New System, New Face: Hastily Reviving a Dead Series with Janky Optional Rules for BFRPG

Been a while since I made a character hereabouts, huh? Figured I'd fix that and shoehorn yet more BFRPG into my blog while I'm at it.

As I've mentioned in the past, the open-source game system BFRPG has tons of fan-made content hosted on its site, from new species and classes, to new subsystems, and in at least one case that I know of, a pretty significant rules conversion mod.

Basic Fantasy Questing by Joe Carruthers changes the game from a mixed OSR title into a hybrid between The RPG Not To Be Named and the "Classic d100 Game" that the supplement references obliquely throughout. For those who don't know what that's referring to, like myself when I started this post, it's the original Basic Role-Playing system by Chaosium released in 1980. It's a generic system similar to GURPS or Savage Worlds in that it supports a wide range of genre fiction that you can flesh out using books in their niche. You might have heard of a few of BRP's little genre splats; they include Call of Cthulhu, Stormbringer, and RuneQuest, among others.*

BFQ works like this: you roll your ability scores and pick a species and class like normal, then convert every ±1 of ability modifier into a ±5% to applicable roll-under d100 rolls, like adding Strength percentage to Melee Attack rolls or Wisdom percentage to Divine Casting. Each class has a main skill that determines their HD, like a fighter's highest weapon skill or a thief's highest thief skill. Class skills start at a 55% base chance to succeed, not including modifiers.

For everything outside of the class's niche, you have a new set of Ability Skills to roll. These skills combine saving throws from the core game with the ability checks for all 6 ability scores that you commonly see elsewhere, and their base % is equal to a character's ability score x2. You roll these to push heavy stuff, shrug off the effects of poison, remember lore, etc.

You might notice there's not really anything to build here, though. What would I be doing other than rolling dice and seeing what I end up with?

Well, fortunately Joe included some optional rules for his already optional ruleset: classless characters.

The classless characters rule nudges BFQ much closer to BRP than to D&D by removing classes and opening all skills up to all characters, albeit at much lower starting values than their specialized fellows enjoy. Which comes up as a bit of an issue later on, but for now let's just figuratively and literally roll with it.

Ability score generation is identical to the base game, which means I spent literally hours rolling arrays in a generator until I got one that felt not too crippled by negative modifiers but also not too good that it seemed like I was blatantly fishing for a strong character. Ultimately I found one that's just average enough to help illustrate a few parts of the system.

With this conveniently middling array, we can calculate our classless adventurer's base skills using the following:

You still select species as part of this system, for which I decided to pull in yet another fan supplement; Monsters as Player Characters by Sidney Parham, Omer Golan-Joel, R. Kevin Smoot, and steveman. I decided to go with hobgoblin, since they're kind of like the humans of the humanoid world in a lot of ways, and a generalist character feels appropriate here. They also have a pretty nice Alertness ability that reduces the chance of being surprised, and +5% bonuses to Listen and Finding/Removing Traps, which is great for someone with free access to thief skills.

Maybe they've actually drifted away from their highly regimented community after failing to find a rank and niche to specialize into? A rather uninspired implementation of the societal misfit trope, I know, but one that at least weds plot and mechanics.

We distribute another 50 points on top of the above base values to finish, so that we have at least 1 skill above 55% and none higher than 70%. After some final bookkeeping we've got our hob:

Art stolen from the hedgewitch chapter of Land of Mist.

As you can see, average base values for classless characters start very low to make up for their much greater versatility. This PC's highest ability score, Strength, only amounts to a base of 26% in melee attack and force, although it's actually slightly higher than this thanks to the +5% from the +1 modifier to Strength which still gets applied to all applicable rolls, for a total of 31%. On the flip side, our friend here ain't gonna be doing much wheeling and dealing with an Influence of 11% (16% base -5% from -1 modifier). At early levels they will probably flail and flounder a lot before they eventually slide into a semi-randomly determined niche of whatever they happen to succeed at by sheer dumb luck.

This is where I come to the biggest houserule I would use for a game of BFQ: reverse the progression system.

Under standard BFQ rules, you mark a skill for improvement once during an adventure when you succeed with it. At the end of the adventure you then roll vs your skill to see if you improve it by 1d3+1 points by succeeding at the roll, or just 1 by failing at it. This is fine for use with the class system because it means each class will naturally excel in the area of their expertise from the base game, such as fighters leveling their attack skill much faster than magic-users from having more and higher chances to succeed at a roll, which compounds after a certain point and makes you all but guaranteed to mark a skill for advancement within the first roll or two of a session, while your less relevant skills fall far behind.

But with the base skill calculations of classless BFQ, most of your skills are going to start off well below 50%. This means improving almost anything other than your 1 or 2 favored skills will be a long slog. And if you're going to specialize like that, why not just stick with classes?

So I propose houseruling it so that you mark for advancement every time you fail a roll instead of succeed. Likewise, when rolling to advance, a failure adds the full 1d3+1 points and success adds only 1.

This way, characters are encouraged to try things outside of their comfort zones, and it's easier to build a generalist if one wants. At the same time, the jacks of all trades will be discouraged from becoming masters of anything by the fact that it's harder to fail rolls at higher levels. Quick, early skill advancement naturally trends downward and slows to a crawl as it nears 100%. This is also closer to the the leveling curve of many OSR games, if that's a plus for you. And depending on the players at your table, it might also just feel better to always be getting something out of an action? Losing that Agility check and faceplanting in the mud's no fun, but now you've learned from that mistake, as that old saying goes.

* Okay, technically RuneQuest came first and then had a genericized version of its ruleset spun off into BRP, but I think it's still accurate to say that RuneQuest is "powered by" BRP so to speak.