Tabletop God of War

[Username17]

Gods at War

A Feng Shui port of God of War

Well, I said I would do this if someone gave a good rundown of how “Weapons of the Gods” works. So here goes. Basically, you're making Feng Shui characters, but you have different archetypes and powers because you're all demi-gods who murder regular gods.



Archetypes

The game is set in the Homeric Age. So that's like 1200 BCE. And you fight gods. Named Characters are mythical beings, demigods, monsters, spirits, and so on. The player characters are various hanyos, demigods, fire stealers, and such that could plausibly fight and displace the gods.

Unmodified Archetypes

69 AD is pretty similar to the Homeric Age in a lot of ways. So magic heroes from that era can usually be ported in without modification. So the Sorcerer and Supernatural Creatures can be used unmodified. Go nuts.

New Archetypes


Fury

You're a spirit of vengeance. Depending upon your source pantheon, you could be a Valkyrie, or an Erinyes or whatever. The point is, you're sexy as hell and don't even know it because you spend all your time murdering people who supposedly deserve it.
Attributes:

• Bod 5
  Chi 0
  Mind 5
  Ref 5
  Add 3 to a primary attribute, 2 to a different primary attribute. Add 1 to a secondary attribute.

Skills

• Martial Arts +10 (=15)
  Detective +4 (9)
  Intimidate +4 (9)
  Info/Crime +2 (7)
  Info/History +2 (7)
  Add 6 Skill Bonuses

Schticks:

• 5 Warfare Schtcks
  Unique Schtick: You know what everyone feels guilty about, just by looking at them. In most cases, this allows you to know someone's actual crimes, but for real bastards it might come up totally blank.

Demigod

You're the child of a god. Or maybe you drank the blood of a god. Or something. You are at least 1/3 divine at this point.
Attributes:

• Bod 5
  Chi 2 (Fu = 8)
  Mind 4
  Ref 5
  Add a total of 6 points to your primary attribute, no attribute may be raised higher than 10.

Skills

• Info/Your Choice +2 (6)
  Leadership +4 (8)
  Martial Arts +10 (=15)
  Seduction +8 (12) [Max 15]
  Add 3 skill bonuses.

Schticks:

• 4 Divinity Schticks, 1 Warfare Schtick

Fire Stealer

You've stolen the powers that the gods jealously reserved for themselves. And now they are super pissed, but you're also ready for them.
Attributes:

• Bod 4
  Chi 2 (For= 8)
  Mind 5
  Ref 6
  Divide 4 points amongst your primary attributes.

Skills

• Deceit +5 (10)
  Detective +4 (9)
  Intrusion +9 (=15)
  Fix It +2 (7)
  Martial Arts +8 (=14)
  Info/Shiny Things +3 (8)
  Info/Choice +2 (7)
  Add six skill bonuses

Schticks:

• 2 Divinity Schticks, 2 Warfare Schticks.

Forgotten God

You used to be a player, a big deal, one of the lords of Heaven. But you got soft, people forgot about you, and you have diminished. Idols of you are old, broken, and unused. And it's going to be a long, hard road to claw your way back into peoples' hearts and the mountain fortress where the “current” gods get to live.
Attributes:

• Bod 10
  Chi 0 (Fu=10)
  Mind 5
  Ref 5
  Add 1 t two primary attributes.

Skills

• Info/History +10 (=15)
  Info/Gods +10 (=15)
  Info/Your Choice +2 (7)
  Info/Your Choice +2 (7)
  Martial Arts +8 (=13)
  Add 6 skill bonuses

Schticks:

• 5 Divinity Schticks

Schticks

Since the world with Gods at War is not exactly based on Chinese action movies, and is more based on Homeric epics and the over-the-top action experience. There are no guns, so no gun schticks. No one knows what hamster style might be, so there aren't literally any Fu schticks. But the effects of swordmanship and Divine Might are actually pretty similar. The Magic and Creature Abilities sections can pretty much be used unaltered. The Gun, Fu, Transformed Animal, and Arcanotech schticks are all replaced with other stuff.

Divinity Schticks

The spark of divinity lets people do crazy shit. These things are often grouped into paths that represent some kind of divine portfolio. Each Divinity Schtick requires that you already had a certain number of Divinity Schticks in the same domain, listed after “Prereq.” Some Schticks have a Prereq of zero, which means that they can be selected first and then applied to unlock further divine powers of the same type. Like Fu Schticks, you pay Fu each round to activate Divinity Schticks.

Might of the Oceans
Characters with the divine spark of the oceans themselves have tremendous power over water. They can walk on it as if it were solid ground, and with higher levels they can control the tides and part the waters and stuff.

Might of the Oceans
Characters with the divine spark of the oceans themselves have tremendous power over water. They can walk on it as if it were solid ground, and with higher levels they can control the tides and part the waters and stuff.

Shifting Waters Stance Fu cost: Shot Cost:
Prereq: 0 Domain: Might of the Oceans
You shift and turn and move about as the oceans do. An opponent has a difficult time figuring out how to attack you with a direct attack (greek fire, magical explosions, and hails of arrows and stones work fine). Before making a direct attack, an opponent must spend one shot making a Perception check. The difficulty of this test is 6. If they fail, they must spend at least one sho doing something else before they can try again.

Implacable Ocean Defense Fu cost: X Shot Cost: 1
Prereq: 0 Domain: Might of the Oceans
Add X to your toughness against an attack. This is a Defensive Action.

Crushing Waves Attack Fu cost: X Shot Cost: 3
Prereq: 1 Domain: Might of the Oceans
Make a melee attack, and subtract X from the target's Dodge. This cannot be your first action in a sequence.

Torrent of Unyielding Fury Fu cost: 2 Shot Cost: 0
Prereq: 2 Domain: Might of the Oceans
Make a normal melee attack. This can only be used when you are yourself attacked.
Characters with Torrent of Unyielding Fury can also make the tides raise by their will.

Jealousy of the Sea Fu cost: 1 Shot Cost: 0
Prereq: 3 Domain: Might of the Oceans
After making an attack on an unnamed opponent, you can make another attack on the same opponent.
Characters with Jealousy of the Sea can part the waters or lower tides.

Warfare Schticks

General badassery is limited by no time period. Warfare schticks represent levels of asskicking that are not specifically divine or magical, but are instead achievable by mortals who happen to kick a lot of ass. The Fu cost of Warfare Schticks is generally pretty low.

Carnival of Carnage: Pay 1 Fu, to make an attack on an unnamed character with a shot cost of 1. If you take this schtick twice, it does not cost Fu to use. Each level of Carnival of Carnage increases your action value against unnamed characters by 1.

Fast Draw The character may add +1 to their Initiative Value for each schtick in Fast Draw. If they do so, they must attack with a weapon as their first action of the round.

Finishing Move: The character may pay 1 Fu and 1 Shot to attempt to brutally finish an opponent who is either unnamed or who has already been struck by you this sequence. Add +3 to your action value on your next attack, this can only be done once per attack. But if you purchase this more than once, you can activate each before unleashing your killer move.

Signature Weapon Each schtick spent on this ability makes the character more of a terror with their weapon of choice. The character's signature weapon does +3 damage.

---

Obviously: you can write more schticks.

[RiotGearEpsilon]

Weapons of the Gods certainly looks interesting, but the fact that their own website has been suspended by their host is.... troubling.

You don't know the half of it. Basically, Eos is a pile of crap now and is probably going to continue to be such, but Weapons of the Gods as a basic system has a lot going for it once you manage to untangle the fucking thing from the book layout.

[NineInchNall]

Ugh. Layout in WotG is almost as bad as Vampire. *shudder*

[Username17]

Layout discussions aside, how does the WotG Chi thing work for making minor mook fights have long term consequences? It seems to me that having role playing and in-combat effects from having had your chi modified might sidestep the problem where combats that don't have any meaningful chance of killing you have no chance of mattering (like is the case in game systems with between fight auto-healing from Werewolf to Champions), while at the same time not necessarily encouraging long sleep breaks between encounters.

So, for those of you who have untangled how the system works in more detail and actually played it... does it successfully do that? If not, how do you think it should be changed to address that issue?

As far as GaWFS goes, obviously you're going to want to write up a buch more Divinity Schtick paths.

-Username17

[NineInchNall]

Hm. Good question. Normally I don't consider the mook-attrition thing to be desirable, like, at all, but ...

The default assumption in WotG is sort-of-auto-healing after each fight - to a point. You can spend Jade chi to heal regular damage at a 1-to-1 rate. This can take a while to heal you completely, since even starting characters can take 75 points of damage or more.

Now, there are complications to this. Chi-flow loss can result from being injured. Every time you take another health level of damage, you lose your breath (your round-by-round regeneration of chi) in one color. So if you lose your breath in Jade, then you can't heal yourself, and you'll have to rely on someone else's Medicine. Practically, of course, since you are usually allowed to choose which color of chi suffers loss of breath, you never choose to lose Jade.

Another thing that can put a damper on your day is Profound damage. Profound damage can't be healed via Jade chi.

There's also poison to consider.

And let us not forget curses and other hindering conditions that require more significant recuperation than the simple "spend Jade chi until you feel better" method. These are really where the GM can get creative. For example, a PC might be about to go unco from an attack, but the GM offers the player the opportunity to suffer a baleful chi condition in order to stay on his feet. (This is the sort of thing the main book actively encourages doing.)

The fights that are purely faceless, unstatted, unnamed mooks will probably only lead to regular damage. Putting in at least one statted enemy can significantly raise the odds of inflicting a condition that will have an effect beyond the scope of the current fight.

[Username17]

Huh. I had thought that the point of all that chi accounting crap was to make it so that encounters could have lasting relevance without being deadly. If they don't actually do that, what is the point?

-Username17

[NineInchNall]

Well, the colors of chi are what are used to fuel your various techniques and other abilities. You might as well ask what the point of all the Land accounting is in Magic.

Actually, that's a good mechanical analogy. WotG's chi is like a Magic game where you get to untap one Land of each type during your untap phase.

The chi conditions provide the lasting effects that you are wanting.

[TavishArtair]

Weapons of the Gods in Brief (or not very)

Weapons of the Gods is a high-action, high-fantasy epic wuxia RPG. It is very focused on wushu traditions, and is not attempting, in the slightest, to be anything like some of the more "realistic" wuxia scenarios. To put it briefly, a modern WotG game looks less like Romeo Must Die, and more like Kung Fu Hustle. No, seriously, they even added the Lion's Roar as a secret technique in their Companion, and the "death by music" kung fu is in the Corebook. The heroes don't even start as the lowest rung, they actually are 4th Rank (actually 2nd tier, since it counts down from 5) heroes, and heroes are almost infinitely better than mooks already.

The core of the system is the resources you have to play with. Dice are a resource. When you roll, you need to match "sets" of a certain die number on your pool of d10s, and use the mode as your tens place. You take the best result, generally... if you have two 5s, you can take that as 25, but if you had not even a single match, you could also take your 9 for a 19. The River is what makes these a resource, since you can pull dice into it from a roll, and then put dice from the River into another roll. It resets entirely every "scene" more or less, to use a White Wolf term, so it mostly affects multi-step tasks, like combat and intrigue, or closely related rolls. An important element is that a lot of times, attacking someone (and forcing them to roll dice) can actually hinder you if they're significantly badass and you're launching a miserable attack, because they'll spend a minimal amount of resources and gain the opportunity to fill their River, which can then be swung at you! The River is limited by level in terms of size, but obviously a swing of two 3s into an existing pair of 3s to get 43 is a bad event for you if you want to not lose your own Defense roll!

Chi is also a resource. There are 5 Chi pools, colored appropriately (Crimson, Jade, Gold, White, Silver). Generally these are the size of your Attributes, and also give bonuses to Styles that use that color of Chi based on where in the tier system they are, as many Styles refer to your "Chi Modifier" which will generally be the same as the Style's Chi or such. You recover 1 Chi per round in each pool, so obviously you're encouraged to diversify and cycle through your pools in conflict. Chi costs generally range from 1 to 5 Chi, with special techniques that give even more power costing you 10 or 15 Chi (though not all in one place anymore), and occasionally some arts have a special reduced maintenance cost (called a channel) of usually 2 Chi per round, commonly seen on level 5 techniques, in order to keep them going. Kung fu techniques tend to be diversified more than you actually need them to be, also, since you can only invoke the same technique once in a round, which may not matter if it affects the entire round, but...

Since Jade Chi healing has already been addressed, I'll note a limitation. It's one of the more oft-forgotten rules, but you're not supposed to heal more than a certain number of Health Levels without receiving medical attention or such, or certain time-based breakpoints (I think stories?). Health is split between points and Health Levels, and you generally easily have like 75 or 100 health, but taking certain fractions of that (1/5th - a health level) inflicts a penalty on actions akin to the WW type of health level, as well as Chi Breath loss.

Chi Conditions are the heart of the "lasting effects" game. They can be inflicted by having a special Destiny (i.e. part of your character), by having Kung Fu used on you, but most commonly by someone using Secret Arts such as Intrigue or Sorcery to nudge your behaviour or alter your fate magically. Being punched in certain chi meridians to cause your chi to shift tends to fall somewhere in between kung fu and Secret Arts, with there being a Secret Art for it but you having to lay hands on them, obviously. Chi Conditions can strengthen someone's breath in Chi, giving them more Chi per round! This allows them to use higher level techniques more often, or maintain lower level techniques indefinitely. There is a certain number limiting how many of these can benefit you, as opposed to hurt you, roughly analogous to your level. Getting them modified or undone is done by using Secret Arts, but depending on circumstances, you may well prefer just spinning off a harmful condition into a beneficial condition if you haven't already been loaded down with beneficial astrological predictions.

Some other minor resources are Chi Aura, which can be rolled out to soak damage and you recover all of it from round to round, and Joss, which can be Xia (spend to add dice to a roll) or Corrupt (spend to subtract dice from someone else's roll!). Chi Aura is level-based, and Joss is based on getting certain matches (if a set of "0s" is your highest match, you get a point), or just doing heroic things like beating up bad guys, or unheroic things like beating up the heroes (which also gives you Destiny and Deeds, the EXP mechanics of the game), but in general, advancing the plot, since "just" defeating an enemy doesn't quite count if I recall correctly, but rather foiling plans, et cetera. Which, can, you know, involve smashing heads.

[TavishArtair]

Huh. I had thought that the point of all that chi accounting crap was to make it so that encounters could have lasting relevance without being deadly. If they don't actually do that, what is the point?

-Username17

They're Magic colors, like he stated, but also NIN forgot the Jade healing limitation, which is a big difference.

[NineInchNall]

The Jade healing limitation is kind of a non-issue once you've advanced even a little. You're limited to healing one health level's worth of points for each die of the Hardiness skill you have.

Which means that spending 3 of your starting skill points and 2 Destiny later gives you enough Hardiness to heal from Dying to Healthy.

Joss is based on getting certain matches (if a set of "0s" is your highest match, you get a point), or just doing heroic things like beating up bad guys, or unheroic things like beating up the heroes (which also gives you Destiny and Deeds, the EXP mechanics of the game), but in general, advancing the plot, since "just" defeating an enemy doesn't quite count if I recall correctly, but rather foiling plans, et cetera. Which, can, you know, involve smashing heads.

Yup. You recall correctly.

[TavishArtair]

The upshot of all this is a system where people don't like taking on too many opponents at once (Chi Aura and kung fu techniques start running out), where people are encouraged to diversify (to use several, not just one Chi type, and also have similar kung fu techniques available so they can always use them if they have to roll twice in a round), and where people don't like continuing the fight when they get hurt, because they start losing several power sets and also take penalties on their fighting rolls, but they have plenty of health to lose so dying in one stroke doesn't happen often. And if it does, the Wulin Sage is supposed to give the unlucky character a "comic relief" pass and have Team Rocket blast off again. Partying with a group of one or two Scholars/Courtiers types and then mostly Warriors is also highly encouraged, because that way everyone can get hit with Secret Arts to benefit them.

And that's true, NIN, but in a story you might be called on to heal back from the dead repeatedly, sooo...

[NineInchNall]

Oh, yeah. Coming back from the dead a lot like the fuckin' Undertaker.

I've got a new character concept I want to play now, dammit!