Buffy The Vampire Slayer at 25 in RPGs

Buffy The Vampire Slayer is a natural fit for RPGs.

Revised core rulebook PDF

Demo at the BBC Cult TV page, which shows most of the system including most of the Drama Points

Urban fantasy plainclothes supers in a world where a whole lot of weird things can happen.

There have been modern-ish monster and monster hunting games before and since and the Buffyverse is a nice big kitchen sink. I often come up with absurd episode hooks on the way to sessions and the setting can take them.

Musical! Silent movie! Turn a hero into a puppet - twice!

And the genre savvy snark you find at gaming tables is part of the show and a natural to bring in character!

See my Buffy Season series like this one and this one and my enormous number of random-title-list plot hook threads.

And maybe I’ll do another tonight.

Indeed, I started trying to cobble together a Buffy game before the licence was announced.

And we were lucky enough to get a good official system for it. Cinematic Unisystem is pretty simple, and the addition of Drama Points makes the balancing of Heroes and White Hats kind of viable and fun.

I quibble with things like granular Life Points and the single D10 (the Vortex system for Doctor Who learned a lot from CU and has 2D6) and I’ve previously house ruled Sorcery as it replicates Willow’s rise from first spell to extinction-level event in four seasons in a game-breaky way, but I could and do run it RAW.

Some of my Buffy love is naturally bolstered by The Watch House, the biggest game I’ve ever run and my favourite, but that started with my existing enthusiasm to run a Buffy game and most of the players’ keenness to run with it.

Title sequence, custom figures.

I made friends through the series, as well as through Buffy in general and in gaming.

And thanks to Steve D for letting me steal his Watchers at university series hook!

I’ve run quite a few Buffy games since, and would cheerfully do so again.

I made the Urban Fantasy category at the Nationals happen so I could run it there.

I even got to play it for a few weeks once! As well in play-by-posts going back to their launch on RPG.net, and I’m running one there now.