Reading RuneQuest: Chapter 3 (Mechanics and Melee)

I got busy during the fall. What can I say? RuneQuest originally came out almost forty years ago so the extra few months won’t have hurt much.

The Mechanics and Melee chapter starts out pretty normally. You have time, including the concept of turns and melee rounds. There’s a note about how a real day should equal one game week, which is a bit of old school detail I always liked. You also have three scales of movement: daily movement, scenario movement, and of course melee movement. Then, like all good systems, it goes into encumbrance. Here we get all narrative: encumbrance (which has an abbreviation, as do all important elements of old school RPGs), is measured in “things.” Way simpler than pounds and ounces. The motivation for this is explained up front: “Ideally, an ENC rule for a role-playing game should read, ‘Characters may not carry more than they should be reasonably be expected to carry under normal conditions.'” That’s the plaint of a man who was tired of too many rules. I think I liked this a great deal at the time.

The rest of the chapter covers melee — the total is about three and a half pages, which is pretty concise. It’s pretty straight-forward, in the way one might expect from the author of that quote on encumberance. Hit rolls are a d100, affected by the opponent’s Defense. You can try and parry, which introduces the possibility of either attacker or defender’s weapon taking some damage.

Initiative, here called strike rank, is deterministic and based on weapon and stats. Strike ranks are also subunits of time during a combat round, in case someone wants to draw a new weapon or something. This is also where we start talking about magic in combat: there are attack spells and ways of enchanting weapons mid-combat, which is cool. Evocative sentence regarding enchantment: “This is because a character will normally immediately carve the appropriate focuses on the weapons the minute he obtains it.” There are hit locations, and some funky bits where each location has hit points but the character as a whole also has hit points. This is pleasingly deadly.

Overall this is different enough from D&D to be interesting. Like Tunnels & Trolls, the basics are similar but the implementation details were refreshingly new. RuneQuest was also way crunchier than Tunnels & Trolls, in a way I still find I like.

It is perhaps a bit optimistic to have called this chapter “Mechanics and Melee,” since chapter 4 is called “Combat Skills.” Next time: fumbles! Impaling! Criticals! And a tiny bit of world building.