Quote from: yosemitemike;867381I thought BESM D20 had potential but that the actual implementation was a hot mess.  It seemed very slap dash and slapped together.



If you like that roll under style system, BESM Revised Second Edition is the best iteration imo.  The core of the game is the same but it has a lot of tweaks to make the system run better and a lot of character options.  New copies are absurdly priced since it has been OOP for so long but you can get a PDF copy for a fairly reasonable price.



Kind of but not really.  It has a much more stylized, Romantic feel than WoD typically does.  It's much more slanted to stuff like Vampire Princess Miyu, Blood+, Shingetsutan Tsukihime  or even semi sci-fi stuff like Strike the Blood or Dance in the Vampire Bund.

yah thats why its the basis though at this point i cant call the system im working on d20 its got huge changes most of it based around making fighter types viable

BESM is one of those games I've never played or ran but still have a soft spot for. I'm not sure it really has any advantage to running its subject over systems I'm already familiar with... but it is a great sourcebook for breaking down those tropes into RPG terms, and it does read like it would be easy and fun at the table.

What's the big diff between 2nd edition (available cheap) and 2nd edition revised? Something major or is it just a collector thing?

Quote from: kosmos1214;867393yah thats why its the basis though at this point i cant call the system im working on d20 its got huge changes most of it based around making fighter types viable

At that point, you have done enough work that you may as well have just written your own game.

Quote from: Simlasa;867394What's the big diff between 2nd edition (available cheap) and 2nd edition revised? Something major or is it just a collector thing?

The difference is pretty minimal.

Quote from: yosemitemike;867400At that point, you have done enough work that you may as well have just written your own game.
snip

thats what i did start doing after a point

Now, for my BESM Vampire: The Masquerade conversions, should I post them in this thread or somewhere else on these boards?

one of the best campaigns I've ever been in was a BESMd20 game that was a space opera setting that the GM created.

it was also the campaign where he decided, "Most campaigns have the PCs be poor.  what will these guys do if I give them SERIOUS money?"

Well, as it turned out, we hired the space pirates to be the space police.
Bought out several evil corporations.
Found the ancient aliens responsible for creating life in our spiral arm of the galaxy.
Accidentally freed an ancient evil upon the universe.
Built a Ringworld to distract the evil corporation that was backed by the ancient evil.  (the GM wouldn't let us build a Dyson Sphere, we couldn't get enough gravity generators for the inside to be habitable)
Beat up the ancient evil and trapped it in a pokeball.
Shot a lot of people with bowel disruptors.  (lending the GM my copy of Transmetropolitan was the best thing ever)

How was BESM d20?

Quote from: Frey;867513How was BESM d20?

I found it clunky and too restrictive for a high action anime style game, where players can cross 30 foot fields in about a second, throw a hundred attacks at each other in the next second and disengage without repercussion.

I have BESM 2e, somewhere, I think.  But for now, I have Wise Turtle's OVA (Open Versatile Anime) RPG for my anime game needs.  It's not perfect (Several 'stats' are actually redundant) but it does the job I want.

What's the primary difference in how OVA addresses anime vs. BESM? The main thing seems to be to present the tropes, have fast combats and maybe some social mechanism for soap opera elements.

So, would my BESM Vampire: The Masquerade conversion go here or on the Design, Development, and Gameplay section of the forum?

Quote from: Frey;867513How was BESM d20?

It's a slapdash mess.  It looks really thrown together and half assed.  The system doesn't really suit the genre very well.  It's not very well thought out.  It just isn't very good.

Quote from: Frey;867513How was BESM d20?

Its good because its put almost everything from BESM (Attributes, Skills and Defects) under the Anime D20 SRD. So we don't have deal with all WW/AH mess!

Hell, they even used it to make Open Core (mixing it with Action! System).

Its one of my favorite systems. I have the 1st and 2 edition and most of the books for it. I had a lot of run running Slayers. Also ran Dominion Tank Police and Tenchi Muyo once.

Big fan of BESM 2nd edition, was my go-to system for years. Moreover, to this day I consider the Tenchi Muyo RPG the penultimate example of how to adapt a licensed property to an established RPG system. It's a work of beauty.

I sort of ignored 3rd edition. I didn't see the point, and didn't really hear anything good about it.


Silver Age Sentinels managed to overthink itself, and Tri-Stat DX in general (along with the D20 versions of games) seemed to be the coffin nails in the company. It's a damn shame. I liked GoO a lot.

I bought 3e for a game that never really got off the ground.  I don't think it's as bad as some people make it out to be but there's no real reason to chose it over the much better supported 2e unless you are one of those people who has a philosophical objection to roll under systems.