[Personal opinion not writing as site owner: if you have something to say that is genuinely a continuation of the old thread, why not continue it? But new threads are also cheap, and posts can be moved around after the fact if we have to.
Officially I don’t believe we have a policy.]
@MichaelCule has been muttering darkly about key stuff that seems not to be in the new RQ. For me it’s always been one of those settings like Tékumel where there’s just too much stuff to grok. (Why don’t I feel this way about Traveller, where similarly there have been decades of material published in obscure fanzines? Jolly good question.)
I agree I have always felt that there was too much to grok (and I feel the same as you about Traveller - I have run that lots). But I think this version just makes it so attractive and bite size. We’ll see if I get the opportunity!
I think Glorantha is an amazing achievement as a setting (even if much of it will never come up). But IIRC there’s multiple RPG systems that you can run it in and one of them was very trad and punishing and sounded awful to actually play, and I could swear that was Runequest. I’d rather do the one Robin Laws designed, which I think at one point was called either Hero Quest or Heroquest and now is probably something else to avoid multiple points of confusion because jesus. (Nota bene, I have neither played nor read either and so my perspective is heavily influenced by Robin Laws’s podcast Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff. And he’s a bit biased.) There’s also a 13th Age version. And honestly, there’s so much setting info that you could probably easily enough run it with something more generic like Fate or GURPS or whatever.
I think I’m personally content with re-enacting the founding mythology via Glorantha: The Gods War, with its ridiculously enormous translucent Orlanth mini.
I bought a Gloranthan game some years ago that I’m pretty sure was by Laws; its conventions seemed to be strongly narrativist, with a mechanic where you diced off against your opponent and the winner got to narrate how the combat went, and the same mechanic was used for physical blows, social cutting, and riddle contests. I couldn’t see running it and I eventually just disposed of it. I’ve fairly consistently had that reaction to Laws’s work; for example, a friend lent me Feng Shui and I recoiled from the mere thought of having anything to do with it, largely because the “world” was so transparently no more than a sound stage where characters could get into fights.
I’m currently running a low-keyed RuneQuest II campaign for two friends here in Lawrence. I picked up the hardback printed reissue when it came out, and I consider it one of the great classics of rpgs. It has its flaws, but for me it’s really the starting point of post-Old School gaming.
We have our points of disagreement, but I’m in accord with you here. Nothing wrong with a universal resolution mechanic but I like to have some more detail of how things went than “you won, he lost, make up the way it went”. His later DramaSystem makes this even more explicit: to over-simplify, every narrative is a series of scenes, every scene consists of a conflict in which someone wants something from someone else, you decide who wins and then you play out the scene with that in mind.
If you want a game where the writeup looks like a TV episode synopsis, it probably works quite well.
It is possible to play a game like that. I’ve run a campaign using Amber Diceless, which really has only one mechanic: compare stat A with stat B and whoever has the higher stat wins. On the other hand, there are four different stats, which means the method of winning is somewhat more specified: “I defeat your Warfare with my higher Warfare” is different from “I close with you and use my Strength to defeat your Warfare” or “I meet your gaze and use my Psyche to make your Warfare irrelevant.”
On the other hand, the demand for a universal resolution mechanic can go too far. When I was working on GURPS Social Engineering, there were people who thought it ought to have a system structured like GURPS combat, with an analog of hit points that could be used up, and with a variety of maneuvers and techniques, and a move by move system for playing out social “combat.” And I thought that was totally inappropriate for a variety of reasons, not least of them being that it was more abstract than the existing system, taking social interaction further away from actual dialogue and gesture and the like. It also would have involved just dumping the existing system of reaction rolls and Influence rolls over the side, and I wanted to explore the capabilities of that system in more depth.
I’d also say that it treated social interaction in the terms you mention in your last sentence, as a series of conflicts. And I don’t think social interaction is inherently about conflict. That model can be seen, for example, in the sort of men who go in for formalized martial-arts-like systems of pursuing women where you are supposed to repeatedly degrade the woman’s self-esteem till she surrenders to you, and I think that’s a pathological model and shouldn’t be the built-in assumption of RPG rules. A lot of social interaction involves looking for common ground, and I wanted rules that could represent that too. And Influence rolls CAN represent that, if you take higher Will as representing “this person has a very clear sense of their values and goals” rather than just “this person is too stubborn to be overawed or intimidated.”
There’s more even to drama than scenes of conflict.
Oh my goodness, War of the Ring. Who knows when I bought it? Well, I know where I lived when I bought it, so sometime in the 2003-2005 range. It was a beast to hunt down the 2e upgrade kit when I was so late to the game, though a kind soul eventually gave it to me for free.
It’s still sitting there.
I don’t really have gamer friends, oddly. Everyone I play with has to be coerced at least a little bit, or their appetite is beyond sated by the end of the second hour. My dad offered to play it with me which is true love but he’s pretty worn down by the end of Samurai, so…
So it sits. It waits. I’ve got, what, another 40 years to find a player?
I have a great deal of affection for Hero Wars/HeroQuest/Questworlds. I think the unified resolution system has got a number of things right but always find that putting it into use runs into cases where it either doesn’t work very well at all (which is much of combat) or works very strangely.
As with all of Robin Laws’ designs, the system tries to focus in like a very, very focused thing on the bits of the sort of story Robin thinks is going on that Robin is really interested in telling and handwaves over what Robin thinks is not interesting, giving it no mechanical support to speak of. Sometimes this works really well but in role-gaming you are always dealing with nerds and geeks and they (we) like to say “But hang on what about…” Sometimes they have a very good point and care about things that the story should have at least glimpsed at. And sometimes they want to argue about the precise date that vanilla was introduced to Europe and delay your story until this is resolved.
What’s the state of mind Socrates is supposed to have reduced people to? The complete crogglement that comes after Socrates demonstrates that you didn’t know what you were talking about? That’s how Questworlds (as I suppose we must now call it) affects me sometimes.
But I don’t always find this a Bad Thing. The focus of FENG SHUI is recreating the action sequences of Hong Kong Kung Fu dramas and analagous Western genres. If that isn’t your idea of fun don’t pick it up.
On the whole though I do think you often (if not always) need a generic system that can suddenly shift focus from Naval Battles to High Romance to Court Intrigue and do them with characters continuing from their core genre.
And my attitude to RQ: G is: “C’est manifique but it hasn’t been properly playtested let alone proofread.” There are just too many places where the writers are assuming that what they are saying is plain and simple and it’s not. Look at the overlap between Rune Priests and Shamans in the cults of Daka Fal and Waha. Do you need to qualify as a Priest before you become a Shaman or the other way round? Is one of the qualifications waived? The developers tend to answer “It means what it says” which isn’t helpful.
But I am currently running my second RQ:G game so I can’t hate it that much. I’m also scrapping parts of the game system and rewriting others and my players are telling me that I’m not communicating as clearly as I think I am so I probably have more in common with Chaosium than I think.
I’d argue that this is true of many designs (e.g. D&D), it’s just that the bits Robin is interested in doing mechanically aren’t the same as those designs. But like, D&D has loads of rules stuff in and around combat and spotty if any support for a lot of other stuff. And for some people, that’s cool - they want the game to step in and adjudicate that because it could end badly for their characters and they want an impartial arbiter, and otherwise they’d rather just make stuff up. That’s not what I care about, so I’m more interested in Robin’s designs. But I don’t always sync with his emphases either.
Looking at my bookshelf, the fact that, whatever Marc Miller’s latest version of Traveller is, I can see a box set still sealed in plastic is bad. I have been playing a campaign of Mongoose Traveller for over a year, and it is fulfilling all my Trav needs. All those GURPS Trav supplements and random editions are just providing background information. Traveller New Era - oh how I want to play some post-apocalyptic Trav, but it’s unlikely to happen soon.
RQ6 - the friend of mine who stormed out of our Heroquest:Glorantha game is now playing this online 3 times a week, so he’s too busy to do any more and no-one else in my local gaming circle is familiar enough with it. Until someone takes the plunge and tries to run some and get people enthused, we’re never going to get there.
Hillfolk - I enjoyed this when I played it, it got me thinking “perhaps there’s other good ways of randomisation management to propel the narrative”. I can see how people who cut their teeth on 80s/early 90s RPGs would find it annoying.
