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BRP misconceptions.


Belgath

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A few thoughts:

BRP is a terrible name - although it has history, I think it would be wiser to move forward with a more descriptive and exciting name.

However, personally I don't think there is a great need for a 'generic' or 'essentials' book. Most people want a complete package these days ( i.e. setting and full rules set in one book ) when they buy an RPG. Buying a generic book ( like the BGB ) and then having to adapt it to your own setting is extra work I don't think many current GMs want to take on ( it's not the 1970s any more). 

The various Chaosium settings seem to be diverging in terms of rules ( admittedly you could theoretically take a CoC character and probably mangle it a bit to make a new RQ4 character but it certainly isn't a straight like-for-like transfer anymore ) so what purpose would a new 'BRP Essentials' book serve anyway now ?

I think Chaosium would be better served by directing their time away from a replacement ( and/or cut down ) BGB and using their resources to make new supplements for successful current settings or creating new settings entirely. They could keep the current BGB ( which is perfectly adequate as a generic d100 system ) alive by selling the PDF or a POD version as required.

 

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10 hours ago, groovyclam said:

The various Chaosium settings seem to be diverging in terms of rules ( admittedly you could theoretically take a CoC character and probably mangle it a bit to make a new RQ4 character but it certainly isn't a straight like-for-like transfer anymore ) so what purpose would a new 'BRP Essentials' book serve anyway now ?

Or maybe they should make all of the various games more compatible? 

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9 hours ago, groovyclam said:

However, personally I don't think there is a great need for a 'generic' or 'essentials' book. Most people want a complete package these days ( i.e. setting and full rules set in one book ) when they buy an RPG. Buying a generic book ( like the BGB ) and then having to adapt it to your own setting is extra work I don't think many current GMs want to take on ( it's not the 1970s any more).

 

You may be right about that. Now, some people still like to use they favorite game to try something new and different. This is where the BRP System has a true edge over usual roleplaying games.

Once you discovered it with Cthulhu, Stormbringer, or any other very interesting game world, you can play a western, a SF or a cyberpunk adventure without having to learn a lot of new rules - and, above all, without having a huge amount of rule adaptations to do by yourself if the new game world you want doesn't exist.

Want to try Harry Potter, Star Wars, James Bond , Wild Wild West or Matrix? No problem. The big golden book allows it. While no Chaosium game with a precise setting really gives you what you need ...

Now, I fully do agree with one of your argument: a big problem of the BRP system is that it becomes more and more split. Runequest is less and less compatible with Cthulhu for instance. Not even to mention the new different D100 systems which, even if they share the same root, become more and more different ... While other universal system succeeded to maintain the same basic rules no matter the universe and the genre you like ... Realms of Cthulhu, for instance, allows you to play Cthulhu adventures with Savage World rules, with very few changes.

I would like BRP Essentials to be something like that. Sadly, more new D100 games are published and less it sounds to be possible. BRP Essentials will probably coexist concurrently with Runequest Essentials, Mythras, Open D100, Revolution D100, etc., instead of gathering them.

As a side note, I noticed that Chaosium put again the big golden book clearly in its Product lines list.

http://www.chaosium.com/basic-roleplaying/

I hope it doesn't mean that they abandoned the BRP Essentials proposal ...

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On 8/11/2016 at 3:06 PM, Gollum said:

I would like BRP Essentials to be something like that. Sadly, more new D100 games are published and less it sounds to be possible. BRP Essentials will probably coexist concurrently with Runequest Essentials, Mythras, Open D100, Revolution D100, etc., instead of gathering them.

There are various reasons for this.  One thing Chaosium could do is make an OGL.  A publisher now has the choice of asking permission (which may or may not involve paying them money) or making their own.  Percentile is easy enough that BRP fans would be able to pick up and play another percentile system.  BRP (not the games based on it) doesn't seem to have as much of a fan base as FATE or Savage Worlds, so using the BRP name doesn't appear to be much of an advantage.  Or at least it is not an advantage worth not creating your own percentile system over.  Finally, there are OGL percentile systems out there to use. 

I am not saying an OGL is the direction they should go.  I am just saying that if you do not want so many custom percentile games out there, then this is the minimum that is required.  They could go Savage Worlds method of having OGL for fan stuff, but must approve the quality of commercial products. 

However, in order for publishers to want to use BRP, they would need to be able to reproduce the rules in their game.  They can't tell players to go buy BRP.  Players mostly want a complete RPG in one book now.  Unless it could be demonstrated that using the BRP name would sell me more books, then I would simply write my own system if I could not copy/paste the BRP rules into my book. 

Doing this, however, might not be to the financial advantage of Chaosium.  I suppose it depends on if people seeing all of these BRP games would decide to buy the generic rules or not.  At the very least, I think it would raise the profile of the system and other Chaoisum games, especially if they all became a unified system between their own products. 

Edited by steamcraft
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I don't think an OGL would be a good solution. It is what they have done with D&D 3.5. And the result is that D&D has a lot of D20 rivals: True D20, 13th Age, Dungeon World ... And, above all, Pathfinder, who cleared out so many D&D customers! An OGL doesn't prevent the split. To the contrary, it encourages it.

Now, it may be true that something like Savage World's OGL (for fans only) is better thought out.

Sure, BRP doesn't have such a fan base. But they still have a good fan base. At least, not the big golden book, of course. But Call of Cthulhu. It is a best seller. In France, it is almost as sold as D&D. Even today. A new publisher, Sans Détour, sells books that costs more than $100 (with a lot of goodies), does it regularly, and it is always rapidly out of stock. So, through Call of Cthulhu and Runequest, the BRP system is very well known.

The problem is that all those fans don't know that the Chaosium system is also a very effective universal system. While fans of Fate or Savage Worlds immediately know that their game can handle every world they can imagine.

I think part of the solution is to emphasize the universal aspect of the game in the very first page of the website of the publisher. Every GM and players like to try another game world from time to time. And if they immediately knew that they can do it with the rules they already love, they would do it.

But, of course, to do that, every game published has to use the same basic rules. Exactly like Fate or Savage World (1). There may be some changes in the detail, to best fit the game world - no problem with that. But not in the basic rules! And the problem of Chaosium is precisely that even the basic rules are not really compatible. As it has been said above in this thread (or in another one), if you take your Call of Cthulhu investigator and want to throw him in Runequest game world, you have quite a lot of adaptations to do. Including in the character sheet! The number of attributes is not the same, basic skills have not the same names and don't cover exactly the same things. They are not calculated the same way. And so on.

That is what reduces the attractiveness of BRP as a universal system. Much more than its name! Someone who plays both Call of Cthulhu and Runequest immediately understands that it is not really based on the same set of rules and so, that the BRP universal system will be either one or the other of these two sets of rules. Or, worse: a third one ...

Of course, all those rules are still based on the same bases ... But D&D and Pathfinder are also based on the same D20 bases. Players of D&D still don't buy Pathfinder books and vice versa.

So, in my humble opinion, the very first step to make BRP Essentials more attractive would be to make Call of Cthulhu and Runequest closer so that it would be obvious for everyone that it is the same game - which is less and less true, sadly.

Another solution would be that BRP Essentials become a game full of optional rules which would send back either to Call of Cthulhu or to Runequest, letting every GM choose what he prefers (or even make a mixing if he wishes to). But that solution is probably the hardest one. A true challenge!

_____

(1) I don't mention GURPS here because it is specific. It was designed and published as a universal system from the start and, only then, developed with some game worlds.

Edited by Gollum
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Oh. I forgot to tell. Another very important thing for a universal system is stability. What makes GURPS very well known despite of its very little audience is that its rules are stable. The third edition lasted 12 years. The fourth one just celebrated its 12th birthday (and there is no 5th edition project; the game goes one being developed as it is). When you buy a GURPS Basic Set, you know that you won't have to buy it again before a decade. At minimum! When you buy D&D, to the contrary, you know that you will have to buy again all your books in a couple of years. Or to play with old rules while most players around (and in forums) use the newest one ...

A game with D&D community can afford changing rapidly. A game with a more little audience cannot, because it is another reason of split (there are those who use the newest version while other ones use the previous version and still other ones use the even previous one ...

Edited by Gollum
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23 hours ago, Gollum said:

I don't think an OGL would be a good solution. It is what they have done with D&D 3.5. And the result is that D&D has a lot of D20 rivals: True D20, 13th Age, Dungeon World ... And, above all, Pathfinder, who cleared out so many D&D customers! An OGL doesn't prevent the split. To the contrary, it encourages it.

Before the release of D&D 4th edition and the GSL licence, none of the d20 games were true competitors to D&D.

Nevertheless, there are already a few OGL games that are really close to BRP (GORE, Mongoose RuneQuest 1, Mongoose Legend, OpenQuest, etc.) and can be used as a base, so I don't see the need for a new one. :)

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6 hours ago, Mugen said:

Before the release of D&D 4th edition and the GSL licence, none of the d20 games were true competitors to D&D.

Nevertheless, there are already a few OGL games that are really close to BRP (GORE, Mongoose RuneQuest 1, Mongoose Legend, OpenQuest, etc.) and can be used as a base, so I don't see the need for a new one. :)

The problem is precisely here: these OGL games are close to BRP ... but still quite different from each other. And there are number of them.

A BRP Essentials would at last bring an official "generic and universal" version of the of the Chaosium's system ... At least, if it succeeded to bring back Cthulhu and Runequest rules together. The big golden book succeeded to do it, thanks to its abundant optional rules. But, now, Cthulhu and Runequest both evolved in a new direction. So, the BRP universal system needs an updating.

The challenge will be to do that in fewer pages than the big golden book ...

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On 8/10/2016 at 4:47 AM, Baulderstone said:

I think D20 is simply the result of corporate committee thinking. They made a big list of things that people wanted in D&D, and they shoved them all well, whether they fit well with the other things on the list or not.

People liked skill systems, but the class/level system was still a sacred cow to many. You got a skill system where your skill were linked to your class and could only rise so high based on your level. That added a lot of complexity to character generation for very little freedom.

People wanted more customization. People felt characters leveled too slowly. They decided to fix both these things. They added Feats, and Class Abilities and Skills, and they made space between level gain much shorter. The result was overkill for casual players with characters being saddled with too many new abilities too quickly.

Another disconnect was Prestige Classes. Adding cool specialized classes that you could move into later was a cool idea. However, it clashed with the fact that the whole system had otherwise designed to open up player choices. Prestige Classes had strict requirements for entry. You needed to pick out the Prestige Class you wanted at character generation, then every character progression choice you made was dictated by getting to that Prestige Class. The whole character generation and progression process was made a lot more complicated to give you choices, then Prestige Classes were thrown in there to trap players into strict path. Organic character growth based on events of the campaign was discouraged. 

Then there were monsters and NPCs. Someone had the idea early on to make monsters work just like PCs. Great idea! Except that idea clashed with the fact they had just made PCs incredibly more detailed and complicated. Just statting up a room full of orcs became a chore. 

Moving onto Pathfinder, obviously part of Paizo's success was based on rejection of 4E. I also think a big part of it was that they had a better understanding of how to help GMs. WotC didn't give a damn about GMs during the 3E era. They had crunched the numbers and realized that there were more players than GMs, so why bother making things for GMs? Just keep cranking out books loaded with Prestige Classes and Feats every month, not really thinking through the fact that players really only can use so many build options over the course a of a campaign. 

Paizo, with it's license for Dungeon, was knocking it our of the park with its adventure paths. While WotC was making books that were jumble of new mechanics for an already complicated game, like Sandstorm, Paizo was making things that a GM could just read and use at the table with relative ease. I think that earned them a lot of goodwill with GMs that came in handy when they released Pathfinder. 

I believe most of the "core" d20 concepts were Jonathan Tweet's work (with some mandates-from-on-high relating to "brand identity" &c -- e.g. classes & levels were "must-have" elements for the "D&D" brand).  Feats, for example, and the skills, were I think from JoT... then it was a matter of massaging the elements together, & lots of playtest/tweak cycles.  He was one of the original designers of "Ars Magica" and IIRC stated (shortly after 3.0 came out) that many of the features in 3.0 were what he would have done if he were doing the next edition of Ars Magica.  But there ARE some choices in skills, e.g. doing skills broadly or picking to always keep a few skills maximized.

The "Prestige Class" (PrC) was clearly a direct linear descent from the AD&D 1e "Bard" class (the 3.x/d20 PrC's, fwiw, are mostly LESS severe on requirements).  The whole "must build from 1st level" schtick is an optimizer's approach:  either how to get the minimums needed to qualify as quickly as possible, or how to get the "best" features/abilities before switching to the Prestige Class; it was by no means "mandatory" however.  Few (if any) leveling-choices actually preclude the eventual PrC choice, it's just that a "sub-optimal" choice may delay it for a level or rusult in a marginally-less-powerful build...

Character-design & build became, in essence, its own mini-game; many folks really enjoy(ed) it.

RQ, with tick-box experience/advancement and "organic character-growth based on events" is a completely different design philosophy... BUT it's worth noting that the pre-requisites for Rune status (Lord or Priest) are conceptually and functionally very similar to the PrC idea:  you have to get to a certain degree of skill/ability before some "professional opportunities" are available...  ;-)

Monsters-as-PC's / PC'able monsters?  This notion, again, clearly dates back to AD&D 1e (at least... maybe even B/X?) .  Adding character-levels on top of the "basic monster" build was nothing new to 3.0 !

Even the "splatbook" approach was, IMHO, solidly in place from the AD&D 1e days.

But... erm... this is probably not on-topic for the BRP forum (but I did work in some RQ compare/contrast elements!)

 

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12 hours ago, Gollum said:

A BRP Essentials would at last bring an official "generic and universal" version of the of the Chaosium's system ... At least, if it succeeded to bring back Cthulhu and Runequest rules together.

It doesn't sound like that will ever happen. RQ7 and CoC7 have already diverged along completely different pathways (much more so than in the early days of RQ2 and CoC1). Mythic Iceland is based on RQ7 but with many differences. I just can't see the Chaosium ever going down the BGB route again, even for purely practical reasons - the games coming out now are so different that a new BGB would most likely be even bigger than the original, and breaking each of the more setting-integrated new base systems into modular chunks would be difficult and maybe not even workable.

I'm looking forward to the new Mythic Iceland, and I'll wait and see what BRP Essentials brings to the table in terms of a usable, stand-alone rule book before deciding whether I need it or not. The other option (not exciting to me but probably useful from a marketing viewpoint), is that Essentials becomes a typical quickstart book - i.e. not a complete game by a long shot, but a taster to explain the game to newcomers and to whet their appetite for the real thing. However, I seem to remember the page count is quite high (in the 200s?), so it's probably not that.

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On 17/08/2016 at 6:07 AM, Vile said:

I'm looking forward to the new Mythic Iceland, and I'll wait and see what BRP Essentials brings to the table in terms of a usable, stand-alone rule book before deciding whether I need it or not. The other option (not exciting to me but probably useful from a marketing viewpoint), is that Essentials becomes a typical quickstart book - i.e. not a complete game by a long shot, but a taster to explain the game to newcomers and to whet their appetite for the real thing. However, I seem to remember the page count is quite high (in the 200s?), so it's probably not that.

It will probably be more than a simple introduction, though the number of pages - from what I read until now - will be about 64-96 pages (rather than 200).

http://basicroleplaying.org/topic/4861-brp-essentials-status/

 

Edited by Gollum
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3 hours ago, Jason Durall said:

Back when I was working on the BRP book, I suggested that we title the actual mechanical part of the game "The Chaos System" but no one in charge seemed to dig it. 

 

I dig it. "The Chaos System" is far more resonant than "Basic Roleplaying".

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On 2016-08-09 at 3:10 PM, smiorgan said:

CoC and RQ have evolved on partially divergent paths. I'm not sure it make much sense now to say that they are powered by the "same" system. I think that train passed when the old Chaosium decided not to base CoC7 on BGB (not sure if they actually did decide or it was strategy by happenstance). Now, that CoC7 is there and is very successful there is no chance of going back.

I have been using an old edition of CoC because I didn't see any real reason to update. I did buy CoC7, and a few nitpicking criticism aside (not a fan of % stats) I absolutely love it. I considered looking in to the new Runequest because I thought a fantasy game with those CoC7 rules could be a good time, but I quickly realized - as you say - they are not the same rules.

I do hope more is done with the CoC7 system. I ordered Pulp Cthulhu from my FLGS and can't wait for it to come in!

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On 8/15/2016 at 7:05 PM, Gollum said:

Oh. I forgot to tell. Another very important thing for a universal system is stability. What makes GURPS very well known despite of its very little audience is that its rules are stable. The third edition lasted 12 years. The fourth one just celebrated its 12th birthday (and there is no 5th edition project; the game goes one being developed as it is). When you buy a GURPS Basic Set, you know that you won't have to buy it again before a decade. At minimum! When you buy D&D, to the contrary, you know that you will have to buy again all your books in a couple of years. Or to play with old rules while most players around (and in forums) use the newest one ...

I agree that its stability is a virtue but GURPS (like BRP) is a terrible name.

Another way to achieve stability for your game rules is to pick one of many out of print titles ;)

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2 hours ago, Questbird said:

Another way to achieve stability for your game rules is to pick one of many out of print titles ;)

Yep, games don't have a 'play by date'. Someone who won't play a game just because it's 'old' is probably someone I wouldn't enjoy playing with anyway.

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21 hours ago, Cosmic55 said:

I did buy CoC7, and a few nitpicking criticism aside (not a fan of % stats) I absolutely love it. I considered looking in to the new Runequest because I thought a fantasy game with those CoC7 rules could be a good time, but I quickly realized - as you say - they are not the same rules. I do hope more is done with the CoC7 system. I ordered Pulp Cthulhu from my FLGS and can't wait for it to come in!

Personally I would like to see some various facets of CoC 7E brought into the new RQ rules if possible.  

Expressing Characteristics as a % is not an issue for me, although it does stray slightly from the original RQ stat blocks, so I can see why that may not happen. However in CoC 7E I really like that Characteristic values are used to calculate skill points during character generation, it makes Characteristics much more relevant.

Having more granular skill levels in CoC 7E is a big plus (the 'Hard Roll' half %, for instance). The CoC 7E Luck Points are also handy (perhaps re-trapped as 'Fate' Points for RQ). I also like the Shield rules from Cthulhu Thru The Ages, simple but effective.

Lots of additional other stuff can be hung from the CoC 7E framework to make it feel 'RuneQuesty', such as RQ Hit locations; CoC Credit Rating (retrapped as 'Glory' or 'Renown' perhaps); varied Special Success according to damage types, like in RQ2; runes expressed like Pendragon's Personality Traits, etc . Even many of the Pulp Talents from Pulp Cthulhu could possibly be re-trapped as Mythic Abilities gained from HeroQuesting (perhaps in a later supplement, rather than core rules).

Having a little more consistency between the rule sets is a good thing in my book, at least at ground-floor core game mechanics level.

I would really like a RuneQuest that plays like a cross between RQ2, Pendragon, and CoC 7E if possible.

Edited by Mankcam
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" Sure it's fun, but it is also well known that a D20 roll and an AC is no match against a hefty swing of a D100% and a D20 Hit Location Table!"

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3 hours ago, Mankcam said:

I would really like a RuneQuest that plays like a cross between RQ2, Pendragon, and CoC 7E if possible.

Yeah, there are aspect of each game that are intriguing. I'd like an RQ that was mostly RQ2-3, but with opposed resolution from Pendragon, and possibly % stats from CoC7.  like the idea of having skills and stats on the same scale. 

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Chaos stalks my world, but she's a big girl and can take of herself.

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Aside from decades of history, I like the 3d6 stats because I used to have the quick and easy option of rolling INTx2 or INTx3. Yeah 1/5 or 1/20 are good options, but again...I'm not 100% sure I feel it's a BETTER option...but yeah, it's fine. :P

PS For me it always and forever shall be the Chaosium System. :P

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