Basic Roleplaying - PDF

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The Chaosium System

Welcome to Chaosium’s Basic Roleplaying system, a book that collects in one place rules and options for one of the original and most influential role playing game systems in the world.

This book comprises a roleplaying game system, a framework of rules aimed at allowing players to enact a sort of improvisational radio theater—only without microphones—and with dice determining whe­ther the characters succeed or fail at what they attempt to do. In roleplaying games, one player takes on the role of the gamemaster (GM), while the other player(s) assume the roles of player characters (PCs) in the game. The gamemaster also acts out the roles of characters who aren’t being guided by players: these are called non-player characters (NPCs).

From its origin, Basic Roleplaying was designed to be intuitive and easy to play. Character attributes follow a 3D6 curve, and the other Basic Roleplaying mechanics are even simpler. Virtually all rolls determining success or failure of a task are determined via the roll of percentile dice. This means that there’s less fiddling with dice of different types, and the concept of a percentile chance of success is extremely easy for beginners and experienced players to grasp. There aren’t many easier ways to say a character has a 70% chance of succeeding at an activity.

The core virtues of the system are as evident today as they were when it was first introduced. Primary characteristics of Basic Roleplaying that have emerged from decades of play, across many different varieties of the system are as follows:

• The system is remarkably friendly to newcomers. It is easy to describe the basics of the game system, and the percentile mechanics, to non-gamers.
• Players of other game systems often find Basic Roleplaying to be much less mechanistic and less of a barrier to the actual act of roleplaying. Less time spent on game systems usually equals more time available for roleplaying and thinking “in character.”
• Most of the information players need to know is present on their character sheets.
• Characters tend to evolve based on practicing the skills they use the most. They do not arbitrarily gain experience in skills and qualities based on ephemeral elements such as levels or experience ranks.
• Combat can be very quick and deadly, and often the deciding blow in a conflict is the one to land first.
• Basic Roleplaying is remarkably modular: levels of complexity can be added or removed as needed, and the core system works equally well with considerable detail as it does with a minimal amount of rules.
• The internal consistency of Basic Roleplaying allows for rules judgments to be made rapidly and with little searching through the rulebook for special cases.
• This book represents a first for Basic Roleplaying—a system complete in one book, without a defined setting. Previously, Basic Roleplaying has been an integral part of standalone games, usually with rich and deep world settings. Due to differences in these settings, Basic Roleplaying has had many different incarnations. Variant and sometimes contradictory rules have emerged between versions, to better support one particular setting over another.

Chaosium’s Basic Roleplaying system reconciles these different flavors of the system and brings many variant rules together between the covers of one book, something that has never been done before. Some of these rules are provided as optional extensions, some as alternate systems, and others have been integrated into the core system. By design, this work is not a reinvention of Basic Roleplaying nor a significant evolution of the system. It is instead a collected and complete version of it, without setting, provided as a guide to players and gamemasters everywhere and compatible with most Basic Roleplaying games. It also allows the gamemaster the ability to create his or her own game world (or worlds), to adapt others from fiction, films, or even translate settings from other roleplaying games into Basic Roleplaying.

Try our BRP Quick-Start - Free!

We invite you to download the Chaosium’s Basic Roleplaying Quick-Start Edition, a booklet that collects the essential rules for BRP and presents them in abbreviated form.

Use this booklet to introduce new players to Basic Roleplaying, or hand it out to your established group for quick and dirty character creation. With our simple You will be up and playing in minutes.

By Jason Durall. A 48 page downloadable booklet with watermarked pages and cover images.

Down the PDF here.

Like a physical printed version? Please order the full version.

Download Character Sheets

To make your life easier, we have created AutoCalc character sheets as well as the standard character sheets. You'll have to use a recent version of Adobe Reader.  If you have questions about the AutoCalc versions and how they work, please check out the AutoCalc Character Sheet Instructions.

Important: The Autofill PDFs will not work in the PDF previewer of your web browser. Save them and open them with Adobe Acrobat Reader.

What the Critics Say

"...the core is the same game we’ve all been playing since 1978, when Steve Perrin looked in his white box and said “I’ll bet I could design better rules than this.”... In short, it’s the cleanest, simplest, easiest generic system around. And now it’s in one book, not 20."—Ken Hite (2008), reprised by DiceHaven. 

"I want to say something. Because it needs to be said… I love BRP… I flat-out LOVE it… It is the simplest, most logical, most straightforward, most elegant RPG system I have ever come across. Period."—Sword of Sorcery.