Source Fidelity

I'm nearly finished with my read of the Buffy RPG and am impressed with everything except the spot editing - the revised core rulebook should not have glaring typographical errors - but I'm not sure that I'll ever get a chance to run anything in it. Of the gamers in my two groups I am only aware of ladegardbeing a fan of the show. There is certainly room for Slayage in other times and places (that reminds me: whswhs, do you have a chronicle for the Boca del Inferno game online anywhere?), but I'd want to come up with a premise that remains faithful to the Buffy concepts accepting responsibility and female empowerment within the confines of social strictures. I suspect that the system would work very well for a game with our arctic Tarzan Roger Frost with a team of helpers - students and professors at Yale before the great war, with anthropologist & mythographer Dr. Watkins making a serviceable Watcher substitute - but the transition from female empowerment to respecting native cultures would make it distinctly not-Buffy. 

Being the genre fiend that I am that sort of thing matters to me. It's the same reason why I want Old Lives, Old Civilizations to feel like original Star Trek, cheesy sets, dated fight choreography, telegraphed morals and all. And it's most especially why things like the recent spate of treating the Marvel and DC universe as if they were closer to 'the real world'  or the existence of Section 31 in Deep Space 9 irk me so much: they are violations of the underlying truth about the fictional universe. If people or governments were going to treat supers they way they would in the 'real world' then the world would never have turned out like the Marvel & DC universes, so the switching of gears is a blow to the setting fidelity and the sign of a writer floundering for a story. It's a truism that the Federation and humanity has reached an ethical point where it can operate through nobility, diplomacy, and the willingness to back it up with a warship or a punch to the jaw - saying at a later date that it needs an assassination bureau undercuts the whole thing.  

(Building a whole new world from scratch that has always worked on those priciples, is just fine and dandy. I have no problem with Wild Cards, or even the Starfleet Battles inspired Prime Directive that views Starfleet through a highly practical, martial lens.)

In any event, the Buffy RPG was a treat to read. Finding something to do with it other than steal the White Hat/Hero and single die roll combat mechanics is something else again.