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Rune Quest is Awful

RuneQuest's Glorantha setting is 500 pages long, so it's about half the length of Lord of the Rings.

In order to help with character creation, players can get a 'Player pack' pdf, which tells you that the book as written was too confusing for normal players to build a character.

The character creation begins with your grandma, determining her occupation, skills, and what that means for you, before we move onto the next grandparent, and so on. I'm not fucking kidding.

In order to help me keep track of the maze of references, I ended up bookmarking the Core Rules pdf, so when it said to visit page X, then that said to look at page Y, I could return to my original spot once the right parts of the sheet were filled out. If it were a physical book, the book would be a mess of little pieces of paper sticking out by the time I got a character made.

Next up, it's time to roll Attributes with a standard 3D6. Or with 2D6+6 at other times, because some Attributes cannot be bad. Also, if you get below 12 on average, you get to reroll.

So the Attributes should be random, and above average, and the way to do this is to add all Attributes together, divide the total by the number of Attributes (6), and if that's below 12 (because calculating a real average for this roll would be insane), then you can start the whole process again.

I couldn't tell what I was doing right, so I decided to look up a Youtube tutorial. Most people learn a new RPG with friends who already know it, so this seemed like the 21st century equivalent. Part one was fifteen minutes long, and part two was forty-five minutes long. I'm not sure how many parts there were.

This all had me thinking, who is this book for? It looks like a work designed for STEM students who feel sad because they've finished all their homework. Where was the sanity check when someone decided to recreate Rune Quest with a setting? Why not take the opportunity to fix the obvious problems with the rules.