RPG system: Big Eyes, Small Mouth
About ten years ago, I was introduced to a quirky little RPG system called BESM, which stands for Big Eyes, Small Mouth. The title is a nod to anime — and the whole system was designed to run anime tie-in games, like Trigun and Hellsing. I’m not a hardcore anime nerd, but I have my favorite cartoons and we gave the system a shot.
Guardians of Order, the company that originally published Big Eyes, Small Mouth is long gone, but my gaming group is still playing BESM. It’s our go-to system for any game that doesn’t fit specifically into another role-playing world or ruleset.
Because it was designed to play anime-based games — which fall into a myriad of genres — BESM was built to be flexible. It’s a universal system, like GURPS. For instance, Big Eyes, Small Mouth has a skill list for science fiction, so that you can run a Cowboy BeBop game. There’s a skill list for magic girl anime, so you can run Sailor Moon. There’s a skill list for high school romance, so you can run Ouran Host Club games. There are game attributes like Combat Mastery and Super-Strength, but there’s also Animal Friendship and Art of Distraction. The special attacks are even modular so you can recreate every Rurouni Kenshin sword technique, or all the spells from Record of Lodoss War. (Am I dating myself yet? Do I need to make a Robotech reference? I’ve been gaming a long time, folks.)
The BESM system is flexible — if a little clunky — and it took us a few games to feel out all the power-balance issues, and places where the rules were fuzzy or not robust enough for our gaming needs. So, of course, we house-ruled the hell out of it. Right out of the box, BESM makes room for you to invent your own Attributes and we went batshit with that. Then we tweaked combat a little to establish some standards to underpin our RPGs, adjusted the costs of this or that, and made it our own.
There’s a D20 version of Big Eyes, Small Mouth, but we use the D6 tri-stat system. The last part of the name comes from the core of three stats: mind, body, and soul. BESM isn’t a class or level-based system, so everything else is freely purchased — with the approval of the Storyteller — more like a White Wolf character.
We learned quickly that while it’s relatively cheap to max out a starting character’s stats, no Storyteller in their right mind should let their players do that. Skill checks quickly become just laughably easy. So one of the things we house-ruled was a scaling cost for character stats over 6 (out of 12).
But my favorite thing about BESM — as I mention in the D&D post — is the special attacks. It’s an optional Attribute and set of BESM rules, but it’s become a core mechanic in our gaming group. Everyone starts with two or three special attacks, which they build from a list of attack abilities and disabilities. Most importantly, each attack does some base amount of damage.
There are two important things about that base damage. One, I know there’s a lower limit to what my PCs can dish out, and I can scale my combats accordingly. I know roughly how many hits it will take to drop an enemy. If any of the PCs went combat-crazy, then they’ll just take things down faster, but I know how much faster and how to balance combat accordingly. Even if someone wants to play the nerdiest librarian, I know that their Book Bash attack will do that base amount of damage, and the player can’t make a character that will be totally useless in combat.
And our librarian brings me to the other reason why I fell in love with the special attacks — the librarian can do their damage with a book. Book Bash has the same base damage as the Chainsaw Enema attack that the next player made. Is this realistic? No, not remotely.
However, BESM is made for anime-style roleplaying, in which tsundere girls can produce tables out of nowhere to bash people over the head, if you want to go whole-hog. But more realistically for my game campaigns, it means that my assassin character — trained to slice up victims with a sharp little knife — can keep up with the holy knight and his ridiculously big broadsword.
An argument can be made that if I want to play a knifey person, I should play a rogue with all their back-stabby goodness to make up for my tiny weapon. But not every system has rogues and backstabs. BESM is flexible enough to make one, but it’s also flexible enough to let me just make knife special attacks — like one called Backstab — that are the equal to the holy knight’s Smite attack.
Maybe I want to use a knife, but I really want my character to be a butcher whose blade skills came from the kitchen. In Dungeons and Dragons, what do I choose for my class? Rogue, because I want to use a knife? Other than the knife skills, rogue isn’t a match for my concept at all. Crap!
Or let’s step further away from D&D. I recently made a character for a Fantasy Flight Games Edge of the Empire campaign, which is a Star Wars RPG. I was playing a Hired Gun with the Marauder specialization. The Hired Gun is a straight-up combat class, and the Marauder is a specialization focused on beating people with melee weapons. Inspired by Chirrut Imwe from Rogue One, I wanted to play a Guardian of the Whills, topped to the gills with martial arts abilities. I wanted to beat the shit out of stormtroopers with a collapsible baton.
But here’s the thing — batons suck in that system. A vibro-axe does more damage, and if I wanted to play the best Marauder I could, I would carry one of those. But I don’t want to. I have actual martial arts experience with sticks, and I have images in my head of epic baton choreography. But I had to suborn my concept and my style in search of the “best weapon.”
With BESM special attacks, though, there is no “best weapon.” Characters don’t have to pick the highest damage weapon, save up their money to buy a bigger sword, or min-max anything. If my player wants to play a dryad and beat people with her magic stick, someone wants to play a goblin with a dinky knife, and someone else wants to play some dude with a chainsaw, the dryad and goblin don’t have to throw away their stick and knife and go looking for chainsaws, too. It lets the character be more important than their weapon.
My gaming group has actually run anime games like Trigun and Avatar: The Last Airbender, but we’ve also run fantasy-horror using BESM — Tydalus, if you’ve read From Dream to Dice — and it’s our preferred system for running both Rifts and Star Wars. They’re both settings that we love, but not systems that we were entirely satisfied with. I’ve played Palladium’s Rifts since I was a kid, and played a half-dozen different Star Wars systems — but for both, our house-ruled BESM has been the most fun.
We use a modified version of second edition Big Eyes, Small Mouth. BESM went through a couple of other editions and then went out of print, so my group may be the only people still playing it. The rights were acquired by White Wolf some years ago and we approached them a couple of times about buying BESM to keep developing it, but I’m afraid the answer was no. So we can’t publish any of the system stuff we do, but Big Eyes, Small Mouth is a fun, quirky little system that’s been flexible enough to help us create a lot of stories over the years.
EDIT: There’s a Kickstarter running for the 4th edition of BESM right now!
