[OT] BESM 2nd edition

[Asmor]

Recently decided to try out BESM, and it just so happened that the 2nd edition was coming out soon and so I decided to wait for that.

Anywhoo, just picked it up today, and skimmed it. Looks interesting. In case you don't know, BESM is Big Eyes, Small Mouth, a generic anime roleplaying game for everything from Ninja Scroll to Tenchi Muyo to Sailor Moon. Oh, it also has fairly extensive rules for mecha, which I like. Like White Wolf's WoD series, this places the emphasis on roleplaying but takes it a step further. There are only 3 main stats which everyone has, and then a myriad of optional abilities and attributes which don't figure into your rolls very much but rather just define what you're capable of (for example "Own a Big Mecha" gives you 20 points to spend on a mecha per level, "Teleportation" has a range that increases by a full order of magnitude with each level). Attributes are rated from 1 to 6, and seem to go up in power exponentially so that 5 is pretty damn powerful but 6 is downright awe inspiring. Finally, they don't reccomend tossing the bones unless you absolutely need to, in most cases the GM arbitrates what happens by his whim.

So have any of you checked it out? If so, what do you think, and did you play any previous versions?

 

[PenguinKing]

I think you vastly overestimate the lack of dice-rolling in the system. It's a common mistake - look at any RPG system, and if it has fewer core attributes than D&D, immediately hail it as the "ONE TRUE KING OF REAL ROLEPLAYING". Close, but no dice, if you'll pardon an attrocious pun.

 

[PA]

Recently decided to try out BESM, and it just so happened that the 2nd edition was coming out soon and so I decided to wait for that.

The 2nd edition has been out for a while. The 2nd edition revised has just been published (first sighting Friday last week, I think). Differences? More things in 2nd edition revised, more condensed (208 pages instead of 288). It includes some stuff from supplements, some very minor rule changes, and is organized differently, while the text stays about the same. A .pdf with all the changes will be made available on the GOO website.

Oh, but, bad news: it costs five dollars less but the inside is all in black and white, instead of the previous full-color version.

 

[JoeGKushner]

I've only had a chance to play the game a few times and I've enjoyed it. The rules are failry easy to learn but sometimes a little more guideance would've been nice. I was using 1st ed rules and don't remember there being a limit on disads and some other issues, but it was pretty fun. I'm looking forward to Silver Age Sentinels but it'll probably have to take a backseat to good old Hero 5th ed.

 

[PenguinKing]

2nd Edition has quite a few more guidelines on the attributes than 1e; for example, it gives two layers of detail on attributes, like "X times faster than the average human, *or* Y kilometers per hour", so you can get specific if you want to.

(And there's still no limit to disadvantages, but many disadvantages are mutually exclusive of some advantages and/or each other, and disadvantages increase in degree geometrically rather than linearly, just like advantages, so it's rarely worth it to take more than a handful of one-point disadvantages - and even then, only if they fit your character concept.)

- Sir Bob.

 

[Aaron L]

BESM is an excellent system for a less technical, more free flowing game style. Anime especially, since that is what it was designed to emulate. I've run a Tenchi game, a mecha drama game, and am planning to run a Cthulhu Endtimes mecha vs. mythos campaign with BESM.

 

[Asmor]

Yeah, it would seem I underestimated how often you roll dice in that game... It really is more along the lines of WoD games, though. Like I said, when I'd posted that I had just skimmed it.

Man, I can't wait to play this... Got an awesome idea for a mecha, but I can't come up with a good name for it. Argh.

 

[Jackcarter]

I have never played the game, but I have read it, so take this with a grain of salt and a lot of imo.

BESM seems to be a rpg version of chocolate; tastes yummy and gives you sugar high, but is in truth nothing more than empty calories. At first glance, the book grabs you: It's small and compact, full of well-drawn color illustrations, and its glossy pages shine in light. An attractive book.

Its mechanics are less than desirable, though. For a game seeking to emulate the anime genre, it surprisingly breaks down at high-end pwoer levels. The die rolling, moreover, is completely unintuitive, and makes the same mistake as ADnD's thaco or saves.

It calls itself tri-stat with pride, but I find it excruciatingly inadequate. Instead of giving itself few more stats, it instead crreates an illusion of more stats by using advantages/disadvantages. I really question the wisdom of using adv/disads to do so when it would've been easier just to have Body, Mind, Soul, Charisma, Con, or whatever extra. I feel this way because adv/disadv are really quite overwhelming as it is, and stat-like advs needlessly complicate the system.

Besm is supposedly a lite system, but reading the book, I find myself overwhelmed by the sheer number of options and the omni-presence of points. In contrast, I was able to make characters and play very quickly in Feng Shui, another lite system and one more deserving to be called that. I even had easier time making a Solar, and exalted isn't exactly the simplest game out there.

A note here, by point I mean how everything ends up being some kind of feature and has a point value, like Gurps. It's modular like gurps, but then, gurps isn't exactly a lite game. Time after time, I was striken by how similar it was to gurps and how the only dividing line between the two seemed to be in combat.

Besm is not a hard game, but it also doesn't seem to deserve to be called a lite game either. Moreover, I wonder whether or not it can recreate high-powered animes like DBZ or X, let alone Ninja scroll.

 

[Aaron L]

I tried making up Goku and Frieza with BESM. Lotta points, I tell ya. It can do it, though.

 

[PenguinKing]

Besm is supposedly a lite system, but reading the book, I find myself overwhelmed by the sheer number of options and the omni-presence of points. In contrast, I was able to make characters and play very quickly in Feng Shui, another lite system and one more deserving to be called that. I even had easier time making a Solar, and exalted isn't exactly the simplest game out there.

I think the problem you're running into is that BESM is a sort of "meta-system" - the same Attribute can represent one of a dozen different things, depending on how it fits into your character concept (unlike GURPS other many other point-based systems, which often have a dozen different finely-differentiated attributes that do more or less the same thing, but in different ways). This effectively precludes building a character within the system; you've gotta have your entire concept, including everything that character can do, without referrence to game mechanics, before you ever open the book. Once you've got that, it's trivial to find a combination of Advantages and Disadvantages that simulates what you're looking for - I can create a starting 30-point character in five minutes if I have a clear and fully-realized concept in mind ahead of time, and higher-point characters take only marginally longer.

The issue of counterintuitiveness is also a tough one to resolve, mostly because there is no possible way for a system to be "intuitive" as you seem to define it. Your definition of "intuitive" is "higher is always better", yes? Well, you can't apply that to everything equally - stats, modifiers, die rolls, target numbers, at least one of those has to fall into the "low is good" trap.

- Sir Bob.