I have now had my hands on Chaosium’s new Basic Roleplaying rulebook for a fortnight or so, and so I’ve had a proper chance to read it and see if it’s any good. My feelings are mixed.

First impressions are good. It’s a weighty tome (400 pages) and nicely presented. The artwork ranges from okay to good, nothing spectacular, but nothing particularly bad either. The book starts with a brief introduction to roleplaying and to the BRP system. There’s then a chapter on characters and character generation, a chapter on skills (which are at the heart of the BRP system), a chapter on powers (a term which covers any kind of special abilities characters might have, these being magic, mutations, psychic powers, superpowers or an alternative type of magic which the game calls sorcery), a chapter explaining the basics of how the system works, a chapter on combat, a chapter of ‘spot rules’: essentially a miscellanea section with rules for things like acid, chases, cold and exposure, fighting underwater and the weather (a lot of which are related to combat and arguably might be more at home in the previous chapter), and a chapter on equipment. Then there’s a Gamesmaster’s section, with a chapter on GMing in general, a section describing different settings with tips for how to run games in them and which optional rules might be suitable, and a bestiary.

So is it any good? First up, the authors have done a good job of rationalising all the different variations of the system into one consistent system (albeit one with a good deal of modularity so that different ways of doing things can be easily swapped in and out). I get the impression that the goal was to keep the new book as compatible as possible with previous BRP games and not re-write the system any more than was necessary. And overall I like the system, it has its quirks and does involve a little bit more maths than is perhaps ideal (for example, dividing your chance of success by 5 and 20 to get the chance of a special or critical success and, worse, dividing the chance of failure by 20 to get the chance of a fumble), but those few extra calculations do produce some fairly neat results, so it is arguably worth it. I’m not too keen on resistance rolls: it’s not so much that they’re a bad mechanic as they are an ugly one, but they are only used for contested characteristic rolls (not skill rolls) and so they should be required infrequently enough that I can over look them. I like the fact that combat is often short and brutal: one or two good hits are often enough to bring an opponent down. I like the way experience is based on which skills a character actually uses. And I like the fact the setting manages to be generic and flexible without being too open-ended, confusing and tiresome. Also, from what I’ve read, the GM section is very good, with lots of helpful advice and information.

The only real problem I have with this book is that the proofreading and editorial work has obviously not been given quite the attention it needed. In some cases the issues are minor, but sometimes they cause issues in play. For example, the rules on weapons with reach claim that a character with a long weapon may keep an opponent at bay with a successful weapon skill roll which prevents that opponent from closing without making a dodge or parry roll to get past the weapon. The section then includes a summary which says that an opponent kept at bay can either choose to close or dodge past the weapon and attack. So which is it?

The worst of these issues is with the (optional) encumbrance rules. The description of these rules begins by saying that an encumbered character is slowed down and will loose fatigue points more quickly. There is then a paragraph describing what constitutes a ‘thing’ (which I believe was the basic unit of encumbrance in second edition RuneQuest). It notes that one thing generally weighs about one or two encumbrance points, but does not otherwise explain what the relevance of a ‘thing’ is, and the concept is not used again anywhere in the book. The next paragraph explains that one encumbrance point is equivalent to about one kilogram, or 1/6 of a point of SIZ (one of the basic characteristics in the game). It mentions that on the resistance table, a character has a 50% chance of lifting an encumbrance equal to 6 times his strength. There’s then a paragraph on the effects of encumbrance on creatures besides humans, which makes no sense whatsoever (it seems to suggest that a non-human character carrying anything will lose a number of fatigue points per turn which is directly proportional to its strength and nothing else). Finally it notes that there is a 1% penalty to dodging per point of encumbrance. Through all this there is, despite the opening paragraph, no indication of how encumbrance affects fatigue at all (besides the gibberish about non-human animals), and besides the dodge penalty, the only hint of any kind of mechanical effect of encumbrance is the reference to the resistance table, suggesting that characters should at some point be making resistance rolls with their STR vs 1/6 of the ENC they’re trying to carry. But an encumbrance system that is based purely on making rolls to lift a particular load is frankly useless, and besides, the introductory paragraph rather suggests that it makes some difference to fatigue. Looking instead at the fatigue section, it notes that encumbrance makes a difference to a character’s starting fatigue points, but not what that difference actually is; instead it suggests that this will be explained in the encumbrance section.

It looks to me as though the author started writing the encumbrance section but never finished. Somehow this unfinished section was never spotted before the book went to print. Admittedly, I don’t think I’ve ever bothered keeping track of encumbrance in any games I’ve run or played in, so for a lot of games I doubt that having no usable rules for encumbrance will matter very much. But all the same, it’s sloppy to have such a mess of a section in the book. There’s also the fact that from what I gather, the encumbrance and fatigue rules in RuneQuest were fairly neat, in that they actually represented quite well the real drawback of armour, which is not that it restricts movement (it doesn’t much), but rather that it is very heavy and so wearing it while doing any strenuous activity (like fighting) is absolutely exhausting.

So that’s BRP. At heart it’s a pretty good system. It occasionally shows it’s age a bit, but not nearly as much as you might expect when you consider just how old it is (as far as I can gather, it hasn’t really changed that much since first edition Runequest in 1978). If you’re willing to have to occasionally improvise or make spot rulings when the book isn’t clear (or is downright contradictory), then there’s a lot of good stuff to be found in BRP. But I can’t help but feel that it’s a shame it couldn’t have received just a little bit more editorial attention and a bit more playtesting (preferably from people who hadn’t played many BRP games before) because it could have been a significantly better product. As it is, I don’t see this book winning the system it contains the position within the games industry it deserves.

Also, I keep feeling that ‘BRP’ probably ought to be pronounced ‘burp’ rather than ‘bee-ar-pee’. Oh, and can anyone who reads this and has access to 3rd ed. RuneQuest (Mike?) confirm that you deducted your encumbrance from your initial fatigue points? Just in case I ever do decide to use encumbrance.