Crouching Dragon, Drifting BESM

[J B Bell]

A while ago, I bought BESM.  This was before I became fully enlightened from reading the Forge.  :)  I was attracted to the "Hero Lite" character design, the extremely nice interiors, and the obvious love that has gone into this thing.

I had a nifty setting--a world invaded and conquered by the Demon Lords, masters of flesh-shaping, not so great with using technology.  Magic is afoot on Earth after the Big Apocalypse, there's mutant critters and people, and there are probably caches of high-tech waiting to be explored.  It's what I call a "kitchen sink" setting.

For some reason I balked at using BESM at the last hour and converted everything to FUDGE.  My lack of understanding that what I'd succeeded at in the past was a very unconscious Illusionism, and my players' being totally new, and other factors, made our first couple sessions--well, they weren't very good.  Eventually we ended up playing Sorcerer, and that rocked.

That setting still tickles the back of my mind, and I've figured out that the Premise relates somehow to the idea of "colonization"; maybe something like "with your home taken from you, your culture suppressed, and your very body subject to the whims of a total state, what is your refuge; how do you know who and what you are?"

Thing is, I still like the Exploration of System inherent in amusing myself by designing powers in the vein of Hero System.  It's an art unto itself.  This is an initial check-in to see if I'm sane, just showing some design goals and thinking out loud a bit.  So, here are some design goals:

[*]A d6 pool system, probably with a "trumping die"--that is, if you have a trump die in your pool, and the opposing roll doesn't, you win, period.  Consult the overall result for the quality of success or failure.  I'm interested to figure ways to find depth and breadth to shorten handling time in such a system.
[*]Some meta-game mechanic that's fairly strong (a way of getting said trump dice) to inject Narrativist decision-making into . . .
[*]A relatively Simmy (or vanilla Narrativist) system of character & item design, reasoning back from effects in the Hero/BESM vein.
[*]Resolution would also be in the Sorcerer vein, though possibly more towards mint chocolate chip than vanilla.
[/list:u]

Part of the reason for some levels of Sim goodness is to blur the line between "demonic," "human," and "mutant" powers.  Demons' powers are all body-centric--they're Cronenbergian nasties; humans can do magic of a folk variety, and possibly some goofy martial-arts stuff; and mutants are, well, mutants--their powers are "natural" in origin.  One possible story vector for a campaign of this game would be gradually eroding these lines, or challenging them, as PCs discover suff like "Eric's not a mutant--he's half-demon!"

OK, I think that's too tall an order to just drift BESM.  But if people have an overwhelming urge to boost BESM and tell me how to handle it, I am interested.

I'll try to post a bit more later after I hit the drawing board for a bit.

--JB

[Bankuei]

As a fellow fan of BESM, here's some general ideas you might consider:

•Dice Pool
Keep the stats as in BESM, simply use the number as the amount of dice to be rolled.  Choose some arbitrary means of success(even/odds, 1-3/3-6, whatever).  Most successes = success.  you can also have gradiation in quality.

•Metagame trump dice
Either copy ROS's Spiritual Attributes, or Scattershot's instant rewards.  Both would work well in this case.

•Character/power/item creation
Keep the BESM rules, and use it to build things.  As far as your setting, you can limit certain types of powers(mutants, demons, etc) to certain powers, or maximum levels in certain powers(such as demons might be the only ones with Soul Attack).

This is just some ideas, but I look forward to seeing what you do with it.

Chris