Action Movie Heartbreaker Discussion

[Josh_Kablack]

Rather than arguing with Frank about how Feng Shui 2 should have worked in the review thread I can do so here.

Before anything else, we have to decide on

Primary Schtick Types:

I nominate three different combat types, plus one or more noncombat types:

Shootin - mowng fools down with guns, bows, crossbows, etc

Fu - rising dragon punch, hurricane kick and the like

Sorcery - spellcasting

Those three are conceptually distinct enough to warrant inclusion as a primary attack types and as schtick grouping. Single attack specialists and attack type pairings give us the first six archetypes.

Not Human - being a warwelf or an uplifted crab or a cyborg or a mutant or alien, etc. These all need to follow the same general rules and not have a dozeen different clans with unique disciplines. Also, this doesn't need to be an attack type, your wolfcrab claws can roll martial arts, you cybergun arm can roll shootin' and your death ray gaze and glowy alien healing fingers can roll sorcery.

Archetype core schticks: things that are essential to an archetype: the bruiser' high soak and health values, the spy's ability to provoke gloating and such count here.

Other Big Skills. If the game includes chase rules, then it can support Driving Schticks; if it has robust investigation rules it can support Detective Schticks; etc. This means taking serious consideration as to which skills should be big enough to warrant schticks ans which are also ran flavor skills. Personally I am ok with an answer ranging from All skills are big and get schticks to No skills are big enough for schticks that would just be confusing.

But once we pick an answer for how many skills deserve schticks, we can procedurally generate archetype frameworks by overllaping those with the atack and not a humna schticks.

[Dean]

You have a class system basically. This means you don't have to balance your combat schticks with your noncombat schticks. Give everyone a noncombat schtick with no balance implications on anything else they get. So Cyborgs can "Hack" (gather information) Sorcerers can "Divine" (gather information), Magic Cops can Investigate (gather information) and so on.

The out of combat areas are probably information gathering, movement abilities like driving, stealth and infiltration abilities. Basically just don't let any class have two gun schticks because another has one gun schtick and an Investigation schtick.

[Username17]

If you're going to have fu/guns/magic as different things, then a "non-human" that does fu/guns (cyborg) is different from a "non-human" that does fu/magic (werewolf) is different from a "non-human" that does guns/magic (angel).

In any case, I broadly agree that either there should be investigation schticks and driving schticks or not. I'd actually prefer if there were, I think. Just as Dean points out, that it's totally unacceptable to be trading "Before I Kill You..." (the investigation schtick that makes villains monologue their evil plans) for "Carnival of Carnage" (the gun schtick that lets you take out more unnamed characters per unit time). It's unacceptable to make that trade in either direction.

As for unique schticks, I'm ambivalent to them. The schtick that makes enemies monologue when you are inevitably captured isn't spy exclusive, because it's something superheroes and scrappy kids also get. The thing where Big Bruisers need a vastly different set of numeric inputs because they are damn near off the RNG with the other characters is another story. But honestly, I think you could set that up with stats alone. I could imagine Big Bruisers taking a fu schtick that gave them a cumulative to-hit bonus for missing that other characters simply didn't bother with because they don't spend a lot of time missing their opponents (especially if it was capped in how high it could take your attack bonus). In short, I don't think they are necessary and most of the unique schticks in FS2 either shouldn't be unique or shouldn't exist at all. On the other hand, some of the unique schticks are fun, and would be pretty difficult to make generalizable in a way that was coherent and remotely fair.

Another thing that I think needs to be talked about is the RNG. Feng Shui's RNG is too claustrophobic. Having even a +2 means you succeed 75% of the time. And that's bonkers. But having a +4 means you succeed unless you fumble, and that's retarded. The game would work better with 2d8 or 2d10.

-Username17

[Lago PARANOIA]

Is this for creating pure action stories like Commando or Ong-Bak or is this for creating action-adventure stories like Indiana Jones and The Mummy Returns? One thing that I've never been clear on from looking at the Feng Shui review or reading after-action reports is just how much of the time is supposed to be spent between action setpieces and how important these segues are.

Nonetheless, if the typical game of Feng Shui is supposed to resemble a Batman more than God of War, I question whether the game has enough skills to make the investigation phase satisfying.

[DrPraetor]

The 2D6 RNG is only a problem because people's stats are so divergent. If the players will all either 12s or 13s (and the 12s had bonuses much more significant than the option of using two attack skills or something), it would be workable. With 12s and 14s in the team, it breaks down completely.

To avoid polygonal dice, I suggest -10 + 3D6 and keeping all the other numbers fixed (based on the ridiculous pretension that they were well-selected).

If you roll two 1s, you roll a D6 and subtract it (repeat while getting 6s). If you roll three 1s, you roll 2D6 and subtract them (repeat for each 6.)

If you roll two 6s, you roll a D6 and add it (repeat while getting 6s). If you roll three 6s, you roll 2D6 and add them (repeat for each 6.)

By the way, the above is also the RNG I would use for Dungeons and Dragons, with roughly the same DC values that 3.5 used.

[Josh_Kablack]

Well if we are using a new RNG, we probably also need to reconsider the Initiative system and the action economy. Feng Shui's system where you generally get 2-3 standard actions for your Speed stat and then roll a d6 to see if you are getting 0,1 or 2 additional standard actions this sequence is on the border of too klunky as it stands. While I do really like the ability to have schticks that fractionally reduce the action costs of various actions or give your attacks fraction action delay riders, I was already questioning whether there was useful streamlining that could be done there, before we even started talking about going from a d6 to d8 or d10.

[Username17]

The 2D6 RNG is only a problem because people's stats are so divergent. If the players will all either 12s or 13s (and the 12s had bonuses much more significant than the option of using two attack skills or something), it would be workable. With 12s and 14s in the team, it breaks down completely.

Having characters who are four numbers apart in combat value seems like an absolute floor. You have your basic character, who is a martial artist, a gun bunny, or a sorcerer. And they have a combat value, which we will call X. Now we also have the character who has a better combat value but pays for that by being fragile or not hitting very hard. They have to have at least an AV of X+1. And then you have a character who has two combat modes and has worse AVs in exchange for having more options and hopefully more synergy. They have an AV no better than X-1. And then you have the character who has a hard time hitting and an easy time being hit but makes up for it in other ways (presumably beginning by hitting hard and taking a lot of punishment before going down), who must have a lower AV than the hybrid character and whose AV ceiling is thus X-2.

The problem of course is that having a 12 and a 14 on the same team breaks the RNG in half if you're using 2d6. The minimum conceivable spread of AVs for character archetypes to have is bigger than a 2d6 RNG can really handle. Of course, once you have 3d6 as your RNG, you don't need explosions at all. The difference between one standard deviation up and down is six numbers.

-Username17

[DrPraetor]

I've been thinking about Rune Quest, Warhammer and Welsh people.

Back in Davis, I had a friend who was really into his Welsh heritage; he wanted to play Rune Quest, but he just couldn't deal with my circle of friends (who were mostly skate punks.) We didn't actually end up hanging out much, but later on I understand he played a lot of Warhammer (the miniatures game), which is what people do when they lack the social skills to play D&D.

In Rune Quest, or D&D stuck at 1st level, being stabbed with a sword killed you, so the argument was you might only make 20 attack rolls in your career; fumbles happen, so you want a fumble % of 5% so that each character experiences a fumble. In fact, you could make an argument that the 5% fumble rate accurately models deaths from friendly fire, and so on.

In newer editions of D&D, this rapidly becomes ridiculous, you're stabbing yourself in the face dozens of times if you fumble on every 1.

The Warhammer RPG has the worst fumble system - fumbles *are* quite rare (about 0.1% for the 1/1000 major magic disaster fumble), but they have a good chance of straight-up killing you. That's boring.

I think it is desirable for RPGs to have a random element that can introduce random and unplanned *plot elements*. So if fumbles are going to happen with any frequency, that needs to be how they work.

[TheFlatline]

I've been thinking about Rune Quest, Warhammer and Welsh people.

Back in Davis, I had a friend who was really into his Welsh heritage; he wanted to play Rune Quest, but he just couldn't deal with my circle of friends (who were mostly skate punks.) We didn't actually end up hanging out much, but later on I understand he played a lot of Warhammer (the miniatures game), which is what people do when they lack the social skills to play D&D.

In Rune Quest, or D&D stuck at 1st level, being stabbed with a sword killed you, so the argument was you might only make 20 attack rolls in your career; fumbles happen, so you want a fumble % of 5% so that each character experiences a fumble. In fact, you could make an argument that the 5% fumble rate accurately models deaths from friendly fire, and so on.

In newer editions of D&D, this rapidly becomes ridiculous, you're stabbing yourself in the face dozens of times if you fumble on every 1.

The Warhammer RPG has the worst fumble system - fumbles *are* quite rare (about 0.1% for the 1/1000 major magic disaster fumble), but they have a good chance of straight-up killing you. That's boring.

I think it is desirable for RPGs to have a random element that can introduce random and unplanned *plot elements*. So if fumbles are going to happen with any frequency, that needs to be how they work.

Did... did you just argue for Quantum Bears?

[DrPraetor]

I missed whatever thread, but yes, if you roll triple-1s, Crossbow-wielding Bugbears should phase in from the other thread, and you have to fight them.

This assumes that a major fight can be resolved with 30 die rolls, so you might play a pick-up game or two and this would never happen.

I was more thinking of legwork rolls than combat. It's very difficult for a combat fumble to do anything actually interesting, especially in a way that doesn't involve a sort of DM adjudication that is prone to favoritism and caustic to the overall play environment.

In many combat systems, simply getting a low enough number is a bad enough result - but if that result is straight-up lethal, you've got a problem because people are just going to ignore the rule.

[Username17]

While I think we can all agree that a certain amount of zaniness and unexpected outcomes is valuable and to be encouraged, exploding dice don't deliver. They make things clunky and make stupid shit happen way too often. In a game where people invoke schticks and spend Fortune points, plenty of weird crap is going to happen just from that.

Indeed, in a combat against just 8 mooks, player characters are going to be making around 12 attacks and being attacked back around 20 times. If a special result happened on any roll with two 1s or two 6s, you'd expect something "special" to happen like five times. And that's honestly not very special anymore.You get double 1s or double 6s on 3d6 fifteen percent of the time. That's bullshit. Remember that when you go up against actual opposition rather than a simple speed bump of 2 mooks per player, you're going to look at a lot more die rolls. So procedurally generated events are just going to come in a pretty expected number of times. They are going to be routine.

As long as your "special" events are going to be routine and expected anyway, they might as well seem "fair." If players are activating schticks and spending narrative imperative points to get them, that's at least something that will feel fair.

The other issue is the amount of swerve you're going to get. The most likely result on 3d6-10 is that you'lee get either a +0 or a +1 - that's a quarter of the die rolls. But that means that three quarters of the time you'll get less or more than that. About one attack in 11 gets a +5 or better result, which is going to make mooks a threat even to characters who have untouchability as their reason for existence.

[hl]

Which brings me to another issue altogether: Bruisers and Mooks. It is actually pretty bullshit how hard of a time Bruisers have getting rid of unnamed characters. The simplest solution would be to make a general rule that when making your "eliminate unnamed character roll" that you can choose use your combat skill or your base damage. This would coincidentally mean that getting your hands on a big gun in the middle of a fight might actually matter when fighting unnamed characters, which I think is probably for the best.

-Username17

[OgreBattle]

Because of the rules lite nature of Feng Shui, shouldn't we first figure out how many "combat" and "plot advancing out of combat" mechanics can work, then apply flavor text to them?

Could the '11 different power schedules' list FrankTrollman made apply to FengShui?

[Username17]

Could the '11 different power schedules' list FrankTrollman made apply to FengShui?

Theoretically yes. You can use pretty much any power schedule you want in any genre you feel like and it doesn't even have to end up like a disassociated Euro-game. In practice of course, the power schedules you choose will affect the way the game is played. And the "fast and loose" over-the-top action experience pretty well shits on any kind of at-the-table planning you might want to do. So things like spell preparation are not going to work out well.

But sure, having a character who has a short list of abilities they can spam at-will, while another character gets to unlock bigger effects later in the combat, while another character can damage or apply future penalties to themselves to pull off more powerful actions all seems pretty workable in a Feng Shui environment. So does delaying your attacks to get better attacks. So does having a point reserve to buy powerful effects from.

Because of the rules lite nature of Feng Shui, shouldn't we first figure out how many "combat" and "plot advancing out of combat" mechanics can work, then apply flavor text to them?

Certainly, having a coherent idea of what a schtick does seems like a decent first step. Feng Shui 2 is pretty badly out in the cold as far as that goes, with Schticks being everything from passive bonuses on every attack to weird battle affecting shenanigans that you invoke once an adventure if you're lucky. The fact that Bag Full of Guns and Signature Weapon both appear on the schtick list is a major failing of vision.

---

The first thing to decide is what a Guns character, a Fu character, and a Magic character are going to do. It is my contention that Guns characters should switch weapons nearly constantly. It is further my contention that magic characters should be left to fend for themselves as far as making up their own special effects, and Fu users should be shifting moves as frequently as a professional wrestler (obligatory HHH joke here).

What this means is that schticks in general can't be shit like Claw of the Tiger or Bag Full of Guns. Those are things that happen one time, a schtick has to repeat. Carnival of Carnage is a good schtick because it's action agnostic, Flying Windmill Kick is a bad schtick because it's a specific move. Whatever you have flying windmill kicks do (strike a single opponent multiple times, strike a bunch of opponents, reverse a disadvantage, or whatever), that should be a more generic schtick that flying windmill kicks are an example of using. So Chun Li has the Spinning Bird Kick, but she also has the Lightning Legs, and the player should call out that they are doing one of those whenever they are using their schtick.

The really important thing is that the basic unit of taking down an unnamed character is that you make an AV roll and if you succeed you take a mook out of the combat and tell the rest of the table how you did it. Having powers that care whether you are using an open hand or nunchaku is totally missing the boat there.

-Username17

[Josh_Kablack]

What this means is that schticks in general can't be shit like Claw of the Tiger or Bag Full of Guns.

I'm with you for Bag Full of Guns on all levels. The mechanics are shit, but even if they weren't, the concept by itself is not worth spending a chargen resource (shctick pick) on. As discussed in the "scene schticks" thread, that's the sort of thing that PCs should be able to just do in response to "how are you preparing for the fight?". "I bring all my guns along in a huge tote bag" should be a valid response that doesn't require anything more specific than having a Guns AV. And indeed, as previously discussed, it's probably desirable to account for various types of fight preparation with scene schtick

As to Claw of the Tiger I am confuzzled though. I hope you are referring to the 1e version where you spend a (per sequence) chi to get a damage boost to your specifically unarmed strike - which means that it's only used in fights where you couldn't bring a machete or your sawed-off parking meter along -- which is really to small a subset of fights to be meaningful. The 2e version has no chi cost and adds a (needlessly) random additional damage component to any Martial Arts attack. That isn't totally action agnostic, since it requires you to be using Martial Arts and hitting a foe who cares about damage (not a mook). But "hitting a foe who has hit points with a Martial Arts attack" is a broad and common enough occurrence to be valid for a Fu Schtick.

[Username17]

I agree that the scene schticks thread pretty much answered how one would go about doing a Bag Full of Guns scenario. Players would have an adventure limited amount of narrative points, and they could spend them to say "I'm putting a bunch of guns in a tote bag and bringing them to the showdown." I think that's pretty much settled.

The problem with the tiger claws is more conceptual. It's doing this:



Which is fine I guess, but hard to justify as a schtick. It's a move. It's a thing you might do one time. Really, I think only finishing moves deserve to be schticks in and of themselves.

-Username17

[DrPraetor]

It's a problem of combining combating genres; HK Gun Fights and HK Chap Saki flicks are not the same movies and do not have the same narrative tropes.

So in Five Deadly Venoms, the Toad has a superpower where he is nigh-invulnerable (and he just beats people up), but the Scorpion has a Scorpion Kick which is specifically a kick but also so awesome that it is a superpower. In Shaolin Wooden Men, the villain has a Lion's Roar which sorta straddles the border, in that the roar seems to be an actual yell and then whatever Kung Fu he does is super-strong?

But they all have explicit powers, whether or not they are supernatural. In a Gun fu movie, you may have similar wuxia-inspired action choreography with the guns, but the conceit is not that John Woo has a Carnival of Carnage power; if he wins and kills all the gangters it is because he is generically tough/smart/quick/lucky, not because he has "secret shoot guns at once technique" as a power that an old master taught him.

So it's up to you how you reconcile those two genres when you mash them up, but I've always thought that Gun Characters shouldn't have Gun Schticks at all; if you have a big guns score, you mow down mooks by the dozens and never seem to run out of bullets, your schtick has to be something else.

[Username17]

Ironically, "Bullet Time" is an honest to goodness schtick that some guns characters have. Max Payne and Neo explicitly have the Bullet Time schtick, which they use repeatedly in multiple combats. This is ironic because in Feng Shui 2, "Bullet Time" is a schtick they didn't even fucking try to write for the final and just left as a broken pointer. But honestly, it's one of the few things that unambiguously should be a schtick available to guns characters.

As far as Fu schticks go, I would say that the big sprawling paths have to fucking go. Your typical martial artist should have like two schticks from a path. One schtick to note that you're using mantis fu or whatever the fuck, and another schtick for your weird finishing move.

-Username17

[OgreBattle]

Would Mad Max car driving wasteland surviving shtick fit with Feng Shui?

[Josh_Kablack]

Well Feng Shui 2 has a Highway Ronin Archetype who is a driving primary character with both Guns and Martial Arts AVs that comes only from the post-apocalyptic future, get an "Against all Warlords" schtick and has default equipment of a modified Ford Falcon, a Sawed off Shotgun and and S&W Model 19 Combat Magnum. What's that you say, the actual gun the movie(s) was a S&W Model 29
http://www.imfdb.org/wiki/Road_warrior# ... n_Model_29
http://www.imfdb.org/wiki/Mad_Max_Beyon ... n_Model_29 ?

Yeah, they couldn't even competently Google or IMDB a revolver for a blatant rip character type. So of course complicated things like designing a car-chase system from the ground up are disasters. So while the game fucking has Mad Max as his own archetype playable as is from the start, you can't actually use it to run a Mad Max movie, because the necessary subsystem is a pile of fail.

[Username17]

It's tempting to make an archetype for every action hero you think is awesome. To have Max Rockatansky and Wong Fei Hung each get their own class written for them. That is super bullshit and you shouldn't do it. For one thing, there are more entries into this genre than people have time to read through and only the most insane genre aficionados have seen more than a tiny fraction of the movies in the genre. And get this: they are making new genre movies at a horrendous clip. What you're going to need to do is to have some sort of reductionist system in which Tequila and Tony from Hard Boiled probably have the same character class.

So each class needs to be open enough that it can cover not only characters who are portrayed differently in different movies (like Craig Bond and Connery Bond), but also characters who appear in the same movie that are intended to be contrasted in a number of ways. I think that by allowing players to select schticks and seconday skills that this can be achieved. But it's something that needs to be kept constantly in mind: the archetype list isn't done when there's nothing left to add, it's done when there's nothing left to combine.

Another big issue is magic. A lot of the genre films are from the 70s, 80s, and 90s and most of them had terrible special effects. Most of the genre pieces are either quite recent or don't give us a lot of information about what Magic "should" be doing, because budgets and technology limited the artistic vision of the creators. Nevertheless, while genre examples of real magic users are thin on the ground in older movies, it's a completely vital archetype. Because the most important movie isn't Hong Kong anything, it's Big Trouble In Little China. And in that movie, one the main heroes is a god damn wizard.


Feng Shui should look like a reboot of Big Trouble in Little China. Main characters are Sorcerer (Magic), Martial Artist (Fu), and Everyday Hero (Guns).

The question of what other characters besides the heroes from Big Trouble in Little China and Hard Boiled need coverage is of course an open one. But you can cover a lot of them without needing to write new archetypes if you can swap schticks around. I wouldn't be offended if you managed to do John McClane from Die Hard and Rama from The Raid with the same archetype. More controversial is questions like "should you have mutant superheroes?" and I could go either way on that. But it seems to me that mutant eyebeams shouldn't use a different set of rules from sorcerous eyebeams if you do.


Lo Pan could be a member of the Summers family for all I care.

-Username17

[Josh_Kablack]

It's tempting to make an archetype for every action hero you think is awesome. To have Max Rockatansky and Wong Fei Hung each get their own class written for them. That is super bullshit and you shouldn't do it.

This is indeed one of the biggest development mistakes of Feng Shui 2. What's being touted as a system where you just pick a class and are ready to go with no fiddly chargen slowing you down is not actually streamlining in a system with 36 classes (of two pages each) to read through. Thus what is supposed to be "quick, pick one" turns into 30+ minutes per player of flipping through the book reading the options and still takes up a full session for chargen. It's like they didn't even realize they were making design tradeoffs, let alone that they carried them so far as to hurt their goal.

Now this could and should have been handled better through chunking and something like Frank's choose-your-own-adventure chargen? And whatever we end up with here should do that, because it's quicker and easier to make multiple decisions between two or three items in a search tree than it is to make a single decision between multiple dozens of items.

Here's a first-draft rough-out for how this could go:

1. Do you specialize in one type of attack or do you diversify?

if you specialize go to 2, if you diversify go to 3

2 Specialize: Is that type Kung Fu, Guns, or Sorcery?

Kung Fu go to 4
Guns go to 5
Sorcery Go to 6

3 (Diversify) Which two do you use: { Fu and Guns } or { Fu and Sorcery } or { Guns and Sorcery }?

Fu and Guns go to 7
Fu and Sorcery go to 8
Guns and Sorcery go to 9

4. Does your mastery of Kung Fu come from your decades of years study or due to your natural talent.

If decades of Study: you are an Old Master ( Mr Myagi )
If Natural Talent: you are a Martial Artist ( Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon )

5. Do you prefer to shoot your enemies up close and personal, or from where they never see it coming.
If up close, you are a Killer ( Chow Yun Phat )
If never see it coming, you are a Sniper ( Marky Mark in Shooter, either main from Enemy at the Gates )

6. Do you prefer X magic or Y magic

if X you are a ____ sorcerer ( ???? )
if Y magic you are a _____ wizard ( Gandalf, Merlin, Dumbledore )

7 Are you still Human?

If yes go to 10
If no you are Cyborg ( Robocop )

8 Are you still Human?

If yes go to 11
If no, you are a Night Creature ( Kate Beckinsale from Underworld movies )

9 Are you still Human
If Yes go to 12
If No you are an Angel

10 What's more important: protecting your allies or bringing the bad guys down?
If protecting, you are Ex-Special Forces ( Auh-nold in Predator )
If catching bad guys, you are a Maverick Cop ( Dirty Harry )

11. What's more important: testing your mettle or protecting the balance of nature?
Testing your mettle: you are a Street Fighter ( Ken Masters ) (or do we poach element-bending here, and go with Avatar Ang?
Protecting the balance: you are an Exorcist Monk ( dude from Chinese Ghost Story )

12. What's more important: having the best equipment or tracking down secrets ?
Equipment: you are a Gazetteer (MacGuyver)
Secrets you are a Magic Cop ( Fox Mulder, Van Helsing )

There, that's a rough-out for 15 with example characters listed and easily expanded to more if needed by adding noncombat skill, home juncture or fragility vs durabilty questions.

But that exercise highlights the WTF do we do here issue with Sorcery and also shows that it's trivially easy to expand the archetype list but difficult to pare it down to a manageable

[Username17]

The "WTF are you gonna do with Sorcery?" question is both central and difficult. But the basic issue is that what makes an archetype necessary is its game mechanical uniqueness, while what makes a character deserving of a spot in the key is simply that they are interesting and iconic enough that someone could answer questions with the expectation of keying themselves out there. What that means is that the CYOA is going to have a shit tonne more entries in it than there are classes. Your basic Guns/Fu character with a major secondary skill could be one archetype, but it would show up in the key as the Spec Ops Soldier (Intrusion), the Spy (Deceit), and the Detective (Detective).

Basically, a Feng Shui archetype could fit on five lines of text, so you could actually fit them ten per page if you really wanted to. What should actually be done is to have each basic archetype come with several "builds" that represent homages to specific movies.

The Big Bruiser is game mechanically distinct from the Swordsmaster, but the Swordmaster is not game mechanically distinct from the Martial Artist. The Swordmaster is just a Martial Artist with a different set of skill and schtick picks. But the Fu primary class page would have several presented builds on it, one of which is Bruce Lee and another is Toshiro Mifune. And when you're doing the CYOA that keys out to a build, it would direct you to go to Martial Artist #3 or whatever.

-Username17

[Josh_Kablack]

So, I'm getting over a nasty headcold and too clogged up on dayquil to even spit out a proper drunken review segment, even now that I'm past the crunch and into the stuff Robin Laws actually wanted to write. (Aside: why the hell do so many RPG writers want to write anything that is not RPG rules?)

So I'm gonna ramble on a few musings here instead.

One of the things that Feng Shui gets largely right is the concept of *Junctures*. Sure we can quibble over precise dates, but there really only are a handful of distinct periods when action movies take place:

• The time of legends, where you have monsters and swords and sorcery and such. (Feng Shui calls this the Ancient Juncture)
• The Old West. (Feng Shui calls this the Past Juncture and centers it around the second Opium War)
• The days of Rum Running and Nazi Punching, and while Laws feels moral quibbles about laying the blame for the holocaust at the feet of fictional villains, such qualms didn't stop Indiana Jones, the Blues Brothers or Kung Fury.
• The Swinging Sixventies, era of exploitation films and retrothentic revivals of that subgenre.
• A world that looks just like our world of today, at least on the surface (Feng Shui calls this the Contemporary Juncture)
• The dark future. This can be either a post-apocolyptic hellscape or a seemingly benign yet-subtly-totalitarian dystopia (Feng Shui calls this the Future Juncture and has switched between the two with the new edition)

Now Feng Shui makes the mistake of pinning hard dates instead of general periods to these. The Time of Legends could plausibly include everyone from Gilgamesh (circa 2800 BC) through Spartacus (circa 100 BC) to Beowulf (circa 600 AD).

In the Past Juncture, it should be valid to play a Civil War Veteran (post 1865), even though you may be fighting to save California Gold Rush Miners (1849 see Pale Rider) in one adventure and then tracking down the supernatural creature behind the Jack the Ripper murders (1888) in another. Sure the Chinese are always justifiably upset about Western Imperialism, but you really don't need to know if it's the first Opium War, the second Opium War or the Boxer Rebellion.

Seriously, pinning these things to fixed dates is a mistake in a setting that already has a conceit that history is malleable and frequently gets overwritten. It would be better to have rough periods, and even better yet to state that the malleable nature of history and secret conspiracies to control the world in the game give a lot of flexibility regarding actual historical events.


Which brings me to the other major topic of this semi-coherent medicated rambling: the factions in the conspiracy. They are horribly done. Instead of trying to force PCs into the Dragons and making most factions loathsome, all of the factions should be both somewhat sympathetic and somewhat reprehensible - that way you could run groups from any and all factions, and you could see groups attacking or allying with any and all factions for reasons other than short-term extreme necessity.

I see each of the factions IP scrubbed and replaced by a cleaner version centered around a single keyword

• Architects - Science
• Ascended - Order
• Dragons - Hope
• Eaters of the Lotus - Ambition
• The Hand - Discipline
• Jammers - Chaos
• Four Monarchs - ???

The Architects are about Science above all, they shun tribalism, nationalism, superstition, and religion. They organize efficiently and use findings from sociology and economics to administer their holdings well. They also place Science and Learning above individualism and individual lives, conducting human experimentation you or I might find horrible, but justifying it as for "the greater good". The terrifying part is that they are likely right about that.

The Ascended are about Order above all. The world keeps running because there are rules to follow and all actions have socially enforced consequences. Work and you get paid. Work harder or smarter and you get promoted. Steal and you go to jail. It's really very simple, but the only way we can even have a society and not just small tribes is with rules like that. Sure there will always be rulebreakers who try to cheat the consequences, but we all have to do our best to catch them, for if too many people stop caring about the consequences, then the whole thing falls apart.

Dragons are about Hope above all. This means that they can never actually lose, since no matter how bad things get, there is always Hope. It also means that as soon as things start to go well, they get complacent, since there is less to Hope for.

Eaters of the Lotus are all about Ambition. The more cunning and more diligent you are, the more status, riches and influence you should accrue. This results in a weird hierarchy where superiors with higher status are both highly respected for their achievements and enviously plotted against. If you've ever worked in a cubicle, this should be pretty familiar.

The Order of the Hand these guys are all about Discipline. Both organizational and self. They are cautious, wise and perceptive. They are all but immune to bribery, temptation and corruption. But they do not tolerate any sass, dislike modern trends and will make you prove your worth before they even listen to you.

Jammers These guys are all about blowing things up to cause Chaos. They really can't ever win, because they don't build, they just raid, steal and destroy. But the more you have for them to raid, steal and destroy, the harder it is to defend against them. There's also a dichotomy here about how their use of force undermines and yet parallels the State's uses of force.

Monarchs - Tenacity? Nostalgia? honestly this set of sub factions has already lost and doesn't have a good hook. They need to be replaced by a faction or set of sub factions who do have a good hook.

yeah, that doesn't actually fix my issues, but it does sort of list some keywords. time for nyquil and sleep

[Whipstitch]

Stealing a cult or two from After Sundown would be a super duper easy way to get a head start on that. Frank totally meant it when he said that Big Trouble in Little China should be treated as a documentary in After Sundown.

[Username17]

Having factions is good for the card game, but it doesn't do dick diddly for the role playing game unless player characters can meaningfully be members of the different factions. This means that having villainous Lotus Eaters and villainous Jammers at the same time is basically pointless. Makes for a fun card game, but it's detrimental to the RPG. It's just a bunch of major characters you aren't going to interact with and a bunch of NPCs rubbing their penises against each other with no input from the PCs one way or the other.

The flip side of course is that having organizations that players can be in only matters if the players can meaningfully decide to not be in them. This means that The Dragons, as formulated, are bullshit.

Your basic choice is to either have good guy and bad guy factions from each juncture (and thus the PCs are a group of heroes from various junctures and their associated factions), or to have just one or two actually bad factions and have all the other factions be things PCs can be members of. Either one of those would be fine.

As for junctures, I think that you've basically hit it right. I could see the plausible need for having a separate dark ages to renaissance period from a might of rome type period. Kings and knights does seem kinda different from guys running around in togas and sandals. That would take you from six junctures to seven, which still seems pretty manageable to me. I could also accept a 30,000 BCE juncture with sabertooth tigers and shit, but it's by no means required.

-Username17