So, yesterday I attempted to begin a game of Big Eyes, Small Mouth 3rd Edition.  I say "attempted" not because it was unfun - far from it, it was the most fun I could have sober in an upright position - but because it took too damn long.

I lubbors my BESM 3rd Edition, but sometimes I just want to go "BESM no baka!" and hit it over the head with an extradimensional mallet from Hammerspace for not going as far as it could have with player chosen Attributes, player chosen Skills, and overt flagging mechanics.

So I introduced some house rules to my players, Alex, Jen and Eli.

Rules one and two were just "Say yes" and "or roll dice... to see if your success bites you in the ass or not."

Rules three through five were about stake setting.  How to do it, that I would ask "How are you saving the world?" if the stakes are too high and "why do you say you love him?" if the stakes were too low. ("By declaring my love for the Nightmare Prince, I will redeem him to the side of Dream!"  "Oh, okay.")

Rule six was a standard stunting mechanic - coolness bonuses.

Rule seven -merging Skills and Features into 2 point per level, player defined Traits- I thought would be contentious, but everyone agreed they made much more sense than both Skills and Features. 

I'm really glad that I yoinked this idea from Dogs in the Vineyard and others, because it made chargen a hell of a lot more fun.  What do you say?

Rule eight?  Flagging mechanic.  All Defects must be and some Attributes could be "Complications" that you can trigger to have the GM think of a devious way to have them ruin your characters state of zen, and get XP for it.  We'll see how it plays, but I LIKE this one conceptually.  Everyone liked this idea.

Rule nine was a simple "Any player that's an asshole will be outta here faster than you can say Low Earth Orbit."

So!  We made characters.  Everyone started talking about what kind of twisted Space Opera types they could make with the templates - a Really Really Good Idea in BESM, by the way.

The characters so far:

Eli was playing Fal Luxxor, an Iinar (doglike alien from a supercapitalist society) who's the epitome of the Honorable Warrior.  Tweak a Dwarf here and you have a stout, doglike alien laborer: give him the Mercenary template and some well chosen Defects and Complications and he's suddenly an honorable bourgouse (sic?) soldier with a wife and kids on an Iinar frontier world, in denial about the torture that goes on in wartime.  He was going to go with him, a techie, or I Can't Beleive It's Not Miles Vorkosigan, but Jen said, "My character and Alex's character are going to have more fun bouncing off a by-the-book foot soldier."  This was an encouraging sign.

Jen was playing Utako Koruino, not yet fully built, a human esper and acrobatic martial artist.  She never, ever does anything by the book, and cheerfuly disregards your privacy - a side effect of living in the socialist Confederation of Man.  (In Socialist Confed, when someone is always in your thoughts, you ask them to get out.)  This will cause Hilarity.  Or possibly Jailarity.

And then there was Alex.  Alex seemed uninterested until we came up with the idea of using the Idol Singer template (for the trans-pacific culturally deprived, think Britney Spears) to represent a Irresponsible Captian Tylor or Zap Brannigan type.  Then everyone got really, really into it.  Thus was born THE IRREPRESIBLE CAPTIAN JACK FALCON!  With every social Trait he could jam into the concept, 25 points worth of bouncy female mecha pilots as Companions (that's 15 of them built on 150 character points each!), and five levels of Divine Relationship (reroll any failed die roll), this character was bound for comic genius.  Then came Alex's fateful words, "This campaign will not end until he throws a Falcon Punch."  We immediately built the Falcon Punch as a Weapon Attack.  Jack goes by the book... the letter of the book, anyway, cheerfully disregarding the spirit.  He.  Makes.  Fal.  Mad.  On a more serious note, Divine Relationship is a prereq for psychic powers in my campaign, because they're based on probability manipulation...

The point of all this?  Group character and campaign creation was essential.  There was no way we could have built such fine characters ready to riff off each other without it, and My God, it was fun.