The Gaming Den

Well there was the Daedelus printing with some color interiors, the Daedelus printing with all B&W interiors and then first Atlas Printing which changed the cover and added new archetypes, but somehow the one on Kickstarter currently is only number 2.

But we are now living in the brave future of Spaceballs where you can not only buy games before they are released, but you also buy the right to do work the game designer didn't do. Hence I am the proud new owner of a PDF file of the 2nd edition Feng Shui rules, marked "Post-Playtest Draft GAMMA Compare to 2.0". But hey when I'm paying someone else for the right to work, that means that I can show up blotto. Heck, I'd go so far as to say there is a moral imperative to be massively impaired under those circumstances.

So I'm through half a bottle of before I start. I'll move on to vodka martinis, shaken, not stirred and using my Info Beer before this gets done. Don't expect me to stay coherent, and don't expect the page numbers to make sense, since I'll be skipping between different devices to read things in the course of this.


Page 1 Credits:
Robin Laws is one of the better designers still working in RPG design. I still respect him for that, even though he'd do better to get a real job or sell his Star Wars fanfic the way Aaron Alston did. I had forgotten that Rob Heinsoo was involved in the original edition.
This page ends with a big "DO NOT DISTRIBUTE", because that always works. But heck, I don't plan on distribution, just druken editorializing.



Chapter I: Kii-Yaaahhh!

Interestingly enough that heading has been toned down from the prior edition, where it was ALLCAPS.

The book truly starts of with an 8-paragraph overview that establishes all of the game's core conceits: Action-movie physics, high melodrama, time-travelling chi warriors, the role of geomancy in tying these together. It's a slam-dunk way to lead off a RPG book, but I fear that just like a true slam-dunk, there's nowhere left to go but down.

We then get a sidebar that hasn't been sidebarred yet about the various ways to pronunce feng shui. Sadly Robin Laws lists neither "Shadowfist" nor "Grindhouse" as acceptable pronunciations - even though either would result in less confusion about the game's name.

Next up, the usual boilerplate about what's an RPG and how do I play and what makes this one different is given a punchy, kicky treatment in sections with headings like "The Game" and "Making an Action Movie that plays in your heads", "High Action Style". A few nods are given to the co-operative nature of RPGs - Laws comes right out as says that "this is rules lite to make it easy for the GM to wing it if Players go off the rails" That's good, but the "flying pronoun kick" section isn't. I personally do not care how traditional nor progressive your choice of gendered pronoun usage is. Just stick to it and we're all good. Don't hedge your bets by saying that sometimes you reverse things -- hire a fucking proofreader-- you know somebody who's sober. And I damn sure do not want to read an explanation of your writer's style guide on pronoun usage in the opening section establishing how to play an action movie RPG. I ain't reading this for a grammar lesson.

...and the wine is kicked before the first chapter is finished. Off to mix something...
Edit Okay, back with a snakebite, that's an action-movie appropriate shot, right?

Next up we move past publication history and into a "Rules Briefing" section that lays out the basics. This part is unchanged from prior editions, you roll your Action Value +1d6 -1d6 (both open ended) against a difficulty. You can spend Fortune to get an extra open-ended positive die, and if you roll boxcars, neither open-ends and instead you get a vague "special" result on the roll. Here we get a somewhat vague sample AVs adjective chart followed by a more helpful table of example difficulties. We get a few new terms: that +/- d6 total that you add to your AV is now called the swerve you now make reload checks instead of tracking individual rounds, you get various types of resistance checks in place of some of the stats which have been removed and can make Rearm checks to grab a gun or the dropped idol.

The interesting part here are the auto-success guidelines. While they boil down to GM fiat far to easily to be called rules, they guidelines are that you auto succeed on things that nobody ever fails in action movies, and you also auto-succeed if the GM can't think of a way for a potential failure to lead to an entertaining new scene.

After the rules overview, we get a setting overview detailing the Chi War, portals, the Netherworld and the four Junctures action movies take place in: Ancient (Fantasy), Past (Opium Wars / Old West), Contemporary (Now) and Future (Post-Apocalypse). Apparently there's enough $$$ to write a couple extra paragraphs about "Pop-Up Junctures". Sadly these are not like

but are instead merely ways to account for action movies that happen in other settings, because some people want official sanction for rum-running, Nazi-punching adventures. Whatever. Interestingly, there are setting reasons why the future juncture has gone from Dystopian Totalitarianism most people think is okay to post-apocalyptic wasteland, but I think that shift runs counter to the cultural and literay trends of the 18 years since the first edition was released. Kids these days are more about Hunger Games and Divergent than they are about Mad Max.

The factions are largely the same as the last time around, the cosmetic changes to the Eaters are forgettable, but the big change is that the Architechts of the Flesh got destroyed and the Jammers split into two opposed camps after their victory. So no more twisted scientists from the evil future, but twice as many cyborg monkies. This at least does reflect the cultural shift away from science education and towards more planet of the apes remakes .

But without the strict tie in to the Shadowfist card game, I think there should have been more of a shake-up. The game is written with the assumption that PCs will take on the role of The Dragons faction maybe with patronage from one of the Four Monarchs. And well, that's sloppier than I am after a bottle of wine and a double shot of scotch. Each organization should be a potential match for various PC groups, and heck it should be totally possible for different PCs in the same group to belong to different groups - because this is a game that totally wants things like
to happen a bunch.


And that's the first chapter - twenty more to go, lemme do a preview:

• instead of stats, default to an AV of 7
• UP checks not just Death Checks
• Counterproductive Classplossion
• .45s still listed as 9mm in flavor text
• Sorcery is still better than you, but in new ways
• Arcanowave gone (YAY!) replaced with Scroungtech which does most of the exact same things (BOO!)
• PC / Antagonist asymmetry now always mandatory.
• Too damned many villain schticks.
• Advancement largely fixed, but needless random component in new system.

Josh, not that I don't enjoy Drunken Reviews, but is there a reason why you're doing it in this style instead of just doing a bog-standard review?

Lago, to answer your question:here's an instructional video

right--o, it has been a while since I killed a whole bottle of wine myself and then kept going, so I'm on to the hungover phase - and that means hair o' the dog, so moving on with a breakfast beer:


this is from my 2nd favorite local brewery

Chapter 2: Create Your Hero



Chargen is given an ultra quickstart method here: pick one of these classes archetypes, come up with a name, and a backstory which includes a melodramtic hook and start playing. That's an admirable goal, but it runs into a major roadblock as soon as any player is prone to decision paralysis. And by decision paralysis, I mean "wants to know what the fuck the numbers mean" or "thinks rules matter, even in a supposedly rules-lite system". Because at this point, due to KS stretch goal classplossion there are 36 different archetyoes to scan through in the basic book before you pick one. A lot of them overlap in minor to moderate ways, but a few have unique subsystems discussed in later chapters.

So at a rate of one minute to read flavor text and contemplate the basics of each class archetype, each of your group's players is going to need over a half hour alone with the book. And If any of them want to go in depth and read the sorcery, or scroungetech subsystems before committing to a character who uses one it's going to be a lot longer than that. Even worse, these 36 archetypes are listed alphabetically, instead of by any sort of useful grouping like suggested junctures or primary attack type. So players can't break their decision into quicker steps like "I want to play a shooty dude, show me the guns characters" without reading everything in order.

Thus, people actually running this will be pirating copies of the PDFs and once again you have either a full session of nothing but chargen or you are handing out pre-game homework and the promise of leaping into the action


I would have learned that term faster if Kratos had taught my literature courses

is unfulfilled.

As another downside, this method means that players are strongly discouraged from playing the same archetype as any other player in this game. Since customization doesn't happen until after the first game session, two characters of the same class will be 100% mechanically identical. So the game doesn't quite support the trope of nearly-identical characters teaming up, which is a major failing considering the source material

open for images

So design wise things would have been better keeping to far fewer archetypes, but giving player one or three customization switches on each archetype than they are having a classplosion with locked options for classes.

But moving past the decision to go classplosion, we get an "archetype key" overview of what the terms on your character sheet will mean. Name and Catch Phrase are self-explanatory. Wealth is highly abstract and mainly flavor text. The stats and substats from the prior edition have been collapsed into just Attack (Primary), Defense, Toughness, Fortune, and Speed, with things that used to be stat based checks now using a default AV of 7.

Attacks come in 6 flavors: Guns, Martial Arts, Sorcery, Creature, Mutant and Scroungetech, and many archetypes have an alternate attack form they can use.

Defense has been decoupled from primary AV in this edition. You no longer dodge with your Guns skill, which always got into funny justifications for how you dodged after you'd been disarmed. Instead you have a DV that's fixed by archetype. This is an improvement.

Likewise Fortune comes in 5 flavors: Vanilla, Chi, Magic, Scroungetech and Genome. Terminology wise, those could be better: Guns should probably be Shooting since it covers Bows and the like, and Scroungetech should probably not run off of Scroungetech points when every other type gets a different name for the resource management game unit. Interestingly the removal of substats means that now the pool of points which powers your supernatural kung-fu, ancient magic or cyborg implants is the same pool that gives you luck points you can spend to roll an extra positive d6. This is a slight nerf to types with schticks that require point expenditure.

Speed is your initiative base. Depending on Archetype it can be as low as 5 (Big Bruiser) or as high as 9 (Killer, Scrappy Kid, Thief, Sword Master). Since you get extra actions for higher initiative rolls, and the roll is a single (non open ended) 1d6+Speed that's a striking amount of variance in how many actions characters will get in a typical fight, but I'll whine about that more when I get to the still-klunky initiative system. Speed is also nominally your movement rate, but as this game is anti-map and has an abstract car chase system, you will never ever use those numbers.

There's a decent section about personalization with player-side advice about what makes workable character concepts and melodramatic hooks and the concept of "buy-in" is introduced. That's where you get the authorship ability to explain why and how your character's motivation leads them to this fight.

Your GM might ask you to establish buy-in at any time. When she does this, she’s also helping you fnd a fruitful thread to pursue. The question “Why do you want to hunt for Stevie Tran?” clearly signals that there’s awesomeness waiting for you, in the general direction of Stevie Tran.

This is kinda railroady, but it at least emphasizes that it is a co-operative storytelling game where you get inputs to help build the rails. That's a thoroughly anti-Gygaxian sentiment and I can wish it had been advanced in a game 30 or 40 years ago.

Then we get into the Archetypes.
Archer -

Not this guy. But you can and should should name your archer "Spy"
you use a bow in ways that make you competitive with others using automatic firearms.

Bandit - strangely this is not the two-sixgun wielding dude who robs stagecoaches and stands up against the railroads' exploitation of immigrants in the 1850s that I would have expected the "bandit" class to be. It is instead a martial arts archetype likely based on the love interest dude from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

Big Bruiser - You are big and slow and hit hard. Robin hyped how this class had been buffed to work better since 1st ed, but I'm skeptical.Your weak AV is partially balanced by getting a cumulative bonus to AV on each consecutive miss, but you have the lowest speed in the game, so the fight will be over before you get to miss much and the bonus is unlikely to matter. The aiming rules seem to be gone in this edition, so you can't even spend your few shots to increase your AV enough to hit.

Bodyguard. - Fortunately the tag line has nothing to do with I Will Always Love Yoooouuuuuu and instead you get this as one of your schticks.

Bounty Hunter - you get Quarry abilities vaguely similar to the 4e ranger. You also start with Fast Draw, which increases your initiative result if and only if your first attack is a Guns attack. This sort of conditional on action initiative bonus is unworkable on first premises, since you roll initiative before combat and don't take actions until combat starts. But hey the schtick description in chargen and the schtick description under Guns schticks don't actually match, so hopefully this is in the process of being patched.

Cyborg - the rules here seem to imply a character who suicide bombers large numbers of enemies and then fails a death check. I'm baffled how this is supposed to represent movie cyborgs and why players are expected to play one.

Drifter - You're a Clint Eastwood character ( other than Dirty Harry ). You get an ability to show up in the middle of things after the other PCs have started a fight and reap bonuses. This is pwnsome if'n you're the guy who has to be late for the game session, but otherwise it encourages players to sit out the first 3 passes around the table before joining the fight.

Driver - You get vehicle schticks and abilities that matter in chase scenes. As the rules for those are in a future chapter and weren't in the old edition I have no idea what these numbers mean yet.

Everyday Hero - gender neutral renaming of the Everyman hero. A few minor tweaks to improve the play experience since 1e but basically you get a bunch of Fortune dice and bonuses for using random improvised weapons Jackie Chan style. You still get Info / Beer at +15.


like these guys have, sadly I am all out of their beer currently


Ex Special Forces - the concept is straight forward, but this class now gets minor buffing / healing schticks which is interesting.

Exorcist Monk - you're a martial artist who gets to revert transformed animals and banish spirits from the campaign. If some of these abilities were ever targeted at PCs of those types, they would be unfair, but probably okay with PC/Monster asymmetry -- aside from foes with redirection schticks.

Full Metal Nutball - you are the guy next to Ahnold here:



Gambler - You're Maverick. Otherwise not sure this needed it's own archetype.

Gene Freak - You get Mutant Powers. This was recently unlocked due to KS stretch goals, and the current messy Genome Point system shows just how recent. Conceptually supposed to let you do vaguely X-Menish super powers in an action movie context. But currently, I'm not even sure if you still can attack once you've spent your last Genome point.

Ghost - Largely the same as the old edition, except a whole lot less clear that you get both Srocery and Creature AVs and schticks.

Highway Ronin - You're The Road Warrior. You get a bunch of vehicle / chase schticks, which are still in a future chapter.

Karate Cop - you're the "good cop" archetype, you get Martial Arts and Guns schticks. Sadly you lose the non-combat "ally with a secondary foe for the session" schtick from the first edition

Killer - you are Chow Yun Fat's character. You are a master of Guns schticks. The change is that now you have a drawback where you take extra damage in climatic fights.

Magic Cop: You are Agent Mulder or Agent Cooper or the dude from Cast a Deadly Spell or somesuch. A nice take on integrating the game's magic elements into the assumed contemporary reality.

Martial Artist - You get a 15 martial arts AV and a mess of Fu Schticks.

and christ I'm only like halfway through afore I gotta go, damnnit but there are too many of these

Edit: ..continuing..

Masked Avenger - Still a mixed guns/martial arts character. The loss of stats means you can no longer start with max Body, but you get a strong toughness and a schtick to make armor actually useful.

Maverick Cop - you are Dirty Harry or reasonable facsimile thereof. The "bad cop" archetype. No longer the primary driving archetype due to classplosion and vehicle schticks, but still good at it.

Ninja - ninja stuff. The interesting bits you get combat bonuses if you reconnoitered the fight scene beforehand and you get the benefit when you defensively Aid Another.

Old Master - You get a 16 Martial Arts AV. Why yes, that does stress the RNG of a +1d6/-1d6 system where the low end is 12. You get a low toughness and speed, but due to the collapsing of substats you can now use your maximum Chi for Fortune Dice. Only maybe held in check by the drawback that your DV drops from taking damage. maybe.

Private Investigator - A few neat noncombat schticks, but at the conceptual level I can't help bu wonder if this could have been folded into one of the 3 cop archetypes or something, as the archetype is more of a noir or thriller archetype that a shoot-em-up or chop socky archetype.

Redeemed Pirate - G'yar annat.

Scrappy Kid - You get a high speed, a Defense as high as anybody and a lot of Chi points. You have crap for Toughness so it hurts when you do get hit. And while you only have a moderate Martial Arts AV, you can still get the Distraction + Flying Windmill Kick combo at first customization opportunity and experienced players expecting to fight things which aren't mooks totally will do that all the time.

Sifu - Wait, how is that a different concept than the Old Master? Well you get Lower AV, and no toughness drawback, and your default schtick picks are healing and boosts. Also, doesn't have "old" in the name, which reminds me that my drink is empty.

(see also, writings of Steinbeck)

Sorcery - I think the book says all you need to know with

With the sorcerer’s versatility comes some additional complexity. You will want to own a copy of the book
to play it to the fullest.

Spy - Okay, screw that low-shelf Bourbon, instead this is where I get a Vodka Martini, mixed in Safe House shaker a contact brought me after a Gen Con trip. You know the drill. The interesting bit is where they are a Guns / Martial Arts character who gets a +1 to attack with whichever AV they didn't use previously - it's like literally the simplest possible design to limit movespam in a TTRPG.

Supernatural Creature - You get Creature Power Schticks. You get no skills and you can only be healed by Ancient Juncture medicine. For reasons, you no longer get a Martial Arts backup AV like you did in 1e, which kinda means that your ability to assume human form goes out the window in any fight. For similar reasons, your Creature Power AV is also 2 points lower than it used to be. But the creature Schticks are broad and flavorful enough that this is still a versatile archetype.

Sword Master - At the conceptual level, I'm unsure why this isn't just a flavor of Martial Artist. But at the mechanics level you tradea point or two each of AV, Defense. Toughness and Fortune for two more points of Speed and you trade away one Fu Schtick for "+2 to Martial Arts against multiple opponents" and then have all your default picks offn the new "Path of the Sword"

Thief - Conceptually just barely different enough from the Ninja to warrant a distinct class. Mechanically you get a 16 Defense and are a minor Martial Arts / Guns / Vehicle hybrid who gets the same Intrusion and Deceit values the ninja does.

Transformed Crab - this time around Transformed Animal is not a single archetype with its own Fu-Schtick like subsystem. (Although the current draft rules still have that subsystem, it is currently solely there as a set of advancement options for transformed dragons.) Instead each is an individual archetype with schticks in the class write up. This leaves more room to write and sell new classes in supplements later. And of course the core book goes with animals that have the most cultural traction in the source material :

Who cares about the Chinese Zodiac, when you can play one of these?

Transformed Dragon - The conceit here is "better than you" The mechanics are spend Chi to temporarily gain a Skill no other PC has or to use the schtick of a PC whose player didn't show up. The cost is that you can actually die from getting hit by a retro-mutagen ray
Also, it's not like you can play as a no-longer transformed animal, but it is totally like you can generate Mr. Long II, with the instant melodramatic hook of "out to avenge the death of his identical twin brother" in no time flat -- and you don't even lose a level doing that with the new advancement rules. It's almost as if that part was supposed to mean something, but I must still be too sober to see what. Congrats, Mr. Laws, you have outdrunk me this time.

Two Fisted Archaeologist - This class bugs me. Because it totally forgets that there is more than one precedent for the archetype and only gets a Whip Schtick without any incentive for dual-wielding pistols.

and that's chapter 2 - looks like I'm moving at one chapter per day, and that's on my off-from-work, drinkin days. So this review will not likely be finished before the KS campaign is, or I'll have to skip much of the entertaining nitty-gritty.

Lago PARANOIA wrote:Josh, not that I don't enjoy Drunken Reviews, but is there a reason why you're doing it in this style instead of just doing a bog-standard review?

Other than occasional humorous references to beverages and badly worded abilities leading to the drinking of such, is there a difference?

Chapter 3: Butt, Kicking Of
Well if you're gonna name your chapter "Butt" I think the musical choice here is obvious

This chapter opens with a stub heading that has one sentence before moving on to the next heading.


That's about all these books have in common

Then we get a bunch of examples of how to describe things cinematically and an admonition to roll first, then describe to avoid having to undo descriptions. That's sensible, but it doesn't jibe with that bit from

Chapter 1 wrote: Depending on what seems most entertaining, the GM gives you
tactical options by telling you the Diffculty number, or creates unease by withholding it from you.

So yeah, you roll first to, then describe after you know if your roll succeeds or not, but you might not know the roll's difficulty until after you roll, so you still have to wait for GM input before or in the middle of your action description. That's clunky and disrupts the flow of narration at the table, which is really disappointing given how thoroughly some of Mr. Law's other writings have discussed what actually happens at game tables.

Up next stunting rules. These are light and good. You have three options: two for opposed stunts and one for unopposed. For opposed stunts you can either get a free benefit anytime you beat your difficulty by 4 or more - and establish the benefit retroactively after such a success or you can declare the benefit you want ahead of the roll and face a difficulty 2 higher than normal.
For non-opposed stunts, you auto-succeed if there is no risk of harm (which probably will cause a few tableside arguments about just what's plausible within action movie physics) or you roll your best attack against a difficulty of 11 if there is a chance of harm damage.

Next a brief overview of types of opponents: Mook, Featured Foe, Boss, and Uber Boss and then the heading "Who You Ought Not To Be Whaling On" - at which point I am confused beyond the powers of google to help. Isn't "Whom you ought not wale on" more grammatical? As a heading, is that a subject or object? Is the slang term "whale" derived from an older Scottish term to raise welts, or is the "whale" usage in Huck Finn correct? Is the passive construction really necessary. Even Kratos is homophobically unhelpful on this one.

But anyway we now start to get into the actual rules. Feng Shui runs on initiative passes called Sequences which are divided into somewhere between 6 and 15 (Plus speed boosting schticks) shots. You roll initiative each sequence and act when it's the shot equal to your rolled initiative. When you act you subtract the shot cost of your action and get the next shot on which you act, with shot 1 being the final shot of the sequence. Attacks and most actions cost you three shots, you can spend a single shot as an interrupt to increase your Defense by dodging, and some other actions take more or fewer shots to complete, and many can be modified by various schticks. Also, there are some rules about shot costs carrying over or not carrying over to the next sequence and how long it takes other PCs to reach the fight. Said rules are somewhere between "still in flux" and "outright contradictory", depending on how you read various sections, but I am confident in claiming that they exist.

The typical fight lasts into the third sequence, and you reroll your iniative at the start of each sequence. So there's a random component (D&D pre-3e style) and yet you have an involved action economy management game with fixed action points (HERO style) and characters get varaible numbers of actions (Shadowrun initiative pass style).

To sum up: Initiative is far and away the clunkiest part of the entire system. And yet it's integral to schticks, balancing classes by speed and the action economy part of the combat minigame, so we're stuck with it.

This edition adds the Keyframe terminology to have new timing triggers. It's simply a word for "one whole sequence, starting now and lasting until the same shot in the next sequence (or the top of the next sequence if nobody has an initiative that high next roll)", but then after adding these rules, Mr. Laws remembers that he has actually played 4e D&D:

For ease of tracking, no character can have more than one keyframe effect going at one time. Activating a new one cancels the previous one.
GMs, unless you fnd it a snap to track multiple keyframe effects, avoid loading up a fght with foes who all have them.
If everyone in your group loves making and stacking up little tokens and can track themall quickly, you can suspend this rule.
Hint: your group probably doesn't.

Then Interrupts are explained and there's a patch for free dodges at the bottom of the order that really seems like it contradicts the prior bit about which sort of shot costs carry over from sequence to sequence.

Next the core system is given some additional terminology to allow for clarity in writings elsewhere.

• That +1d6/-1d6 result is now called The Swerve.
• Your ( AV + your Swerve ) - Difficulty is still called your Outcome.
• Your positive outcome plus your Weapon Damage is now called your Smackdown.
• Wound Points are still Smackdown - Target's Toughness; at least aside from a handful of schticks that do not pass Go and go directly to Wound Points.

Next some rules for hitting multiple opponents - if the GM Fiats them as close enough to be in the same movie shot you can target groups, taking a -N to your AV, where N is the number of foes you are attacking. and against a difficulty of the highest Defense in the group. They all take the same Smackdown but apply their individual Toughnesses (which honestly are likely to be the same if you're attacking a group) Those rules seems nicely generous for the action movie spirit, but I have a hunch that they probably end up obviating some of the mook-clearing schticks.

Then dodging is reexplained again, with encouragement to use cinematic, character-defining descriptions of your dodge and the revelation that you can spend and roll a Fortune Die to increase your Defense when dodging. There's a brief mention of the Sitting Duck rules -- which really honestly probably should just be cut from the game. If someone is Defense zero during an attack, that oughtta just be an autosuccess.

In this edition, Mooks go down when hit. This is a simplification over the last edition where you needed to have an Outcome of 5 or better to down a mook. It's not actually a change, since AV and Defense have been decoupled and mooks now default to Primary AV 8 Defense 13 instead of just AV 8 like the old edition. Yes, that's right, doubling the number of stats mooks have actually simplifies that game. No, that's no sarcasm, that's something to keep in mind about game design.

It's now completely explicit that the players always get to decide whether your character killed or just KO'ed anyone they put down in a fight. Because, regardless of real world lethality, the source material totally works like that.

Then the impairment and keeling over rules are laid out. PCs (other than Big Bruisers) and Featured Foes take -1 (Impairment) to all AVs at 25 Wound Points, another at 30. At 35+ Wound Points PCs Cs must make an UP check to keep fighting, while Featured Foes drop. Bosses take an additional 15 wound points to face impairment and at 50+ wound points bosses just have an even/odd roll chance of dropping, because that's simpler than Up checks.

Which brings me to Up checks, they work largely like 1e Death Checks did, but they get a bit harder due to stat streamlining. Each time the damage from an attack brings your wound point total to 35 or more, you roll an Up Check. This is a Difficulty 7 Toughness check, but most of the time you will have 2 points of impairment at 35+ wounds, so everybody except for Big Bruisers and Cyborgs have worse than even odds of making it unless they spend a Fortune Die or have a relevant Schtick. But if the bad guys a "fighting to kill" each Up check you make gives you a Mark of Death. Plus in an Gygaxian attempt to increase lethality you get to take an extra Mark of Death for each Fortune Die you spend on Up Checks during a fight. That's right, if you use your luck to stay alive in a fight to the death you become more likely to die. That might make some sort of conceptual sense if this was a comic-book game where villains generally just place KO'd heroes in Dr. Evil style deathtraps[/url] and so players are encouraged to go along with it when their characters are downed, and the game would want rules that punished not doing so. But in the Hong Kong cinema that inspires and informs this game, there is a lot of precedent for ultra-bloddy gun battles where main characters actually die, so villains who are fighting to kill are expected to cap your downed PC in the head, and you are expected to use every resource you have to stop that from happening to your character.

Anyways, after the fight, you then make an actual Death Check with your Toughness (and likely -2 impairment) against a difficulty of 5+Current Marks of Death. This is a explicitly a closed roll, so 6s do not explode and you cannot spend fortune dice. Because more Gygaxian fuckery. If you pass, you're good and you lose all Marks of Death. But if you fail, you die just after making your melodramatic final speech. The "time before snuffing it" chart is gone.

So, the rules for dying in this edition compared to the prior edition eliminate the math of subtracting 35, but double the number of rolls you have to make, double the number of variables you have to track, make it a lot more likely for PCs to actually die despite the redundant rolls, punish PCs for using Fortune in the fight, disallow PCs from using Fortune after the fight make things significantly more lethal for PCs, and eliminate the potential to have a "rush him to the hospital" chase / fight scene.

That is the opposite of an improvement in multiple ways.

Words cannot express my fury right now,
but I have copypasted that last paragraph to a KS comment, so I still lose since I now have actually given playtest feedback after paying for a project.

Now to be constuctive and not just rage: What the game really *should* have are a few different optional lethality rules sets to allow the genre to be tuned to reflect various types of source material. The overall ruleset should allow you to play anything from a "GI Joe Cartoon" campaign where fights are over after all the vehicles explode and nobody is ever truly seriously hurt to a "Star Wars" game where the Old Master bites it in Act 2, but death isn't as likely to happen to any other PC to a "The Killer endfight" style hail of bullets bloodbath where all the PCs are downright expected to die at the end of the arc.


But, moving onwards and drunkwards. After the horribleness that is Up Checks and Death Checks, we get some more bad rules about healing, in a stub that provides a supposedly comprehensive list of healing schticks which fails to list several, briefly talks about timing of rejoining the fight after being healed from a KO and finishes with this finely polished turd:

A character can benefit from any number of healings during a fight, but only one healing in the period between one fight and the next.

Congrats, Feng Shui 2 with healing archetypes actually plays out like the high end of FF tactics, where you immobilize, paralyze and restrain your enemies, but make sure not to KO or kill them because that ends the fight and you can't use your cumulative schticks outside of fights.

But next we actually get back to the rules-lite movie spirit that this game is supposed to have: PCs heal fully between sessions (save for rare cliffhanger exceptions) and also heal at the end of a story arc if that happens mid-session.

Then a few pages cover:

• Damage charts for weapons -- same as 1e, but melee weapons are now all fixed instead of STR+,
• Damage Chart for other sources of injury -- largely the same as 1e
• Range penalties -- meaningless in an anti-map system, but whatever,
• Thrown explosives rules that confusingly don't use the new terminology, or even consistent terminology so you can't actually tell when you are applying your Defense and when you are just applying your Toughness,
• Rules for shot cost of switching weapons (seem a bit harsh)
• Rules for Cover which say "this is a movie, it's a special effect of Dodging"
• Rules about Unconventional Attacks - which just say that flavorful description gets to follow the same mechanics as normal
• Boosts -- aka Aid Another from D&D

And we get to the next new goody: Restraint Attacks. This is an attempt to do simple grapple rules, and they almost work. You make a Martial Arts attack against a target's defense. If successful, that target is unable to act normally and instead must attack you on their next action. If they attack you with anything that isn't Martial Arts, they are at -2 to that attack. So if they are using say Natural Weapons (Creature) or Very Strong (Mutant), they take the same penalty to escaping the grapple as they would for targeting you with an AK-47. Anyways, if the restrained opponent succeeds, they are free and gets to act normally on the following shot. If the restrained opponent succeeds by 3 or more, they also deal the restrainer 7 damage (again, not sure if they mean 7 Smackdown there or not). If the restrained opponent fails, they remain restrained and can do nothing for another 3 shots. Additionally, you can always choose to free someone you have restrained as a 0-shot action, and you automatically let go of anyone you are restraining if you take wounds from anything else or if you dodge. In either of those cases, the opponent you were restraining gets to act at the end of the shot in which he was freed.

That all sounds reasonable at first, but it has flavor issues with how easy it is to pin characters who shouldn't be easy to pin like a Big Bruiser or melee-specced Supernatural Creature and it opens up serious potential for timing abuse when players realize that they can use restraining friendlies combined with the the 0-shot unpin to transfer actions around in the initiative count, doing horrible things to the action economy of this game in downright clownish ways.


Cheesing It - this is the funny, Futurama-inspired name for chosen for a withdraw / retreat action.

The term is not product placement
Once per fight any character can spend 3 shots to attempt to flee. Any opposing character can, on their next action try to stop you, with a Speed Check against your Speed as the difficulty. If that check succeeds, the cheezing character is caught and forced to stay in the fight. If that check fails, the getaway is good. Regardless of how many characters pursue, you only have to elude one to escape the fight. That's a little odd, but should work to keep the flow of the game. My only problem with this section is that it doesn't address how Cheesing It integrates or doesn't integrate with the new and expanded chase rules and whether an escape is an escape or whether it's just a "get out of fighting and into chasing" transition.

Armor is massively changed from 1e, where it was pretty explicitly for Stormtroopers only. Instead this time around Armor comes with an initiative penalty, Thunk and Pop-Back. The initiative penalty is straightforward and always at least -1, which is a big deal if you don't have a schtick to ignore that, since that's at least one shot you don't have to spend on active dodges. Thunk is once-per-sequence damage reduction increase to your Toughness as an interrupt when hit. The only original RPG design there is putting it on a once-per-sequence cooldown, which makes it meaningful without being gotta-have-it strong. Pop-Back is much more original and does a much better job of representing how bulletproof vests work in the movies. It's a once per-game-session complete negation of damage from an attack that would put you past N (usually 35) wound points with an activation cost of 1 Fortune and 3 Shots (spent apparently dead). The bad parts of the design are that most armor only applies against Guns attacks -- which adds complexity for a gain in real realism instead of the desired gain in action movie genre simulation. Also, it's kinda weird that the game only list 4 suits of armor, and all of them are modern-era police / military. There are no guidelines for ancient juncture armor, or post-apocalyptic future armor, nor guidelines for improvising 1850's armor, despite a pretty major precedent for such in the source material

After an unremarkable section on Hitting Objects, there's a horrible stub on Opportunistic Fire. Basically if you have to stop shooting to disarm the generator or something opponents get free interrupt attacks against you -- because Gygax again.


And then the chapter wraps up with the rules for Adverse Conditions - with the interesting idea, that fog, darkness, typhoons, cramped quarters and such impose the same restrictions on attacker and defender and so representing them as penalties is pointless. Instead each condition has an "immunity bonus" listed, which is something characters with a workaround for that condition get to add to their attack and defenses. This is mathematically the same, but results in both less actual math at the table and makes it more likely for players to want to do the remaining math, since it's now a payoff for the character with immunity rather than a burden for everyone without. This is simple, yet genius design. It's a shame that the current version of the book forgets to stick with it in a lot of the later sections.

....and that's the chapter.

Can you spoiler some of those wider pictures in Chapter 2? They make it a pain to read on 19".

Interestingly, I have only ever seen people play transformed crabs and dragons. Roosters, monkeys, and such were possible, and IIRC there were a bunch more in expansion books, but it all came down to Crabs and Dragons, who were largely superior thematically and mechanically.

-Username17

1. Large images now either spoilered or resized and re-hosted. If'n you still have problems, lemme know? But really 19" gives you problems, you coulda claimed 10" netbook or 7" tablet?

2. I think the popularity of transformed crab PCs is 1e was entirely due to mechanical superiority and not at all thematic. Although maybe I could see a case for better mechanic to thematic match.

One problem with editing previous posts is they don't show up as new posts on the threads list.

So, now they split enemies into Mook, Featured Foe, Boss, and Uber Boss? You mentioned that enemies don't use the player rules any more. Is there a mechanical difference between each of these like there was for Mooks & Named Enemies previously or are they just different gradations of power?

Okay, you want an alert, then I have now finished ranting about chapter 3. Tomorrow I should get into chapter 4: Skills, and if'n I can keep to the goal of only ranting and raving about the highlights and lowlights instead of each heading no matter how bland, I should be able to move a bit faster from here on in.

But to respond to your complaint: with my life in general right now, I really can't consider the alternatives of either making an extra click or two to check on progrees or just waiting until I get a new post up to qualify a any sort of a "problem"

But rest assured that I have weighed my options and consider the fit and spurt editing of posts to cover a whole chapter way I am doing this better than my other potential alternatives (wait until a chapter is done before posting, make a stream of like 2-sentence posts, stop posting)

I do like the immunity bonus concept. I mean, it does take away some of the more emergent tilting effects (like thick fog might be expected to hurt ranged attackers more than swordsmen, thus giving a relative melee advantage), but if you're going to be doing something where the characters have a lot of super powers, it seems like definitely the way to go.

I'm worried about the base AV of 7 and Old Masters still having a fucking AV of 16. That seems way off the RNG for no real benefit. Any AV differential greater than 4 can only be made up with a die explosion, so there's no real call for any featured skill to be higher than 12 if the untrained AV is 7.

-Username17

Yeah, the immunity bonus does remove doing things like having Fog make everyone on both sides harder to hit resulting in longer fights, but it does seem like a really good fit for the rules-lite action movie tone of Feng Shui.

And the AV divergence is still a problem, but generally not to the range of 7 vs 16.

Primary Combat AVs range from 12 (big bruiser) to 16 (old master) - and the bruiser has schticks that provide temporary bonuses to that 12.

Noncombat skills are at 7 AV for the "I don't have it" default, with a common way to weasel a 10 in that case, and range up to 15 for the archetype who is a master of that skill. Most "good at this" archetypes get a 12 or 13, while most "this skill is backup/flavor for this archetype get a 9 to 11)

So combat is generally within about the 3ish point range you want, but noncombat skills will occasionally diverge as much a 7 vs 15 (At least before modifiers start stacking up). But I think the genre is probably okay with an Archer not having a real chance catching the Driver in a car chase.

Now there are marketing reasons why it can't happen, but I have to wonder if this game might work better using paired d8s or d10s for a wider RNG?

Okay, I'm done with 2nd best, now I gots me one of these:

You can enjoy with Info:Beer well below 15
and the new Leonard Cohen Album
( edit: this album's Nevermind song is actually thematically appropriate to Feng Shui, check it out.),
so that means it's time to talk about

Chapter 4: Skills.

There are relatively few changes to skills since the previous edition. Each skill still comes with a Physical Ability, Knowledge and Contacts. There's a still to be sidebarred sidebar about "attacks as skills" which seems to indicate that combat AV's aren't skills, but you can use them like they were, which is decidedly less clear than necessary. Still a bit of guidance about what and who your know with your Guns and Sorcery AVs is helpful. Interestingly this sidebar-to-be includes the stretch-goal Mutant skill AV but forgets the pre-Kickstarter campaign Scroungetech AV

The rules for defaulting for skills you don't have are short and sweet. You have an AV of 7 -- unless one of the other PCs who is not in this scene has the skill in question. Then if you invoke their expertise in your action declaration, in which case you get an AV of 10. That's actually masterful design that fixes all the wackiness 1e skill default and attribute stuff Red Rob and I were arguing about on that other thread. It's short, simple, easy to remember, encourages PC's to diversify, encourages players to pay attention to the skills of other player's characters, and it works so that knowing someone with the skill is good, but not as good as actually having the skill. That's pretty much exactly how skill defaults should work in a rules-lite RPG.

Skills still suffer unfamiliar juncture penalties when used out of their time period, and this edition fills in the numbers for those penalties, but tries to mitigate things by having the penalties fade after three attempts, but the tableside consequences of these rules were not considered. There's an example about an 1850's juncture investigator taking fingerprints in a modern police precinct and how he takes -4 to the first set of prints, -2 to the second, -1 to the 3rd and then none to the 4th and subsequent. But the problem is that those penalties are task-specific in a game with very broad skills. The example explains that even after the fingerprinting penalties, the 1850's investigator will take a -4 to the first time he has to deal with DNA evidence. This is really shitty, as it means that you now have to track what each out-of-juncture check was made for, and players will waste time arguing with the GM that a penalized task is similar to a previously done 3+ times tasks. The game would be better off without these rules, but if you really want to do juncture penalties to support man-out-of-time riffs and cultural assumption comedy here are a half dozen ways it could be done better:

• Using any skill out of combat in an unfamiliar juncture imposes a -2 penalty. Characters generally become familiar with a juncture by spending a few weeks living in it. The GM may rule that certain uses of a skill are universal and no juncture penalties apply.
• For the first session any PC is in an unfamiliar juncture, they suffer a -2 to non combat skill checks due to cultural and technical unfamiliarity. After the first game session, they have acclimated and this penalty no longer applies.
• In movies, time-traveling characters generally interact comedically with contemporary culture and technology, but are still surprisingly competent at getting the job done when things really matter. Thus characters visiting unfamiliar junctures suffer a -2 to skill checks outside of combat, but ignore this penalty on any given skill after they spent a Fortune die on a check with that skill.
• The first time each session a PC attempts to make a non-combat skill check involving unfamiliar elements of a juncture they suffer a -4 to that skill, and any failure results in a comic relief scene.
• If a player attempts to use a skill in an unfamiliar juncture, they must describe their skill use in a way that relates to their home juncture. "Ahh, I see, the ink on the fingers leaves tracks on the parchment like the horses of an enemy army leave tracks in the mud"
• Okay, I lied, that's only five ways to do it better. I blame the beer -- wait that's it - Everytime your character uses an skill in a juncture where they are unfamiliar with it's nuances, the player must drink. That's right, a stupid drinking game would still be better than the actual rules here.

Then the skill list is unchanged from 1e, aside from separating the combat AVs into their own pile, we have:

• Deceit - lie and cheat
• Detective - find clues, detect lies
• Driving - combat driving, becomes an even bigger deal due to chase rules
• Fix-It - gadgets, repair and MaCguyvering
• Gambling - winning at games of chance, knowledge of games and casinos
• Info - fill in the blank, you know all about that blank. Mainly flavor
• Intimidation - scaring people, auto-succeeds against mooks in groups of fewer than 4
• Intrusion -sneaking, includes hiding, bypassing alarms and magic wards, picking locks and the like
• Leadership - you can spur people to useful action and sometimes convince enemy mooks that you're in charge, leave references to deleted factions in your skill descriptions, that sort of thing
• Medicine - you can heal people with rules I forgot to mention in the wounding section, also you know medical and/or apothecary stuff
• Police - a lot like Detective, but you are officially a cop with this skill, and can play Bad Cop
  
  Strangely it's some other, inferior Liam Nesson Role which gets a nod elsewhere in this book
  
  
• Sabotage- Breaking things, with things being pretty much whatever isn't alive. Demolitions, explosives, etc.
• Seduction.- "Do you have any secrets you wanna tell the fruitviking?"

So once again it's a very short skill list and skills are very broad. Actually having a skill on your character sheet is meaningful, and most characters only get a couple.

A bunch of these have their own sample difficulty charts, and the emphasis is that "things which help move the story along" get way easier difficulties, while things that give non-story moving benefits or are against bosses / uberbosses are harder. That's probably unavoidable, but the Denizen in me has to point out that such is just softcode for "GM Fiat" in many cases.

But what does work is the general 4 tiers of skill AVs. If you are defaulting as a long shot you have a 7. If you know someone who has the skill or your class gives it as a fallback, you have like a 10 AV. If it's something your class is supposed to be good at, you have it at like a 13 AV. If it's something your class is supposed to be the very best at, then you have it at 15. Note that each of those is just close enough to the next tier for a Fortune Die or exploding reroll to let the underdog win this time. Of course, the RNG being what it is, each additional tier requires another dice explosion to keep up, and that becomes so improbable at the extreme ends of 7 vs 15 with a -5 to +5 before open-ending RNG that it's not generally a contest.


these characters failed reversion checks

And that's it for the skill's chapter. Tommorow onwards to guns and all their flavor text errors and dated pop culture references.

So our group played it's first session of (House ruled) Feng Shui at the weekend, which means this thread is highly relevant to my interests. We played it pretty rules-lite with more emphasis on crazy action stunts than D&D style tactical combat and it worked pretty well.

I like the look of a lot of the changes listed here, in particular setting AV's by class rather than figuring them is a big step forward. I heard they also got rid of substats, does that leave any of the stats as the Red-Headed Step Child? *Cough Mind Cough*

I notice you didn't mention that these rules incorporate the "Mook Bowling" optional rule from Blood of the Valiant which I've seen recommended a fair bit, is there anything like that in these rules or is it simply "hit a mook and he's out, miss and you suck"?

To attempt to clarify, in 2e, PCs all have 5 stats with numeric values:

• Primary Attack - this is named Guns or Martial Arts or Sorcery or Creature Powers or Mutant or Scroungetech, which opens up different schticks, but the numbers mean the same thing, how good you are at hitting enemies
• Defense - how hard it is to hit you / how good you are at dodging
• Toughness - your soak, this number is subtracted from incoming damage (aside from a few cases of "do not pass go" aggravated damage type deals)
• Fortune - this is named Fortune or Magic or Chi or Genome, but the numbers function the same, as an expendable resource that powers your mojo or can be used to buy bonus dice. In 2e the loss of substats means that your "spell points" and your extra dice rolled are depleting the same resource.
• Speed - this has rules for movement which you will ignore, but it determines your initiative, and that determines how many actions and dodges you get, which is huge.

And that's it for universal stats. A lot of archetypes also get a Backup attack, and there are quite a few that get schticks and tags like "very strong, +3 to melee weapon damage, carrying annat" or "sturdy: +3 to Resistance checks" ,(which are otherwise just Toughness rolls)

And while if you were in a strict point buy system I could maybe make an argument for Fortune and Toughness not mattering quite so much as the other 3, none are really into red-headed stepchild territory.

Oh okay, that makes more sense. I heard melee weapons now have fixed damage, which fits with removing Strength as a stat. So if Strength is now determined by archetype, do unarmed attacks do a fixed damage too?

Also, how does 2e reconcile the fact Fortune is used up per session and Chi is used up per scene? In my quick hack I ended up making them separate stats to resolve this, but if they come from the same pool that would seem to lead to some awkward accounting.

Red_Rob wrote:Oh okay, that makes more sense. I heard melee weapons now have fixed damage, which fits with removing Strength as a stat. So if Strength is now determined by archetype, do unarmed attacks do a fixed damage too?

Yes. The 2e Weapon Damage chart is pretty much what you would get if you replaced "Str+N" in the 1e Damage Value Chart - Weapons with "6+N", aside from minor tweaks like moving nunchuku up 1 point and actually printing the value for wielding a parking meter.

Also, how does 2e reconcile the fact Fortune is used up per session and Chi is used up per scene?

It's all per session now, and 2e deals with that mainly by upping the Fortune/Chi values across the board from 1e. Now nobody gets less than 6, and there are a lot of archetypes with 9s and 10s. Compare to the 1e corebook where, but only the Monster Hunter and Scrappy Kid had better than 2s in both their power point substat and in Fortune for extra dice.

And 2e also deals with that by handing out a fair number of schticks that allow occasional recovery of Fortune / Chi / Mutant points. When I actually get into the Guns section (apologies, spent the part of last night I thought I had for this on reconfiguring my router) I'll point out how great Firm Grip is for this.

On top of that 2e also generally reduces the costs of a lot of schticks. Point Blockage used to cost 5 Chi, now it costs 3; Flying Windmill Kick used to cost 7 Chi, making it once per fight, now it costs zero, making it now work like this

In my quick hack I ended up making them separate stats to resolve this, but if they come from the same pool that would seem to lead to some awkward accounting.

Ah, I think that making them a single pool is actually a simplification over 1e where they could be separate substats. It's one sole expendable value to track to power your awesome. Everyone can use it to add a die to a roll, and many archetypes can use it to fuel their speshul powers. So while that involves a bit more triage for resource management, it's fewer resources to actually manage.

The part I'm unsure about is the way that combining them into a shared pool emphasizes attacks which don't require Chi/Magic/Genome/Scrounge. That might be good as it helps to limit fancy schtick use to enough that they still feel special when they are used. Or it might be bad, as it probably tips Guns into the most overall combat effective attack.

Tonight I'm drinking gin and tonic and the music is Bone Machine. The booze choice is leftovers, the music choice is deliberate, it was a great experimental early 90s album, it won the 3rd ever grammy for best alternative album in 1992, and along with his collaboration with Primus and role as Reinfeld in Coppola's Dracula helpef pull him from obscurity Also, several of the tracks from Bone Machine were listed as theme music in the panels of Scud:The Disposable Assassin. Got that, "alternative music is 3 years old. Primus is hot, Dracula is the vampire heartthrob and Scud is a hip comic. Congrats, that's the sort of context you need for:

Chapter 4: Guns

Yes, that's right, this is also labeled Chapter 4, even though Skills was chapter 4.
But before I get to mocking the other typos and how dated the references are pointing out how badly a +11 AV schtick breaks the RNG, I want to point out an organizational change between editions:

In the first edition, Feng Shui had all the schtick sections before the combat rules. In this edition the combat section is right after the template listing, and before all the skill and schtick descriptions. That may seem a trivial change, but it actually illustrates one of the more meaningful shifts in RPG deisgn over the past two decades. In the old edition, things are still split AD&D style, with the chargen section (PHB) up front, followed by the rules for fights and such (DMG) following and then the antagonists and sample adventure in the back (MM). In this edition, the first four chapters are pretty much "things everyone kinda oughtta know", and then chapters 5-11 are specific schticks that only players using that particular attack and the GM need to know. Chapter 12 is advancement, and everything after that is GM advice, antagonists, and sample adventure. This switch in order presents material in the order players are likely to need it, and is more generally useful.

This chapter starts with an admonition that Guns are a fantasy element in this game, and not realistic, also don't shoot your eye out,

and then it moves right into Gun Schtics. At 7 pages of schticks, There are a lot more of these than in the last edition, where they only took up one page. Some of that is formatting, where you have a listing for Both Guns Blazing I, another for Both Guns Blazing II, another for Both Guns Blazing III, another for Both Guns Blazing IV and a yet another for Both Guns Blazing V, instead of 1e style where the Both Guns Blazing listing just says "for each additional schtick you spend on these, get these additional modifiers"Still on a quick skim and mildly buzzed skim I count 35 distinct guns schticks, which is a massive expansion over the 1e core books 7. Even discounting the Archery and grenade specific schticks, that's a lot. Heck, it's probably too many. While it's cool that you could run an entire PC group of nothing but Killer archetypes who all customized their schtick picks without having any character have any single schtick pick the same as any other,

a list of choices this long needs to be subdivided or players and GMs will have trouble remembering what's on it.

Guns schticks are the simplest of the various schticks. If you have it, you get to use the ability. A number of them are contingent on various triggers, working as "when X, you Y", but there are very few which require expenditure of Fortune. Thus Guns characters will generally be more free to spend Fortune on Fortune Dice than characters with other types of primary attacks.

Now, to highlight and lowlight particular Guns Schticks:

Bag Full of Guns. This is a neat idea. You start the fight with a damage 9 revolver and whenever you miss, you spend zero shots to pull out any gun that is bigger (1 higher damage) until you max out at 13 with an assault rifle or shotgun. Except that in Feng Shui, most fights are only 3 sequences long, and your average initiative is at best 13, and your typical attack takes 3 shots. Thus is order to fully use the damage upgrading part of this schtick you are going to have to miss with your attacks for roughly one-third of the fight, and that's just to be where you'd be if you brought a shotgun to begin with. Oh, that's just to use BFoG I, this comes with II, III, and IV upgrades, each of which ups your maximum damage gun by 2, and makes the upgrade condition slightly easier: fail to inflict N damage. While you can satisfy that by wasting mooks who don't take wounds, you're still spending a large part of the fight ramping up to get to something better than you could just buy off the rack.
Despite the neat concept, the current execution is elaborate crap. If you want a big damage gun, just take Signature Weapon on a big damage gun. If you want to always have a gun on hand, just take Signature Weapon.

Battle Scavenge: You pick up a gun from a fallen foe. Conceptually, this is not a schtick, it's something any guns character should be able to do.Mechanically it it's like Lighting Reload that only applies after you've run out of bullets the first time. From the extra-long actions example back in chapter 3 that mentions this having a radically different shot cost. I suspect that edits to the rearm and reload rules left this underwhelming.

Blam Blam Epigram: Cool name. You make a quip, take 1 extra shot and deal +2 damage or +8 damage against an opponent who is already Impaired. Remember that the most common source of impairment is having a bunch of wound points, so this is intended as a finishing move against featured foes / bosses. However there are schticks elsewhere in the game that give foes impairment, so I expect inter-character combos here. Design wise, I think the damage bonuses go the wrong way: this would be better if the big bonus was against non-impaired foes, but reduced against already impaired foes - that would make for a schtick that's an opener rather than a closer and as such would move the fight along to the point where characters are trying to run away sooner. It also would work against focus-fire / smear the queer and make PCs who used it seem just a hair more honorable by not rewarding shooting a foe who's already hurting or sponging kills from other PCs.

Bloody But Unbowed: This gives a bonus to Up checks. I only mention it because it follows the one schtick is +2, each additional is another +1 model common to fair number of these. Not sure how I feel about that sort of thing. On one hand it encourages diversity of schticks by giving a bigger relative bonus for the first one. On the other hand, it kinda makes spending multiple picks on such a trap option.

Bullet Time: currently not a schtick, just a note that it doesn't work. Reminder that this is a work in progress.

Both Guns Blazing: This is very similar to 1e, you still add the damage value of your guns together and you still double your opponent's toughness, so this is still a bad deal in cases where the target's toughness is greater than the damage value of either of your guns. What's changed is that if you have the IV or V levels of this you get not only an AV Bonus to the attack, but also an equal Defense Bonus against the next attack directed your way.

Carnival of Carnage: AV bonus vs Mooks, higher levels reduce the shot cost of attacks vs Mooks, which has some combo potential with other Guns schticks.

Click Click Toss. After you fail a reload check, spend a shot to throw your gun away and then get +5 (I), +8 (II) or +11 (III) to your following attack roll. While that's kinda hard to set up and usually involves spending additional shots drawing a new weapon on top of the 1 shot explicit in the schtick, those are bonuses to ATTACK, not merely damage.

So there are some abuses you should consider setting up by starting out with a derringer or going overboard on Autofire to empty your clip.

Disarming Shot: The text here seems to indicate that enemies have different shot costs for drawing weapons than PCs do. Also, this one costs a fortune point to use, but doesn't look like it requires any sort of attack or roll. Odd all around, but not bad.

Eagle Eye: Nobody took the 1e version, so this now lets a character with it use what used to be the Aiming Rules from 1e. Sadly the "X is a positive thinker" sidebar prevents it from also letting you use anything like the 1e snap shot rules with it.

Fast Draw: This does not actually let you draw a new weapon faster, which is really something that one of the available schticks ought to do, and this would seem to be the name for it. Instead it's an initiative bonus that only applies if you use Guns as your first action of the sequence. What's that you say? Initiative is rolled before actions are declared, and the outcomes of other's actions can impose hard restrictions on allowable action declarations. There are no rules for what happens if you get the initiative bonus, spend a few shots on active dodges and interrupts, but are disarmed or otherwise prevented from using Guns before you get to your first actual action. This needs a different name and the bonus needs to be contingent on something that is checked when initiative is rolled, not when actions are declared. Like perhaps "+N to initiative if you have one or more guns on your person when initiative is rolled"

Firm Grip: If you plan on using autofire weapons, you almost certainly take this as your first schtick. It's trivially easy way to recover spent Fortune, with another minor perk for autofire.

Flesh Wound: Once per fight, when you take 10+ wound points from an attack, you can choose to take zero but instead reduce your Toughness by 3 for the rest of the fight. That's not as horrible a trade off as you might first think, but it is highly dependent on the number of opponents remaining. Basically one big attack does zero, but then all future attacks which hit do 3 more damage, so if you will only take 3 or fewer additional hits, it's a net win. Also, the toughness reduction may avoid Impairment, which would be a -1 to Defense and therefore 1 addiitonal damage from future attacks anyways.

For The Squad: when you aid another offensively, the beneficiary's attack takes 2 shots. Really odd that such is not "1 less shot than it otherwise would, minimum 1". The current wording means that aiding a buddy with Carnival of Carnage III or IV doesn't help, but the pair of you can totally cheese out Eagle Eye's attack bonus.

Hair Trigger Neck Hairs: "Gain +1 Defense for the first sequence of any fight your opponents start unexpectedly" That's a bullshit fuzzy condition that does nothing but penalize characters for being wary - the exact opposite of what this schtick would suggest. "+1 Defense the first sequence of any fight" would be much better. Or if that's too powerful "+1 Defense against Guns attacks in the first sequence of any fight" would at least be unambigous.

Lightning Reload: This is a bonus to Reload Checks equal to the number of schticks you spent on it. (below) Oddly it doesn't actually let you reload faster, it just makes it less likely that you will need to. It's considerably harder to never run out of ammo in 2e than it was in 1e.

Ready Resupply: Rearm an ally at a cost of 1 Fortune and 1 shot. This is the only Guns Schtick to have a different schtick (Bag Full of Guns) as a prerequisite. I also get the sense that Rearm checks have been in flux during development
Smoke Arrow: This imposes an Adverse Condition penalty on an opponent. Wait, I thought Adverse Conditions were handled through Immunity Bonuses now? I guess someone noticed the synergy Impairment has with Blam Blam Epigram and nerfed that in the bud without regards to chapter 3.

Stop Right There: Prevent an enemy from cheesing it. No mention of how this interacts with Covering Fire, which stops an enemy from preventing an ally from cheesing it. That probably oughtta be mentioned somewhere.



Take The Shot. You get a bonus against targets using hostages as human shields. That sounds good in concept, but the Human Shield rules are tiny and so hard to find that they might never get actually used. They are literally in a section called "Blue Moon Rules" for rules that will only come up once in a blue moon.




The Way the Wind Blows: You ignore penalties to Guns from Adverse Conditions and also get a +2 bonus to Guns under Adverse Conditions. Wait, is that an Immunity Bonus, or is this an earlier rules version again? I am confuzzled.

Wild Grenade: Spend a Fortune to bypass the usually grenade scatter rules and just share the damage with a target of your choice. That reminds me, the grenade statistics aren't here in the Guns chapter, instead they were back under "Assorted Fighting Rules" in chapter 3.

And those are the rant worthy schticks, now onwards to the guns rules and stats for particular models:


Guns still are listed as Damage/Concealment/Reload. Damage values range from 8 for a .22 handgun up to 13 for a combat shotgun or 7.62mm assault rifle. It's worth noting that the bigger guns have the highest damage (before schtick boosting) of any attack type. That combines with the rare and low Fortune costs of Guns Schticks and the bonuses assault rifles weapons get against mooks to make a decent case that Guns is the most combat effective form of Attack in the game. Overall, it's still probably close enough that the potential for guns to be disarmed, jam and run out of ammo probably compensates. And then there's the noncombat utility a bunch of other schtick categories get, so it's not completely dominant.

Concealment works largely the same as it did in prior editions, with more guns and bigger guns having bigger numbers, which make it harder to sneak weapons in to secure locations. However, the explicit PC/NPC asymmetry and collapsing of stats means that the check works differently. It's no longer foes making Perception checks against you with a modifier for ƩConcealmentValues instead it's now the PC making a Deceit check against a chart with listed difficulties for Mook, Featured Foe, Boss and Uber Boss and adding ƩConcealmentValues to that difficuly.

Reload is where it gets weird. In 1e, you actually tracked shots (unless you had the schticks not to do that). Now, you have a reload roll to reflect the innumeramancy of action movie characters. If you're in the first sequence or have had to reload this keyframe, you do have enough bullets and do not check reload (unless you are using a autofire weapon). Otherwise, after your attack, roll 1d6 (presumably closed) and if that 1d6 is less than or equal to your gun's reload value you've run out of bullets and will have to spend shots reloading or drawing a new weapon or something. Note that you actually need to exceed the reload value to keep firing, so anything with a reload of 6 will run out after your first shot of the 2nd sequence / next keyframe, and you need a number of Schticks of Lightning Reload equal to the reload value of the gun to guarantee that you never run out. (Note that Lighting Reload Maxes at 4 schticks now). I'm not sure about these rules. On one hand, they reflect the fuzzy counts of movies well and save bullet-by-bullet counting. On the other hand, they add additional die rolls later in the fight, which probably slow things down.

Next up are the rules for Malfunctions. If you get a way awful failure (Boxcars and miss, or total result below zero) with a gun, you make a Fortune Check. if you pass the gun has jammed and takes 8 shots to clear (which will be most of a sequence), if you fail, then the gun needs to go to the shop for repairs. That's intentionally worse than reality to encourage PCs to carry multiple guns, but I can't help but think that there should be a schtick to mitigate some or all of that.

Autofire rules are simple. With an autofire weapon you can add up +N damage to an attack but increase the weapon's reload value by +N (and you have to make reload rolls in the 1st sequence and within a keyframe where you've reloaded after an Autofire attack). If N is greater than 2, you also subtract 2 from your AV for this attack. So aside from a BGB autofire attacks and similar edge cases, you will never want to exceed +2 here.

Then there's a mention that your character can personally carry a number of firearms equal to "your Strength Check Value". Since there's no longer s Strength stat I'm not sure if that means you roll a default 7 AV check for scenes where it matters or if it's a remnant of the old system. Strength Schtick Comparison time: the Big Bruiser's Very Strong back in archetypes specifies a +3 bonus to Strength Checks, but the Gene Freak's Very Strong back there doesn't, while the Transromed Bear Schtick in chapter 9 has a Very Strong which is just +3 to Strength Checks without any of the other benefits. So in summary:


The losing guns section says don't do shopping scenes to shop, do shopping scenes if they introduce a lead or turn into a fight scene, with the following admonition:

Players and GMs who wish to make a big deal of this are advised to watch a home shopping channel instead.

Which is exactly the sort of snark Robin Laws first gained my respect with.

Next is a short section on Military-Grade Weaponry. Here's what this section is supposed to be. Instead it adds inane insanity where CGI fireballs have damage values which vary depending on the current Wound Point total of any named characters jumping walking away from them. Because hey, big explosions in the game should mean more accounting for the players, right?

And finally, we get to the actual listing of guns. For pre-modern weapons the big change is that now Bow and Arrow now explicitly never has to make reload checks. Crossbows still suck and the game offers only basic pistol and musket stats. I know modern guns are more exciting, but I think I few of the identical stat modern era weapons could be deleted to make room for a few more pre-modern weapons like pirate blunderbusses, steampunky proto-gattling guns, and real world goodies like polearm-mounted wheellocks, the scattergun that's a plot point in Lone Wolf and Cub and the first batch of Sharps Rifles.

The Modern era guns are broken into subsections, with automatic pistols first. And there are way too many of these, many of which have overlapping stats, especially now that reload value is a thing you roll on a d6 instead of a number of rounds in a clip.

The flavor text of the Colt 1911A still lists it as 9mm. Fortunately the game is not granular enough for that to matter for the mechanics, but damn man, that was an embarrassing mistake 18 year ago. It should have been fixed before the Atlas reprint. It should be triply humiliating in that most of the other .45/9mm mix up flavor text has been caught be this playtest draft, but the Colt 1911 is far and away the most iconic and historically important of all such weapons.

The Glock 17 flavor text mentions how US soldiers bought these for "The" Gulf War. That dates things just like talking about the trenches in "The Great War" would.

A bit of google searching reveals that the Grendel Pistols, which are flavortexed as being cheap and commonly available haven't been manufactured since the early 90s and have become collectable.

The Tec-9 flavor text refers to "the assault weapons ban", which sunset several years before I am writing this.

Google informs me that the Ruger K89 is actually the Ruger P89 which was discontinued in 2007, but the K89 gets the listing in this book.

Then we get reminded what weapons Mulder and Scully carried. Because '90s.


The revolvers section has the bright idea to list one model of revolver with snarky flavor text and then list a bunch of other models of guns with the same game stats under the same heading. This makes it harder to find a specific gun if you are looking for it, but saves a whole lot of space and lets PCs pick things stat first then find a weapon name that works for them, so it should probably be applied to the automatics subsection too.

There's a subsection for "Target Pistol" which has all of one entry, because it's a gun that was used in Hard Boiled. This gun has a reload value of 7, "because it always reloads in slow motion". Again, what the fuck? Reload value is what you need to roll to not run out of ammo, not how long a gun takes to reload, so whoever wrote that hadn't actually understood the mechanics. Also, since you need to be strictly greater than on your reload roll, all a 7 does is make your first selection of Lightning Reload totally useless.

Then Submachinegun section has a bunch of actually updated flavor text, referencing the Expendables, Kate Beckinsale, the US wars in Afghanistan, the Total Recall remake and pop-up Junctures. It's worth pointing out that PC abusing Click Click Bang want to open up fights with either of the first two SMGs so they can guarantee running out of ammo often with the autofire rules letting them run out early.

The only mock-worthy flavor text in the shotgun subsection is the Mossberg Special Purpose's reference to Dana Carvey's Church Lady -- which is subtle enough that you kids these days what won't get offn my lawn probably wouldn't even recognize it as such. I do want to point out that you can still squeeze an extra point of damage with a "Ka-Chink" and a number of these are listed as having pistol grips, which qualifies them for Both Guns Blazing, so that's a way to go for big damage numbers.

The Rifle section is entirely listing of assault rifles, which is what PCs will want, but the game could use a few listings for non-automatic rifles. Especially with the opening of Pop-Up Junctures, the game probably needs listings for things like the Steyr HS .50, a Winchester 30-06, .22 hunting rifles, as well as historical rifles with traction in films, like the Spenser Repeating Rifle, and Sharp's 1874 Cavalry Carbine. Anyways, if you are not worried about concealment or cheesing out some Schtick Combo, your PC wants an AK47, with 13 damage autofire capability, +2 to attack vs Mooks, and a reload roll of 1 (so even on autofire 2, you're only 50/50 to need to reload). The M4 Carbine gets a minor line of flavor text in the m16 entry, but it probably should be a distinct entry with a concealment that's a point lower, because that's pretty much the reason for switching from the M16.


...and that's the chapter..., not sure when I will have time to get to the next one on Fu Schticks.

Expanding Gun schticks is good - the original list was pretty restrictive. It sounds like this runs into to 3e feats problems though, making things that should have been handled by Stunts into a feat. Picking up weapons from defeated foes? Passing guns to a friend? Not schtick-worthy. For me a Schtick should be exactly that - something you would describe as a characters signature "trick" if you watched a movie.

Changing to an ammo roll rather than counting shots was one of the more obvious changes to make. Rolling an extra dice seems clunky though. We've been using a system where rolling a double on a firearms attack means you are out of ammo, you could easily compare the number rolled to an Ammo stat if you wanted more granularity.

Honestly, the gun stats in Feng Shui always seemed kind of extraneous. I just gave each level of weapon a damage and concealability stat and really that is all you need. Does it really make a difference in an action movie what pistol the hero uses? What make of SMG the mooks are firing? Feng Shui doesn't seem to know if it wants to be rules-lite or not, and things like the laundry list of guns with minor stat differences is a symptom of that. Personally I'd like Feng Shui to embrace the fact it is supposed to be fast paced, high action and try to stick to the simplest implementation of things. It is never going to be a tactical combat game, so why give hints of it here and there that don't give enough depth to really make a difference but get in the way when you are trying to be awesome?

I likewise am concerned about "feat bloat." A lot of those things seem like stuff that gun people should be allowed to "just do." Even "Bag Full of Guns" is only a recurring shtick in a few cases (Desperado, for instance), and is simply a thing characters bring to specific showdowns (as in Hard Boiled or The Big Hit).

Anyway, so far this looks like two steps forward, one step back once we get the gibberish ironed out in edit. I think it probably qualifies as an excuse to put together a new Feng Shui God of War hack that is slightly less half-assed.

But basically it sounds like there needs to be some sort of scene effects declaration thing where characters can bring a bag full of guns or set fire to their surroundings or whatever and have that be different from character shticks. Otherwise the game doesn't even pretend to do anything other than do one-shots.

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote:But basically it sounds like there needs to be some sort of scene effects declaration thing where characters can bring a bag full of guns or set fire to their surroundings or whatever and have that be different from character shticks.

Interesting Concept, care to discuss your ideas for how something like that could work in a new thread?

Josh_Kablack wrote:

FrankTrollman wrote:But basically it sounds like there needs to be some sort of scene effects declaration thing where characters can bring a bag full of guns or set fire to their surroundings or whatever and have that be different from character shticks.

Interesting Concept, care to discuss your ideas for how something like that could work in a new thread?

Sure.

-Username17

Before I move on to fuschticks, I want to step back and question a meta point about schtick design. Namely whether different types of shticks *should* have different resource management systems?

In 1e Feng Shui:

• Guns Schticks were things either you had or you didn't. If you had them you could use them at-will.
• Fu and Transformed Animal Schticks cost you Fu points to use. (with a couple rare exceptions like a melee Signature Weapon ). But you got Fu points back each sequence, effectively using a spell point system to put your big moves on a cooldown timer.
• Sorcery was a crazy mishmash of systems with at-wills, things that required magic point expenditures (which only refreshed per session), speshul backlash rules, and the possibility to set your stats on fire with the Desperate Efforts rules
• Creature Powers were almost entirely at-will (Domination required a magic point expenditure)
• Arcanowave schticks used the threat of mutation on a random roll in place of point expenditure or other resource mechanic (and also copied the Desperate Efforts rules, making multi-AV characters pretty slick)

In 2e Feng Shui, all the Chi substats have been collapsed together into Fortune, which only refreshes per session (or with various schticks), so at the stats level, the game can no longer differentiate between martial arts Hadokens which are on a per-sequence spell point system and sorcery Dragon Slaves which are on a per-session spell point system. And if the game can't do that at the stats level, is it worth doing it at the schtick level, or should the differentiation be dropped in the interest of streamlining and ease of teaching?

Despite my overall snark in this thread, that's an honest and earnest question and I'm not sure of the answer. I'm just a little disappointed that it doesn't seem to have been considered as part of the redesign of the game at all.

As I understand it, characters who have abilities that use Fortune also need abilities that recover Fortune, putting them on a default rage bar mechanic. That means that any "per session" limitation is out the window because everyone can put themselves on rage bar if they care.

Under the circumstances, it seems like you shouldn't even pretend that you have a vancian per-session restriction at all, and just tie yourself to ragebar mechanics firmly and openly for everyone all the time.

-Username17

Well nobody gets more than 5 schticks to start, and the first time through you're expected to use the listed schtick picks. SO the design expectation is that you largely will be playing with a vancianesque per-session resource management setup. But every schtick type has at least one schtick that regains something, even if they do so in roundabout ways. Most of the schticks which regain Fortune are either moderately rare conditionals (when you deal 3 or more damage, reduce your damage dealt by 3 to regain a spent Genome; when you succeed at an Up check, regain all spent Magic) and/or on a random roll (when you hit with an autofire attack, roll a die, on evens regain a spent fortune, when a guns attack misses you on an odd-numbered shot regain a Chi).

Aside:

just noticed that Mutant Schtick Casual Leakage recharges your Genome when a Boss makes an Up check, but under current rulings Bosses do not use the Up Check rules. Oopsie.

So the actual game is going to be some players on tight Vancian schemes carefully rationing Fortune between power activations and bonus dice, others set up with nothing but at-will schticks being looser with their Fortune die use, and still others with Rube Goldberg schtick + tactic setups trying loop so that they can recover Fortune easily and spend it freely. { Firm grip + always autofiring / Psychic Vampire + a buddy with healing + getting into gratuitous fights with that buddy }.



That really doesn't seem to be a considered design to me, and I think there was a huge missed opportunity to either

1. Simplify: by putting everybody on the exact same Fortune usage and recovery scheme
   or
2. Differentiate: by putting each schtick type on its own point usage and recovery scheme.

And while I'm not sure which of those directions would be better than the other for Feng Shui, I'm reasonably either would be better than the current lack of direction seems to be.