I own Silver Age Sentinels, and BESM as well. Sentinels had amazing production values, but at the core of it, the three stats just didn't work for me.

Once I got my hands on Mutants & Masterminds, which did work for me, SAS was immediately shelved,

I think the best version of the Tri-Stat System was the Heaven & Earth version.  It uses cards instead of dice and let the players make some interesting choices in how they used those cards.  You had a hand of 3 and got to use one, discard one and keep one.  It let them decide which actions were worth passing or failing and maybe save a card for the future where they would need it.  It was a Twin Peaks like setting, but I could see it being used for something more heroic.

I also wanted to like the system yet found something distinctly unappealing about it. Then switched to M&M.

Not a fan of how they're super-inventionnpowr ( basically build any device) in game. They gave no real rules and expected the GM to handwaive everything. Combined with their every decreasing production values and inability to support their game lines at the time turned me off. I nicknamed the GONS. Guardians of non-support.

They thought no one would notice the decline in production values and really hated to hear any negative feedback. One of their final products a book on female superheroes called Country Matters art looked like it was doodled by some high schooler on his lunch breaks. Not to mention the bad name. Then Marc financial mismanagement came out and it killed any interest I had in the system. Made worse when other writers in the hobby made and keep making excuses for his past behaviour.

Quote from: trechriron on May 20, 2023, 01:16:29 AM
The most recent version of Tri-Stat was released with SAS as a generic game last year. (Disclaimer: DTRPG links are affiliate links.)

I wasn't aware there was a revised system... as such, most of my observations from the old system (in the posts above) are probably irrelevant.

Quote from: tenbones on May 18, 2023, 05:05:21 PM
Would adding relevant stats help?

Honestly no.

Why?

Because the system allows you to effectively make custom stats to cover whatever. It is remarkably flexible in that respect. But like with gurps it can be a boon or a bane or just a stumbling block.

Quote from: Abraxus on May 21, 2023, 08:35:04 AM
I also wanted to like the system yet found something distinctly unappealing about it. Then switched to M&M.

Not a fan of how they're super-inventionnpowr ( basically build any device) in game. They gave no real rules and expected the GM to handwaive everything. Combined with their every decreasing production values and inability to support their game lines at the time turned me off. I nicknamed the GONS. Guardians of non-support.

They thought no one would notice the decline in production values and really hated to hear any negative feedback. One of their final products a book on female superheroes called Country Matters art looked like it was doodled by some high schooler on his lunch breaks. Not to mention the bad name. Then Marc financial mismanagement came out and it killed any interest I had in the system. Made worse when other writers in the hobby made and keep making excuses for his past behaviour.

That is BESM's strength and weakness. It is really freeform. And it puts even more pressure on the DM than gurps it feels as its even more "do anything" a system.

The focused setting books tended to help alot by doing a bunch of the footwork.

I think that BESM 4E is a better game than BESM 2E or 3E.  Tri-Stat Core RPG (the current version) has (almost) all the rules from BESM 4E and BESM Extras in one small inexpensive book without much art.  Unfortunately it doesn't have the examples from BESM 4E and BESM Extras, which are quite useful in figuring out how to do things.  Absolute Power replaces the anime trappings with superhero trappings and support material, but uses the same system.  Note that Tri-Stat Core RPG is considerably closer to BESM 4E than Tri-Stat dX (the previous version) was to BESM 2E; revised mechanics make 2d6 work better at various power scales, so the change to 2d10 in Silver Sentinels and the arbitrary 2dX in Tri-Stat dX isn't necessary.

If you don't like the anime trappings of BESM, The Tri-Stat Core RPG book has all the rules you need without the anime trappings.  Without those, it's pretty clear that it is a generic point buy effects based RPG suitable for anything.  I don't think that using Tri-Stat (or even BESM) forces a game to be Anime, although it certainly works well for that.  (I'm currently slowly working through converting Centauri Knights to BESM 4E, and I think that playing that need not be forced into a anime mold: a bit of cyberpunk, a bit of transhumanism, a bit of exploring alien civilization, with several different modes of play.)

I think that the current Tri-Stat based games are mechanically simpler than GURPS or Hero or Ascendant, so for me that makes it easier to build characters.  I agree that the free form nature of character generation can be a problem; that's where the examples from the BESM 4E books help a lot.  They essentially have templates for character archetypes and ancestries, which you can combine and have most of character creation done.  The examples of Items (weapons, mecha, artifacts, etc.) are also useful in showing how things are built.  I think that a BESM GM running a game would be well advises to spend some time selecting or building such templates to give to their players to make character creation easier, since combining templates will be enough for some players, and the ones who want to dig into the depths of character generation it shows both how things are done but also the kind of things that reasonable for the specific game they are to play.