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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Scurvy_Platypus" data-source="post: 5243148" data-attributes="member: 43283">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.</blockquote>

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