How to Roleplay HighSchool in a tabletop rpg

[thastygliax]

Originally Posted by L.J.Steele

Both _Buffy_ and _Smallville_ had tie-in games which have advice on high school adventures and balancing monster-of-the-week with teen drama.

I played in a long-running Buffy the Vampire Slayer RPG campaign some years back. While the main game focused on college-aged PCs, we also had a "spinoff" game featuring high school student PCs.

As in the TV show, "on screen" classes (for both groups) were mostly just sketchy background flavor and set-up for the real meat of the story: the interpersonal drama and the mystery of the week.

The rulebook has an excellent chapter on running the game. One major point it makes is that the show is really just a soap opera with supernatural trappings. The ever-changing relationships between characters, and the challenges and fallout that they produce, are at least as important to the ongoing story as whatever supernatural threat is the "plot" of a given episode.