In some ways AD&D even probably did a better job. For example RuneQuest was notably very bad at dealing with individuals vastly more powerful than the human norm, such as heroes and superheroes, which were well established as one of the more distinctive things about Glorantha in WB&RM - AD&D at least did a good job of that sort of thing! Its a major flaw of the D&D family (that aspires to be a generic game that covers all fantasy genres) that they generally only do a good job of modelling fantasy worlds where some individuals are vastly more powerful than others and capable of unleashing completely over the top abilities and magical effects, which oddly means its better suited to some fantasy worlds than others (Chinese high fantasy films, for example) and not particularly well suited to some of the things its clearly inspired by (Tolkien, most notably). Glorantha, however, does fall into the former category.
If for some reason you decided that you really wanted to play an RPG in Glorantha, but you desperately wanted to play with a very gamist rather than a narrativist system, you could probably do an OK job with some adaptation of D&D3.5E/D20, though it would be a lot of work to get the required richness. Glorantha tends to attract those with a narrativist rather than gamist taste for sure, but there is nothing intrinsically wrong with the idea - seen in that light, RQ caters well to people with simulationist taste, but that too has fallen out of favour in the Gloranthan community. At one stage simulationism (in RQ) was a great step forwards for RPGing from a hobby that had only clumsy gamist systems (derived from wargaming) like early D&D, and it was common to disparage those stuck in the old paradigm, but given a few years and mature expressions of both styles, they are equally valid if thats what you want to play.
Overall RQ did a better job than D&D did of modelling Glorantha, but if the same effort had been put into expressing Glorantha via D&D like rules as has been put into expressing Glorantha via Basic Role Playing, that might be debatable.
Notably, though, Gregs tastes run more towards the narrativist - his style as a world builder is very to concentrate on myth and story rather than quantitative data, and he is brilliant as a storyteller and not much on maths - so HW is probably a better way to express what HE wants to express about Glorantha. Neither RQ or AD&D was ever likely to be a good fit for his expression of the world. And as fans our tastes are likely to trend that way too.
Anyway, final thought - Greg never provided stats for any of the major heroes of Glorantha in RQ format, but did once provide many of them in D&D format!
Cheers David (why yes, I do read The Forge, why do you ask? Andpass me that slimy yellow drink that reeks of pure evil, would you?)
Powered by hypermail