The upcoming edition of RuneQuest does seem odd to me. Stafford seemed to decide that RuneQuest ultimately wasn't right for Glorantha, so Hero Wars/HeroQuest seemed to become the game for "real" Glorantha, while RuneQuest became a broader fantasy system that was also used by people who still wanted to play in the "flawed" version of Glorantha it represented.

It seemed like everyone was pretty much happy for a while, but now it looks like RuneQuest is getting remade to make it something closer to HeroQuest. It might be a cool game, but it seems very late in RuneQuest's life to make it over so drastically and keep the same name.

It's not really an issue as the BRP system is really thriving with a wide range of supported rulesets at the moment. Mythras certainly seems to have survived its name change without suffering, and OpenQuest is still out there. It just seems weird for me to have the one called "RuneQuest" to be one furthest from what I think of when I hear the name.

I suppose it is a bit like the 4E era of D&D where Pathfinder and the retroclones all represented more traditional forms of D&D, with the one actually called D&D being the furthest from it.

Just to be clear with my analogy, I never played 4E, and I have no serious opinion on it. I'm not trying to say that 4E sucks or that the new Runequest sucks. I'm just saying they seem to be very new takes on a game that will be competing more traditional versions of the same game.

It could work better for Chaosium than WotC. As a smaller company, Chaosium has more potential to bring people in active gamers that don't already play RuneQuest, even if it loses some fans. With 4E, WotC was already had the dominant marker share, so it seemed to shed players, and didn't bring many in.

Quote from: Omega;939323How so? Seems fairly straightforward from what Im reading (in Standard)

-1 fatigue per round of combat, sneaking, swimming, etc. -2 per round of combat sprinting, etc.
If fatigue was negative then all skills suffer the same amount of loss.
And going negative equal to max fatigue score incapacitated.
And get back 1d3-1 per round not doing anything fatiguing.

Seems pretty straightforward? Its effectively a second HP system that wears down from activity rather than combat.

Claudius already mentioned the constant bookkeeping required for every PC, all of the time. If I recall correctly, encumbrance impacted fatigue level. So, acquiring new equipment, or making changes to your loadout required a recalculation of fatigue points.

Quote from: Simlasa;939688I can't see Revolution d100 being my cup of tea though. The author seems bent on bringing in more narrative type mechanics and that will keep me away.

I had the same impression of Revolution D100. I recall looking at some playtest notes (a year ago or so?), and seeing some comments from the writer/publisher. And they led me to believe that RD100 was an attempt to NewSchoolRules BRP, with a more narrative focus.

I also wasn't interested in contributing to its Kickstarter - when the system was still in the process of being playtested and written.

Quote from: soltakss;939253MRQII changed its name to Legend, RQ6 changed its name to Mythras, neither are now RuneQuest. Support should be picking up for D100 games generally.

Quote from: Simlasa;939263But what matters if they're still basically the same games? Having 'Runequest' on the cover just gives expectations of Glorantha, which we're thankfully now free of.

When Chaosium/Moon Design announced that their RuneQuest 7th (yes, I said 7th) wouldn't be based on RQ6, and that it would be a Glorantha-only game, I got somewhat annoyed, but after thinking through the whole matter, I realized that it was not so bad. The Design Mechanism, not being able to keep working on Adventures in Glorantha, has to turn their attention to their Mythic and fantasy settings. Since I'm not interested in Glorantha, for me it's a win. I only feel sorry for Pete and Loz, who must have put a lot of work and excitement into their Glorantha supplement.

Alephtar Games was also hit very hard by Chaosium's recent policies (they lost like 90% of their catalog), I hope their new Revolution d100 gains momentum and they put back in print their catalog. Even if you don't like Revolution d100, their supplements can still be used with other d100 games. I want to like Rd100, and I think that there is a great game in there, almost as good as Mythras, but first I have to understand the damned rules!

Erm, wasn't this supposed to be a RuneQuest 3 thread? Who derailed it talking about products by The Evil Competition(TM)?

Jokes aside, a couple brief replies, as some posters called me in.

Quote from: Simlasa;939688I can't see Revolution d100 being my cup of tea though. The author seems bent on bringing in more narrative type mechanics and that will keep me away.

After consultation with co-authors and feedback from potential users I have decided to make the "narrative" mechanics completely optional, which was not the initial goal when we kickstarted the game. A considerable amount of side notes has been added to mark the points which contain such mechanics with "do not use this rule if first-person play is fundamental for you" warnings.

Some variants of the game (Mecha) will have non-simulative mechanics inextricably bound to the rules, but the core engine does not. It is perfectly playable as a purely simulative engine.

Quote from: Claudius;940142I haven't decided yet if I like Revolution d100 or not. On the one hand, I liked A LOT the short list of skills + traits thing (traits are like specialties). On the other hand, I tried to read the Conflicts and Combat chapters and I was clueless. Am I the only one? :confused:

No. But to a degree, this might be an inevitable effect. When faced with a choice between something simpler that did not produce really satisfactory results in playtest, and something more complex that actually did the job it was supposed to, I went with the solutions that proved the best at the table. This does not always imply that they are also the most linear to explain. Or, in other words, you have to try it in practice to really grasp the system. Pansophy had the same doubts when reading the text - he changed his mind completely after playing!

Quote from: K Peterson;940157I had the same impression of Revolution D100. I recall looking at some playtest notes (a year ago or so?), and seeing some comments from the writer/publisher. And they led me to believe that RD100 was an attempt to NewSchoolRules BRP, with a more narrative focus.

This is not the only goal of the game, of course, and this is the reason why we have left ample options for playing it the traditional way.

The core intent of the game was to disentangle us from the decisions and strategies of other publishers.

However, I also made the intentional choice of not producing just "yet another derivative of the Mongoose RQ SRD". It could probably have made more sense marketing-wise, as all those who commented "it keeps me away" would have commented "I will buy it" instead, had I proposed a semi-paraphrasis of OpenQuest with enough crunchy options to replace the Big Golden Book. Such an operation, though, would have had the limited purposes of just "biting away" small pieces of market from D101 or TDM by replicating essentially the same thing they were already doing.

In other words, why make a game that tried to cater to a segment of customers who were already perfectly happy with with OpenQuest or Mythras? It certainly made more sense to focus primarily on gamers who were interested in seeing something different, as long as compatibility with other D100 games was more or less guaranteed.

Even more important, system overlapping and uniformity is not necessarily good for the fanbase. As most if not all gamers mix and match various rules from different D100 incarnations, the more different a game is from the average, the more useful it is to gamers. Thus, I have made the conscious and explicit choice of selling fewer copies in the beginning (we have enough setting materials ready to re-publish to make up for this loss), but having a game which has a real justification for its existence beyond "we no longer have a Chaosium license". This also leaves us more room to attract customers not usually interested in D100 and thus enlarge the potential audience.

Quote from: K Peterson;939292Is it going to be much of a new game? All that I've read has indicated that it's basically RQ2.5 for the rules set. Probably with some fluffy narrative mechanics to reflect the setting "better". I can't image that it'll be that hard to learn, or will be that different from RQ2.

I suspect that all this Chaosium talk that "the new Chaosium RQ4 (yes, 4th, Mongoose and the Design Mechanism never happened!!) will be like RQ2, with some tiiiiiiny changes", is just marketingspeak. After all, RQ2 is still remembered and very well regarded by a lot of RQ fans, and the RQ2 kickstarter was a resounding success, so it is in the best interest of Chaosium to portray RQ7 as the natural successor of RQ2.

I had a look at the RQ7 design notes, and didn't get the impression that RQ is actually so similar to RQ2. Yes, RQ7 is a d100 game and as such, it will share a lot of traits with RQ2, but I think the same can be said about RQ3, MRQ1, MRQ2 and RQ6. Or Stormbringer.

Anyways, all of this is speculations from me, time will tell if I was right or wrong.

Quote from: Claudius;940376...

I had a look at the RQ7 design notes, and didn't get the impression that RQ is actually so similar to RQ2. Yes, RQ7 is a d100 game and as such, it will share a lot of traits with RQ2, but I think the same can be said about RQ3, MRQ1, MRQ2 and RQ6. Or Stormbringer.

From the mechanics I've seen RQ7 is pretty much abandoning all of the mechanics that were introduced in RQ4-6. RQ 7 has:

the resistance table, characteristic rolls (STR*5 etc), skills as a flat base chance + category modifier, skill increase through experience, no "differential rolls" (i.e. no special effects in combat or degrees of relative success); combat ordered through 12 Strike Ranks per round rather than a number of Action Points to spend per round.

At this point I don't recall whether they are keeping criticals as 1/10 or reverting back to specials (1/5) and criticals (1/20). Also don't know if they are keeping "blackjack" tie-breakers for opposed rolls.

They seem to have decided that not only must every bit of setting content published since 2004 be erased but also every mechanical change.

Compared to RQ2 the changes look to be: slight tweaks to the list of skills; skills as true percentiles rather than units of 5; replacing defense with dodge; wholesale changes to magic and the addition of runes as a central mechanic.

As far as I can see, it's as if someone found the RQ3 design document with track changes turned on. They undid most but not all of the RQ3 track changes and deleted the magic chapter ready to start again.

What it seems like to me is that the chaps at new Chaosium woke up one morning and said "Hang on a minute, we put a lot of money into this so lets publish the RQ we liked playing when we were young."

Well I kinda liked Glorantha as presented in RQ2.
Fantasy chaotic romans versus fantasy germans/celts plus ducks and dragonewts.
Add to this a map, a short timeline and that's it.
No fat, nicely trimmed.

Quote from: deleriad;940378From the mechanics I've seen RQ7 is pretty much abandoning all of the mechanics that were introduced in RQ4-6. RQ 7 has:

the resistance table, characteristic rolls (STR*5 etc), skills as a flat base chance + category modifier, skill increase through experience, no "differential rolls" (i.e. no special effects in combat or degrees of relative success); combat ordered through 12 Strike Ranks per round rather than a number of Action Points to spend per round.

At this point I don't recall whether they are keeping criticals as 1/10 or reverting back to specials (1/5) and criticals (1/20). Also don't know if they are keeping "blackjack" tie-breakers for opposed rolls.

They seem to have decided that not only must every bit of setting content published since 2004 be erased but also every mechanical change.

Compared to RQ2 the changes look to be: slight tweaks to the list of skills; skills as true percentiles rather than units of 5; replacing defense with dodge; wholesale changes to magic and the addition of runes as a central mechanic.

As far as I can see, it's as if someone found the RQ3 design document with track changes turned on. They undid most but not all of the RQ3 track changes and deleted the magic chapter ready to start again.

What it seems like to me is that the chaps at new Chaosium woke up one morning and said "Hang on a minute, we put a lot of money into this so lets publish the RQ we liked playing when we were young."

RQ2 doesn't actually use a Resistance table for anything other than POW vs POW conflicts (usually for magic). The universal table must have come later on. There aren't any Characteristic x 5% rolls either. They only influence Ability (Skill groupings) modifiers.

Quote from: TrippyHippy;940387RQ2 doesn't actually use a Resistance table for anything other than POW vs POW conflicts (usually for magic). The universal table must have come later on. There aren't any Characteristic x 5% rolls either. They only influence Ability (Skill groupings) modifiers.

Characteristic rolls were in the appendix to RQ2. Also used in Rainbow mounds as I remember. DEX roll not to fall in the water and I think you had to fail a SIZ roll at one point or get stuck somewhere.

Resistance table was also in the basic roleplaying booklet that came in the RQ2 box set: used for arm-wrestling with good old Burly Bob.

To answer the OP's question. I don't remember the precise details but because the initial release of RQ3 was so expensive and sales bombed a few years later they came up with the wheeze of dividing it into standard and advanced. Games Workshop sold them as hardback books in the UK. I had forgotten that AH also made box set versions that they sold in the rest of the world.

Standard was basically the full game with all kinds of bits cut out. You could just about play it as a game in its own right but all the published supplements were written for the advanced (aka the complete) rules. This meant that all the supplements then had an extra section detailing the "advanced" elements in the supplement.

Although I played RQ3 for about 12 years I have managed to blank out the number of idiocies in the product.

As a rules set, taken in the whole, I found RQ3 to hang together slightly better than RQ2 but at the expense of being a lot more fiddly. The system became a lot more granular. For example, though it's not explicit, in RQ2 most of the time if you get a modifier it's pretty big, often +/- 20%. In RQ3 you could easily end up with 3 to 4 modifiers per die roll starting at +/-1% (Looking at you Fatigue Points) and not infrequently including a multiplier.

RQ3 was state of the art c. 1984 or so. It's still a decent game, but there are a lot better options out there.

I tend to prefer RQ2, but RQIII is a fine set of rules, and I rather liked the Mythic Europe setting. I'd be happy playing either. I like RQ6, as well, but my RQ6 games have not been as successful as I expected. Not sure why -- maybe it's just my familiarity with the older versions contrasting with my rulebook referencing when using RQ6.

My main issue with RQ3 were the flimsy paper covers on the rulebooks that came in the boxed set. I was careful with mine, and kept them out of the hands of rougher folks... but I really wish they'd been made of sterner stuff.

Quote from: Herne's Son;940478RQ3 was state of the art c. 1984 or so. It's still a decent game, but there are a lot better options out there.

Thanks for the most meaningless contribution to this thread.