around - the original boxed set was so incomplete as to virtually require you to make house rules in order to be able to play at all. But I played in a few games around then and pretty much everyone used the natural 20 does double damage rule.

No fumble, though - perhaps he was being nice to us.

Rules for critical hits on a 20 outside of fanzines were first published in Empire of the Petal Throne. 

[Mechashef]

I have been listening to a few D&D podcasts and one thing that may surprise many people is that combat in D&D 5e often takes a similar amount of time to RQ.

The primary reason seems to be that most of the time taken in combat is not game mechanics.  Each time a character acts in D&D combat there seems to be three phases (regardless of what the rules claim and I'm sure these aren't the official names).

1. Statement of Intent (SoI)
2. Combat mechanics roll/s
3. Narrative description of the effects of the combat rolls

If anything, SoI seems to take longer in D&D.  The actions a D&D DM may allow often seem to be more extensive and convoluted than in RQ and these sometimes take a while to describe.

 

Combat mechanics in theory are much faster in D&D than in RQ.  However due to the plethora of combat options due to feats, spells and other special abilities the mechanics resolution phase can take longer than I'd expect.  Players with characters of classes they are very familiar with do resolve their turn quickly, but even experienced players seem to often refer to manuals to get the correct rules when playing classes they aren't familiar with.

 

Describing what actually happens due to an attack obviously varies from GM to GM, but it often seems to take longer than the actual dice rolling.  Descriptions such as where the successful attack hits, a visualisation of the result, and role playing the reaction of the defender all take time.

 

Added to all this is of course that once characters get up several levels and are facing opponents with significant hit points, it can take many rounds to defeat them.

 

Like many of you I have nightmare stories of RQ battles that seem to last forever in an endless cycle of countered attacks and I'm not going to claim that combat in RQ is faster than in D&D  (but then again I've heard similar stories in D&D when fighting regenerating creatures).

What I will claim is that in many cases the difference is not significant.

 

[Tigerwomble]

I'm a little late to this, and to be honest, I haven't read every post.

What struck me was the use of  'vs'. I don't think they can be pitted one against the other. Apples and oranges.

Both seek to tell stories in different ways, both of which have merit. After that it's it's purely subjective.

[boradicus]

On 8/19/2018 at 12:52 PM, Joerg said:

One thing I would handle different from when I chose RQ3 over any other game system available at the time (1988 or so) is to have a lot less but broader skills, going in the direction OpenQuest has gone from the MRQs. I get it that the way RQG is presented as almost fully backward compatible with RQ2 does carry over that multitude of skills. However, I recently revisited the game system which I played before switching to RQ, which probably noone outside of Germany has ever heard about, and I found that what originally attracted me to the system - the detailed skill system - has become a bit of a burden now that I have collected experience with much leaner sets of abilities in other systems.

Approaching RQ the same way, leaving nostalgia aside, a RQG lite based on basically skill categories, possibly slightly subdivided, with the option to take specialisations that either opportunity or personal preference create as break-out skills (much like HQ handles it) might have been a better way to attract players new to RQ.

A leaner set of skills to track with slightly higher abstraction would still create enough gritty stuff to hang on to as you take weak (or buffered) hit after hit.

I am quite pleased with the magic systems, even with sorcery for specialists, as far as Dragon Pass and Prax are concerned. I have come to doubt whether RQ magic works as well to reflect the cult practices of the Lodrili (who don't usually initiate to a single deity the way the Orlanthi do) or the Westerners. It should work well enough for henotheist Malkioni, though (and given that that's one of my main points of wrestling RQ3 rules and the setting together, this is saying something).

 

The only D&D that I have played in earnest was AD&D 1st edition and a little bit of 2nd edition. The system sucked for me for a number of reasons. No unified skill system (only the Thief class had any in 1st ed), classes, XP for gold, XP at all, levels granting endless supplies of HP, and near limitless world-shattering magic overshadowing the non-magicians after a certain level, before which the MU was nearly useless unless he directed henchmen/followers (which few DMs allowed in the environment I played D&D in). And many of these points are what people who love the game consider its strengths.

Although I have only played CoC thus far, I love Chaosium's game system.  As for the skills, what immediately occurred to me as an enhancement, would be a skill "tree" by era.  In other words, some skills are related to each other in such a way that there might be enough in common between them that they could provide some cross-over capabilities.  But in order to model this accurately and neatly, a tree would be needed, wherein more general skills serve as umbrella categories for more specialized skills.  Of course, both technology, and culture progress (or, sometimes regress) from era to era, and this would provide an opportunity to create specialized skill trees based on eras - and this could be done in the form of monographs or supplements for the particular era/world/culture in question.  

In terms of game mechanics, each monograph/supplement could detail both the chance for a more general skill to succeed at a more specialized skill, as well as how much a specialized skill might cross-contribute to a more general skill further up the trunk.  One way to model this - that would make sense - would be for each monograph/supplement to first map out a skill tree.  Then, the specialized branches of the skill tree could be categorized into tiers [e.g. Tier 1: 1920s firearms; Tier 2 1920s Handguns; Tier 2 1920s Guns w/Gunstocks, Tier 3: 1920s (Gunstocks) automatic weapons; Tier 3 1920s (Gunstocks) sharp-shooting weapons (rifles, etc); Tier 3 1920s; Tier 3 : 1920s (Gunstocks) scatter weapons (shotguns)].  Once the number of tiers for each root skill has been determined, we could then take the total number of skills from the highest tier (the most specialized tier) and this would determine how many points would be allocated to the tier below for each specialized skill learned; these points divided by the total number of points possible from the tier above (the more specialized tier) would provide the percentage for success for the tier below.  

So, what about branches that don't have as many tiers as others?  How should they be weighted?  Well, progressing from tier to tier, for each branch that is missing a tier, a general weight could be assigned by taking the average number of skills of all of the skills under the same branch at that tier.  This would then be a reasonable weight for the purpose of determining the points to be added to the branch on the tier below it (the more general skill, closer to the root skill).

Now, this could be a bit tricky during design due to the fact that cross-over can exist between skill branches with different skill roots (e.g. veterinary medicine would have some cross-over with human medicine; traditional medicine would have some cross-over with allopathic medicine, etc.).  From the supplement/monograph designer's perspective, this could be addressed through the use of a custom software program that can handle such complex ontologies, and perform all of the same calculations that I mentioned above in a multi-dimensional topology (as opposed to a 2d topology where branches from different roots have no lateral branches between them).  While this all sounds (ab initio) to be rather complex, such a software tool (even one made publicly available online) could be used by monograph/scenario designers to achieve both integration and consistency.  As for changes in the core rules from edition to edition, such a software tool could be updated (if actually need-be) at the time (or shortly after) of the release of said new editions.

Although another challenge, for such an approach, would be deciding how trees would be provide cross-compatibility from era to era (e.g., how would experience with a tommy-gun provide skill with a more modern automatic weapon?), by using such a software management tool, such challenges could also be deftly mitigated.

Any thoughts?  Any takers?  [Electronic & Software gaming tools are increasingly the wave of the future - why not incorporate tools for the designers?]

 

Edited April 18, 2019 by boradicus
corrections, grammar, etc