The Inside Scoop on Gaming

Introduction

It's finally out. I've been waiting to see Vampire Hunter$ for a long time, and it's finally in stores. You see, I love horror games, and I love vampire movies. Oh, the ones with angsty vampire heroes are all right, but I really like seeing a lone mortal or a determined band of mortals fighting against the forces of darkness. From what I'd heard about Vampire Hunter$ it sounded fantastic. (It also sounded similar to, although less serious than, a monster-hunting RPG I've been kicking around designing in my Copious Free Time.) The owner of the local hobby store told me that he was going to use me as an example for picking up games on hold in a timely fashion: it's not out of the box for five minutes and I'm in the store with my credit card ready.

The Book

The book itself is a little slimmer than I like for $25. The cover art is okay, about what I expect from a small-press game. The interior art varies wildly in quality, and a lot of it seems very familiar (there are some modified photographs that look familiar, I think I saw the logo for Witchcraft, and there's a picture of a fish-man that looks like the artist used an old Call of Cthulhu Deep One miniature as his model--it's the same pose and everything). All the text in the book looks like it was done on a manual typewriter, giving the book the appearance of a pile of typed notes.

There is no index, but there is a comprehensive table of contents that could make up for it. The problem here is that while page numbers are marked at the beginning of the book, they become spotty, then finally stop altogether. The last third or so of the book (I'm not going to sit and count pages) has no page numbers whatsoever that I could find. I found at least one "page XXX." In the explanation of the rules, we are told how to roll the dice and reminded not to forget to reroll and add dice that come up matched. I hunted frantically through the previous pages trying to find the rule I missed about rerolling and adding and couldn't find it. That rule is explained two pages after the reminder not to forget it. The credits in the front of the book give the people who worked on it titles like "lead surgeon" and "ear, nose, throat and internal medicine." So I don't know who was supposed to edit Vampire Hunter$, but shame on them. It's really not fair that I can't put editing experience down on my resume, because I haven't done any professional editing, but someone else can put it on their resume for editing Vampire Hunter$, which is one of the most amateurish editing jobs I've seen in a long time.

The Rules

Character creation is incredibly simple: you have 10 dice to put into your Talents (which cover both skills and statistics) or hit points. You get five Knacks, which are aptitudes for a Talent that fall short of actual training. You take a Fault, and you can take up to two more Faults, gaining two extra Talent dice for each Fault.

Resolving a task is a little more complicated. First, you take two dice (Vampire Hunter$ uses 6-sided dice exclusively)--you always get 2 dice--add any dice for your Talent, roll them and add them. If any dice came up matching, you reroll them and add them, continuing if they match again. What this means, first and foremost, is that I can't figure the odds of beating any difficulty number. In the rules section, we are assured that a Simple task (difficulty 10) can be accomplished by a person with a Talent of 1, and therefore 3 dice, about half the time. Simple tasks include such things as putting gas in a car (covered by mechanic), winning a game of checkers (covered by gambling), noticing a smiling vampire in front of you (danger sense), or replacing a battery (electronics). Yes, with no training in Negotiation, you'll find convincing a small child to eat candy to be a daunting task!

Combat follows roughly the same rules. Hitting someone is a Simple task, with the difficulty modified depending on specifically how hard it will be to hit someone. Initiative is a d6, plus another d6 for every die you have in any combat Talent, even if it's not applicable to the situation. The average human will have about 17 hit points, and player-characters will have up to 40 to start. When you get to 1 hit point, you have a chance of falling unconscious, and when you reach zero, you're dead. Weapons do a fair amount of damage, but the difference between being just fine, unconscious, and dead is too narrow.

Finally, what would a horror game be without fright checks? Vampire Hunter$ has fright checks, based off of the Willpower Talent. Which means most people will fail even the simplest fright checks routinely. It seems wrong for a group of professional monster hunters to be loaded up with psychological problems by the end of the first adventure. Even worse, having knowledge about the supernatural means you're more likely to fail your fright check, on the grounds that knowing what you're up against makes it more terrifying. This works fine in Call of Cthulhu when the reality of the universe is truly mind-shattering, but when you're fighting a vampire or a werewolf and you know exactly what it takes to kill one, you should be less frightened--especially since you should have a good supply of whatever you need on hand.

The Setting

Vampire Hunter$ is set in what is essentially our world. Players take the roles of professional monster hunters who work for an organization called "Vampire Hunter$, Inc." VHI was started by an ex-Marine who found out about the existence of the supernatural. There's not a great deal more to the setting. There's a few pages of information on how a Vampire Hunter$ franchise works (you pay $100,000, get some promotional material from the home office, and you're on your own), and what sort of training is involved (not much) but no real information on how they interact with legitimate law enforcement or what most people think about a nationwide franchise of people who advertise in newspapers and on television that they kill vampires.

The section on monsters is amusing, since it covers most B-movie monsters since the inception of film. You have vampires, ghosts, werewolves, blobs, fish-men, little green men, mad scientists and their creations. There are also some guidelines for creating your own monsters.

There's some GM advice which is very generic, GMing 101 stuff. Very little on how to set a scene for a horror game. We're told that the GM should emphasize the isolation and fear of the characters, but not much else, and not how to do that. We're given guidelines for spending experience points, but only told that characters should be awarded experience at the end of an adventure, not how much.

The book finishes up with an adventure "Ladies of the Night" an oddly antiseptic adventure about a vampire controlling a pimp and chowing down on prostitutes. The impression I got was that the author wanted to write an adventure that showed just how grim and gritty Vampire Hunter$ is supposed to be. It's a good try, but nothing else in the book even implies that this is supposed to be a grim and gritty game. At the end of the adventure, there are guidelines for awarding experience for the adventure and we are told that we should use these as guidelines for awarding experience in our own adventures. Again, a good editor would have seen that guidelines on how to award experience would have been in the section on awarding experience, not in the adventure.

Conclusion

There's a lot of potential in a game about monster hunters. Vampire Hunter$ only scratches the surface. The rules need work and the book needs re-edited. There's a kernel of a good idea in here, but it needs far more development than it received. As late as Vampire Hunter$ is in being released, it should feel more like a finished game and less like someone's pile of notes for making a game.

Style: 2 (Needs Work)
Substance: 2 (Sparse)

Vampire Hunter$
Author: Mark Arsenault Category: game Company/Publisher: Nightshift Games Line: Vampire Hunter$ Cost: $24.95 US Page count: unknown ISBN: 1-929332-16-5 SKU: CFE1500 Capsule Review by Kevin Mowery on 01/17/00. Genre tags: Modern_day Horror	Introduction It's finally out. I've been waiting to see Vampire Hunter$ for a long time, and it's finally in stores. You see, I love horror games, and I love vampire movies. Oh, the ones with angsty vampire heroes are all right, but I really like seeing a lone mortal or a determined band of mortals fighting against the forces of darkness. From what I'd heard about Vampire Hunter$ it sounded fantastic. (It also sounded similar to, although less serious than, a monster-hunting RPG I've been kicking around designing in my Copious Free Time.) The owner of the local hobby store told me that he was going to use me as an example for picking up games on hold in a timely fashion: it's not out of the box for five minutes and I'm in the store with my credit card ready. The Book The book itself is a little slimmer than I like for $25. The cover art is okay, about what I expect from a small-press game. The interior art varies wildly in quality, and a lot of it seems very familiar (there are some modified photographs that look familiar, I think I saw the logo for Witchcraft, and there's a picture of a fish-man that looks like the artist used an old Call of Cthulhu Deep One miniature as his model--it's the same pose and everything). All the text in the book looks like it was done on a manual typewriter, giving the book the appearance of a pile of typed notes. There is no index, but there is a comprehensive table of contents that could make up for it. The problem here is that while page numbers are marked at the beginning of the book, they become spotty, then finally stop altogether. The last third or so of the book (I'm not going to sit and count pages) has no page numbers whatsoever that I could find. I found at least one "page XXX." In the explanation of the rules, we are told how to roll the dice and reminded not to forget to reroll and add dice that come up matched. I hunted frantically through the previous pages trying to find the rule I missed about rerolling and adding and couldn't find it. That rule is explained two pages after the reminder not to forget it. The credits in the front of the book give the people who worked on it titles like "lead surgeon" and "ear, nose, throat and internal medicine." So I don't know who was supposed to edit Vampire Hunter$, but shame on them. It's really not fair that I can't put editing experience down on my resume, because I haven't done any professional editing, but someone else can put it on their resume for editing Vampire Hunter$, which is one of the most amateurish editing jobs I've seen in a long time. The Rules Character creation is incredibly simple: you have 10 dice to put into your Talents (which cover both skills and statistics) or hit points. You get five Knacks, which are aptitudes for a Talent that fall short of actual training. You take a Fault, and you can take up to two more Faults, gaining two extra Talent dice for each Fault. Resolving a task is a little more complicated. First, you take two dice (Vampire Hunter$ uses 6-sided dice exclusively)--you always get 2 dice--add any dice for your Talent, roll them and add them. If any dice came up matching, you reroll them and add them, continuing if they match again. What this means, first and foremost, is that I can't figure the odds of beating any difficulty number. In the rules section, we are assured that a Simple task (difficulty 10) can be accomplished by a person with a Talent of 1, and therefore 3 dice, about half the time. Simple tasks include such things as putting gas in a car (covered by mechanic), winning a game of checkers (covered by gambling), noticing a smiling vampire in front of you (danger sense), or replacing a battery (electronics). Yes, with no training in Negotiation, you'll find convincing a small child to eat candy to be a daunting task! Combat follows roughly the same rules. Hitting someone is a Simple task, with the difficulty modified depending on specifically how hard it will be to hit someone. Initiative is a d6, plus another d6 for every die you have in any combat Talent, even if it's not applicable to the situation. The average human will have about 17 hit points, and player-characters will have up to 40 to start. When you get to 1 hit point, you have a chance of falling unconscious, and when you reach zero, you're dead. Weapons do a fair amount of damage, but the difference between being just fine, unconscious, and dead is too narrow. Finally, what would a horror game be without fright checks? Vampire Hunter$ has fright checks, based off of the Willpower Talent. Which means most people will fail even the simplest fright checks routinely. It seems wrong for a group of professional monster hunters to be loaded up with psychological problems by the end of the first adventure. Even worse, having knowledge about the supernatural means you're more likely to fail your fright check, on the grounds that knowing what you're up against makes it more terrifying. This works fine in Call of Cthulhu when the reality of the universe is truly mind-shattering, but when you're fighting a vampire or a werewolf and you know exactly what it takes to kill one, you should be less frightened--especially since you should have a good supply of whatever you need on hand. The Setting Vampire Hunter$ is set in what is essentially our world. Players take the roles of professional monster hunters who work for an organization called "Vampire Hunter$, Inc." VHI was started by an ex-Marine who found out about the existence of the supernatural. There's not a great deal more to the setting. There's a few pages of information on how a Vampire Hunter$ franchise works (you pay $100,000, get some promotional material from the home office, and you're on your own), and what sort of training is involved (not much) but no real information on how they interact with legitimate law enforcement or what most people think about a nationwide franchise of people who advertise in newspapers and on television that they kill vampires. The section on monsters is amusing, since it covers most B-movie monsters since the inception of film. You have vampires, ghosts, werewolves, blobs, fish-men, little green men, mad scientists and their creations. There are also some guidelines for creating your own monsters. There's some GM advice which is very generic, GMing 101 stuff. Very little on how to set a scene for a horror game. We're told that the GM should emphasize the isolation and fear of the characters, but not much else, and not how to do that. We're given guidelines for spending experience points, but only told that characters should be awarded experience at the end of an adventure, not how much. The book finishes up with an adventure "Ladies of the Night" an oddly antiseptic adventure about a vampire controlling a pimp and chowing down on prostitutes. The impression I got was that the author wanted to write an adventure that showed just how grim and gritty Vampire Hunter$ is supposed to be. It's a good try, but nothing else in the book even implies that this is supposed to be a grim and gritty game. At the end of the adventure, there are guidelines for awarding experience for the adventure and we are told that we should use these as guidelines for awarding experience in our own adventures. Again, a good editor would have seen that guidelines on how to award experience would have been in the section on awarding experience, not in the adventure. Conclusion There's a lot of potential in a game about monster hunters. Vampire Hunter$ only scratches the surface. The rules need work and the book needs re-edited. There's a kernel of a good idea in here, but it needs far more development than it received. As late as Vampire Hunter$ is in being released, it should feel more like a finished game and less like someone's pile of notes for making a game. Style: 2 (Needs Work) Substance: 2 (Sparse)