Tag Archives: Basic Roleplaying

Articles, Level One Wonk

On Specificity

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Why is Mothership, well, Mothership? Put another way, why isn’t it Basic Roleplaying, or Call of Cthulhu? The core mechanics are all very similar; basically everything in Mothership that isn’t specifically about starships is adapted from Call of Cthulhu in one way or another. And that little starship aside does point to the answer: The reason Mothership is Mothership, Call of Cthulhu is Call of Cthulhu, and neither of them are BRP has to do with the specificity of their missions. Both Call of Cthulhu and Mothership frame their ideal game experience as horror, which lends itself to specific mechanics in the designers’ eyes. Mothership more specifically is science fiction horror, so the designer adds rules about spaceships and space travel. Specificity isn’t limited to genre, though. Mothership is also intended to be light on mechanics; famously the game has no mechanics for things like stealth which means that the adjudication of things like hiding and following are circumstantial and entirely in the lap of the GM. Whether you agree with this mechanical decision or not, it is deliberate and it is specific.

While specificity of game outcomes is produced by having more and more concrete rules (Mothership’s take on stealth is completely non-specific, while a game with one or more stealth skills and a laundry list of modifiers would be much more specific), specificity of game design is much more interesting, especially as there’s an entire class of games that deliberately avoids it. When I looked at QuestWorlds, I saw a game designed to try and do everything, at the expense of doing anything in a particularly interesting or engaging way. It’s hardly the only generic game, and one could make the same complaint and direct it at Fate, or GURPS, or Savage Worlds.

But hold on. If we go back and look at Mothership again we have, broadly, a fairly non-specific game. Yes, it’s about space horror, and the character options are tuned to space horror. The GMing advice is very good. The layout is very good. The game, though? It’s, outside of the space horror part, stripped down Call of Cthulhu. So where does that Mothership ‘vibe’ come through besides the design ethos? A good part of it is the modules (hardly a controversial opinion), but I think a specific and interesting point is that the modules bring with them hyper-specific mechanics. While GURPS has mechanics meant to be at the level of physics and D&D has mechanics which reinforce genre, Mothership has a good chunk of its mechanics corpus supporting specific stories, designed for and included in the pages of modules like Gradient Descent and Another Bug Hunt. And this is kind of important: While Mothership clearly takes inspiration from the DIY and hack-and-borrow ethos of the OSR, it’s presented a bit differently. The modules, in addition to providing the setting and conflict and everything else for a solid few sessions of adventure, also provide the hacked/modified rules to make that adventure feel different or play different than the base game. It does make me think, though: If you’re hacking the rules (or using the designer’s hacks) for every module, how truly different is that from using a generic game? Put another way, what really makes Mothership different from BRP, really? It’s not rules, after all.

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Articles, Level One Wonk

Guide for the Perplexed: Biggest Names

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Imagine for a moment that you’re a recent entrant into the tabletop RPG hobby. In all likelihood you entered via D&D; the longest lived brand in the hobby almost certainly holds a majority share of hobby sales and definitely of hobby mindshare. If you wanted to stay in the realm of D&D, that’s easy; the game has the largest community by far, the volume of official supplements is solid, and the third party support is massive. Even if you tire of D&D 5e itself, there are a number of directly comparable games to play; you can go Pathfinder if you want something more granular and more complex, or go to the OSR for something more imagination-and table-driven. But let’s say you want something different. How do you figure out what’s going to appeal to you?

Guide for the Perplexed is going to be a series of articles looking at finding new games outside of D&D. The key angle here is accessibility: These games will be easy to find and it will be easy to find other players. To that end, I’ll be looking at three different approaches to finding new games: Games which have the outright largest player bases, games which are easy to find at your local game store, and games with active communities online. As the series progresses the discussion will not only be about the games, but also about the channels that the games come through. Gaming at your local gaming store isn’t just about what books you can find on the shelf, it’s about the events being offered. The same goes for local gaming cafes or even your local library. Similarly, ‘online community’ can mean a lot of different things, but it’s important to see which ones are welcoming and support gameplay, including subreddits, forums, and living communities.

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Articles, Editorial

Basic Roleplaying Review

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Back in the 1970s, a new role-playing game built a foundation that would stand for years to come, a foundation of accessibility, hackability, and ease of use. Am I talking about D&D? Absolutely not! I’m talking about RuneQuest, a game which, in 1978, not only became a quick second place finisher to D&D in the fantasy genre but also established many RPG conventions we still see today. In 1980, the RuneQuest second edition box included a little 16-page booklet titled Basic Role-Playing, and from there it was off to the races. Basic Role-Playing (later Basic Roleplaying, also called BRP) would form the basis of every game released by RuneQuest’s publisher, Chaosium. As that esteemed publication history includes none other than Call of Cthulhu, BRP is likely the bestselling house system in the history of role-playing games.

Thanks to RuneQuest and Call of Cthulhu, BRP forms the cornerstone of how gamers expect d100 systems to work. In short, your attributes and skills give you percentile values which are equal to the probability of rolling under them on a d100 roll. Look at your sheet, you know how likely you are to succeed at a baseline roll. In addition to BRP itself, this mode of d100 mechanics saw widespread adoption in games as varied as Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay and Eclipse Phase. Now, Chaosium is staking the future of BRP on its utility as a platform. The new edition of Basic Roleplaying is here, and it’s being marketed to game designers as much if not more than game masters.

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