Kasumi
02-06-2005, 04:59 PM
Short version: it's really accessible and really good.
Long version: Yesterday I ran Snow and Thunder (http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?t=169326) for a couple of friends, but with as much dicing out of stuff as I could. I was pleased to see my friends picking up the game very quickly (despite me not being the greatest explainer of mechanics), and the use of dice only increasing the total session time by about an hour (which including learning the rules is pretty good)!
This should really be considered a rules preview rather than a review - while Brad Elliott has been kind enough to release some extra material our way, and answered many questions, things like weapon stats and kung-fu were largely approximations guesstimated from the wealth of information on the Eos Press forums. Most of what we used in play (ie the combat chapter) is publically available for download on the Eos site.
Accessibility: The players were experienced roleplayers, but even so I felt they picked the system up pretty fast. They certainly didn't have any trouble figuring out what to do in combat, and while they didn't use their kung-fu as furiously (and as chi-tactically) as I'd expect after a few games' experience, there was no real confusion over what the kung-fu did - in fact they were thinking up creative applications for it, like using disarm bonuses to snatch scrolls and lifting bonuses to cause avalanches!
Speed: The mechanical resolution is pretty fast. As you may know, you roll a pool of 10 sided dice, usually between about 3 and 7 dice, and look for matches. The number of matching dice becomes the tens digit and the number on the dice the unit. So, if I rolled 7 dice and got
1, 3, 3, 5, 7, 7, 7
I could either take 23 (for two 3s) or 37 (for three 7s). If you roll no matches, you still get at least 10, since you can choose a single dice (so you get one 9 as 19 or whatever). I think this would be unwieldy for large pools, but for the size of pools used in WotG, it's a breeze, and kinda fun :) Other than that, you usually add any bonuses (like a weapon or kung fu's Strike bonus), and either compare it to a difficulty or an opposed roll - pretty standard stuff, there.
A combat round is quite fast - you can take one full action (usually an attack) and two free actions (like movement or taunting or what have you), and you always get a free defence against an attack - defences cost no actions. There's no multiple actions other than through kung fu (which I think is rare?), and so a turn goes by quickly. There seems to be scope for tactics, through kung fu and choice of actions, but it's not as mechanically complex as say Exalted (which is a very different game, but I still think bears comparison due to overlap of target markets :)).
You can save excess pairs in your River (which is a limited slot to hold dice) and then push them back into rolls in later turns. Players liked this.
Lethality: The game is not very lethal, from what I can see. Expect lots of heroic rivalries, since you won't necessarily be recycling NPCs too often :) While mooks are mooks, even fairly lowly Wulin foes seem to take a few good hits to go down, while monsters like the Rank II Metal Lord in my game are veritable Energizer Bunnies! This is fine for me - I like villains able to run away when they realise things are grim, and for PCs to be able to have a shot at hitting a battlefield and surviving even if outclassed. Any powerful hero will be fairly resilient, because the amount of damage you can take is based on how much chi you have.
There is a death spiral, which is partly the normal penalties and partly to do with chi, which I'll talk about shortly.
One-on-one duels will naturally last much longer than multiperson fights because of the chi aura mechanic - essentially, you get a number of dice based on your Rank each turn that you can spend to decrease damage. In a one-on-one duel, barring multi-attack kung fu, you'll each make one attack, and your opponent will spend all his chi aura to reduce its damage. When ganged up on, or fearing multiple attacks, you need to be more tactical with the chi aura, and you quickly run out of it. I actually really like this, but I'm guessing people wanting grittier games (like Three Kingdoms etc) might want to ditch the chi aura, along with damage-reducing kung-fu.
Essentially, as it stands, combat actions are fast, but combats as a whole can be long, with many exchanges of strikes and such. However, the Free action rules encourage lots of colour during fights, so I think this is absolutely a feature - long combats are good if they are long on cool content.
Chi and Kung-Fu: OK, chi is awesome. You have five different colours of chi, which you have a rating in, usually from about 1-6. Each kung fu style has a colour of chi - using a technique of that style costs one point of chi of that colour per level of the technique (ie using Silvereyes Nan's third level of his Gilded Falcon (Crimson) kung fu costs him 3 Crimson chi). Simple.
Then you get back one of each colour of chi per turn. This is cool. This encourages you to not only use your kung fu (not all out by default, since you'd be tapped out, but not analy trying to fight as cheaply as possible - you're wasting chi if you don't use some kung fu), but to switch between styles of different colours (use a big Crimson technique, then use Jade and Gold for a few turns while Crimson regenerates). Plus you're inevitably fresh for the next fight!
Being wounded, though, reduces your chi regeneration. Each level of being wounded forces you to choose a color of chi which no longer regenerates. You can use Jade chi to heal yourself (so you'll probably be fine for the next fight), but it's still a problem in battle, and you'll need to choose which colours you lose carefully depending on the situation and what kung-fu you need.
We were only using a couple of official styles of kung fu (Lightfoot and Bei Fist) - the rest we, uh, made up. However, the basic system for kung fu is easy to grasp, and comboing them is a breeze - you can use as many techniques as you can pay for, but only using the best bonus for a given area - they don't stack.
In the heat of battle there was a bunch of cool stuff I forgot - like weapon breaking - but I think we still gave the system a good shakedown, and it came up looking very good, and importantly very accessible - I think I'll be leaning on this game a lot for one-shots.
Long version: Yesterday I ran Snow and Thunder (http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?t=169326) for a couple of friends, but with as much dicing out of stuff as I could. I was pleased to see my friends picking up the game very quickly (despite me not being the greatest explainer of mechanics), and the use of dice only increasing the total session time by about an hour (which including learning the rules is pretty good)!
This should really be considered a rules preview rather than a review - while Brad Elliott has been kind enough to release some extra material our way, and answered many questions, things like weapon stats and kung-fu were largely approximations guesstimated from the wealth of information on the Eos Press forums. Most of what we used in play (ie the combat chapter) is publically available for download on the Eos site.
Accessibility: The players were experienced roleplayers, but even so I felt they picked the system up pretty fast. They certainly didn't have any trouble figuring out what to do in combat, and while they didn't use their kung-fu as furiously (and as chi-tactically) as I'd expect after a few games' experience, there was no real confusion over what the kung-fu did - in fact they were thinking up creative applications for it, like using disarm bonuses to snatch scrolls and lifting bonuses to cause avalanches!
Speed: The mechanical resolution is pretty fast. As you may know, you roll a pool of 10 sided dice, usually between about 3 and 7 dice, and look for matches. The number of matching dice becomes the tens digit and the number on the dice the unit. So, if I rolled 7 dice and got
1, 3, 3, 5, 7, 7, 7
I could either take 23 (for two 3s) or 37 (for three 7s). If you roll no matches, you still get at least 10, since you can choose a single dice (so you get one 9 as 19 or whatever). I think this would be unwieldy for large pools, but for the size of pools used in WotG, it's a breeze, and kinda fun :) Other than that, you usually add any bonuses (like a weapon or kung fu's Strike bonus), and either compare it to a difficulty or an opposed roll - pretty standard stuff, there.
A combat round is quite fast - you can take one full action (usually an attack) and two free actions (like movement or taunting or what have you), and you always get a free defence against an attack - defences cost no actions. There's no multiple actions other than through kung fu (which I think is rare?), and so a turn goes by quickly. There seems to be scope for tactics, through kung fu and choice of actions, but it's not as mechanically complex as say Exalted (which is a very different game, but I still think bears comparison due to overlap of target markets :)).
You can save excess pairs in your River (which is a limited slot to hold dice) and then push them back into rolls in later turns. Players liked this.
Lethality: The game is not very lethal, from what I can see. Expect lots of heroic rivalries, since you won't necessarily be recycling NPCs too often :) While mooks are mooks, even fairly lowly Wulin foes seem to take a few good hits to go down, while monsters like the Rank II Metal Lord in my game are veritable Energizer Bunnies! This is fine for me - I like villains able to run away when they realise things are grim, and for PCs to be able to have a shot at hitting a battlefield and surviving even if outclassed. Any powerful hero will be fairly resilient, because the amount of damage you can take is based on how much chi you have.
There is a death spiral, which is partly the normal penalties and partly to do with chi, which I'll talk about shortly.
One-on-one duels will naturally last much longer than multiperson fights because of the chi aura mechanic - essentially, you get a number of dice based on your Rank each turn that you can spend to decrease damage. In a one-on-one duel, barring multi-attack kung fu, you'll each make one attack, and your opponent will spend all his chi aura to reduce its damage. When ganged up on, or fearing multiple attacks, you need to be more tactical with the chi aura, and you quickly run out of it. I actually really like this, but I'm guessing people wanting grittier games (like Three Kingdoms etc) might want to ditch the chi aura, along with damage-reducing kung-fu.
Essentially, as it stands, combat actions are fast, but combats as a whole can be long, with many exchanges of strikes and such. However, the Free action rules encourage lots of colour during fights, so I think this is absolutely a feature - long combats are good if they are long on cool content.
Chi and Kung-Fu: OK, chi is awesome. You have five different colours of chi, which you have a rating in, usually from about 1-6. Each kung fu style has a colour of chi - using a technique of that style costs one point of chi of that colour per level of the technique (ie using Silvereyes Nan's third level of his Gilded Falcon (Crimson) kung fu costs him 3 Crimson chi). Simple.
Then you get back one of each colour of chi per turn. This is cool. This encourages you to not only use your kung fu (not all out by default, since you'd be tapped out, but not analy trying to fight as cheaply as possible - you're wasting chi if you don't use some kung fu), but to switch between styles of different colours (use a big Crimson technique, then use Jade and Gold for a few turns while Crimson regenerates). Plus you're inevitably fresh for the next fight!
Being wounded, though, reduces your chi regeneration. Each level of being wounded forces you to choose a color of chi which no longer regenerates. You can use Jade chi to heal yourself (so you'll probably be fine for the next fight), but it's still a problem in battle, and you'll need to choose which colours you lose carefully depending on the situation and what kung-fu you need.
We were only using a couple of official styles of kung fu (Lightfoot and Bei Fist) - the rest we, uh, made up. However, the basic system for kung fu is easy to grasp, and comboing them is a breeze - you can use as many techniques as you can pay for, but only using the best bonus for a given area - they don't stack.
In the heat of battle there was a bunch of cool stuff I forgot - like weapon breaking - but I think we still gave the system a good shakedown, and it came up looking very good, and importantly very accessible - I think I'll be leaning on this game a lot for one-shots.