Best friends may not be the most testosterone filled RPG in the market, but dang it if its not one of the most creative to come along in a long time. If you have seen your share of dungeons, dragons, cyborgs and evil bases, you should enjoy best friends, whom appear to be more viscious than all the previously listed
Best friends produced by Box Ninja and written by Gregor Hutton is an RPG heavy system that has its players playing the rolls of girls with serious problems towards one another. The tone of the game is very much tounge in cheek. This game is not a cutesy RPG for kids, as the name suggests. It appears that when girls have it in for each other, it gets very cutthroat. Of course any man who has ever taken his wife to a dinner, only to have another woman have her dress on has witnesses this before. The game is best for five players, though there are rules for anywhere between 2 to 8 players (not including a GM). The 50 pgs are all well laid out and contains both PDF bookmarks, table of content bookmarks and internal bookmarks to make navigation pretty easy.
A unique thing about the game is that it does not have a ?set? RPG setting. Game Masters are free to play the game out however they wish. You can use any setting, fantasy, scifi, serious, silly, horror or anything else you can think of. If you tweak it a bit, you can even lay it over your d20 game and play both systems simultaneiously. So those of you whom have always wanted to run an all Red Sonja game are finally in luck.
Once its determined what will be played, the game master develops scenerios with each scenario beginning with a conflict between the players based on their dislikes of each other. Players must play out their characters as their dice indicate.
There are no dice to be rolled. All conflict resolutions are solved by whom has the higher rating. You also get a few ?friend chips? that allow you to temporarily boost your ability to win a conflict. For the typical RPGer, this appears to be the biggest weakness in the system. The lack of randomness can make you feel trapped/
For the Player
Like, the most coolest thing about this game, is like the character creation system. Its like, so innovative. Seriously!. Instead of, like, you picking out your character traits, your character traits are selected by how, like, the other players see you.. You first select a name, then everyone shows everyone else their name. Next to the five hatreds, you list a player?s name like other than yourself. The hatreds are: pretty, cool, smart, tough and rich, which are also your key abilities. If two people placed you as like pretty, you have a 2 bonus in pretty. The game is like not dependant on lots of stats so after your attributes are determined, you are free to write down all your other loves, hates and like of course girly items you own.
This creates a very free form environment like for the player and like adds a lot to character creation.
For the Game Master
Again, you will, like, love the character creation which really takes a step away from power gaming. You will, like, find yourself putting in a lot of, like, work. Best Friends is a light preparation RPG which means you will, like, have to come up with things on the fly and ,like make a lot of decision making because of the vagueness of what constitutes what hatred.
Like also, The game is built around playing it session by session, and does not lend itself to a ?like? full campaign. But for th
The Like Iron Word
I like so enjoyed this game. The player creation system is awesome and I can see myself instituting a similar system in my d20 game. This is another game for the pure RPGer that is unusually polished for a new system.
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<b>LIKED</b>: - The player creation was very unique
- lots of rpg opportunities
- Way to vent some steam when your daughter runs up her cell phone bill. <br><br><b>DISLIKED</b>: - Little randomness
- lots of dm in game work<br><br><b>QUALITY</b>: Very Good<br><br><b>VALUE</b>: Satisfied<br>
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