In the first place, it fumbles right out of the gate with the utterly tacky and chunder-headed upfront declaration that it is not in fact a game:
“However it is played, the primary purpose is to have fun.
“Like any FRP system, these can only be guidelines. Use the as you will.”
California at this time was at the forefront of the normalization of openly gay behavior. This game is all the evidence you need to illustrate just how bad things were even as early as 1978.
And the audacity of it! It is not enough for these losers to make a nongame and then sell it to people. It’s not enough for these Goofus types to masquerade as a game designers and to encourage people sit around pretending to play a game when they aren’t. No! These people have to just so graciously speak up for every other game in the fantasy roleplaying space, both at that time and going on into the future as well. Not only can’t they not imagine anyone anywhere playing an rpg with actual rules, but they also insist that nobody else can do so either.
And that’s ugly.
“But Jeffro,” you say. “They don’t really mean it like that.”
They don’t, you say? Did you not catch the fact that they open this book with an explicit paraphrase of “do as thou wilt?” But okay, I can see that you’re skeptical and you need a little more evidence than mere “rule zero” boilerplate. And I’ve totally got you.
First up, feast your eyes on the exceedingly cool training rules you have in this game. A real beauty! You can improve not only a bunch of skills that don’t actually mean anything, but you can even upgrade your core attributes as well. I think even Tunnels & Trolls still had an experience points for levels system at this stage. This system takes what Ken St. Andre started and cuts out some pointless cruft. Instead of the “XP for gold” lynchpin of classic D&D here, you’ve got “gold for training for attributes.” Who wouldn’t want to play with that?!
Well, you can’t. Nobody can. You bought a non-game buddy. Behold:
The authors of this game dislike elaborate Encumbrance rules with lots of bookkeeping. Therefore we suggest that “a character should not be allowed to carry more than he is able to.” If questions arise about this rule players should try the situation out on themselves to see how much they can carry.
Maybe you guys could head some of those questions off if, you know, you actually wrote a rule so that people could actually have a clear understanding of how to deal with this stuff. Even worse, this fumble is in a game where the character advancement which is the only thing any player will actually care about hinges entirely on how much coin the characters can haul back from their adventures. THIS GAME IS A COMPLETE DISASTER.
But hey, they don’t call it the California school of rpg design for nothing!
“Oh, but Jeffro. This game has a time rule. You are big on timekeeping and you said that was a Pan-Ah-SEE-uh.”
Look, buddy, your table is not going to stand if it only has one leg. Timekeeping can’t save a game that doesn’t have rules.
And hey, I know you are innumerate in addition to being illiterate. The typical roleplayer will turn white as a sheet at the thought of having to do subtraction. You losers have made THAC0 into a byword for just that reason. You don’t know what an axiom is. You don’t know how geometry works. You are a culturally denuded baboon. If I even tried to explain this stuff to you, you would wine and kvetch and moan that this sort of digression and metaphor and analogy is even worse than my Lindy Hop talk. I know you! You would call me a cult leader if I even set my toe in these waters in an extemporaneous speaking situation.
But this isn’t just some kind of high-flown metaphor. Game rules are a kind of axiom. Gameplay dynamics derive from them in precisely the same way that entire systems of theorems derive from mathematical axioms. And you can see this in RuneQuest’s time rule.
First off, note how these chowder heads pull their punches even here. Holy cow! If there is any place in an rpg rule set where you need to go the full all-caps imperative, it is right here!
But why did these weak Californians make the shift from “one real day equals one game day” to “one real day equals one game week”? Simple. They wanted to eliminate the occurrence of time jail due to characters being out for training. Because they didn’t want to be running stables of characters anymore. Because they were more interested in openly homo and fake roleplaying than they were in setting up a model world with multiple independent actors that were operating against each other’s interests under a fog of war. Because they didn’t want to play a real game at all and instead just wanted to show up, play in an “adventure” that the referee had prepared for them and which they could sleepwalk through with little chance of getting their character killed so that they could just “get the ruby” and get paid for showing up and doing whatever the 1970s equivalent of zoning out and playing Bejeweled on your phone while some low-T referee elaborates on his completely boring world building efforts.
They changed the axiom in order to suit the sort of play dynamic they wanted to support. And the result is the extraordinarily boring Getalong Gang style anti-game where the referee is forced to come up with one fake challenge after another to baby low effort players that will whine the moment that anything goes against them. Suddenly, “balance” becomes this weird thing that the referee is responsible for providing. Instead of running a model world, the referee is now tasked with writing “adventures”. Instead of scenarios developing organically from the conflict that occurs between diverse parties and factions within the campaign, you’ve got people playacting through a story while they wait for the steady morphine drip of treasure which they miraculous win with their last hit point in session after brain damage inducing session.
Where does this fake, broken, and dumb gameplay hail from? It comes from people that picked up the original D&D rules booklets who had NO IDEA WHAT THEY WERE LOOKING AT WHEN THEY READ THEM. The tell is in everything they left out. Things like mass combat and naval battles aren’t just omitted from Tunnels & Trolls and RuneQuest because the designers did not understand how to set up wargame campaigns. They left them out because the players in their games would never be able to experience the kind of autonomy where they would have the chance to use such rule systems.
They omitted them because they were developing a new type of game that wasn’t a game at all.
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