Arref posted on Shadows of Greatness, a link to this article on emulating television genres. It's a great read for anyone who plans to attempt this and highlights a lot of the problems and solutions I've had to deal with running Buffy.
I think that also brings up a reason that my Battlestar Pegasus game I ran last year at ACUS worked so well. Battlestar Galactica is a show where you expect that at any time a character may actually die....without warning or purpose other than: This is war and it sucks. It's amazing how well this show has cultivated that feeling considering so few characters have died, but that is the feeling so when I ran BSP, the players seemed to really feel that their characters were looking at that their last stand and when the crew managed to escape with only one PC casualty, they seemed to take that as a great success. In a Star Trek game, I feel that would have been less likely.
Which brings me to the real reason for this post. The article above linked to The Kirk Rule. it's an idea so elegant and perfectly suited to any genre where the heroes are bigger than life heroes (it could just as well be called the "Bond rule") that I think I am going to start handling skill checks like this in most of my games....particularly Buffy. I'll run it by my Buffy group at the next session, but I'm almost certain that they will grok it.
Posted by Nuadha at January 17, 2006 10:44 AM