Not Enough Anime in 4e, on to BESM!

[Voadam]

D&D 4e is not anime enough for my group. We are converting our campaign to BESM 3e.

About three weeks after I got a year long subscription to DDI

The DM came to hate running 4e combat, one player hates combat but 4e combat in particular, and another got really bored at super-effectively locking monsters down with his fighter powers. I was loving it as is but I'm flexible and willing to try different things.

We debated a lot about what to do next, new DM (me) vs our current one, new campaign vs converting the current one, and different systems (Call of Cthulhu, Pathfinder, BESM, Eclipse Phase, Palladium Fantasy RPG 1e, GURPS).

I would have happily run a heavily house ruled Pathfinder Freeport or general fantasy game but I wanted more to keep going with our current save the world campaign. The consensus came around to a more quick running rules light system with conversions of our characters and continuation of the ongoing plot. So BESM.

Big Eyes Small Mouth is the now defunct Guardian of Order's quick running rules light anime RPG using a version of the Tri-Stat rules system.

The DM is the only one with the 3e BESM book. Another player has a mechanically incompatible 2e book and I just got the 3e pdf. Unfortunately the hardcovers are running from $130-200 used on Amazon and Ebay even though it is a 2007 book so it looks like that's it for now.

I'll be converting my paragon level ranger (paragon multiclassed wizard).

I've never played any Tri-Stat before so its new to me.

The skill set is a little wierd. The closest diplomacy analogue seems to be etiquette and seduction. It seems to be a lot of background flavor stuff and not much that will actually get mechanically used (social sciences and administration for my former merchant prince). I'm not entirely sure yet how skills will be actually used.

I also have to make a bunch of choices in turning D&D magic (scorching burst, lightning bolt, rituals, utility magics, items) and ranger combat powers into effects based stuff for the new system. I think I'll be going for one basic physical melee attack and one magical ranged attack with some variant options each plus one magical defense and maybe some minor low power random magic stuff.

Anybody have any experience to share about the Tri-Stat system, BESM, or BESM 4e?

 

[Skade]

I've never gotten to try the Tri-Stat version. We used the d20 BESM for like a session and the game faltered through no fault of the game, just no real interest in the over the top, no holds barred, cross genre thing that is BESM.

 

[Crothian]

Tri stat is a neat little system but I haven't played in years. I have an earlier edition of BESM and it wasn't for me but lots of people like it. The 3e books I think came out right as Guardians of Order went under so the print run is small or maybe a bunch are locked away for legal reasons.

Did you consider Mutants and Masterminds with the Mecha and Manga sourcebook? I don't know if it would be what you are looking for but it would be easier to find copies of it.

 

[Doug McCrae]

Next time I run M&M I'll be trying to make the combat more like 4e. No more 'I grapple, I grapple, I grapple', instead players should have a half-dozen or so equally viable options in combat, with advantages and disadvantages.

 

[Voadam]

Tri stat is a neat little system but I haven't played in years. I have an earlier edition of BESM and it wasn't for me but lots of people like it. The 3e books I think came out right as Guardians of Order went under so the print run is small or maybe a bunch are locked away for legal reasons.

Did you consider Mutants and Masterminds with the Mecha and Manga sourcebook? I don't know if it would be what you are looking for but it would be easier to find copies of it.

The DM had the 3e BESM book and not True20 or M&M or Blue Rose. We discussed those a little but I was the only one with any of the OGL stuff and I'm not familiar enough with them to want to DM with them. The DM likes what he has read of his BESM book and wanted to give it a try.

I'm not sure Mecha and Manga would be helpful for us, the DM and other players reference manga and anime a bunch, but it is still at heart a D&D fantasy style game we are shooting for, just with quicker combat resolution and different rules.

 

[evileeyore]

D&D 4e is not anime enough for my group. We are converting our campaign to BESM 3e.

Harrumph! Wasn't no "anime" in Gary's D&D, ain't gonna be none in mine!

Now get off my lawn ya damn hippy!

 

[Verdande]

D&D 4e is not anime enough for my group. We are converting our campaign to BESM 3e.

By all that is unholy, you and I have extremely different styles. One of the things that I disliked about 4e was how over-the-top it all felt, with handfuls of magic items and silly combat powers. I'd complained about it being way too 'anime' for me, no kidding.

 

[Scurvy_Platypus]

I ran the BESM d20 system for about a year; specifically the version of BESM d20 used for a game called "Everstone: The Bloodstone Legacy". It is hands-down my favorite version of d20. It's not _perfect_ but it does an awful lot of what I want. If I had to do a one sentence summary of Everstone it'd be, "What I hoped Ebberon would be, Everstone delivered." It's definitely sliding towards the anime side of the fantasy scale.

Default BESMd20 is slightly more problematical, but still workable. You can see what it's looking like by checking out the Anime SRD.

BESM 3E didn't appeal to me. I already felt that 2E Revised was getting a wee bit fiddly for what BESM was supposed to be. 3E in my opinion went way over that line.

Depending on what you're looking for, you might consider picking up Uresia: Grave of Heaven, by S. John Ross. There's a BESM 2E (Tri-stat) version of it, as well as a BESM d20 version. It's Ross' homage to D&D-fantasy as seen through the lens of anime. Of course, there's books like Slayers and what-not, but Uresia is the best approach I think. Not super-heavy in terms of the world-building, but what you see there in the description as well as the various character options, should be useable for a game, even if you're not going with the setting of Uresia.

There's one "problem" I think you might bump up against and it's the same in both the Tri-Stat version and the d20 version.

Simply put, the system does not believe in objective balance.

When you see an option that's worth 5 points, there are other options that also cost 5 points which could be either extremely good or crap in comparison to your starting option. This is a _big_ problem for some people, who feel "5 points should _mean_ the same thing period."

M&M for example takes the approach that something which is 5 points is going to be basically equivalent to something else worth 5 points.

The system itself does _not_ try and restrict/limit a person that wants to Min-Max. BESM is up front about this, basically saying that it's a group/person problem, not a system problem. You're told that the starting point values are suggested, but a GM should feel free to change the value of something if it's going to be especially useful/useless in their game.

One of the reasons BESMd20 got slagged so heavily (besides the fact that it talked smack about D&D which pissed off people) was that it relied on/expected that there'd be some negotiation/discussion by the group in terms of how the game was going to go. d20 expects to be able to have perfect strangers show up and the system will then act to try and limit the amount of being a dick by both player and GM. BESMd20 and Tri-Stat BESM do _not_ have that assumption built into their systems.

As for the status of the line in general:

GoO went under. BESM 3E had been pre-ordered and was basically ready to go. White Wolf bought up the BESM line from Guardians of Order and honoured the shipping on 3E. It was a small print run and nothing more has been printed since then. PDFs of GoO's stuff are for sale (last time I checked), but White Wolf hasn't indicated any desire or inclination to do anything with the properties. You can find a fair number of the older products in print on the second-hand market, but finding a physical copy of BESM 3E is usually extremely difficult. Last time I looked (a year and a half ago) they were still going for over $70 U.S.

Since there aren't that many physical copies of BESM 3E out there and most gamers are allergic to running a game from pdf, the game hasn't really developed a large/strong fan-base. Quite a few of the older BESM fans seem to feel that 3E has some ok points here and there but on the whole is just "too much".

BESMd20 is like the Keanu Reeves of the d20 games, taking an awful lot of crap from everyone. d20 folks hated most of the assumptions the game made (in terms of design) and BESM fans hated it for being a sell-out/cash-in on the d20 craze. Everstone (a 3.0 version of the rules that came out in early 2004) shifted BESM d20 to be more in line with traditional d20, but GoO did essentially no promotion of it and Ebberon came out which completely overwhelmed any chance of it carving a niche for itself.

There's still a solid community of BESM 2E players/GMs out there but it's slowly fading. With no new products on the horizon, cracks starting to show in the seams of the system, and a continual churn of new games, people are starting to drift to other games.

Note: An awful lot of what I wrote above is personal opinion. That means some folks might have a very different perspective on it than I do.

 

[cignus_pfaccari]

Default BESMd20 is slightly more problematical, but still workable. You can see what it's looking like by checking out the Anime SRD.

We ran an Aberrant game with that, and imported part of it for a Birthright campaign.

It was okay. Part of the issue is I didn't really understand what I was doing with character building, and I dislike games like that. The bits pasted on for the Birthright game (for the blood powers) were easier to manage, as they were an add-on and not the main event. But that took an awful lot of work on the DM.

BESM 3E didn't appeal to me. I already felt that 2E Revised was getting a wee bit fiddly for what BESM was supposed to be. 3E in my opinion went way over that line.

I picked this (maybe 2e, it was a LONG time ago) up to flip through in my FLGS back in the day, and my eyes bled.

I realize that not every gaming book has to be a textbook; hell, I grew up gaming* with Shadowrun, with the "one gun/car/cyberware per page and comments" supplements. But BESM was just so horribly busy and hard to read I set it down almost immediately after.

Brad

* - The Vindicator minigun from Street Samurai Catalog is directly responsible for my getting into gaming. Hell, I named a D&D character after it.

 

[thastygliax]

Anybody have any experience to share about the Tri-Stat system, BESM, or BESM 4e?

I realize that this thread is a few months old (I haven't been on these boards in a long time), but I hope I can still contribute something of use.

A few years back, I ran a mini-campaign (a half-dozen sessions or so) using BESM 2E in a fairly generic fantasy setting of my own creation. It was a success--most of the players want me to do a sequel someday--and was good practice for me at being more improvisational and less over-prepared.

More recently, I've been running a solo BESM 3E game for my wife for the past 3 years. The rules-light mechanics and flexibility of character creation have been a very good match so far for this game, which is set in mythological Greece, and involves regular encounters with monsters, gods, and other larger-than-life beings.

Right now, I'm about to wrap up a D&D 3.5 campaign, and was planning to run some 4E in Freeport as my next game. (I've previously run Freeport in 3.0 and 3.5, so 3 of my 4 current players know and love the setting.) However, having just finished a big dungeon crawl, my group is thinking that 4E (any 4E) seems a bit too much of the same thing, so I'm now looking at other systems for alternatives. BESM 3E is the biggest contender at the moment--chargen is fairly easy, the rules are simple and not overly-intrusive, and it has a heroic, over-the-top feel. Plus I'm already GMing it, so I'm on my game system-wise (so to speak).

The skill set is a little wierd. The closest diplomacy analogue seems to be etiquette and seduction. It seems to be a lot of background flavor stuff and not much that will actually get mechanically used (social sciences and administration for my former merchant prince). I'm not entirely sure yet how skills will be actually used.

I'll concede that the skill rules are a wee bit too rules-light, even for BESM. That's partly due to the fact that skills were a tacked-on optional rule in previous editions. They're better integrated into the game in 3E, but the GM will have to decide for him/herself what a player can do with a skill and what the Target Numbers will be for those actions. (There are some standard TN's for easy, average, difficult, etc., and opposed rolls are pretty straightforward.)

As far as social or influence skills go, the creators of BESM made a design decision to leave most of those sorts of interactions in the realm of role-playing, not mechanics. However, your GM is free to create new skills, if he or she thinks there are gaps that need to be filled. Or just use a Soul roll--that stat covers charisma and expression, among other things.

I also have to make a bunch of choices in turning D&D magic (scorching burst, lightning bolt, rituals, utility magics, items) and ranger combat powers into effects based stuff for the new system. I think I'll be going for one basic physical melee attack and one magical ranged attack with some variant options each plus one magical defense and maybe some minor low power random magic stuff.

Yeah, you're probably better off choosing a few signature powers and not stressing about translating everything over. Alternatively, if your GM is willing, you could take some form of Dynamic Power, which is much more loosely defined.

If you need more examples to get you started than what's in the rulebook, here are a few more sample magical effects.

If you're interested, I have a lot more BESM 3E material (characters, items, monsters, campaigns) on the following websites:
http://besm.wikispaces.com/tag/view/fenoria
http://arcadayn.pbworks.com/w/tags/show?tag=besm3
http://thastygliaxsvault.wikispaces.com/tag/view/besm3