Review: Basic Roleplaying Universal Game Engine Quickstart

In my earlier review of BRP, I posited the need for a basic Basic Role-Playing, and several people have pointed out to me that this already exists and I should look at it. So here we are.

In a Nutshell: The latest incarnation of Basic Roleplaying in a 50 page free quickstart edition. Generic RPG by Chaosium with a d100 roll-under system, free to download here; this is the core game engine for BRP, RuneQuest, Call of Cthulhu and others. Full colour on every page, copious adverts for other products, but I don't begrudge them that; it's what quickstarts are for.

Contents

• Introduction (3 pages): The usual; what an RPG is, how it works, what players and GMs do, what you need to play, how the dice work.
• Characters (11 pages): Seven characteristics, choose or roll a die to select a set of values; select a profession, and increase nine skills from their basic levels, three by 50% and six by 25%, and add 10% to a skill of your choice for each point of Intelligence you have. Then calculate derived characteristics such as move, hit points, damage bonus, power points. There are a dozen professions in the quickstart, and around 50 skills, not counting specialties. Gear is basically whatever sounds reasonable for a person of that profession. There's an example PC, an SF bounty hunter. There are only the barest hints for non-human races (in the adventures chapter), but that wouldn't be an issue for me as I rarely use them anyway. This section also includes the character sheet.
• System (4 pages): This covers skill and characteristic rolls in more detail; the basics are that to succeed, you roll your skill level or less, 5x a characteristic score or less, or roll on the resistance table, which essentially adjusts characteristic rolls depending on an opposing characteristic. Nothing about character improvement; that's disappointing, they could've explained it in the space it takes to point you at the free download.
• Time (2 pages): Turns, combat rounds, skill check times; how long each takes.
• Combat (5 pages): The combat round consists of preparation (used to be called statements of intent, everyone says what they want to do), social (talk your way out of it), ranged (ranged attacks and long-reach weapons), movement, and close (melee attacks). This is different from the sequence in previous editions, adding the social phase and pulling ranged attacks forward before movement. Actions are resolved in descending order of Dexterity and/or weapon length. Attacks may be parried or dodged once the attack roll has succeeded. This chapter also details armour, shields, weapons, damage, and healing.
• Spot Rules (5 pages): A selection of tules for things which don't come up that often; ambush, backstab, cover, darkness, disarming, grappling and whatnot. This chapter also has a combat example.
• Adventures (12 pages): A prison break in 1620s France, surviving a transport crash on a colony world, looting treasure from a lost temple. Each has pregenerated PCs, opponents, tips for the GM, and a map.

What I Liked

• As I wished for, it is much smaller than BRP, and yet more or less complete unto itself.
• No hit locations or hit points by location.
• The adventures demonstrated to me that you can make a PC with only 10 or so skills and a short statblock; you don't need a two-page character sheet and dozens of skills.

What I Didn't Like

• Still too many skills and specialties for my liking.
• How skill improvement works isn't mentioned. Shrink the picture on page 20 a bit and you could fit it in.
• Rolling to parry or dodge, which I dislike as characters fairly quickly get to the point where you spend most of every combat whiffing, slowing things down.

What I Think

My objective with free quickstarts is to be able to run a campaign with nothing else, although I accept publishers have to make a living and are under no obligation to help me do that; I could almost do that with this one, although the lack of rules for skill improvement and magic/psionics would need some additions scribbled in the margins.

This is much more to my taste than the larger BRP Universal Game Engine; shorter, more obviously simple, more credible as a book that's easy for beginners to pick up. 

However, I can't see it luring me away from my current favourites, the few things I don't like about it are too jarring for me. YMMV of course.