Cat girls and magic and mecha (oh my)

After much fanfare, BESM (Big Eyes Small Mouth) Third Edition is finally here. While it is billed as an anime role-playing system, BESM 3rd Edition remains a good all-round system for whatever strikes your fancy. It makes a nice edition to any table-top collection, coexisting peacefully with such powerhouses as GURPS 4 and Dungeons & Dragons 3.5. While Guardians of Order, the original publisher and creator of the BESM series has died, Arthaus Games, the makers of White Wolf, have picked up the system so that it may finally see the light of day.

It makes significant changes from the second edition, adding both new content and more complicated additions to previously existing rules. However, it retains the original goal of the series, by being reasonably simple to pick up and ridiculously fun to play. Like its predecessor, it uses the 2-d6 Tri-Stat system, but contains numerous changes to the other rules. Skill points were done away with entirely and the character point has a mere tenth of its former power. You may remember BESM 2e as being a slim paperback volume of modest proportions, but 3rd is a full-sized hardback, with a built-in anime “multiverse” in which to run games. It includes maps of Japan and Tokyo to make GMing (game mastering) easier and tells you exactly how to go about destroying buildings and blowing up whole worlds in a game session. Frankly, there is more material than you may ever need. But the creators understood that and scattered notes throughout the book on good rules to ignore and how to streamline gameplay.

One of the most interesting new features from a character-creation standpoint may be the character templates. Would you like to make a Demon Hunter? Try page 122. It will cost 130 points for a basic demon hunter with appropriate abilities and skills. Templates make character creation easier for first-time players, although you may find yourself disagreeing from time to time with what the writers consider appropriate abilities and skills. No problem! The templates are easy to modify.

The biggest downside to the system is the character sheet. To be frank, it’s terrible. The boxes are the wrong sizes, it doesn’t make a lot of sense when printed in black and white, and there aren’t lines in the big boxes for writing attributes, defects, etc. There’s even a typo on the sheet that is hard to miss and should have been easy to fix. The upshot is that you may want to design your own character sheet. If you’re feeling lazy, I know someone who already has.

Another cool feature is that the book is full color with a wealth of art, much of it in the anime-style. Colors are strategically used to organize the layout and differentiate between chapters. However, I spent a lot of time just looking at the art. It gives the distinct feel that while role-playing may not be serious business, it should be a darned good time.

While I’ve yet to run a game in the new system, I think it’s a good buy. You can pick it up pretty much anywhere for a suggested retail price of $39.00.