Why Buffy the Vampire Slayer makes for Bad Gaming

In your game: Even after you’ve arranged for all the Orbs of Soul Restoration to be destroyed in a convenient earthquake after the PCs gathered them up, players will use the Spike-and-Dru Exception to try and convince you to let them play a vampire who a) is a bad guy but will try and convince the party otherwise; b) doesn’t have a soul, but hey, he’s not so bad; c) is in love with one of the other PCs and can be trusted as a result. You’ll spend half of every session explaining that no, you don’t want a game-imbalancing vampiric lord of undeadly might running around with a party which otherwise consists of high school sophomores with C’s in PhysEd.

What’s the moral here? Well, aside from giving me a chance to vent about the logical inconsistencies in the show, which do tend to grate on me when they come up so often, the point is that what works on television – or in a novel – or in a movie – or in a comic book – where the creator has full control over all the characters will not work in a game, where the players outnumber you and have much more free time to dedicate to outsmarting you than you have to not being outsmarted.

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