OSSR: Buffy the Vampire Slayer RPG

[angelfromanotherpin]

I'm coming at this review from a position of some ignorance of both source and system. I was only vaguely aware of the geek-culture juggernaut that was the Buffy TV series when it was on the air, despite being smack in the target audience at the time. I saw an episode here and there, but I got most of it second-hand from real devotees I knew, and didn't actually sit down and give the series any real attention until Netflix streaming; I'm very fuzzy on details. I've been somewhat more aggressive about not giving Unisystem any of my brainspace until now, because it looked a lot like a bunch of other not-very-distinct generic systems that I always regretted looking at, and the flagship games (All Flesh Must be Eaten and Witchcraft) didn't interest me.

There are two versions of the core book; the first came out in 2002, while the show was still on the air and is only current through the end of the show's 5th season; it also pretends not to be a Unisystem game based on what appear to be a very few minor deviations. The 2005 revised edition has the whole series to draw on, and has stopped pretending. I'm doing the 2002 version, because that fulfills the age/edition requirements for the OSSR label, and also seems more likely to be hilarious. If anyone is really interested, I might do an addendum and compare the revised version.


Pre-Chapter 1

Book's a glossy hardcover, very high production values generally.


At least 6/8 of the people on that cover are smirking.

In fact, by RPG standards, this book is really gorgeous, and not just because it has American TV star faces all over it. Basically every page is in full-color, and even though the bottom layer is usually some sort of elaborate print, the text is always very readable. The credits page is a particularly nice example, evoking as it does the style of the show's opening credits.

Page 2: Credits
Now, there's only one name under 'Writer and Game Designer,' which suggests a nice unified vision. But there are seven more names under 'additional writers,' and I don't know what that means. A bunch of them are also in the ~50-name long 'Playtesters' list, so my first thought was that they were being credited for some things that came out of the playtest, but a few of them aren't, so I don't even know. Also, the foreword is listed separately and credited to Chistopher Golden, who appears to be a generally successful pro author, and who wrote a pile of official Buffy-verse fiction.

The book has two producers and a director, and I didn't think that those were things a book had. I guess I can see a director, making sure the art and the text and all that come together effectively. Not even the foggiest notion of what a book producer might contribute.

One editor, one assistant editor, four proofreaders, and as I mentioned, ~50 playtesters. Very impressive QC for an RPG book. I find myself wondering, how much did Eden Games shell out for this thing? The RPG license (along with seemingly unlimited image usage) might have been relatively cheap, but the production, presentation, editing, etc. all make it seem like this was a big bet on the game doing very well.

However, the real comedy gold on this page are the five names listed as 'Quotemeisters,' (presumably in charge of sifting appropriate page quotes from the vast abundance of snappy dialogue available) and this line:

Buffy is hip and tuned in.

It's part of a section about how the book includes a lot of pop culture references to properly capture the feel of the show (and no IP infringement is intended), but man, I can't read that with a straight face.

Page 3: Table of Contents
Under a group shot of the main cast (Season 2, I think), we are promised eight chapters, an appendix, an index... and two sections between Chapters 2 and 3 that apparently don't count: Archetypes and Original Cast. I feel like those could have merited being a chapter, but maybe the director was making some kind of a statement.

Page 4
A splash page of Angel's face.

Page 5
A splash page of Buffy's face.

Page 6-7: Foreword
The 'foreword' is actually a two page fiction. It's... not great. It introduces a few of the setting conceits (though, crucially, not the basic Slayer deal), includes a few Whedonisms, and it emphasizes Slayer angst, the tedium of patrolling and stakeouts, the emotional stress of fighting and killing the possessed bodies of people you knew in life. It's a downer, and it doesn't make me want to play the game. The angst was an important part of the series as a whole, but I'd think as a grabber intro you'd want to focus on the humor, the horror, and/or the excitement angle(s).


Next Up: Chapter 1 - It's the Slayer's World, We Just Play Here.

[Heaven's Thunder Hammer]

I watched the show but never took it seriously enough to even read the rpg books. I'm curious to see what you uncover.

[Laertes]

I had friends at university who were very into Joss Whedon and so prevailed upon me to play this with them. My verdict, not being a Whedonite myself, was pretty "meh." From a game standpoint Cinematic Unisystem doesn't really do anything special. The Buffyverse IP was the game's selling point, and for all I know that may have been very successful: the overlap between Buffy geeks and RPG geeks is extremely high.

[Covent]

I admit to requesting this, as I have fond memories of both the show and game, and was curious as to how it was viewed by others.

[Ancient History]

I was asked to make a crossover Buffy RPG/Firefly RPG game once. But they were drunk and I was not.

[codeGlaze]

I have friends who love it.

The problems they've had to wrangle are near-immortal Slayers and witches.
Witches get middling-to-low support spell-wise, but can end up being overly powerful.

So basically if you're not either of those... you're Xander more often than not.

[Slade]

Hey, Xander was pretty bad-ass, but strangely only when alone.
Remember that episode where he took out 12 zombies "ghouls" (they were intelligent, but undead bodied) that planned to blow up the school.

He was alone, but decimated them all.

Sure, the rest of gang of scoobies was fighting an eldritch evil in the hell mouth at the time, but if he didn't succeed they would be dead from the blast.
Sometimes he was more competent than others. Plus, he used the power of love to defeat Willow "evil witch" mode when Tara died lol

[angelfromanotherpin]

I. It's the Slayer's World, We Just Play Here

The chapter titles have an irritatingly elaborate font. It's not illegible (except for the capital letters, but those are easily deduced from context), but most of what it communicates is pretention.

This chapter is the 'introduction to...' chapter. It starts with an intro to RPG concepts, although it uses TV terminology for them. The MC is the 'Director,' the PCs are 'Cast Members,' and the NPCs are 'Guest Stars' if they aren't hostile, or 'Adversaries' if they are. That last one not really fitting the pattern aside, these terms are twee, but strike me as a decent way to introduce the concepts. I recall a few games from around this period specifically labeling less-important NPCs as 'Extras' as well.

The style of the text is also twee, in that it is specifically Buffy-type stylized-conversational. It varies between well-done and... not, but I think it succeeds as branding, if nothing else.

There's a bit of unhealthy MC-elevation. I don't mind them being characterized as 'first creator,' because MCs do tend to create a lot more content than other players, but it goes on to talk about 'handing down' rulings and 'enlightened despotism,' and how 'most Directors are all in favor of players doing the sucking up thing.' It's an honest and light-hearted acknowledgement of a dynamic that can exist, but it doesn't need to be endorsed. Even in 2002, this is something the hobby should have outgrown.

Sessions, dice, all the usual suspects get some ink. There's a summary of the chapters, and it's a bit unfortunate that the chargen chapter comes before the system chapter. That's an amateur mistake, and I blame the director. Also, the appendix appears to focus on authentic Buffyspeak, just in case you hadn't yet realized that was a thing.

Then they explain a bunch of things I don't think really need explanation. If this is a call-out to the show, I don't get it. Like, they explain their use of tangential text boxes, U.S. measurements, and using the feminine pronoun as their general pronoun because Slayers are girls.

Finally, setting stuff. The vampire/slayer/watcher background is very briefly explained here. Then they summarize the first five seasons of the show. It's like, if you were new to RPGs, the previous material was for you; but this is for the people who are new to Buffy and also don't care about spoilers, because damn, the spoilers. This seems more like the writer being very enthusiastic about the show than anything else, because it's actually a pretty daunting read for someone who's just getting started. It's kind of like starting a superhero RPG with a summary of 100 issues of Uncanny X-Men; even if it's all good stuff, that is too much continuity to expect a person to have to deal with straight out of the gate, especially when the basic pitch is so simple and punchy.

Although, I will say that the end of Season 5 is actually a really good point in the canonical timeline to start a campaign, because (spoiler warning) Buffy dies at the end of Season 5, so the way is totally clear for a new (PC) Slayer to emerge, while still allowing fans to include as much of the rest of the setting as they want.


Next up: Chapter 2, Some Assembly Required

[codeGlaze]

Hey, Xander was pretty bad-ass, but strangely only when alone.
Remember that episode where he took out 12 zombies "ghouls" (they were intelligent, but undead bodied) that planned to blow up the school.

He was alone, but decimated them all.

Sure, the rest of gang of scoobies was fighting an eldritch evil in the hell mouth at the time, but if he didn't succeed they would be dead from the blast.
Sometimes he was more competent than others. Plus, he used the power of love to defeat Willow "evil witch" mode when Tara died lol

Right.
He makes for an awesome and endearing NPC.

But it sucks to be Scrappy Doo as a PC.

[angelfromanotherpin]

2. Some Assembly Required

So, the chargen chapter, where you get to assign your numbers before knowing what they do. Good times.

This chapter's opening is mostly pretty good, talking about a lot of different ways to handle character generation, endorsing both adhering to canon and diverging from it, using characters from the show as PCs and making your own (or combining the two), and so on.

Except that again, the assumed primacy of the Director is everywhere. Literally the first paragraph ends with 'You are limited only by your imagination – and the casting needs of the Director.' Way to step on my dreams, guy. And that sentiment is everywhere.

Now, I understand that Unisystem is a point-buy system in the same philosophical boat as GURPS and HERO, and as a result MC guidance in chargen is probably crucial to keep things at all sane but this goes well beyond that. The only part where possible player resentment is acknowledged is in the subsection which discusses the MC designing all the characters and having the players pick from among them, saying that they might feel deprived of their "fundamental right" to participate in their own chargen. Those quotes around fundamental right are in the text.

Credit where it's due, the text does encourage the Director to be 'flexible and sensitive,' but always from a position of authority.


This picture expresses my response to that, and if you repeat it 100 times, also expresses the art direction for the book.

Anyway, character creation has four steps: Type, which tells you how many points you get in each of the following steps; Attributes, Qualities/Drawbacks, and Skills. Those are each bought out of separate budgets, although Drawbacks give points that can be spent on either Qualities or Skills, suggesting that the two are interchangeable (or that one of those options is a sucker's game).

The character types are basically power levels. Supposedly, White Hats are basically ordinary people; Heroes are beginning Slayers or experienced normals; and Experienced Heroes are what they sound like. I say supposedly, because I don't have a lot of faith that the writers can judge effectiveness very well. Though, at this point it's just a suspicion, I'm willing to be convinced.

Human attributes are mostly on a 1-5 scale, with 6 being the human maximum, except for one-in-a-billion prodigies who get to 7. Not that the setting is short of superhuman beings, so the system presumably goes as high as needed. The six attributes are Str/Dex/Con/Int, Perception and Willpower.

Qualities and Drawbacks come in a long-form listing, without an actual list form until the appendix. Some are...questionably balanced.

The Age Quality (representing centuries of life for various long-lived supernaturals) costs 2 points/level, and gives +1 skill point per point of Int (max 4) per level, and one 'free' level of Adversary or Secret, for a nominal net point gain.

The two-point Artist Quality gives +1 to two different Attributes, +1 to the Art skill, and -1 Willpower, for +1 Attribute and +1 Skill point for 2 Quality points, suggesting that an Attribute point is also on some level interchangeable with Quality and Skill points. Now, again, I don't at this point know how the system works because the game hasn't bothered to tell me yet, but it looks like a stat+skill system, and given that there are six Attributes and ~18 Skills, that seems poorly thought-out. Anyway, that sort of thing is all over the Quality listing.

The Slayer Quality probably bears looking at, given its centrality to the setting. For 16 points, you get +11 points in Attributes, 10 points in other Qualities, 8 points in 'free' Drawbacks, 2 points in Skills, and two miscellaneous benefits (rapid healing, sense vampires) that apparently cost the equivalent of (16-11-10+8-2=) 1 point. Seems dubious, and also I don't know why those two miscellaneous benefits aren't just on the Quality list.

Skills have a somewhat scaling cost, 1 point/level for the first 5 levels, 3 points/level after that, though it seems to be the same in both chargen and advancement, which is a plus. Looking back, Qualities that hand out skill bonuses hand them out in levels, not points, so some serious min-maxing potential there. Skills seem to be on a 1-10 scale, with 10 being 'best in the world' territory.

There are only a few combat skills: Getting Medieval for melee weapons, Gun Fu for ranged weapons, Kung Fu for unarmed combat. Acrobatics can be used to dodge, and Sports can fill in for some limited combat circumstances. That's surprisingly sensible.

Drama points are mentioned (in how many different Types get), but only vaguely explained, although it would be hard to explain them in detail as they interact with mechanics that have not been explained.

Then it's the Archetypes non-chapter, which is a bunch of pregen Heroes and White Hats, including the only original art assets in the book. Most are completely generic high-schoolers/action heroes, although there are more belly shirts than usual.



I think the most distinctive piece is the Former Vampire Groupie, which looks like a standard White Wolf piece, only in color and with perplexingly-placed arrows.




The second non-chapter is the 'Original Cast,' which is stat-lines for the people with names in the opening credits of the show. They are presented as they are at the end of Season 5 (except that Buffy is still alive), but there's also a section for 'seasonal adjustments,' which tells you how to modify these stats to represent their less-developed versions. I can't be arsed to go through and add things up to see how they compare to the standard types.


Next up: Rules, Borders, and an End Zone

[Lago PARANOIA]

hey are presented as they are at the end of Season 5 (except that Buffy is still alive), but there's also a section for 'seasonal adjustments,' which tells you how to modify these stats to represent their less-developed versions. I can't be arsed to go through and add things up to see how they compare to the standard types.

I've seen a few episodes of Angel and rather enjoyed them (despite my hatred of protagonist and/or ensemble cast vampires), I haven't seen any of Buffy. So tell me, how well do the stat lines represent characters from the show? I think that this is the money shot of the book right here. If Xander feels like Xander without having to use ST plothole spackle and players have an intuitive sense of how badass they are out of CharGen in relation to Buffy, then that's like half of your job done right there.

[angelfromanotherpin]

So tell me, how well do the stat lines represent characters from the show?

The numbers and traits seem broadly appropriate, but who knows? I haven't read the chapter that would let me contextualize most of them yet.

[angelfromanotherpin]

3. Rules, Borders, and an End Zone

So the basic mechanic is apparently d10+Stat+Skill (or Statx2 if no skill applies). If you get 9 or better, you get a 'success level' (SL), with more SLs for higher totals. The actual table is:

9-10 : 1 : Adequate
11-12 : 2 : Decent
13-14 : 3 : Good
15-16 : 4 : Very Good
17-20 : 5 : Excellent
21-23 : 6 : Extraordinary
24-26 : 7 : Mind-Boggling
27-29 : 8 : Outrageous
30-32 : 9 : Superheroic
33-35 : 10 : Godlike
+3 : +1

So, the bonuses are very large relative to the RNG and things get deterministic fast. Buffy's sheet has her rolling 1d10+18 for Kung Fu, and Xander rolling 1d10+8, so unless there's some more uncertainty in there somewhere, he's 100% boned in that match-up.

Resisted Actions are presented as simple comparisons of roll totals, which is strange, because attacks are resisted actions, and one of the mentioned uses for success levels was adding those on the attack roll to the damage of the weapon. So, very basic rule contradiction, good times.

Also, apparently NPCs don't even roll, they just have a fixed number that the PCs roll against, and that strikes me as a terrible amplification of the short RNG, because an outclassed person can't hope that the opposition will roll low. So, more determinism.

Roll modifiers exist to represent relatively easy or difficult actions, although the table is sorely lacking in guidelines. An 'easy' task is +5 to the roll, but there's no indication as to what such a task might be.

A character's movement rate is Dex+Con yards/second, which is problematic because... human movement speeds really aren't that variable. I'm basically okay with Buffy running at 34 mph, she's a superhero. But that leaves a normal person running at ~10 mph which is... substantially slower than most people actually run. I guess it's fine for fairly abstract game purposes, it's just kind of a lazy failure of simulation. That could also describe the extremely abbreviated chase mechanics. Also apparently a Turn is 5 seconds long, and this is kind of a surprising place to learn that. Maybe that editing team didn't cost so much after all.

Randomly, the process for researching monsters is next. It's kind of a general gather info section (including Hacking and such), but it's almost completely empty. I peeked ahead to the monster stats, and none of them have any note on how hard they might be to research, but this section says that if the PCs don't have access to the right books (represented by some level of the Occult Library quality), the task is an auto-fail – and this is apparently declared in some completely arbitrary way by the MC. Also, this section says that you shouldn't waste much game time on this stuff – roll, see how long it will take to get the answers, and move on. But there's no method given for determining how long it takes to get the answers. So this actually very important part of the monster hunting process is 100% MC ass-pullery.

A sample NPC listing follows, complete with explanatory breakdown, and these are actually nicely compact. You could get four on a page easily, maybe five if they were short.

They have a fear mechanic, which looks fairly okay. Real hero types are basically immune unless the gore/surprise modifiers are stacked sky-high, but normal teens are going to startle and flinch reasonably often.

The combat section is super long, so it's going to have to wait for next time, and oh man, it looks very questionable.

[angelfromanotherpin]

So, the first thing you need to know about the combat system is that it is completely fucked even before you get to the die rolls.

The combat round procedure happens in three stages:

1. Intentions: Everyone declares what they want to do. Only player intentions, mind, mostly to make sure those intentions are reasonable as one turn's worth of activity. Which is necessary, because there does not appear to be any kind of standardization as to what counts. The example intentions given are 'cast a spell,' 'scream and run,' and 'attack three times,' and there's no commentary to let you know if you should find any of those more or less reasonable than the others.

Now it turns out that *much* later under a subsubheading, characters can attack and defend once each per turn. It seems like that might have been important to address earlier and more prominently. The same section details how a higher Dex grants extra attack/defense actions per turn, and yes, Dex is already the stat used for attack and defense rolls, so welcome back once again to Dexlympus, where the agile are as gods and all others can experience getting screwed in epic fashion. And this actually does break the simulation pretty hard, because a number of the enemy combat heavies like Adam and the Judge are lumbering brutes, but under this system they are either paper tigers who whiff on their infrequent attacks, or get assigned superhuman agility that they visibly did not possess.

But I digress.


2. Initiative: It's 2002, and you'd think it wouldn't be possible to fuck up initiative too badly, right? Sure, in some games the roll you make is clumsy and arcane because people are experimenting with all kinds of kooky die mechanics, but this is a d10+modifiers system, so that's got to have a pretty high floor, right?

Oh, son.

So, apparently the first arbiter of initiative is 'common sense,' and that promising little nugget of shit precedes a torrent of diarrhea.

- 'If it's an ambush, the ambushers go first.' Reasonable.
- 'If a Slayer is attacking a gun-toting goon and is too far away to grab it, the gunman gets to shoot first.' Want to know what constitutes too far away? Fuck you!
- 'Unleashing a supernatural or mental power goes before a kick.' Because <reason not given.> I don't recall spells actually getting this kind of primacy in the show, but I could be wrong.
- In general, it's spells, ranged, melee.
- If the situation is 'less clear-cut,' highest Dex goes first deterministically, with a roll-off for ties.
- 'During subsequent turns, determine Initiative in the same manner or award it to the character who has momentum (whoever managed to connect a punch without being hit back, for example).' This is a giant middle finger in the eye of consistency and another giant middle finger up the ass of objectivity.

What the fucking fuck? I think the part that bothers me the most is that they do present a very simple and reasonable d10+Dex method in a text box as an optional rule. How you come up with that and then declare that it's going to be sidelined in favor of an arcane semi-codified turn-by-turn ass-pulled MC feels-based arbitration is beyond me.


3. Action: Intentions are now resolved, using the base mechanic, in whatever order Tzeentch has determined.


The game has approximately one million combat maneuvers. Bow Shot and Crossbow Shot have separate listings, because the writers couldn't be fucked to put the distinctions between those weapons in the weapons table (seriously, the table does not tell you that bows have a penalty to hit or how long it takes to reload a crossbow). Kick and Spin Kick have separate listings, despite the difference being essentially one point of power attack. There are three 'different' ways to knock someone down, and I don't even care.

My guess is that someone sat down and literally wrote down every attack mode ever used on the show and then tried to differentiate them.

There are basic situational modifiers and most of them are innocuous, but one that stands out is that attacks against distracted enemies allow no defense (without a particular Quality), which offers the less competent an opportunity to actually land some blows. It also offers the MC an opportunity to surprise-buttsex your character without warning, but that's not really a new thing at this point.

Damage is quite static and deterministic. All weapons have a damage rating (frequently set by Strength), and success levels on attacks are added to those. Success levels on the attack aren't reduced by those on the defense, so high accuracy is a lot like higher base damage (Hail Dexlympus!), since the entire RNG is like 4-5 points of variance. Then armor straight subtracts from that.

Two things stand out: 1) Wearing a bulletproof vest makes you immune to most punches, because there's no mechanism for punching someone where they aren't armored. 2) The text refers to the process of calculating Base Damage plus Success Levels minus Armor Value as 'a bit complicated.' What.

There are four damage types: Bashing, which is the only one that can KO a person; Slash/Stab, which does double post-armor damage to humans; Bullet, which does double post-armor damage to humans and much less to vampires and many other monsters; and Fire. That's actually a really nice take on the damage modes of a very specific genre.


Anyway, next time it's general injury/healing stuff and the Drama Point system (finally). They keep talking about using Drama Points in their examples, and it's really irritating.

[Chamomile]

This whole review mostly just makes me want to work on a second draft of Scoobies.

[angelfromanotherpin]

The injury section seems pretty inoffensive. It covers a lot of things, including falling, disease/poison, etc. often very simply. There's a wound penalty mechanic, and it seems pretty simulative of the show (if you're suffering wound penalties, it's because you are in very bad shape).


Drama Points

These are the sort of 'narrative currency' people have been writing into games since at least WFRP (that was the first place I saw them) and probably before. Characters start the game with a pile of these based on their character type. White Hats get 20, Heroes get 10, and Experienced Heroes get... 20. It looks like the intention was to give the sidekicks some compensation for being sidekicks in a game with Heroes, and to make Experienced Heroes unapologetically better than other types.

One of the first things said regarding Drama Point use is that they are subject to Director veto. I'm not even surprised anymore, but I think it bears special mention because wow, even the mechanism specifically designed to give players some authorial input has impact only at the whim of the guy the book specifically encourages you to suck up to. Issues. Subscriptions, really.

Drama Points have 5 uses:
1. +10 to a roll; yes, a bonus the size of the RNG.
2. Heal half of damage taken so far. Can be used repeatedly.
3. A beneficial coincidence. Usable only 1/session to minimize player authorship.
4. Spend 2 for +5 to all attacks for a fight if seriously provoked: an attack on a loved one or a personal betrayal are examples.
5. Spend 1-10 to return from apparent death, depending on speed of return.

There's actually a really useful sidebar about expected rate of Drama Point expenditure: 3 per episode on average, 5 max. If the players are spending more than that, the Director is instructed to ease up on them. If I ever played this game, I would have very much appreciated that.

Getting more Drama Points is not handled very well. See, White Hats start with a bigger pile, but with a couple of exceptions they don't acquire them any faster, and there's no such thing as a refill; once spent, these things are gone for good. Most of the acquisition methods are specific role-play elements (Whedonesque dialogue, self-sacrifice, angsting), which is a nice incentive-based way of directing the play, although players being the notoriously exploitative folks that they are, I suspect that attempts to spam these have hilariously undermined the mood they were intended to create.

My favorite method is the one where the Director hands out Drama Points as an apology for railroading. If you're going to railroad, acknowledging the act and giving mechanical compensation so the players have more control later on is a nice way to handle it; if only because it's being honest abut the whole thing.

White Hats have two small advantages in gaining Drama Points and thus maintaining what limited mechanical advantage they have over Heroes. The first is that they have a method to get Drama Points that no other Type can use; helping other players deal with their angsting. The other is that they buy Drama Points with XP at half cost. Yeah, you can spend XP on dispensable burst effectiveness, opening up all the power now/later worm cans involved.


Experience Points
Players get 1-5 xp/session, in basically the White Wolf mode where equality is not prioritized.

Improving attributes and skills is flat at chargen, and scaled with experience. I know all the cool kids (White Wolf, Shadowrun) and to some extent GURPS are doing this in 2002, but that's still no excuse because HERO is doing it the non-stupid way and has been for years. The only real variation on the formula is that most humans can only raise each attribute once ever, or twice if they start the game as a teenager (and there's your incentive to have your PC be a high-schooler). Skills don't have that limit, so you're mechanically encouraged to min-max skills like a Russian gymnast at chargen.

A very special facepalm to the section on buying Qualities with XP, which lists those qualities that can be bought with XP (as opposed to those which cannot), and then utterly fails to have a cost for doing so. Seriously, nowhere in the book is there any indication as to how much to pay for new Qualities. I just checked and this is not fixed in the revised version of the book; I don't even.


Next up: Playing With Primal Forces.

[MisterDee]

Without reading any of the review parts...

I would love to play as (mid-to-late series) Xander. One of the stronger part of the series is how he translates from shy/awkward high schooler to solid, dependable adult. Buffy flat out telling the Watcher's council to fuck off because Xander earned his spot on the A-team is probably the high point of the series after season 3 (and Hush, of course.)

[TiaC]

Two game ideas this made me think of.

1. I'd like to see a Buffyverse campaign that encouraged the sort of knot-cutting thinking that players love. For example, there are a number indestructible doomsday artifacts in the Buffyverse. Generally, they aren't very well concealed. I want to see what the average group of PCs would do with one.

2. "One girl in all the world" was enough to prevent the apocalypse for thousands of years and hold the demons to a stalemate. Post-season 7, there are hundreds. I'd like to see a campaign where the Slayers are clearly winning, it looks like it's only a matter of time until only peaceful demons are left. So the evil demons are becoming desperate. Kick up the tempo, but in a hopeful way.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Playing With Primal Forces

Back!

This section spills a lot of ink trying to describe how Buffyverse magic is. Words like unpredictable and dangerous get thrown around a lot. The problem is that they don't really seem to have any caveats for the shit Willow is getting up to even in Season 5, where she can toss around low-level effects completely casually. I mean, right under the text where it talks about how dangerous it is to try to invent your own spells is a quote from the show about how Willow just invented her own spell with no apparent consequences.

On par for the game, the whole magic system is premised on playing mother-may-I with the Director. First you need to get the spell you want out of an occult library, and that is straight GM-fiat. There are rules for how long it takes to find a spell that is in a library, but whether it is or not is 100% arbitrarium, 0% cotton. Mind you, even if the spell was found, its components are also arbitrarily decided, so the Director can declare that it requires some capriciously-available thing and then dole that thing out whenever he feels like you casting that spell.

Now, I can get behind that kind of restriction for serious plot device spells like ensouling vampires, or rewriting the universe to make you the most awesome for a while, or so on, and indeed the game has a sidebar for putting particular controls on that sort of major hoodoo. But it's really only the barest extension of what they have in place for every other spell.

Once all the elements of knowledge, ritual, and ingredients are in place, spellcasting is a simple Willpower+Occultism roll that can have Drama Points spent on it. And failing the roll is completely safe. The danger zone is when you get a success, but not enough success, at which point you roll on the side effect table, which is actually pretty show-accurate (spell effect is delayed until some inconvenient time, spell is partially effective, spell targets wrong person, etc.).

There's a segment on how being an actual Witch makes your casting better: a bonus to casting rolls, a free telekinetic effect, and the ability to cast certain spells a lot more quickly than other people.

There's a basic build-a-spell system which is very min-maxable, or would be if the players were allowed to use it. It comes with a short list of sample spells from the show, which is a pretty useful way of demonstrating what some of the guidelines mean.

The system seems fair-to-okay in terms of functionality and representing the show, but it is clear that the writer was leaning far too heavily on the MC ruling with an iron fist to keep magic in check rather than writing a system that didn't need such banhammer-level constant intervention.

Next up: a double-header – Sunnydale After Dark and Creatures of the Night.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Sunnydale After Dark

(Back! Again!)

This is the general setting chapter, starting with some very useful material on how terrible Sunnydale is and how it still has a population despite that, and also some details on the setting's amateurish version of the masquerade.

This is followed up with some bare-bones description of a few of the more relevant locations in the town. I think my favorite part is how Sunnydale General Hospital has the best trauma unit in the U.S. because of how much practice they get. That said, it is very thin. Most places get one inefficient paragraph and the whole thing is over in five pages, including descriptions of the Initiative and the Hellmouth. This is odd, because if the assumption is that you haven't seen the show, you don't really get enough to work with - not even enough to establish the proper atmosphere at The Bronze; but if you have seen the show and can do that sort of thing already, you don't get anything you don't already know. I can only conclude that the target audience was the other half of the ass used to write this.

More useful are the stat blocks for normal people, from 'Joe School' to Police Officer, which let you know how the PCs stat up to normals. A few named characters serve as stand-ins for more generic types, like Johnathan Levinson seeming to be an good example of the kind of troublesome sorcery-experimenting kid who's likely to unleash this week's monster.

What immediately becomes clear, however, is how completely bullshit the philosophy of static values for NPCs is. One of the first things I can think of using innocent bystander and cop stats for is to see how long it takes monsters to actually get them, in a dynamic rescue scenario. But because there's no randomness on either side of that equation, the outcomes are completely deterministic. And while it might be okay for teenagers to be mathematically helpless against the sample fresh-turned vampire, is it also okay that said vampire can sneer at an arbitrarily large number of police because her dodge value is at least one point higher than all the police's attack modes? Or that a single Initiative commando can do the same? (The answer is no.)


Creatures of the Night

The monster chapter actually opens with a section on making your own monsters. And it starts with some good conceptual frameworks: cannon fodder, mystery monsters, mythic archetypes, and teenage-issue metaphors. But then it just stops. There is literally zero discussion of how to implement your concepts mechanically. No 'what should the combat values be,' no 'these sorts of abilities are problematic,' nothing.

Credit where it is due, actual vampires get a proper write-up. Seven pages detailing their origins, nature, abilities, weaknesses, and so forth, with actual numbers and everything; three more pages of sample stats, from generic fresh-turned/veteran/lieutenant vamps, to some very distinct named characters.

The demon section again nods towards building your own demon, but apart from listing and describing a few abilities, gives almost no help in actually doing so. The exception is in setting how many life points a demon should have, depending on its role. It's a little better than the previous nothing.

The section on shapeshifters is mostly about werewolves, and brief but relatively useful. The section on ghosts is basically completely useless, failing to properly describe or emulate even the ghosts they use for quotes and examples. The sections on zombies and robots are basic but functional, if not very interesting.

Lastly, there are statblocks and descriptions for the show's various 'Big Bads,' from the Master to Glory. I will say that the mayor's pure demon form seems... kind of weedy compared to later Big Bads. As I predicted, Adam is depicted with an incongruously high Dex to keep him combat relevant, and is also over two-and-a-half times as tough as the mayor's pure demon form. Nothing else immediately stands out as questionable.


Next up: Episodes, Seasons, and Drama.

[hyzmarca]

But it sucks to be Scrappy Doo as a PC.

There's always Season 8 Nick Fury Xander.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Episodes, Seasons, and Drama

This is a campaign-design chapter, and it raises some interesting and important questions, but doesn't really offer much guidance towards answering them.

For example, when talking about deciding on the setting, they have a section on Sunnydale and variants: as, with, and without the original cast, in the dark alternate version from 'The Wish,' or some other variant. And while those are all things you could do, this book spends like a page and a half and is only faintly more substantial than a simple five-line list.

The cast variants are better-developed, talking about the challenges of making an all-heroic, all-normal, or mixed group work. Although there is a lot more listing of challenges than there is of listing possible ways to meet those challenges.

Most of the rest of the chapter is actually a discussion about how to structure your RPG campaign like a TV show - breaking it down into episodes and seasons, with special attention paid to premieres and finales, and continuing plots, subplots, and villains. This is pretty well-done, not least because the book puts some actual care and wordcount into it. Seriously, I'd say it's worth reading completely independently of the game it's attached to.


Sweeps Week

This is an introductory adventure, and is notable for having the closest thing to encounter guidelines in the book. When adjusting the opponents for groups of differing power levels, they refer to 'highest skill total in the group plus 2' and similar. How none of that made it to the monster chapter is beyond me.


Appendix: A Guide to Buffyspeak

This is a... disturbingly systematic guide to producing specifically Buffy-style Whedonesque dialogue. They recommend it as a distinctive feature of the show, and while the whole thing is far too long to take in, I will admit that with a few short notes, most people could probably turn in an appropriate phrase or two per session, and that would probably be enough to flavor the game very successfully. So, a job well done, there.


And that's more or less the book.