RuneQuest III (Deluxe) Fixes

I played RuneQuest III (or Deluxe) for a very long time. It's a "pen & paper" role playing game, for those who haven't heard of it. I've understood it's actually the first RPG designed specifically for a specific fantasy world, Glorantha. Later, Chaosium made a Basic Role Playing system based on RQ. BRP is basically variations for different styles of gaming, such as Dark Fantasy in Elric (or Stormbringer before that), or cosmic, Lovecraftian horror, as in Call of Cthulhu (CoC).

(I know there was an attempt to create RQ 4, which had some good ideas, and that it never got published. I also know of the Mongoose version of RQ, which in my opinion does not do RQ justice, although it too has some good ideas. I have never read the rules for the earlier editions of RQ. When I'm referring to RQ in this post, I'm referring to RQ III, also sold in the RQ Deluxe package.)

RQ was made for Glorantha, a world of mythology. In fact, I've thought of Glorantha not as a "real" fantasy world in the way most fantasy worlds are intented, but rather as the setting of mythical, epic tales of the people of some fantasy world. It's decidedly a High Fantasy world, meaning that it's full of magic, monsters, gods, and other things that are - for a good reason - considered "fantastic", rather than realistic. But the system of RQ is still pretty realistic as RPGs go. And I find myself regretting that I sold all my RQ material some time ago.

What sets RQ apart from most other games is that all characters in RQ use magic. There are several different types of magic, such as Divine Magic, Spirit Magic, Ritual Magic, and Wizardry. Or maybe that last mentioned was called Sorcery, I can't remember. The funny, and in a way, historical thing about it is that Wizardry in Glorantha was practiced by monotheists who worship the Invisible God - clearly a religion inspired by Christianity. It's funny, because renaissance mages considered themselves Christians. :-)

I'll try to get to my point now. I was always unhappy about some aspects of RQ, which is also why I eventually sold it (I had played it for over 10 years consequtively, and not for years when I sold it after running out of cash). I've been looking for better RPGs, but found that there actually doesn't seem to be a perfect RPG around. Who would've thought. ;-)
Harn Master (HM), for example, as good as it is, has problems of its own. Ars Magica has some good ideas about magic, but doesn't seem to work as a game very well. About a dozen other games I've looked into have seemed mostly trash. HM is the game I now use in my fantasy games, CoC in horror games (despite the problems I'm having with it). But I've renewed my respect for RQ III, and think it could be improved into one of the best RPGs ever, and especially into the best high fantasy RPG ever.

I'll list those problems I saw in the system, and then sketch how I would fix them. There really are just five big problems I have with the system.

(1) Hit Points and injury system.
RQ has a hit location system, with the body divided into seven zones (for humanoids like humans and giants, more or less for others). Each zone has a number of Hit Points (HP) equal to a portion of General Hit Points (GHP). This latter, I think, may be my own term. The GHP are calculated from the Characteristics, which makes a lot of sense, and clearly separates RQ from games like Dungeons & Dragons, where HPs are gained by "levelling up" or other such horrid nonsense.

But while RQ works as it is, it can - and should - be improved. Instead of using those HPs as points that are lost due to damage, they should be used as indicators of toughness, or resilience to damage. That is, 5 HP in a leg should not be lowered to -2 HP when hit by 7 points of damage. Instead, the 7 point hit should be recorded in a list of injuries, and the severity of the injury would depend on the HP in the location struck. Thus, for a location with 5 HP, it would be pretty bad, but for a giant's similar location with 25 points it would be much less.

GHP should only be used for the effects of bloodloss, and perhaps to asses the effects of poisons and diseases.

The effects of injuries should be altered. In RQ, an arm is chopped off if it suffers a blow of twice the HP in damage (max damage is always twice the HP, so the 5 HP leg can only go to -5 HP). This is too easy, and should occur when the damage exceeds three times the HP (a 4 HP arm suffers more than 13 points of damage in one chop). After all, a limb is rendered unusable much more easily than it is severed.

But for added realism, it would be nice to have some "critical damage" rules, perhaps a table, to be used when a location suffers much damage. This could be ignored when playing very high fantasy, but would be great for more realistic games. I'm talking about effects, like reduced strenght in the limb, or other things like that. I also know it would be difficult to flesh out well, and don't see it as a necessary addition - just something that would be nice to have.


(2) Damage Bonus, Weapons and Armour.

One of the worst things in RQ (and consequently, all games using BRP) is the way Damage Bonus is done. Especially when combined with the injury system and weapon damages, this causes some pretty ridiculous things. The basic idea of a damage bonus based on the character's strenght and size is a very good one. But the game gives such massive bonuses that it makes the whole thing ridiculous.

For example, a big and strong human has a damage bonus of d6. A knife does something like d4 or d3+1 damage (a dagger does d4+2), so in his hands, it would do d4+d6. He could just use his fist to punch for d3+d6 damage! And a weaker man wielding a big sword would only do d10+1+d4. Something isn't right here...

Also, as the bonuses change significantly in discrete steps, it means the game has "magic numbers" that the players will want their characters to reach. For example, a character with the total of strenght (STR) and size (SIZ) of 30 will want to raise his characteristics by a total of 3 points, to reach a higher damage bonus.

The fix is basically simple, although hard to do in practice: the damage bonus should be simply the average of STR and SIZ, or perhaps (STR x2 + SIZ) / 3, if that's not too difficult. This would mean a really big change in the system, but I think it could be done without too much trouble.

Another way would be to simply reduce the Damage Bonus greatly (as they did in the attempted RQ4).

The weapons need a complete redoing as well. And so do the armours. It would be a good idea, perhaps, to have different methods of striking or using the weapons (and btw, no different skill for attack and defense, just different modifiers for these actions). Different damage types could also be used. But it's also a valid idea to keep things simple, because no greater detail is necessary in high fantasy. But in any case, especially considering the redoing of the injury system and damage bonus, all things related need to be changed so they make a working whole.


(3) Characteristics improvement.

This is the smallest of the problems I see in the system. Some Characteristics are too easy to improve, and can be improved too much. Dexterity (and Appearance too, IIRC) can be improved to original DEX x1.5, so a DEX 16 character could improve it to 24, while a DEX 6 character only to 9. Other Characteristics are connected in a way that doesn't work well either: Strenght, Constitution, and Size can all be increased to the level of the highest among them. So, a character with STR 4, CON 14, and SIZ 13, could increase all three to 14. Or maybe SIZ can't be increased, I can't remember well. But surely it's silly to think that the others could be raised to the level of SIZ. Even if we ignore SIZ, the connection between STR and CON is too strong and limiting.

I don't have a really good fix for this, but it could be something like any Characteristic could be improved given the available of usable methods, but they could only be improved by a limited number of points, certainly no more than to 1.5 times the original, but often not even that much. Perhaps an arbitrary limit of 3 or 5 points would do as the absolute maximum addition.


(4) Free INT and Wizardry basics.

I've finally reached the problem that used to bug me the most in RQ. Free Intelligence or Free INT. Wizards in RQ can manipulate spells based on the number of Free INT points they have. Free INT is equal to INT - the number of Wizardry or Spirit Magic spells "held in the mind" or memory of the person. The idiotic result is that the wizard is the more powerful the fewer spells he remembers! (He certainly would have others means of storing spells, such as spell matrices, but the ridiculousness of this point still remains.)

The way Free INT could be used was based on very good ideas, though. Wizards manipulate their spells to increase their Intensity, the Range of their effects, or the Duration of the spell. They could also cast multiple spells at once. Free INT is used as a limit to how much of this manipulation can be done.

The greatest problem with this is that even a newbie wizard with high INT can cast immensely powerful spells (if he just succeeds in the casting) - the skill of the caster is irrelevant to the power of the spell in this system.

Luckily, there's a simple and I think good fix to this. After all, wizard spells in RQ are separate skills. Instead of Free INT, use the spell skill's "Skill Index" (SI), to use a term from Harn Master. This is the number of full tens in the skill. So, a spell with skill of 56% has SI 5, and can be manipulated with up to 5 points. Similarly, limit the number of points used in each type of manipulation to the manipulation skill's SI. So, Intensity 77% means the wizard can intensify a spell to 7 point max, even if his SI in the spell is 12. (This is unlikely. Usually the wizardry skills are higher than any spell skills.)


(5) Skill Improvement.

The basic idea of skills and their improvement in RQ is great! You gain Experience Checks by using skills - these have a possibility of increasing that specific skill. The higher the skill, the less likely it is to improve. Very reasonable. Unfortunately, the number of points added to the skill is too much (d6 in RQ, d10 in BRP). A lesson from Harn Master shows how to fix this: instead of just one check, the GM can award multiple checks (and checks should not only be awarded from succesful uses of a skill - surely one can learn the hard way also). Then, instead of rolling a die for each success, add just one point per success. This forces the skills to improve in a much more reasonable manner, steadily. Even a high skill can improve a little with significant experience, while a low skill can improve pretty much with the same experience.


These are the big issues, and it's not impossible at all to fix them. The others parts are fairly easy, while everything having to do with injuries is difficult. Now I just hope somebody does the work on those and publishes a (hopefully free PDF) version of the whole game, so I can try it with my players! :D