How Could BRP Be More Popular...?

[Nightshade]

I think CF is as good a place to start as anywhere. It is in full print and it shows how to do D&D-style dungeon-bashing with a more effective rule-set. I'd think most roleplayers can relate to that and for demo purposes, it should do the trick.

But yes - as Paolo says, two settings is better.

That's probably as close to a universal door of a setting that you're going to get, honestly.

[Nightshade]

Fantasy rules, Science Fiction rules, and Historical rules should be seperate volumes. I'd buy the historical rules in a heartbeat and I suspect quite a few

This suffers from the problem it always has; people who want things that overlap object to rebuying the same rules. Often they object quite a lot. Its not a coincidence its a model that's largely faded from view with games that share a core system.

[RosenMcStern]

If I were to try to do a 1 page flyer (probably folded into an A5 booklet) I would take a very different approach of learning through trying.

You are cold, tired and scared. It feels like you have been running for hours since THEY broke in through the door.

...

I've just dashed that off with no real care and attention. It can be done but I'm not entirely sure when it would ever be useful.

Exactly. I can find only one glitch in all this.

Like the "Go fight the bear who eats the old woman's sheep" example in the old BRP booklet, this example is suitable, but hardly exciting.

Try and imagine another example with, this time, Bobbi-wan the Jedi Padawan who has to infiltrate the spaceport tavern and discovers that he is not facing smugglers but Siths. The dog is not a dog but a small Droid, and he is not trying to avoid being listened, but sensed using the Force. Or it might be Purple Sonya the swordswoman who is crawling along a sewer in the city of Shaddi-zar, and meets the carrion-eating snakes of Seth. The situation is similar, but it gives you the idea that you are there do something *cool*, not to avenge the Granny's sheep.

[Rob Thomas]

The first thing needed to make BRP more popular is to get more people to pick up the book in the store. First step would be to up the eye candy value; better cover, better interior illustrations, etc.

Second is a good price point so the people who picked it up are less inclined to put it back down. Easiest way to accomplish that. especially since color is going to have raised the price, is to streamline what is in the basic book and that means pulling the gamemastering material. Separate gamemaster books work for other roleplaying games so why not BRP.

Once someone owns the book you need to convince them to play it. building flavor in a "universal system" book is challenging, but it can be done. The basic BRP book has none. Second is to get rid of the damn Spot Rules Chapter. right now there is an anemic Combat Chapter, and a whole lot of combat rules scattered about the Spot Rules Chapter. Total frustration.

Next big step is to help someone who has started playing find additional material easily and expose them to other possibilities. Best way to do that is with a good website. Interested in finding a setting, click a button and there is a list of all of the options. click on fantasy and here is all of the source books that have useful material. Right now there are a heck of a lot of good Monograms available and the only way to find out about them is to plod through the whole list.

End result would be more people buying BRP material and probably more people playing it.

[NickMiddleton]

I think CF has something else going for it. It is the only fantasy supplement for BRP that exists at present. So for better or worse it is the only option...

At present, and much though I like what Rod's done with CF, it's one of several fantasy related publications and monographs - even if one excludes the various historical settings (Rome, Val-de-Loup) that include magic as an option, there is still Ashes to Ashes, as well as at least two fantasy scenario - and significant portions of BOTH adventure anthologies are fantasy IIRC.

Cheers,

Nick

[Mister Apocalypse]

The first thing needed to make BRP more popular is to get more people to pick up the book in the store. First step would be to up the eye candy value; better cover, better interior illustrations, etc.

I think the first thing is to get the book into the store. None of my local gaming shops carry BRP. I've been working on talking one shop owner into doing so, in place of MRQ2 (I was his only sale for MRQ1, so he's listening), but it's all but impossible for someone to encounter BRP without having already made a conscious decision to do so.

As for upping the eye candy and such, that would require Chaosium to print a new book/edition. I doubt they will, but either way it is not something that we can do much about.

Second is a good price point so the people who picked it up are less inclined to put it back down. Easiest way to accomplish that. especially since color is going to have raised the price, is to streamline what is in the basic book and that means pulling the gamemastering material. Separate gamemaster books work for other roleplaying games so why not BRP.

Or maybe just keep the current rulebook and supplement it with a "Player's Book"? Pendragon did that at one time. It was a book than handled character generation, and the basics of game play. IMO a small but pretty book like that wouldn't hurt. I don't know if Chasoium would do it, but again, there isn't much that the rest of us can do about that-except maybe for the third party companies. And they would have less chance of getting it into a store than Chaosium.

[wbcreighton]

Here is an 8 page mini rules set for WEG d6 system. It might be of interest as an example of distilling rules.

Mini Six

[frogspawner]

... designed to teach the rules as it was run. The game master didn't even have to know how to play, he just sat the group at the table and started playing...

Doing it quick, playable and for several genres is the way to go. A solo adventure would be ideal for a "flier", a multiplayer one for a convention quickstart.

If I were to try to do a 1 page flyer (probably folded into an A5 booklet) I would take a very different approach of learning through trying. You are cold, tired and scared...

Lots of RPGs have used a "pick a path" adventure format. I think it would be a good intro for BRP too. ... As for trimming the rules, some suggestions: ...

Here is an 8 page mini rules set...

Plenty of good ideas - that's great! If anyone is inspired, please go for it (i.e. don't rely on me: I'm off for the hols with limited computer time/access, taking the kids to see their grannies - now Brum, next Kent). If we end up with with a range of different BRP Flyers - to suit different genres/audiences/tastes - then so much the better!

[Enpeze]

First, sorry for not reading every single one of the 63 pages above.

so the question "how could BRP be more popular..." comes IMO down to several basic assumptions.

a. balancing - its not balanced. you all know this. Most of you dont think that is important. I agree only to some extent. But after playing unbalanced games for decades, the last several years I discovered the advantages of balanced play. There ARE advantages in some genres and playing styles where balancing is fun and essential. Eg. for ARENA-type styles of play - you go into the dungeon/encounter/whatever and you know that there is the next 5min. a combat with opponents of approximately equal combat strength and you know your group which is not more than a kind of sports team in this style of play, has a decent chance to beat the shit out of this equal enemy force. If you play bad, dont make the right tactical moves OR if you dont play as a team or if you roll bad then you will not succeed, you will use too much of your resources or even pay with your life. Thats ARENA style. And many roleplayers like this style. I for my part like it too, sometimes in some settings. But at least for me other settings and styles (actor-style, investigation-style etc.) do exist and I enjoy them too. So I say balancing is important to many players who likes arena style roleplaying and if a system does not offer this, they dont buy, like or play it.

b. deadlyness - this is self-explanatory. BRP is deadly if you play it vanilla. Many dont like this. They want to be like undestructable heroes of bad movies or fantasy novels. Kill the baddy and be better than in real life. Pure Escapism. I dont remember that conan or Captain Picard ever dies. People want to BE like those undestructable media heroes and not like a 13rd dwarf from left in the row. BRP dont offer this. A GM has to be either heavily modifiying the rules for enable the players to be like Conan or cheating his NPC-dice rolls constantly.

c. no core book. "Hey- we have a BRP core book", you will shout! Is this really so? I dont think that the new book from Chaosium is a real core book. Its rather like a kind of museum. An thick tedious 400p archive where every rule (good or bad) which existed in BRP, has been written down. So, a game without core book - what is this? The third reason why BRP in its present incarnation will never be interesting to a lot of fellow roleplayers or even newbies.

Look at SWEX (Savage Worlds explorer Edition). This is a good core book. It has 120 small pages of information and decent color graphics. Easy to read and to understand.

IMO the whole hobby suffers from a lack of understanding and creative ideas how to bring in new players. The current companies are catering rather their existing old fanbase and this will lead to the end of roleplaying hobby as such in 10-20 years. And of course noone of the publishers is admitting that he is guilty of anything. Always blaming the "market" the "economy crisis" the "video games" and so on. But its the fault of egocentric designers which mostly are not smart enough to understand the basics how to draw in fresh blood into the hobby.

Edited February 7, 2010 by Enpeze

[rust]

The current companies are catering rather their existing old fanbase and this will lead to the end of roleplaying hobby as such in 10-20 years.

I have been reading such dark predictions for most of thirty years now, and I have

never found any evidence that they have any tendency to come true.

For example, here are the results of a still ongoing poll over on Fundus Ludi, where

I asked the users when they did start with roleplaying games:

1974 – 1980: 2

1981 – 1985: 6

1986 – 1990: 5

1991 – 1995: 8

1996 – 2000: 13

2001 – 2005: 7

2006 – 2010: 5

Of the 46 people who answered until now, 25 started after 1995, and 5 started with-

in the last 5 years. The results for a "dying" hobby would look much different than

this.

[Guest Vile Traveller]

I suspect though, rust, that there may be something different about the RPG market in Europe. I emphasize "suspect", I don't know. I have no idea what it is, but it's probably something that publishers in the UK and US should be looking into. Marketing research is one thing which is sadly lacking in this hobby, possibly because almost no-one is really in the business without also being a gamer.

My anecdotal experience in all my years of gaming around various parts of the UK and Eire over the decades is that the gamers have always tended to be within the same age group as myself, give or take 5 years. In other words, the groups seem to have been ageing at the same rate as me. Some of them started earlier or later in life, but they have tended to be introduced by their friends of my 'generation'.

[rust]

Unfortunately I have found no reliable data at all about the average age of

roleplaying gamers in the UK and the USA. There seem to be few studies of

that kind, or I did not understand how to search for them.

Over here the majority of those gamers who are active on the various fo-

rums seems to be between 20 and 30 years old. Fundus Ludi has more than

1,400 members, and as far as I know I may well be the oldest one (:eek:).

[Rob Thomas]

I have to agree with Vile. When I started going to conventions in the late 70s most participants seemed to be high schoolers like myself. Now, most are going gray (like me) and it is very rare to see a teenager.

[rust]

This is really a strange difference. :confused:

However, it is not the only one, there also seems to be a difference in the

percentage of female roleplaying gamers.

On Fundus Ludi about 10 % to 20 % of the active members are female, and

from what I have seen the percentage is similar at the gaming tables over here

(lower where D&D is played, much higher where Vampire is played ...), while

it seems somewhat rare to meet a female roleplaying gamer on a forum that

is based in the UK or USA.

[wbcreighton]

The results of the poll from this site:

1974-1980 39 45.88%

1981-1985 32 37.65%

1986-1990 6 7.06%

1991-1995 6 7.06%

1996-2000 2 2.35%

2001-2005 0 0%

2006-2009 0 0%

Not sure what the real meaning of this is but the poll from this site asking when you started rping gives those results.

[Dredj]

I went to a local gaming group here in Wisconsin. Everybody was only interested in board games, with only a few that expressed interest in White Wolf products. I wanted to start a Savage Worlds game (sorry), and might still do that. But it will be a hard sell. My initial impression is that people really don't want to invest the time in developing a character that they may only play once. And, if they get bored with one game, they want to move onto another game after one session. Rpgs are notoriously time-consuming, and nobody wants to derail a plot line by coming and going out of a game. This is why I'm such a fan of Mythic Role Playing because it solves those problems. But the reputations of rpgs are pretty fixed. And, lets face it, making a character in BRP is time-consuming and thought-consuming. Especially if you are new to it. There needs to be some more stream-lining, for starters.

I also agree with someone above about how the game designers need to hire people with actual business sense. Not just people who are fans of the games. And, furthermore, they should contact their local colleges and universities with marketing programs and get free marketing assessments from students in those programs. I think there actually is a much larger pool of people the table-top rpg industry could tap. But it does mean they have to change the way they do certain things--or at least market their products.

[Nightshade]

solves those problems. But the reputations of rpgs are pretty fixed. And, lets face it, making a character in BRP is time-consuming and thought-consuming. Especially if you are new to it. There needs to be some more stream-lining, for starters.

While I don't necessarily disagree, compared to what? The basic version of BRP characters doesn't seem any more time consuming than is typical for the market; you roll up the attributes, distribute two pools of skill points, modify a few skills based on orientation, and that's it. It might be a bit more complicated than D&D 4e, but that's not the whole gaming market and I'm not sure that level of simplicity is a pool useful to fish in.

[rust]

Comparing BRP to the other systems I use, it seems to me the character design with BRP

is on the comparatively fast and easy side.

In Traveller the character creation is almost a game within a game, because the lifepath

system also creates much of the character's background history and contacts. The result

is worth the trouble, but the character creation takes some time.

GURPS with its many possible combinations of advantages and disadvantages is also not

exactly a fast and easy system.

And in my view D&D 4 is only fast if one creates a 1st level character, the creation of a

more experienced character can easily become very complicated and time consuming.

[frogspawner]

And, lets face it, making a character in BRP is time-consuming and thought-consuming. Especially if you are new to it. There needs to be some more stream-lining, for starters.

True. For my own variant, I've trimmed char-gen down to one page (quick and easy, with hopefully still enough details included to be interesting). I will be doing a version for straight(-er) BRP when that reaches the top of my to-do list again...

[Dredj]

I was using BRP as an example for all the other rpgs out there. And I wasn't comparing BRP to any other rpg. Board games usually don't take so long or so much thought to set up as any rpg out there. Nor do video games for that matter. And you can often walk away from any board game or video game in a short order of time without messing with any one else's fun. Please read my above post again.

Simply put: new play options must be introduced to rpgs if they wish to gain more players.

Edited February 13, 2010 by Dredj

[Dredj]

Or companies must find new ways of promoting them.

[Atgxtg]

I was using BRP as an example for all the other rpgs out there. And I wasn't comparing BRP to any other rpg. Board games usually don't take so long or so much thought to set up as any rpg out there. Nor do video games for that matter. And you can often walk away from any board game or video game in a short order of time without messing with any one else's fun. Please read my above post again.

Simply put: new play options must be introduced to rpgs if they wish to gain more players.

Perhaps, but one thing they don't want to do is loose the players they have. I've got a gaming group that just returned to RPGs after spending years playing Magic: The Gathering. Sure, setting up for a game of cards is easier, and people can miss sessions or even parts of sessions without disrupting the game. An RPG requires more time and commitment. Board and video games do not.

It is possible to change things so playing an RPG requires less thinking, reduced set up, and situations that players can drop in or out, but I don't think it's worth the trade off. D&D 4E is structured more like a video game than an RPG. I'm sure it fun for people who want to just roll dice and kill things, but I wouldn't consider it an improvement. If you change RPGs too much they won't be RPGs anymore.

As far as the difficulty to create characters goes-that is generally due to familiarity (or lack thereof) and the number of rulebooks floating around. Some of my players used to swear that rolling up a character for RQ was much more complicated than doing so in AD&D. For them it was, too. Not because RQ was more complex, but that the players had played AD&D for over a decade, everyone had their own copy of the book, and each know the procedure by heart. By contrast, we only had 1 RQ book on hand and the only one who was familiar with the character generation was the GM.

[frogspawner]

Well, attached here is the one-page char-gen for my own homebrew, that I will be converting for BRP when I get time. (And others can do so for other systems, I guess). Quick and easy, and every player can have a copy - so no problem there. If that still isn't quick enough for you, the GM could always pre-gen a half-dozen characters and hand them out.

Keep adventures short, one-session affairs until you're confident the drop-out problem is past. The BRP QuickStart freebies (converted to your preferred genre) are ideal.

As for marketing, well I've made my suggestion before: something like the attached char-gen, plus a one-page (solo?) adventure on the back, printed by the hundred and posted through letter-boxes. Or for a more targetted audience, stuck amongst the D&D books on the shelves at your local Waterstones...

BRQp1.pdf

[Bygoneyrs]

Well speaking for myself here, I feel it might be worth while for someone to come up with a book that stepped more completely through the whole character creation process to make is crystal clear for everyone. Maybe even a section of too on crating NPCs as well too to make newer GMs work easier. Also maybe some sections in that same book on some tables or what ever to make a newer GMs job esier. These kinds of books seem to go a long way to making newer players and GMs more willing to actually pick up the books and get to know and use them better. To me it just seems to show more support in a line of books for any RPG game, to have something like that type of book. Also I have always wondered why they have not produced alot more books for the line, instead having fans produce the books and selectively publishing them. Seems to be rather a weaker support for the product line, and it kind of shows using that approach. Oh I have almost bought all the different books that have come out to being a "printed" version, but then I like to have a complete collection of any system I collect anyway.

Penn

[threedeesix]

For the next volume of Classic Fantasy I am including a chapter devoted to NPCs, that includes templates for each "class" at three different "power levels", low, mid, and high. Each is done up in such a way that you choose an average member of a race and tack on the templete and it's done.

To speed up character creation, I have spent the better part of a month making an excel program for creating Classic Fantasy characters that automates everything, and then fills the information out on the actual CF character sheet. Thats why I always use excel to make my character sheets, easier to automate them later. Anyway, I have one of my playtesters helping me find all the bugs right now, but I hope to have it posted here for download in a week. Using the program, he has been creating characters in 5 to 10 minutes, completely outfitted, spell, race, and class descriptions all filled in automatically, and so far only has to refer to the books to choose a deity.

I know this isn't an answer to everyone's BRP problems, but it should go a long way to making Classic Fantasy easier for newbies to grasp.

Rod