Monday, May 9, 2022

Tending the Hearth-Fires

A Different Kind of Adventure Game!
In 1977 I started "adventure gaming", which is the term originally used for the hobby that has became widely known as "role-playing". Having previously played several popular "family" tabletop games, map wargames and wargames using miniature figures for years, I was then, and remain so today, interested in almost all new concepts in games, tabletop or digital. Much as I have described previously, my approach to The World's First Role-Playing Game was to treat it as a new "fantasy" themed wargame. My game character(s), we often controlled more than one during any given session, I saw as synonymous with "playing pieces". Each "character" consisted of a list of abilities and rarely did the character have anything one would identify as a "personality". I made game decisions using the character abilities as tactical options to achieve success at the table. The character was moved, made attacks and cast magic much as one would move a playing piece across a board or play cards from a hand or deck. It was simply put, "a game". It took us some time to get comfortable with even this simplistic gamey approach to the new hobby.
Then my friends and I discovered a new tabletop RPG called Call of Cthulhu and our head scratching wonderment began all over again. The new game published by Chaosium involved playing "investigators" rather than "adventurers". Asking questions of the NPCs seemed more important in CoC than killing them and taking their stuff. The emphasis on combat abilities gradually gave way to social and research skills. Based on the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft, Call of Cthulhu is set in the 1920's and a bit of "law and order" is assumed within the setting. Random acts of PC violence often leads to the intervention of authorities - much as one might expect. Research and problem solving ability, along with the role-playing of numerous PC/NPC conversations is more a part of a typical session of Call of Cthulhu than shooting and stabbing. It is through playing Call of Cthulhu that our gaming group began to understand "playing a character role" at the table.
Soon after Call of Cthulhu we began exploring another game published by Chaosium, RuneQuest 2nd Edition, and our learning of something new about the hobby took yet another sharp turn. RuneQuest's default setting is the mythical bronze age world of Glorantha in which bronze sword and spear prevail as weapons of choice and a pantheon of nature-based deities take active roles in the lives of the characters who often seek to re-enact the heroic deeds of their ancestors through various "quests". Perhaps unfortunately, RuneQuest seemed just close enough to our beloved dungeon crawler game that we attempted to do just that using the new d100 mechanics of RuneQuest. Its low powered "battle magic" and hit location damage gave RQ a distinctly different flavor. The result of our playing RQ as a dungeon exploration game was a lot of maimed and dead characters.
It seems obvious in hindsight that we missed the target while playing RuneQuest. We just did not "get it" in the early 1980s. There is a really special game to be had in RuneQuest and for the most part it went unnoticed as we ignored thatt as we tried to force RQ to be something it was not designed to be.
The designers of RuneQuest envisioned a game where players take on the role of playing characters who are active members of a culture, a religious community and a social group. The RQ character is supposed to be more than a playing piece. Context matters as much as personal character achievement in RuneQuest. Advancing the PC's abilities is secondary to the events that involve the deities and the other fictional inhabitants of the fictional setting. RuneQuest is a game about relationships and we largely missed that fact. 
As a result of my personal ignorance regarding the game's actual objectives, I struggled mightily with RuneQuest as a game system. RQ 3rd edition brought us a new boxed format and a few changes to the game mechanics - such as the introduction of fatigue rules - but the release of any specifically Glorantha based setting material for RQ3 was slow. In the meantime, I was attracted to the fantasy Europe setting as offered by the new publisher of RQ 3e, Avalon Hill. Vikings became my preferred setting for RQ3 and drawing upon my knowledge of historical Scandinavian culture, I began to accidentally play RQ more as I believe it was designed to be played. The player characters were viewed more as members of their society, as a ship's crew with mates with a village to return to, or as settlers on a remote island exploring and surviving the harsh environment. Context. Gradually I got a glimpse of how RuneQuest could be played and what great enjoyment could result from this sort of game. Then Avalon Hill went out-of-business and RuneQuest 3e became out-of-print. My friends and I moved on to other newer games and years would pass before I returned to RuneQuest and Glorantha.
Having come to the realization that many of the best games ever produced are currently "games of years ago" in terms of being new or in-print, I have devoted much time of late to re-acquainting myself with many "old friends" in the form of older games I once loved - RuneQuest not the least among them. With my modern "gamer eyes" I can see more clearly what RuneQuest 2nd edition sought to accomplish circa 1980 and I have new respect for its subsequent influence on the hobby - even though I largely missed out on all that at the time, others obviously weren't as clueless as I was. The evidence of RuneQuest's success in the hobby can be seen in many role-playing games today that feature player characters in context. PCs who are connected to each other, involved with the setting and with groups of NPCs, all through relationships that give play a depth and enjoyment factor that transcends crawling through a dungeon looking for treasure. Do I still enjoy the occasional dungeon crawl? You bet I do. But I also enjoy many other types of adventure games as well.

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