The new edition of Big Eyes Small Mouth is available in PDF Form for backers and I wanted to take an opportunity to create a character – as that is one of the best ways to go about learning a new game…However there is also another anime focused game on the market called OVA by Wise Turtle Publishing. That is also a good rules lite game that many people are aware of. I have posted some characters for that system on my blog. My main goal today is to showcase a version of the same character using both of the versions of Big eyes small mouth as well as a version of her in OVA.

My first thought for making a character for these systems is that i should aim for something with a lower intensity. Something that could be a one shot or a character for a mini series that does not revolve around combat…

For a mini series light on combat you need a protagonist that suits the narrative. So when making a character, you sometimes get ideas on how things should go… but as I made her- I kept coming up with new ideas and scrapping old ones. So I would say her design evolved over the course of creating her. I made the character technically four times. Once for BESM 4 lite. Once for BESM 4 core. Then I went back and remade her lite version with some new ideas and concepts I thought about from the Core design… Finally I created her in OVA.

Without further Adieu, I introduce “Flying Girl Sachiko” – including the most important part of character creation…getting to know the character.



*I did not create this picture… image details at the end of document.

Flying Girl Sachiko – I envision takes place in modern day Japan. Rarely, the new generation has been experiencing a strange new yet extraordinarily rate phenomenon. Called Xceed, the new X gen has kids born with random special abilities. Sachiko is one such youth.

Sachiko Shinohara is a 14 year old girl that lives in Calderon valley. She lost her mother at a young age and lives with her father in a two bedroom apartment on the eastern side. She just started her first day of high school at Tezuka high, known for their athletic students. Sachiko herself is a youth that loves to indulge herself in gossip with her friends Anna and Violet. She herself, is a bit anxious, and absolutely abhors violence. She can be a bit naïve and even impulsive and therefore can be quick to jump into situations and sometimes make them worse though she is well meaning. Sachiko loves her father very much and understands how much he has to work to keep a roof over her head and take care of her…so she does her best to try to help him whenever possible. Her biggest fear is loosing him and that fear often causes her much distress.

Despite her loathing for violence, her father Akira made her take some self defense courses. He was adamant that someday the time may come when she may need to defend herself or someone she cares about… So he enrolled her in the Orange Star karate academy where she is currently a yellow belt.

Sachiko Xceeded – giving her the special ability to fly. She can fly without wings or other outward expression, though she glows faintly before she begins to lift off. She can fly extremely fast but flying for long periods of time can be tiring. The Japanese government has not interacted a registration for its Xceed populace but there is talk within the Japanese Diet that such measures could be worth entertaining if necessary. For now, her gift seems to give her unwanted attention sometimes as people will want to see it in action or ask her to deliver things.

Now that you have an understanding of who Sachiko is, lets try to express her through the game mechanics of BESM and OVA.

I mentioned this in my rules preview for BESM 4 but I figure I can reproduce it here… BESM 4 is a point based rpg where the GM will tell you how many character points you will begin the game with. It has guidelines that tell you in general what power level your campaign will be. Points are then used to determine how your character interacts with the world. Stats are the primary basis of the game. In games like dungeons and dragons you have 6 stats – strength, constitution, dexterity, intelligence, willpower and charisma. In BESM, you only have 3 main stats that cover a broad base. Body, Mind and Soul – thus the game’s Tri-stat system. You then choose attributes that help determine what extra abilities your character has access to. You then get defects to help define your character’s personal challenges and personality quirks.

BESM was split into 2 editions essentially but they work functionally the same. With BESM 4 Lite (I refuse to call it Naked) the game’s attributes, defects and other details are often shortened a bit in order to make the game easier to play. BESM 4 Core is not actually that much more difficult in many scenarios but it does have more details in many areas. I found that this character in particular was very similar in both versions of BESM. I did take some extra time in BESM Core to finer detail how some things worked.

BESM 4 – Lite – Flying Girl Sachiko. Adventurer tier- start with 50 character points.

Name: Sachiko

Age: 14

Tristat 30 pts

Body: 4

Mind: 4

Soul: 7

Attributes 33 pts

Attack Mastery level 1

Defense Mastery level 1

Energized level 4

Features Level 1 – holding breath

Flight level 6

Inspire level 2

Mulligan level 2

Skill Group level 4

Domestic level 2 at 1/1

School student level 1 at 2/1

Defects 13

Easily Distracted level 2 – teen troubles/gossip

Hounded level 1 – isn’t that the flying girl?

Ism level 2 – Agism – “She’s just a kid!”

Phobia level 3 – fear of losing her father

Social Fault Level 2 – Anxious, impulsive, pacifistic

Derived Values

Combat Value 5

Attack combat value 6

Defense combat value 6

Health Points 55

Energy points 95

The BESM lite version of Sachiko is pretty nice. As you can see she has a little bit of self defense training but otherwise the real star of the show is her name sake. She is able to fly and that gift is incredible at level 6. One thing to note here is that within the character basics chapter – they note that within the adventurer tier that level 4 is the max you can go. However, there can be exceptions as noted in the exceptions section – just be sure to talk to the GM first. Because Sachiko is a character designed for myself by myself, I allowed her to break limit on this one attribute.

BESM 4 – Core Sachiko

Something I began to think about is how it would be nice if she had better control over her flight powers. In BESM 4, flight defaults to Body when making a difficulty check so one of the changes I made to the core version was to give her a situational bonus to her body stat only when she is flying to represent finer control over her flight power. In addition, I wanted a few more points to fine tune the character so I increased the annoyance she gets when dealing with people on her powers – so hounded level 2. Another thing that seemed odd to me was her amount of health points. I felt that it was odd that she had so much HP given her age so I added fragile as a defect to reduce it a bit. One thing I considered was changing attack combat and defense combat mastery to melee attack and melee defense respectively. I felt that these while costing the same could get more bang for your buck but I also felt that the bonus would be higher than intended… sometimes less is more and since this anime series isn’t supposed to be a combat based one, I kept the values as they were before.

Name: Sachiko

Age: 14

Tristat 30 pts

Body: 4

Mind: 4

Soul: 7

Attributes 35

Attack Mastery level 1

Augmented – Level 2 effective level 3 – body + level – Dependent on attribute flight.

Defense Mastery level 1

Energized level 4

Features Level 1 – holding breath

Flight level 6

Inspire level 2

Mulligan level 2

Skill Group level 4

Domestic level 2 at 1/1

School student level 1 at 2/1

Defects 17

Easily Distracted level 2 – teen troubles/gossip

Fragile level 2 +2

Hounded level 2 – isn’t that the flying girl?

Ism level 2 – Agism – “She’s just a kid!”

Phobia level 3 – fear of losing her father

Social Fault Level 2 – Anxious, impulsive, pacifistic

Finally I wanted touse the other anime rpg that BESM will be most often compared to. That one is Open Versatile Anime rpg (OVA) by wise turtle publishing. I have written a few things on the blog as well as detailed characters for it. I will make a version of Sachiko for this game as well.

OVA rpg is a neat game. It is rules lite and its philosophy comes from the fact that you must define the exceptions to your character rather than everything else. So it automatically presumes you are average at most things but your positive qualities (abilities) and negative qualities (weaknesses) are defined through stats. This was done in order to try to give emphasis to those traits and ocerall reduce the amount of things needed to account for.

In order to determine how abilities are weaknesses are awarded, OVA rpg has a few different ways to make characters. The more common one (that also tends to produce more powerful characters) is the base zero rule. It states that for every ability you gain you must have an equal amount of points in weaknesses to counteract it. It does allow you to have 5 points by default that you do not have to have an equal amount of defects.

By this time I have pretty much defined what makes Sachiko – Sachiko.

OVA version

Name: Sachiko TV 10

Age: 14

Abilities – 18

Agility +1

Charismatic (to represent Inspire) +2

Cute +1

Endurance Reserve +3

Evasive +2

Flight + 6

Knowledge

• Domestic level 2

• Academia level 2

Lucky +2

Weaknesses – 16 (includes special notes below)

Ageism -1

Easily Distracted -2 (to represent more than one thing – being teen troubles and gossip)

Frail -2

Impulsive -2

Naïve -1

Pacifist -2

Unique weakness – fear of loss (to represent the paranoia above) – 2

Unique weakness – unwanted attention (I felt that love magnet was close but did not represent what I needed) -2

Special notes

Endurance Use level 2 – flight (the flight ability costs endurance points to utilize)

Values

Health – 20

Endurance – 100

Combat

Hand to hand – +1 dice (3 dice rolled), Damage multiplier (DX) 1, endurance cost 0, Defense +2 (4 dice rolled)

Final note no OVA – TV is a value in OVA that helps GMs determine challenge rating but I always had a hard time with it.

I think OVA does a great job representing the character as well. Agile and Evasive do a good job of making her swift and the bonuses help her slightly with attacking and defending/avoiding damage. One thing that OVA had that BESM didn’t was that – I always intended that Sachiko’s flight powers costed her endurance. BESM 4 has built in rules for doing things over a long period of time… so that will work in theory but I always wanted it to be existing to fly without wings. BESM 4 has “deplete” under the customization section as a limiter…however I feel like it’s a bit too strict, even at level 1. What I would want is something like that – that costs energy points but the cost is lower over a longer period of time. OVA has “Endurance use” as a weakness that has a much better curve for my original intentions. OVA had me create a few things to cover some of the weaknesses I had in mind. Its not difficult to actually do this but its something I had to for OVA that BESM had originally. Of course this also could have been a product of the fact that I made her twice in BESM before making her once in OVA – so maybe if I did it the other way there may be things I would need to make in BESM that were in OVA… Though – BESM has more up front things… so its possible it would have already existed anyway but that’s just some speculation.

Ok so there we have it. It was interesting making the same character across multiple versions. BESM lite is still a great representation of my initial idea. BESM 4 core builds a bit off that and I think with core you may want those extra details. In the case of this character it may be a good idea to have a little higher of a body stat but I didn’t really want it all the time… hence my version adding augmented. I also kept playing around with having her take deplete and attach it to flight to represent how exhausing the power is supposed to be but I couldn’t get over the cost being 10 points per 1 minute. That works pretty good in combat but outside of that it seems a bit more expensive than I’d like…however she also has a huge flight speed so that could be mitigated from that alone…

OVA also has a great representation too. I think no matter what system you chose, a character made in this kind of low intensity setting – will work great for both games.

** Note: The wise Turtle himself contacted me to let me know that Fear actually would do a good job of representing the loss weakness so I wouldn’t have had to create the custom weakness! That’s pretty awesome, thanks for the clarification!

The artwork for Sachiko was created by a character creator program I came across on twitter.

Anime drawing creator – girls

https://picrew.me/image_maker/43383

Anime Drawing creator – boys

https://picrew.me/image_maker/135049