[RPG]: RuneQuest Deluxe, reviewed by Lev Lafayette (3/4)

[RPGnet Reviews]

http://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/13/13871.phtml

Lev Lafayette's Summary:

The three-in-one publication is a welcome compendium to the Mongoose RuneQuest line. The general game system is good but suffers from numerous, and sometimes serious, glitches. Stylistically average the book is reads well, but without flair.

Go to the full review (http://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/13/13871.phtml) for more information.

[Lars Dangly]

You don't really tell us how you think this version stacks up against the classic editions (2nd and 3rd). Which would you actually play?

[smascrns]

Great review, Lev. Now I look forward to your review of the new BRP. Of course you will do it, willn't you?

[Lev Lafayette]

Firstly, my apologies for this late reply. I've just spent the last five days travelling and attending Gencon Oz..

You don't really tell us how you think this version stacks up against the classic editions (2nd and 3rd). Which would you actually play?

As mentioned, my reviews of previous products are available on rpg.net. Overall, I would prefer to play (as I currently do) RQIII, but with a fair number of rules from MRQ, and better still with the concise writing of RQI/II.

Great review, Lev. Now I look forward to your review of the new BRP. Of course you will do it, willn't you?

Most certainly. As with this review I will have to mark myself as 'associated with the product', as I was a playtester for that as well. The BRP mailing list says that the playtester copies have been shipped, so I should see it soon.

[Tori Bergquist]

Very nice review, Lev, and as an advocate for the current MRQ (as well as someone who previously ran RQ2 and 3) I appreciate your very fair review.

I recently put my MRQ campaign on hiatus while that group tries out D&D 4E, but having run a campaign with this system over the last year I've noticed some interesting elements that surfaced in play....and was both surprised at "what actually worked, but wasn't supposed to" vs. "what I thought would be cool, but turned out to be a pain." I'll go ahead and group them in a sec.

I liked your suggestion that the current edition of Runequest lacks some of the more anthropological and mythic recognition or identification in the text of earlier editions, as I think you are essentially right; the earlier editions of Runequest read very well, in terms of conveying the ancient world and its mythic parables. It hadn't really occured to me until you mentioned it, but that is a hard-to-define trait that the older editions have and which this one, in its straight forward conciseness, lacks. Actually, a lot of RPGs are lacking that these days, I am afraid; I think that's a n unfortunate side effect of the hobby's age and the influence of fantays fiction, film and video games moving so far away from the root sources of fantasy and myth.

I'm still of the opinion that Runequest can and should be a stand-alone game, on to which Glorantha can be added. I've never run Glorantha, and never will, although it's a nice setting....I just prefer to do my own thing. So MRQ being more open to multiple settings remains a good thing for me.

The Cultural Packages deal is an interesting point of debate: I'd love to see some elucidation on how this could be fixed, for those who are concerned with it. While the fact that MRQ is not modeling any particular anthropological classifaction of what cultures are is certainly true, speaking as one who got his degree in anthropology, I can't say that it would have necessarily been any better or different. Given that they were going for a simpler model on character building (or so it seems) I haven't really been bothered by the way it is done in MRQ, although perpaps they could have done a cultural package deal added to a Social Status package deal, and that would have fixed the issue (and I would have approved of such a model, too.)

Now, for my In-Play Observations:

Unexpected Pros:
I thought the magic systems would prove to be both unwieldly and game-breaking. I was expecting the runes to be fun, but (as you suggested) turn in to basic magic items with a collection motif. Didn't work out that way at all; players loved finding them and integrating them when possible, but the simple fact was that the GM could easily control the rate of acquisition, and impose restrictions on why a given character would or wouldn't arbitrarily integrate every rune he found. In actual play (with my group at least) this proved to be a non-issue and became a big portion of the role-playing plot elements. Also, the use of runes as physical qualities proved to be a novel and interesting take on magic in my (non-Glorantha) campaign that seemed to really appeal to my jaded gaming group.

The Sorcery system also gave me a measure of heartbreak, but in actual play turned out not to be such a big deal, either. I imagine given enough time, a very powerful, highly skilled sorcerer will be a real beast.....but the game hasn't progressed that far yet.

Skills in Runequest actually worked pretty well. I remember the old days (and even some CoC games) where it seemed like I had to hand out arbitrary numbers of extra skill points to make starting characters basically functional. The system, as presented, created some essentially competent characters, although it helped that everyone in the group coordinated to make sure they had their important skills covered.

The modifications to the skill improvement rolls worked rather well. On the one hand, players familiar with BRP games missed the idea that they could get a skill roll for every stat they successfully employed in play, but on the other hand they loved a smaller number of rolls, but with at least 1 guaranteed improvement point.

I never thought the legendary abilities were a bad idea; in fact I loved that idea. In actual play they take a looong time to acquire. In some ways, MRQ feels like two games: a variant of the old RQ we are all familiar with, and then a Legendary edition in which a group can start with bad-ass characters from the get-go. But getting from standard RQ to "we're all bad asses" is actually a very, very long process. Kind of like how getting to play a 21st-30th level character in D&D is a rarely seen event in most campaigns (in my experience, anyway). But players loved the concept that they might, someday, be able to perform some of those legendary abilities.

Unexpected Cons:
I was surprised to discover that I really, really disliked the absence of a core HP score. However, the players liked this feature a lot; in play, the players tended to survive better (as intended in the design, I suppose) but the monsters often held out far longer, as well. I pretty much ended up house ruling that most non-boss monsters would just fail their resillience checks and keep over when they hit -HP in a critical location, to save myself some book-keeping nightmare work. Also, I noticed that the likelihood of death seemed to go waaaay down. Again, I was miffed, but players liked it. Heck, I would dare say death is easier in D&D 4th edition than in MRQ!

The armor point rules are damned annoying. Stacking rules (or absence thereof) are kind of arbitrary, a hand-waived effort to avoid the case of something with natural armor of 5 APs wearing plate on top of that, I suppose. Although the calculated system for skill point penalties for wearing armor was cool, it does not properly reflect armor that's really effective while simultaneously being light weight and maneuverable, so some armors which really should be less restrictive (imo) while still having a lot of stopping power don't make as much sense as they should under this system. I forget how it worked in older RQ editions, but the BRP system is better, imo.

I hated Strike Ranks in 3rd and 2nd edition, let me get that out of the way: it was damned annoying. But despite preferring the streamlined system of MRQ, I found the real issue turned out to be Combat Actions. CAs are defined entirely by one's attributes, so the CA value is going to be high for quick, nimble types like elves and low for slow lumbering types. But in actual play, this is where player started dumping skill checks to try and improve attributes, to get that golden number that grants 1 extra CA. I think that, given a chance to do it my own way, I'd simply make CAs a flat number, say 2 or 3 for everyone, and then just let quickness for Dex and such be reflected in the initiative. This will also help avoid the "guy with slow tank sits back for 2 CAs while all the quick little people run around." In actual practice, the quick guys tended to be low damage dealers anyway, and the big guy with one good hit tended to demolish things when he got his chance, but the net effect of a set number of CAs would (to me) seem to do nothing more than insure all players were equally involved over the course of play.

Because MRQ (and all previous editions) are stat-based for race creation, in actual play I can safely say that letting someone run a...oh, say...minotaur can guarantee you have one player who can cause serious damage while everyone else hides behind him. This has always been an issue with RQ and BRP, though, not sure how to "fix" it beyond restricting options for players (and thus the campaign) which I'd rather not do. On the other hand, because the group had a minotaur in it, I often let loose with some pretty formidable opponents, and the minotaur came close to dying....many times.

I quickly ran in to stat block problems with the monsters: monsters who wore (non-natural) armor should have skill penalties, for example (which apply to attack skills as well) but it was impossible to tell from the stat blocks if those were prefigured in or not. I decided to assume they were, as some creatures (like the slaarge) would be borderline incompetent in battle if I applied the skill penalties. Except for this, and occasional monster stats seeming incomplete (like skeletons and ghouls...why are undead making resillience checks? What exactly is going on here?) I didn't encounter many other issues.

Other minor quibbles I had: I wish the book had key charts assembled in an appendix in the rear. I wish Mongoose had not used their in-house printer for a while there, because my UK-published book fell apart in the middle of the first session. The new ones are sturdy, yes, but the post office managed to lose my replacement copy and I am unsure if I will ever see another replacement. But all that aside, it's a nice book.

[smascrns]

I liked your suggestion that the current edition of Runequest lacks some of the more anthropological and mythic recognition or identification in the text of earlier editions, as I think you are essentially right; the earlier editions of Runequest read very well, in terms of conveying the ancient world and its mythic parables.
Well, a lot of people that loved RQ2 considered that RQ3 lacked as well in this regard, if not in terms of content at least in terms of tone. The problem is that the more specific a game is about this kind of stuff the harder it is to use it for a different setting. Personaly I prefer a fantasy game that is more generic and adaptable than one that is too tied for a particular setting, even if that setting is delivered with great anthropological and mythic depth. I prefer to see this depth in setting books, not in the core rules book. In other words, this is a field where I think MRQ compares well with its predecessors. As you say, "MRQ being more open to multiple settings remains a good thing".
In actual play (with my group at least) this proved to be a non-issue and became a big portion of the role-playing plot elements. Also, the use of runes as physical qualities proved to be a novel and interesting take on magic in my (non-Glorantha) campaign that seemed to really appeal to my jaded gaming group.
When I reviewed MRQ it seemed to me that it could work in play, and your experience shows it does. I still think that Mongoose didn't play the idea as well or as deeply as they could.
In some ways, MRQ feels like two games: a variant of the old RQ we are all familiar with, and then a Legendary edition in which a group can start with bad-ass characters from the get-go. But getting from standard RQ to "we're all bad asses" is actually a very, very long process. Kind of like how getting to play a 21st-30th level character in D&D is a rarely seen event in most campaigns (in my experience, anyway).
Interesting. Your play experience shows I was right when I considered that RQ with legendary abilities turns into a different game, and that it's also a different level of play. Either one wants to stick to pre-LA level and plays traditional RQ, (what I called "junior level" in my review) or one goes for LA level and we are with another game to a great extent.
Once more, why doing this? Why didn't Mongoose focus on one of the two and drop the other? Until now your experience has been with playing the pre-LA level, I hope you and your players move to the LA level and see how it plays.
the players tended to survive better (as intended in the design, I suppose) but the monsters often held out far longer, as well.
It seems that Mongoose intended to have a less lethal game all along, what with Hero Points and similar devices.
I pretty much ended up house ruling that most non-boss monsters would just fail their resillience checks and keep over when they hit -HP in a critical location, to save myself some book-keeping nightmare work.
This is something I didn't get. Why keep HP-location instead of general HPs? It requires a lot more book-keeping.
I found the real issue turned out to be Combat Actions. CAs are defined entirely by one's attributes (skip)
CA are a poorly done pain-in-the-ass by just reading the book, but it's nice to see that game play confirms it.

A question: Did you use in your game any of the supplements that Mongoose (and other people) are publishing for MRQ? If yes, which and how did they help?

Now, a suggestion: Your post looks right like a small review of MRQ. Why don't you expand it into a full fledged actual play review? Please do so, I would love to read it.

I may not be a fan of MRQ and I may think that previous editions are better but I also hope that Mongoose comes out with a second edition of their game, one that corrects the things that need to be corrected and where they decide what game they want: One without LA or one that focus on LA.

PS Do you recall our interaction at the time of my review of MRQ? Then we touched on rules legacies and the case of D&D rolled attributes was mentioned. I stated, "I would not be surprised if a future generation of D&D drops the rolled attributes, though". It seems I was not far off from what came to be, if I can rely on reviews of DD4 (my copy is on the mail right now).

[Tori Bergquist]

Well, a lot of people that loved RQ2 considered that RQ3 lacked as well in this regard, if not in terms of content at least in terms of tone. The problem is that the more specific a game is about this kind of stuff the harder it is to use it for a different setting. Personaly I prefer a fantasy game that is more generic and adaptable than one that is too tied for a particular setting, even if that setting is delivered with great anthropological and mythic depth. I prefer to see this depth in setting books, not in the core rules book. In other words, this is a field where I think MRQ compares well with its predecessors. As you say, "MRQ being more open to multiple settings remains a good thing.

When I reviewed MRQ it seemed to me that it could work in play, and your experience shows it does. I still think that Mongoose didn't play the idea as well or as deeply as they could.

I think part of the problem here really simply lies within the proficiency and focus of the author(s). I also like a generic, flexible fantasy system, but I think it's possible to achieve that and still have fluid, engaging and inspired text. Off hand, though MRQ reads quite well. But you definitely pinned down what made RQ2 special; I still have a copy of it somewhere, along with my original black-box Traveller and 1st edition Gamma World as games I just like to reminisce about....
You're also right, RQ3 was a more technical game, in presentation; in retrospect though it kept a pretty sophisticated feel for the time in which it was published; back in the late eighties I recall that most RPGs were either easy to read and pretty straight-forward, or felt like some sort of dissertation in progress, laden with incomprehensible rules. RQ3 sort of walked the line, remaining accessible yet thick.


Once more, why doing this? Why didn't Mongoose focus on one of the two and drop the other? Until now your experience has been with playing the pre-LA level, I hope you and your players move to the LA level and see how it plays.

I'm definitely eager to start a game at the legendary level. I think Mongoose did okay the way they have presented it so far; having a Legendary sourcebook helps focus that play style in one area, but the core book has enough to make a player aware it exists. Still, most of the supplementary material doesn't offer much support for Legendary games; I'd also be interested in seeing Mongoose publish a book designed to be specifically played at the Legendary level.

On a side note, I do recall that for the most part, characters who achieved excessively high scores in the old RQ days usually went off to retirement in my games; it was an interesting "mental shift" for me to contemplate a RQ-based game in which guys with triple digit skill levels were normal, but I like that (it seems, so far) Mongoose pulled it off. If I do an LA game soon I'll offer up some play results.

It seems that Mongoose intended to have a less lethal game all along, what with Hero Points and similar devices.

I think you're right. I'm not sure I like it, personally; the one other verteran RQer in the group seemed to adjust, but loves telling other players in the group about how they'd be dead if we were playing an older edition ...

This is something I didn't get. Why keep HP-location instead of general HPs? It requires a lot more book-keeping.

I wanted to retcon a core HP mechanic in to the system but on putting it to a vote I was soundly shouted down; the players wanted to keep the system as-is, so I grudgingly went ahead and put up with it.

CA are a poorly done pain-in-the-ass by just reading the book, but it's nice to see that game play confirms it.

CAs look pathetic when compared to the simple elegance of the move-standard-minor system of D&D 4th edition. Given a choice, I'd just derive the basic combat system from BRP and weld it on to MRQ for future games. The guys with the CA 4 characters might complain, but the guys with the CA 2s would be delighted....

A question: Did you use in your game any of the supplements that Mongoose (and other people) are publishing for MRQ? If yes, which and how did they help?

Yes, I have all of the RQ supplements released to date, but the ones I actually used a lot in play were the Arms & Equipment guide, which became a pretty regular resource, and the Spell Book, from which a number of interesting spells were derived and used, although I ended up vetoing several others that looked (and I am sure they weren't) unplaytested. I also found the Game Master's Guide to be extremely useful, and had some rules for things like summoning, additional combat rules, skill criticals and fumbles and so forth that were all adapted in to play. It also contained additional rules on rune stones that you might want to check out, adding a great deal of flavor and variety to them; we adopted all fo the rune stone rules in that book, as well. As a side note, my GM's Guide fell apart too, but I have since received the free replacement with the much sturdier soft cover bind.

The two most recent supplements (Land of the Samurai and Monsters 2) will be used when we resume the RQ game shortly down the road. The LotS book is a marked improvement, I feel over the RQ3 version of such, and in fact a better role playing book for the setting than GURPS Japan, I feel. The Monsters 2 book has lots of useful content, although I suspect Glorantha fans will get the most use out of it.

Now, a suggestion: Your post looks right like a small review of MRQ. Why don't you expand it into a full fledged actual play review? Please do so, I would love to read it.

I may not be a fan of MRQ and I may think that previous editions are better but I also hope that Mongoose comes out with a second edition of their game, one that corrects the things that need to be corrected and where they decide what game they want: One without LA or one that focus on LA.

PS Do you recall our interaction at the time of my review of MRQ? Then we touched on rules legacies and the case of D&D rolled attributes was mentioned. I stated, "I would not be surprised if a future generation of D&D drops the rolled attributes, though". It seems I was not far off from what came to be, if I can rely on reviews of DD4 (my copy is on the mail right now).

Yes I do recall...now that you mention it! Not only were you pretty spot on, I feel (after all, the Con Score is the only attribute in 4E that has any application at all; the rest are just there for flavor now, it seems, and to pace the Modifier numbers a bit, since the Mods are the only important element after HPs are settled at 1st level now.)

I suppose you are right; I guess I'll consider doing a review here, soon....thanks for the suggestion!

Take care! Keep up the great reviews, Lev....controversial or not, I think you provide a lot of keen insight on these games.

[Lars Dangly]

Re: the RQ2 vs. RQ3 vs. MRQ issue, I think the core issue is simply the talent of the authors. RQ2 is just about the best-written core roleplaying book I've seen. It doesn't do much good to imagine a version of it that is less setting-specific: it is what it is. Attempts to re-write it in a more generic way have produced games that might be structurally more sound or more flexible, but the spark is gone because the talent of the original author is missing. I've seen enough rule sets come and go to be relatively uninterested in the eternal search for the perfect game. The less tangible things one gets in a well-written paragraph or clever turn of phrase simply appeal to me much more. This is why I still turn to RQ2 when I want to bust out the percentiles.

[Strange Visitor]

I hated Strike Ranks in 3rd and 2nd edition, let me get that out of the way: it was damned annoying. But despite preferring the streamlined system of MRQ, I found the real issue turned out to be Combat Actions. CAs are defined entirely by one's attributes, so the CA value is going to be high for quick, nimble types like elves and low for slow lumbering types. But in actual play, this is where player started dumping skill checks to try and improve attributes, to get that golden number that grants 1 extra CA. I think that, given a chance to do it my own way, I'd simply make CAs a flat number, say 2 or 3 for everyone, and then just let quickness for Dex and such be reflected in the initiative. This will also help avoid the "guy with slow tank sits back for 2 CAs while all the quick little people run around." In actual practice, the quick guys tended to be low damage dealers anyway, and the big guy with one good hit tended to demolish things when he got his chance, but the net effect of a set number of CAs would (to me) seem to do nothing more than insure all players were equally involved over the course of play.



We told them even in the early playtest that the action rules were a problem; from what I can tell, they made it a little less pervasive (at that stage of the playtest, someone who wanted to be a combat monster and nothing else could probably pull off max actions and still do and take a lot of damage) but not really addressed the problem.



Because MRQ (and all previous editions) are stat-based for race creation, in actual play I can safely say that letting someone run a...oh, say...minotaur can guarantee you have one player who can cause serious damage while everyone else hides behind him. This has always been an issue with RQ and BRP, though, not sure how to "fix" it beyond restricting options for players (and thus the campaign) which I'd rather not do. On the other hand, because the group had a minotaur in it, I often let loose with some pretty formidable opponents, and the minotaur came close to dying....many times.




Like you said, this has always been a problem with RQ (and other games where stats actually matter); the one problem with your last solution is that if the bruiser does go down, whatever took him down will likely scythe through everything else. When running an RQ:AIG variant I varied available skill points at start by how much attributes value a given race had, but that only slows the problem down.

[Tori Bergquist]

In actual play, the minotaur did indeed go down once, to a griphon. In a moment that can only be described as "One of those memorable scenes", the player with the character described as "A skinny little Mayan-esque shaman type" with a sharp stick ran up, jabbed the Griphon in it's wounded spot and critted. He got 1 point through. The griphon failed its resillience check and croaked. It was absolutely awesome.....!

But I was actually waiting for a TPK to unfold before my eyes if the minotaur dropped before any real damage was dished out to the primary monster....they just got lucky, I think!

On the RQ2 book issue: pretty much right on. That book was a rare classic, and hard to beat; many of the older Chaosium games had that certain flaire that newer games are often missing.

[weasel fierce]

The gamemasters guide tweaks the damage rules a little. Mostly by making characters incapacitated as soon as you take a major wound to any location

[Lev Lafayette]

Tori, your in-depth comments are a review in their own right. I appreciate them enormously.

Like weasel fierce one way I've gotten around the increased toughness of characters in MRQ is to use the old RQ3 standards for incapacitation of limbs etc.

[Strange Visitor]

There were a fair number of people who thought by the RQ3 period that it was too lethal; one of the points in the RQ:AIG project was to address that (and it did). It sounds like MRQ may have swung a bit far in the other direction, though.