The Business: Stop Pretending That Dev Kits Are For End Users

Black Lodge reviews Basic Roleplaying.

The question: Can Basic Roleplaying REPLACE Your RPG Books?

It's a dev kit.

You don't buy it and run it as a game. You buy it and use it to design a game run using the BRP Engine. Once you grok this, BRP makes sense. Alas, sometimes Chaosium itself fails to grok this.

Dev kits don't need art. Dev kits don't need trade dress. Dev kits, at most, need workflow graphics to visually depict rules procedure processes. It needs to be a technical manual, and Chaosium falls down on delivering a clean, clear technical manual.

Above and beyond Network Effect issues--if BRP was something most people wanted, it would be as popular as Palladium; it's not--the big reason why BRP is made clear by BLG in the review, albeit in passing: the constant reference to actual products. Call of Cthluhu, RuneQuest, Pendragon- these are BRP-driven products. What we see here is the manual to make those products, not a playable product in itself.

Therefore, like GURPS and HERO, it is a category error to call this a game. It is a game engine. Not the same thing.

If Chaosium had the sense that God gave to a diseased donkey, this would not be presented as if it were a product or priced as one; it would be as fun to read as the user manual for a Ruger 10/22 (not), restricted in availability only to professional parties, and priced accordingly (i.e. over $1K, maybe over $10K, preferably even higher, and include a License Agreement).

But Chaosium is run by retards, so here we are.