[Runequest] Runequest II

[Simon Phipp]

Andrew:

> So which company has released/re-released RQ2 in order to attract new 
> players?


Mongoose released a new version of their RuneQuest, which they called RQII. It 
is pretty good.

David Cake:
>At 1:15 PM -0700 3/11/10, Simon Phipp wrote:
>>In my opinion, I would rank the versions as follows (best version at the top):
>>RQ3
>>MRQ2
>>RQ2
>>RQ4
>>MRQ1
>>
>>However, other people will definitely disagree ...
>
> I'd disagree because I quite liked RQ4, and while I have vast nostalgia for RQ2 
>I always found it a bit 
> of a struggle in play.

RQ4, for me, was very wargamey. Combat was incredibly clunky, I found, with 
sectors and arcs and movement phases and whatever. I didn't like that part at 
all. RQ2 was very easy to play, I found, but RQ3 was a lot better.

> But I'm definitely interested to hear your relatively high 
> opinion of MRQ2. Particlarly interesting to me because MRQ always 
> seemed to make quite an effort to extend to high level play, a 
> traditional weakness of RQ2 especially - do you think MRQ2 would make 
> for a good high level game?

No version of RQ has been very good for high level play.

Partly this has been due to the opinions of the designers (Greg Stafford has 
said that all PCs should retire once they reach Rune Level and even HeroQuest 
has been focussed on low level play) and partly because the RQ Percentile system 
creaks at high numbers and the Resistance table falls down with high numbers.

MRQ2 has some nice ideas. However, it is no better for high level play than 
other versions of RQ. It deals a lot less damage out than in earlier versions of 
RQ, which means that larger/stronger creatures don't deal out excessive damage 
and improves scalability.

I play RQ3 for my campaign, but with bits thrown in from RQ2, RQ4 and MRQ1/2.

David Cake:
> My understanding is that the Basic Roleplaying System 
> currently offered by Chaosium
> http://basicroleplaying.com/content.php/34-Basic-Roleplaying
> seems to be some bits of rules from Call of Cthulhu, some 
> from RQ3, with the rules for magic/other extraordinary powers from 
> several different settings (Stormbringer, Hawkmoon, Elfquest, 
> Superworld, etc). Several of the supplements for it look to be 
> straight RQ3 reissues, though.

It is based more on Stormbringer than RQ3 - I tried to get it based on RQ3 but 
that wasn't happening. 

> Anyone taken a look at it?

It's pretty good but should be expanded to cover the main genres. Hopefully this 
will happen in future supplements.

See Ya

Simon
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