5 December 2025 AA vs. BRP
Last night my brother and I had a conversation with our good friend Dan, who we have been role playing with since way back at the beginning, in 1984 when we were all in high school. We were making a video so that we can learn how to make Youtube content for our (eventual, hopefully) gaming company Wicked Place Game. It was a lot of fun to traipse down memory lane and remember the great adventures of yesteryear, and the halcyon days of spending a Saturday afternoon flipping through old Dragon Magazines, or reading the AD&D Players Handbook for the umpteenth time. Wonderful memories.
We had a lively discussion about gaming systems, picking apart the things that we like and dislike about many of them, and generally nerding out about TTRPGs. As Dennis and I think about creating content for our nascent gaming company, there has been some disagreement between us about what exactly we should be working on. Little brother is firmly in the Castles&Crusades camp, and with good reason: the game system is well-designed, we've played it and like it, the company is great, and they give us a 50% discount when we buy things! All solid reasons. I have been a bit hesitant, though, because in my observation, the footprint of the game is much smaller than other systems we like, so it's a very small pool to swim in should we go in that direction. Other games (not including 5e, which none of us are interested in) like Dragonbane, Shadowdark, and (we think...) BRP have larger audiences, more eyeballs, more dollars, etc. It is notoriously hard to find information about games sales, so much of what we are talking about is supposition based on anecdotes (like how many game-related materials are available on Drivethru RPG, or how frequently games are discussed on websites like ENWorld, or how many members there are on a Discord channel). It's hard to know where the energy is outside of 5e and big guns like Daggerheart and Draw Steel.
No game is perfect. For example, I prefer unleveled games (BRP) but I don't love skill systems (therefore AA). Both systems are supported on Foundry, but neither on Roll20. BRP is probably much bigger than AA re: a community of players, but both are tiny compared to something like Shadowdark, which itself is fractional when compared to D&D. Both of these systems are old (C&C is 20 years, BRP is 50!) so game mechanics have modernized and changed a great deal since then. I have tremendous affection for BRP, but I do love the Troll Lords. It's hard to know what to do, but at this point, all of this is a passion project: we are doing what we like in hopes of one day (maybe...) monetizing it somehow.
I have become bogged down in writing my C&C module. It's been a bit of a slog lately. It might be that I'm a little burnt out on fantasy in general, which is mainly what my group plays. I don't want to run Call of Cthulhu again; I love that game but I am done with it (I've written about this elsewhere). So...what, then? A horror game that's not CoC? Some kind of multiversal sci-fi game? I'm not sure. I might need to switch it up a bit.
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