Increasing health with level = Stupidity

[SkeleTony]

RuneQuest. A D&D competitor dating back since 1979, now being published by Mongoose. King of Dragon Pass is loosely based on its Glorantha setting (but not its mechanics).

I don't know how exactly skills are increased there (use? XP buy?), but if they are (and how wouldn't they be?), they *will* be grinded for in a computer game.

I believe the first RQ was published in 1976 or 77.

Skills are increased in RQ by using them and the better you are with a skill, the harder it is to increase through experience. If your rapier attack skill is 77 and you land a special hit against an enemy(thus enabling an experience check for that session) then you must roll percentile dice for HIGHER than your skill of 77 in order to raise your skill by a d6 roll(or alternatively just taking an increase of '3' if you fear getting a 1 or 2).

The flaw in this system was that one could theoretically attack children until they scored special successes with their weapons(easier to do against weak enemies/targets) to raise their skill more quickly but there were several rules(some of them unofficial) for rectifying this(for one you were limited to ONE experience check per skill for each session/scenario/adventure which kind of makes attacking children/old women pointless.).

 

[mondblut]

As far as I can tell, it's a relatively faithful representation of VTM period.

Well, tabletop VTM is indeed a narrativist heavan with next to no gaming or simulation involved, but still it isn't an action game.

Does that mean that VTM is not an RPG?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNS_theory

The problem lies not in the existence of narrativist/storytelling/"tr00 roleplaying" games. It lies in the refusal to acknowledge it as only one among the styles of the roleplaying game - and a latecomer, non-originating one to boot.

Then it gets transferred on PC, and the few surviving RPG traces are axed in favor of "immersion" and "real time" and "player's skill" and whatever else which *surely* the tabletop version would love to have to enhance its "storytelling" and "roleplaying" capability, but naturally cannot due to limitations of the medium, but now thanks to the power of the CPU it can finally be achieved. Yeah, right.

In the end, we have an action game with some dialogues. Which, admittingly, a narrativist gamer wouldn't really care about since he abhors computing game mechanics and engaging in any activity which doesn't give him much space to "play a role" (such as combat). But other kinds of RPG gamers very much would.