[Exalted-Wushu] Look what I made

[voidstate]

Originally Posted by DariusSolluman

One modification I made when running WuShu for SpyCraft that made it play much, MUCH better for my players.

Whenever the PCs are in a dangerous situation, the situation has 3 Values- the Difficulty, the Danger and the Time.

The Difficulty is the total number of Yang successes needed to escape the situation successfully. The Danger is the number of Yin successes you need to avoid losing a point of Chi this turn. Each round of descriptions causes the Time to decrease by 1. If the Turns reaches 0, you start to lose 1 Chi per Turn.

Previously, one of my players had asked 'Why not just always put all but one die in Yin dice, and have one Yang'. I had no good response at the time.

I like that idea. So how did you explain the time element to your players in game turns. Surely there wasn't always a bomb about to go off (or maybe there was - this was a spy genre game after all).

vs

[DariusSolluman]

Originally Posted by voidstate

I like that idea. So how did you explain the time element to your players in game turns. Surely there wasn't always a bomb about to go off (or maybe there was - this was a spy genre game after all).

vs

Well, sometimes it was easy- there's a bomb or they've been put in a slow moving deathtrap or whatever. Other times, it's cause the audience is starting to get bored with how long this scene is taking to wrap up- long fights with mooks are out of genre.

Mind you, I'm re-translating from the terms I used when explining WuCraft to them- in which Yang, Yin and Chi had become Attack, Defense and Cool. It makes more sense to say that Bond is less Cool is a fight drags on too long than his Chi is reduced

Re: Pacing.

Pacing is controlling the flow of action and events to retain the audience's interest, right?

How exactly does WuShu help with the /pacing/ of events, as it is written? It certainly helps with getting interesting narration and empowering players, but how does it encourage pacing, and how can you adjust a game's play with it's pacing mechanics?

In particular, what is meant to discourage players from doing the 4 Yin Dice - 1 Yang Die if fighting mooks, or otherwise just straight overcoming a challenge?

Simply vary the Difficulty rating? That's one dial- it almost amounts to a clock. Adding additional dials to tweak lets you have different types of challenges- short and sharp (low Difficulty, low Time, high Danger), typical fight scene (moderate Difficulty, moderate Time, moderate Danger), the very scenary (especially when it's soomething both the Nemesis and the Protagonists have to contend with- high/infinite Difficulty, low Danger, unlimited Time).

[Bailywolf]

That is SWEET.

-B

[indra]

Seconded! Very cool character sheet :)

Pacing: Wush does lack a mechanic for time pressure, but that's because I normally handle such things narratively. Technically speaking, there's nothing to prevent most hero types from just leaping over a crowd a mooks to get to the Abort Switch or Fleeing Nemesis (at least, not in a wire-fu style game).

Once in a while (usually when I've set the Threat level too high), mook fights do get to a point where you're like "Aren't they dead yet?!" My solution (which will appear in Wire-Fu) is what I call the Last Mook Standing rule. Many of you may have heard this already, but what I do is tranform the last 1-5 points of Threat into a minor Nemesis with 1-5 points of Chi. They only get a target number of 3, but I get to build up a pool for Yang dice for them, so they stand a decent chance of at least bloodying the heros' noses on their way to hell ;)

It picks up the pace becaus it changes the action and raises the stakes, at least a little.

L8r, --Dan