[UA] UA Bitterness (long and mean)

[Royal Minister of Stuff]

--- Saul Peers <rexmundis at hotmail.com> wrote:
> I have taken this approach to Voodoo in the one game
> I've run so far.  I 
> made the Loa(gods) be powerful sorcerer-demons who
> mounted(possessed) to 
> hougons(priests) for several hours in exchange for
> magical services 
> performed while controlled.  It worked really well,
> the only part of the 
> adventure that did.

You really don't like UA much, do ya, Saul?

I keep getting this "your game don't work" vibe from
these messages.

I know how you feel.  Until I started playing UA, I
was always poking around Wwolfie stuff, trying to find
that one thing that seemed so close... yet it never
worked for me.  I'm still kinda bitter about it (wait,
no, I tell a lie, I'm really, truly, deeply bitter
about, but I'm trying to control it.) It always seemed
like there was potential but it never panned out.

Maybe I'm wrong, since I've always been awful at
reading between the lines.  Whether I've guessed
incorrectly or not, what I'm trying to do is improvise
and put out a call to the many, many experienced
players and GMs on the list:

UA obviously doesn't work for everybody, some people
are looking for other stuff, but they drift into this
game because it almost, but not quite, has what
they're looking for.

So, the question is this:

What's cool about UA and what isn't? Nothing's perfect
and there's going to be a new version of the system in
a short period of time anyway.  What would you use to
sell the game and what do you think would turn people
off?  What kind of caveats would you give?

I'll start.  I like the humanist angle that UA takes
and its focus on characterization.  It uses in-game
rewards to reinforce emotional roleplaying (most
specifically, the rules revolving around Passions and
stimuli.)  The world has a very "toolbox" feel to it,
lots of little peices you can pick up and put together
however you want.  Passions, cabals and a focus on
grubbing for mystic power makes it pretty easy to
motivate characters and set up subplots.  In addition,
the skill system is not only wide open, but encourages
people to make up their own take on everything.

Now, what I don't like: 
Having no skill list scares off half the people who
would, otherwise, be interested in the game.  I have
the resources to compensate for this (namely a large
GURPs library), but other GMs may not.  One page of
organized "suggested skills" is usually enough to ally
people's fears.  If there can be a one-sentence blurb
by each skill, so much the better.  I don't like
complicated defaults (which is why I don't play GURPs
for as much as I buy the supplements.)  I prefer
blanket defaults based on attributes (defaults which
cover skills that WOULD be under that attribute, it
would make freebies in driving, general athletics,
etc. unneccessary) and I really hate telling players
"you just can't do it, it ain't possible, no way, no
how."  Maybe you don't think it's so hard to work out
default rolls for UA and maybe you're right, but I
think it's a valid criticism.  I don't like the sense
of overwhelming frequency which seems to pop up in
canonical UA, so I compensate by bombarding players
with too much information.  Both can shut a group
right down, but that's a GMing problem.  (Fortunately,
Robin Laws' "Robin's Laws" has some tricks to help out
in that area.)  And, finally, I don't like UA because
it seems better than anything I could ever write and
sometimes I wake up a 2am thinking about that. 

=====
-- Rp Bowman, Royal Minister of Stuff
The Electronic Nation of Yokeltania:
http://www.geocities.com/yokeltania/

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