Buffy Meets Arkham - The After-Action Report

[theron]

All in all, the game went pretty well, especially when you consider I'd not played Cinematic Unisystem in three or four years and I'd never actually run it.  Of course, I've been playing with this crew for a couple of years now and we generally get along at the table, so I wasn't sweating rules issues overmuch.  Still, I'm happy with the way things came together and will happily run it again, should the opportunity arise.

One interesting thing I noticed as the game progressed was how much shorter my game notes got from week to week.  While I think some of that was due to familiarity with the PCs and the way the players approached them, I think a lot of it was also just a general loosening up my improv skills from week to week.  The beauty of Cinematic Unisystem is that you can get away with fairly low prep GMing and I took full advantage of that fact.

The one place where I felt I fell a bit flat was in gauging appropriate levels of opposition in combat encounters.  I generally just ran with canned critters, but it was sometimes hard to tell what was too much or too little for them to face.  Which is, I suppose, a trade-off for a low prep sort of game.

Anyway, I'm now beginning my work in earnest on the D&D With Kids game, mostly making sure I've got the visual tools to make it interesting and fun.  I've also got a 12-pack of Jones Soda's D&D flavors to share with the table.

Comments

Re: Curses!

[theron]

Generally, the fights went a little too easy. Granted White Hats are supposed to be burning Drama Points to stay alive, but once the players understood this, the PCs were rarely even scratched by an unmodified bad guy. As a result, I did end up amping up a few here and there. In one of the big fights with a bunch of minion vampires, I mixed in a vampire lieutenant the Slayer to fight, just because I wanted to delay her a little. But even that had some balance issue though, because he was very nearly too tough for her.