Retrospective: Basic Role-Playing

When asked to name an old school roleplaying game, most gamers would, I suspect, immediately say, "Dungeons & Dragons," and not without good reason. Being the first and still most successful RPG ever published inevitably brings with it enviable name recognition, even outside the hobby. Readers of this blog, however, could almost certainly name many other early games equally important to the history of the hobby, both in terms of their innovations and influence. A supremely good example of such games is Chaosium's Basic Role-Playing, written by Greg Stafford and Lynn Willis, based on the pioneering work of Steve Perrin, Ray Turney, Steve Henderson, and Warren James, each of whom had contributed to the design of 1978's RuneQuest. 

First published in 1980, Basic Role-Playing is a 16-page distillation and development of the rules found in RQ but shorn of their connection to Glorantha or any other setting. As its subtitle makes clear, BRP was intended as "an introductory guide" to this new form of entertainment 

wherein the players construct characters who live out their lives in a specially made game game-world. The characters need not be anything like the people who play. Indeed, it is often more rewarding and enjoyable to create characters entirely unlike themselves. For instance, the most popular sorts are warriors and magicians – how many knights and wizards do you know in this world?

I like this passage a great deal both for what it says and how it says it. Basic Role-Playing is written in a very engaging style that is clear without being vapid, to the point that it includes a number of genuinely insightful philosophical digressions, such as this one on "life and death," which I reproduce in full, because of how delightful it is.

Danger is a common part of role-playing. There is satisfaction in non-dangerous occupations, and players are urged to have some non-combative characters if time allows. But the sharpest spice is the performance of characters in life-or-death situations. Dying is the one experience we cannot know more than once, and few of us are interested in hurrying-up our chance for the knowledge. Role-playing gives us surrogate danger without the risk.

Even so, you will experience real emotion when your characters gain victories, and undergo real agony when they die. Players and their characters have a very intimate relation, and the longer a player runs his character well, the more likely there will be a sense of loss when death comes and resurrection is not possible. This can be traumatic if you are too close to the characters at hand. For this reason, people are advised to never play themselves in a game. Always maintain a proper mental attitude towards the game, and remember that it is only imagination, no matter how real it seems during play. 

Possibility of loss makes success rewarding. Commit your characters to battle and play without restraint.

There's so much good stuff in these three short paragraphs that I could write an entire post discussing it (and perhaps I will), but I share it here to illustrate the balance, good sense, and even wisdom present in this short staple-bound booklet.

I first encountered Basic Role-Playing in 1981, when I bought the first edition of Call of Cthulhu. The boxed set included a copy of BRP, to which the game's rulebook frequently referred when it came to describing certain rules. Though this was unwieldy, to be sure, it did afford me the opportunity to spend more time with the text of Basic Role-Playing itself. The text presents an easy-to-understand and use percentile-based system for handling combat and skill use, along with probably my favorite experience rules for any RPG. The skill list is small and focused primarily on physical actions and combat is relatively fast and potentially deadly. It's a terrifically compact but sharp set of rules – little wonder then that it's been used in and imitated by so many roleplaying games over the last forty years.

I have only good things to say about BRP; it's a true classic of the hobby, right up there with OD&D, Tunnels & Trolls, Empire of the Petal Throne, and Traveller, as examples of brilliant early rules sets. Correction: I can think of one criticism and that's that the original 16-page version of the game is no longer available. I know that Chaosium has, in the years since, produced a much lengthier version of the game and I'm sure it's fine, but, for me, those additional pages are just gilding the lily. They can't hold a candle to the 1980 version I read all those years ago. It's still one of the best things Chaosium has ever released – a sterling example of old school rules economy to which few can compare.