Druken PREview Feng Shui 2nd Edition.

[hogarth]

Before I move on to fuschticks

I keep reading this as "fucksticks".

[Josh_Kablack]

Which is why I didn't go back and edit the space in between those words.

[Zaranthan]

And while I'm not sure which of those directions would be better than the other for Feng Shui, I'm reasonably either would be better than the current lack of direction seems to be.

At the very heart, Feng Shui is supposed to let you play action movie characters, yes? Put everybody on the same power schedule. White Pants McGee and Black Pants Sheng both start with full Fortune pools. They burn their points trying to do cool shit, then they do oddball stuff to recover their pools. This ping-pongs until somebody manages to prevent the other guy from recovering, then beats his ass into grass.

That's how every climactic fight I've ever seen in an action movie goes.

[Username17]

The issue right now is that Fortune pools aren't just trying to do climactic fights, they are also trying to act as a cap on people doing major movie plot twists like begin mighty rituals of vast power and find dropped key cards. And obviously if wacky shit in the middle of combats refreshes your fortune pool, fortune doesn't act as an effective limitation on those things.

-Username17

[Lago PARANOIA]

They burn their points trying to do cool shit, then they do oddball stuff to recover their pools. This ping-pongs until somebody manages to prevent the other guy from recovering, then beats his ass into grass.

How many times is this reversal of control supposed to go? Because generally the formula for RoC is supposed one of these:

• Protagonist and antagonist fight. One of them busts out their big-time knock-out move and wins the fight. If this happens near the beginning of the story it's usually the antagonist that's victorious. The closer the story is to denouement, the more likely this is the protagonist.
• One character has some standard trick that the other sees coming; they counter with a trick of their own and win.
• One character (usually the protagonist) comes into a fight with two good tricks. Their first good trick gets countered, they get their ass beat for awhile but then they pull out their second trick and it wins them the fight.
• One character (usually the antagonist) doesn't pull out any tricks in a fight because they dominate the opposition that much. The other character uses one, two, or no tricks but still gets their ass turned inside out.

As far as single-author action-adventure fiction (which FS is supposed to emulate) is concerned, the flow of fortune in a single discrete climatic encounter can deviate from that list but the author sure as fuck better know what they're doing. We make fun of Bleach's endless mid-battle powerups for a reason.

[Username17]

So my wife is sick, so I've grabbed a bottle of Ouzo and the Feng Shui playtest preview packet to see who is right and who is dead. Josh did a bunch of the slogging, so let's focus in on the highlights. That means that I won't harp on the rather tin eared "Flying Pronoun Kick rant at the beginning.

The first real mechanics presented in this game are the Action Values. The introduction of them leaves something to be desired. First of all, the AVs are introduced in two tables, the second one tells you what an action result might actually do, and the first one gives you vague adjectives to describe how awesome you are to have AVs in that range in the first place. And like White Wolf or Shadowrun before it, these descriptions are bullshit.



For starters, "Top Notch" is at 11, despite the fact that it is obviously not the top notch because there are four notches listed after that. Those include "World-Class," "Freaking Astounding!" and "Totally Kick-ass." I have elected to not put these in the order they appear to underline how fucking meaningless those adjectives are. Seriously, there are five other orders those three could come in, and I'd bet a dollar that if you asked people to unjumble them that people wouldn't get it "right" a whole lot more than 20% of the time.

Anyway, what the Action Values actually do is to define what levels of stunts and shit you can pull off, which is the next chart altogether. This would be a great except that the examples have basically nothing to do with the rest of the rules. For example, Leaping Safely from a Speeding Car is listed at Action Result 15, but I think that's literally one of the stunts that characters automagically succeed at in this game; and Deflecting Bullets With a Sword is listed at Action Result 19, but it's definitely just modeled as a special effect for the relatively high defensive number that swordsmen get in this game.

In short: the description of the AVs and the charts appear to be copy pasta from the pitch meeting of the first edition back in 1994 and in no way reflective of this edition or even last edition as they actually exist. Not helpful to new players and confusing for old players.

Anyway, next we get to the basic die mechanics. The basic die mechanics are that you roll a positive die and a negative die and both dice explode on a 6. What this means is that 39% of the time your Action Result is within 1 point of your base AV, and that a swerve differential of +/-5 can only happen if one of the dice explode, in which case the swerve is likely to be considerably more than 5 in one direction or the other, and over 30% of rolls involve an explosion of some kind. So the entire difference of 2-4 in either direction only sees the light of making any fucking difference at all about 15% of the time. This is coincidentally the AV spread of most of the archetypes, which pretty much means that being on the low end of AVs is a huge kick in the nuts, and being on the high end of AVs is like playing an entirely different game.

Also, I genuinely don't understand why we need a Boxcars rule at all. Very high and very low results already act as crits and fumbles and happen far too often in any case.

TL;DR: I think that Josh is basically right and that Feng Shui is in search of a bigger RNG that explodes less often. Like maybe a +/- d10

You know, I think that in nearly 2 decades of this game being out, I have never gotten a straight answer to how the box cars rules work with spending a fortune die. That's weird.

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The fact that Rearm checks even exist defeats the purpose of several shticks.

I'm not sold on many of these special case rolls existing. People don't actually have Constitution values, and there are only a couple of shticks that interact with Constitution at all. A few NPC monsters have Constitutions, but the only thing that seems to do is to let them drink poison and not take damage - assuming they get a sufficient Action Result on the defense check and I can't find the required AR in this book. Fuck. Really seems like there's still some streamlining to do here.

---

The timeline got pushed forward in weird ways. The Ancient juncture went forward 621 years, the Present and Future junctures went forward 18 years, and the Past juncture went forward 0 years. I... don't even know. Parts of the book don't even acknowledge these time shifts happened at all, but I assume that is an editing mistake.

Literally I have no idea why any of this happened. The Dragons apparently got killed off again to make room for new heroes or something. The future got blown up and now it's a post apocalyptic Planet of the Apes remake. And we are still doing the Taiping Rebellion in 1850s China. Why not advance the timeline there by 18 years? We could have former Confederate soldiers, and there's the bloody endings of the Nien Rebellion, so why the fuck not?

The exploded future seems like it wasn't really thought through at all, and the fact that the 1850s juncture got all the way rebooted for no reason makes it look like it got even less thought in it. I can kind of accept wanting to go to a non-evil female Emperor in China, so the jump from 69 AD to 690 AD sort of makes sense, but I don't see any reason given. We got rid of the Architects of the Flesh for... what? Planet of the Apes remakes? Basically, the "bad end" future appears to be just like the possible bad end future in Days Of Future Past, which of course is bad and you need to stop it - but that's like one adventure. Having the bad end future that is going to be replaced at the end of the first adventure be the only described future in core book is extremely stupid.

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Genome and Scroungetech points are stupid names. Also, backup attack systems don't really. Gene Freaks are stupid names for a mutant with powers, while Cyborg is a fine name for a dude with supertech cyberware. Making attacks with your "scroungetech" skill for punching people just fails the stupid test. Scroungetech characters should just have a Guns and Martial Arts AV like everyone else who punches people and has a flame thrower.

The Archetype presentation leaves much to be desired. I understand it's a draft copy, but it really doesn't look like it's going towards anything super user friendly. The quick-pick-shticks aren't labeled as such, so it's quite a lot of back and forth to do even what minimal customization the game lets you do. I understand that everything is supposed to be streamlined for jumping right into it, but with 36 archetypes from 4 junctures in no particular order that wasn't achieved.

Basically, I want the customization options in the archetype descriptions, and I want the Archetypes arranged by juncture rather than alphabetically.

Old Masters seriously push the RNG. They have an AV of 16 and an attack that they are allowed to keep getting bonus attacks until they miss. A lot of Featured Foes have a defense of 12, which as previously mentioned means that our Old Master hits 85% of the time, and could very plausibly go a long time of rolling before the chain ends. There are of course ways to penalize the defense of the enemy by one to three points, so the Old Master is going to do a lot of really long attack chains. His average is 5 hits to resolve.

Which brings me to my first gripe: target numbers. Most of what you can do is actually just based on enemy stats. But the enemies don't use PC archetypes at all, and they aren't listed until page 268 of this document. It's not Scion levels of fuckery, but's close. Seriously, this book badly needs to put some basic enemy defense stats into the AV chart at the beginning of the book.

-Username17

[Josh_Kablack]

Quick Reply:

I will return to do more slogging soon, but sadly real life and day job are requiring all the slog I have for a few more days yet.

I'm in basic agreement with much of that post: first AV table is leotarded; archetypes need chunked by either juncture or primary AV; RNG is too small and explodish; customization options need to be more clear; special case rolls look like answers to questions that didn't actually come up; Genome is terribad name; Scroungetech isn't inherently terribad -- but the way it is used is.

I have some quibbles about Frank's characterization of secondary AVs. But he's not wrong, just oversimplifying. And I don't have time to elaborate.

There totally are setting justifications rationalizations for the past juncture staying at 1850 in the book. I still agree that a late 1860s makes more sense.

Flying Windmill kick being a tier two theoretically infinite loop in a single schtick is crazy without the Chi cost of 1e, but that isn't even the craziest part of the Fu schticks chapter - which isn't even the craziest of the power chapters.

[Username17]

So I like the basic Reload check. It's a little weird that it's called a "Reload Check" when it actually is the check to see if you've run out of ammo and actual reloading is handled without a check. I don't like the way any of the gun shticks interact with it. Particularly "lightning reload," which despite the name does not actually make you reload any faster. That's kind of bullshit.

Also, the thing where when you pull a new gun, you don't have to make a new reload check until the same shot next round is too much book keeping. No reload checks until the end of the round would be fine.

The thing where all Bosses are universally good at noticing things and kicking the crap out of people is out of genre a lot of the time. I don't like it. There are a lot of movies where the final dude is King Pin and just generally badass at everything, but there are also a lot of movies where there's a thinky/talky boss like Goldfinger and a smacky/crushy boss like Oddjob. These rules don't seem to even attempt to address the second case, and it seems relatively difficult to hack them until they do. Basically, I'm not really sold on the way the book handles the Villains Are Different conceit it is trying to pull.

-Username17

[Josh_Kablack]

Chapter 5: When the Fu Shits, Wear it.

Fu Schticks are still sold in paths, which are a bit like 3e D&D feat chains. The paths have been streamlined since 1e, with no single path having more than 8 powers, but the number of paths has been expanded to 19. The 2e paths are a lot more linear, generally following a 1-2-3-4-5 structure with 1 exception. Thus in 2e a path might hand out a bonus schtick or have a pair of tier 3 powers, one of which is a prereq for the tier 4, the other of which is slightly better right now. But the need-a-chart-to-understand it crap like 1e's Path of the Storm Turtle where there were 19 Fu Schticks arranged in an array with four different paths following non-linear progress through five different tiers doesn't happen.

Steps forward

However, this dots in a discipline approach to Fu powers does a better job of representing 90s trends in game design than it does in representing the way wire-fu works in chop-socky flicks, and it probably should have been reconsidered.

There's a reminder that you can never take the same schtick twice, which pretty much means just one signature weapon. Of course 'Signature weapon" is both a guns schtick and a Fu schtick, so you probably can in fact take each of those schticks to have a sig gun and and sig parking meter, but it's not specifically addressed in this comment which specifically addresses signature weapon, so expect to argue it with your GM each and every time you play.

I just counted 86 different schticks in my 1e book. As of this draft, 2e looks to have 106. I know bigger numbers make for better marketing, but that's probably more than are strictly necessary. Some should probably be edited out and others could be consolidated to get rid of dead space and to avoid confusion between "Fire Fist" and "Fire Strike" having to use names like "Training Sequence II"

On to the actual paths:

First up is Path of the Banisher, which has Stave off Monkey at tier 2

When an opponent makes a successful attack against you, interrupt and pay 2 shots; the
attack fails.

I'm honestly not sure why anybody would ever need to take any other defensive fu schtick after that. There's no chi cost, no attack type limitation and the typical offensive attack has a shot cost of 3, which is greater than the shot cost of the schtick. Thus unless you are outnumbered by at least 1.5 * Reciprocal_of_Opponent's_Chance_of_Hitting, you still get offensive actions even after trading away your shots in the action economy to negate *all* incoming attacks. Heck a fight between two characters with the power goes on until until the scenery collapses and they take environmental non-attack damage.

Next is Path of the Death Punch, which is only three powers, with the top-tier Dim Mak only working against featured foes after the 2nd sequence and setting wound points directly to 34, all of which seems underwhelming for a third of your Chi. It really should work against all named opponents (bosses and uber-bosses too) and it should probably work ON or after the 2nd sequence, and it should set wounds to 35 (unless already higher).

Path of the Dragon has a bunch of self-buffs costing Chi and a capstone power to boost your Speed by the number of named foes you have already damaged this fight. In practice, this will be a minor boost or an impressive performance against desperate odds. In theory, this lets you get an arbitrarily large initiate result and take infinite actions.

Path of the Drunken Master: The concept here that your AV will vary during the fight and it comes with a little warning not to take it "if your simple arithmetic is slow". Well maybe people who missed that chapter 4 does not come right after chapter 4 should not write rules like this. As a drunk, I feel obligated to post Schtick by Schtick breakdown of the sobriety at work here:

bonus: Drunken Master You take no intoxication penalties to martial arts or defense. Of course since this is a PDF, I ran a search and the word "intoxication" appears exactly once in the 436 pages of this manuscript.The actual rules section in the Blue Moon chapter refers to taking Impairment while drunk, and by those rules I have been at -2 for the vast majority of writing this review. But the general concept is that you invert the usual penalties, whatever their name and take -2 while sober, -1 if only buzzed and no penalty while blotto. Of course this sort of penalty-on-condition balance cannot actually work if the penalties are part of a Fu schtick, since Fu schticks are things you choose to activate or not. So in a flailing attempt to give some sort of restriction for having a forced-combo path that's kinda useful, the designers decided that you also can't use any of the schticks on this path while sober, and they hid that rule in a bonus schtick instead of putting it at the top of the path description because we liked Gygax's layout in the DMG.

bonus: Speed Drinking Spend 1 shot to consume 2 servings of alcohol. Okay, the conceit here is that you can spend shots drinking as a form of powering up, since other schticks in the path give you a bonus based on the number of drinks you've had during the current fight. Of course, when your initiative count unit is called a "shot" it seems antifreeze in the wine blindingly obvious to use a 1 shot per shot rule for speed drinking and have the bonuses phrased to use a x2 multiplier. Also, the path has been edited since 1e, so only one schtick actually cares about the precise number of drinks consumed this fight, so really did you need a bonus schtick to set up a single schtick instead of just rewriting Wily Stupor to include its own power-up clause?

1st tier Drunken Stance +2 to Martial Arts on odd-numbered shots, -1 on even numbered shots, but if you hold an action to act on an even shot you have to pay 1 Chi. You will never take that -1 and it should not have been written. The idea is that it's part of the whole forced-combo thing this path has, so that you'll either be Speed Drinking or using the Drunken Fist version of the 1e snap shot rules to time your attack, but the reality is that the rules don't work like that, and if they did, players should do out-of-genre things to bend them. Firstly, this is a Fu Schtick so you can just decide not to use it the same as you can decide not to Flying Windmill Kick a fool on an even numbered shot. There's no Chi nor shot cost, so you're not out anything. But even if you lose that argument against your GM, or if it gets rewritten as a keyframe duration buff (and starts conflicting with the other Keyframe duration buff here) to work as the designer probably intended, then the rules still say "take a useless action and waste other player's time at the table, because saying `pass' costs your character a per-session resource", so you should powergame your way out of them. Now to waste a single shot without using the forced-combo options here there is active dodging, but you can't do that unless targeted for an attack. So every drunken master will go into battle not merely with a jug of plum wine, but carrying a pair of empty autoloader handguns that they never fire. That way they can spend a single shot to load one, then a single shot to load the other, then a single shot to drop one, then a single shot to drop the other, and by the time you've wasted those 4 shots and made 4 to 8 attacks with the bonus the fight should be about over.

2nd tier Drunken Fist This is like the snap-shot rules from 1e, you get to make attacks with reduced shot costs but at at AV penalty. It's reasonable in theory, but in play encourages players to have their characters flail about with low-hit probability attacks dragging out the realtime needed for combat and taking spotlight time from other characters.

3rd tier Wily Stupor Spend 1 Chi, add the number of servings of alcohol you have consumed this fight to your Toughness for Keyframe duration. As I mentioned above, this could have been functionally identical without the need for a bonus schtick writeup with the wording "add twice the number of shots you have spent consuming alcohol this sequence to your Toughness". Also, low and decreasing toughness is the balancing factor for the Old Master archetype's 16 AV, and this schtick does the opposite to a frightening degree for anyone willing to set a number of shots on fire

+8 to Toughness
( that's one more than the spread between Big Bruiser and Old Master )

4th tier Aberrant Spasm When you are targeted for an attack spend 2 shots to designate a named character with lower defense than yours. If the attack misses you, that character takes Smackdown equal to weapon damage. I dunno why this can't work vs mooks and the defense comparison seems a really convoluted way to go about this. This schtick is really just filler to make it a hard choice whether to get the Chi-refreshing capstone or to go back and spend those two to get Stave Off Monkey from the above path.

5th tier Spasmodic Leap If a Guns attack misses you on an odd-numbered shot, regain a Chi point. As a no-cost passive, This is the 2nd best Chi-regaining schtick available for Fu. However as a 5th tier power, it requires all the schticks of a dedicated Fu character to get, and the only things on this path which cost Chi are keyframe buffing your Toughness and deferring your action by a shot -- so you will not be using that easily-refreshed Chi to activate fancy powers unless you run long enough to get a significant amount of character advancement, and this works as a bunch of free fortune dice in fights with a lot of mooks.

It also touches on my quibble with Frank's post. If the game includes a bunch of defensive and/or reactive schticks which only apply against [AV TYPE] attacks, then situations will arise where it is tactically better to target a foe with your lower AV back-up attack. And the way this only triggers off of Guns attacks fits that paradigm. The thing is, the tight RNG means that taking the lower AV hit for a back-up attack means that such schticks need to be both relatively common and downright pwnsome in order for there to actually be a decision. This is neither, as it is a 5th-tier Fu power, meaning that only characters who go all the way down the Drunken Master gutter will have it, and even against a character who you know to have it, it is never statistically worth giving up more than 2 points of AV to use an attack other than Guns against them. It's a 50/50 chance of recovering a Fortune die, and on average each Fortune die is worth +4.2 on a single check or Dodge.So while it's a slight win for a Bodyguard (Guns 14, MA 12) to use his fallback attack against a foe using a top-tier anti-guns Fu schtick, it's still foolish for a Killer (Guns 15, MA 10) to even think about it. Still, that would be kind of okay, if Spasmodic Leap wasn't the paradigm for most such Schticks: kinda hard to get, kinda rare and not making a big enough difference for most archetypes to want to accept a lowered AV.


And that's the path of the Drunken Master. Drink before I move on to the rest in far less detail.


Path of Flame: This is a surprisingly boring path that has an Immunity Bonus vs Extreme Heat, a damage shield effect, a couple unimpressive damage-over-times, an overly complicated tier 4 power that lets you set the scenery on fire Extreme Heat, and a capstone indirectish AoE which bypasses toughness but inexplicably doesn't hurt mooks. What jumps out at me is how this totally isn't based on any individual nor combination of the many obvious pop-culture references for flaming fists of fire kung fu:

Path of the Fox: A couple merely nice defensive schticks, a disarm an opponent then get a bonus with his weapon which gets confusing if you disarm something that isn't a melee weapon, and then Vengence of The Fox,

no, that's was the 90s version

this time it's kinda sorta like holding an action to martial throw in Hero, but also kinda sorta like the author doesn't understand the rules to this game. You take the damage from the incoming attack, but then you throw your attacked N meters -- which is pointless to compute in an anti-map system without knockback damage rules nor stand-from-prone action costs, and your damage is computed based on their Strength Check value - which requires referencing their stats, but is only going to be not 7 if they have a schtick boosting it.

Path of the Healer: The first tier schtick here is something a lot of characters are going to take out of theme, since it lets you cash in on any of your teammates Rube Goldbergian Fortune recovery builds without having to have such a build yourself. The bonus is an antidote you will never need, so you don't care. The tier 2 and 3 schticks both cost a Chi to deliver action result healing, but the tier 3 can be split between multiple patients, which you will only rarely care about. What's more cheese worthy is that the Tier 2 specifies that it cannot reduce Wound Points below zero, but the tier 3 doesn't say that, so you can make an argument from the gaps for converting excess fortune into something like Temporary Hit Points. The Tier 4 lets you spend a Chi point to give an ally who has failed a Death check another try, and can apparently be repeated until you run out of Chi. The Tier 5 power lets you spend 1 Chi to impose a -1 penalty (nonstacking, all fight) on an opponent who misses you with a Martial Arts Attack, which is seriously underwhelming for any schtick, let alone a capstone, but that's okay because this one has Point Blockage as a Tier 6 power. Yes, this goes to 11, so only Old Masters or Sifus who go all in on healing can even get it. And while Point Blockage's ability to immobilize a foe for a keyframe is pretty strong, it's Chi cost of 3 is damn near prohibitive now that Chi is a per-session resource. Unless you have an infinite Fortune loop you are at best going to be able to keep one single opponent in this entangle with no defense for one whole fight scene, but if you do have such a loop anywhere, then you'll be throwing out paralyzation riders every time you hit a named foe.

Path of the Hundred Names:You can take Bloody But Unbowed up to three times here, because filler in a draft that's already over 400 pages long . Honestly, giving a +4 bonus to Up checks for a single schtick pick would be more than fine. The other three schticks give you various bonuses after you have passed an Up check, which is nicely thematic, but mechanically will come into play pretty rarely, given how harshly lethal the new rules are and how badly characters should want to run away before making Up checks, so having more than one schtick for that circumstance is probably wasted wordcount.

Path of the Outlaw: This path lets you spend Chi to get various bonuses when the fight is looking bad for you in various ways. Conceptually neat, mechanically meh and these things should be folded into the prior path. The only interesting thing here is that the 5th tier power is a keyframe +2 to all allies' attacks when named opponents outnumber PCs and how that probably interacts with things the Drifter ability to arrive mid-fight for bonuses. But I don't know because this isn't specific about how things interact with characters entering or leaving the fight via various means. Can you scout ahead alone, get jumped by Destro and the Baroness, trigger the bonus then have all your buddies rush to the rescue benefiting from the floating bonus? If it's a four on four brawl and the bad guys drop one of yours can you trigger this now that it's a 3 on 4? If so, do you all keep the bonus when you drop one of them next shot and make it a 3 on 3? I know this is rules lite, but this schtick is a bit too vague about questions like that which will come up in actual play.

Path of the Montage. This opens with another best defensive schtick in the game. Lemme quote it for ya:

Flesh Wound
As an interrupt when you take Wound Points, reduce Toughness by x until en
to reduce Wound Points taken to 0. x=the number of the current sequence

You might think that the Toughness reduction would be hosey and you are trading taking damage now against the risk of more damage later. But you would be wrong. This is a no-cost interrupt that negates all damage, and more importantly Feng Shui does not have a zero lower bound on stats. You don't start making zero bonus attribute checks to take actions ala HERO, you don't become incapcitated ala 3e D&D, your Troll doesn't fall over from Charisma Drain ala Shadowrun. Instead you just have no rules for being at negative stats. And heck we know that the only penalty of having a zero in your Fortune stat is a reduction in Fortune Checks and having no Fortune dice to "spend". But this schtick doesn't "spend" toughness, it reduces it. And since I passed the 4th grade, I know that you can keep subtracting from zero. So in actuality, this no-cost schtick actually lets you trade damage now against the risk of having to use this schtick again later at no-cost.

Then the rest of the path is a schtick that gives a bonus when three or more named characters can target you and only you, an attack bonus against Uber-bosses and a defense bonus against Bosses and Uber-Bosses. Those are all kinda rare and the flat numeric adds are not interesting. This sort of thing should be folded together into the prior two paths and edited down to a single "Underdog Bites Back" path with about five or 6 total schticks centered around "turn the tables when the chips are down" rather than having one path for "after you succeed at an up check" another path for "when you are fighting extra-tough opponents" and another for "when you are outnumbered". Did I mention that the draft PDF is currently over 400 pages long? That's some serious liver damage I'm gonna incur before I get to the end. Speaking of which, time for another Whisky Sour.

my county went to war for just this sort of thing, and it could be a good pop-up juncture.

Path of the Ninja. The 1e name was better and less likely to be confused with the archetype name. That's the first of three problems here. The second is that it's eight schticks long, with only one bonus, so nobody maxes it out without advancement. The third is that Gathering the Darkness requires a heckuvalot lot of notice checks and bookkeeping about who passed and who failed for a conditional -1. That needs to be rewritten to only check modifiers when the character using it is attacked and remove mooks making extra rolls.

Path of the Nunchuku: This path looks like a bunch of decent schticks if you want to spend five schticks on wielding nunchuks. At least until you see the next path and realize that nunchuks are inferior to swords. Of course spending all of your schticks on a single type of weapon is more a fighting game convention than an action movie convention and I suspect the game would be better off limiting weapon-specific schticks to Signature weapon and maybe one more schtick per category of weapon.

Path of the Sword: You know how in any mixed-weapons anime, the sword wielding PC character is always the most powerful in the group.

Yeah, just like that.

This has 7 schticks but only 3 tiers. One branch is mook killing and the other branch maxes out at auto-kill a named foe. So you can do both, or you can only go up one branch and cherry pick Stave off Monkey or some other defensive schtick. But to say something nice, Water Sword has been changed from 1e to do something other than use needlessly convoluted wording.

Path of the Tiger: Extra damage sometimes, then three different flavors of damage shield counterattacks, and a capstone that lets you spend 2 Chi as an interrupt to act at the beginning of next shot, there is no mention of what you have to interrupt there, despite the rules for interrupts saying that they all specify a condition. But in the games people will actually play, this path has at least one, and likely two more schticks than it needs. At least the Chi cost on Tiger Stance limits the interrupts on the stack when two Tiger masters dueling each other.

vs
when they fight, they each swing five times before anybody else has swung a second time

Path of the Weapon Master: Five schticks, no tiers nor prerequisites. Sig Weapon is hear, so is one Spear Schtick, one schtick that's a bonus after switching to a new weapon, and then two schticks for using darts/shurikens. I really think the sword an nunchuku paths should be edited down to fit in here. And heck, even having two schticks for a weapon as iconic as shuriken feels like a stretch in a game where characters with six schticks total are supposed masters of martial arts.

Path of ENDLESS HURRICANE KICKS ALL DAY FUCK YEAH!!! Tier 1: Superleap, Tier2: Regain Chi when an opponent misses you with Martial Arts, holy shit that was tier 5 to get a 50/50 vs Guns back in Drunken Master. Tier 2B: FLYING WINDMILL KICK, the one schtick infinite loop, there are no other damaging powers worth taking. Tier 3: This looks like a movement power, but there are no maps fool. It's a +1 Shot Cost to add +1 to your FLYING WINDMILL KICK roll, meaning you hit more often, meaning your hit chain gets longer. Tier 6: We had to put Shadowfist in here do to the card game name, so we stuck it here where you do not fucking care and made it require the tier 5 schtick from some other path as well as Flying Windmill Kick, so you also cannot fucking afford it.

Path of the Willow. This is a defensive path, that has various bonuses vs Guns and others vs "Non-Martial Arts Attacks", and then it gets a few water-themed bonus oddities. Not a bad concept, but nothing here is half as defensive as Stave off Monkey nor Flesh Wound, so until those get edited into sanity, this is a waste, and honestly even with fair Chi costs on Stave off Monkey and a zero-bound on toughness reduction for Flesh Wound, this will still likely end up inferior for most cases.

Path of Wing Chun:

no, WING chun

What the fuck? Why are we suddenly naming things after actual real world martial arts styles? Shouldn't that have been an all or nothing design decision and not something tucked away in the last two paths? Anyways, this offers bonus damage on a weird schedule; spend chi to get immunity bonus vs confined space; bonus for smear-the-queer; add a keyframe defense penalty (only vs martial arts because bookkeeping is fun) rider to your attack; keyframe effect that makes martial arts attacks against you cost extra shots and caps out with reduced shot cost attacks against chosen foe for all fight.

Path of Wu Shu: Mechanically, there's a more than fair bit of overlap with Path of the Tiger here, so maybe the two paths could be merged into one path with five or more distinct schticks. Thematically, this uses names of some actual stances Josh has practiced, and while 8 months of kung fu at a local school is nowhere near enough to be a Hong Kong Action Movie Hero, the schticks with those names in no way relate to anything my sifu said about any of those stances. If you're gonna go with real world names, there should at least be a superficial relation to real world forms for ease of memory.

And that's the chapter. Drink

[Josh_Kablack]

Okay, so this is at like 3 weeks with no updates -- Are people interested enough for me to pick it back up? Given my RL , the best case is maybe a chapter reviewed a week.

EDIT: UPDATE: I have found a new place and will be actually moving this weekend. This will bring and end to the frantically searching and packing that got in the way of this project. I will then have most of thankgiving week off from work -- but without internet connected. So once I get the boxes unpacked, I'll basically have time to write many walls of text, but will have to wait a week to be able to post them and add cutesy links and pics.

[Foxwarrior]

I was enjoying your review, yes.

[Josh_Kablack]

As I said above, updates are going to be very slow right now, and RL complications have made them about an order of magnitude slower than I thought but since there's interest, they will continue.

Music is Best of John Lee hooker, and I will be alternating one bourbon, one scotch and one beer for this portion

Chapter 6: VRROOM! Whoosh! Ye-HAW!!

The vehicles chapter is really emblematic of everything about this game, both the good and bad parts. It ditches reality for genre conceits, but does an inadequate job translating those genre conceits into game mechanics. It uses evocative words like 'Squeal" "Bump" and "Crunch" as game terms, but uses them in non-intuitive ways making things more confusing than they need to be. It keeps the rules on the lite side to allow for fast-and-loose action scene descriptions, but then has 3 dozen vehicles schticks and statlines for 3 dozen different vehicles. It disdains the use of actual maps and minis for chase scenes but then wants you to use toy cars to track whether pursuers are in the "near" or "far" chase positions. All in all, it's a showcase for how completely schizoprhenic the system is about the fundamentals such as whether this is a "rules lite" system or a crunchy system and whether genre emulation or RPG conceits matter more. On top of all that, it's also clearly a playtest version with likely legacy stubs from earlier rules iterations and a desperate need for an editing pass to achieve and acceptable degree of clarity.

In the course of the move, I dug out Golden Comeback, so I can say that these rules are an improvement over the 1e supplement rules Greg Stoltze wrote - where vehicles just provided a flat bonus to Drive checks during a chase. And of course, including rules for chase scenes in the core book instead of waiting for a supplement is pretty much mandatory for any game about action movies.

If you need a caption here, you are reading this wrong

Cars have Acceleration, Handling and Frame. For reasons unclear to me, Handling +2 = Squeal and Frame +2 = Crunch. My best guess is that those used to be distinct variables to allow for greater differentiation of vehicles by statline, but recently got folded into just three variables plus two derived stats. Or maybe it's just a way to use single words describing the damage Chase Point dealing functions.

Chases are between evaders and pursuers. The system outright does not handle split objectives like "catch up to Johhny Stool Pigeon while staying ahead of Big Boss Donny", which would be okay if it was strictly rules-lite, but probably isn't okay with the amount of fiddliness in these rules.

Drivers use their vehicle's Acceleration in place of their Speed to make initiative checks. This is probably unneeded complexity and likely results in confusion when you switch vehicles. This game really should handle PCs leaping from one speeding car to another. But the entire system largely assumes that one character per vehicle will be dedicated to driving the whole chase, while others do the shooting, kungfuing and chi blasting. ( Although that is completely not the way it works in action movies I've seen ) So the idea here is to give the Drive character something really important to do during chase scenes, but the execution is to lock them out of doing things that aren't making Drive checks.

Every 3 shots in a chase scene, a driver - or is it each driver? I honestly cannot tell how the enemy asymmetry is supposed to work here - makes a driving check against a difficulty of the opposing driver's Driving AV. Wait, what's the difficulty if you are chasing or being chased by multiple vehicles whose driver's have differing AVs? My answer is time for scotch, and that's a much better answer than the book gives.

If you win you deal chase points and either widen (evader) or narrow (pursuer) the gap between vehicles. Chase points dealt are always Outcome + Squeal - opponent's Handling. So if you each have the same make of car you deal 2 Chase points on the smallest possible success. What about chase scenes with multiple vehicles on one side or the other? You know like:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMagP52BWG8

http://vimeo.com/90760828

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ETruidd5lQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8OZpmIWcxg


well the only nod the rules here make to these are spliced apostrophes that seem to indicate that a pursuer can only narrow the gap as regards one singular evading vehicle while the text under the next point is a copypasta fail that's either supposed to be the same but is missing an indefinite article or is supposed to be different and has the apostrophe misplaced "an evader widens the gap between his vehicle and pursuer’s." Is that supposed to read "and a pursuer's" [vehicle], or is it supposed to read "and pursuers." ? And either way that's not a lot to go on, so it's like Schroedinger's rules here. Which means I need more beer, and that gives me an excuse to post

schroedinger's beer's[/align]

Anyways, Chase Points are like Wound Points, getting them is bad, getting many of them results in impairment and getting too many of them means you lose the chase. Chase impairment overlaps and does not stack with wound impairment. Chase impairment only applies to occupants "inhabitants" of a vehicle (that's the actual word in the text, so just don't live in your car or drive an RV and you can rules-lawyer out of it), and do not apply to bosses nor to uber-bosses. It's nice that the system parallels the wound system so well, but having Impairment work like that is going to encourage PCs to try to abandon vehicles mid-chase, which is thematic, but as I already mentioned, it's something these rules do not handle at all -- thus the GM is either going to ad-hoc alternate initiative totals in the middle of a sequence when it happens.

it works just like this

Next up there are some rules about Gaps being either Near or Far,

Perhaps more games should use Sesame Street rules design aesthetics

This is also where it tells you to raid your kid's toybox for some Hot Wheels to use in place of a map.
If a gap is Near you can run cars into each other causing Condition Points; which after I read the section four times, I realized are a subcategory of Chase Points: this because clarity writing for not has. Anyway, running a car into another is a Ram if the pursuer does it, but a Sideswipe if the evader does it -- even though they are mechanically the same, because it's not like common terminology would be simpler -- oh wait, it is!. Anyways, a successful driving check deals Condition Points equal to Outcome + Crunch - opponent's Frame; but if your vehicle has a lower Frame rating your vehilce also takes damage chase points, because while we're adding confusing wording and adding extraneous variables we might as well throw in a shout out to HERO system movethroughs here and make people divide by V /3 and v/5 and calculate Knockback.

rules-lite

If a gap is Far then a pursuer can only attempt to narrow to Near and an evader can only attempt to maintain it. This isn't a bad idea, but the rules for gaps are only about driving checks and say nothing about important matters like ranged attacks...which kinda seems like it might come up in a game about car chases and shooting....just maybe....you know.....could happen.

Oh, and if those apostrophe do mean that pursuers are chasing singular evaders, then gaps are completely non-transitive and non-mapped, so Pops Zinegata can totally be Near and outright ramming Lupin the 3rd's convertable and yet Far from Fujiko's motorcycle, even as Lupin and Fujiko hand this episode's mcguffin back and forth. Good luck modeling that with Hot Wheels and masking tape.

Then the section on losing a chase has a nested set of if/then statements that finally say something about how to handle chases with multiple vehicles on one side, enjoy all the clarity provided by "You might be confronted by all, some, or no pursuers", because that's as good as it gets. Oh, and if the if/thens didn't confuse you, they are followed by another exception clause which explains that if you lost the chase and at any point your vehicle was rammed/sideswiped or took damage from {see list}, you Crash and all the vehicle's occupants take damage.

I will take any excuse

Otherwise you are merely boxed in. Now if you are anywhere near as sober as I unfortunately remain, you might wonder why the toggle there is based on tracking specific events from a list rather than based on the Condition Points you were presumably tracking anyway. Because I am totally wondering that too.

I'm also wondering how I missed this movie

Moving on, vehicles occupied solely by mooks crash when a PC gets a Driving Outcome of 5+ against them. So you should maybe perhaps kinda be able to use something like the "hitting multiple opponents" rule for combat in chase scenes, because that would let you cause the sort of pileups of squad cars actually seen in action movie chases. It's a shame these rules don't actually suggest that. Obstacles are arbitrary penalties with timing that make no goddamned sense and rules that seem to ignore that whole "immunity bonus" thing. Conditions are similar, but those will at least last the entire scene. This section states that during a chase passengers in one vehicle can make ranged attacks at passengers in other vehicles. A Driver can also make such ranged attacks, but they take a -2 AV to such attacks and their vehicle automatically takes 5 Condition points when they do, and just in case that wasn't hard enough role protection, they can't do so until they have made a Drive check in the current sequence. There's no mention of Gaps mattering at all here, and no mention of doing clever genre-appropriate things that should influence the chase like shooting out the tires or blowing the radiator. When s driver goes down, their vehicle takes 15 chase points. Oh, the same thing happens if the driver has to make an Up Check. Regardless of success or failure on that Up Check. Because we all know that a the driver staying conscious and toughing it out through the pain should cause the same amount of hardship and damage to the other PCs as the driver losing consciousness, it's just plain common sense really. Or at least an excuse to move on to the beer.

Maybe it's the rotgut, but this is the point where I take back my earlier comments. This section is not merely emblematic of the good and bad of this game. It's train wreck.

Figure 6a

While I enjoy the poetic irony of a train wreck about car chases, the sheer amount of bad design, PC cockblocking, and outright stupidity here is starting to drive me into a rage.

Up next we get rules for damaging vehicles, which are terribad. Vehicles do not take damage from small arms fire, and instead you must target passengers in the vehicle, but if you get a boxcars success, then you can miss the passenger and deal chase points directly to the vehicle. That's right, your critical success is not hitting the guy you were aiming for, and the general stunt rules from chapter 3 are disregarded in favor of making the players roll craps. There's the start of some interesting rules for using heavy weaponry designed around the concept that bazookas and missles and such can only damage vehicles and buildings in action movies, but they don't actually integrate correctly with reload values and the like. And then "Ranged Sorcery, Creature and Genome attacks can also target vehicles." Note the omissions there, Not only can't Mad Max use his On-Board Flamethrower as it's Scroungetech, but cars are apparently also immune to Fu schticks like Ken's Hurricane Kick:

Too powerful, banned from use.

Oh wait, they aren't completely immune, hand to hand attacks meant to deal Chase Points instead of Wound Points to a passenger just require a stunt declaration - which would make me back of my above hostility if'n I was drunk enough to have forgotten how 2e stunt declaration rules actually work, as the author apparently did. In short it's a pointless hose to melee types that prevents them from attempting straight forward damage or schtick use and requires declaring stunts at a penalty.

Up next some rules for flying characters above a chase, which let Ken use his Hurricane Kick to keep pace with speeding cars, even though it can't damage them. Then rules for climbing atop a car and making rolls to keep from getting knocked off, which do a decent job of simulating action movies, but which are pretty much all risk, with no reward for a PC, so your character will never use them. Anyways, if you get knocked off or out of a vehicle and left behind in a chase scene you can spend 3 shots to make a difficulty 12 *Fortune* check to try to flag down or commander another vehicle. Note that 10 is the highest possible starting Fortune value, 6 is common and the stat is ablative with schtick use and fortune die expenditure. Nobody makes that roll on average, and in most cases when you've already been knocked out of a chase, you will need to open-end upwards to succeed on that one. The good news is that you can keep retrying with the difficulty going down by 2 each time. The bad news is that's still going to be an average three long-odds rolls and nearly a whole sequence before a such a character can rejoin the fight. This really should be less hosey and more streamlined than "it's you're turn, roll dice again to see if you can rejoin the action in this game about action movies, oh look you fail again."

Then after some quick guidelines for hitting pedestrains, using Fix-It to make repairs and aeriel vehicles, we finally get to the schticks:

Most of these are conditional +1+2/+3s, entirely too many have I, II and III tiers to give slightly bigger bonuses. There are some mildly interesting group buffs for your passengers and conditional interrupt chase-point negation schticks - but most of those are iffy deals for their fortune point activation cost, especially given the one keyframe per character limit on buffs. Those aren't worth further comment.

Armor Plated, Custom Ride: These each give +1 to a primary and figured characteristic, but I'm totally unsure if that results in a total +2 to the figured characteristic.

Counterslam: the II and III values give exactly the same bonus.

Hightailing It / Hot Pursuit: These are a neat schtick idea. Spend a fortune die to get +2 to Driving for a keyframe. One works only if you are the evader, one works only if you are the pursuer. For reasons unexplained, you cannot take both. Honestly, there could be other schticks which let you use a fortune die to get { +2 to [thing] for keyframe } instead of the normal { +1d6 to [this roll] right now }.

Lightning Speed: Your driving actions take one less shot than normal for keyframe. That would be okay, but for some reason, this costs 3 WHOLE FORTUNE to activate in the first place. That is literally half the fortune the Maverick Cop has for the entire session. Hope your Driving focused character doesn't spend more than 2 sequences driving this session....

I just Painted that + Tarmac Warrior. Kind of an all-or-nothing buff combo, but If you meet the conditions for both, you get a pair of +2 bonuses to Martial Arts for at least current fight duration with no fortune point expenditure.

Tools of the trade: If'n you hit a fool with a wrench or tire iron, spend a Fortune to give it a damage value of 15 for Keyframe duration. Thematic, but I'm honestly unsure if'n you wouldn't be better off spending a schtick on Sig Weapon: Tire Iron and having a damage value of 12 all the time without spending Fortune.

Vroom!: If you are in the driver's seat at the start of a sequence, spend a Fortune point to have an initiative 1 shot higher than anyone else in the fight. This can result in some strong inter-character synergy for various schtick builds.

Then the chapter ends with 5 pages of vehicle stats, most are just Acceleration, Handling, Squeal, Frame and Crunch plus flavor text, but a few have one more stat like "takes +1 chase point from any bump" or "loses one point of acceleration for each passenger after the 2nd". All 5 pages are then summarized in a half-page numeric only chart. Really seems to me the chart should have been first, included asterisks for the optional extra stats and then the entries could be flavor text only following the chart.


And that's the chapter. I should get to mocking Sorcery Schticks a lot sooner than three months from now.

[Josh_Kablack]

Final version PDF just shipped today, so I will be picking this back up as a REview.

Quick Initial reactions afore I have to head to work:

The the layout is bright, colorful and seems to "pop" pretty well. Art seems a bit sparse, but it's full color and not-great, not horrible, so I'll go with "adequate".

The intro section has been cluttered with a klunky Foreward by John Rogers. Raise your hand if you knew who that was before Googling or reading the byline at the end of the foreward.

Flying Pronoun Kick seems unchanged. Ugh.

Quick Edit after emailing the authors about the typos they need to know of in the next 12 hours:

If "Bullet Time" makes it into the print version as a null pointer, mock them ruthlessly. That's still a reminder to the author that the schtick did not work, and I have emailed them directly about it.

Maybe it's my device, maybe it's the layout, but pages turn painfully slow on my tablet - that kinda ruins the point of having a game reference in PDF.

The best art is in the archetype section, which is probably the best place to put the good art.

Archetypes are still not chunked, and the current PDF has a few weird artifacts in the index (no bookmark for Big Bruiser, DrIvEr spells with those caps)

Death Checks are now against a target of 4, so with the -2 impairment, most PCs are at +1 on them. They are still closed cannot-spend fortune rolls, because Gygax, but at least characters don't die in the average case anymore.

After 20 years, 3 printings and two playtest beta packs, Colt 1911 is finally listed with the correct caliber flavor text.

Flying Windmall Kick caps out at 3 hits now. Stave off Monkey has a shot cost of 5, meaning that it's usually a net loss no longer an automatic massive win in the action economy and no longer auto-immunity to all attacks forever, merely particular attacks when tactically wise, EDIT: or when you already have a high enough defense/Speed ratio to trade shots favorably. Flesh Wound is now sole king of the crazy-broken defensive Fu schticks. Drunken Master is not fixed at all.

There are still three different Schticks which do three slightly different things, all called "Very Strong"

[Josh_Kablack]

Okay, I know what I have is the "hey suckers, crowdedit for us" draft and not the fully polished manuscript they are paying to kill trees for, but by the fucking infinite layers of the abyss this is sloppy. COLLEEN RILEY gets an editing credit, and with that she is hereafter on my RPG-industry shit list for doing this piss-poor a job.

Lemme just go through take a brief start on the current version of the archetype section:

Page 26: Archer, Awesoming Up Section lists "Draw a Bead" as a potential Schtick for advancement, despite no such schtick existing. See also, Awesoming Up Section for Bandit, Bodyguard, Bounty Hunter, Drifter, Ex-Special Forces, Full Metal Nutball, Gambler, Highway Ronin, Karate Cop, Killer, Magic Cop, Masked Avenger, Maverick Cop, Ninja, Private Investigator, Spy and Two-Fisted Archaeologist.

Page 26; Archer. Soul of the Sniper is tagged as a Core Schtick, when it is quite clearly available as a Guns Schtick on Page 126.

Not actually a mistake, but the helpful note at the bottom of the Archer Archetype explains that you use your Guns skill for attacks with your bow, and not that the listed damage value for said bow will change due to your core schtick.

Page 29: Bandit. Dagger is listed as damage 10, including a +1 bonus from "Strong" core schtick. Yet Page 108 lists "knife" base damage as 8, and "thrown dagger" base damage as 6. Page 160 of the 1997 edition does list "Dagger" as a "Strength+3" weapon, but that isn't in this book and anyways it still doesn't make the numbers work.

Page 30 Big Bruiser: No boookmark for this archetype in PDF file.
Page 31: Big Bruiser: Damage value with Baseball Bat is listed as 13, including a +3 bonus from "Strong as an Ox", yet weapon damage chart on page 108 lists "club" base damage as 9, meaning that it should be a 12.

Page 35: Bounty Hunter. Listed Shotgun Damage value does not include Signature Weapon. Damage value for Telescoping Baton is 10, when page 108 lists "club" base damage as 9.

Page 36: Cyborg. Awesoming Up Section gives "Force Distributor", "Juicer" as a ScroungeTech Schtick option. Neither are in ScroungeTech section, although there is a "Force Blade"

*****

Yeah, the whole thing is like that, wrong names and wrong numbers and incorrect pointers at a rate of like two per page, without getting into questionable design (Should the Bandit's "Strong" apply to things besides weapon damage?) nor layout decisions (Would my tablet struggle less without the ugly fake-clothtexture green borders?) nor missing explanations (does the big juncture icon on an archetype sheet matter?) nor explanations where the layout is missing ( "Does your Martial Arts attack come with an
asterisk? If so, your character learned to fight on the streets, as a rough-and-tumble brawler without formal fighting training." )

That this version has been through three playtest iterations, has a credited editor and has the sort of six-figure pre-funding through Kickstarter that means the creators don't need to rush it to press is a travesty, and people who shelled out for the fancy print versions should be up in arms if these things weren't caught before it went to press.

[Josh_Kablack]

Okay, the crowdedited revised update has now dropped, so let's see:

Page 26: Archer, Awesoming Up Section lists "Draw a Bead" as a potential Schtick for advancement, despite no such schtick existing. See also, Awesoming Up Section for Bandit, Bodyguard, Bounty Hunter, Drifter, Ex-Special Forces, Full Metal Nutball, Gambler, Highway Ronin, Karate Cop, Killer, Magic Cop, Masked Avenger, Maverick Cop, Ninja, Private Investigator, Spy and Two-Fisted Archaeologist.

NOT FIXED.

Page 26; Archer. Soul of the Sniper is tagged as a Core Schtick, when it is quite clearly available as a Guns Schtick on Page 126.

NOT FIXED.

Page 29: Bandit. Dagger is listed as damage 10, including a +1 bonus from "Strong" core schtick. Yet Page 108 lists "knife" base damage as 8, and "thrown dagger" base damage as 6. Page 160 of the 1997 edition does list "Dagger" as a "Strength+3" weapon, but that isn't in this book and anyways it still doesn't make the numbers work.

NOT FIXED.

Page 30 Big Bruiser: No boookmark for this archetype in PDF file.

Fixed. Yay.
Caveat: I personally reported this one before the deadline.

Page 31: Big Bruiser: Damage value with Baseball Bat is listed as 13, including a +3 bonus from "Strong as an Ox", yet weapon damage chart on page 108 lists "club" base damage as 9, meaning that it should be a 12.

NOT FIXED.

Page 35: Bounty Hunter. Listed Shotgun Damage value does not include
Signature Weapon.

FIXED

Damage value for Telescoping Baton is 10, when page 108 lists "club" base damage as 9.

NOT FIXED

Page 36: Cyborg. Awesoming Up Section gives "Force Distributor", "Juicer" as a ScroungeTech Schtick option. Neither are in ScroungeTech section, although there is a "Force Blade"

NOT FIXED.

Page 124: Bullet Time schtick description reads as follows: "Oh Wait, That's just Dodge.Never mind, don't take this one."

Note: I personally reported this one before the crowdedit deadline. This is "See page XX" level, and tt's bumping George F Will's curmedeotyranny from my sig at least until we get closer to elections.


And in the course of checking on these, I noticed that the Cyborg Awesoming Up allows them to gain any Schtick off of the Path of the Hundred Names, including "Humble Fury, which gives a conditional bonus to a Martial Arts attack....but Cyborgs have Scroungtech and Guns as their combat AVs and no option to gain Martial Arts via advancement. Ok, so it's just a trap option, right, no player should take it......But Humble Fury is a prereq schtick for a Fu schtick that is actually helpful with Guns and Scroungetech attacks. Making it an oversight that looks like a trap option but actually turns into a feat tax through the power of oops. I literally cannot look at this without finding more editing failures.

Moral of the story: Don't count on internet crowd editing to actually catch things.

Additional Moral: Don't back RPG products for dead-tree prices on KS.

[Whipstitch]

Okay, back with a snakebite, that's an action-movie appropriate shot, right?

Honestly, I've never seen a snakebite served in less than a pint glass, so, uh, not really. Ideally you would have a tequila slammer.

[Josh_Kablack]

Thanks for the reminder, I will do Tequila Slammers when I get a chance to actually sit down and do a full post of the things which got fixed since I covered them in the playtest preview and then move on to the magic fail and the ways PC/foe assymetry is extra assy, instead of the mere fractal failures of editing in 20-minute post windows I've had.

But we are talking about two different types of Snakebite here. There's the the Lager+Cider served in a pint class you are talking about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snakebite_(drink),
and then there is the Whiskey+Lime Juice shot I actually drink on occasion.
http://cocktails.about.com/od/whiskeyre ... e_shot.htm

[Red_Rob]

Listening to the Ken and Robin podcast gives me the feeling Mr Laws is great for big picture stuff and coming up with a workable basic system, but he doesn't seem so hot on the mathhammering side.

I'd take Feng Shui 2 in a much more rules-lite direction than this seems to be going, but I'm still interested to read your further thoughts.

[Josh_Kablack]

but I'm still interested to read your further thoughts.

Thanks.
More coming soon,but I keep finding that I am fundamentally incapable of brevity for this style of review.

( Edit: as my below post shows, a "quick overview" of material I previously covered ran 4000 words to cover the first 3 chapters )

[OgreBattle]

So, how well does it run RIFTS

[Josh_Kablack]

Okay, so starting over, with the chapters I hit in the preview with changes:

Intro, Credits, Contents, Foreward:

Best Hits Actually useful ToC
Worst Flops Irrelevant Foreward, Massive Length, Sluggish PDF response on mobile device

The most obvious change since the post-gamma playtest packet is the addition of art, layout and color.

The art is merely adequate, but the art direction and use of art assets is actually pretty good. I like that there are recognizable depictions of each archetype, and those depictions are used again for later chapters in action and world-establishing shots. While some uses are expected like the PC Martial Artist leading the Fu Schticks chapter and the PC Sifu in the middle of the Fu Schtick Listing, some are not, like the PC Scrappy Kid tied to a chair in the background of the Supernatural Creature splash piece and the PC redeemed Pirate leaping with sword drawn to illustrate the Chi war. Oh heck, just click:

An Everyday Hero, a Gambler and a Transformed Dragon take on Cardinal Richelieu's men in a Pop-Up Juncture

I futher like that they didn't feel compelled to do this for all the art - there are villain only, environment only, and gear only pieces. Plus there are also pieces with characters who don't match the depictions shown in the archetype section-- The piece with the alternate masked avenger and not-in-this-book techie on page 113 is very evocative.

The layout is readable, but as I mentioned above, this PDF gives me tablet more trouble than a gaming reference really oughta, so that's gripe-worthy. Most of the book is bog-standard two-column, but there are a fair amount of inset boxes, full-page tables, character sheets and such to break things up without getting too confusing. Big headings are huge white text on bright red banners, small headings are large red text on the standard white background and the whole book has kinda odd green border trim with a texture that seems meant to evoke cloth - this does help the red banners and other colors pop, but it is ugly in and of itself, which I wouldn't notice if my pages and bookmarks didn't get stuck so often. Speaking of not noticing, the standard text font appears to be Times New Roman, with some less common font used for headings.

After the cover art and credits, we get a two-page, three-column table of contents, and each TOC entry of the PDF is an internal link to the referenced section -- That is pretty awesome for a gaming reference. We then get John Rogers' foreward which is somewhere between unnecessary, disappointing and outright insulting. He leads off with how to break the collar off a motel TV to install your VCR to watch bootleg tapes in something that's maybe supposed to be waxing nostalgic for the thrill of discovery of 80s Hong Kong Action cinema - but which few if any readers of this book will be able to identify with.

I should also comment that the 1e book I own clocked in at 286 pages, with 26 of the first thirty taken up by in-universe fiction and splash page art. This PDF is 354 pages, with zero full-page illustrations, no fiction and the only real waste of space is the 7 page list of Kickstarter backers ( where tragically, I now share a credit with Sean K Reynolds ) So the new edition is something like 80% longer than the old one. Even with all the additional archetypes and new schticks and addition of Mutant and Driving schticks, a lot of that 80% is bloat.


Chapter 1

Best Hits: Intro Paragraphs; Stat Streamlining
Worst Flops: Still too many specific subchecks; Leaving most factions as explicitly hostile

Chapter 1 is largely unchanged. The "Getting Started with Feng-Shui" intro section is still one of the best intros to the conceits of an RPG I have ever read, the confusing and in some-cases contradictory tables for sample AVs and Difficulties are still there, and still just as unhelpful as Frank pointed out months ago.

Speaking of unhelpful, I noticed that I have been interpreting the Boxcars rule wrong for nearly two decades now. I always assumed that the two 6s canceled each other and you merely compared your total AV plus a swerve of 0 to the Difficulty to see if you succeeded or failed at the check. but no, the 6s instead both Open-End and you reroll both to generate a new Swerve. And if you roll boxcars again, repeat. While entropy prevents this from being truly infinite and ensures that you do get to a resolution at some point, it's still rolling extra dice for the sake of rolling extra dice.

Rearm checks are removed from this chapter and are instead handled differently with rules listed in the Guns chapter. The preview rules were ass-tastic and there are too many sub-checks, so this is an improvement. BUTBUTBUT, characters using melee weapons or cyber-claws might also need to rearm, so tucking those rules in the Guns chapter instead of either here in the overview or in the general combat chapter is a poor editorial decision. Design wise, the rules still list sub-mechanics for Attack, Constitution, Defense, Melodrama, Will, Notice, Strength and Fortune Checks. Now Attack, Defense and Fortune will not usually default to 7s, so those should exist. I cannot for the life of me see why Will and Melodrama need to be two distinct checks, Constitution should just be a Toughness check, and you could plausibly fold it into Strength. Heck, due to the collapsed stats and skill default rules even Notice could be scrapped as a namedchecked Check - it's just a Police/Detective skill check, and with the defaulting rules it still works the same. So this section really should just be Attack, Defense, Strength (maybe Toughness), Fortune, and Melodrama and then the 'Dude that's a lot of checks" sidebar could be deleted.

The factions are unchanged since the draft version, and I still think that's a tremendous missed opportunity there to give players many conflicting sympathetic, yet flawed faction ideologies to choose from.


Chapter 2.

Best Hits: The Art
Worst Flops: Not chunking archetypes into manageable sub-lists to pick from. Lack of customization directives anywhere. Unforgivably Sloppy editing.

This is where I start getting mad. A lot of what is needed to understand the game is flat-out missing from the archetypes section, too many of the numbers are wrong, and pointers point to missing or incorrect entries. Honestly, the editorial quality of this production version is on par with the editorial quality of my series of posts here. The difference being that these posts are written for shiggles by a drunk enthusiast on the internet, whereas the game is written by a team of "professionals" for a six-figure prepayment.

I suspect there was a paragraph Robin forgot to write that would say something like

If this is your group's first time playing, you should use the archetypes with their listed schticks. If you are all experienced hands at Feng Shui, you can customize the starting schticks for your archetypes. To do this, simply swap any of your schticks for any other schtick of the same type which you meet the prerequisites for. You may never swap out a character's Core Schticks - those are intrinsic to the archetype.

But there isn't, so it really looks like you can only customize non-combat skills for an archetype until you get advancements. If it's not an oversight, this is bad design. Limited options to streamline chargen and remove option paralysis only works to a point. When a game says "Your one choice at chargen is to pick from this list of thirty-six (with more coming in supplements)", that actually takes players more time to choose than presenting them with two choices from a pair of nested lists of six items each.

You can't even do easy chunking by attack type or juncture, since an actual majority of the classes are Guns / Martial Arts, any juncture but Contemporary listed first and biggest.Yeah, what it means that a juncture symbol is listed first and larger than the others for a given archetype is something else that is missing from this chapter. It's not explained in the reference key, nor anywhere else. So maybe it's a default juncture, maybe it's a purely aesthetic decision by the art department, maybe it's another typo.



But my point here is that so many of the archetypes overlap in juncture and AV types that some could easily have been folded together and then have customization switches as part of the class. Heck, they could have done what they did for advancement and wrote a specific section for "customization options" for each and every class.

Now another quick run through the archetypes, with things I feel comment worthy.

Archer - aside from the incorrect schtick labelling You get Wuixa Archery, which sets there bow damage to one less than the highest firearm damage of any of your allies at the start of the fight. You also get a super-slow mo replay that lets you repeat the same wound points just dealt for 1 fortune and 3 shots. So if you have buddy with Sig Weapon: Shotgun, you get arrows that deal 15 damage, and after you hit a named foe with one, you can bypass the normal attack rules and just spend fortune to deal damage over time equal to what repeated successful attacks with that would do. Handy for boss-killing.

Bandit - I still don't know how this Archetype isn't an 1850s dude who robs stagecoaches and Opium traders with six-guns.

Bounty Hunter - You get Sig Weapon: Shotgun to start, meaning that you start with the highest damage weapon of anyone (See Archer, Scrappy Kid). You also get a bonus against a designated "Quarry" and a schtick to share some of that bonus, so you are like the lynchpin of any boss-killing party.

Cyborg - The 1e Cyborg was horrible for not reflecting movie cyborgs (Robocop, Terminator, Major Kusanagi) and being tightly tied in the the setting specific Arcanowave rules, which not everyone wanted to use in their games (and Cyborgs have more pop-culture traction that Abominations and Monster-Hunters from the future). The 2e Cyborg manages to do an even worse job of reflecting movie cyborgs, and due to revisions is now the only single archetype to use the scroungetech schticks. So it's got the same problems, but worse.

Full Metal Nutball - Ready Resupply is now a core schtick for this guy, and it doesn't actually resupply or rearm anyone, which seems kind of confusing and the current "you fumbled, have a free attack" version should probably have been named something else. This guy also gets Bag Full of Guns II - which has all the problems of the playtest version compounded by an even harsher trigger condition for scaling up. After you make at least 5 attacks against named opponents it tops out at a 15 damage homemade weapon. Signature Weapon: Shotgun gives you a 16 damage weapon at the start of the fight and costs 1 schtick. So at your first advancement you are going to take that and ignore the two schticks sunk into Bag Full of Guns here.

Gambler - Your core schtick lets you spend 1 Fortune to reverse a swerve. You might think that's meh compared to the +1d6 open-ended that normal Fortune expenditure is, since the averages are comparable, but you would be wrong. Firstly, it stacks with normal fortune expenditure, so you can both flip the swerve and also add +1d6 open ended on important rolls. More importantly it can reverse the results of anybody's swerve. So defensively while it screws up pregenerated mook attacks Robin likes to use, you can switch things so that the one mook who had a 24 attack result due to open-ending up three times instead open-ended down three times and has a negative 8 way-awful failure. Since this is a swingy RNG where you will face a lot of mooks, this sort of defense is useful. Alternately you can use it to aid allies, doubling the Masked Avenger's chance of getting the bonus mook clearing from or helping the Archer get her damage-over-time going faster and bigger. Finally, since this is a schtick, you are not explicitly disallowed from spending it on closed rolls and can use it to actually pass Death checks.

Gene Freak Like the Cyborg, this archeype gets yet another special-snowflake schtick selection, which is just not smart design. If you are going to have Mutant powers, and 36 archetypes, you should probably have 3-4 different archetypres who get Mutant powers. It would have been easy enough to do the Pure Mutant, the Guns Mutant, the Martial Arts Mutant and the Magic Mutant as slightly different archetypes.

Additionally, adding these special-snowflake rules creates issues with grappling restraint attacks and various defensive schticks where the assumption is that all hand-to-hand attacks will use a martial arts AV. But a in 2e you can have hand-to-hand attacks with a buzzsaw hand (Scroungetech AV) or with a Super Strength punch (Mutant AV) or with critter claws (Creature Powers), and due consideration wasn't given to including these in a few rules.

Ghost Just like in first ed, Ghosts still get Damage Immunity: Bullets as one of their Creature Powers in 2e. Unlike in 1st edition, Damage Immunity is no longer listed in the Creature Powers section, so it's not really explained and important questions like "Do arrows count? What about grenades" are now left unanswered in ways they weren't in the old edition. On top of that, there's a severely questionable layout decision in the character sheet. Your primary attack is listed as "Sorcery 13", because that's what your Blast runs off of. You have no backup attack listed, but there is instead a note at the bottom of the sheet saying that your value with Creature Powers is 14. I kind of understand the desire not to confuse new players with a 14 AV they can't use at the start....but this sheet should say Primary; Creature Powers 14, Backup: Sorcery: 13, and the default picks should be redesigned so that players actually have schticks that use both as attack AVs.

Karate Cop The first ed version got an interesting non-combat schtick where they could gain the aid of a foe who wasn't this week's primary foe. The 2e version gets a forced-combo set of interlocking combat schticks that has you the player running a paindeck, where you are taking wound points to trigger bonuses and gambling that your next hit will recover wound points. I think the old version better simulated the source material and offered more interesting options than the unique resource management minigame here.

Magic Cop You get a core schtick which lets you ignore juncture costs for sorcery in your home juncture. Except that these only come from the contemporary juncture because screw the weird west idea and they are actually called juncture penalties. So minor fails of both considering sources and editing here.

Masked Avenger When you drop a mook, 4 more mooks flee. Or 6 flee if your positive die exploded, this has small but notable combo potential with the Gambler.

Private Eye: You are one of the few archetypes in 2e that has a non-combat core schtick. You also get Disarming Shot, which has issues in that it doesn't actually disarm, due to the "simplified" rules for foes. Guns schticks not actually doing what their name implies seems to be a theme in this edition, just to be clear and it's bad, by which I mean it is actually the opposite of good.

Redeemed Pirate: The art department gets props for this one. When I think "pirate"I don't think Juri from Street Fighter 4 but with a sword. But somebody did, and it works really well.

Scrappy Kid: This was criticised for being perhaps too strong in 1e. So of course 2e gives them 3 more schticks than the old version and Driving skill they didn't use to have. Their Distraction still combo's well with the Old Master's Flying Windmill Kick, and Forcefull Dart combos really well with any ally who has a Signature Shotgun (see Bounty Hunter, advancement)

Sifu The art (and listing the Past juncture largest) makes it quite clear that this is the Wong Fei Hung class. I'm unsure if the inspiration was the Once Upon a Time in China version or the Iron Monkey version.

Spy The 1e version had a highly genre appropriate schtick where they could spend a Fortune to get an NPC to tell you something they didn't want to. Like so many other non-combat schticks this is gone and it's now replaced by a couple of combat schticks.

Supernatural Creature This one hurts. The 1e supernatural creature was a great design and had easy customization which let you approximate the vast majority of movie monsters. The lack of explicit customization removes that and makes me sad. But there are significant overall nerfs on top of that. Now your only non-default skill is Creature Powers, in first ed, you got a backup Martial Arts attack and got +3 to spead between up to 3 noncombat skills. So now you can't have a supernatural creature who has better-than-default tracking (Detective) or sneaking (Intrusion) or even has Info: Noodles or any sort of flavor detail like that. On top of that the Transformation schtick got battered overly hard with a nerfhammer. So in Feng Shui 2, your supernatural creature will absolutely need to waste the first three shots of any combat monstering out, which really really sucks when your Speed is the lowest value any archetype) and a bunch of your critter schticks lose potency with each passing sequence. In short, they took one of the best designed classes from 1e and nerfed the hell out of it for no rhyme nor reason.

Transformed Crab and Transformed Dragon Okay, look the game kept Tranimal schticks, but they manage to be less special-snowflakey-for-no-reason than Scrougetech and Mutant. Not only are there two of them in the core book with strong implications of more coming later, but Tranimals attack with Guns and Martial Arts, and their unique schticks interact with pre-existing AVs, not with a new unique AV called something horrible like Beastiness. This is how Cyborgs and Mutants should have been handled.

Two-Fisted Archeologist This is a straight up Indiana Jones rip, which is sad because it can't do Lara Croft, who should be the same class. I'm also not sure if their Dogged schtick works as intended, although that could just be be assuming the general level of incompetence in this section applies here. As written, you Impairment only causes you to get hit more often for the same damage, unlike the normal case where Impairment causes you to get hit more often for more damage.

As arcanowave types from the first edtion, Abominations and Monster Hunters don't make the cut into 2nd edition, and I'm am totally onboard with that. What I am a little concerned about is that the Techie is also gone. While it was kind of weaksauce and underplayed, it was at least enough of a niche that it deserves inclusion in a list of three dozen classes. In 2e if you want a Fixit specialist, you are probably playing a Full Metal Nutball or a Driver now, and well neither of those quite does the MacGuyver/MacGruder / Nick Cage in the Rock archetype like the old Techie did.

Chapter 3

Best Hits: Streamlined Stunting Rules, Explicitly giving players authorship abilities in the "boosts" section.
Worst Flops: The new Death Check rules are worse in all ways than the 1e version.

I covered most of this stuff in my preview post so I'm just going to point on the glaring typo where the Sidebar on Page 101 say "Reload An Submachine Gun" and then move on to rant a bunch about Up Checks, Death Checks and Healing.

To recap, PCs get to make UP Checks at 35+ Wound Points. Each take you take additional damage that increases your wound points to over 35 you make another UP check. This is a difficulty 5 Toughness Check, but your base value is very likely a 7 AV with -2 impairment, making you ~57% (since rolling a 0 swerve passes) in most cases. If opponents are "fighting to kill" (GM Fiat), then a PC takes a mark of death for each UP check made, and another Mark of Death for each Fortune spent on an UP Check.

A Death Check is Toughness difficulty 4, +1 for each Mark of Death, so minimum 5 if you need to make it and you are usually at -2 impairment, so again you are looking at about ~57% to not die on the easiest one, and there is nothing you can do about it, because FUCK YOU that's why. Oh, but that's not not enough fuckery. You also get to increase the difficulty if nobody has yet died this campaign, or if it's late in the campaign (or session for one shots) because REALLY, DOUBLE-GYGAX FUCK YOU for growing attached to a character.

These rules are so shitty, that they are only used to shaft the PCs. Enemy Assymetry ( which I am spelling that way because the 2e increases to it are Ass ) prevents the MC from having to deal with it.
Featured Foes: simply go down in a manner of the downer's choosing at 35 wound points. Bosses are a flat even/odd 50/50 to go down when taken to 51+ Wound Points. Then each attack that delivers a smackdown to a boss at 50+ wound points then generates a new 50/50 check whether that smackdown exceeds the bosses' Toughness or not, so ticking damage exists here, albeit likely unintentionally as this seems a weird wrinkle of complexity. It also somewhat removes player agency to have it be an unmodifiable 50/50 roll instead of based on damage or something.

Shifting from design back to editing, the game has Schticks which trigger when enemies succeed at Up checks (Against all Warlords, Casual Leakage, Why I Oughta....) , yet the by the final rules, enemies never actually make Up checks.

That's the big rant for this section. The number 2 rant is that the healing have been made WORSE since the playtest pack. To wit:

All of them allow the healer to make a check and subtract the result from the recipient’s Wound
Point total. A character can benefit from any number of healings during a fight, but only one healing in the period between one fight and the next.

Thus the FFT style thing where healers should spam entangles, restraints and impairments and avoid ending the fight is still there, because that's what the rules encourage. But it's made even worse with the following addition:

Where not otherwise specified, any in-combat healing is a standard action costing 3 shots. Healing with the Medicine skill costs 5 shots. The next attack against the character performing healing
with the Medicine skill gains +2 to its attack AV. The healer can’t Dodge this attack.

So, yeah, healing out of combat is once-between fights, and healing in-combat gives opponents a meaningful bonus to hurt you, so make extra sure that you're in a fight but not actually in danger before using these schticks.

On the upside, healing now explicitly removes marks of death.

A positive change since playest is the addition of "Partial Recovery Rules" - at the very start of a fight, you can sacrifice a point of toughness to recover half your spent fortune and reduce your wound points to 10. In a slightly crunchier game, this would be key to an engine of infinite health and bonus dice, here it's only marginally exploitable in conjunction with already abusive defensive schticks and serves instead to help characters who do not have Rube Goldbergian Fortune-Recovery Engines stay relevant in longer sessions and/or when they've had a run of bad luck.

As a smaller gripe, the Weapon Damage Chart is even sparser than 1e, which makes for problems matching listed entries to listed damage values. What looks like bad math and leaky-sewage editing to me might only be miscommunication between the authors and the readers. Is the Bandit's "Dagger" a "Knife" or a "Machete"? Is the Bounty Hunter's Telescoping Baton a "Club" or a "Tonfa". A larger list of example and equivalents would help a lot here, and it would be really easy to insert into a full-page chart in a book that's 350 pages of text.

[Josh_Kablack]

So, how well does it run RIFTS

Well you totally can do *something* with inter-dimensional juncture portals and fights between sorcerers, ninjas, supernatural creatures and dudes with crazy guns, and characters ripped from your favorite fighting game pretty easily in the system.

However, Feng Shui doesn't really have anything for mecha combat, which could be a big issue for a lot of Rifts games. Then the Arcanowave / Scroungetech stuff is idiosyncratic to the presented game world so it may not adapt to your vision of the minions of Splugorth or whatnot.

So I really wouldn't advise trying to do anything approaching a direct Rifts adaption, but you could very easily do a genre mishmash in the same vein as the Rifts setting.

[Username17]

So it's not the Feng Shui 2nd edition that we needed, it's the Feng Shui 2nd edition that we deserve.

-Username17

[Josh_Kablack]

Chapter 4: Skills

Best Hits: How statless defaulting is handled
Worst Flops: Forgetting to include Scroungetech in the section at all.


Okay, honestly I have the fewest gripes about this chapter of any in the book, so this post can be short and sweet instead of verbose and ragerantic.

The skill list is short, skills are broad and (mainly) distinct, and having one on your character sheet is a meaningful thing. Bundling Physical Ability, Knowledge and Contacts all into each skill is actually pretty great design, even if it was around 20 years ago in the prior edition. The Juncture Adjustment rules are lightened up since the playtest - being a bit more on the side of GM can Fiat a penalty for these than I would like, but still an improvement over the playtest version. The reference to the Buro in Leadership actually got caught somewhere, which is a surprise given what got missed.

The new innovation of "Skills default to 7, unless another PC has it, in which case you can default to 10 by invoking their expertise, and if you get a skill it is at 11+ is near-genius game design. Because non-important skills waste space on a character sheet and detract from player focus (Note: In the entire archetype section there is one skill listed at only 9 and two at 10)


For gripe quibbles

• Police and Detective still overlap probably too much,
• The specific tables for "Sensing Deceit" and "Intimidation" have a bit of weirdness regarding PC vs PC skill use and all bosses and uber-bosses always having the same difficulty regardless of character type
• The "Attacks as Skills" Section forgets to include Scroungetech, which is bad, since that's the "be a cyborg" skill and presumably would be useful for cybernetic knowledge.
  As much as the right answer is to remove that skill from the game and have cyborgs attack with Guns and Martial Arts, that's not how this edition rolled.

So that one was easy. The next couple chapters won't be, so don't hold yer breath.

[Josh_Kablack]

Chapter 5: Guns


Best Hits: The idea of reload rolls in place of ammo tracking is the best improvement since 1e.
Worst Flops: So many to pick from, but I think the winner is the trend in naming where Reload Rolls aren't what you roll to reload, Lightning Reload doesn't help you reload, Fast Draw does not let you draw faster and so on. A close runner up is how the current advancement setup means that some of these schticks cannot ever be taken by anyone within the rules-as-written.

This chapter is a bit weird in that after the "don't shoot your eye out" bit, it opens with the schticks and then has stuff that should have been in the general combat chapter and then has gun-specific rules and stats. Kinda seems to me like the rules stuff should be before the schticks which give you bonuses to interact with various parts of the rules.

Again, let me apologize for verbosity, but this chapter is so countchoculafull of fall that I have to go pretty much schtick by schtick, and that's gonna mean the schticks alone take up this post with the rest of the chapter to come later:

But before I begin, I want to point out that the lack of archetype customization and class-by-class list of advancement options, means that nobody can take any schticks which fail to appear on either their starting character sheet or in their Awesoming Up section. Running search through Chapter 2 of the PDF, that means we have
Schticks Nobody Ever Gets.

• Back For Seconds
• Firm Grip
• Reactive Fire
• Shake it Off

Yay for playtesting, proofreading and editing.

Atlas Games' Employee Uniform

Back For Seconds: With the way UP check difficulties shake out, and the recommended enemy party strength this is really "Get +4 to a single attack once every 2 or 3 game sessions". Not worth a schtick.

Bag Full of Guns: You still need three schticks of this to top out at the damage value you get by spending one schtick on Sig; Weapon Shotgun This is still in all ways inferior to just bringing a shotgun along in the first place, except that now it's worse than playtest post gamma, in that it gets harder to climb up the scaling damage if you go past the first Schtick. With the I version you get to upgrade whenever your attack misses, regardless of who you are shooting. With the II and III versions you have to specifically target named characters. Honestly one schtick in this should get you the IV version, where you auto-scale after each attack and 8 attacks into the fight you catch up to Sig Weapon: shotgun, then you scale up for another three attacks after that. Seriously, your initiative is going to be in the 7-15 range, and your attacks generally take 3 shots, and most fights only go 3 sequences, so PCs are only getting in the range of 9 to 15 attacks ( a few more with speedy schticks, a few less with dodges and defensive schticks ) per fight. Having damage that catches up to a good damage schtick 8 attacks in and then surpasses it after that is completely fine.

As if the uselessness wasn't of this shctick wasn't injury enough, they added insult as the flavor names for the better-than-military homemade weapons are horrible and forget to specify meaningful rules things like autofire capable and Ka-Chink bonus.

Battle Scavenge Again, conceptually this is not something that should take a schtick to do, and having I-III versions of it is pure bloat. Mechanically you get a bonus to rearm checks (which haven't been explained yet because poor layout) and you also get to pick up the best gun from a downed opponent with only 3-2-1 shot cost (which I kinda think you can normally do for 3 shots) and you also get a free fortune on your first attack with the scavenged weapon and at the higher levels you also regain spent Fortune when you do this. That's a weird combination of bonuses to pack into a single schtick and has minimal straightforward utility but a lot of utility in RubeGoldberg Engine Fortune recovery combo builds. There's something horrible you can do with a bunch of schticks in this, Click Click Toss, Firm Grip, A way to spend a lot of Fortune and opening fights with a high-reload value autofire weapon.

Bloody But Unbowed With the current rules,any bonus to Up checks is good. However having 3 schticks for a +2,+3 and +4 bonus to them is not something meaningful enough to warrant space on a character sheet in this game. This probably should just be a single schtick that gives auto-success on the first UP check of the Session.

Both Guns Blazing The case where you are shooting a big-bruiser with small caliber pistols has always worked out that you are doing less damage with this schtick than without it. I was okay with that in 1st edition, where the schtick specified that the MC told you the Toughness numbers and you could therefore run your math and make an informed decision. I'm not okay with it working like that without the player explicitly knowing the Toughness value.

Bullet Time See my current sig. See also, page XX. I cannot mock this one hard enough.

Not even with this sort of help.

Click Click Toss When you fail a reload check, spend a shot and lose your empty gun to get an RNG breaking bonus to your next single attack. I still have a hard time believing that's supposed to be a +5/+8/+11 bonus to *attack* and not merely damage.

Covering Fire I'm really hoping that the enemy assymetry means that the interaction with Stop Right There doesn't actually come up.

Disarming Shot Cleaned up since the playtest. Still bad. This is now an attack at -1 that deals damage and causes a foe spend an extra three shots on their next attack (presumably recovering the weapon you just disarmed, but not explicit) after which they explicitly have their weapon. So it uses odd wording to prevent this from being an outright stun juggle, instead it's just trading accuracy for gains in the action economy. Enemy Assymetry prevents this from working in a logical way, where you actually disarm and enemy giving them options to try to rearm, or to switch weapons, or to attack without said weapon and where someone on team PC can grab the disarmed weapon.

Fast Draw Does not actually let you draw a weapon faster, which is bad flavor. It's still a conditional initiative bonus that will often apply before the condition can even be checked. The case where you claim the bonus, but don't go first and get disarmed or point-blockaged, before your first shot is problematic, as is the case where you spend all your shots on dodges and defensive schticks.

Firm Grip A strong Fortune recovery engine in a single schtick. Sadly, you cannot ever take it.

Flesh Wound This is a decent defensive schtick. My issue is that it does something similar, but not identical to the Fu Schtick Flesh Wound found on the Path of the Montage, that's a recipe for confusion and a competent editor would have renamed one of them,

For the Squad The description of this Guns Schtick here in the Guns Schtick Section says something notably different from the description of this Guns Schtick given on the Ex-Special Forces Archetype sheet back in chapter 2. Yay editing.

How RPG editors get hired

Hair Trigger Neck Hairs You get this bonus in fights your opponents start unexpectedly. If you are a genre-savvy group being faithful to the genre, that's roughly none of them. To avoid such silly MC-fiat vagueness you should probably just get the bonus on the first sequence of any fight.

Lightning Reload This does not let you reload guns any faster, and is instead a flat bonus to Reload Rolls, which are what you roll to see if you are out of ammo. It only goes up to +4 for 4 schticks, so you can never have enough to avoid running out of ammo for guns with a reload value of 6, which is something you probably ought to be able to do for setting a pile of schticks on fire.

Mocking Arrow and Reactive Fire There is nothing gained by splitting these into two different schticks and quite a lot lost. Firstly the bow version is more limited because fuck Robin Hood and secondly nobody can actually take the guns version because editing is hard.

Signature Weapon I still have no idea if the Guns and Fu versions of this count as two different schticks allowing you to have a Sig Shotgun and a Sig Sword, or if they count as the same schtick and you can only take it once.

Scattering Fire With this and Carnival of Carnage III+ you theoretically can stunlock all mooks in a fight. It's not quite reliable without more comboness, but that's still pretty strong in a lot of fights.

Showy Arrow Nothing is gained by limiting the 3e Rogue's ranged Opportunist to archery only, and it''s just bloat how the three schticks of this each just increase the attack bonus by 1.

Soul of the Sniper If you win initiative often, use guns and have allies, you want this party-wide stackable bonus. Unlike Hair-Trigger Neck Hairs it's clear when it applies.

Time Tested Tech This doesn't need to be 4 schticks. If it is going to be 4 schticks, then each one should be strictly better instead of the top tier having an increased shot cost to use. Also, due to enemy assymetry, mooks never make reload checks, so this isn't going to come up all that often.

The Way the Wind Blows Wording of this schtick in here does not match wording of this schtick in the Archer Archetype listing. And while they aren't far off, neither version quite jibes with the Combat section rules for Adverse Condiions and Immunity Bonuses

Wild Grenade Very slight wording difference between this listing "Spend 1 Fortune" and the version on the Full Metal Nutball archetype You may spend 1 fortune". This one is better as there isn't an "if you do" clause strictly linking cause and effect otherwise.