Buffy & Angel vs. The Matrix

[Captain Morgan]

Also, guns are already useless against vampires, which they did explain at some point

Except the evidence presented on camera says otherwise. As early as season 1, episode 7 they showed that bullets could hurt vampires enough to put them on their ass, and this happened on other occasions too. Logically, there is no reason you can't pump one full of lead to basically immobilize it and then finish it off with stakes or decapitation. Heck, they also demonstrated that your average demon can die just fine from bullets in Angel.

That's bad storytelling.
You don't explain why something you're not going to show anyway isn't a factor. That kind of writing leads to doing an origin story for Barry Allen's bowtie.

And the scale of the conflict has not been raised in any way..

It's worse storytelling to demonstrate that everyone in the show, villains and heroes alike, is vulnerable to something as basic and common as fire arms and then have no one bother to use them.

In fact, given that Buffy is set in the modern world, you are basically avoiding a plothole by doing this. Hell, you don't even need an on camera demonstration. Just have Xander ask "Hey, why don't you take a gun with you?" and Giles says "Bullets bounce off vampires as much as they would Buffy." You've now established why you need a designated vampire slayer as opposed to just a government hit squad, or calling in a SWAT team armed with machetes for finishing things off. Buffy and company are too tough for bullets to even slow down, and you need the striking power of a slayer to penetrate a vampire's damage reduction.

This isn't bad story telling, and it does raise the scales. The actual trade off is that now vampires are so tough and dangerous that they would eviscerate any of the Scoobies, and the Scoobies wouldn't be able to scratch their paint. But the show is filled with tons of examples of normal humans fighting vampires with various degrees of success or failure. It was a storytelling decision, not a budget decision, that led to Xander being able to survive Vampire scraps, and Charles Gunn taking them out in groups.

Shows like Being Human had vampires cause massive amounts of carnage off screen, and they had shoestring budgets. They never especially showed Vampires fighting on screen to begin with, but that also neatly avoided the problem of low showings. It wasn't a show about super hero punch outs.

Buffy is a show with super hero punch outs, that simply aren't very impressive on the grand scale of super hero punch outs. (It's also a lot of other things.) Was the budget a factor when they decided to set this power level? Probably. But there were plenty of ways around that if they wanted to be more realistic, more powerful, or less campy.

Hell, they've been publishing Buffy and Angel comics for years now, which would have been a great way to demonstrate this theoretical unlimited budget power level you claim. And yet to do that they gave Buffy an external power up. I've yet to hear anyone name feats that Buffy or Angel use in their default forms in the comics that are drastically beyond their TV show counter parts.

[Dr Will Hatch]

As much as it pains me to give a lame cop out excuse for one of my all time favorite TV shows, but I don't think that we were meant to take most of the monsters on Buffy seriously. They were just metaphors for things that were going on in the lives of the characters. The budget had something to do with their relative lack of coolness too(In the movie, vampires could fly, but the show didn't have enough money to do that every week, and suddenly upping their power levels in the comics for no reason would just be bad storytelling), but it was mostly because they were just colorful background noise. Whedon has shown in Cabin in the Woods what happens when he is serious about telling a horror story with inhumanly powerful monsters in it(Hint: The world ends).

[choptop]

That's not bullet time (as a film technique, not the definition Rumbles gives to the word). That is simplistic slow motion with really crappy CGI bullets added to it.
Bullet time is when the camera pans around a scene in slow motion or even frozen in time.

true but not all Bullet time scenes have to pan around a scene.

[Carabas]

true but not all Bullet time scenes have to pan around a scene.

It has to pan around the slowed down object.

Many of those scenes in that clip don't even look like bullet time. Particularily most of the ones that involve Rumbles bullet time dodging.

[Siriel]

Yes they do, they load Neo full of martial arts and they say they've been doing it for hours so he already had a crap ton loaded into him.

Yes, they do say that. What they don't do is show anywhere near the skill level of someone who knows all those martial arts.

[krang]

Except the evidence presented on camera says otherwise. As early as season 1, episode 7 they showed that bullets could hurt vampires enough to put them on their ass, and this happened on other occasions too. Logically, there is no reason you can't pump one full of lead to basically immobilize it and then finish it off with stakes or decapitation. Heck, they also demonstrated that your average demon can die just fine from bullets in Angel.

Therein lies the problem with Buffy in rumbles. The power levels we are told the characters have and what they actually demonstrate on screen are at odds. Going by dialogue Buffy is supposed to be this super-powered low end brick but ends up getting taken out by normal humans hitting her over the head with bricks every other episode. Ultimate evils that are supposedly capable of taking over the world are blown to smithereens by RPGs. So many people, either not knowing rumbles rules or over-inflating feats due to narrative, don't realize that her consistent high end feats don't place her all that high compared to many other forms of fiction.

[Siriel]

Ultimate evils that are supposedly capable of taking over the world are blown to smithereens by RPGs.

That's not really the show's fault. They only ever claimed that they were world-wide dangerous through prep or some "press this button to end the world" magic rituals, not that they would punch the world into submission.

[abmccray]

To be fair, it was only the first bullet-timing ever, a film technique the Wachowskis developed specifically for the Matrix.

It was the first actual film, as opposed to short or commercial to use that filming technique that coined the phrase, but there were other clear(er) examples of bullet timing before that in film, for instance, Frost in Blade.

edit: Whoops, only the first page loaded for me for some reason.

[Dr Will Hatch]

That's not really the show's fault. They only ever claimed that they were world-wide dangerous through prep or some "press this button to end the world" magic rituals, not that they would punch the world into submission.

Not only that, but there is some evidence that the supernatural world in Buffy doesn't WANT to escalate things into a world war because the monsters and demons know that humans are capable of fighting back. The very premise of the Buffyverse is that humans were able to drive the Old Ones off and back to wherever they came from, and vampires and demons are just shadows of their power. This isn't the Cthulhu Mythos where humanity is completely screwed. Buffyverse humans have a fighting chance.

[The Drunkard Kid]

It should also be noted that the Judge was only ever a real threat in the pre-Modern age, but no one, including him, realized that until Buffy brought out the RPG.

[Guy1]

It should also be noted that the Judge was only ever a real threat in the pre-Modern age, but no one, including him, realized that until Buffy brought out the RPG.

Boom.

Glorious.