The Buffy the Vampire Slayer Roleplaying Game

September 26th, 2007

On vacation, I had time to read the core rulebook for the Buffy The Vampire Slayer Roleplaying Game. I picked it up because a friend who has never played a roleplaying game in her life but who seems like a good candidate absolutely loves the Buffyverse.

In fact, our very first session will take place this Friday. Introducing a new player to roleplaying is fun and exhilarating. This woman is friendly, fun, and creative. She loves good stories and acts in the community theater. Unless the utter geekiness of our activity sends her screaming, she should be a wonderful addition to our group.

I like the Buffy system. This is my first encounter with Unisystem, but from what I can tell it will be a genuinely fun game system that actively supports the genre. The very grainy rules (one skill covers all melee weapon use) mean that players can focus on doing the cool stuff they’ve seen on TV without worrying about a dozen possible techniques for any given weapon. (Note, I absolutely love games that let you worry about such things. GURPS is my system of choice, after all. But that sort of detail has no place in Buffy.)

The text itself does a pretty good job capturing the feeling of the show (the name of that one melee skill: “Getting Medieval”), although sometimes I thought it got a bit heavy handed. Yes, it’s clever to use Buffyspeak in the text, but sometimes every single sentence in a rules-heavy paragraph seems to drip with Whedonesque wordplay. Funny and fun, but not all the time.

This Friday, we’ll spend most of our time creating characters. I’ll need to refamiliarize myself with the rules (I get lots of great players, but none of them ever seem willing to read the damn rules, even though doing so would make our games richer) and put the finishing touches on our introductory adventure.

Before I do, though, I’d like to ask anyone who plays or has played the game one question: How important are the various supplements? I have one player set to take on the mantle of the Slayer, one who wants to be a reluctant witch, another who can’t resist the alure of a lycanthropy, and the last who’s eager to play a Watcher. Will we be missing out on lots of great rules of we don’t have the The Slayers Handbook and the The Magic Box within easy reach?

Entry Filed under: Popular Perception, Roleplaying, RPG