RuneQuest Classic - first impressions

I've been making my way through RuneQuest Classic, a reprint of the second edition of Chaosium's role-playing game set in Greg Stafford's Glorantha. Like many games of that era, it seems to be trying to do many things at once - in today's terms you could say that it has several competing creative agendas. One of them is immersing you in the shamanistic, bronze-age setting of Glorantha. So far it is hard to say whether it's successful, because of the dominance of the second agenda, led by designers Steve Perrin and Ray Turney: improving upon some shortcomings of Dungeons & Dragons, first published in 1974.

Did you find classes in D&D restrictive? In RuneQuest, there are no classes; instead, you generate a character who has attributes which lead to access to potential skills, some of which are martial or magical. To a certain extent, everyone can participate in fighting, casting spells, crafting items, and other aspects of adventuring in the world.

Did you not like how advancement in D&D was tied to experience points, which in turn were tied to finding treasure and killing monsters, with no relation between how you got the experience points and what you got better at doing? In RuneQuest, individual skills, as well as spells, cost money to learn and improve upon because you have to pay experts to teach and train you; in addition, using skills lets you roll to see whether you've improved in them, and there is a hard limit on how good you can become at a skill when you don't go out into the world to try it out. Using specific weapons, and specific ways of using them (say, attacking and parrying), are each considered skills, as well; although there is a default way of using half your skill in, say, one weapon to use a similar weapon you are not trained in.

Did you find D&D's combat unrealistic and insufficiently lethal? RuneQuest has an elaborate system with specific skills for individual weapons, complicated combat rounds where the timing of your strike depends on the type of strike. When you do strike, you can hit individual parts of the enemy, and you can easily kill someone just by hitting them hard enough in the head, measurably different than an attrition of hits in separate limbs. Whether the hit connects depends on the target defending and/or parrying the blow, with results on the weapons or shields involved; and shields, armor, and weapons can be worn down or destroyed in combat. Comments in the second edition suggest that melee combat, at least, was simulated based on the authors` experience in Society for Creative Anachronism mock battles, rather than D&D's simplified rules, scaled down from the statistics of mass combat. The fumble table (for really bad combat rolls) is populated with embarrassing situations that came up in SCA fights.

Did you find spellcasting in D&D, which involved choosing to prepare individual spells, which then disappear when used? RuneQuest... well, it bases your ability to cast spells on depleting a POW attribute, but there is also an INT attribute which decides how many different spells you can have ready to apply to begin with. I am not sure if it's really an improvement, but it's certainly different.

I have an adventure concept I'm eager to try out, so once I've read the book through and done some play-testing, I will be able to decide whether adventuring in Glorantha explicitly is captured well. If this RuneQuest doesn't work out, nor the more recent edition, I might decide to take up HeroQuest, Robin Laws` narrative system, as an alternative. In the meantime, King of Dragon Pass should allow me to get the vibe in a solo computerized environment.