Overview
Buffy The Vampire Slayer is a TV show that I am sure most of you all know; if not here is a quick description of the show and its ideas.Buffy is a teenage American high school student, she is an attractive yet troubled student having burned down her last school. What the rest of the world doesn’t know is that Buffy is a vampire slayer and there is only one. She has been chosen to fight vampires and demons and other nasty things.
Ok the role-play game works around that you will be playing ever the original cast, which are all given stats in the book or you can start completely for scratch with your own cast of characters. Which can be anything that you want them to be, as long as you can come up with the concept for the character, you can play it from bog standard human to a demon.
Eden studio are the creators of the role play game they decided that the game would be aimed at fans and that it would be made for the average fan rather than for the regular role-play as a result of that the gaming system is a simple system that allows people to learn it very easily.
The system is cinematic, which means that the game runs like a film rather than being rules heavy like White Wolfs Storyteller system. So instead of being bogged down by large amounts of skills and large amounts of rules its keep pretty clean cut and simple which makes for a system that is pretty fast and rolls on constantly, thus allowing for a quicker progressing storyline.
Character creation
Ok, character creation is interesting that you have 3 options for characters, first you have a Hero who has more physical stats from there you have to spend in your initial attributes, but as a result you have less points to spent in skills and you also have less drama points which I will explain later. The alternative is a White Hat who has lower attribute points and skill points to play with. Although they do have high drama points to use also the other difference is that drama points are easier to acquire for a White Hat then they are for a Hero. The final option is only available if you have people playing the original cast which is a Veteran Hero which is basically an experienced hero.Character creation will take about twenty five mins form start to finish if you have read through the book or have someone who can explain to you what stuff does, the character creation process is pretty simple and works very well for first time players as well as veterans role players.
As I mention earlier in character creation charterers get drama points these are similar to the Bennies in savage worlds review. The drama points can be spent in different ways one of which is to guarantee a success the other ways are to bring your charters back from the dead, later on in the game which is an interesting concept, other things that can be done is another interesting concept called plot twist for example you spend the points, so for example your running down a hall and you turn in to a T junction corridor and there is a load of vampires to one side and they notice you for a White Hat this is a death sentence so you spend the drama points it turns out that the vampires where all tying there shoe laces while walking down the hall with their backs to you.
System review
OK so the system is called the uni-system it’s the cinematic version from Eden Studios. As they have a none cinematic system they use for All Flesh Must Be Eaten which is a zombie horror game and it is also used in some of their other published role play games.The system for the cinematic version is simple enough to pick up. The system is attribute + skill+D10 this then leave you to check your combined total against the success levels chart the more you succeed the better the success, for example a wizard cast's drain strength and roll intelligence 4 + occult 5 and rolls a 9 that a total of 18 giving you a success level of 2 so you would drain 2 points of strength with that spell, the dice rolls are open ending if you roll a 10 on a 10 sided dice you keep get to re-roll that dice and add the second roll to it if you manage to roll a 10 again you keep going.
The system itself if useful to have in an avid role-players collation just to have as a filler game if your group is wanting to do something, while they are waiting for you to make some plot for a new game or some of your players have fallen short that week and you want to do something that week and not in the mood to play the PS3 or the 360 and the last thing on your mind is playing a game of zombies as it can take up to 3 hours to finish, so you decide to play some random game.
Combat review
Combat is interesting enough where you have to play for the player you have to roll over a score if you are fighting a NPC if you are fighting a player character you have to roll contested rolls attack Vs the defenders defences.The strange thing about combat for this game is that the GM dos not roll dice at all, making this the first system that I have found that actually leave the GM completely free of dice rolling in combat. And give more time to putting thought in to the actual description of the combat, or more time to reconfigures what’s going on.
GM’ing the game
GM’ing the game is interesting as, if you choose to you don't have to roll a single dice in a session, as for running the game it is simple enough just focus on the role playing and seen setting of the game rather than dice rolling, which make for a more interesting experience with GM's and players, thus giving you more time to build something that the players would want you to go back to.
Raksha's final thoughts
Over all I personally say that it is a system that it is worth picking up if you can find it on cheap through someone like drive thru RPG or Amazon. Other than that it is a good game to have played at least once with a group of decent role players.
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