Basic Roleplaying: The Chaosium Roleplaying System [Englisch] [Gebundene Ausgabe]

This review is for the second edition of BRP in hardback, the so-called "Gold Book".

It's nice to see that Chaosium can put out a quality product these days. Surveying the line of supplements that have been sold from that storefront one might be fooled into thinking the Chaosium Crew had "lost it", but this volume goes some way to mitigating that view.

BRP as a system was born out of the original Runequest RPG and has been munged to fit many different purposes over the years in games like "Elfquest", "Ringworld" and of course "Call of Cthulhu", probably Chaosium's most well-known title.

This book is a significant reworking of the various "flavors" of BRP into one more-or-less coherent whole, and not before time I might add. Kudos to the Authors.

The BRP system uses three D6 (mostly) to generate stats that are essentially the same as stats for other RPGs. After that one selects skills for the character using a pool of points that depend on the type of game one will be playing, expressing the chosen level of expertise as a percentage (it is really easy boys and girls, don't let the math word frighten you off - one point equals one percent) and when called upon to test for the success of these skills in play one rolls percentile dice aka D100. Your GM may lower or raise the bar, but that is essentially it. There is also a mechanism called The Resistance Table for pitting an active principle such as brute strength against a passive one like the strength of a locked door, again using percentiles. It's just about the easiest system to learn I've come across in thirty years of RPGing bar none.

The one place that trouble often occurred in years past was in combat. The combat system used in Runequest was nice, but required a formulaic approach or the wheels could come off. It also sacrificed player survivability on the alter of realism in that one had to chose the opponent one was parrying before that opponent attacked. If that opponent went down, the parry was lost.

When moved into the world of Call of Cthulhu, where the mechanics were slightly stripped down, one could become confused as to what one could do in combat if one did not have access to the original Runequest rules, and they didn't include modern firearm considerations. It could, and did, get bloody (no pun intended).

There's a (humorous) school of thought that the reason people think you shouldn't be fighting in Call of Cthulhu is because the combat rules are so bad at dealing with it.

All that has been by-and-large fixed with the wonderful new shiny combat rules that make it clear how many parries and dodges one can get in a mass combat, and making those "opportunity-use" actions leaving the players to worry only about selecting a target for their attacks when working the tactics of the scuffle. These rules seem to me to make sense, more sense than they ever did before, and can be used in modern-day combat with effectiveness.

The authors acknowledge that to provide a system that can be all things to all games and serve as an engine upon which to run any setting or milieu, and to do so without swamping the GM and players in detail that they may not wish in their game, it is necessary to bolt on and strip off optional rules that re-balance the game for a particular environment. These options are presented in sidebars, the only real use for such things and well done the Authors for not putting core stuff in them (yes I'm poking YOU Fantasy Games Unlimited and YOU Evil Hat). A shaded sidebar will contain useful information that may be ignored if it doesn't "fit" one's current setting.

There is a section on what a role-playing game is, something that a year ago I would have said was superfluous but I know now that there is an audience that has been exposed only to console games that wishes to explore the pencil-and-paper gaming world because I have such players taking part in my games. There is a section on character building. There is a section on skills and attributes, what they mean, how to use 'em (though most are self explanatory if you ask me). There is a section on how the game runs, composing scenes and the makeup of rounds and so-forth. There is a section on Combat. There's a small Bestiary. There's a grimoire and a list of superpowers.

What there *isn't* is any sort of setting. This is a core book in much the same vein as the GURPS core books, the Savage Worlds core book and the D20 SRD - a foundation on which to build worlds and game in them. One shouldn't expect specific setting-based stuff in a core rule book, but I often hear complaints about this book that it is "too general". Well, that's the point.

From a materials standpoint what you will get is a hardcover book with a stitched binding. The pages are white with black ink.

All art is black and white, which is a shame but not a showstopper. Chaosium is quaintly mired in the 80s RPG aesthetic here, most game companies having acknowledged that color is a good thing after Wizards of the Coast put out the stunning D20 D&D books and showed the way in the late 90s.

The pages are of fairly lightweight stock (thicker than in GURPS and the 30th Anniversary Call of Cthulhu, thinner than Savage Worlds), semigloss.

With care it should last a lifetime of gaming, but don't get those pages wet - the glazing will not fare well.

I had for some time had a "Meh" reaction when people mentioned BRP, although I am an early adopter Call of Cthulhu GM and a faithful adherent of the system as represented in that game. But after having briefly flipped through this book I found myself mentally arranging the checklist for porting a number of games into the system. It's that good.

Highly recommended.

Everything old is new again! Except that for years, the Chaosium BRP system was usually ahead of the curve. While you will find no new "innovative" mechanics or cutting-edge contributions to the roleplaying metasystem, this game is a gem.

Sure, the guts of the system are about 24-years old. Numerous incarnations (Runequest, Call of Cthulhu, Sotrmbringer, Superworld, Elfquest, Ringworld, etc, etc.) has allowed for LOTS of playtesting in different genres, and this set of rules boils down all of the permutations of the original Basic Role Playing "system" into a coherent whole. This is NOT like D&D - a clunky port from wargaming with tacked-on roleplaying rules that simply got clunkier as it got older. This is a game that pretty much got it right at the beginning, and simply added the missing pieces as it matured.

It works. It is VERY intuitive. It can support myriad ranges of power gaming and genres. While it doesn't have the depth of GURPS or the fiddly mathematics of HERO, it nicely handles a variety of fiction modeling that is pretty solid. It is NOT perfect (what game is?), but Basic Role-Playing can usually handle any world or setting.

Enjoy!