I'm glad that you're getting some use from my old books! BESM has one of my favourite design ideas for a generic game - a table with variable skill costs by genre, so that computer skill might cost a bit more in a cyberpunk setting than in classic sci-fi, but piloting might be far more expensive in sci-fi. The downside of BESM is that it's not very well balanced. It's one of those systems where you can end up with some PCs vastly more powerful than others unless everyone works within an "honour system" to not min-max (or everyone min-maxes equally as much).
I forgot to note in the video that I was kind of right that the core book would have made for an extremely short video, as it was less than 5 minutes I spend covering it. Your old book will indeed be getting some use, as they're currently sitting in the middle of the room, so will be my first stop in the coming weeks for videos. When I was sorting out what's to be distributed to who, I noticed that I'd missed one of the BESM books, oh well.
Wow, I remember this game. I had the first edition of the rules, plus the Tank Police, Demon City Shinjuku and Sailor Moon source books. I think the only other supplements out at that time was one other licened source book, the gun bunnies book and one other generic one. Had no idea there were so many more supplements for the second edition.
I remember this one and loved it. The anime/manga club I was a part of in high-school did this Tabletop RPG and it was awesome we did the Hellsing set. And if I ever am able to do a group for the Hellsing RPG I can guarantee you most of the players would rather do a adaption of Hellsing Ultimate: Abridged for obvious reasons.
As a game, I love the character ideas it gives me just leafing through the book. So many options, all of which would be fun to play. Cheers for the comment, much appreciated.
@@RPGGamer Yeah it is fun. And to make it better there are sets/settings adapting popular anime/manga allowing for the ultimate fan-dream actually experience an adventure set in said anime/manga. The 4 I know of are Slayers Next, Slayers Try, and Fushugi Yuugi which are your typical fantasy genre, and Hellsing which is a horror/action/mystery genre set in the modern day. Since BESM uses a variation of the D20 rule-set seen in D&D, Slayers Next, Slayers Try, and Fushugi Yuugi are basically the BESM setting equivalents to typical D&D settings like Forgotten Realms, Mystara, Dragonlance, and Greyhawk, where as Hellsing is essentially Ravenloft set in a modern setting.
You said yourself that these books were riffing on things like Star Wars and Pokémon, so couldn't you just use existing settings? Seems like you could pick any IP you wanted and run it with this game.
Yep, absolutely, you could use any setting you wanted. But my main joy of looking through BESM is that it gets my creative juices running and I find myself wanting to create a gameworld where the players are supernatural cops in a version of earth dragged into Hell where humanity is living side by side with demons. Or a space opera but everyone is anthropomorphic animals. Every read through gives me more ideas . . . which truthfully I'll never use. But it's great being creatively stimulated like that though.
I'm glad that you're getting some use from my old books! BESM has one of my favourite design ideas for a generic game - a table with variable skill costs by genre, so that computer skill might cost a bit more in a cyberpunk setting than in classic sci-fi, but piloting might be far more expensive in sci-fi.
The downside of BESM is that it's not very well balanced. It's one of those systems where you can end up with some PCs vastly more powerful than others unless everyone works within an "honour system" to not min-max (or everyone min-maxes equally as much).
I forgot to note in the video that I was kind of right that the core book would have made for an extremely short video, as it was less than 5 minutes I spend covering it.
Your old book will indeed be getting some use, as they're currently sitting in the middle of the room, so will be my first stop in the coming weeks for videos. When I was sorting out what's to be distributed to who, I noticed that I'd missed one of the BESM books, oh well.
Wow, I remember this game. I had the first edition of the rules, plus the Tank Police, Demon City Shinjuku and Sailor Moon source books. I think the only other supplements out at that time was one other licened source book, the gun bunnies book and one other generic one. Had no idea there were so many more supplements for the second edition.
I remember those books too, although never got my hands on them. But there's loads of really great books for the 2nd edition.
I remember this one and loved it. The anime/manga club I was a part of in high-school did this Tabletop RPG and it was awesome we did the Hellsing set. And if I ever am able to do a group for the Hellsing RPG I can guarantee you most of the players would rather do a adaption of Hellsing Ultimate: Abridged for obvious reasons.
As a game, I love the character ideas it gives me just leafing through the book. So many options, all of which would be fun to play.
Cheers for the comment, much appreciated.
@@RPGGamer Yeah it is fun. And to make it better there are sets/settings adapting popular anime/manga allowing for the ultimate fan-dream actually experience an adventure set in said anime/manga. The 4 I know of are Slayers Next, Slayers Try, and Fushugi Yuugi which are your typical fantasy genre, and Hellsing which is a horror/action/mystery genre set in the modern day. Since BESM uses a variation of the D20 rule-set seen in D&D, Slayers Next, Slayers Try, and Fushugi Yuugi are basically the BESM setting equivalents to typical D&D settings like Forgotten Realms, Mystara, Dragonlance, and Greyhawk, where as Hellsing is essentially Ravenloft set in a modern setting.
You said yourself that these books were riffing on things like Star Wars and Pokémon, so couldn't you just use existing settings? Seems like you could pick any IP you wanted and run it with this game.
Yep, absolutely, you could use any setting you wanted.
But my main joy of looking through BESM is that it gets my creative juices running and I find myself wanting to create a gameworld where the players are supernatural cops in a version of earth dragged into Hell where humanity is living side by side with demons. Or a space opera but everyone is anthropomorphic animals. Every read through gives me more ideas . . . which truthfully I'll never use. But it's great being creatively stimulated like that though.