Off the Shelf: Runequest

My 5E books are on a secondary shelf while I revisit Runequest. I like the BRP d100 system; it is solid and a 'character builder '- you level up what you use. Want to be stealthy? Do sneaky things. Want to use daggers well? Stab things.

You don't get free powers just to get a level. Every power is earned through hard work and making skill rolls. Since everyone has magic, your spells enhance your weapons and combat powers. Want a magic sword strike? Learn the spell that does it, and cast a sharpening spell on your blade. Learning magic is more than reading a spell list; a few magic systems are in the game, and they all work differently.

Unlike GURPS, you cannot "spend points on whatever." This is an involved character simulator, and if you want skills in areas where it takes work to earn skill points, you will need to work at them. You can't learn history sitting in a forest or how to get better at combat if you find a few thousand GP and convert them to XP.

Nothing comes for free in BRP. You earn every point. Your characters level organically. Combat is deadly.  Roleplaying and knowing the "who's who" in a tribe or culture matters. Getting favors and survival matter. Crafting even has a place. Parts of this game feel like Minecraft, where you hunt, forge, mine, craft, and build. This is another "thinking person's game."

And it is one world, the Bronze Age, with established lore and culture, without silly planar travel to multiverses. There are no robots or talking skeletons here. You play primarily humans, but with such a diverse civilization, you can find all the diversity you want in this game by being human. In D&D, diversity can feel "faked" in that humans are boring, primarily the European stereotypes, and diversity is equated with the fantastical cartoon races.

In Runequest, diversity is not just a feature; it's a necessity. To succeed and thrive in this world, immerse yourself in its cultures and understand their nuances. This game demands that you care about the world you inhabit, and that means doing your homework.

Do you want to be diverse in this game? Learn about the world your character lives in and its history.

Runequest also divorces the same-old Renaissance level of technology with the plate-mail, steel, crossbows, and tall ships that pervade the entire notion of fantasy gaming today. It feels like Minecraft, where you craft your gear, bartering, building shelters, and crawling through ancient ruins. You do not have worldwide trade, steel, universities, huge guilds, giant castles, armies of plate-mail knights, or even the stirrup. This is the Bronze Age, a different time where personal magic, skill, and heroism matter more than "gear loadout."

Everyone has magic, even if it is just minor incantations. Even people in town find ways to use "everyday magic" - minor spells to make the hard life a little easier. The setting isn't high magic; it is very spiritual and enlightened, where minor magic is a part of everyday life for many. You can play this up or keep it down as much as you like in your games, but this personal magic exists. It isn't used as a "technology replacement metaphor," but here.

Spells can be expensive to learn or held by cults, so while everyone may have magic, the spells needed to cast them are not always freely available. A tavern owner may only know two spells that ignite and extinguish small fires, but each spell costs 50 silver coins, and 60 silver per year is the average standard of living for a free family. Compared to today, this is like one minor spell, costing a household the entire cost of living for a year. Magical knowledge can be very expensive!

Runequest is a game with a lot of the lore and culture baked in, and learning about it is as much playing the game as playing is. This is the game that the 1990s AD&D always wanted to be, a mix of race, culture, world, and history where everything and everyone matters. Nothing is generic or cheaply borrowed from Tolkien. Dark Sun came close, but the dream died when TSR did. It is also a game like Traveller, where the setting is a massive part of the fun.

This game destroyed my love for Pathfinder 1e and the old-school Golarion theme park world. You can't throw tropes together and expect a world to happen. It showed me how to create a world, rules, and settings where everything makes sense together. Culture matters. History matters. Geography matters. Religion matters. Technology (and the lack of it) matters. Survival is the goal. Learning about the world makes you more powerful. Understanding people makes you more powerful. Magic is the key to power.

And knowledge is a powerful thing.

Goodbye, Pathfinder 1e

My Pathfinder 1e books are in storage now.

I tried running a GURPS campaign, but meh. I was fighting the world more than I was having fun. With this much work, I would create an original world and have fun there instead. Dungeon Fantasy needs its own world and setting, which I have and will talk about soon.

Theme park worlds were excellent in the 2010s. Today, it is a cultural appropriation city. I would rather have a dedicated Egypt setting and Fantasy Africa than this. Everywhere you go, a Fantasyland, Adventureland, or other Disney-like little theme park area sits there and says, "Not Ravenloft, not Egypt, not Vikings, not science-fantasy, but close enough!"

Dedicated settings where it is one world, all Norse, with races and cultures that fit in that world, are far more immersive than this messy mix of everything, every culture, every race, and every culture. They end up being buffets of low-quality food but with great choices. At the end of the meal, you end up feeling sick.

Theme park worlds are also a source of the rot within the hobby, inviting in endless expansion books, grift opportunities, and encouraging every player to pick an "alien" background and nothing fits together; no one has to be a part of the culture of the world, and everyone is a special something or another. Pathfinder 1e was going there with the Advanced Race Guide, and there were far too many player races in the game by the end of the edition.

I would rather play in a Norse-themed world, where I have to read about the cultures, understand the diverse peoples, and make some hard choices on who my character is in this world. You play D&D or Pathfinder 2, and you will get the person at the table wanting to be a talking plant or Muppet and be the goofball when everyone else is trying to play seriously.

Theme park worlds invite everyone to be "the outsider," and they just feel touristy. Once you get the tourist, the planar crowd is not far behind, and then everyone is a particular "someone from somewhere else," at that point, I don't care about their characters since the players are not showing any effort to care about the world I am running.

One of the most toxic trends in modern gaming is escapist identity marketing; the game has to support being an anything tourist, and everyone that plays wanders through a theme park.

At this point, most locals look at the PCs like the locals look at tourists who wander through, destroy things, and take all the parking places.

Runequest's Glorantha killed the Pathfinder Golarion theme park for me. There are "elder races" here, but most of the backgrounds are a variety of diverse humans and mixes in between. There is much diversity here; you must read and care about the world to unlock it.

The world has a few themed areas that aren't blatantly "theme parky" like other worlds. These cultures may mirror some on Earth, but they are ultimately their own, with history and plenty of detail and flavor. And there is a ton of history to read. Runequest describes the world in one book, and there is a unique two-volume set if you want to dive deeper.

The Great Wheel and Pathfinder's Golarion have become far too cartoony and childish for my taste. I outgrew them. They are turning into this mass market; look at the cute things, smug heroes with attitudes, and mass market experiences that any 3D Hollywood animated movie for kids is these days. Both feel like Pixar or Dreamworks animated movie games; the worlds are bland, too much steampunk, and uninteresting. Some of the worlds rely too much on the old guard remembering them, and they are currently unsupported and left to decay.

Pathfinder 1e was visually appealing because of the "rule of cool" art. All of that has been erased and feels like a hangover in the setting today, a party the company wants to forget happened. The art can't carry a campaign setting alone, though. It is also dated and a little silly, and I prefer stylistic realism with a more serious tone. Even the remastered art tries too hard, feeling strangely surreal and unrealistic. Final Fantasy swords larger than a body belong in video games for kids. This is fantasy, but I outgrew that style when I gave up my PlayStation 1.

Give me a serious-toned world with history and a defined set of cultures and backgrounds, and let me enjoy digging in deep and being rewarded for my research.

And I was a super fan of Pathfinder 1e, and it all fell apart. I realized I had outgrown it, and there were better things to spend time with. The whole theme park thing made me cringe. I don't want to play in a rip-off of ancient Egypt, and Castles & Crusades has a Fantasy Egypt campaign guide where you can play in the actual setting in a fantasy context. There is far better out there, and a dedicated setting will make players invest in the setting with their background choices rather than play "another Dragonborn."

I am not selling the PF 1e books, but they are stored away and out of my mind.

But, the Most Technology is the Most Fun!

Do I really want to play in a Bronze Age setting?

But I will need more technology than that to play fantasy!

There were no colossal sailing ships, crossbows, plate armor, lances, saddles, catapults, windmills, gears, water wheels, compasses, universities, banks, blown glass, printing presses, gunpowder, playing cards, or even iron smelting.

Even though Runequest has more magic than D&D, many people get hung up on the lack of iconic fantasy equipment when trying to play in a setting like this. It is a challenge, and if you put yourself in a "Conan" mindset, things start to make a little more sense, giving you a frame of reference that people can watch movies about and get an idea of what is going on.

It isn't Conan directly, but when you tell them Conan, people don't think of Arthurian Knights and catapults, so it is a good starting point. Another good starting point is Greek culture, movies like Hercules, and films set during the time of Greek gods. Again, this isn't Ancient Greece, but that level of technology and civilization gives people something else to think about and keeps Merlin and Gandalf out of their minds.

Too much fantasy these days is this sloppy stew of Renaissance concepts, Robin Hood, King Arthur, Harry Potter, Ren Faire, Final Fantasy, and even Lord of the Rings. You get fantasy art with people with modern haircuts and hair dye and that smug movie-poster look on their faces doing something impossible in that rule-of-cool style art, holding a sword outsizing their body, which means nothing. I am not against fun and expressing yourself, but most of today's fantasy art is this commercialized, childish, comic-book-style, Instagram-influenced, AI-art-looking tripe.

It is meant to sell you collector's market books.

A Bronze Age setting lets you strip that all away. Even in Runequest, the setting is primarily human but has a wide variety of actual diversity. Many games say "diversity" but hide it with anthrophonic animals, planar races, puppet races, intelligent plants, cat-headed fur-covered humans, or dragon people. Do you want to be diverse in Runequest? Pick a culture, race, and skin tone; there you go—you are diverse. There is no hiding under a sports mascot costume or foam rubber alien mask.

This game is not about your gear, funny shape, planar origin, or silly animal voices. Sometimes, I feel 5E has become "the cosplay amateur theater game" more than it is about stories, quests, dungeons, monsters, treasures, exploration, or even the world. The selfish notion of "identity" is the only thing that matters, followed by hamming it up with a funny voice. I like creating unique characters and acting in character, but many streaming shows take this too far to the point of clownery.

And when the game becomes all about "you," the people of the world, world, story, and even death take a back seat.

Similarly, people get wrapped up in gear. The typical "dungeon outfitting" of sorting through gear lists and adjusting encumbrance takes over the game, where you get into this puzzle-game-inspired gameplay. Hammer and spikes solve the "jam the door shut" puzzle. A ten-foot pole solves the "pit trap problem." The rope solves the "climb down the shaft" puzzle. Runequest has some of that, but in most situations, you will use skills, roleplay, cast magic, and avoid fights. The OSR "puzzle shopping" isn't as important here.

The list of Runequest equipment includes only a dozen tools and pieces of exploration gear, plus a few pages of prices for other common (non-adventure) goods and services. Even in the equipment book, adventure gear goes a page and a half, and it isn't the sort of "stock your pack" lists that many OSR games get into where you need to start buying dozens of ordinary items just to be able to have an adventuring pack.

But what is there to do if the game is about something other than the gear or technology? If I had to be human, I would be bored! I need to travel the world, to go to the outer planes, to have fun!

D&D teaches you many bad habits. The D&D 4E "planes at level 10" has to be one of the dumbest ideas Wizards has ever foisted on the hobby, which is still being pushed today. Everyone has to be a special something. Campaign settings are boring. Plane-hopping is the only fun. Magic is like superpowers.

The truth is, you will have more fun with less.

Your family, your kin, your home, your tribe, or your town are the heart of who you are. Who is your blood? Who are your people? You can play a loner and wanderer type, but establishing a connection somewhere becomes a goal. Are your people building a settlement in a new land? Do you look different from others in the tribe? Are you an outsider? How do you win their trust and become accepted? Are you being chased by people you escaped? What is happening today that threatens your home?

With the distractions of magic superpowers, gear shopping, steampunk technology, unique backgrounds, and planar travel out of the way, you can focus on the story.

Your story.

The story of your people.

The story of events in the world.

You can care so much about options and choices they bury you.

There are times I find players who need all those colorful ornaments, rules, plate armor, classes, and backgrounds to hide behind, so they have to come out and get into their character more. I had a player who only played Dragonborn forced to play a human, and he discovered he enjoyed being forced to make something he thought was uninteresting into something he loved. The same thing happened with a player who only played plate-wearing paladins. Who are you without the armor and holy powers?

What is your story?

Strip it all away and tell me who you are.

Runequest & Minecraft

The stereotypical default "adventure start" for D&D is, "You are all at an inn when...!"

The exact same starting default in Runequest is, "Your tribe declares this hill next to a river shall be their new home!"

Runequest is a much lower-level experience. Its iconic start is similar to another beloved game, where you start in the middle of nowhere and build, craft, and explore the world.

Runequest is a lot like Minecraft.

When you have D&D, you assume this pseudo-modern Renaissance setting, with the typical British castles, thee and thou, those Ren Fair theme park towns, bustling markets, tall ships, jousting, knights, princesses, comical bards, and every other trope across a thousand years of history jammed into one time period.

D&D is a game of stereotypes.

D&D is, by default, set in a time of plenty. If a town doesn't have it, traders will bring it in, and people will have enough money or resources to trade for whatever they want. Almost every D&D setting (outside of Dark Sun, but even that is a wealthy setting that does not worry about food) is like this. Trading routes have been long established. There is a vast "fat and wealthy" class. The towns and cities are enormous, and the borders between kingdoms are often drawn on well-established maps.

In Runequest, that starting scenario means your tribe is worried about the number of cows, oxen, sheep, chickens, and horses it has. People are building houses. People in your village go out in the hills and forests to forage. Others are tilling the land to plant crops. A few are building defenses. Some are making primitive tools and clothing.

You, the town's young adventurers, are called upon to go save someone who went missing, deal with raiders trying to steal your food or animals, explore the wilds looking for resources, and investigate ancient sites of mystery on your land. You help out where you can, but as your power grows, the town sees you as more important, being the problem solvers and people they call upon during a crisis.

Sound familiar? Yeah, that's Minecraft.

Oh, and by the way, you are likely crafting your own weapons, learning magic from things you find in those ancient sites, becoming more robust to deal with threats, and finding treasures lost by heroes of old in those ruins. As your town expands, the threats grow, and you begin working with surrounding settlements or fighting with them. You start to discover the secrets of the land and universe. Your power grows. You can craft better weapons and armor and enchant them.

That is all, um, Minecraft.

Runequest is Minecraft with a Bronze Age "mod" put on top of the game. Granted, this is a very simplistic way of describing the game and sort of unfair because it offers so much more, but it is far easier than describing it as "sort of like Conan and Ancient Greece, if you read the Odyssey, but not really that way." But when you look at how the lowest level of the world works, the day-to-day life of people is a lot like what you do in a Minecraft game.

Take care of the animals, till the fields, build houses, craft weapons and tools, build defenses, cut roads, explore, deal with dangers, threats, and hostile forces, learn magic, fish for food, hunt, trap, craft a bow and arrows, train, and explore ancient places of mystery.

This is your jam.

And that Runequest jam is Minecraft. Minus all the crazy builds, those are still possible if you play on longer arcs and open your mind a little. But the gameplay loop of the typical Runequest village start is surprisingly similar. You don't have iron, but you do have bronze as your "quality metal" and magic.

D&D is far too cosmopolitan and modernized, especially in its modern form. In Pathfinder 2, I get the feeling that Steampunk DoorDash is operating with spider mechs, delivering food from a magic Internet communication system, and the world is the Industrial Age. D&D has this "Age of Sail" feeling where worldwide trade brings commodities from distant lands to local markets. D&D is fat, wealthy, affluent, civilized, and with established governments and social norms. The towns are immaculate, built up, and look like tourist towns with dressed-up cosplay actors and many stereotypical Ren Faire things. Starships fly in from out of space. Gates connect the planes, and the outer planes are places everyone knows about. Gunpowder exists. Magical healing means no one gets sick. Parts are a parody of the fantasy genre, while others are so modern or sci-fi they don't belong in the game. D&D is more of a 1900s Victorian fantasy these days.

D&D and Pathfinder 2 are modern-day genre games that wear fantasy cosplay.

We are one step away from the designers of these games introducing cell phone magic items because characters can't be expected to not have those, and players won't know how to function in a pretend world without them.

Go ahead and laugh.

I will be right on this one day.

With Runequest, you are stripping away two whole technological ages. The Renaissance and Middle Ages have never happened, nor will they ever happen. You don't even have organized churches. Faiths are personal. Sea travel is hazardous, and with smaller boats, it is short-range. People need help to keep their animals cared for and in pens and must store food for longer winters. Tribes move into unsettled areas and try to settle them.

There is no iron or steel.

If you live in a small town, you won't have an "adventure shop" selling weapons, tools, torches, and armor. A smith will craft all these, and other tradespeople will craft essential gear like ropes and leather goods like packs. You won't have a wandering magic item merchant. Trade caravans exist, but only along major routes. There is no "industry" in this world. There are no "world-spanning governments" or "massive organized religions." People fight hard to scrape out survival.

You may even craft and sell your own goods. Get crafting skills, gather or buy resources, and tell your referee that your character will be crafting between adventures or during downtime.

You will be able to make quality gear and make coins on the side.

You add the technology level of D&D and all the trade, social, governmental, and world-spanning advancements with it. Once you have mass-produced iron, you will have an industry, universities, worldwide trade, exploration, colonization, a settled world with nations, and a powerful church. And you say high magic is added to this? That is an accelerant towards mass colonization and conquering the world.

The best model for relating Runequest to others is Minecraft. This is a survival game in which you need to craft your technology yourself out of the things you find. There is an "urban and social" part of Runequest that ignores the survival aspect, but 99% of the world is made up of these small towns and settlements fighting for survival in a hostile world.

Mail Room: Runequest Starter Set

A few notes: The Runequest Starter Set does not have a character generation system and uses a simplified subset of the rules in the full Runequest game. You will play with many relatively attractive pre-gens (on the cover, plus many more in the box).

Runequest also has some vast misconceptions from the D&D crowd. You are not playing in the Renaissance, and not having European castles, plate armor, crossbows, gunpowder, iron, and giant-masted sailing ships does not mean this game is any less fun.

You are not King Arthur; you are playing the epic heroes of ancient times, like in Odessy, Jason and the Argonauts, and many other classics. You all have magic, even fighters. In some ways, you are more epic and capable than starting D&D characters.

Less gear and technology means a greater focus on characters and story. I have had players in D&D whose characters' motivations were "plate mail, shield, and longsword."

You are not playing a creature cantina of different races. Your starting characters will likely be humans, who can be wonderfully diverse—just look at Earth.

Fighters have magic to sharpen their blades and do extra damage, plus damage to magic creatures. Archers can use a spell to ignite arrows and cause massive damage if they hit. Rune spells expand the possibilities, and every character has them.

Also, characters are linked to both elemental and power runes - which have oppositions and hierarchies. These form your powers, but they are also roleplaying cues. Characters also have passions, which are more roleplaying ability scores, and these can even be used to buff a skill roll. There are more ability scores for roleplaying - directly linked to powers and story - than in any other game.

Runequest puts the D&D inspiration system to shame.

This game puts story games, like FATE, to shame.

My character's loyalty to a people can be used to buff a combat roll if they are threatened. On a critical failure, I can become wracked by despair and have my passion level decrease. Passions gain experience, just like skills.

There is a rune called disorder, which covers disorder, egocentricity, greed, strife, thoughtlessness, and the self. Let's say you have this at 70%. You now have a 70% chance of getting a buff (inspiration) to a roll that this rune could help. If you are a greedy thief, this rune helps you. It can level up. Also, if it gets above 80%, it may guide your actions over your best wishes, for good or bad.

If you want to change your ways or tamp down an extreme personality type, you can work on the opposite rune, truth, and try to level that up. Every point gained in disorder takes a point away from truth, and vice-versa. You can pursue a balance or go all-in on one.

This also means if you are water-aligned, you will swim very well and fast and be able to hold your breath underwater longer (less effort). Air rune characters will likely have the breath-holding thing, too, but not the swimming (more air). There are many roleplaying ways to use these, which will blow your mind.

These scores are also used for casting rune magic linked to your powers.

Your runes and passions make you a hero. They can be used for buffs. They are used in roleplaying.

Sometimes, I wonder why streaming shows like Critical Role aren't playing games like Runequest, where the roleplaying stats are real and matter. If the entire premise of your show is characters and their personalities, why are you playing D&D?

Basic Roleplaying Solves the Runequest Problem

I see many reviews of Runequest from a few years ago that say the game is too tightly tied to the setting, and they wish it wasn't. Most complaints are from those who did not use the setting but liked the rules. Mythras, the BRP fork supported by the creators of Runequest 6, solves the problem by creating a set of rules not tied to a world.

I like Runequest 7 being tightly tied to the setting, making the game different and unique. I am tired of the cookie-cutter, planar-linked, faux-modern, non-colonial, neo-Renaissance, Harry Potter meets pop-culture settings that Wizards puts out, and they are all the same at this point. Baldurs Gate 3 takes the entire D&D genre into sci-fi, and it is hard to call anything D&D fantasy these days. Call them Spelljammers, but they are starships, and most D&D settings are now wannabe sci-fi settings that force characters to start as primitive stick-using townspeople.

There is so much sci-fi in fantasy these days. This Conan meets Buck Rogers stuff gets tiring, and all it serves to do is put every genre in a blender and press the highest number on the machine to create flavorless multi-genre scop paste.

The science-fantasy fad also subconsciously tells every fantasy character, "You are a low-intelligence primitive." It is the designer's way of describing the audience as inferior for wanting to play fantasy archetypes and is also colonialist in theme. Fear not, stupid barbarians and primitive peoples of the world! The space people are here! Sorry, our cleaning robot killed you. Don't kill yourself figuring out our space artifacts!

Sci-fi in fantasy, unless this is the game when it starts, sideswipes the players and their expectations and feels like the DM and module writer talking down to the players.

And how do you return to caring about the everyday fantasy world when you know UFOs are out there? Do I care that the Black Knight ruined the King's celebration? Am I mad that the Dark Elf raided the Border Keep? Do I care about the lost island? We need to rescue the princess, but we really want to be chasing aliens.

I have never had a fantasy campaign recover from a sci-fi incursion.

And frankly, Gamma World is a better mix of the genres. Post-apocalyptic is the place to be for mixed sci-fi and fantasy, and it does the genre the best, with mutations as the power source. You belong here, and the great mystery is figuring out what happened to the world and who the ancients were.

Dungeon Crawl Classics does it right, too. The sci-fi elements are so crazy and strange that they are alien and unrelatable. You are not getting a "Star Trek" ship that is more civilized than you up there, with a crew teleporting down and telling the characters what primitives they are.

Runequest is pure bronze-age high fantasy, with even everyday people using magic. You think "everyone knows magic" as something that blows out the game world, but it works here with a heightened sense of spiritualism and magic being a part of life. The magic is minor and more like charms or incantations, something used to help clean a room, like the old AD&D cantrips. In 5E, cantrips became "laser" attack spells like a video game (and fell into the 'why take anything else' category). In AD&D, they were minor incantations, like magic tricks, with no combat use.

If I were using Runequest for a generic fantasy game, I would use the old Basic Roleplaying game 'Big Yellow Book' before using Runequest since the assumption that 'everyone knows magic' is nonexistent. These days, we have even better...

The only answer here is the same one that was true back then as it is now: the Basic Fantasy Game is the generic d100 system for non-RQ fantasy, and it always was. These days, we have an ORC-licensed system ready to expand upon and use, and it works out of the box for generic fantasy, high to low. It also works in Gamma World-style settings.

But letting Runequest be Runequest is a strength. I love runes and passions as part of the character. I love the tight tying to tribe, cult, and family. No other game does this! Let the game's systems reflect the world, culture, and experience of living there.

BRP is for everything else except Cthulhu. BRP is designed as a toolkit and fits better as a generic fantasy starting point. And the starting point is an excellent way to describe it since fantasy games are always better when the generic part is tossed out, and the group adds their ideas and magic to the system.

Mythras is also a great option if you go off-Chaosium, and they have a classic fantasy supplement if you want less Bronze Age and more high fantasy. Yes, the font size is small, and I use a PDF on a tablet (and I bought reading glasses). Hopefully, when this team goes ORC license, they reprint the book with a larger font.

The BRP-like d100 systems are a great place to play and are also very compatible with each other.

BRP is the best thing to happen to all of Chaosium's games since it takes the 'universal system' pressure off them. This also allows Runequest and Call of Cthulhu to be their own thing, with system-specific game rule extensions. This also sets the model for your worlds and creations, inviting you to build subsystems to add to the game.

I love GURPS, but with Chaosium games, the parts unique to the world are essential to the flavor and play of the game. You need to flip optional rules in GURPS to get the same thing, but there is a freedom in BRP that allows the designers to customize the game for the setting—and it invites you to do the same.

Mail Room: BRP (2023) Gold Leatherette

The gold leatherette book for the Basic Roleplaying System arrived today and is an excellent volume. The paper quality is the same non-glossy satin, a sort of "soft, not slick" paper stock that is heavy, sturdy, and pleasant. It is also lighter than a heavier clay-glossy paper book; while those are nice, this is nice, too.

BRP is a one-book GURPS replacement for me. Nothing will beat GURPS as a character designer, but as a more straightforward game that does roughly the same thing GURPS does, but with a character development system that rewards using the skills you use, not those you don't. BRP is good enough for me and does the classic open-ended percentile system about the best.

This is far different from a level-based system, where if you do not use a dagger for 20 levels and pick one up, you suddenly become a master knife fighter. In BRP, if you want a skill to improve, you must use the skill. If you want magic, learn magic and use the magic.

In GURPS, you can just "buy magic" and say, "I learned it." Typically, a good referee requires a good reason, but out-of-the-blue stuff can happen. In an initial purchase, it can also occur in BRP, but improvement is directly linked to use. Level-based systems are even worse. They give you freebies. You never have to explain how you learned, and I find that I never use many of them because they never fit into my character concept. You can multiclass and never explain how, all of a sudden, a warlock became a part-time paladin.

BRP reminds me of the classic Top Secret System, but it has been highly evolved and refined over 40 years of development. This separates BRP from any DriveThruRPG or Kickstarter percentile system; while those may have the buzz and flash, BRP has had 40 years of development, play, and experience. Is BRP slightly heavy in terms of rules? Yes and no, most of the system is optional, and you can just use the system as a clean combat and task resolution system, roll 1d100, apply damage, next turn, and ignore almost all of the special rules. Every old-school system does this at heart and does not expect you to "follow all the rules," while today's games often depend on the rules to keep them working correctly.

BRP could easily create a Top Secret or even a James Bond 007-type RPG, maintain that percentile-game feeling, and have the crunch and skills to make the game more than a 5E-style "room-based combat simulator." Spy games need a good skill base, with various specialties for experts and character types. If you think back to the Mission Impossible TV series, you will have disguise specialists, art experts, infiltrators, technical people, and all other types assembled for a team mission.

If I did a Mission Impossible-style game, each player would have a few characters with different specialties, and the team leader (who would rotate) would choose the characters from the group. That way, a player could have an 'art expert' character and another character as an 'Olympic Triathlete,' and different missions could call for various experts. BRP is simple enough to run multiple characters, while other systems are far more complex.

Top Secret and the 007 game never had a robust character advancement system like BRP. Even Gangbusters or Star Frontiers could be implemented just as effortlessly by BRP. The latter would need a few items ported in, but the Chaosium percentile system is decades beyond the abandoned TSR ones and, frankly, likely what TSR was trying to implement and compete with. Yes, the TSR systems were more simple, but BRP stood the test of time and outlasted them by decades and companies.

Also, since BRP is a more streamlined system, it is far easier to get into than a more robust implementation of the same system, such as Runequest. While this is the same engine that powers Runequest, the rules in RQ are more in-depth and layered than those in BRP, with many more subsystems and specific character options for the RQ world.

BRP is supposed to be more of a "base system" that is to be layered upon. You can play BRP as-is, but the book says you must put on your game-designer hat and add world-specific rules that your game needs. Granted, BRP comes with many options to use; encouraging players to become game designers is how old-school games were played.

I do feel BRP is easier to begin that RQ, but they have a beginners box for RQ that is coming soon.

What is so great about BRP and Runequest is the Skyrim-style improvement system. Your character starts without a class with beginning abilities based on background and choices. To improve a skill, you must use it successfully. In d20 games, you can never shoot a bow, get five levels, and be better at it. Some classes even give you free bow powers while you were never using that bow! I can do the same in GURPS by adding character points that improve bow skills without using them, but I would disallow that as a referee.

Too many people like the d20 freebies and automatic advancement. This is even present in the OSR and almost every class-based game design.

Earning my skills through use gives me greater satisfaction and connection to my character. It also gives me a greater connection to my character's story since I can look at those skills and know why they are as high as they are. If I have a character with high stealth and dagger skills, that tells a story of every advancement. I wonder why they are that good in a class-based system. Did they find a 5,000 gold piece gem and get a few levels in a 1 XP for 1 GP system? Did they complete a roleplaying quest as a part of a party (and only really did something to earn them) and just ride along for the XP?

I wonder why that class-based system character is good.

In BRP and Runequest, I can look at my character sheet and instantly know why. The story is a part of my character, as are my choices and the good and bad things that happened along the way. When you start a character, you still determine where your character will go, depending on your choices. Very few OSR games use this sort of "open system." If they do, I guarantee they haven't been around for 40 years and have also tested this well.

Runequest: Elves

I am more of a Runequest 3 player; that is when I started back in the Avalon Hill days. If there is one thing that I change about the new rules, it is the look and nature of the elves and, to a lesser extent, dwarves. Elves and dwarves in Runequest have always been closer to the Tolkien-style ones that earlier editions seemed to embrace rather than the more alien ones in the newest edition, at least to my group.

They look like the above, more like plant people than elves. In my world, this "tree form" is a magic the elves have that gives them excellent camouflage. It also explains the art since very few see them around. This is all they can say an elf looks like to human artists since this is all they have seen.

This is not a lore-breaking change; it aligns the game with the versions I am used to and makes the elves more traditional and mysterious. The tree form is also very cool. A lot of the lore about them can be kept, like them being vegetarians and vulnerable to iron, and even skin colors can be preserved, making some brown, others green, and some yellow or blue.

Why can I do this? The book gives me the right to the Maximum Game Fun (MGF) rule. If my group and I have more fun with traditional elves with the magic ability to shift into trees, then as the rules say, "We go with it."

Just remember, all art is interpretive and in the eye of the beholder. Speaking of which...

Runequest was cross-published in Japan in the late 1980s, so if I wanted every race and character to look like manga or anime, that is within the lore since the books exist and the art was used. I can have manga elves in my game if I want, I just declare MGF, and it makes it so. I frankly love this anime-style art in the books, and I wish Chaosium had an edition of the game with 100% manga and anime-style art. The art is already amazing as it is!

...but just imagine. "Manga Game Fun" Runequest would be awesome.

Off the Shelf: Runequest

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.

Planned Systems vs. DIY Systems

Some pen-and-paper games lay out everything for you and make your choices for your character as you level. You get a level, and the system says you get X and Y powers, ability scores, and hits. These are planned systems, and some good examples of them are:

• d20, Pathfinder, and D&D
• Basic Fantasy and Labyrinth Lord
• Fantasy Age and Dragon Age
• Most class-based systems
• Most MMOs

Some pen-and-paper games are DIY (do it yourself) games, and often these give you a number of "character development points" to use anyway you would like to improve your character. Some examples of this type of game include:

• Savage Worlds
• Legend and Runequest
• GURPS and Champions
• Mongoose's Traveller
• Star Frontiers and many of the TSR Boxed Games
• Most classless systems

And some fall in the middle:

• Fantasy Flight's Star Wars System

Planned systems are great for newcomers, because it is a lot easier to say "you get this and that" when you level instead of spending time sorting through the rules and the book asking the question "is this a good choice" over and over again. Believe us, we have been there, and you practically have to teach every new player the complete set of rules when they first level up with a DIY system. Otherwise, how would they know what is good?

Planned games protect new players from making bad choices, and balance the game based on prebuilt and predictable "endgame" builds.

We prefer DIY systems, because we like making our own choices when we progress characters, and we are more experienced players who know what we want when we build characters. Some planned systems have elements of choice (skill points and multiclassing), but a true DIY system foregoes classes and balances the game around skills and task resolution. Personally, when I level a character, I don't like feeling limited to the choices the game makes for me, especially if that wasn't the direction my character was going in during the last adventure.

If my warlock spent most of the last session socializing and roleplaying, why should he advance in "warlock power" at the end of the night? Shouldn't something reflect his learned ability in socializing and people skills due to this experience?

With a planned system, it is difficult to reflect those experiences and often you end up a better warlock and just as bad as a talker as you started. Warlocks aren't talkers, are they? That's a bard! So do I have to take a bard level now? Great, hand me a lute and paint it black.

With a DIY system, I put some skill points in a social skill reflecting what I did that night, and I am done. How did I get those XPs? Shouldn't those reflect my experiences? My warlock powers don't increase because I didn't use them, but who cares? If this campaign is all about talking, I am all setup for the next game with a little better oratory skills under my belt for next time, and I am happy. If next time we have a swashbuckling adventure I may pick up a sword skill or two.

Does it matter I am not progressing along a game designer's pre-planned class advancement track? Something the company spends countless hours balancing and tweaking to get "one" advancement experience perfect? No, it doesn't. My "advancement track" is the adventures I go on, and if I end up more of a glib, sword swinging practitioner of dark magic than a pure 100% power-level don-nothing-else factory-stamped-out warlock I don't care. My guy is my guy, and the adventures he went on made up the skills and powers he collected along the way.

DIY systems focus on organic advancement and balance the game on skill rolls and task difficulty.

DIY systems don't really have predicable "endgame" character builds, you just become very good at doing the things you do the most. You may end up the world's best talker, but if that is what you enjoy having your character do at the table, that is a good thing since your character advancement reflects what you are doing when you play.

Planned systems also tend to have these "pre-balanced" endgames, where the fighter will always have X attacks at Y to-hit, and be able to do Z damage a turn. Since the game designer "planned" this out, relative character power between classes is easy to calculate, and the "end game" monsters are easier to balance, Well, they should be, but a lot of planned systems typically don't take a lot of factors and exploits into consideration at the higher end (conditions, initiative, and turn denial powers) and things fall out of balance easily.

This is why a lot of competitive multiplayer online games are (or end up being) planned systems. You saw this in World of Warcraft's evolution, a lot of DIY systems were dropped to put characters in predictable, damage-and-healing-output-known envelopes. PVP and PVE balance in these games equals challenge and fun - at the cost of letting you level up your character how you choose to play.

D&D 4 was like this for us, at the high end the game fell apart for us because of the amount of stuns and other powers that rendered foes unable to act during a turn, and also our characters felt like they were getting competitively weaker versus the monsters they faced. The end-game tactics broke down into: go first, deny the enemy his turn, load it up with conditions, and beat on it with "whatever power you have" until it succumbs. The game wanted to be battle chess (which it was for us at low levels), but the high-end game did not work - at least for us.

With a DIY system, the endgame can be calculated if you do a little math, but the end-result is typically a flatter power level. The numbers usually don't get way out of balance, as the system is usually balanced around task resolution. Better skills can lead to a higher DPS and damage output in a DIY system, since you are hitting more and you may have access to special combat moves and abilities you purchased with your points. The Star Wars RPG by Fantasy Flight does a good job with talents and making those unlock higher levels of combat power, so there can be a calculated "end game build" with a DIY system - it just takes a little more design and forethought.

What character advancement system you like is of course, up to you. There are times when "I don't want to think" and I appreciate the simplicity of a planned system. I still like Fantasy AGE a lot, and I feel it is a great, stepped and balanced design that does a better job at planned advancement than most d20 based games. It is a more modern design with a hybrid "choice plus planned advancement" that I like, and it is a fun and simple model and great for new players. One problem with this model is that if the game designer doesn't think of a role, it is not viable - such as Dragon Age vs. Fantasy Age and the rogue archer issue.

We still like DIY advancement systems for our games, since it fits our play style better. We run wide and diverse games, and they don't always fit into the box of a planned class box that easily. For us, what happens at the table that night is how the characters advance, and if the players want to go sword swinging and combat one night, they can reward themselves with those skills at the end of the night and get a little better. If all we do is roleplay and socialize with NPCs, that is what is rewarded at the end of the night. It fits how we play and gives us a better sense of satisfaction when players figure out rewards, and it also reflects how we play and what happens around our table a little better than a planned system could ever account for.

The Level System

This one started over coffee. DarkgarX mentioned to me that once levels were put into the game, the dynamic of the game changes from story to advancement. The feeling goes from "what am I doing in the game world" to "how can I get points?"

Now, admittedly, this is a pretty negative view of level-based games, but it is an interesting "advancement dynamic" that I am sure is present in all games. Everyone wants to do well, and everyone wants to get levels or skill points in a non-level based system to get rewarded at the end of the night and advance their characters. So this pressure is present in any game system with an advancement system present.

But do levels change things?

Levels, the Elephant in the Room

I always found it funny that levels are the one thing you can't talk about in-game in-character, yet in D&D they control everything, from character power to spells to monster hit dice. My Pathfinder world design, Realms of Proteus, tries to do away with that and allows in-game characters to speak freely of their level and stats, so there is a fun bit of power and meta gaming going on there, but for the most part we use euphemisms, "seasons" or some other sort of relative explanation of power and strength.

But do levels change things? Is the primary focus on hit-points and levels a factor in making the game more mathematical and cut-throat?

In a pure story-based game, you have this outward focus on how your character fits into the current story and overall game world. Your stats can be increased, and the focus of improvement is to allow your character to better be able to influence the story. A higher persuasion skill lets you persuade more NPCs, and thus your influence over that story grows. You can think of story based games as a fight to control the ever-shifting narrative between the players and the referee-controlled NPCs.

Levels. Hit dice. Tactical combat. Damage per turn. Whiff rate. Condition spells. Attacks of opportunity. Advantage and disadvantage. Here we go with traditional D&D style level based games, and a whole host of hard mathematical statistics comes into play. Not only do you have to be good at controlling the narrative, you have to be able to know how this hard math works, and master the combat rules. Levels make this easier, but also complicate things as you go up.

Levels vs. Narrative

Do levels fight the narrative push and pull? They certainly distract from it a bit, because all of a sudden you are not purely worried about narrative influence, to do good and control the narrative, you need to master the combat system too. You need levels to get better at this system, because roleplaying matters little in raising combat power. You need XP to get better, and you need to defeatefoes and solve problems.

Note how D&D type games lump problem solving and combat in the same pile of XP. If you solve problems with roleplaying and get XP, you get better at controlling the narrative (roleplaying skills), but you also get better in combat. You could have a 20th level character who just got roleplaying XP in their career and never touched a weapon, yet this person would be a better fighter than 99% of the people on the planet. You could have the inverse, a combat-only barbarian who never spoke a word being a diplomatic master negotiator at the narrative-influencing social skills just because of their level.

I think it is this connection between the ability for a high-level character to influence the narrative and the "let's have combat for XP" part of the game that troubles me. In a purely story-driven narrative game without levels, all you are doing with advancement is ticking up the skills you want. If you just want to be a talker, all you buy are social skills. If you just want to be a fighter, you work on fighting skills. Levels remove that granularity and ability to specialize, now yes, there are more social style classes in the D&D style games, like bard or thief, but those classes typically force you into a skill-monkey role and take away your ability to excel at combat.

D&D's classes make those choices for you.

You want to fight? Be a fighter! You want to be a fighter who excels at narrative control and social situations? You are out of luck, roll a rogue or a bard. Yes, as a fighter you can put skill points and feats towards social abilities, but typically (Pathfinder is a good example), the more skill-point heavy and social-focused classes are going to have an easier time of buying these feats and skills.

In D&D, King Arthur is King Arthur because he can kill very well, not because he has the skills and social power over the kingdom's narrative that a king should have. There's a disconnect there, and a simplification that I feel makes pure-story based games focused on the narrative a better choice for pure roleplayers than D&D style games.

Levels vs. Storytelling

I have had pure roleplayers at my table who played D&D 3-5 because that's what our group played. I always felt bad for them because they could care less about this mess of combat rules and gaining levels, and they just wanted to have fun. We did a good job accommodating them, but the game we played (D&D 4) required an attention to builds and rules that I felt turned them off to the whole game. We had some that loved the battle chess aspect, and we still like this part of the game, but the combat and level rules felt like an artificial limitation put over the game for players who were more interested in narrative control than "kill for treasure and XP."

If your players are more concerned with mathematical concerns and tactical battles, D&D works better, and I will go as far to say that D&D 4 works the best for players who want a Warhammer style figure tactical combat experience. D&D 5 tries to bring the story back to the table, yet it still has the baggage of a tactical game based on resource management, and a level system that connects narrative control and combat ability into one lump sum of XP. D&D style systems also pre-choose your character's lifetime ability to perform narrative control and combat contributions from game #1 with your choice of class.

Yes, you can switch careers and multiclass in mid-stream, but King Arthur is not a bard nor a rogue.

Answers?

I don't feel there is a good answer for this in the modern D&D style games. Again, we are hit with the abstraction of the class and combat systems, and this limits our choices. Of course fighters are the ones with the swords that never think their way out of a situation. The game assumes "fighters fight" and gimps their skills and gives them the best damage output and choices in swinging swords. I would love to see a D&D system "off the rails" that let people be people, reward skills used, and got rid of the abstract class and level system entirely.

Yes, Legend, Runequest, and other games do this, and they do it well.

There is a choice here of how much control you feel you should have (as a player) over your control over what happens at the table. If I choose to be a social character, I don't want my choices limited to, "well, pick a social class and suck at combat for as long as you have that character." If for a couple sessions I want to improve combat skills, let me improve combat skills. If for some others, I want to be the master of parlay, let me do that and improve my social prowess.

This is not about being a "fan" of a game, I collect them all and love reading them, so count me in as a fan for them all, as my shelves will attest. What this is about is taking a look inside yourself and asking, "am I getting rewarded for the things I want to do at the table?" Does a game force you into a role that later on you may regret or limit your contributions? Yes, a good referee can adjust things and give chances for everyone to have fun, but if your game takes a turn for the political, can your combat-focused character adapt?

It is again about understanding what each game does best, and finding games that fit your view of gaming and how your contributions are rewarded. We have moved beyond the "network effect" where every game has to be a modern version of D&D, and we are moving into an era where games are designed around a almost niche "way it plays" and the reward and contribution systems are designed to fit that game. You see this in videogaming with indie gaming. The big-box games are always there like the Call of Duties and D&D games, but a huge market is developing for custom and unique experiences that are off the level system tracks and as diverse as the players in our hobby.