Mercule
Adventurer
This is how we did our first campaign of Vampire, way back when. I was the only one with the book and it took a bit of cajoling to get the rest of the group to buy into something besides D&D. We actually did a short-run game in the spring before heading home for the summer (college). It went well and people wanted to do it again, in the fall, but no one else had any books, yet. So, I just sat down with each player and did a kind of fluid prelude that established who they were, then went home and statted up their characters. I showed them the dots on the page, once, then just handed them a brief, dossier-type page on their character, in plain English.
I rolled all the dice for the entire campaign and the players never saw their sheets for the entire campaign. I handed the sheets to them before the next summer break. Everyone raved about the game and ran out and got books. The next fall, we had so many freaking rules arguments everything broke down. We did, eventually, find our groove, but it was more D&D, less story.
I tried to recreate it by bringing the character sheets back to the GM side of the screen, but it never quite worked. I think you can do it, but it has to be a relatively simple system (yeah, calling Mage "simple" is dubious) and the players have to be willing to roll with things. I've never been quite that in the dark, but I've done several systems where I've just kinda jumped into the first game session and learned as I went (Shatterzone and Ars Magicka were both a blast, even though I never did get the books for either).
I rolled all the dice for the entire campaign and the players never saw their sheets for the entire campaign. I handed the sheets to them before the next summer break. Everyone raved about the game and ran out and got books. The next fall, we had so many freaking rules arguments everything broke down. We did, eventually, find our groove, but it was more D&D, less story.
I tried to recreate it by bringing the character sheets back to the GM side of the screen, but it never quite worked. I think you can do it, but it has to be a relatively simple system (yeah, calling Mage "simple" is dubious) and the players have to be willing to roll with things. I've never been quite that in the dark, but I've done several systems where I've just kinda jumped into the first game session and learned as I went (Shatterzone and Ars Magicka were both a blast, even though I never did get the books for either).