Runequest is the best-kept secret in Roleplaying. It has been around 40 years in nearly the same version for a reason, and it shares DNA with Call of Cthulhu. My copy has been sitting in the closet, but with the release of the Basic Roleplaying game, I took another look at this system, and everything I felt about it was still valid.
It is high fantasy but set in a fictional Bronze Age fantasy setting.
Combat is deadly, so you try to find ways to avoid it. Sound familiar? Oh yes, this is an old-school game. Why fight when we could figure out another way around it? 5E trains you to fight first and think last. Even things like perception and insight are put on autopilot, so you don't need to consider them. 5E is brainwashing its players into being more aggressive and bloodthirsty problem solvers.
D&D has always had this problem, so we all dropped it in the 1980s for GURPS, Shadowrun, and Runequest. If Stranger Things wanted to get it right, they would also drop D&D and move on to better games, just like we did in the 1980s. TSR didn't bankrupt themselves; the players walked away for better things. We did that.
But D&D's nature of "making combat fun" was put on crack by Wizards of the Coast, and every version from 3E to today has been a game more focused on killing and death than anything else. There is also this troubling notion of "you can't die" and "you will be the hero" in 5E that eerily mirrors what dictators tell their soldiers. Tie that with "combat is the only solution," and you see where the problems pile up with how the game presents conflict resolution.
And you see the design of D&D move more and more towards killing from 3E to 5E. With fewer skills, most of the game is focused on numbers and combat, passive skills, and the game is refining towards that violent, heroic, never-die ideal.
I love D&D, but as a child of the 1980s, I know its problems well. And I don't say any of this out of hate; these are valid and troubling parallels that are still true today and, in some ways, even worse. I love the game, but parts of what designers do today to attract video gamers and violent audiences are very troubling.
We can do better. And we should.
Suppose you go back to video games and movies in the 1980s and 1990s. In that case, you will see the same arguments about "violence being the only way presented to solve problems" and "violence being glorified." This subject isn't new, and I was around the first time people saw this happening.
It was a different world back then. Gamers saw the parallels between the arms race in the Cold War and the propaganda coming out from both sides about inevitable war and conflict, and we all turned away from games that presented solutions in a violent manner. The populations of the USA and USSR were being trained and pushed to war, and gamers, being progressive and free-thinkers, saw right through that.
Nobody wanted to die in a fireball.
This is why we had so many skill-based games in the late 1980s, and D&D eventually died in the 1990s. This is where "deadly combat" became a thing in gaming. The designers of these games wanted combat to be deadly and the worst possible option for conflict resolution. They were far more progressive than the designers today since they could design a more noble and realistic social training into their games that reflected the tastes of their audience. There was a massive distaste for "killing all the goblins in a tribe" since "they were all worth XP." The more progressive games of the 1980s wanted to treat combat seriously and create systems of alternate problem resolution. The audience wanted something better.
Video games offered people a better way to fill the "combat for fun" need, and games like Battletech did it well, too. Magic: The Gathering was also a PvP combat game.
In Runequest, you can present a village with many problems, including the local farmers' inability to rotate crops and irrigate correctly. A player with farming skills could recognize that and help them out. If D&D, there will most likely be an ankheg under the ground causing these problems. Runequest can do the combat stuff, too, like a tribe of hostile raiders, but alternate ways to resolve problems could be added to the adventure. Let's say everyone is hungry, and that is why they are fighting. A non-violent solution would be to show everyone how the land can feed everyone and then solve the problem of finding food for the coming winter instead of killing everyone over it. Those raiders could be negotiated with and turned into a group that protects the valley and helps the characters raid a chaos den to get the treasures inside and use that to stock the food stores up for the winter.
The only combat here was against the corrupting forces of chaos and evil. The raiders could help the characters in the final battle and be given homes by the villagers from those who passed away in the famine. Most of this could be solved without combat, but the final struggle shows former enemies working together. Violence was a last resort, but a positive end came from it.
A great game with skills that make combat a serious choice makes creating these adventures and situations easy. In 5E and even Pathfinder, this is more likely a series of rooms and encounters you must kill through. The passive skills turn the referee into a DVD player, reading the text in the boxes and running the next combat. With a skill-based game, the referee can write adventures to use those skills, and players can feel like they are solving their problems with creative thinking rather than number-crunching for combat.
Skill-based games with deadly combat will always be more socially progressive than a pen-and-paper video game. I can still have fun with the games that do "combat for fun," but video games are better for that, which was another thing my generation figured out. I also know how video game designers can manipulate you with designs and game systems, and I am also aware that all problems don't need a violent resolution.
The games that give me those options appeal far more these days.
And they did back then, too.
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