<I>Wushu</I> is a hot little indy game with attitude. It likes to do triple back flips while shooting down a hundred mooks with double pistols blazing, long coats flapping like raven wings, and painfully trendy-cool shades that never fall off. It revels in style over substance, and demands constant hyper-kinetic detail of appearance and flash. In short, it is a rules-nearly-non-existent game of Matrix style action that laughs in the face of reality, detailed systems and stats, and the idea that more ninjas is ever a bad thing. While it achieves this goal with aplomb, it does so only with help from the GM, and at the cost of being enough of a real heavyweight for long-term play.
Post originally by Jared A. Sorensen at 2003-06-16 10:17:30
Converted from Phorums BB System
Here's my problem with games like this. I describe an incredibly cool manuever (5+ dice), but for some reason things don't work out and I miss the roll.
So the GM says, "Um, no...here's what happens instead."
So now I'm a chump. Man, I hate that.
How I'd do it:
If you make the roll, you describe the *action* the character attempted. Roll another die. If you make THAT roll, describe additional details. And so on, up to the limit of your character's abilities.
Post originally by Paradoxdruid at 2003-06-16 10:22:54
Converted from Phorums BB System
I haven't bought it, but I have looked at the Wushu rules included in the Matrix adaptation, and I think your review clearly and accurately summarized the game.
I've been pondering someday using the Exalted background with the Wushu rules... I think it could work well.
But yeah- with such a small resolution range (a few traits rated from 1-5) it's hard to really offer experience and growth.
Post originally by Daniel Bayn at 2003-06-16 12:21:04
Converted from Phorums BB System
One of Wushu's central tenets is that anything the players describe _happens_ regardless of the outcome of the die roll. The "Resolution" step of each round is heavily de-emphasized and only meant to measure progress towards the "end" of a scene (i.e. achievement of a goal or defeat of one's enemies).
The dice only tell you _how well_ something worked, not if it worked at all.
I had initially toyed with the idea of rolling first, then awarding narrating right based on degree of success, but decided against it because 1) most of my players lose interest in the events of a round after the dice are rolled, and 2) I wanted to use the dice as a _reward_ for vivid description, not the other way around.
Post originally by Brand Robins at 2003-06-16 12:59:02
Converted from Phorums BB System
That is what the game says. It's a very cool solution, and a big step away from other games.
I'd also say it's one of the things that needs a little more emphasis and description. I mean it sounds simple enough, but a lot of us who've been playing the other way for years just ain't as sly as you are Mr. Bayn, and need some more guidance befor we can become Jedi.
Post originally by Brand Robins at 2003-06-16 14:02:20
Converted from Phorums BB System
In general successes show how well you did at your action. What your action looks like is already set, but what the exact game effects are varies by how many successes you get. However, things can get a little hazy around the corners when you consider the difference between, say, mooks and a nemesis.
With mooks your successes really are a measure of how far you move the scene towards resolution and how much it hurts you to do so. If you get lots of successes, then the mooks are that much closer to being taken down. I’d note, that though it never really talks about this in Wushu, this does make it possible to do actions that don’t directly smack mooks, but that do other things to move the scene towards eventual mook smackage.
For example: In one of my games there were a bunch of mooks hiding behind a large concrete barricade (mook threat 21). We had a cyborg character who ran out, and rather than attacking the mooks, hyper-rammed the barricade and sent it crushing into dust but specifically did not attack the mooks himself (5 successes). Now, his action did not directly effect the mooks, but his successes still decreased the mook threat level to 16 – because it decreased the level of effectiveness of the mooks, and made it easier for the other characters to kill them. Because the system is about scene resolution, anything you do to effect the scene in an anti-mook way counts.
However, when you fight a nemesis you get a more typical “must kill baddie” approach, because the nemesis, essentially, is the scene and you have to focus on overcoming him specifically. So the above hyper-ramming wouldn’t work as well on a Nemesis, unless you stated that the exploding barrier also knocked the stuffing out of him. Nemesis have Chi, like PCs, and essentially have to be taken down the old fashioned way – by making them run out of hit points.
For non-combat actions you can use either method. There are times where using scene resolution is very fitting, in a gathering information scene for example, the characters might need 20 successes to find everything they want – so the successes track what percentage of the total the characters have acquired and can be used to figure out exactly what they get. Other times, the specific focus of the nemesis rules might be more fitting – such as diffusing a bomb, where you either diffuse it or it blows you into orbit. (Of course, it would also be possible to do either the other way as well – having a gather information scene in which only one person knew the info and the PCs had to drag it out of him using nemesis stylings, or a situation in which the characters don’t care about the bomb so much as protecting innocents in which they use the mook style rules to try and accumulate enough successes to make sure everyone is out of the building before it blows.)
So, I guess the short answer would be: successes are a measure of the degree of effect your action has upon the resolution of the scene (in mook terms) or the demise of a single threat (in nemesis terms)
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