OK, for Day 6 of the 2025 #CharacterCreationChallenge I’m going to use the Basic Roleplaying 4th edition system by Chaosium that has a copyright of 2022. Now regular readers of my blog will know that I’ve talked about and used the Basic Fantasy RPG several times, but despite the similar names, these two systems are not the same. Basic Roleplaying is a generic system (like GURPS and others) where they give you the framework and the GM decided what universe place around it. I’ve heard of this for years as it was used for Call of Cthulu, RuneQuest, Ringworld (which I think I may have played once in the late 80s-early 90s), Elf Quest, Stormbringer and a few others. I had never owned a copy until it came up for a really good sale price one day on DriveThruRPG. I snatched it up thinking that I’d use it for this challenge. Then a few weeks later, Chaosium announced a newer edition called Basic Roleplaying Universal Game Engine. So that might have been why the first edition went on sale. So I’m not doing a mini-review of the latest edition, but I’m going to use it anyway.
Since this is a generic system that can be used for just about anything, I think I’m going to attempt to make a spy for an espionage game. Let’s see if the book can explain it to me cold.
A guide to creating a character is listed on page 22-23 (with further details on the pages before and after). It has been broken down into several steps. Step 1 is the Name and Characteristics. It even says “Write your character’s name at the top of the page” on the first bullet point under step 1 with the second bullet point being “Write your own name on the character sheet”. I’d laugh but having run a Star Trek club where we’d have people work on merit sheets for rank advancements and a lot of times they would forget to put their name on the sheet. So points for being thorough. Our modern day spy is going to be named Jacob Green and he’s a bloke. Yes, the steps asks you to pick the gender now, but states that it doesn’t have an advantage system-wise. Our characteristics are Strength (STR), Constitution (CON), Power (POW), Dexterity (DEX) and Appearance (APP) that require a 3D6 roll. Do I assign them or do them in order? (searches the book) OK, I can choose them as an option. Before I start rolling the dice I look up what the POW characteristic is in this game as it may or may not affect my decisions. Ah it’s like the Willpower characteristic. I rolled the characteristics and assigned them. Now there are two more characteristics that require a 2D6+6 roll to determine the score. This is for Intelligence (INT) and Size (SIZ), which I’ve written down. Now I can redistribute 3 points between the characteristics with nothing above a 21, of which there is no chance as 16 was the highest roll. I elected to make a few changes.
Step 2, Magic and Powers. The book actually states on page 19 that you can skip this step if you are not in a world of magic, mutations or super powers. Works for me, onto step 3.
Age and Experience. The default age is 17+1D6 and Jacob turns out to be 20 years-old. So perhaps he’s been recruited while in college? There is an option for Education that guides me to page 27 (quickly reads). Ah I see this as the last characteristic. Grasp of general knowledge gained through a rounded education system and can be used in modern or futuristic settings. The book talks about how the attribute is generated if using a point based character creation system (which is an option) but not by throwing dice. I’m going to assume its the 2D6+6 (which rolled really well actually, but that’s good if Jacob wants to be a smart spy)
Step 4 tells us to generate some characteristic rolls based off of the values we’ve rolled above. For example CONx5 = Stamina. I did the math and wrote these down. Step 5 is more derived characteristics and more math this and math that for things like damage bonuses, hit points etc. I wrote things down.
Step 6 is interesting. It’s personality and type option. I’m instructed to roll a 1D4 and consult the chart. Jacob Outsmarts his opponents to gain an advantage. That actually fits what I’m thinking of. I’m wondering if some GMs would let their players pick if they already had something in mind?
Alright, step 7 is the skill point allocation with ranges from normal game (i.e. more like real life) to Superhuman Game (lots of stuff) Let’s go with the second lowest of Heroic with 325 points to professional skills with a max of 90%. There is a personal point pool (INTx10) that I can use for anything that doesn’t exceed the above limit. That’s a lot of points to spend. I’m instructed to go to page 33 and choose a profession, and yes I found a Spy farther down on page 42. So that gives me the wealth range and the list of suggested skills. But in going over the different steps and skill descriptions, I can’t find how much my initial cost for the skills are during the character creation process. I’m going to go with the assumption that 1 skill point equals 1% that I add to the base chance for that skill. Gah, it seems so simple of a thing to quickly explain. I think I did this correctly as there was a number of skills selected that would be appropriate for an espionage agent, but I had the feeling that I had missed something here. But I don’t have time so I move on.
Step 8 is marked as optional, but it’s the distinctive features. With the App score of 10, there is one distinctive feature. Randomly rolled resulted in facial hair. Um…. OK. From the list I selected no eyebrows.
With the last step we equip the character. It states that Jacob already has clothes, pocket money based off of wealth level (which was what?), a personal item with an emotional connection (Um… his Grandfather’s pocket watch… yea), any trade tools or equipment that matches the profession (makes sense), any weapon the character has 50% or more (glad I took that score on Light Pistol), a vehicle (yay spy car, or at least something good looking). Interestingly enough, there was no spot on the character sheet to write down equipment other than weapons. So I think I’m done and ready to scan the character sheet. I didn’t scan the second sheet as it primarily dealt with superpowers.
Afterthoughts:
There are a lot of pages that you have to jump to in order to follow the process. Had this been a physical book, I would have ended up using lots of bookmarks. It was a little annoying trying to click on the right bookmark within the PDF as not everything had a bookmark. I wonder if this is smoother in the latest edition of the rules?
The percentile system looks interesting. It reminded me of the FASA Star Trek RPG that also used percentiles for their resolution rolls. I think I’d be interested in trying out this game in a one-shot or at a convention before I knew if I wanted to put more effort into the game (i.e. long-term game or homebrews). It looks interesting to play, but like GURPs, but I hated making the character.
Additional Notes:
When I was printing up a bunch of the character sheets that I was going to use in the 2025 challenge, some of them came up slightly off kilter. This is one of those sheets that did that. Other sheets did not (quite strange). So I had a soft copy of the sheet up while I was also working on this and it looks like nothing really got cut off the bottom except for some border lines.
Am I putting too much detail into the steps? Since I’m trying to play catch-up, I think that I’ll be making this a shorter blog post. But when I sit down to type, my fingers keep typing what my brain tells them to. I also stop to look up tidbits and details to make sure I’m presenting them correctly. What do you guys think of the detail that I’m putting into these posts so far? Please let me know by social, email or Discord. Thank you.
Coming Up Next:
Everyday Heroes
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