M-Space

The Runequest 6 ruleset switched companies and became the d100, BRP-like Mythras game, spawned a sci-fi game called M-Space. This is almost a rules-light implementation of the Mythras engine, and it is a complete sci-fi game with alien creation, starship construction and battles, and character creation and combat. There are exploration rules, too.

Runequest 6 had many fans. The new Runequest is also excellent; it is another flavor of BRP worth supporting. If you are in the d100 BRP world, you have a lot of excellent choices.

The only weak parts of the M-Space game are the equipment and gear, with only a sample selection. I can pull in a gear list from many other games, from Star Frontiers and Cepheus Engine to Space Opera, so this isn't too much of a problem. However, it will vary if you use this game to play in another universe. Sometimes, a considerable default gear list will limit what you can use the game for since a gear list for a hard-science Traveller-style game will not fit in a Star Wars-style universe. Also, in Star Wars, that universe is not as "gear dependent" as a game like Star Frontiers, where characters are more defined by their collection of gear to activate their skill and abilities.

There is also an argument in sci-fi that the genre should not be so dependent on gear. The presence of it should be more determined by an oracle roll; the situation, or even skill possession, should assume the relevant gear is on the character without them needing to buy and track it.

If you are a technician, your skill grants you a "tool vest" for free. If someone in the story "takes it from you, " you will make technician rolls at a substantial negative modifier. The vest is also easily replaceable by access to any tool locker, where you can grab a tool belt and load it up with the things you need. The same goes for a medical kit, investigative gear, or any other piece of gear a skill may need.

Secondary "skill enabler" gear is assumed to come with the skill and is easily replaceable enough that you don't need to track it other than "has it" or "doesn't have it." In a survival situation where characters start off prepared, assume every character possesses "skill equipment," at parts of the story, they use it up, lose it, or eat through their survival rations in 7 days.

There will always be "unique items" like a teleportation belt, which must be tracked, purchased, and written on a character sheet. Weapons and armor are also significant enough to buy and track. If it is a weapon, unlinked to a skill, story item, strange find, or a unique item - track it on the character sheet. If it is everyday "skill enabler" gear, if you don't have it, put an "X" by the skill, and try to replace it as soon as possible.

Why does sci-fi need giant equipment lists? This definite "survivalist theme" in many sci-fi games turns it into a game of, "Didn't explore the planet with salt pills? You're dead." Players must go down the gear list, check 'do we have this' boxes, and buy dozens of minor items, such as a compass and lighter. Gameplay turns into, "What did we forget to take camping this time?"

The Star Trek TV show may have had under 5 or 6 props for the series used regularly. With the communicator, big phaser, women's shaver phaser, tricorder, and medical wand thing, Star Wars never worried about huge gear lists. Many sci-fi shows handwaved gear as something of lesser importance to the story.

Sci-fi games get into D&D "shop at town" mode, and we have shopping lists. Some games even have books full of gear. This is only bad if you assume this is how you must play. Yes, gear lists are more of an OSR thing, but if I am playing a Star Trek TV series-inspired game, I don't need a list at all, just a few item descriptions. It seems strange, but many sci-fi genres do not need gear lists.

However, if you look hard enough, there are good sci-fi equipment guides out there that are mostly setting neutral. This one by Angry Golem Games works well for most sci-fi settings. The OSR weapon damages are primarily in line with BRP and M-Space, and it contains enough general gear and tech trinkets to keep you shopping and geared up for quite a while.

Pick up a copy of the Space Opera PDF for really old-school games, which has powered our sci-fi gear lists for decades (even Star Frontiers). This is a solid 40-page list of sci-fi gear that covers a lot of genres, and since the gear is a multi-sci-fi genre, it fits well in many games. Weapon damages don't exist in an OSR or BRP format, but they do give a "wound factor" number that is easily convertible into a damage die; just count a +0 as a d6 and step up a die for each +1 (0 = d6, 1 = d8, 2 = d10, 3 = 2d6, etc.). Ignore the armor and penetration numbers here, too.

Is M-Space worth playing?

My feeling is yes since I have nothing like it, and it fills a need from a d100 sci-fi role-playing angle—especially with the BRP-style "improve as you go" game style. Frontier Space is the ultimate Star Frontiers replacement since it solves SF's broken action economy and higher-than-100% skill system.

So why not play Frontier Space?

FS is a more straightforward game but is more gear-dependent. FS also does not have a ship design system. FS has a character-point-driven improvement system (with a talent system) that is a crowd-pleaser since SF sorely needs this. FS has a very pulp feeling.

M-Space feels like hard sci-fi, almost like a Traveller. There is a de-emphasis on gear, like the Star Trek or Star Wars universes. In most situations, you can "assume" skills have gear, and characters either have it or not. In Star Trek, Spock has his "tricorder" in that pouch, and you don't need to track it, buy it, or write it on a character sheet (unless it gets destroyed or lost, X next to the skill until the skill-gear is replaced). Only track weapons, armor, unique, and story items.

Otherwise, head out into the universe, explore, and use the skills you want to improve.

Okay, my next question is, why not BRP?

M-Space has starship design and combat, which you could use with BRP, too. The beauty of the d100 systems in this family is a level of cross-compatibility on par with OSR games. You could use ORC BRP for characters and M-Space starships—no problem! M-Space is a more rules-light implementation, with far fewer rules than Frontier Space and BRP. It leans on Mythras for special case rules, but the game is complete. On another note, BRP suffers from the same sci-fi equipment list problem M-Space has, but my fix works well enough.

Also, M-Space has sections for simplified combat and starship combat rules. The game falls on the most rules-light of the BRP-style systems, streamlining the system even more than the BRP book.

What would an M-Space game feel like? Based on the art, I get this almost massive, open-ended, expansive, and vast sense of wonder only games like Tales from the Loop give me. Lots of sci-fi games "get in your face" like Star Wars, Starfinder, Star Frontiers, Star Trek, and others - they come at you hard and tell you, "This is how you play." The play structure is predefined, and social interactions and expectations are pre-set. An infinitely large game like Traveller can feel confining and small because everything is known. Even Starfinder feels small since there are no mysteries to the universe, and magic does everything.

M-Space feels like my first time in Minecraft. The only other game that gives me that feeling is Stars Without Number. But unlike SWN, M-Space is open-ended on progression and develops as you develop your character. Does your space pilot become a merchant, space miner, or mercenary? Unlike SWN, no classes exist, and your future is up to you.

The stars seem like a more enormous place without character classes telling you where to go.

M-Space is also rules-light like the original Traveller little black books but without the setting. Frontier Space feels set in either its universe or the original Star Frontiers universe, and the heavy focus on gear makes it a "shopping game" style of sci-fi instead of an "experiences-based" model. Tales from the Loop is also an equipment-light game; you decide if someone has something, and that is it. You are not going to Uncle Farley's General Store and trying to spend 5 dollars and 35 cents on gear and writing down bubble gum, comic books, playing cards, dice, and Swiss Army knives on character sheets.

So, I don't know where this would go or how it would play. In Starfinder, I know I am heading into a space dungeon or abandoned starship, and there will be football-headed space goblins in there to kill and take their weapons because we are eternally poor. In Star Frontiers, there were only a few good adventures. In M-Space, I don't know what this game is or does.

And all that is mine to make.

That freedom, while frightening, is fantastic. I will never worry about a book contradicting my universe or living up to the original game. I will never feel like I need to have a Star Wars adventure. I will never need to feel guilty that I am not "boldly going" anywhere. I will never be tied to "fighting the evil space aliens" - unless I want to. I will never have a galaxy so large I will feel hopeless. I can never explore it, and most of it is the same anyway because of UPP codes.

The universe and the expectations around that universe are mine.

I don't know what to do with it, which is fantastic.

BRP gave me that feeling back in the day with the big yellow book. It was always a game that seemed hard since it gave you everything and told you nothing. I now see how beautiful 'zero-story' games are like this. Why do I need game designers to tell me how to play their games? BRP, Hero, and GURPS are like that for me. Cypher falls in the middle since there is much designer influence around the play structure, yet the game has no story.

BRP games are excellent. Once you break free of your d20 dependence and class-based systems, the training wheels come off, and your mind opens to infinite possibilities.

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.

One Book Games

There is beauty to a one-book game, and I can't stress this enough. The collectors are ruining the hobby, and my garage is filled with games going out the door and being sold—they are collector's books, all of them. And games built for collectors are fluff-filled, shelf-filling, unplayable messes.

Collectible books are killing tabletop roleplaying.

As much as I love Pathfinder 1e, I fell into that trap. Every game Paizo and Wizards have released is a collector's game, and this is their bloated business model. Other companies follow the same model, and finding a game with the guts to stick to one book and make it the game they support is challenging. Today, games are book after book of paid-by-the-word walls of text, poorly edited, art-filled tripe. I love the art, but there gets to be a point where a book crosses the line from a game to a coffee-table book.

One of the One D&D concept art pages covered 80% of the page with a beautiful 2-page landscape spread and four tiny paragraphs of rules shoved at the bottom, almost as an afterthought. That is not a rule book. That is a coffee table book marketed towards collectors. That type of book is not usable at a table and is too nice to ever be taken to a play session.

Games written for collectors' markets aren't games. Could anyone play them with all the books? I doubt it. I could never play Pathfinder 1e with all those rules, and it takes a computer program to sort out the mess. Books become worthless as reference guides when they are so full of art and fluff.

There is a massive difference between a rule book and an art book with a few rules.

Back in the day, TSR published a fully playable 64-page rulebook that provided years of adventures.

These days, big companies spend at least 1,000 pages in three core books to communicate the same idea and game. What is worse, these games are rarely complete, missing core classes introduced in full-priced expansion books. We are getting "20 times the game" with "20 times less playability."

And like someone with a substance abuse issue, these publishers can rarely admit they have a problem.

The problem gets passed down to the collectors, who turn the addiction into a hoarding issue.

Getting rid of these collector's market games makes me want to play the ones I have.

I know; this puts some of my sacred cows on the chopping block. I love Pathfinder 1e, GURPS, and a few others. But honestly, some games do everything GURPS does in a single book. The game isn't worth playing if you need software to figure out a character since computerized record sheets are often used to hide the addiction and extract more money from you.

But the big games, like 5E and Pathfinder 2E, are going out the door.

Games made for collecting are not for playing. Owning them gives me a feeling of never being able to read them all, so I don't play them and just give up - happy to have the books, but no way in heck I would ever play something that bloated.

Smaller games?

Very playable.

And they invite me in instead of keeping me out.

The Fake World

There is this notion of the fake fantasy world, the reality that game designers live in, where an adventurer class is a sustainable part of the world. The world exists to support the adventurer. Yes, this is fantasy, but the extent to which this artificial "adventurer class" has been elevated reaches the level of gross oversaturation and parody, especially in many artwork pieces that ship with these games.

They act like cities with grand shopping bazaars, hundreds of magical weapons, items, and spells, and streets devoted to selling adventure equipment and magical items. We ran that type of campaign in Greyhawk, where we assumed the entire city was filled with rich, high-level, adventurer-class people sitting on millions of gold pieces, primarily idle and bored, as they tried to justify their pointless and worthless societal roles.

They were the overpowered, selfish, greedy, entitled, magic in everything, and snobby, entitled rich.

And they were the worst villains you could ever imagine.

Even the gods hated them because they kept killing the gods and taking their stuff (thank you, DDG). The gods would reincarnate and get more and more fed up. Greyhawk City became a festering sore of overpowered jerks. They did not want to conquer land or rule the world; they were too rich and lazy to lift a finger. They grew inward, collecting magic trinkets, worrying more about their appearance and stuff, and evil and good lived side-by-side - their alignments were all "entitled-rich" instead of lawful or chaotic anything.

After a while, alignment did not matter.

Faith did not matter.

Wealth and power won.

They were the new gods, and they acted like it.

Taken to its logical extreme, this is how D&D always ends up: people who can't be killed by repeated dagger thrusts, people who are constantly brought back to life, and magic that teleports and contingencies everyone out of certain death situations. Unlimited wishes.

Was this lousy gamemastering? Hey, we were kids. If it was in the game, it was allowed, right?

Many today have this attitude toward 5E: If it is in a book, we can use it, and it is legal.

I know this was our mistake back in the day, and it doesn't apply to everyone and everything today - fair point. But I still get that feeling in 5E. These aren't adventurers but superheroes who can't die.

There is such a thing as too much power, and today's D&D defines it.

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.

Dungeon Crawl Classics: OSR 101

DCC exists because people forgot how to play roleplaying games.

It takes a lot of random charts, forced 'bad stuff happens' rolls, bad things happen, random sudden death, and insane modules to come close to how we played the game back then - but this comes close.

For some, it is too much—it was for me the first time I read this. I felt it was impenetrable—a giant book with hundreds of pages and charts everywhere. I was reading it, telling myself, "This is cool, but I do not need all this to role-play how we used to."

I would just do it.

And I could do it with any version of B/X; just pick it up and go. Something insane may happen? Make a save, or it does. The old "save or die" roll, and we interpreted that as "save or this crazy stuff happens to you."

An arm turns into a tentacle, and you are turned into a green slime. Your face melts, and your sword is destroyed. You are teleported, sans gear, into a random dungeon room. You fall into another plane of existence, and your soul is torn from your body.

Deal with it.

I feel future D&D books will ban these sorts of things from the game and forbid the DM from using these "save or die" mechanics because they are traumatic. The entire game will be written around "protecting the player's ego and mental health," and at that point, it will be time to throw the books out. We are almost there with institutionalized safety tools; even though I support their use, people will abuse them - and game designers will just keep extending what they can do into other parts of the game.

Every monster will have a safety tools section.

Most Safe (recommended): The gelatinous cube will not dissolve the character in acid but merely carry them around in a comical and slapstick way. The character will be able to breathe and speak normally. As a result, nothing terrible will happen to the trapped player character, and they will be let go in 1d6 turns (in a safe area). If the X card is touched, merely push the character back a square without encasing them. If touched a second time, the cube blocks forward movement without forcing backward movement (DM: Ask the player if they fear substances like Jell-O and do not serve them this type of food during the game).

We would not want players to have panic attacks because they fear being dissolved alive and suffocated! You may laugh, but this is the cozy game D&D is slowly turning into. I am all for non-violent solutions and problem-solving, but I do not believe in pulling punches to protect someone's character. I have had a player believe their character could not die, step off a cliff to prove it, and I ruled the character died.

Cha'alt has a simple roleplaying game (Crimson Dragon Slayer) written into the book's appendix, and it is a complete, rules-light version of 5E meant to run the adventures at conventions. With every book, this gets iterated on and improved, and I can see why it is there. For convention play, why do you need anything more? Why do we need character sheets? Say what you are and the rules. Figure out your hit points, attacks, and bonuses, and tell me what you do.

And compared to DCC? Why do we need all these charts, character sheets, rules, and dice? This game goes all around the barn to walk in the front door. You don't need all this extra stuff if you know old-school play.

Fail a spell roll? Critically hit? I will tell you what happens. I only need a few pages of charts and rules. DCC, by comparison, is old-school play with training wheels. It is a very harsh way of putting it, as I love DCC as my go-to OSR game, but I can see where the feeling comes from. The charts train you how to "do all this" without a book telling you to "just make up something cool."

The charts are a starting point; if you can think of something better now, go with that! The book tells you to. In fact, DCC tells you to go beyond the book and the rules if you want to, so the entire game is optional.

So DCC is too big and unwieldy, and if you look at it another way, all of DCC is optional - so it isn't.

But DCC does train you on how things are done and gives you ideas. In this day and age of role-playing games written to take all imagination and fun out of the game and make the events in them "reflect your mundane life," we need this game more than ever.

So, playing Cha'alt with DCC makes sense.

In other ways, it doesn't.

The old-school answer to the question?

Are you having fun?

If you say yes, then it doesn't matter.

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.