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Beneath
Odin’s Hood: Rune RPG Game Mechanics
by Gwynhala
Your character is deep in the underworld, in a strange cavern which seems
to swallow up and feed upon the light from his torch. He steps carefully forward.
Suddenly, a net falls upon him! - Rune RPG Preview Kit
[Part
One | Part Two | Part Three]
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The
Rune RPG, coming next March from
Atlas Games, brings the bloody
Viking world of Human Head Studios’
Rune video game to the pencil-and-paper
role-playing community.
In Part 2 of RuneNews.com’s
three-part preview, we pull out a pillaged draft of the Rune
RPG rule book and analyze the game’s (still evolving) mechanics
and combat system. |
Let’s get right to it. Here’s what sets these rules apart from others you
might have played:
- This
game has winners and losers. Don’t be misled - you are competing with
every other player in the game.
- Rune
RPG is a violent fantasy combat game with really big,
sharp weapons and brutal close-quarters battles, not an artsy story-telling
game or a wussie spell-casting-at-100-paces game. Sure, there are puzzles,
but you get extra credit in this game for beating a foe with his own
dismembered limbs.
- There’s
no single game moderator. The players take turns controlling the encounter
(more on this later).
- Each
encounter is a self-contained unit, created using a point system, so
encounters can be traded with other players, scaled to the size of the
party, and re-used in multiple adventures.
Many
elements of the Rune RPG will
be familiar to experienced pencil-and-paper players:
- Characters
are defined in terms of characteristic, ability, and gift
scores, and hit points.
- Weapons
and armor have initiative, attack, defense, and
damage ratings as well as encumbrance.
-
All monsters and weapons from Rune
are available.
- When
trying an action or fighting, order is determined by an initiative
score, and success is determined by rolling dice against a target
number or appropriate attack / defense stats.
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Victory
Points
In
the Rune RPG, the player with the
most victory points at the end of an adventure is the winner. You earn
victory points by hurting things, killing things, plundering treasure from living,
hurt, or dead things and getting away with it, succeeding at using your abilities,
or impressing other players with your ferocious Viking-ness. Pretty cool huh?
Adventures
In
theater - another kind of role-playing - there’s a classic formula for a three-act
play. First you get the hero up a tree, then you throw rocks at him, and then
you get him out of the tree. Applause.
Rune
RPG adventures follow a similar format built around three
key encounters known as the set-up, the development, and climax
encounters. These give the adventure some shape, without resorting to free-form
storytelling. Then more encounters are added, one authored by each player (you
can use a pre-made encounter if you’re not feeling creative), to create the
adventure. This makes for a clean, well-defined ending - when all encounters
have been played, the adventure is over. It’s also great for tournament play,
in which each team might play out the same adventure, or two competing teams
might contribute encounters to a base scenario.
Encounters
Your
encounter, which you game-master, is your chance to earn extra victory
points by giving the other players harrowing near-death experiences. A chance
to say, “you’re on my turf now, dude - let’s tango.”
Each
encounter is built on a point system. Everybody gets the same number of points
to create their encounter, but an encounter can be designed to favor the strengths
of a particular player. Danger costs points, based on its difficulty. Reward
gives back points, based on its value. To stay within the points budget, the
greater the danger of an encounter the greater the reward.
At the start of the adventure, each encounter gets adjusted to match the size
of the party. This is done by setting foe quantities, hit points, attack ratings,
etc. based on each foe’s threat category (which ranges from Pitiful to
Terrifying) and the collective strength of the players.
Because the point value of each encounter is easily determined and easily adjusted
to party size, players of the Rune RPG
can trade encounters with each other in person and over the internet. Particularly
challenging or entertaining encounters can be worked into new adventures, or used
as standard tournament scenarios.
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Characteristics, Abilities, and Hit Points
When
creating a Viking warrior for the Rune RPG,
you have a certain amount of points to spend on characteristics, abilities,
and hit points. These will determine your basic strengths and weaknesses.
Your
Viking warrior’s innate abilities are defined in terms of his or her strength,
stamina, dexterity, quickness, intelligence, perception,
presence, and communication. These characteristics are used alone
(for example to determine ability prowess) or combined (for example, to calculate
weapon damage).
Abilities are skills that your character has learned. They may be combat skills
(Brawling, Two Weapons), or other useful skills (Healer,
Skiing). Although the Rune RPG
has no predefined character classes, there are many abilities to choose from
when creating a Viking to your liking.
Depending on your chosen characteristics, you’ll have 40 - 100 hit points, and
your powers will be somewhere in the range of human capability.
Gifts
Not
good enough you say? You want super-human powers? Well for that, you’ll have to
get on the good side of a Norse god or two and hit them up for some gifts.
Gifts are super-human skills that the Norse gods bestow on their champions. They’ll
make you more successful in your adventures, but there’s a catch: the more gifts
you take from a god, the more he owns you. You might find a god who’s given you
a lot of gifts taking control of your character in battle, or playing tricks on
you, or giving you very dangerous side-missions.
I don’t want to spoil the fun by saying too much about the gifts, but Rune
RPG author Robin Laws’ sense of humor is on display here. I asked
Atlas Games President John Nephew to name his favorite gift, and he selected
the Aura of Phlegmatic Acceptance (ignores victory point losses from battle
wounds).
Weapons
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Your
Viking warrior has access to all of Rune’s
weaponry (swords, maces, axes), a number of ranged weapons (bows, chairs,
throwing axes) and additional sado-masochistic weapons (whips, chains, studded
leather armor). Here’s a little snippet from the Rune
RPG Weapon Chart, showing the initiative, attack, defense,
and damage scores of selected weapons (remember, a warrior has 40-100 hit
points)
| Name |
INIT |
ATK |
DFN |
DAM |
Load |
Ability |
Availability |
| Rock |
+4 |
+0 |
NA |
+2 |
0.0 |
Thrown |
Common |
| Roman
Sword |
+3 |
+1 |
+4 |
+4 |
0.5 |
Single |
Rare |
| Sap |
+1 |
+0 |
+1 |
+2 |
0.15 |
Single |
Common |
| Severed
Arm |
+1 |
+1 |
+1 |
+1 |
NA |
Great |
Special |
| Short
Bow |
+0 |
+0 |
NA |
+6 |
0.5 |
Bow |
Common |
Weapon
damage in the event of a melee hit is calculated by adding together your
strength bonus (typically 0-3), the DAM rating of the weapon (typically
0-14), and any other damage bonuses you may have. Armor can soak damage,
as can stamina.
For
example, two Vikings with +2 strength bonuses and +3 stamina bonuses could
hit each other all day with the severed arms of a 3rd Viking,
and never do any damage. On a hit, the arm does 1 (DAM) + 2 (strength) points
of damage, and each Viking can soak 3 (stamina) points of each hit. That’s
a cheap good time in Midgard! |
Botches and Triumphs
The
last aspect of the Rune RPG rules that
I’ll mention is the botch / triumph system. This system allows players to occasionally
score very high (or very low) attack and target number rolls. Here’s how it works.
If you roll a 1, its a botch. You roll again, and keep rolling and adding
up numbers until you roll something other than a 10. The sum is the negative of
your effective roll. For example, rolls of 1, 10, 10, and 3 would produce an effective
roll of -23. That oughta be a pretty spectacular failure at whatever you were
trying to do.
Similarly, a roll of 10 is a triumph. You re-roll and add up numbers similarly.
For example, rolls of 10, 10, and 4 would produce an effective roll of 14.
Battle-luck was revered among Vikings - the Nordman believed to be luckiest, often
led the raiding party. The open-ended botch and triumph system in the Rune
RPG makes luck your powerful ally - or your cruel enemy!
Summary
Although
the Rune RPG uses its own system of
rules based loosely on Ars Magica, the basic mechanics should be an easy
adjustment for any experienced paper-and-pencil gamer. RuneNews.com
based this article on an early, partial rule set - the game won’t be available
for about six months - but what we saw looks easy for a novice gamer to learn
, while rich enough to hold a more experienced gamer’s attention. The Rune
RPG promises to offer a structured, bounded style of roleplay rather
than open-ended story telling. With this style come some exciting opportunities
for internet-based encounter trading.
Next
Time: Rune vs Rune RPG, and More From Atlas Games…
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