Post originally by Jay at 2003-04-19 09:32:35
Converted from Phorums BB System

I was in a gaming group with two excellent GM's, one of which GM'd RuneQuest and the other, Harnmaster. RuneQuest combat was quicker, primarily because in Harnmaster a player usually rolls every time he attacks and every time he is attacked and a significant amount of lag time was spent in consulting the charts. Also in Harnmaster a player has to decide if he is going to block, counterstrike, or dodge an attack, and although this seems a simple thing to decide, some players took a while making this decision. Also, every time a character is wounded, 1d6 is rolled for each point of Universal Penalty (must roll under Endurance)to see if the character passes out. Then the character must roll to gain consciousness each round. As you can see, the additional dice rolls add up, making combat go more slowly. The odd thing is that with the amount of detail going into the description of the battle, it doesn't seem like its taking longer. Harnmaster combat is very realistic while RuneQuest bridges the gap between realism and playability. I found that I could do things in Harnmaster combat that I could not do in RuneQuest with creative use of Defender's Tactical Advantage. Wounds in Harnmaster are much more well described than in RuneQuest and they come close to the detailed descriptions given in Rolemaster. Harnmaster does not have a detailed bestiary like RuneQuest does. This gave my Harnmaster GM considerable difficulty when preparing for an adventure. He had to literally make and design his own monsters and assign detailed strike locations to them.

The same goes for magic. Magic is much more realistic and detailed in Harnmaster...but the RuneQuest system lends itself to more effects because there are more spells and they can be combined. Harnmaster, however, gives rules for making your own spells...which my GM did. This had the very realistic effect of not knowing what spell effects could be created or what spells were in existence. In the end the Harnmaster system lent itself more toward creativity and expansion while RuneQuest was better for a GM who didnt have time to spend making up religions and spells.

Now I am a GM. I tried running RuneQuest, but had difficulty getting players because they had difficulty getting rule books. I am switching over to HarnMaster because it is still available and probably will continue to be available for quite some time. It is really very easy to import or change little things here and there from Harnmaster so that it is more consistent with rules in RuneQuest. If someone wanted to, they could just run HarnMaster using the Runequest combat system using the Frame characteristic instead of Size.