Posted by
Solomoriah on
Jun 09, 2010; 4:33am
URL: http://the-lost-and-the-damned.71.s1.nabble.com/Basic-Fantasy-Role-Playing-Freebie-d20-Basic-D-D-clone-tp4044886p5156724.html
Always late to the party...
I'm the author of Basic Fantasy RPG (well, the primary author, anyway), and I'll try to answer a question or two:
Billiam Babble wrote
It's strange. I'm not sure what's behind most of these publications, apart from open licensing and nostalgia - certainly not profit. But surely people don't play whole campaigns with a free system when they have lavish modern (or old) rulebooks on their shelves?
Certainly not profit, for me, but several of the retro-clone systems are supported by commercial offerings. I'm not a believer in that... games are a hobby, not a job... I don't profit from my hobbies in any monetary sense, and I don't plan to.
But... "lavish" rulebooks don't suit me. "Lavish" rules (as in, lots of them) don't suit me at all. Sure, there are a bunch of supplements on the Basic Fantasy website, but that's all they are... supplements. I use almost none of that, except the extra monsters. "Modern" rules don't suit me all that well either.
Basic Fantasy RPG is a labor of love (else, it would never have been finished). All that really mattered to me was that I like it... the fact that many others do also is just gravy. I've sold over 300 copies of the rulebook (at cost) and have had something more than 20,000 downloads of those rules in PDF from the website; of course, not nearly everyone who downloaded the game runs it, and I know a few copies of the rulebook in print were resold, but still, there are others using my game system. This makes me happy.
Light, fast, simple.
For the record, I have a full set of 1st Edition AD&D books, a tattered set of the 1981 Basic and Expert rules (which is where I started, and what I found I preferred before I wrote my own system), a few 2nd Edition AD&D books, and a mess of other non-D&D game materials stashed in the attic. The games I run now consist of Basic Fantasy RPG, Project 74 (an older free system of mine), and Marvel Super Heroes. Previously, I ran an extended "pulp sci-fi" campaign using a system I wrote.
Billiam Babble wrote
Also, one difference that I am found in the BFRPG of is that you can be a Halfling Thief! Class and race are separate in BFRG like in AD&D with some limits upon which class they can be. There's also a vague example "combination class" of fighter/magic-user available to the Elf which ties in neatly with Basic D&D.
"Vague?" What's vague about it?