Feng Shui

[Dean]

I would like to know about Feng Shui. I just got it on a lark and will be reading through it tonight. But how is it in the Den's opinion? Full of garbage? Actually pretty cool? Famous for any particular rule breakdowns or ability imbalances. What's the word.

[Murtak]

Pro
- Character generation is fast. 90% of your time will be spent working on background - picking attributes and shticks can be done in 5 to 10 minutes.
- Learning the system is fast.
- Between mooks / named characters, stunts, archetypes and shticks simulates action movies quite well.

Con
- Character advancement is shit and needs to be redone from scratch.

Weird
- Really really requires imaginative players.
- Not suitable for adaption outside of its niche.

[CCarter]

The game systems "+a d6, minus a d6" means you'll often have 0 or a very low modifier on the dice most of the time, with not-too-infrequent explosions where someone gets the roll to run up a stream of bullets. A -1 or -2 is very significant, so its critical to maximixe attack/defense stat as much as possible.

I played it briefly without having any background on the system and picked the Big Bruiser archetype...big mistake, since I was giving up the ability to hit for invulnerability in a game where everyone was probably already indestructible.

Just for the record we had a party consisting of myself (a Luchador, "El Cocharacha Diavolo"), a civil war ghost, an eskimo child and a Dirty harry type cop, set in the 1950s. ---I don't know which templates the others were using --we thought it was going to be a generic 50s' game using the Feng Shui engine until the DM started using bad guys from the books.

[erik]

In one Feng Shui game we had our party was:

Set in modern era U.S.
A magic detective, a cyborg jigglypuff, the ghost of our GM (which he might not have appreciated)... and possibly one more guy whom I have forgotten since it was over a decade ago.

I don't recall the 2nd game very much. I recall it was a fantasy world and I was a member of the race of Fizgig (the furry ball full of teeth from Dark Crystal), and was also a transdimensionally-standed prince on a planet where nobody could understand me. I took out my frustration on people by biting them.

So yeah, weird parties are definitely my favorite thing about Feng Shui.

[Thymos]

Feng Shui is fantastic for what it sets out to do. As far as that goes I literally have no complaints. It's supposed to do action movie-esque quick oneshots or a little longer than that (1 to 3 sessions).

The only possible complaints about it are not relevant to it's set out purpose.

[Dean]

Con
- Character advancement is shit and needs to be redone from scratch.

Weird
- Really really requires imaginative players.
- Not suitable for adaption outside of its niche.

Could you extrapolate on these three points, and particularly the last two? What about it makes it unadaptable to other settings. It seemed, from a brief look, that it might be possible to turn it into a reasonably functional fantasy heartbreaker standard or something.

[Username17]

Con
- Character advancement is shit and needs to be redone from scratch.

Weird
- Really really requires imaginative players.
- Not suitable for adaption outside of its niche.

Could you extrapolate on these three points, and particularly the last two? What about it makes it unadaptable to other settings. It seemed, from a brief look, that it might be possible to turn it into a reasonably functional fantasy heartbreaker standard or something.

The first one is easy: Feng Shui character advancement is an insult to gods and man. The costs of gaining action values and abilities are nonsensical, and the realities of the small RNG make asymmetric AV gains a travesty that unravels the whole game.

The second part corresponds to the fact that the game play is basically half describing the over-the-top actions of your characters. Played with some wallflowers or people at the incorrect levels of inebriation, it can crawl.

And finally, translating it to other genres is pretty difficult. Things operate on action movie logic no matter what. You can totally port it to other periods or settings, but it's still going to be the same genre. If you play in Ancient China or Anachronistic Greece, you'll still be played by Chow Yun Fat. Enemies will still get taken down in swathes, people with names will still be nigh unkillable, and the Rule of Cool will still dominate your character's choice of equipment.

-Username17

[Josh_Kablack]

The good:

• Simulates action movie / hong kong cinema antics really well
• System is very quick to explain and learn
• Robin D. Laws's tone in writing it makes it a great read.
• Template character generation works exceedingly well for the genre. Pick a template, make a handful of choices about which skills go where and then choose a Melodramatic Hook and you are good to go - it's seriously less time that an OD&D fighter to make a character.
• Most of the Skills are broad and clear. If you have a skill YES you can use it, and the GM can tell which skills apply to what.
• The core rolling mechanic of open-ended +1d6/-1d6 with the option of expending fortune dice makes it so there's a pretty big difference between an even match, and +2, but the difference between +4 and +8 is trivial. This encourages players to hunt for situational modifiers when they matter and not sweat it otherwise

The bad:

• Does not do well with anything outside of action movie logic, except maybe some genres of action-movie esque Anime. If you want to try to do other stuff, you could pick up NEXUS:The Infinite City, which is the "universal" system Mr. Laws wrote first and then hacked into Feng Shui - but it was so bland that nobody has ever played it outside of Laws' convenetion demos in the 90s.
• Way way too much of Sorcery works on AV vs Stat, Since stats are 0 to 10, and PC AVs are 13-16, (and heck, some of Sorcery specifically goes against the Magic stat, which is a Chi substat that starts at 0 for many archetypes) this results in a fair bit of Auto-win being hidden in the sorcery details. I strongly recommend going through Sorcery (and to a lesser extent Creature Powers and Arcanowave) to find anything that works like this, and houseruling anything you don't want to auto-hit to be Sorcery AV vs target's highest AV
• Arcanowave stuff is highly setting-specific to the Shadowfist world. Does not reflect many action movie cyborgs.
• Likewise the whole Awakened transformed animal deal does not fit into many action movies. Fortunately most of those schticks can still be used a mystic kung-fu with different backstory.
• Early edition guns section was written by someone who did not know guns at all. The narrow potential range of damage values means this is not a mechanical problem, but dammit Colt 1911s do not fire 9mm rounds.
• Some stuff that should be intuitive requires system mastery. That I can remember:
  • Both Guns Blazing is supposed to be an extra damage schtick, but becomes less effective than just regular shooting when used against a Big Bruiser or other high body type. The RAW fix is that BGB lets the attacker know the Body value of the target, so the player can totally calculate if it's worth using that schtick or not, but that's an extra math step and counter-intuitive to the schtick description about extra damage.
  • The rules about increasing or decreasing the shot cost of actions at AV bonuses/penalties are kinda key to playing Big Bruisers effectively and yet they also make initiative tracking a pain.
  • Triangular advancement means characters get the best deal grabbing schticks outside of their starting template if they can, and just buying up AV, reflex or Body otherwise. Your martial artist should not buy more fu schticks, because that's inefficient.

[Avoraciopoctules]

I heard that there's a new edition of Feng Shui being developed, and a bit of googling came up with this: http://blog.atlas-games.com/2013/09/sav ... rying.html

Apparently, there was some kind of alpha playtest that ran up till the end of October. Is there anywhere I could find more detail on what's being changed with this reboot?

[OgreBattle]

What makes their minion system better than 4e's?

[Niles]

What makes their minion system better than 4e's?

Nothing, It is vastly worse.

[Josh_Kablack]

Apparently, there was some kind of alpha playtest that ran up till the end of October. Is there anywhere I could find more detail on what's being changed with this reboot?

You can follow Robin Laws on G+. He's made a few posts about it. I've missed any big reveals, but caught the recent one where he noted that "rolodex" was a dated reference now.

What makes their minion system better than 4e's?

Now that you have the idiot perspective, let my provide another:

The minion/mook systems are similar, and 4e probably swiped the idea from Feng Shui. However 4e dropped the ball on a number of key points which made their implementation worse

1. Different Genre assumptions.

This is the big one, so it gets a lengthy explanation.
In Feng Shui player characters are all action movie badasses. They start out as action movie badasses and during a campaign arc pick up a few new and cool tricks. In D&D, player characters start out as Bilbo in the Shire or Luke on his uncle's farm, and during the campaign they pick up levels so that in the lategame they are tricking the mightiest Dragons and dueling to be the premier Space Wizard in the galaxy.

Thus in Feng Shui, large groups of opponents who all dress alike but don't have individual names exist to provide a way for PCs (and named villains) to establish their pre-existing badassery by mowing down hordes of such characters.

In pre-4th D&D, large groups of opponents were swarms of lower-level monsters, and served a similar purpose of illustrating PC baddassery. Except here you had the added enhancement to PC feelings of accomplishment with the chance for 6th level PCs to mow through a dozen Ogres and remember back to how a single Ogre was a near-TPK challenge back at 2nd level. However the 4e minions don't work like that - they are fragile, but have to hit and damage numbers which pose actual threats to level-appropriate PCs -- which makes them glass cannons in the threat-evaluation part of the tactical microgame instead of opportunities for PCs to show of their badassery and how far they've come since the old days.

2. Furthermore, minions kinda suck at being tactically interesting glass cannons in 4e. The right answer is always always always target minions first, and the only countermeasure for the DM is preventing the PCs from telling which monsters are minions and which are not -- and that countermeasure in encouraged by having a Cyclops which are minions and Cyclops which are not minions at the same level and showing up together in sample encounters. The point of having "you want to target these first" enemies in a mixed group is defeated if the players do not have the means to differentiate those enemies from the other ones.

Contrast to Feng Shui where Mooks are explicitly unnamed characters and show up all dressed alike. An opponent showing individuality is a named opponent and follows the standard combat rules-- and the game provides explicit tells for players to glean such information during combat scenes.


3. Powers which interact with Mooks are fully intergrated into the system and clearly spelled out as such in Feng Shui. Carnival of Carnage specifically makes you better at fighting mooks. Contrast this to the differing ways that AoE attacks (make a roll against each foe) and lingering damage zones (each foe in zone at the start/end of turn takes damage) interact with 4e Minions and how it's unclear which of those type of effects makes your character more effective at dealing with minions.


4. Even if the rules were the same, Feng Shui did it over a decade earlier than 4e. There are edge cases where Feng Shui mook rules get problematic, and I'm willing to admit those are stupid. I'll even accept a knee-jerk reaction that those edge cases prove the whole idea is stupid -- but if you want to look at two equally stupid rules and pick a winner, clearly the pioneer is less stupid than the follower who had the example. So even if the systems are identical, with identical flaws, then 4e is still stupider.

The fact that 4e not only failed to fix those flaws, but also added new ones and failed to account for the difference in game genres goes beyond stupid and into the realm of pure Mearls.

[TheFlatline]

I remember Feng Shui with some fondness.

It's not the only Blood Opera themed RPG out there. I have first and second edition of Hong Kong Action Theater which is basically the same idea, but your PC is a character in a movie, so you get "movie skill" packages appropriate to the role, and if you die, that's no big deal because the role dies and not the actor. In fact, dying gloriously is more rewarding that surviving and not being badass.

1st ed was this bizzare kludge of a system that worked but wasn't very good. 2nd ed decided fuck it and went with the Tri-Stat system and blew goats. It might make a fun OSSR to type up.

[Jefepato]

Has anyone ever come up with an actual non-crappy advancement system for Feng Shui? My group could probably get some mileage out of it if I could get my hands on a sane way to do advancement.

[Sashi]

Honestly, there's probably no non-crappy advancement system that's possible for Feng Shui. You really have to rebuild certain assumptions of the game from the ground up.

So you pretty much just need to implement some kind of "Everyone agrees to stick to their archetype" social contract. Because the Martial Artist can actually buy Big Bruiser level toughness for a lot cheaper than the Big Bruiser can buy Martial Artist level combat ability.

I'd also run games with the structure of action movie franchises and have a reboot after 2-5 story arcs before a reboot. Even if someone wants to carry their character along through the reboot they have to reset to character creation alongside everyone else. You just turn Sean Connery Bond into Daniel Craig bond and move on. Or Operation Condor Jackie Chan becomes Rumble in the Bronx Jackie Chan.

[Josh_Kablack]

Blog Links and G+ quotes from Robin D Laws regarding Feng Shui 2 powers. (even though the 2nd edition was in 1999, and there were multiple distinct printings before that, so this should be at least the the 3rd edition)

http://robin-d-laws.blogspot.ca/2014/02 ... inder.html

#fengshui2 scroungetech schticks include Buzzsaw Hand, Adrenal Boy-Howdy, Lumbar Scorpion and Blow Up Real Good.

So there's now a Scroungetech powersource.

#fengshui2 mutant powers include: Acid Blood, Chronofuxor, Go Cartilaginous, How Magnets Work and Mjolnirification.

So there's now a Mutant power source.

Many changes in #fengshui2 are about making sure the game is actually as simple as its fans remember.

That's both an admirable goal, and completely non-measurable, so he can claim he achieves it no matter what the end product looks like.

Inclined to axe the Medic from #FengShui2. Are you a devoted player of this archetype who’d miss it if it went away?

Probably a reasonable cut.

Unique schtick for Drifter archetype in #FengShui2: Ammunitional Rescue.

There's a Drifter archetype. That was not in the old edition core book.

New #fengshui2 gun schtick: Blam Blam Epigram.

Cool name. I reserve further judgement until I see more details.

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As for advancement:

1. FUCK triangular advancement.

It instantly breaks any and every game where chargen works on any non-triangular basis. The only case where triangular advancement can be anything other than an exploit is if both chargen and advancement use the exact same point-buy and the exact same triangular costs for abilities. Anything else is bad and you should say mean things on the internet about designers who write games with them. Even back in 1996, this was inexcusable from a professional designer like Mr. laws.

2. The Genre convention is for characters to start off badass, but no matter how much improvement, they never get better than straddling the line of "is that humanly possible?". This means that characters should never be able to advance into truly superhuman 4-color comic book levels of power.


3. The system has a 5 point AV difference as the line between "mildly annoying mook who shows up in horde quantity" and "actually challenging named character". This means that all PC primary AVs need to be kept inside a pretty tight range. More than 6 points should never ever occur, and more than 4 points should be vanishingly rare. This means that there have to be hard caps on buying up AVs. Either it works like HERO where there is an AV range for the game and everyone stays inside it; OR you outright prohibit any increase of AV over starting values OR you have some sort of oddball last-man-up kludge where players can only increase the lowest AVs in the party.

4. As stats determine order of actions, number of actions, soak and sometimes damage, stat disparities between PCs become problematic in a similar manner to AV disparities, although the tolerable threshold is a bit higher. So again you need some sort of hard capped stat range OR an outright prohibition OR some sort of oddball kludge.

5. The genre convention is for Archetypical characters to stay within their Archetype, and not to branch out into new archetypes. This is not D&D, there is no multiclassing and your Colt 1911 / No Shadow Kick doesn't go obsolete and need to be upgraded into Fireball the way Sleep does. This means that advancement should encourage characters to get better at the type of schticks they already have. Triangular advancement does the opposite of that and encourages characters to grab schticks from other sources whenever possible.


So what's probably needed is advancement where the cheapest, most common option is to lower the Chi/Fu/Magic or shot costs of using schticks you already have, the next cheapest option is gaining more picks of the same Schtick / Fu Path you already have, the third cheapest option is buying additional schticks within your idiom, and then you have training montage options for learning new or improving existing (noncombat) skills, and improving AV or stats is highly restricted if not outright prohibited. Possibly you have a sidebar about the option of transformational experiences or series reboots where you get to rebuild your existing character as a new archetype.

Sadly that would involve not merely an advancement system (as I could knock out a Karmic advancement decklist in about an hour) but actually writing new rules for using additional picks on the same selection to improve many Sorcery, Arcanowave and Transformed Animal schticks.

[TheNotoriousAMP]

Sorry if this is an obvious question, but what's "triangular advancement"? I just googled it and I'm not finding anything.

[Grek]

Advancement costs more if you already have more of what you're trying to advance. When going from 1 to 2 in Butt Wrangling costs less than going from 2 to 3.

[rampaging-poet]

What Grek said. It's often achieved by making the cost to go from Level X to level X+1 cost X+1 points, so the total cost to go from zero to X+1 is a triangular number.

[TheNotoriousAMP]

Advancement costs more if you already have more of what you're trying to advance. When going from 1 to 2 in Butt Wrangling costs less than going from 2 to 3.

Okay, I get it now. Basically the problem is that people who play the non triangular char gen minigame well dominate the rest of the game because no one can catch up?

[Josh_Kablack]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangular_number

The issue with using triangular advancement for any game which has linear chargen costs is that it is explicitly wrong to start out with balanced stats and hyperfocus is rewarded.

Let's assume a very simple game where there are only two stats, PCs get 6 points to split between them at chargen and it costs XP equal to the current value of a stat to raise it. In this system if you start out with six points at chargen and spread those between a pair of stats both at 3, it costs you 4+5 XP to get one of those to 5, and 4+4+5+5 to get both of those to 5. However if you instead spread those between a pair of stats with a 1 and a 5, then it only costs you 2+3+4+5 to raise your dump stat to a 5. You end up with two characters who now have the same stats of dual 5s, but one of them paid 14 XP to get there and the other paid 18 xp.

Now since the same stats can cost varying amounts of XP, using XP as a metric for how powerful the PCs have become and whether various challenges are appropriate is completely unreliable from the start.

[Grek]

You get the same thing in Shadowrun and a bunch of other games. The solution is the same too: Make whatever points you spend during character creation be the same points you spend during character advancement.

[angelfromanotherpin]

I actually maintain that while flat starting/triangular advancement is frequently implemented badly, it is actually not an inherently bad model. As long as the players are made aware that they should have a small number of high values at the start of the game and fill in their secondary schticks later, it actually models certain setups. Like Star Trek, where a character has their officer role abilities really high even in the pilot episode, but in later episodes they get much less impressive abilities written in to round them out/serve the immediate plot demands.

[Josh_Kablack]

What the fuck is wrong with you? I guess I haven't been saying mean enough things on the internet.

Even if you actively want the numbers to work so that it takes differing amounts of XP to get to the same ability scores and XP gained to not correlate at all to power level, linear starting costs combined with triangular advancement costs are still horribly inefficient and bad game design. It is inherently bad, flawed on first premises and I shouldn't be having this argument in seriousness in 1996, let alone 2014.

Costs per benefit and character parity issues aside, it's still two entirely different ability cost menus for you and your players to learn, when you could achieve the goals of having advancement fill in character rounding and immediate plot holes by having any sort of advancement schedule that uses the same cost structure yet hands out new minor abilities frequently but rarely or never increases character-defining tag abilities.

[Chamomile]

You could also have triangular advancement paired with pre-set starting packages that have limited customizability and are all fairly specialized.