The Inside Scoop on Gaming

(A note: Although neither I nor any of my gaming group are listed, we were playtesters for Hunter. I was surprised when I got my free copy. We hadn't heard for the longest time anything about our playtesting, not even a "thanks for your comments" then all of a sudden the guy who ran the playtest game showed up to Saturday's session with a box full of copies of Hunter.)

Introduction

I remember in The Hunters Hunted the image of the vampire hunter was that of a loner, stalking the streets at night, sucking down black coffee and chain smoking to calm their nerves. The hunter faced death every night at the hands of bloodsucking fiends; it was unlikely they'd live long enough to develop lung cancer. In short, vampire hunters were cool.

White Wolf followed with Demon Hunter X, about monster hunters in Asia. These weren't the sociopathic loners of Hunters Hunted, they were wandering kung fu masters and high-tech commando teams. Hunters Hunted was the monster hunter as envisioned in dozens of movies and books in the West, Demon Hunter X was the monster hunter from anime or Hong Kong action movies.

Now White Wolf has released Hunter: the Reckoning. This is not a second edition Hunters Hunted. Contrary to the advertising campaign, this game is not about average joes fighting the forces of darkness. These joes aren't any more average than any vampire or werewolf: they may have been just plain folks at one time, but now they're Imbued--granted strange powers by unknown benefactors. They're average joes like Buffy Summers is average.

Not that that's a bad thing. I'm a big fan of Buffy. The chance to kick the ass of, as the game says, "the walking-dead poseur and the bleeding-heart, tree-hugging shambling rug" really excites me. (Not that I haven't had a lot of fun in both games, and most of the other World of Darkness games as well.) So what the hell went wrong? Why aren't I frothing over this like I frothed over just about every other game White Wolf has published?

The Book

As always, the book itself is gorgeous. It's thick and apparently well-bound, with the cover showing shotgun shells falling through flames. The pages are slick and the artwork is almost entirely beautiful. The pictures by Richard Kane Ferguson and Ron Spencer are especially eye-catching.

There's the standard table of contents, and an index which could be more comprehensive than it is. In a book almost 300 pages long, there's more information than the sparse two-page index would indicate. The chapter numbers and headings are along the top of the pages, so it's easy to locate about where information should be, though.

The Setting

Here's where things started to fall apart for me. In an e-mail discussion with someone who worked on the book (who shall remain nameless unless they want to speak up), I was told that the original tone of Hunter was going to be much lower-key. Imagine the cops of Law & Order or the early seasons of Homicide: Life on the Streets going up against the walking dead. Grim and gritty vampire hunting like dad used to do.

Things changed, though, and we don't have ordinary folks fighting the creatures of the night. Instead, we have mysterious otherworldly forces granting different Edges to hunters, based on virtues and paths. Instead of hunters driven to kill the monsters, we have hunters who want to kill them, hunters who want to understand them, hunters who want to bring them back into the light, and others. In fact, there are 7 "creeds" of hunter. These aren't solitary stalkers of the night; they're organized! They've even got a webpage--it opens the book.

Admittedly, there's plenty of room to play in a game with a secret society of supernaturally-powered monster hunters. It's not the game I'd have created, but perhaps that's a good thing. I wouldn't pay for a game that was just like what I would have done on my own.

What irks me about the setting is that the hunters are given supernatural powers by mysterious beings. The hunters even call themselves the Imbued. What's supposed to be a game about average folks taking back the night isn't. It's one group of supernatural creatures fighting other groups of supernatural creatures. There are shadowy creatures granting powers to the hunters, and what do you want to bet they turn out to be villains, too?

The Rules

Okay, the setting gets a solid "eh" from me. At least the rules are as good as we can expect from the Storyteller system, right? Well, no.

The mechanics borrow some from the recent updates to the Storyteller system in Vampire Revised and Trinity and Aberrant. But not entirely. For the uninitiated, tasks are accomplished by rolling a number of d10s equal to stat+skill against a difficulty number to generate a number of successes. In a huge step backward, rolling a 1 subtracts a success. This was the source of one of the earliest complaint I ever heard about the system, that being more competent increases your chance to botch! There's an easy fix, of course (don't subtract successes), but at this point it shouldn't have to be made.

Damage is divided into bashing and lethal. Lethal damage can't be soaked. You get shot, you're going to hurt. Sounds good to me. Anything to make the game grittier.

The part of the system that really aggravates me is the Edges. Even if the rest of the system grows on me over time, these Edges won't. Let me quote something to you from the book: "Although a level-two edge is often more powerful than a level one in the same path, it isn't always." You read that right. You can spend experience points to go up a level in your powers and get a new power that, well, sucks. Take the Vengeance path: at the first level of power you get the ability to imbue a melee weapon with the power to damage supernatural creatures in a big way, or even to manifest a lethal blade of supernatural energy if you don't have a melee weapon! If you go up a level, you gain the ability to make monsters leave a trail you can follow. Eh. Another level and you can create a fog that obscures vision and sound. Double eh. At fourth level, you can boost your physical attributes, and at fifth you can make a cleansing holy flame erupt from your body and obliterate your enemies. Is the ability to boost your stats so powerful that it needs to be a level four power, especially when there's a lesser version of it available at level one to another path? (This was something we mentioned in our playtest comments, by the way. We thought it was a bug that second level powers tended to be lame. Instead, it's touted as a feature! Hunters get powers in the order they need them, say the designers. A violent, Vengeance-oriented hunter is more likely to need a butt-kicking power at first level, then need other powers later. Perhaps, but I'd be hard pressed to justify spending experience to get those second and third level powers. They just aren't that good. Not that I have to worry about spending experience points on them . . . just see below.)

This highlights another problem with the Edge system: there's little logic to what groups get what powers. Three out of seven paths give you the power to spot monsters; the Visionary path is not one of them. The Visionary path gives you the power to regenerate your own or others' limbs, though. The Vengeance path I mentioned above has two powers that have nothing to do with killing monsters. I get the feeling that there are powers that the designers really wanted to put into the game and couldn't find a place for them, so they just stuck them in anywhere they could. Wouldn't all the powers related to spotting and exposing monsters fit better into one path than across all seven? Wouldn't one path of healing powers work better than multiple paths each having a single healing power?

There's still another problem with that Edge system. Remember that cool immolating power that comes at level five on the Vengeance path? You can't have it. Ever. You can buy Edges from the Vengeance path (or other Zeal paths) with your Zeal virtue. You need to have one point to get the first level Vengeance power, and two more points to get the level two power. Once you've used those points to get one power, you can't ever use them for any other power. If you devote a Virtue to only one path, you can only get a level 4 power (1+2+3+4=10). Again, this is touted as a feature! There's even a sidebar devoted to what a neat idea it is that you can't ever get level 5 powers by the rules. Which means all that space spent explaining 7 level 5 powers is completely wasted. Heck, given the rules for character creation, practically all space for Edges is wasted. You get three points to put into your three Virtues. You can put no points into two and three points into one. This is the only way you'll get a level two power to start, since you can't raise Virtues with Freebie points. To get a level three Edge, you need to get a 6 in that Virtue. There aren't rules for increasing Virtues or gaining new Edges. Okay, to be honest, there are rules for it. The rules amount to: you can't do it with experience points, you have to earn it through the mystical experience of the hunt. That's it. There's a reason experience points are awarded: so that the character can increase in power according to the player's wishes. I can take my handful of experience points and increase my skills or attributes or even my character's willpower. But I have to rely on the gamemaster to tell me when I get new powers and what they are? I don't think so.

Summing Up

Hunter was a game I was really looking forward to. I desperately wanted this to be a great game. I was a little disillusioned after the playtest, but there was still the chance for things to be changed around and fixed. Little things got fixed, but the big things didn't. The game still doesn't allow you to play average folks fighting monsters, like the ad copy claims. Even as a game for playing hunters with strange, otherworldly powers for fighting monsters, the game falls on its face. Power paths are illogical, and the rules surrounding character advancement are ludicrous.

There's still potential for a great game in here, but it would take so much work to fix the problems that I can't recommend it. If you want to play low-powered monster hunters in the World of Darkness, go find a copy of The Hunters Hunted or Project: Twilight. If you want to play high-powered hunters in the World of Darkness, get a copy of Demon Hunter X or convert the Storyteller system to another game. I'd recommend Feng Shui. Hunter: the Reckoning is a mess. White Wolf can do better than this. Looking at the credits for designers and authors, I see a lot of overlap. I have talked with several of the people who are listed only as authors, not as designers, and bought other things they have written and I know they can do better than this.

For whatever reason, the designers created a piece of junk and ignored the playtest complaints that I know they got, since I was one of the people complaining. At least one of the authors is unhappy with the game. In short, if I hadn't gotten a free copy, you wouldn't be reading this review because I'd never pay money for this game.

Style: 3 (Average)
Substance: 1 (I Wasted My Money)

Hunter: the Reckoning
Author: Bruce Baugh, E. Jonathan Bennett, Carl Bowen, Ken Cliffe, Greg Fountain, Geoffrey Grabowski, Jess Heinig, Ed Hall, Robert Scott Martin, Angel McCoy, Jim Moore, Wayne Peacock, Greg Stolze, Richard Stratton, and Stewart Wieck Category: game Company/Publisher: White Wolf Game Studio Line: Hunter Cost: $29.95 US Page count: 298 ISBN: 1-56504-735-4 SKU: WW8100 Playtest Review by Kevin Mowery on 10/17/99. Genre tags: Modern_day Horror	(A note: Although neither I nor any of my gaming group are listed, we were playtesters for Hunter. I was surprised when I got my free copy. We hadn't heard for the longest time anything about our playtesting, not even a "thanks for your comments" then all of a sudden the guy who ran the playtest game showed up to Saturday's session with a box full of copies of Hunter.) Introduction I remember in The Hunters Hunted the image of the vampire hunter was that of a loner, stalking the streets at night, sucking down black coffee and chain smoking to calm their nerves. The hunter faced death every night at the hands of bloodsucking fiends; it was unlikely they'd live long enough to develop lung cancer. In short, vampire hunters were cool. White Wolf followed with Demon Hunter X, about monster hunters in Asia. These weren't the sociopathic loners of Hunters Hunted, they were wandering kung fu masters and high-tech commando teams. Hunters Hunted was the monster hunter as envisioned in dozens of movies and books in the West, Demon Hunter X was the monster hunter from anime or Hong Kong action movies. Now White Wolf has released Hunter: the Reckoning. This is not a second edition Hunters Hunted. Contrary to the advertising campaign, this game is not about average joes fighting the forces of darkness. These joes aren't any more average than any vampire or werewolf: they may have been just plain folks at one time, but now they're Imbued--granted strange powers by unknown benefactors. They're average joes like Buffy Summers is average. Not that that's a bad thing. I'm a big fan of Buffy. The chance to kick the ass of, as the game says, "the walking-dead poseur and the bleeding-heart, tree-hugging shambling rug" really excites me. (Not that I haven't had a lot of fun in both games, and most of the other World of Darkness games as well.) So what the hell went wrong? Why aren't I frothing over this like I frothed over just about every other game White Wolf has published? The Book As always, the book itself is gorgeous. It's thick and apparently well-bound, with the cover showing shotgun shells falling through flames. The pages are slick and the artwork is almost entirely beautiful. The pictures by Richard Kane Ferguson and Ron Spencer are especially eye-catching. There's the standard table of contents, and an index which could be more comprehensive than it is. In a book almost 300 pages long, there's more information than the sparse two-page index would indicate. The chapter numbers and headings are along the top of the pages, so it's easy to locate about where information should be, though. The Setting Here's where things started to fall apart for me. In an e-mail discussion with someone who worked on the book (who shall remain nameless unless they want to speak up), I was told that the original tone of Hunter was going to be much lower-key. Imagine the cops of Law & Order or the early seasons of Homicide: Life on the Streets going up against the walking dead. Grim and gritty vampire hunting like dad used to do. Things changed, though, and we don't have ordinary folks fighting the creatures of the night. Instead, we have mysterious otherworldly forces granting different Edges to hunters, based on virtues and paths. Instead of hunters driven to kill the monsters, we have hunters who want to kill them, hunters who want to understand them, hunters who want to bring them back into the light, and others. In fact, there are 7 "creeds" of hunter. These aren't solitary stalkers of the night; they're organized! They've even got a webpage--it opens the book. Admittedly, there's plenty of room to play in a game with a secret society of supernaturally-powered monster hunters. It's not the game I'd have created, but perhaps that's a good thing. I wouldn't pay for a game that was just like what I would have done on my own. What irks me about the setting is that the hunters are given supernatural powers by mysterious beings. The hunters even call themselves the Imbued. What's supposed to be a game about average folks taking back the night isn't. It's one group of supernatural creatures fighting other groups of supernatural creatures. There are shadowy creatures granting powers to the hunters, and what do you want to bet they turn out to be villains, too? The Rules Okay, the setting gets a solid "eh" from me. At least the rules are as good as we can expect from the Storyteller system, right? Well, no. The mechanics borrow some from the recent updates to the Storyteller system in Vampire Revised and Trinity and Aberrant. But not entirely. For the uninitiated, tasks are accomplished by rolling a number of d10s equal to stat+skill against a difficulty number to generate a number of successes. In a huge step backward, rolling a 1 subtracts a success. This was the source of one of the earliest complaint I ever heard about the system, that being more competent increases your chance to botch! There's an easy fix, of course (don't subtract successes), but at this point it shouldn't have to be made. Damage is divided into bashing and lethal. Lethal damage can't be soaked. You get shot, you're going to hurt. Sounds good to me. Anything to make the game grittier. The part of the system that really aggravates me is the Edges. Even if the rest of the system grows on me over time, these Edges won't. Let me quote something to you from the book: "Although a level-two edge is often more powerful than a level one in the same path, it isn't always." You read that right. You can spend experience points to go up a level in your powers and get a new power that, well, sucks. Take the Vengeance path: at the first level of power you get the ability to imbue a melee weapon with the power to damage supernatural creatures in a big way, or even to manifest a lethal blade of supernatural energy if you don't have a melee weapon! If you go up a level, you gain the ability to make monsters leave a trail you can follow. Eh. Another level and you can create a fog that obscures vision and sound. Double eh. At fourth level, you can boost your physical attributes, and at fifth you can make a cleansing holy flame erupt from your body and obliterate your enemies. Is the ability to boost your stats so powerful that it needs to be a level four power, especially when there's a lesser version of it available at level one to another path? (This was something we mentioned in our playtest comments, by the way. We thought it was a bug that second level powers tended to be lame. Instead, it's touted as a feature! Hunters get powers in the order they need them, say the designers. A violent, Vengeance-oriented hunter is more likely to need a butt-kicking power at first level, then need other powers later. Perhaps, but I'd be hard pressed to justify spending experience to get those second and third level powers. They just aren't that good. Not that I have to worry about spending experience points on them . . . just see below.) This highlights another problem with the Edge system: there's little logic to what groups get what powers. Three out of seven paths give you the power to spot monsters; the Visionary path is not one of them. The Visionary path gives you the power to regenerate your own or others' limbs, though. The Vengeance path I mentioned above has two powers that have nothing to do with killing monsters. I get the feeling that there are powers that the designers really wanted to put into the game and couldn't find a place for them, so they just stuck them in anywhere they could. Wouldn't all the powers related to spotting and exposing monsters fit better into one path than across all seven? Wouldn't one path of healing powers work better than multiple paths each having a single healing power? There's still another problem with that Edge system. Remember that cool immolating power that comes at level five on the Vengeance path? You can't have it. Ever. You can buy Edges from the Vengeance path (or other Zeal paths) with your Zeal virtue. You need to have one point to get the first level Vengeance power, and two more points to get the level two power. Once you've used those points to get one power, you can't ever use them for any other power. If you devote a Virtue to only one path, you can only get a level 4 power (1+2+3+4=10). Again, this is touted as a feature! There's even a sidebar devoted to what a neat idea it is that you can't ever get level 5 powers by the rules. Which means all that space spent explaining 7 level 5 powers is completely wasted. Heck, given the rules for character creation, practically all space for Edges is wasted. You get three points to put into your three Virtues. You can put no points into two and three points into one. This is the only way you'll get a level two power to start, since you can't raise Virtues with Freebie points. To get a level three Edge, you need to get a 6 in that Virtue. There aren't rules for increasing Virtues or gaining new Edges. Okay, to be honest, there are rules for it. The rules amount to: you can't do it with experience points, you have to earn it through the mystical experience of the hunt. That's it. There's a reason experience points are awarded: so that the character can increase in power according to the player's wishes. I can take my handful of experience points and increase my skills or attributes or even my character's willpower. But I have to rely on the gamemaster to tell me when I get new powers and what they are? I don't think so. Summing Up Hunter was a game I was really looking forward to. I desperately wanted this to be a great game. I was a little disillusioned after the playtest, but there was still the chance for things to be changed around and fixed. Little things got fixed, but the big things didn't. The game still doesn't allow you to play average folks fighting monsters, like the ad copy claims. Even as a game for playing hunters with strange, otherworldly powers for fighting monsters, the game falls on its face. Power paths are illogical, and the rules surrounding character advancement are ludicrous. There's still potential for a great game in here, but it would take so much work to fix the problems that I can't recommend it. If you want to play low-powered monster hunters in the World of Darkness, go find a copy of The Hunters Hunted or Project: Twilight. If you want to play high-powered hunters in the World of Darkness, get a copy of Demon Hunter X or convert the Storyteller system to another game. I'd recommend Feng Shui. Hunter: the Reckoning is a mess. White Wolf can do better than this. Looking at the credits for designers and authors, I see a lot of overlap. I have talked with several of the people who are listed only as authors, not as designers, and bought other things they have written and I know they can do better than this. For whatever reason, the designers created a piece of junk and ignored the playtest complaints that I know they got, since I was one of the people complaining. At least one of the authors is unhappy with the game. In short, if I hadn't gotten a free copy, you wouldn't be reading this review because I'd never pay money for this game. Style: 3 (Average) Substance: 1 (I Wasted My Money)