Instead of talking about my trip, I'm gonna talk about a product I got to finally buy, BESM d20.
For those who don't know, BESM stands for Big Eye, Small Mouth. Its basically a rulebook for making your own Anime RPG using d20.
Before I say anything, I want to point out I do like this product. Its a must have if you want to make an anime game or just inject anime styles into a game. But here I'm going to mostly be ranting about its faults, with little praise.
Lets start with the book itself, 142 pages. Not that big, but certainly not small. The artwork inside while black and white, is very good. I especially like Lindsay Cibos' work. Her evlen sorceress is...well lets just say I was impressed in many ways. On the downside the pages are made of a low quality paper. More like what you would see in a 5 cent auto trader magazine then a pricy rule book. After just a days use I had several minor tears. I've had to be extra careful with it. Despite the good anime artwork, if you find the 30$ pricetag a bit heavy, I strongly suggest you purchase the cheapass gamer version. Sine there are no real diagram pictures, there is no functionality lost.
Now lets talk about the actual content. First off BESM runs off of a point system. It makes sense, I don't see anyway to make the diverse characters we see in anime with classes as stiff as d20 normally has. This is however a universal point system. That is you start with normally 40 character points. These points are used to buy abillity scores, attributes, race, skills, feats, and really just about everything.
Race especially didnt make sense to me. There is nothing I hated more then the cool forgotten realms races getting power adjustments that made them useless, this is not as bad but still I dont like it. Honestly the difference between a dwarf and elf are so trivial and situation dependent that making a character pay more for a dwarf character is just plain stupid. If you are making your own races where some are signifigantly more powerful then others, then I can see this working. But the defualt d20 does not need races to cost character points. Even the suggested construct race is insanely costed at 4 more points then a human. And I can just see the munchkins salavating that their half-orcs GIVE them 5 more character points. bwa?
This is part of an overall problem that BESM has, its really tying to hard to make everything fit into the cost of 1. That is just about every ability, everything in the game goes down to a base of one. It may be true that pricing everything should make the game more balanced, but not when everything costs the same.
On to classes. Let me say this, while these classes do represent a broad range of anime archtypes, I would not want to play as any of them. The are simply designed poorly. The adventurer would be the perfect class all by itself, but it has no class combat skills and NO, NONE, ZILCH, ZERO ways to make them class skills. In a game with a bajillion opitions, that was f-ing stupid. The dynamic sorcer is rather weak compared to D&D wizards. Sure they can cast a bajillion spells but like the D&D sorcerer proved players would much more like to be able to cast fireballs at 5th level instead of 7th! like in BESM. Honest to god an adventurer who specalized in evocation could kick the shit out of a dynamic sorcerer after 1st level. Giant Robot confuses me. Can you name me a anime where a mech is the main character, alive, and not poileted or changed into from something else? Its like they invented a genre. I guess it makes a good mech for mech pilots as opposed to the norm. Gun Bunnies are nice, representing any gun oriented anime. But the class doesnt get any character points until 9th level. That means most 8th level gun bunnies will be almost exactly the same. The Hot Rod class is a tad strange. I mostly think of biker gangs from like Akira. Its hard to tell what this classes role is, but that can be a good thing. Magical Girl is obviously the Card Captor Sakura class. Heck the example even looks like her. The problem is this class really isnt a magic user.......ooooooook. The martial artists is a joke, its because it only gets 2 skill points per level, more on that later. Mech pilot is ok, but since you really need d20 mecha to do a mech anime its not a lot of help. Ninja is cool, but it suffers the most from the overall problems i will get into. Pet Monster Trainer is for pokemon and digimon games. However the rules could just as easily allow you to make a game where your training more brutal tiny killers, like pokemon meets gladiator. Samurai is cool, but it too suffers the same problems as the ninja. Now we come to sentai member. WTF? Power Rangers are NOT anime? Why is there a power rangers class? Ok I guess you could use it for sailor moon or magic knight rayearth, but it looks/walks/talks/fights like a power ranger. Shaperchanger... good concept, bad execution much like ninja. I really like the Student class, and not just cause I have a fetish for the sailor school outfits. The class really does portray the anime student hero well and gives good flexibility. Tech Genius is nice, but suffers the same overalll problems.
What are those problems? Well first off a lot of these classes are just set up wrong. Lets look at the ninja. The class has teleport. I can see ninjas having teleport like abilities, but the majority of anime ninjas have thier own specialized stealth skills. All the classes force you to take attributes that can be against your character concept. Not to mention almost none of the classes start out with the personal gear attribute. So playing strictly by the rules a 1st level samurai has no SWORD!! Of course most ninjas will want the ability to walk on walls. But the ninja class doesnt give it to you until 20th!!! level. The is just nuts considering you can BUY the ability for ONE FREAKING POINT at first level. BAH! These classes just have a lot of problems. But perhaps most of all is that they are not really flexible. Unlike D&D most anime games will not have the players all playing different classes. Your simply not likely to see a smaurai, a mech pilot, a hot rod, and a dynamic sorcerer all in the same game. If you are playing in a gundam like game then your PCs are probably all going to be mech pilots. And since all mech pilots have the same abilities, that can get very boring. My suggestion, these classes are decent EXAMPLES of what classes might look like.
There is obviously much more to go over, but Im taking a break.
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