[UA] Bad Reactions to UA?

[Kenneth Hite]

Chad asks:

>Has anyone on the list introduced UA to a player who doesn't
>like it, and what has their experience of it like?

Not that I know of. :^)  I did, perhaps, make a mistake in not giving 
out more skill points for our more "Tim Powers upstairs badass" UA 
game, which caused some disjoint between the campaign world and the 
"James Ellroy danger to yourself and others" game system for a while. 
But now, everything is Perfect, I'm sure....

>I ask this because one of my friends and players has a
>significant dislike of the somewhat nihilistic tone of UA, that
>everything seems to be tainted or undercut, that everyting is
>depressingly overempahsized realism in terms of what characters
>can do, and that all magick does is make your life worse.

At some level, not all games are for all people.  People who don't 
like a realistic morality, or percentile dice, or modern day 
settings, or the words "occult underground," aren't going to like UA, 
end of story.  They should play another game; the point of games, 
after all, being to have fun.

>Add to this, a reviewer friend
>of mine sent me a preview of a review column he was writing on
>UA (esp. Hush Hush), and mentioned that he thought that UA was
>highly Romantic (in the artistic sense) and that wasn't his bag.

I think, in all honesty, your reviewer friend is smoking crack. UA is 
(and I'm talking about "default flavor" UA, here, not the weird 
Powersy way I run it), if anything, even less Romantic than CALL OF 
CTHULHU.  Emotion and love is almost never the answer, nature and 
nature's wildness play virtually no role, most personal dilemmas have 
to be faced within rather than echoed without, youth is stupid and 
endangered not privileged, society is not inherently corrupt but the 
"outsiders" quite likely are -- even the archetypes and Avatars are 
presented (or Greg tries to present them) not as expressions of some 
Jungian oversoul but as human fuckedness Writ Large.  I could, in 
fact, make a case that UA is an anti-Romantic game of almost Burkean 
proportion, although it's really too expressly anti-traditional for 
Burke. Almost the sole Romantic quality the game retains is the hero 
whose choice can change the world, and that's hardly exclusive to the 
Romantics.

Yours,

Kenneth Hite, LHN

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