Buffy the Vampaire Slayer/ Engle Matrix Game hybrid

[MatrixGamer]

My brother was over for Thanksgiving and as we frequently do I ran a game for him and my wife. A couple of years ago we did a BtVS one shot. We ended up doing a second game with those characters (which were conviently still in the book.) I started the game by describing a scene in which Buffy Willow and Xander were in the high school courtyard looking at a crystal. When Buffy held it up to her eye the camera zoomed in on it and came out in an alternate world where Lydia Chan was the Slayer and Scotty Huen was her only surviving side kick. The players enjoyed my openning since I effectively ended their world in the previous game (aka destroying Anya's necklas in the series).

At the start of the game I had no real story planned out. I had some vague notion that it events would happen on a school trip - to the desert. I also knew that I wanted there to be a parrallel event in 1849 that would foreshadow what happened this time. I told them that there WAS a big bad guy.

Buffy is a setting that seemed full of opportunity for the players to explore burning narrativist issues like "Do I save the jock? He's a jerk!" or "How far can I go to get the monsters? Is buring down a gym full of vamps okay?" I didn't explicitly state this as a goal but expected it to emerge.

Since I didn't have a scenario planned I used hybrid Engle Matrix Game ideas to build the game.

1. I asked the players to make arguments about the rumors of what happened on these field trips in the past. I made it clear that these trips had been happening since the 1950s. The players made up that there was a mine with a place called "The Killing Cavern" in which a bunch of kids had died in the past. This established the beginnings of the geography and suggested a bad guy. Ian established that the teacher chaparoning the trip was thought to be an alien. Could she be the big bad?

2. Next I had them both argue to describe what happened in 1849. As it turned out a wagon at the end of the train got caught in quicksand and all the people disappeared - but that their cloths were left. Also the mine was described as being a deep shaft gold mine (looking for the source of the gold in creeks) that was worked from 1855 to 1880. It was run by the Davis family.

We then proceeded on to a role played scene in the courtyard as students were lined up to get on the bus. This was when I described their fellow students so they could identify the social peaking order. My wife and brother established that they were goth fringe types. They got along well with the stoners and uncool kids and were heckled by the popular kids. The players enjoyed making their lists of items taken on the trip and role playing events at the "last chance gas station" which marked the end of the outside world and the gateway to the world of mystery (2.5 hours further on). Our discussions during this part of the game established that there were cabins at the mine rather than a tent camp ground. I had one of there stoner friends suggest that they go to Killer Cavern that night.

Once at the Mine location I saddled the players with some cabin mates (from the people they identified as liking). At this point we shifted back into a Matrix Game to establish more of what was going on.

1. I had the players tell me what happened when they went for a nature walk. This lead them to meet "Dirty Gerty" the camp ground keeper, that the "alien" teacher and a selected student slipped off into the brush for inappropriate behavior and described the general lay of the land in more detail. The player's characters went sand boarding and discovered a old fashio key (that had no scratches or wear marks despite being found in the sand.

2. I had the players make arguments to describe what was watching them and who it went after first. In this case the teacher and teacher's pet were targeted.

At this point the stage was set for the core of the game to unfold. We had a number of things that would play into the story. I started the game with the crystal that when looked through showed a different world. They found the key - it had to open something. The monster would attack people leaving only their cloths behind. Their friends were going to go to the cavern (moral delima - do you protect them?) The beast is about to attack...

The game alternated from here between scenes that we role played or talked through and my asking them to make arguments.

During the talked through or role played scenes I made things up on the spot. In this way we shared power because I controlled individuals and they controlled individuals. When they search a secret room in the mine for clues I asked them to make arguments telling me what they found. (It turned out that Gerty was Gerty Davis and was feeding the monster with meat by products - except for this week when students were on the menu.) In these cases the players had more power than I did because the were mini GMs.

I would periodically ask the players to argue for the outcome of scenes in which the monster attacked other characters. From this they learned that the beast could be stopped by a metal found in the mine and that it disliked fire.

Eventually the sun rose to about half of the students being gone - oops! - but none of them the friends of the players. They then faced down the monster in a standard RPG combat and kicked its butt.

The players seemed to have a good time but they said that they didn't like being put that much in control of the game. Instead they wanted to experience it. Also they didn't seem jazzed up about the narrativist angles. My guess is that they are both more simulationist players - winning was nice but experiencing the story was more what they were after.

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From a game desing point of view, I viewed all the rolls in the game as Matrix Game arguments. Task resolution rolls were just arguments that said "I kick his butt". This point of view allowed me to shift from role playing to matrix arguments with ease.  I used arguments to get the players to create the game as we played it. The items they invented were guarenteed to end up being important in the story because they went to the effort of making them up.

At Christmass I think I will do a story creation MG pregame and then run another RPG so the two will not be as emeched.


Chris Engle
Hamster Press = Engle Matrix Games