I originally got to know it through playing Call of Cthulhu (shortened to CoC by our group). In CoC, fighting is for the most part a stupid idea that will get you killed quickly, so CoC dropped RuneQuest's hit locations. I think for the better, combat is quicker and deadly enough without them.
I believe basic role playing system is the most elegant system among the major systems. Granted, I only know maybe a dozen or so different ones, but that includes nearly all the commonly played ones. The economy of tools, and the realism and flexibility achieved are just beautiful.
Differences to D&D
The most visible difference between this system and D&D is that it is a d100 based system, not a d20 based one. But this is not really a fundamental difference, it just means that the granularity is a bit finer. You could implement nearly the same system in d20.
The biggest real difference is that there are no levels and no ever increasing amount of hit points. You start out with somewhere around 10-15 hit points, and for the most part, that is all you will ever get. With weapons dealing similar damage as in D&D, you die after only a few hits, like a level two or three D&D character. This means the system is not great for high fantasy battles with horrible monsters. Fighting against dragons and giants in RuneQuest is pretty much a death sentence.
The other large difference is that it has no classes like D&D, no attached attached special class powers. Everyone in principle can learn everything. The professions in the system are just a list of the skills that you can spend the bulk of your points on when you create your character, typically about ten.
Basic role playing has no magic system by default, and no default spell list. This means the magic rules differ from variant to variant. If there is magic, then anyone can use it, it is not limited to a class of wizards, as there are no classes. Variants with professions that primarily cast spells require you to put skill points into magic related skills, and if you do not have those skills in your list, you can dabble in magic by putting your precious general points into them.
Look at the example adventures in the free rules, where you have a wizard who has a Flame spell at 45%, dealing 3d6 damage at 50 feet range. Not that different from the Elf Hunter who has a Long Bow attack at 60%, dealing 1d10 damage. The Flame spell seems to work like a cantrip, but you might need to spend power points on it, which would offset the higher damage by consuming a limited resource.
Characteristics
Characteristics are the same as D&D's ability scores. There are seven: Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Power, Appearance, and Size. I reordered them similar to D&D. As you can see, most are the same. Power is similar to Wisdom and represents will and mental strength and is also the prime attribute for magic, instead of intelligence. Appearance is pretty much Charisma. In addition there is a Move rate, 10 for all humans.
Size is the one additional characteristic absent in D&D. It represents body mass and co-determines hit points and damage output. I think this is elegant way to capture the influence of size, in comparison D&D has to fudge this by giving large creatures lots of hit dice. Some creatures are a lot larger than humans, and these creatures can have massive hit points and damage bonuses. A giant or star spawn of Cthulhu can mush you with a single hit. This feels a lot more realistic if you think about it, but of course is less heroic.
All creatures have these characteristics, another thing that D&D took over starting with 3e. Human characters roll 3D6 to determine their attributes, with 2D6+6 for intelligence and size, so the range is mostly between 3 and 18. Derived from these characteristics are
- hit points, equal to the average of constitution and size, when they fall to 1 or 2 you are unconscious, when they fall to 0 you die. They regenerate at a rate of 1d3 per week, full 3 points if in medical care, not overnight. Successful first aid may heal 1d3 points on an injury once. In CoC, if you lost more than half your hit points from a single attack, you had to roll a constitution check or drop unconscious.
- damage bonus, based on the sum of size and strength. The scale is centered around human range, so that the weakest humans have -1d6, the strongest +1d6, and it linearly increases from there. Different variants use slightly different ranges.
- power points equal to power, they are used for spell casting or for resisting spells, and the regenerate daily after a full night's rest. If they fall to zero you are unconscious,
- personal skill points, based on intelligence x 10. These can be used to increase any skill in character creation, making intelligence a powerful asset. I think because of this, it is a good choice to have power determine magic ability, both from a flavor an mechanical perspective.
The Core Mechanic
The core mechanic is the percentage based skill. You have a number that represents your skill, in percent. To use that skill, you roll percentage dice, and if you roll under or equal to that number you succeeded. Attacks are the same, with the skill that of attacking with a sword, or firing a handgun. If you role under 1/5th your skill, you achieved a special success with better results. My favorite was the impale: if you had a special success on an attack with a melee weapon like an ax, your weapon dealt double damage and was stuck in the opponent, and you needed a strength check to pull it free.
This mechanic is also used for characteristic rolls for anything but size. To translate the characteristics into d100 range, they are multiplied by 5. This is the analogue to ability checks.
Skill checks may be easy or difficult. An easy check doubles your skill, a difficult one halves it. The rules award easy or difficult status to situations like D&D 5e does Advantage or Disadvantage, for example a backstab or sneak attack is an easy attack. (We used to just apply bonus percentages or penalties, which also works, and RuneQuest does so today, with +/- 20% or more).
Each skill has a starting probability available to everyone. This can range from 0% in Foreign language to 40% in Climbing. Some skills are special in that their base values are derived from your characteristics, for example dodging a melee attack starts as 2 times your dexterity. RuneQuest bases all starting percentages on the sum of two relevant characteristics, or two times the same. This is a bit more work to create a character.
Training and experience improve these numbers. Similar to point buy for attributes in D&D, you can set the power of starting characters by the number of points they have to increase their skills. The standard rules allot 300 points for your profession's skills, plus intelligence times 10 points anywhere, and do not allow to start any skill above 75%. On average you could maximize six professional and two personal skills.
More complex variants can add a bonus for characteristics to skills, similar to how ability score bonuses influence skills in 5e D&D. The basic rules do not and it always felt like an unnecessary complication to me. You have enough freedom with distributing percentage points to be great where you want to be.
In Call of Cthulhu an Education characteristic, I think of 3d6+3, determined how many skill points you could put into your profession skills instead (education times 15 or 20, depending on the edition).
The brilliant idea is how to represent experience: after an adventure or session, when your character has time to reflect, you get to roll against the skills you used in the adventure (the skills have a small checkbox on the character sheet for you to track that). When you roll over your skill, you get to increase it by 1d6 percentage points. I just love this. You only get better in whatever you actually exercise. And the better you get, the more easily you succeed, but the harder it is to get even better than that. Beginners have a hard time, but learn fast if they make it.
Anything is treated as a skill, from Attack to Dodge, from Appraisal to Zoology. The main question is how granular the skills are. Do you need one attack skill for all firearms, for all handguns, for all revolvers, or for a specific caliber of revolver? This is defined by specialties listed under the skill - in the case of firearms, revolver is a specialty, so you can use any caliber competently, but your training is no use with a rifle. In old CoC, you had to learn a specific caliber.
Another mechanic is the resistance table, for comparing the outcome of two forces in contest, like when you try to push a door open, and someone else tries to hold it shut. For this you compare the attribute values of the two forces, here Strength on both sides. If both numbers are equal, the active force has a 50% chance to win. For each point that the active force is larger, this increases by 5%, for each point it is smaller it decreases by 5%. If you have a strength of 15 and you are trying to push someone of strength 12, you have 50 + (15 - 12 = 3) * 5%, or 65% chance to make it. A difference larger than 10 points results in automatic success or failure.
Sanity
In Call of Cthulhu you also had a sanity characteristic, with your starting points equal to your Power times five. This was an ingenious and elegant way to make the game play like a horror movie.
Whenever you experience anything horrible, like sudden confrontation with a mutilated corpse, being buried alive, or seeing a zombie, you roll against your sanity. Succeed and you lose no or relatively little of it. Fail and you lose a chunk. A zombie might cost you 1 or 1d6 points. Seeing a great old one like Azathoth might cost you 1d20 or 1d100. If you lose more than 5, you may suffer from temporary insanity, and pick up a phobia. Once your sanity reaches zero, you become an NPC under the GMs control.
And it was very hard to get back. You might get a few points at the end of the adventure, if you were successful. Otherwise, only lengthy psychotherapy or crude methods like electroshock therapy that could just as likely turn you into a mental vegetable offered any relief.
Cthulhu also had a special mythos skill, starting at 0, that described how much you knew about dark magic, servitor races, great old ones, outer goods and all. You could increase it by reading tomes like the Necronomicon, or a little by going temporarily insane the first time. This skill was valuable because it helped you understand better what you were confronted with. However, your sanity could never be higher than 100 less this skill. At the time where you knew all, you were irretrievably insane.
The lower your sanity gets, the faster you lose more, its a downward spiral. You want to avoid things that lower it. All of this ensured that we as players were horrified to confront monsters, not only because they could kill us. This is the one game where being blind might actually increase your chances of survival.
Magic
In Call of Cthulhu spells require no specific skills to cast. The real cost here is that most spells take a heavy toll on your sanity, as they are doing things that should not be possible. You normally learn spells from tomes of forbidden knowledge that cost sanity just for reading. Then, if you are lucky and they contain a spell, and if you are even more lucky with a successful intelligence check, you may learn a spell. Most spells call or summon entities that should better be left undisturbed and will cost you even more sanity when they show up. Moreover, they are under no obligation to do anything for you. The casting of the spell itself may cost sanity too. So to for practical purposes, only deranged villains serving the abominations they call become powerful in magic. Players typically learn simple protective wards like the Elder Sign, nothing more.
In variants like Elric! or RuneQuest magic is more combat-fit, but wizards are unusual there too. In Pendragon, even though later editions provide rules for it, the players are not supposed to play wizards. As these are power point based systems, and you do not have a lot of points, they tend to have other interesting ways to get power points, from rituals to ley lines and sacrifices, and they tend to have ways to scale the effects to longer duration, larger area, higher intensity based on how much power you channel into the spell. It's very different from D&D.
Combat
Combat is organized in rounds, like in D&D.
Initiative follows dexterity order. Minor actions like drawing a weapon or moving lower your dexterity rank for when you act. In CoC, firearms instead always acted before melee weapons.
In melee, the outcome of an attack is not resolved in a single roll like the combination of attack bonus and AC is in D&D - you do not compare the attack skill to the parry skill and then roll on the resistance table, you attack and parry separately. Armor does not make you harder to hit, it reduces damage if hit. (In original RuneQuest, you did have a defense value influenced by intelligence, dexterity and other things, that was directly subtracted from the attack value for the role, but I never saw this in CoC).
Typical combat consists of one combatant going first and making an attack. Then the other can try dodge or parry the blow, unless the attack was from a firearm. Special success on an attack calls for a special success on a dodge or parry or the attack will do normal damage, and if not averted at all, extra damage.
Armor is subtracted from damage. Soft leather is 1 point, full plate is 8 points. Helmets add 1 or 2 more points. Heavy armor subtracts up to 25% from physical skill checks, helmets up to 50% from perception checks. Shields do not automatically add armor, they are used to parry.
With a sword dealing 1d8+1 damage, fights of fully armored medieval combatants could take a long time, chipping away one or two hit points every now and then. Weak opponent like a goblin with short sword might only be able to hurt a fighter in plate mail when they score special success hits. In CoC, you played librarians and private detectives that wore no armor. A single hit with a shotgun at close range for 4d6 was enough to take you out.
Compared to D&D 5e, a 75% to hit chances for starting characters is similar to +5 to hit, which also translates to a 75% hit chance against an unarmored opponent. In D&D by mid levels you would have +8 or +9 to hit, comparable to 90-95%.
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