This is something I posted on G+ when CJ Carella's Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel RPGs were in the Bundle of Holding.
I put BtVS in the ludography for Malandros for a number of reasons, and here some of them are in no particular order. Mainly it's about how it is set up to create a specific game experience.
1) Character creation. BtVS features classic 90s-style merits & flaws. But the great thing is how well they're chosen to fit the kind of setup they're aiming for. Even if you full-on GURPS-min-max your PC, you'll get a character that fits right into a Buffy TV show. I played an ex-junkie slayer portrayed by Fairuza Balk. I made the ghost of a Templar knight inhabiting a superscience robot body (who was going to high school, obviously). A private detective with a magic filing cabinet. OK, maybe that last one wasn't bang on, tonewise.
2) The no-dice GM in Malandros comes from here. Yeah yeah, Apocalypse World, but this is where I saw it first. In BtVS, NPCs have static scores that function as their skill roll totals and the target numbers for PCs' attacks on them. As in the show, sometimes you simply cannot beat an enemy through a particular approach. The monster will just keep hitting you unless you come up with something else.
3) It showed me you didn't necessarily need to worry about balancing all the PCs stats against one another, even though RPGs have a whole industry dedicated to that. In BtVS you frame your victories by who you are. For a vampire-slayer with magic vampire-slaying powers, killing one vampire isn't a big deal. For a tweed-wearing librarian it is a tremendous thrill and relief. Plus White Hats (the sidekicks level) get more luck points, but whatever.
And more broadly, the Hero/White Hat divide outlined how mixed "power" levels aren't really mixed, if the intra-group relationships are strong. If the PCs are equally important to each other, it doesn't matter which of them can lift a car over their heads.
4) I played a demo game at Gen Con UK that CJ ran, and he was cool.
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