What are your favorite house rules, experiences, etc. with Big Eyes, Small Mouth?

I'm running one BESM game and (might be) playing in another.  Guess I'm on a bit of a BESM jag.  No clue why.  

But hey, it's fun.  I just haven't had much of a chance to play it (along with most everything else, save Deadlands Classic and oWoD) over the years, so...

The one house rule I'm using right now is pulled from Blackbird's excellent BESM Ex netbook:

Quote from: BlackbirdTreating combat checks like standard contested actions makes it easier for attacks to hit and ensures that the accuracy of an attack directly determines how difficult it is to defend against, but it also makes each combat roll require another step. Powerful characters will be able to more easily overwhelm weaker ones, and combat will involve more damage being dealt overall. Hong Kong Action Theater! Uses a similar rule, except that if the defender’s degree of success is less than the attacker’s but the check is still successful the damage is halved.

So I'm doing it HKAT! style.  So what little tricks can ya'll share?

Well, my personal favorite house rule is to just use some other system than BESM.

But, more on topic:

1) Flip around to a roll high system instead of a roll under system.  (This also neatly eliminates the problem the game has with combats being solely about critical hits)

2) Make attributes and skills cheaper so players will actually want to purchase some rather than spending all their points on stats.

Edit:Oh, and once it's changed to roll high, combat rolls become contested rolls with the high roll winning.  It's also helpful in that case to make the base DCV either equal to CV or 2 points higher than CV.

Quote from: Gabriel2) Make attributes and skills cheaper so players will actually want to purchase some rather than spending all their points on stats.

If I use it again in the future, I think I'll go with the optional table of escalating stat costs.  Right now, other than gm fiat, there is no good reason not to max out a stat and buy a power or two at a low level that uses that stat.

Roll high is a common house rule - rule under can get a ceiling effects with the powers.

I think that the escalating Stat Costs option neatly curbs that sort of urge, but I've not had a problem with it yet.  My players tend to want all sorts of Attributes more than Stats anyway.  Making properly anime-esque characters doesn't lend itself well to vanilla stat-munchkinning, for the most part, too.  If one wants to game chargen in BESM, it's ridiculously easy to do regardless.

I haven't seen a good reason to switch to roll-high yet.  The only issue I had so far was unrelated to the dice mechanism (it's the "ping pong" effect of un-opposed Defense,) which I corrected easily enough with the HKAT rule.

Someone on the purple, in a stunning display of actual helpfulness, directed me to a wonderful BESM fan forum with lots of information and fan-created goodies.

The Hong Kong Action Theatre! rule that if the defender successfully makes his or her DCV check but doesn't beat the attacker's margin of success, then he or she takes half damage.

EDIT: Beaten by one minute.

Ex is good as is HKAT and a few bits from Tri-Stat dX. Shock value is a must for more gritty play and makes a good mook rule.

Tekumel: Empire of the Petal Throne combines a lot of that and would work nicely as a pulp / planetary romance ruleset with little tweaking. Margins of sucess, damage multipliers, 1d10 (I use 1d12), a better (albeit geared towards Tekumel) and smaller sets of skills and such, and a very fun magic system. Tekumel magic is like the dueling sorcerors in Conan the Destroyer on 11 with Buck Rogers and secret temple spells of Doom mixed in.

My house rules document with an earlier draft in the files section. I don't mind roll under but I did have a problem with positive modifers being negative, IIRC that's fixed in T:EPT.

T:EPT makes for quick & decisive lethal combat while still taking into account combat skill and tactics. T:EPT also has combat maneuvers, a very basic mass combat resolution system, and a very useful teamwork skill which creates a team pool of pips to add to anything (doesn't have to be used in combat). And it's written in Canadian English.

In my most recent combat I almost had a TPK with some skeletons and zombies and a now undead but still sneezing Big Bad but the party used good tactics and ideas + had some good rolls. They wound up staggering away after killing the Big Bad for the 2nd time around.