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Hello everybody and welcome to this capsule review of the Basic Action Super Heroes: Ultimate Edition style role-playing game. This is your reporter for the day, Stacie, signing in to give you the highlights of this updated edition to the original BASH, which unfortunately I’ve never read nor played, so this review of Ultimate Edition is not a comparison piece between the two. This report is of the soft cover version of the book, which I was able to get in a book trade with a fellow rpg.netter so to that wonderful person, thank you for the trade.
So, the burning question of the moment that thousands of people have asked me and it is the question I try to answer in this review is, what is BASH: UE!??? Well, by the title alone, this is a super heroes role-playing game, and if you take a look at the cover and see the six costumed heroes in full color rushing at you about to burst off the page like the classic’s of old, it gives you that old school vibe of being a hero rushing off to save the day. Advertised as Simple! Fast! And Fun!, does this game live up to the hype and expectations? Well, come with me and lets take a look under the hood together and find out, shall we.
Under the Hood:
First and foremost, this game begins with the standard introductory chapter of what role-playing is and what this game is all about. Unlike most books, however, this one keeps it short, sweet, and to the point. The author briefly states that initially his goal was to make a role-playing game that would appeal to kids, and I find this admirable, and upon further reading into this book it shows that this game would make a perfect introductory game for any new player just coming into role-playing games. Nothing is extrapolated to much or into to much detail and everything is to the point. If you have kids and you want to introduce them into the wonderful world of role-playing, this is a perfect game to start with.
I should take a moment to describe this book to you. It’s 132 pages plus table of contents and index, both of which work well enough that if you don’t memorize the entire book you should be able to find whatever it is you forgot by referencing these two sections. The covers are full color, the interior is black and white and the artwork is average in a classy, comic book sense, and does help to give you that vibe that you are, indeed, reading a super hero rpg. My favorite pieces of art in the book are the comic book style pieces, like on page 67 which has the villain talking to the heroes in the classic “Villain monologue” scene and the full page shot on page 59 which introduces the players to the Narrator’s Section. Great stuff.
Another thing is that, while this book might seem small at 132 pages, it is chocked full of information and is compact. The lay out is good, there isn’t a whole lot of white space, and the artwork appeals to the feeling the book sets out to do. So, you’ll get your money’s worth.
How to BASH Others:
I know, I know, everybody wants to know how to BASH other people (no horrible pun intended right there). Everybody has two six sided dice, right? If not, go raid those old games of monopoly or yahtzee and grab a couple, because that’s all you’ll ever need.
Now that you have 2d6, whenever you make a roll, you’ll role these two dice and multiply the result against a multiplier, which is usually set by one of three Stats that defines your character: Brawn, Agility, and Mind. -- Brawn is your overall strength and toughness and determines your initial Soak and Damage in physical attacks. -- Agility is your overall reflexes, ability to dodge physical attacks, your ability to strike in close combat, your speed and priority in combat. -- Mind is your willpower, IQ, psychic potential, and uniquely enough, it also determines your ranged attack damage and your character’s awareness.
These three Stats are what defines your character’s RAW potential in BASH. They are also the base multiplier, so if you are trying to hit you’d roll 2d6 (x Agility) and your target, if an important story character, would also roll 2d6 (x Agility) and whoever rolls higher wins. That’s pretty much it. Once you master this basic system, the rest comes easy. Then if you are rolling for physical damage, the multiplier is based on Brawn or if it’s a ranged attack, then you use your Mind.
So, does this mean that whoever has the higher multiplier will almost always win? That’s where fate comes in, as if you roll your dice and they come up doubles, you get to add another d6 to the die roll. And if it comes up the same number, you keep on rolling more d6’s till you get a different result. This is where you have those people with a x2 multiplier having a decent shot at defeating somebody with a x5 multiplier.
Your Own Comic Book:
When you make a character in BASH, which we’ll get to the nuts and bolts of making a hero soon enough, you are assumed to be playing a HERO in your very own comic book. Because this is a role-playing game, you’ll most likely be teaming up with others, as it is easier and safer to save the world against those dastardly villains that wants to take over the world in world domination, but if you want to go it alone, we’ll save some space for you at the super hero cemetery…I mean, celebrate your awesome victory against overcoming the odds in the face of ultimate adversity.
Anyways, BASH does something unique in this reporter’s opinion, and this sets the tone that you are really in your own comic book. You know how most rpg’s use the terms Adventures, Rounds and Turns for sessions and combat and all that…in BASH, your Adventure is called your Issue. Rounds are Pages, and Turns are your Panels in which you act, and the whole book is written like this. This sets the tone, the mood, and really helps to get your mind into the fact that you are playing in a superhero role-playing game. When the Page flips you will get to act in your own Panel, and at the end of the Issue (Adventure) everything gets wrapped up nice and neat till your next Issue comes out.
This, in my opinion, is one of the neatest things about BASH.
At the start of each Page, each participant figures out their Priority, and the book gives a few suggestions on how to do this. One is to go in order of Agility, rolling a d6 to break any ties, and if there is a tie, ties go to the Hero, or whoever is acting the most Heroic. Another is to have everyone roll for Priority. A third option is to base their Priority on the Stat in which their action is most dependant during the Panel (if someone is performing mental actions, base the Priority off the character’s Mind stat).
Priority then sets when a person’s Panel comes up. When it comes up, its time to Act.
Being a Hero:
When its time to Act, you have a few options available to you beyond just rolling 2d6. You have these wonderful things called Hero Points and Hero Dice. The Narrator, however, also has something called Setback points, Villain Points and Villain Dice. Let’s go over the good first, before discussing the not so good.
Being a Hero is a good thing. You get to save the day, maybe get Fame and Glory along the way, and one of your tools at your disposal is your ability to perform beyond the normal call of duty. To help you succeed where you might otherwise fail is your ability to use Hero Points and potentially Hero Dice. Hero Points first.
Hero Points is your pool of luck and determination that allows you to succeed where you might fail. You spend these points to add to the result of a die roll in order to succeed. Plain and simple. If you fail by two, you spend two HP, and now you succeed. One way to get HP per issue is when you make a character and you don’t spend all your build points, whatever you have left over is your HP per issue. There are also ways of gaining them during the Issue, but that’s up to the Narrator, so be nice to her.
Hero Dice is what truly separate you from the pack. In order to gain a HD, you have to trade in 5 Hero Points, but it is these HD that let you do all the cool things like Never Say Die! (snap out of being unconscious or dazed, for example), Power Stunt! (doing something unique and new with a power for the Issue), You Weren’t Going to Start the Party Without Me! (enter a scene in which you were previously not in) plus a few other really cool uses.
Now, to the Bad…because being Hero is tough business, it is possible to gain Setback points, which are personal pools of points that you might acquire either during the adventure, or more commonly, during character creation when you spend more points on your character than the build point limit. So, if you have a built point total of 25, and you spend 28, then your Setback point pool per Issue is 3. These are the points the Narrator can use against you.
Setback points are points the Narrator gets to use against you, so be careful.
The Narrator might also gain Villain Dice, which lets him use them for his vile henchmen much like Hero Dice, plus a couple of other more Unique Uses, like letting the Villain escape mysteriously from what was certain doom to come back and fight again.
Building Your Hero:
Ahhh, now we come to what you probably wanted to know this whole time. How to Build your Hero? This is simple as well. The Narrator would decide on the relative character scale and through that, how many build points you will have available.
Character Scales from Mystery Men to Street Level to World Class to Cosmic, and the Build Points you get are split up between Stats and Powers. For example, if your making a Street Level character, the suggested total is 25 points, split between 14 for Stats and 11 for Powers.
Stats are your Brawn, Agility and Mind. Each point of Stat is 2 Build Points. Your Stats range from 0 to 5, 0 being Severely Disabled to 5 being the Pinnacle in Perfection. In BASH, average human is a Stat of 1. This does lead to some Abstraction in interpretation, which for me is perfect but for people who like more details or a more detailed power scaling this Abstraction might be too Abstract. Powers have variable point costs, depending on the power, and trust me when I say this that every point in this game is important. There are no wasted points in BASH.
After you have your Stats, you figure your Skills, which are based on your Agility and Mind. Each Agility point is a physical skill slot, and each Mind point is a mental skill slot. Simple. When making a skill check, just like above, you’d roll 2d6 and multiply the result against the Stat its based on. If you are defaulting, which is using a skill you didn’t spend a slot onto, then the multiplier is one less the Stat.
Next you come to your Hero’s Advantages and/or Disadvantages, which are optional but highly recommended by yours truly. You can pick up to three Advantages, and for every Advantage you choose, you have to take an equal number of Disadvantages. How BASH does them is great as well. For the most part they are fairly abstract and give either a bonus or penalty, but each of them is definitely influenced by the comic book feel of the game. You don’t just pick an Advantage for a numerical benefit, you do it because it truly fit’s the Hero and your Hero’s concept.
The same goes for Disadvantages.
Now comes the truly fun part of any super hero game. Your Powers. Those gifts that bless you with the power to truly defy the odds, and set yourself apart from being a mundane, normal human being into the crime fighting, butt kicking, villain defeating Super Hero in which you all aspire to become. Powers are divided into seven categories: -- Movement Powers, Combat Powers, Mastery Powers, Intense Training (those Powers that even normal humans can take), Perception Powers, Bio-Manipulation Powers, and Mental Powers.
Through the selection of these Powers, along with the Limitations and Enhancements the game provides, you can make just about any character you can think of. And as previously stated, no point goes to waste in this game. Even if you don’t spend all your points, those left over become Hero Points per Issue, so for some characters, this could definitely be a way to go.
Like the rest of the system, Powers are broad based Effects, and its designed around the concept that you won’t need to fine tune everything to such a detail that you need to list every single possible type of power stunt or effect in the Power’s description. One example given in the book is a character with the ability to shoot flames. Along with shooting flames from his hands, as smaller special effects he could also make a torch to see in the dark or snap his fingers and light a candle with his finger. These minor special effects are tiny and don’t need to be bought with points. This, I think, is a wonderful implementation of minor special effects.
One thing of note, though, that I discovered upon my second read through these rules, is that there is no in game system for making your own Powers. I’m not sure if this is a good thing or not, and I think for people who truly like to tinker with their games this might be a little offputting.
The Rest of the Book - Being the Narrator:
The First three chapters deal with all the rules and character creation guidelines. The Rest of the Book is for the Narrator in her own section. This is Chapter Four and Five, the Narrator’s Section and Settings.
The Narrator’s Section is only 14 pages long, but it’s a thing of beauty. In these 14 pages they put in enough good guidelines for running a Super Campaign and how to focus the Issue (Mysteries, Brawls, or Subplots), Random Events, Villains and Minions.
You’ve all faced those situations where you had a group of people coming over in just under a few hours, and so far you’ve had nothing prepared. Well, this book has an answer for that, and it is its Random Events generator, which is a useful tool for generating an Issue. First you roll 3 dice, and look in the appropriate neighborhood: Slum, Downtown, Midtown, Uptown, Suburbs… then from there it determines the Event type: Violent Crime, Crime, Routine, Emergency, Hero’s Life, or Something Strange, and you go from there. From these two pages of simple charts, and your own interpretative powers, you can create an Issue on just a few die rolls.
It also has great basic advice on how to run Mysteries, Brawls and using Subplots (Super, Personal, or Professional Subplots), and how if a Subplots comes into play the Narrator should award the Hero with 1 to 3 Hero Points for dealing with it.
Super Settings:
Chapter Five is the chapter on settings, and BASH hit’s the mark once again here. It goes into the different Super Genres: Pulp Heroes, Golden Age, Silver Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age, Super Teens, and even Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Cosmic.
But not only does this just describe each setting, but the author was kind enough to write up example minions, items, and gives wonderful advice on running a BASH game in each setting, as well as what the standard Tropes and expectations of the setting are. This is probably one of my favorite sections in the entire book. He even gives real life recommended reading and viewing for good representations of each setting era. For this chapter alone I’d highly recommend people at least get the PDF version of the game if they can’t get the softback. Combine with Chapter Four, this book is worth the price for all this game offers.
Appendices:
This game ends with two Appendices, a typical section on Hero and Villain Archetypes categorized by Scale, and the final on Alternate Game Mechanics.
The first is a chapter of its own full of example characters, ranging across the board on various Super Archetypes, so I won’t go into this that much.
However, the second, on Alternate Game Mechanics, provides players with other options to playing the game in case they don’t want to use the multiplier system. Playing Cards, d12 Dice Pool and d10 Dice Pool systems are listed, as well as a d6 Dice Pool Success Count system is offered. My favorite alternate use mechanic, though, is using Fudge Dice instead of the d6 dice.
It gives guidelines for using alternative map and miniature alternatives, like using Hex Maps and Measuring Tape, and the option for Buying Advantages for 1 Build Point instead of having a 1:1 match between Advantages and Disadvantages. Then it goes into Fame and finally an Experience Point system for character advancement.
The Back Cover:
The back cover of the book, like the front, is full color. It is a table of the multipliers ranging from x2 to x10 and color coded according to Difficulty results. This is very handy to have around the table and from the main website you can download this chart to print off and hand out to all your players. It’s a wonderful tool to help speed play, and after a session or two I’d want to assume that even the use of this chart might become second nature.
In Conclusion:
BASH: UE is a solid super hero role-playing game written for ease of play and to have a good time. It is more on the abstract side and for people who like to tinker, tinker, tinker with the fine details and create their own powers and skills and special effects, this game doesn’t necessarily provide the tools to create your own stuff. There is no section, for example, on how to build your own Power. If you wanted to add your own Power, you’d have to basically come up with it and compare to what’s already in the book.
That said, there is more than enough in this book for everybody, and for anybody who likes the comic book genre of role-playing games, and like to have a kick back, fun time with a system that appears to play fast and loose, this game is quite possibly for you.
This is Stacie from channel rpg.net, signing off! Keep the Gaming Real!
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