Quote from: Old Geezer;688015* pees on David Johansen's boot *

If you want to fight mass battles, why not just use CHAINMAIL or even SWORDS AND SPELLS?

I mean, if you think back engineering an RPG to mass battles is fun, knock yourself out, but miniatures rules, including fantasy, are almost as thick on the ground as fantasy heartbreaker RPGs.

Because my point is that the existing rules in AD&D 1e don't require reverse engineering.  YOu could have all weapons do average damage and roll hit dice as a saving throw to speed it up a little more.  But you don't really need to because the game is already there.  It's almost like it was designed that way or something!

Runequest requires substantially more modification.  All we're really seeing here is D&D players reflexively gaging up the same old "it's not a wargame" whining that let Games Workshop sweep fantasy wargame field out from under it in the first place.  I think D&D's greatest strength is its broad appeal and I find the knee jerk defensiveness and clanishness of its fans laughable.  Almost as laughable as their name dropping celebrity worship.

Anyhow, Geezer, you should go change those pants but I'm not going to remind you to unzip first next time in any case.

Quote from: David Johansen;688398Runequest requires substantially more modification.  All we're really seeing here is D&D players reflexively gaging up the same old "it's not a wargame" whining that let Games Workshop sweep fantasy wargame field out from under it in the first place.  I think D&D's greatest strength is its broad appeal and I find the knee jerk defensiveness and clanishness of its fans laughable.  Almost as laughable as their name dropping celebrity worship.

I don't really disagree, D&D has a tactical miniatures game deep in its DNA. Runequest has SCA-style combat in its deep DNA (and there really is no rules connection between WBRM and Runequest). If you want to run a big skirmish with lots of miniatures, it isn't going to be much of a stretch using one of the many incarnations of D&D. That being said, you can easily run big skirmishes with RQ6 (right Pete?) or Pendragon. Hell, I've run dozens of battles using HeroQuest, but that's not as a tactical exercise but more of a Faces of Battle kind of experience.

But honestly, there's a lot of silly chest-beating going on here. D&D and RuneQuest are both fine rules system with very different, but enjoyable, combat engines. I personally prefer RQ to D&D, but I've been playing primarily in Glorantha since about 1980, so we ditched AD&D for RQ2 back then. Not because RQ2 was self-evidently superior, but just because it supported the settings and the games we liked (and you could play were-pigs, were-wolves, or trolls - which I recall as being pretty darn awesome at the time).

That being said, our group switched from RQ to Pendragon (David Dunham from our group came up with the Pendragon Pass rules) around 1992 or so, and never really returned to RQ. We've been using either HQ2 or Pendragon variants as our preferred rules engine ever since. Again, not because HQ2 or Pendragon are objectively superior, but because they support the style of play my group enjoys (although for the last six years we've used HQ2 pretty much exclusively as my current gaming group really prefers the rules lite approach).

Jeff

Quote from: richaje;688419I don't really disagree, D&D has a tactical miniatures game deep in its DNA. Runequest has SCA-style combat in its deep DNA (and there really is no rules connection between WBRM and Runequest). If you want to run a big skirmish with lots of miniatures, it isn't going to be much of a stretch using one of the many incarnations of D&D. That being said, you can easily run big skirmishes with RQ6 (right Pete?) or Pendragon. Hell, I've run dozens of battles using HeroQuest, but that's not as a tactical exercise but more of a Faces of Battle kind of experience.

But honestly, there's a lot of silly chest-beating going on here. D&D and RuneQuest are both fine rules system with very different, but enjoyable, combat engines. I personally prefer RQ to D&D, but I've been playing primarily in Glorantha since about 1980, so we ditched AD&D for RQ2 back then. Not because RQ2 was self-evidently superior, but just because it supported the settings and the games we liked (and you could play were-pigs, were-wolves, or trolls - which I recall as being pretty darn awesome at the time).

That being said, our group switched from RQ to Pendragon (David Dunham from our group came up with the Pendragon Pass rules) around 1992 or so, and never really returned to RQ. We've been using either HQ2 or Pendragon variants as our preferred rules engine ever since. Again, not because HQ2 or Pendragon are objectively superior, but because they support the style of play my group enjoys (although for the last six years we've used HQ2 pretty much exclusively as my current gaming group really prefers the rules lite approach).

Jeff

Yes.
Find the rules that support the setting and the style of play.  Not objectively better or worse without the context of that perspective.

Vreeg's first Rule of Setting Design
"Make sure the ruleset you are using matches the setting and game you want to play, because the setting and game WILL eventually match the system."

Quote from: Old Geezer;688015If you want to fight mass battles, why not just use CHAINMAIL or even SWORDS AND SPELLS?

I mean, if you think back engineering an RPG to mass battles is fun, knock yourself out, but miniatures rules, including fantasy, are almost as thick on the ground as fantasy heartbreaker RPGs.

I prefer Battlesystem myself but I agree with the general point being made.

Quote from: David Johansen;688398Because my point is that the existing rules in AD&D 1e don't require reverse engineering.  YOu could have all weapons do average damage and roll hit dice as a saving throw to speed it up a little more.  But you don't really need to because the game is already there.  It's almost like it was designed that way or something!

Yes elements of Classic D&D can be traced right to Chainmail where 1 hit to kill became 1 hit dice and 1 hit became 1d6 damage.

But Chainmail was purposely designed with mass combat in mind. Classic D&D is not. Rolling a d20 for a mass of 10 men to hit is not accurate in anyway shape or form. Nor is assuming that damage is average although that not as big of sin as the to hit roll.

I am not talking about historical accuracy but probability. The translation of the many possible hits to a single dice roll.

If that what you want to do then what reflects the probability of 10 men hitting is use binomial distribution; the probability of X trials with Y chance of success succeeding. The result is a bell curve which can be mapped to a 2dX roll (2d6, 2d10, etc)

As it happens I made such a chart for my own use.




1st edition Battlesystem did something similar and took it a step further and combined it with damage. Instead of using average damage they used the HD themselves. You do X HD damage on a successful hit. 1 HD would take out an orc while 4 HD will take out an ogre.

Binomial distributions can be applied to any RPGs including Runequest. And similar combined charts can be made to see how much damage many men hitting would do in Runequest or any other system.

A person has somewhat knowledge in probability to set up the charts but in doing any RPG can be given a mass combat that accurately reflect what would happened if you actually rolled for hundreds of NPCs.

And none of this is new, miniature wargamers were aware of this since at least the sixties and the military training programs before that. Which is one reason Old Geezer rightfully mocked you.

Quote from: David Johansen;687911You know, while we're at it, Runequest might have been more "realistic" but it certainly wasn't any more tactical or strategic.  You still basically lined up and traded blows and parries.

I don't think this is true, especially with RQ6 combat effects which have changed how you might approach melees - this opens up tactical options to make it seem:
a) closer to a 'real' fight,  and
b) make combats more interesting by giving you all these choices.

Of course that doesn't mean that this way of doing things is more appealing to some people than any other game but it has a very distinctive quality which does give it a completely different feel to D&D.

Quote from: sylvermoonkitten;687731The roll over mechanic especially is brain numbing. Not allowing the gms and the players to understand it is all percentile anyway.

The roll over mechanic is horrible to old RQ fans as well.

Quote from: soltakss;688582The roll over mechanic is horrible to old RQ fans as well.

There is a roll-over mechanic in RQ?

The only percentile system with a roll-over (or roll-high) mechanic I know is RM/MERP/HARP.
And after GMing MERP I decided that I would change that as soon as possible to a real % roll, basically by shifting the table rows accordingly. (Yes, I know that I would have to fiddle with the tables a lot, that it won't be a strict conversion, and that some features of the tables could be lost in the process.)

Quote from: Dirk Remmecke;688763There is a roll-over mechanic in RQ?

No, it's the same old roll under%. I think the conversation got a bit garbled.

On big battles:
Back in the early 1980s, I wrote a set of miniatures rules to interface with my very RQ-ish house rules for RPG. It was pretty clunky! I think a better approach would be more like Gygax's Swords & Spells than the approach I took.

On a related note:
I always thought D&D was better suited than RQ -- which was focused on the earlier careers of figures with such potential -- to depicting the Heroes and Superheroes and mega-monsters of WB&RM. An issue of Wyrm's Footnotes included some writeups in terms of Hargrave's Arduin rules.

Quote from: Dirk Remmecke;688763There is a roll-over mechanic in RQ?

Experience in MRQ/Legend/RQ6?

There was a roll-high element in resolving ties, which I never liked as it was too close to roll-over.

QuoteThere was a roll-high element in resolving ties, which I never liked as it was too close to roll-over.

You mean the 'roll high but under' mechanic used for opposed rolls.

Which isn't even remotely close to roll-over, because you're still rolling within your skill range.

The only roll-over mechanic any BRP-based game has used is for skill advancement.

Back in the early nineties, one of the guys bought Runequest and was going to run it.  After a couple hours of character generation, when we realized we were only about halfway done, we all decided it would be better to roll up some D&D characters.  Fifteen minutes later, we were ready to enter a dungeon.

That is how Runequest failed to overtake D&D at my table.  Exact same pattern happened when I tried to run Dangerous Journeys.  Exact same pattern with GURPS.

Quote from: Old One Eye;689316Back in the early nineties, one of the guys bought Runequest and was going to run it.  After a couple hours of character generation, when we realized we were only about halfway done, we all decided it would be better to roll up some D&D characters.  Fifteen minutes later, we were ready to enter a dungeon.

That is how Runequest failed to overtake D&D at my table.  Exact same pattern happened when I tried to run Dangerous Journeys.  Exact same pattern with GURPS.

That is a weakness, chargen is 95% of my games takes a session in itself.

Quote from: Old One Eye;689316Back in the early nineties, one of the guys bought Runequest and was going to run it.  After a couple hours of character generation, when we realized we were only about halfway done, we all decided it would be better to roll up some D&D characters.  Fifteen minutes later, we were ready to enter a dungeon.

That is how Runequest failed to overtake D&D at my table.  Exact same pattern happened when I tried to run Dangerous Journeys.  Exact same pattern with GURPS.

Wow! I've never, ever, come across RQ character generation taking 2+ hours. Rolemaster yes... but never RQ.