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Assorted miscellanea

No big news this evening, so I'll treat you to whatever random thoughts occur to me as I write this blog entry.

  • Is it just me, or is Law and Order just an incredibly amazingly good show? I think I'm starting to get hooked.

  • I got my car's front windshield replaced today with a nice shiny new one. The best part? I got to park my car in the heated garage at work all day so the windshield could "settle" without being exposed to extreme cold. You know how awesome it is to be able to reach my car after work without leaving the warm interior of the building, and how nice it is that my hands don't freeze to the steering wheel and my body doesn't go into frantic convulsions as the bitter cold inside the icy tomb that is my car seeps its killing chill into my bones while the car heater takes its sweet time switching from "dispense icy cold air" to "dispense warm heated air?" It's really nice.

  • So who, exactly, watches Charmed? You know, that show about those witch sisters or something? Who? I demand that a fan of that show reveal him/herself so that I can see with my own eyes that somebody does in fact watch it. Surely somebody must be watching it, because I'm always seeing commercials for it. Right?

  • Hunter: the Reckoning has just got to be one of the best RPGs ever written. It just keeps getting better. I've been following it as it has developed over the last year or two now, and the latest sourcebook for it, Fall from Grace, is just excellent. Now to find players...

  • Time for bed.

Posted by Andy on January 13, 2003 11:22 PM |

Comments

How can a Classicist stand to play White Wolf games? I've tried to read them a few times and I always end up gagging on their bizarre, often Latinate, archaisms and having to go lie down for a while until the feeling goes away.... Not that I've specifically read Hunter: The Reckoning -- but I imagine it's pretty much the same...

Posted by: ejh | January 14, 2003 10:24 AM

I'll say this in my defense: Hunter is the only one of White Wolf's World of Darkness RPGs that I really like; the others (while not without a few cool ideas) don't appeal to me for a wide assortment of reasons. I'm not sure why I like Hunter so much, but a few reasons that spring to mind:

  • it's a completely fresh look at the other World of Darkness games, the overblown seriousness of which approach self-parody at times. Hunter is a fairly serious game in concept, but it leaves you free to decide exactly how "serious" you want to be. You can play it deep and insightful, with lots of shades of gray and tough moral decisions to make; or you can play it like a straightforward monster-killing game, where the toughest choice your character faces is which gauge shotgun to use on the werewolf you're ambushing.

  • unlike most other WW games, you aren't a tragic immortal antihero who deserves our sympathy; you're just an average everyday person. It's actually not that common in RPGs to play completely normal people who aren't trained with weapons or magic or superpowers. Hunters get a few special abilities, but they're quite wimpy in the grand scheme of things, and few Hunter PCs would resemble the action hero PCs that you find in other RPGs (including other WW RPGs).

  • Hunter has some great writers working on it, my favorites being Greg Stolze, who worked on the excellent Unknown Armies and Godlike RPGs, and Bruce Baugh, who has written some great stuff for WW's Aeonverse games.

  • For whatever reason, Hunter just grabbed my imagination. What can I say? :)

All that said, if you really hate WW's other horror games (I'm not a big fan of them myself), you will probably not find much in Hunter to change your mind. However, if you are feeling up to it, I strongly recommend that you take a look at Exalted and/or Adventure, two other WW RPGs that are not set in the World of Darkness. Exalted is high fantasy with an anime element (and lots of good Classical elements thrown into the mix); Adventure is a pulp game set in the 1920s. I know of many WW-haters who like them quite a bit; they might soften your opinion of WW somewhat.

Just my $.02.

Posted by: jrau | January 14, 2003 10:35 PM

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