Sunday, August 26, 2007

Goodbye, So Long, Farewell, Long Live the New Edition

BESM 1e
My first impression of using BESM 3e was quite positive, and I’ve been thinking about the differences between the new BESM and the previous edition. I’ve mentioned, briefly, the basics of the BESM 2nd Edition mechanics before. The characters are defined numerically by three stats: body, mind, and soul (quantifying the physical, mental, and metaphysical/supernatural). The success of non-combat actions are determined by rolling two six-sided dice (or as those of us in the hobby would say 2d6) and comparing the number to the relevant stat (body for physical actions, mind for mental actions, and soul for basically everything else), if the result is equal or less then the stat the action succeeded. Various skills and abilities can be taken to make success more likely (for both combat and non-combat actions), but those are the basics.

BESM 2eCombat itself is slightly more complicated, but only slightly. If one of the PCs in my campaign were to try and put the hurt on a hapless NPC it would have gone something like this. First the player would have tried to hit NPC (probably with a sword, they all seemed to like their swords); the player would roll 2d6 hoping to get a result equal to or under his attack combat value (which starts out as the average of all three stats). If the result was over the combat value the attack was a miss and we moved on, but if the player succeeded then I’d make a defense roll for said hapless NPC. I’d roll 2d6 and hope to get under the NPC’s defense combat value (which starts out as the average of the NPC’s three stats minus two). If the defense roll succeeds then the NPC managed to block, dodge, parry, soak, or otherwise some how avoid what would have been a successful attack. Should the roll fail the player would gleefully announce how much damage his attack just dealt.

BESM 2eRDifferent variations on the “roll this number or less” mechanic have been with role playing games since the very beginning of the hobby. It is certainly a serviceable mechanic and I’ve played many fine game systems that make use of it (GURPS and the Hero System come to mind, but they hardly scratch the surface). It can have some drawbacks however. Depending on exactly how it gets implemented it can be counterintuitive – for example in BESM 2nd Edition bonuses are expressed as negative numbers, while positive numbers are penalties. It can also start to break down when a character has enough skill, bonuses, or other modifiers to raise the target number above whatever the highest possible number you can roll on the dice the game is using making it basically impossible to fail. In BESM 2e, which uses 2d6, that number is 12 (while in GURPS and Hero that number is 18 because both systems use 3d6). This point can be reached pretty quickly and easily in BESM 2e even by starting characters.

With BESM 2e in particular another problem that could arise during combat is the characters that go first in a combat round tend to do nothing but burn through the opponents defenses allowing the slower acting characters to actually damage them. First off combat rounds - almost every role playing game divides combat time into discrete units generally called rounds, turns, or phases which usually represent a few seconds of time (I’ve seen systems where a round was as fast as one second, and others where it was as long as one minute). Now as for burning through defenses – the simple combat example I gave above covers one person making one attack, but there are various abilities that allow for multiple attacks during a round (alternatively more then one person can attack the same target in a round). BESM handles this by making the target’s defense combat value decrease by two for each use after the first in the round. If the target also has multiple actions during a round the penalties start once all of those actions are used up. I tended to throw one powerful opponent backed up by some cannon fodder at my players so I tried to design them to be able to fight multiple opponents. Since for most of my campaign the PCs had two actions a round, their opposition usually had three.

All of the above added up to make most fights look something like this (in a very simplified sense): the first PC would attack twice (almost certainly succeeding both times), the villain would defend twice (again almost certainly succeeding both times), the second PC would attack twice, the villain would successfully defend the first attack and have about a 50% chance of succeeding at the second attack, the third PC would attack twice, the villain would try to defend but at this point had only a minute chance of succeeding, and this was repeated until the villain was defeated. Fortunately creative players can go a long way to alleviating this problem, and my players were nothing if not creative. Seriously how many players would think to have their characters use Ethernet cable to first lasso an attacking dragon, and then use it as reigns to ride said dragon while fighting other dragons? And the great thing about BESM 2e is it is flexible enough that when aforementioned player announced his plans regarding Ethernet cable and attacking dragon, or any of the other countless wild/crazy stunts they all pulled I didn’t need to grab the rule book and start madly flipping pages to try and find a relevant rule, I just had them roll their attack and applied whatever seemed relevant as a modifier and adjudicated the results.

BESM 3eSo how does BESM 3e differ? Well it does away with the “roll under” mechanic in favor of roll 2d6, add your relevant skills and other modifiers (or subtract relevant penalties), and total your result - if it is equal to or higher then a target number set by the GM you succeed. These types of systems tend to be a bit more intuitive for people to grasp, although the need to judge what an appropriate target number is can be annoying for the GM. As for combat both sides roll 2d6 and add their combat values (plus other relevant modifiers) and the higher total succeeds (ties go to the attacker iirc). Character creation is more complicated then it was under 2e. Characters in BESM 2e where built on fairly small point totals as compared to most point based role playing games. I favored 25-35 points for starting characters, whereas GURPS 3rd edition suggested 100 points for most of their starting characters (really 145 points since it was 100 points + 40 points in disadvantages + 5 points in quirks), while HERO 5th edition suggests 150 points for their starting characters (at the heroic level for super heroes it suggests 350 points). Granted each of these games uses a completely different system so you cannot really just compare point totals, but in general the more points you have to create a character the more complex your options are going to be and the more powerful (or diverse) your character is going to be. The characters we created for Matt's campaign were built on 300 points and I'd estimate are about on par with a 2e character of 30 or 35 points. So obviously the costs of the various abilities in BESM have been completely reworked for 3e, and the number of options available to you has increased significantly. This certainly doesn't hurt BESM, character creation was extremely flexible under 2e, and it only becomes more so under 3e. While I have to reiterate that character creation has become more complex, I'd still say it is far easier than say Hero 5th edition or Shadowrun 4th edition.

Anyway to sum up, my first taste of BESM 3e was positive and I look forward to playing some more. I believe we are getting together again on Labor Day for round two of the Mattoverse, so I'll probably have some more to say about it after that.

Before I go I'd like to point out I've been blogging for one year. Woohoo! I'm a little surprised I've kept it up, all previous attempts at anything resembling a journal have failed quite miserably. By my count I've been blogging for 381 days and with this being post 54 I'm averaging just over one post every seven days; which is pretty much exactly what I wanted to do. So huzzah for me! In celebration I leave you with this amusing picture that has nothing to do with BESM, or anything else I've talked about in this post.Steampunk, Yeah it's like that

Friday, August 24, 2007

Well Played Matthew, Well Played

BESM 3e
A month has already passed since the end of my BESM campaign. I remain extremely satisfied with how the BESM campaign turned out, easily one of the best I’ve ever run under any role playing system. My players remained true to form, coming up with interesting and completely unexpected things to do right up until the end. I was particularly impressed with their decision to try and remove every soul in the Hell of Hungry Dragons before they sealed it up forever. Dan’s character was the driving force behind this little decision, apparently he felt infinite suffering for finite sins was terribly unfair, and he was able to convince Matt’s character that something needed to be done about this. For the record they succeeded (probably a testament to how ridiculously overpowered I let them become, and also to how as a GM I’ll allow almost everything that amuses me).

As (parenthetically) noted in my last post we got together on Saturday for BESM 3rd edition, which was also Matt’s first attempt at GMing. Matt has been talking about his multi-genre, anything goes, chaos campaign for as least as long as I ran my BESM campaign (quite probably longer). The general idea is any sort of humanoid character we could come up with (and build on 300 points) was basically fair game (there were a few restrictions, mainly don’t build a character whose abilities are completely derived from his social standing since he won’t be staying in his original world). Matt ended up with a Jedi (courtesy of Paul), an elven wizard (Dan’s contribution), and a steampunk tech genius (my character - heavily inspired by the Girl Genius webcomic). Interestingly Matt informed us that our characters had all died, and had us come up with the circumstances of their deaths.

The campaign opened with our characters waking up on a hill after being pulled away from their own worlds at the moment of what would have been their deaths. We don’t actually know who did this, or exactly for what reason. We’ve been told it was to save the universe, but the person who presumably did the summoning is currently in a vegetative state due to an accident during the complex magic ritual used to snatch our characters away from the jaws of death (or more precisely his soul had been sundered from his body and is currently lost). Just as we were getting a handle on our situation (we were on earth, but apparently the only humans in the world live in a village protected by a magic bubble that keeps the dinosaurs from coming to eat them), and hot on the trail of a clue to return the architect of our situation to consciousness, we suddenly found ourselves sucked into another alternate earth.

First RunFor me this is where the night was made (I suspect Paul probably harbors similar sentiments). We found ourselves in a convenience store staring face to face with a troll who was doing a little shopping. For numerous reasons that mostly have to do with shared gaming experience, and knowledge of the GM, I very quickly suspected (I imagine Paul did as well), and Matt soon confirmed that we were in a Stuffer Shack. If you’ve played Shadowrun, you almost certainly know what that is. Matt continued to delight by running us through Food Fight which is a classic Shadowrun introductory adventure (at least from 3rd Edition, and I think from 2nd as well, but I don’t know if it made the jump to 4th edition). After trouncing the thrill gang that was trying to rob the place we made good our escape, and Matt brought the evening to a close.

Saturday, August 18, 2007

OMG!! ONOZ!!

Evil Mage


WoW has made me a tool of the Devil!!

That is all. Come back in a few days for a real post. Possible topics for this post include the end of my BESM campaign (yes it really has ended), the inevitable "OVA" sequel campaign, my thoughts on Matt's "all genre-chaos campaign" (it's BESM Saturday!!!), my reaction to finally using BESM 3e (did I mention it's BESM Saturday!!!), Chipple hitting level 40 (I really need a picture of her on her horse), the anime I've been watching, and maybe even how I feel about my job these days (that last one is a pretty remote possibility).

Before I go I should mention the final Harry Potter (see below) book did not disappoint.