BESM Sources

Any good sources for BESM shit? Conversions, house rules, etc. Also, BESM general?

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besmresourcesite.net23.net/3/main.php
prismnet.com/~thrash/
goofansite.com
twitter.com/NSFWRedditVideo

I tried to run a Centauri Knights game in high school, so like ten plus years ago, but I don't think the players really got the setting.

Anyways, I have fond memories of BESM. Still have the third edition somewhere, but I'm not sure what I'd crack it out for. I've sort of not a believer in generic systems, I find, and I'm much less of a weeaboo at this point in my life.

Anyways, I hope someone responds for you, OP.

Try Demon City Shinjuku. You can find it in the PDF archive.

Which edition is your favorite?

Just play MAID.

besmresourcesite.net23.net/3/main.php
I found this when I was gearing up to run a BESM game myself. It hasn't been updated in years but it seems to be the only site with material for BESM 3rd edition.

OP here. I've really only looked at 2ER. I tried to look at third, but it made my head spin. I had heard there were conversions for 40k, Exalted, and other stuff but all I can find is a pretty decent Star Wars one.

Thanks!

Hell yeah! My girlfriend and I are working on a Kingdom Hearts conversion book for our upcoming game. It started off as a pet project, but I think it'll have enough material and enough interest that we'll actually format it and throw out a off.

One of the biggest additions is Focus. Focus is a derived value used to pay for special martial abilities. [(BODY + MIND) x 5] If you played KH before, it's basically a combination of the Drive and Focus gauges. Do you want to take your magic physics- defying sword, sheathe it in ice, throw it at a group of 8 enemies, deal huge ammounts of damage, and then have it return to you? That ability costs Focus. It was our way to balance derived values (because it bothered me that there weren't 3 resource pools), while also balancing martial abilities (action commands) and magic.

That sounds cool as hell! I love KH! Would like to see what you have.

Sweet! Right now we're just trying to organize everything and determine what to keep and what to scrap before we actually stat anything. There's a lot of stuff to go through. We should have a (semi)coherent pdf in the next month or so, and we'll share what we have when we do.

Thanks! Looking forward to it.

As someone who has played several campaigns in BESM, I would strongly recommend Mutants and Masterminds over it. Both are systems that allow you to heavily customize your character and that character's abilities, but M&M is just much better-balanced.

If you do want to play BESM, you need to ban the nesting of the "a la carte" abilities, Magic, Item of Power, Owns A Big Mecha, Weapon/Special Attack, and so on. For example, ten character points will buy you two level two Special Attacks, *or* an Item of Power that contains one level six Special Attack and one level five Special Attack. Four character points will buy you ten points to invest in spells, *or* a spellbook which is an Item of Power that gives you twenty points in spells plus 20 MP to fuel those spells. Twelve character points can give you a level three Special Attack, *or* a level three Big Mecha which is actually a suit of power armor that includes a level six Special Attack and +60 HP.

Also, you'll want to rejigger attacking and defending somehow. If someone with an Attack Combat Value of 8 attacks someone with a Defense Combat Value of 10, (both of which are very likely numbers to reach in this system), that is extremely likely to be a whiff. Maybe rework Defense Combat Value to be something like a modifier to the attacker's roll, rather than a value the defender rolls under in order to completely avoid an attack.

Oh, one last thing: RAW, Area Effect can single-handedly destroy planets. Watch out for explosives suddenly turning into nukes or planet-crackers. Especially if you crit.

Thanks! I'd heard about the RAW damage thing before, but nesting abilities is something I'll watch out for. Then again, my players are pretty chill.

>ban a la carte attributes

Or you could, you know, talk with your players and not let them cheese the system by going Item of Power -> Magic -> spells. It's pretty easy to see that's not appropriate, and while technically allowable by RAW, the system numbers are designed in such a way that vanilla uses of those attributes is fine. Seriously, why would you approve someone who deliberately breaks the game in that way? There's a reason the character creation chapter starts with "Fucking talk with your GM, dipshit". So you can discuss what is and isn't appropriate like adults.

I do agree with you somewhat on combat, though. While it can be quick and fun going back and forth between two opponents who can't hit each other, it can also be a slog. Never was sure about what to do to fix it, though. Nothing ever worked right.

post slayersd20

Memories with this thing. I was too much of a lazy cunt to learn a better system, but it was fun and flexible for all my early attempts at GMing.

Had to take a lot of abilities off the table. Much like what a lot of people here are describing, there are crazy over-powered abilities for players to point dump in. And I loved my players, they were my good friends, but I knew them better than to trust them with that shit.

BESM is like babby's first RPG and there's good fun to be had if you're running something lighthearted and wacky.

I kinda use this system because of the crazy over the top shit. Dragonball Z works much better in BESM than fuzion.

Anybody have a good fix for combat so its not a whiff fest?

Oh if any BESM grogs could check their hard drive for an old fan-made conversion called Vast Imperium, Bold Travellers, we've had a guy over in the Traveller General who's been looking for it.

What system do you use now?

Yeah it fits really well for that. Trying to use a serious setting won't fit nearly as well without a lot of modification.

Nothing, sadly. Revised Second Edition was what I ran at the time.

Its some JTAS article, but I cant seem to find it.

I don't think so, it's not listed in the article index for JTAS or Challenge. When I looked around, the only place I found was on a dead old website, and archive.org didn't have the goods.

According to this site (by the author)it is, but the link for it goes to a dead SJG link

prismnet.com/~thrash/

Oh yeah, that's because it was posted to the now long-defunct JTAS Online, a sort of forum/community project thing run by Steve Jackson Games back when GURPS Traveller was still a thing. I forgot that that was the site it was on.

goofansite.com

Basically the same site, but still updating

My google-fu failed me past that

I always thought it was an interesting looking system and we had a guy who always wanted to run it, but his game concepts were such crazy anime things and no one else was in to that, so we never played. Seems a shame.

There was a Phantasy Star one out there somewhere IIRC. I was sorely tempted, although I'm mostly getting that PS urge out with Numenera now.

Thanks! I'll try and find it. Phantasy Star was pretty fun. I'm kinda wanting to do a Wild Arms game...

Played a game ages ago. Lasted about a year and a half and was co-DM'd by myself and another. That way one could still play while the other DM'd a few sessions.

It was really fun and basically anything goes. We had Stand Users, Magical Girls, Time Travel, Magic, Spider-Man, Aliens, etc. It sounds retarded but was really fun. I miss it.

I want to note that their Utena book is the most useless RPG book ever published. There's like a couple actual pages of content, but it's 95% episode summaries.

Maid is a specific kid of comedy game. BESM is all about the super powers, basically a d6 Mutants and Mastermids but for weebs, right down to them both being effortless to break

Maid and BESM do completely opposite things.

I wanna say the Hellsing one was kinda the same. The pre d20 guides were a little better in that they actually had game content.

Trigun supplement was similar. No idea how you'd run a decent Utena game, though. That show was nuts. Awesome, but I haven't done nearly enough acid to run it as a game.