Buffy: New players, new adventures

October 1st, 2007

We kicked off our new Buffy campaign (set in the Spanish colonial town 170 years before the show started) with a character creation session. This was the first time any of the players had experienced Unisystem, and they appreciated the super-graininess, used as they are to GURPS. One player has never, ever played a roleplaying game before, so it was her first time experimenting with the concept of character creation. (Seriously, for the first time ever, she touched a die that had more than six sides.)

She absolutely shined. She’d come up with an interesting background (daughter of an American Protestant missionary family, venturing through unsettled Indian territory to the Spanish town of Valle del Sol), and she’s agreed to play a “potentia” Slayer, partly because not one of my three established players wanted to take the role of Slayer proper.

I did find one problem with the graininess: the players all gravitated toward a heavily overlapping set of Qualities and Shortcomings. The two combat-oriented players appear almost identical (although one is a werewolf). The two non-combat characters (one a potential witch, the other a Watcher who happens to be a man of the cloth) are similarly similar.

With this crew, though (my wife, a couple who’ve been the core of our gaming group for a while, and the new woman), I don’t anticipate this being too much of a problem. Oh, we’ll have two or three people rolling for lots of skill checks, but they’ll come up with different plans and deal with situations differently. With a bit of clever GM manipulation, I think I’ll be able to give everyone good screen time without too much trouble.

That said, I want to hear any suggestions anyone has for fostering “niche protection” in a system that’s mildly hostile to it!

We had a quick play session after character creation was finished. Normally, I have a good idea of everyone’s character a week or more in advance, so I found it quite challenging to place and integrate everyone’s characters into the plot believably. In the end, I felt a bit off.

My wife tells me, though, that if I hadn’t said anything, no one would have noticed. And G— (the woman of the couple) sent me an IM this morning gushing about the game. So I won’t worry.

Instead, I have to figure out how to schedule a follow-up session, along with sessions for the fantasy campaign, the pirate campaign, and the Lost-inspired campaign I’m running. As well as get-togethers for all the great board and card games I want to play.

Entry Filed under: Roleplaying