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It's all in black and white, so if you're the type who doesn't like reading text on a computer screen it's economical to print out. I particularly like the cover, which has the perfect man, with each of his 4 arms and 4 legs in a different genre. It's damn clever, I think probably the best cover for a multigenre roleplaying system I've seen, and I almost want to give it a 5 for substance just based on that (fortunately it's not the only thing that's good about it, so I can anyway). The rest of the artwork is pleasant too, for the most part it's line drawings, although not completely consistent in style. The pictures at the start of each chapter don't have any captions, but the rest of them if there's something going on in them (rather than just a picture of a gun for example) will have a small blurb below talking about how something in the game relates to it. This shows the level of detail and thought that was put into producing it, and speaks highly of Chaosium's production values.
The text is in a clear and easy to read font - nothing fancy was done that detracts from readability. However, as is common with PDFs, since it's 2 column text on A4 sheets, you have to scroll up and down to read each page fully. This gets a bit annoying as the decorative bars at the top of the page are an image element in the PDF so the image seems to stutter when you scroll past the top of each page. This is a good sign again for printing though, as it shows the text is actually a text element and not scanned, so you can print without hassle to 300DPI rather than potentially being stuck with printing 72DPI text that was only intended for screen reading.
Another thing I like, which probably stems from Chaosium producing games intended for people who haven't played RPGs before is that it's presented and written in a clear and easy to understand fashion, which while obviously beneficial to newbies is also beneficial to veterans. This is something sorely lacking in most RPGs (along with an index, which this is also lacking, albeit forgivably given it's a quickstart). What also helps, since it's a quickstart, is that only the essential rules are preesented, so you're not going through an overwhelming glossary of terms you don't understand followed by an overwhelming list of rules, most of which you won't use right away anyway.
Character creation specifically benefits from this. It's not quite the 1 page 10 step method from the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition Player's Handbook, but it's still short, and better than the PHB all the necessary info is in one place. It has a nice diagram showing where everything in the instructions goes on the character sheet, and even has the front side of the sheet, in full right after it (there's also both sides of the character sheet in the back). Speaking of the character sheet it's quite well laid out, and shows that the system (at least as presented here) is well suited to having everything you need about your character on a single sheet, whereas some other systems I find are better if you have a full booklet.
Overall the production quality, presentation, readability, layout and art is top notch, and I don't hesitate to give it a 5 for style.
The content is also quite good. It's too sparse for a 5 rating, which is to be expected from a quickstart, but I can't justify giving a 5 to any product that clearly has some content missing - even if it's free! To stick to the space limitations, rules are only given for what's really generic and can be used for the most part in any campaign. Nothing's given for nonhumans (although other races are included in the sample adventures) or for magic. So quite naturally you can't use it for everything, but at least there's no wasted space demonstrating a couple example powers for a genre you couldn't really play with it (as GURPS Lite 4th Edition did with the time travel power.
Chapter 1 is the obligatory "What is roleplaying?" introduction chapter, it's well done but I won't bother going into detail for it.
Chapter 2 is character creation. The system is very obviously old school. Characters have 7 stats which are either rolled as 3d6 or 2d6+6, so unlike D&D it avoids having some wacky results for character types it wouldn't make sense for. I also would guess from 2d6+6 being on size and intelligence that other races would have a different distribution of 3d6 and 2d6+6 abilities. Of course since stats are rolled this way, you can't arrange them to taste, there's no provision for not rolling them the old school way. The only thing that helps is you can take up to 3 points from one stat and put them in one other stat. I don't get the impression that you can take 1 each from 3 stats to sink into one stat, but it probably wouldn't make much of a difference given it's a 1 to 1 point transfer. Two things I noticed off the bat is the example characters are all unrealistically high given the rolling method, I can buy some of them with 2d6+6, so it's understandable to have an average that's higher than with D&D characters, but they're still too high which makes me think the designers cheated, and gives a bit of an unrealistic expectation. I also see an immediate twink habit in that most people will use size, which gets the +6 rather than just D6, as their source of 3 points to put into their desired high stat. Size is beneficial though, so not everyone will want to do it, but it's even one of the examples they had. Since BRP is a percentile system, checks are done all with d%. To handle ability checks (for which there are on each one except size, which just gives a potential damage bonus or penalty) you multiply your stat by 5 to get a % result from 15% to 90%. I'm not sure if this was intended by Gygax and Arneson in developing D&D, but it seems 3-18 is a very convenient range of abilities seeing how easily it converts to percentile. Another neat thing is a special success is any result of 1/5th or lower of the total percentage, which is simply equal to under your ability score.
Skills are independent of ability checks, and skills are the basis of the BRP system. They have defaults ranging from sometimes 0%, or more often something from 1% to 30%. Speaking of defaults, a neat thing I saw was the interaction of brawling and martial arts. Martial arts is just a specialised training in combat (and I love very non-specific martial arts rules since if hardly anything is said about them then they can't get unarmed combat wrong) so you make 1 roll for both brawling and martial arts. Brawling defaults to 25%, martial arts defaults to 1%, so if you make a brawling roll and get 5 or less it counts as a special success, and if it's a 1 it counts as a success for martial arts which doubles the damage dice. It's quite simple and elegant, I can't think of anything wrong with it. Rather than classes, BRP has professions, which are a collection of 10 skills which you get to distribute 300 points over (alternatively you can create your own new profession with 10 skills of your choice). Depending on how skills are handled I'm not very fond of them, but my main issue with skills is that you have to select from a bloody long list of them, which bogs down character creation. Since you pick a profession first, and then just distribute your points across those skills it really narrows it down for you and keeps character creation moving along. So in essence BRP still has classes (and races too, just not presented in the quickstart), it doesn't have levels, and new class creation is easy and straightforward.
A nice touch relates to equipment. No list is provided in the quickstart, which I'm happy about, starting equipment is simply basic clothes and stuff anyone would have, as well as anything that would make sense for your profession - so if you've got a skill at any reasonable level you can just assume you have the necessary equipment to use it if it's not something that can be done without equipment. This is a very nice, and unexpected, benefit of a skill based system.
Chapter 3 is the system. BRP is a percentile system, so this isn't complicated. It only takes 5 pages to explain. Included in those 5 pages are special success, success and failure, the results of contested rolls (what happens with success vs success?) and has a fairly straightforward table for comparing active vs passive tasks. A size chart is provided, showing sizes of various objects and structures allowing you to eyeball something pretty good and making the size stat useful in game and not just character creation. Since the basis of BRP is the skill system, advancement is also on skills. Any skill used successfully in an adventure gets a check mark next to it. At the end of the adventure, any skill with a check mark is tested for advancement. While normally you roll under to succeed, here you have to roll over your skill (making for diminishing returns at higher levels) to improve, and if you do you increase that skill by 1d6. This clearly shows that at the lower levels it will be really hard to improve since you need to get a success first, which will hardly come, and at the higher levels you'll often get your initial check but rarely advance at the end of the adventure. It's also probably risky to keep trying low or untrained skills, so they likely won't improve without training. Off hand I imagine first aid and martial arts will be the low skills improving the most. First aid naturally because there's no down side to trying - if you don't do anything they die or are seriously injured and you could only make it better. Martial arts because the roll is simultaneously made with brawling. It won't improve every adventure, but it has the best chance of any of the 1% skills since that one time you roll 01 for brawling you get a check mark to martial arts as well, and you have a 99% chance of advancing martial arts. Once that happens it'll pick up and start improving faster. I figure some people might balk at this thinking martial arts should only be trained (and I suppose this may be the rule in the core book since training is mentioned as being included there) but I find it just fine. While technically you do have to train a martial art, the fighting ability which is directly represented by the skill can only be acquired by actual fighting experience. Whether you train formally or not, you'll only get better by actually doing it. The only improving if you succeed paradigm is something I can accept as it seems pretty realistic to me, although I'd also accept an only improving if you fail paradigm (which also has its realistic characteristics, and also has some game fairness advantages, namely compensating players who get screwed with a string of really bad results). I didn't read through the whole list of skills in detail, since lists are something I detest, and that's not really necessary to get a sense of the game, but of the ones I did read through I saw no obvious problems.
Chapter 4 is about time. It distinguishes between narrative time and game time, using the same turn and round terminology as D&D (which is somehow the opposite of what I understand them to mean, I'd think a turn is a component of a round rather than the way both D&D and BRP handle it, but I'd guess it's an older use of the word that has fallen into disuse). What I also liked was the list of time ranges for using different skills. It'd be easy to figure these out without a list, but it's nice to have anyway, particularly with psychotherapy being listed as requiring 6 hours to several days - I don't want someone trying to argue they're going to use psychotherapy in the middle of combat.
Chapter 5 is combat, which segues very nicely from the chapter on time (see what I mean about it being laid out and presented very well?). It covers the time of the combat round, initiative (determined by highest dexterity first), statements of intent (something that's probably self understood for most people, but good to have codified) and results of attacking vs parrying and dodging. Some extra detail that's interesting is for the weapons, particularly that weapons have hit points. If a parry is a special success, 1 point of damage is dealt to it. Obviously this means a weapon won't be destroyed very quickly, but eventually it will wear down and break. It's a nice touch. Armour, is as many people like, a reduction of damage, rather than a decrease in chance to be hit. The ranges are from 1 point reduction to 8 points, which is pretty much D&D's armor class range, just applied differently. Since D&D's hit point system is abstract, while BRP's is concrete, it's hard to really translate between the two, but I found that interesting. There are definitely numerous characteristics in BRP which I see are derived from D&D, and to me this is a good thing, it makes the system comfortable and familiar. Shields are handled differently than armour, they're an obstacle, and are therefore treated as weapons (you can even attack with them!) with HP that will have them eventually destroyed, and also makes it very easy to handle shields as providing cover. I actually had an issue with AD&D recently in that using shields as cover against arrows isn't really well supported by the rules and would require making the AD&D rules more complicated. Here the system is maybe a bit more complex than D&D's hit roll vs AC and then subtract damage from hit points, but it's still plenty simple to understand and allows for more flexibility in what you want to do and has the actions in combat more easily visualised.
BRP still has hit points, which some people might not be so happy about, but hit points are an average of constitution and size (which makes sense to me) and don't go up, so BRP is more survivable compared to low levels of D&D but much more deadly than high levels (speaking of level comparisons, with BRP it's possible to start with someone very, very competent). Weapons deal a similar amount of damage to the range in D&D. Rather than D&D's optional (and GURPS' official) negative hit points rule, at 1 or 2 hit points the character falls unconscious, and at 0 or lower it's strictly death. I find that somewhat more unforgiving than the bleeding rules, particularly with only a 2 hit point window between fully capable of fighting and death.
Since hit points are more concrete and relate to actual physical damage, it's recommended to track each wound individually, as the healing skill is applied to each wound. This certainly helps for verisimilitude, but makes for a bit of a bookkeeping nightmare. With the character sheet provided it'd be easy to circle the range of points damaged on each attack, and then erase part of that, but then there will be gaps all apart, so you'll be healing first, then adding up the total healed, then subtracting that from the total damage, erasing everything on the damage track and placing your hit points at a new point. It would also be feasible to have hit points represented with glass beads, and taking them in separate groups for each wound, and then move partially healed points back into the main pool. Like most RPGs, BRP benefits from game aids, however with the set up it won't get unwieldy having 1 bead per hit point, as it would be to track everything properly with D&D at high levels or with GURPS for any character.
Chapter 6 is spot rules, which is listed as rules not dealing with combat, but seemingly half of them have to do with combat. Not only that, a very nice example of combat, going step by step through multiple rounds is provided in this allegedly non-combat chapter. Despite that peculiarity it's fine, and a round-by-round example of combat is something I really miss when reading through most RPGs. At the end of this chapter there's also a list of all the rules not covered in the quickstart (ouch) that are covered in the core rules. It's nice to have I guess, if you want to see if something that the quickstart doesn't do for you is actually covered in the core rules before you go out to buy it.
Chapter 7 is adventures. It starts at page 31 out of 48, although 4 of the remaining 18 are character sheets and back and inside covers. So a total of 14 pages of adventures (that sounds something like the total page count of the old BRP quickstart), totalling 7 short "adventures" (they're not long enough to be complete adventures, but they're good enough for starters) across 5 genres, including science fiction, fantasy, swashbuckling, modern day action, war and post apocalyptic. There's obviously some blurring of genres there, but it does a much better job of showcasing the versatility of the system than the encounter with a bear on a farm in the old quickstart). There's also a peculiar section called a "few" fearsome foes. They seem to think 2 is a few, which I guess is technically true, but the 2 of them are an allosaurus and a lion. Seriously? It's still possible to derive some monsters and enemies from the included adventures, so it's not like there are only 2 opponents provided that are barely useful for all the genres. The adventures also include sample characters from other races than human as well as spellcasters, neither of which have rules in the quickstart, although they're still playable. I found this an odd decision, and makes me think these adventures are from the core rulebook and they just copied them into the quickstart rather than making them up explicitly for it. At $0 I won't really complain, but I will give them a stern look.
The content in the quickstart is good, for some real world and historical adventures it's pretty easy to play with just what's included. Sci fi might be doable depending on the type of sci fi, fantasy I'd consider a write-off unless it's a really low magic fantasy with pretty much only people. The inclusion of shield rules also make me think it's geared more for fantasy (although a riot shield is also included, so it works for modern too), which given the lack of magic and alternate races is a bit of a disappointment. At the same time it wouldn't be hard to make an alternate race that's a monkey person that is statistically identical to a human, but nothing could really be done in terms of magic.
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