[RQ-Rules] Determining success in RuneQuest

[Nick.Middleton at invensys.com]

>ASHLEY MUNDAY wrote:
>> "Yeah Rolemaster was alot like RQ."
>>
>> Rolemaster was more like an accountant's DnD - it had
>> levels, classes, huge FO spell lists, critical hit
>> charts that made the Arduin Grimoire's look sane and a
>> lovely paragraph format and writing style stolen from
>> SPI.
>>
>> Add to that the avalanche of charts (you'd have to be
>> eidetic to play it just off the character sheet) and
>> you had a game that was almost totally unlike RQ.
>>
>> AND it was 5 times the price of Runequest in 1982...
>
>RM had a few cool ideas here and there, but overall it's pretty ponderous.
>
>My brain hurts just thinking about the times we actually tried to play
>it. It helps if you have a GM who really knows and likes the system (go
>figure) and actually WANTS that level of complex, somewhat arbitrarily
>structured detail.
>
>Even so I found it excruciating when we ran combats or determined
>advancements. Give me BRP with its more elegant and consistently
>structured systems any day.

Good god, you actually tried to play the full version?!? Despite wall
themselves up behind mountains of books, every Rolemaster game I ever
witnessed seemed to ignore all the complexity in favour of just generically
saying "roll open ended d100, add relevant mods, get more than this to
succeed".

And passing round the books so everyone could snigger at the silly critical
and fumble results, which were a real hoot...

>I really like Shadow World (the RM "house" setting) though. And many of
>the modules for Middle Earth Roleplaying (which was sort of RM-Lite)
>were brilliant.

I have a huge fondness for the Southern stuff: Far Harad, Greater Harad,
The Forest of Tears etc. I never though MERP itself particular caught the
feel of LotR but I loved the stuff they did "off map" as it were, would be
a cracking setting for a Dark Sun like RQ powered game come to think of
it...

Cheers,

Nick Middleton