A faster BRP

There's no doubt here that Basic Roleplaying is an excellent system that's surprisingly easy for beginners, adaptable, and can support extended play. But even if you were to leap in with the Basic Roleplaying SRD as your compact rules, many of the systems grouped under the OSR label, and early versions of D&D itself, have one significant advantage for new players: it's quicker to roll up a new character and get started.

Now, with a group of interested adults 30–60 minutes rolling characteristics, assigning and calculating skills, deriving HP and MP and the rest, creates a substantial, interesting character sheet that will serve well for a long time. But it would be fun, sometimes, to just create a character and go in half the time or less.

To that end, here are some notes towards faster BRP characters. The skills and professions offered heavily favor fantasy and historical worlds.

Faster characters for Basic Roleplaying

Characteristics

Generate the BRP characteristics—STR, DEX, CON, SIZ, INT, POW, APP—according to the SRD. Calculate Hit Points (HP), Magic Points (MP), and Damage bonus (Db), as well as characteristic rolls, using the same procedures.

Adventuring Skills

The standard BRP skill list is comprehensive but long, and skills are drawn from many incompatible eras. These skills are adjusted for fantasy adventuring.

These skills are common to all characters at the starting percentages given. 

• Jump 45%
• Climb 55%
• Perception 35%: replaces Listen, Spot, Sense, Insight, etc. May also be used to track targets with a suitable profession indicated.
• Stealth 25%: Used for all covert movement and covers hiding also. Hiding (without moving) is generally easier (+20% bonus).
• Swim 30% or DEX x 5 if Lucky or approved by GM as suitable to background.
• Throw 45%
• Brawl 45%: fighting with hands and feet, or commonplace and improvised weapons (knives, sticks, etc.).
• First Aid 45%

Professional Skills

Select a broad profession, and figure the related skills accordingly. 

Warrior

Any martial profession, from soldiers to wandering mercenaries to mounted knights.

• Ride (DEX x 5%): may substitute another mode of transport or Strategy (INT x 5%).
• Warrior (Average STR, INT, DEX) x 5% in 3 weapons (maximum 75%).

Expert

Any profession relying on specialist knowledge and training, from scholars to diplomats, merchants, spies, and performers.

• Literacy INT x 5%
• Expertise (Field) INT x 5%: field may be any area of specialist training: medicine, exploration, trade,  engineering, performance, spy-craft, alchemy, and so on.

Magician

Any profession using magical or spiritual powers. such as wizards, sorcerers, witches, mystics, and so on.

• Literacy INT x 5%
• Spells: define four spells at INT x 3% chance to cast

Rogue

Shadier pursuits, often developing expertise on the opposite side of the law. Rogues may be thieves, burglars, outlaws, or merely drifters who live by their wits.

• Sleight DEX x 5%: replaces the Fine Manipulation skill, and tends towards pick-pocketing, snaffling and concealing small items, and so on.
• Tinker DEX x 5%: crafting and improvising with materials at hand, but also tampering with devices such as locks and traps, forcing chests and windows, and so forth.

Hybrid

With approval, combine two professional skills from two professions. The Magician profession spells are too demanding to master with another profession.

Background Skills

As a finishing touch, distribute INTx5 across all skills, including weapons, which have the same base skill rating as the SRD. Can be used to acquire or improve spells with GM approval.

No skill for a starting character can total more than 75%.

Identity

Record Name, Profession, Background, other personal details.

Back to Basics

Add suitable equipment, and you're now ready to play using any flavor of the Basic Roleplaying rules, although the lightest version can be found in the SRD.

Alone on the range: Strider Mode

 Recently, the tinkerage picked up Strider Mode, the solo rules for The One Ring RPG. Strider Mode, as you might think, contains rules for playing a single player-hero in Middle-earth, adapted from the system of The One Ring.

Now, The One Ring Second Edition is a fine system with many thoughtful and atmospheric touches, but it still isn't the game I would choose to run adventures in Middle-earth. As per my review of the first edition, the system is still too programmatic and committed to phases and counters of all sorts. It feel sometimes as if deep down it's a board-game, where your character's engagement, reactions, and choices are shuffled off to dice-rolls on a table. As readers might gather, my instincts for gaming in Middle-earth are either to strip everything back to a free-form core in the style of the Green Dragon, or to use the clean, flexible structure of Basic Role-Playing.

Strider Mode, on the other hand, is a great resource for playing through a solo Middle-earth experience. It contains two elements that are essential to solo play (and darn useful for group play also): a chance resolution system and a semantic generator.

By a chance resolution system, I mean a way to pose the question how likely is a certain thing to come about, roll, and resolve that question. In Strider Mode, that's a d12 roll ranging from a "certain" chance to an "unthinkable" one, with an extreme result on either end. I often use the same sort of roll to determine the severity or intensity of a certain condition, so a low roll is hardly at all and a high roll is extremely so. This can range from the friendliness of an inn to the severity of the weather on a given day. And chance resolution also provides a basic action resolution system, as you can check whether, given current conditions, a character's action is likely to succeed or not.

What I call a semantic generator is the "oracle" in other systems. The semantic generator allows you to randomly generate words or phrases that you can use to attribute meaning to an uncertain or open situation. Strider Mode calls this the Lore Table. In my play all the books approach, this would be the library of tables and generators that you can call on to frame an otherwise open encounter or scene. In fact, as you travel in Strider Mode there are "Event Detail" tables that provide descriptive seeds for events along your journey (from mishaps to chance meetings), as well as the atmospheric lore tables which suggest the Action, Aspect, or Focus of the moment.

These two tools provide the adventure and discovery for the player that the GM's preparation or the written scenario usually deliver. If you lost your way, did you stumble on a ruined tower or a bandit camp? What is the tale of that ruin? The task for the solo player is to deliver these questions to the dice and then play the options they suggest.

As I mentioned before, I don't use the core rulebook for The One Ring for resolution, but rather a free-form approach using the chance resolution system. Of course, there's nothing wrong if you enjoy using the published rules and engaging with the variables of the full system, but I find that a lighter, more adaptive system allows me to engage with the scenario at hand rather than the intricacies of the rules. 

One might think that this adds another kind of challenge, switching between the GM's mindset of making assessments and calls on the fly and the player's mindset of responding to the action without the support of firm procedures. This isn't what I find. Consider that even with a complete "system" in play, the GM or the scenario author has already prepared the encounters and considered the modifiers and relative difficulties, and this means neither setting dead-end tasks that are too difficult nor challenges that are too simple. All you need to do to GM yourself is be open to the chance of success and failure, which means that you sustain the uncertainty and hence the drama of the moment, and estimate chances fairly. For any given roll, there's always a chance of a wildly high or low outcome; and if you're rolling for yourself, that wild result is bound to come up. Finely-measured probabilities are not really required. And as Hickman et al observe, in the end it always comes down to a probability, assessed as a number on the die or dice that is constrained to a given range. Call it fairly as you see it, check the result, and keep going.

In my test of Strider Mode, I found myself bushwhacked by bandits in an abandoned farmstead, trading words with stiff-necked dwarfs, and battling orcs and a cold-wyrm in a ruined tower. The Lore Tables in particular do a good job of pushing your to engage with Tolkien-like tropes and challenges. For something that's either in one's own head, or in the dice and the tables on the page, that's a pretty good trip, alone, across Eriador.