Why is BRP not that popular?

[Simlasa]

I wonder if it's also that the various BRP games have kind of skirted the traditional genre tropes...

I mean, for me that's a plus... I never went in for the Tolkienesque Eurofantasy all that much... but I never got into Glorantha all that much either...

I wonder if the interesting settings Chaosium has chosen to focus on have been just enough outside the mainstream to keep that mass influx of interest at bay... even if the promotion/support had been higher.

Ringworld didn't easily fit the expectations of a Traveller or Warhammer 40K player... Elric is kind of pale and wierd and where are the elves/dwarves/hobbits?... Runequest, 'you mean I HAVE to play a cleric?'... 'does COC really expect me to spend more time in the library than killing monsters?... What do you mean I can't kill the monsters?!!!'

[badcat]

Yeah, that's exactly why I think Chaosium 'missed the boat' back in the eighties when they didn't expand Magic World and Future World. I guess the one they did expand, Superworld, just didn't do well enough to justify expanding the others, or something.

[Simlasa]

Yeah, having expanded/fleshed out supplements for all the Worlds Of Wonder books would have been great...

They would have been really good 'Gateways' into the other Chaosium stuff...

Funny that even though I was a Chaosium fan back then... and have most all their other stuff from that time... Worlds Of Wonder was completely off my radar until last year... up till then I'd somehow not noticed it.

[Guest the Bromgrev]

If Chaosium had played their cards right, it was possible at one point to have had RuneQuest be the RPG instead of D&D.

I don't think RQ ever had the potential to rival AD&D/D&D. However, Worlds of Wonder was a reall missed opportunity to provide the gaming world with what Steve Jackson did later. If only they had nailed down the system as a good, solid basis for infinite spin-off settings. Not that I hate GURPS, but I don't think it hangs together as elegantly as BRP.

And that's the other trick Chaosium missed. WoW is a hell of a lot better as an acronym than either BRP or GURPS.

[Simlasa]

Well... Chaosium could still have called their new gamebook Worlds Of Wonder if they'd wanted to... right?

Though I think that name might turn some people off nowadays... not 'edgy' enough..

[McBard]

(longtime COC/RQ player, first-time poster here--glad to have found you!)

I want my games to be gritty... but then I'm not a huge fan of Hollywood blockbusters either...

Two comments:

1) I think a look at ENWorld over the past couple of years will uncover a fairly large outcry for a more gritty d20 approach (e.g. Grim n' Gritty [obviously], even True 20 to a certain extent...). Whether this minority outcry translates into BRP gameplay and sales, I don't know.

2) I find it a bit ironic that BRP would be the perfect system to drive a Middle Earth campaign (whether a Jackson-based or more source-pure one) given that LOTR is usually cited as more of an inspiration for D&D and so very unlike Glorantha.

[Atgxtg]

Probably one of the biggest ironies about BRP is that it'S grim and gritty approach apparently didn't suit Glorantha, either, at least according to both Greg Stafford and Steve Perrin.

[Trifletraxor]

(longtime COC/RQ player, first-time poster here--glad to have found you!)

Glad to have you onboard! :-)

I find it a bit ironic that BRP would be the perfect system to drive a Middle Earth campaign (whether a Jackson-based or more source-pure one) given that LOTR is usually cited as more of an inspiration for D&D and so very unlike Glorantha.

Yup. If you check the link list, there's actually a guy who have taken the effort to create a BRP conversion out of Middle Earth.

Sverre.

[Agentorange]

In fact there are two BRP/middle earth conversions ,though t'other one may be over on the Greenback clan big RQ link list.

[Trifletraxor]

Colin Brett's Home Page

What's the second one?

Sverre.

[Agentorange]

Did I not send you the link ? Bugger, it took me ages to find it the first time round , I'll have another look when I get time.

[McBard]

Glad to have you onboard! :-)

Thanks!

If you check the link list, there's actually a guy who have taken the effort to create a BRP conversion out of Middle Earth.

Ah, very nice.

[badcat]

Yes, it is. I particularly like what he did with the Magic World magic system. When I first heard about the new BRP book I was hoping for something like that to be in it but alas, Jason Durall said it is not expanded upon very much past the original...

Witness the power of fandom.

Finally working for BRP.

[Aycorn]

I think COC's strength is a fairly cohesive and colorful mythos... and the definitive flavor of the 20's and the pulp/jazz age (though it seems like modern settings are just as popular). I think it's been a good seller in SPITE of the spectre of near-certain character demise/insanity (though I don't think it has to be as common as a lot of folks seem to assume).

Maybe people mostly play it as one-offs... like Paranoia? Maybe they tweak it so the PCs can rape/loot/pillage the Old Ones into being just like orcs in D&D?

I think many people do, but frankly, as a long-time player, I had a group that went two years and only lost one character to death/insanity.

I think it depends on (a) smart players who know enough not to go toe-to-toe with some powerful monster ( a GM who gives players a fighting chance.

Of course, there seem to be a LOT of COC players who apparently prefer the "you open the door and - IT'S YOG-SOTHOTH!! Everyone dies!! The universe explodes!!! AHAHAHAAH!!!"

Different strokes and all...

[Simlasa]

Yeah, I can't say any of the Great Old Ones have ever made an appearance in the COC games I've run... our games are more like Holmes and Moriarty... where Holmes knew he was out there, somewhere... but didn't really come face to face with him until that last fatal moment (which we've never gone too)...

Also, I think people assume that every game of COC has to be about some Earth shattering plot they need to thwart... whereas I think it works just as well, if not better, to keep the focus more personal... closer to home... a lot can be done with just wierd cultists and minor Mythos entities... as well as the occasional string of games that have no Mythos content at all.

I think the D&D legacy sets people up to expect 'over the top' adventures in their RPGs... bright colors, lots of magic... then they get to COC and the magic is kind of off-limits and the colors are a lot more subtle... some people thrive on that and other get turned off...

[tzunder]

Chaosium.

BRP in the form of RQ2 and CoC was at one point one of the most popular games in the UK. BRP games have been extremely popular in many European countries.

It has been allowed to die due to the deep monetary crap Chasoium got into, so all effort went into CoC and fiction and slowly crawling from the pit.

This combined with a rather low key marketing approach that just doesn't stand up to that used by Wizards or White Wolf and BRP games have dwindled.

That can change but has Chaosium the modern marketing skills to do it?

I hope so, I like Charlie and even though his style is retro I believe that BRP games are fun and easy to play. They also have a core mechanic that can be adapted to support new schticks without layering another set of rules on top (my problem with d20 and Mongoose especially).

Unlike many here, though, I don't think that a new multi genre generic rulset ALONE will help. I think most successful BRP games have been successes due to the settings and the depth of them. Good supported settings and a groundswell of fan support will raise the profile.

However.. simulationist games with simple mechanics are not all that people want. Some people like the gamist schticks of Savage Worlds and some of the indie games, others like the roleplaying support of White Wolf and HeroQuest, others just love the defined career paths of class/level games. CoC itself introduced Sanity, a roleplaying support mechanic, itself. Simple, simulationist and gritty do not appeal to all, so I would be careful pushing it. BRP is quite capable of being utterly over the top, heroic, world destroying..

[badcat]

So long as we don't give into what 'everyone else' wants to the point that it becomes not BRP any longer. Anyway, it does look like Jason has put a lot of optional rules into the game that promise a great deal more flexibility in the style of play. I worry that if Chaosium tries to please everyone they will wind up pleasing no-one.

[Nightshade]

I suspect a combination of issues (including just the lack of broad support from Chaosium) are involved;

1. First off, its fishing in a different pool than D&D; you can view this in a negative light if you want, but D&D players want a particular sort of high magic, generally over the top fantasy, and BRP and its kin have not, generally, supported that very well; its roots in the relatively realistic RQ have pretty much made that true in any version of it I'm familiar with.

2. While the system as a whole is relatively flexible (as in, easy to add and remove modules for) individual games approaches have often been very paroquial with character generation and subsystems designed to support their particular setting and not easily converted to anything not particularly close.

3. Simply presence of undesireable features for some, or lack of desireable features for others. Once you get into people who want advantage/disadvantage system, bell curve resolution, seperate tracks for lethal and nonlethal damage and other properties that either aren't supported by current versions of BRP or would require actively changing the core structures to support, you exclude more people. I'm not getting into an argument about whether the game should, but those _are_ features some demand, and if you don't have them, you've lost those players.

Individually, most of this wouldn't screen that many people out, but in combination, its not suprising that by the time its done, the market doesn't have a lot of love for BRP. If it gets proper exposure, the new version could help with some of these, but its not going to do much about the issues in #3, and I suspect it can only do so much about #1.

[tzunder]

Not disagreeing, but Glorantha and therefore RQ is very high magic, as was Stormbringer..

[weasel fierce]

There's a difference though. On a PC level, runequest magic tends to be in the veins of bladesharp 3 and heal 2. Fairly minor and unintrusive stuff.

[Nightshade]

There's a difference though. On a PC level, runequest magic tends to be in the veins of bladesharp 3 and heal 2. Fairly minor and unintrusive stuff.

Correct. You see some very high magic things on a heroquest type level, but the actual RQ rules don't support that; even higher end sorcery and rune magic wasn't particularly spiff compared to even moderate level D&D spells.

[Atgxtg]

Years ago Chaosium stated that the reason for the similar discrepancy between RQ and the Gloranthan board games was that RQ magic was individual spells, while the magic in the board games was a collective effort of several casters.

In theory, you could reflect this in RQ by allowing for some sort of community/rtiaual effect to amplify battle magic. For example, if a 100 man unit could boost thier leader's bladesharp to bladesharp 100, or give each man a 1 point bladesharp spell, you start to get HQ level effects.

Off the top of my head, if you took the RQ3 ceremony chart, replaced time with worshippers/followers, required a ceremony roll and charged each participant 1 MP, you could use it to calculate the "group bonus".

[badcat]

You are wrong about the system not supporting 'D&D style' magic. I ran a game for years with an expanded magic system cobbled together from the hints in Stormbringer and Magic World fleshed out with the old Bard Games' Arcanum, that blows the magic in D&D away. Not only the standard stuff but alchemy, summoning/bargaining with demons, magic duels, the whole fantasy magic portfolio...much better than your average D&D, AND you can do more with it. Try it sometime. It really is not fair to BRP or accurate in general to say it can't work for a full fledge magic oriented game by comparing a couple of very narrowly focused settings to the likes of Greyhawk, and saying the system is inadequate.

And I am betting that for every one who turns BRP down because it doesn't share the little subsystems that are considered necessary by a lot of gamers these days, there are many more who might look at an easily understood and approachable system like BRP as a breath of fresh air. Come to think of it, there are a lot of throwbacks to a simpler style of rpg coming out right now, for a fact. I don't think BRP is going to fail because it doesn't embrace all the strange little dice and 'social mechanics' and such that have become so common the last dozen or so years. All IMO, of course.

[Enpeze]

The demon magic of SB1 has its own very impressive powers. (Demon of Protection anyone?) Demon summoning in SB5 is quite open to your own POW attribute. If you have a high POW you can summon and bind mighty helpers.

In RQ3 I admit that spirit and divine magic is somewhat low powered. But sorcery can be totally impressive if paired with high FREE INT and high POW. Imagine what you can do if you have 30 or more FREE INT and 100+ POW. Most spells in other systems are not near as powerful than sorcery can be in RQ3. Another very mighty magician is the experienced shaman with a fetch.

So the day-to-day magic of RQ is low. But the system is scaleable up to extremely high powered magic.

[soltakss]

One of the things about BRP and RQ in particular that has always annoyed me was the idea that what was in the rules are the only way of playing it.

So, trolls are always Gloranthan ones, spells are always the standard ones from RQ and so on.

Absolute rubbish, really.

If you want a crackle-zap, high magic campaign then it should be fairly easy to write new spells or adapt spells from other systems.

RQ has no levels and runs from Magic Points, so spells have to be adapted, but there is no reason at all that the spells from, say, AD&D can't be adapted to a RQ setting. You could have a specific groups of people, Archmages, who learn these spells. Each spell takes INT=Level to learn and MPs = Level to cast, but MPs can only come from the Archmage, not from crystals, unless the Archmage has special magical items. Most of the spells would be high-powered for a normal RQ campaign and most people wouldn't get them, but most of them can convert fairly easy.

I don't know about D20 as I've never played it, but I assume there are spells that are similar to the ones from AD&D.

So, there's no reason why BRP can't have a high-powered magic system.

In fact, looking at the Spells SRD at http://www.wizards.com/d20/files/v35/SpellListI.rtf, there's no reason why BRP can't use this as the basis of RQ magic, especially as RQM is covered by virtually the same OGL as D20. Sure, you'd have to change the spell effects slightly to take into account RQ/BRP Hit Point values and change the casting times a bit, but nothing too drastic.