RPG Spotlight: Big Eyes Small Mouth; The Anime and Manga RPG System
If you, like me, spent way too many of your teenage dollars and hours on subtitled cartoons, Big Eyes Small Mouth is an RPG system you’ll want to check out.
With its first publication in 1997, Dyskami Publishing tried to fill in a niche with Big Eyes Small Mouth, making a tabletop system specifically for anime-style role playing. Creating a system that revolves around one specific genre or universe is usually neat and clean. The people who want to play in that particular sandbox are familiar with what the world should look and feel like and the game designers usually know how to make the world look and feel that way. But anime isn’t just one genre. You can go from super heroes to mechas to sports to monster slayers to slice of life in one thirty second scroll through Crunchyroll.
2nd Edition’s GM Screen.
BESM is a tabletop system that tries to cater to all of those genres at the same time, and manages to pull it off better than you’d think. The 3rd edition source book (that happens to be the edition that I own) is full of helpful tips regarding the general feel of anime and how to GM certain scenarios as well as incorporating options for all of the big and small anime tropes I can think of. It’s a system that seems to want you to succeed. It wants you to feel like you’re living in your favorite anime, whether you’re a GM or a player, and it succeeds because the game loves anime as much as you do.
Unfortunately, being open and available for any anime world you want to jump into means that BESM falls slightly into the same pit as GURPS; it’s kind of crunchy. You buy your character’s skills and attributes with points and buy back points by taking defects (sound familiar?) to create your own bespoke anime character. I find it a little less crunchy than GURPS personally because it’s at least somewhat streamlined for a couple of core genres that most people would be sitting down to play in, but I couldn’t call character creation easy by any stretch.
Luckily, the book has an entire chapter full of basic character templates for you to copy and modify if that’s the route you’d want to take.
Gameplay is probably similar to other’s you’ve experienced. Roll two D6, add or subtract your attributes, skills, or defects as applicable and try to roll over the difficulty level the GM has set for you. It used to have a roll-under system, but switched to roll-over with third edition.
Overall, BESM is a fun game to fill in the intersection of anime fans and tabletop game enthusiasts. It’s a little generic, but so is the umbrella genre of “anime.” The book isn’t small, topping out at 240 pages, but they spend so many of those pages explaining various skills in painstaking detail and leaving encouraging notes and hints for potential GMs. BESM is a system that wants you to enjoy your time at the table, and only gets in its’ own way from time to time. But if you want to run a campaign with magical girls, giant robots, and student athletes all at the same time Big Eyes Small Mouth just may the exact system for your game.
Keep an eye out for fourth edition which is scheduled to be available for purchase in the next few months.
What’s your favorite anime genre or show? Have you played a BESM game? Let us know in the comments! Is anyone interested in the Rayearth-esque campaign I bought this book for and then never ran?
Happy Adventuring!
