Feng Shui design space?

[Schleiermacher]

Feng Shui 1e was, for its time, a great game. Feng Shui 2, 20 years later, was mostly a great disappointment, with rule changes and schtick writeups that, notwithstanding a few genuine improvements, bore every sign of having been ad-libbed by a roomful of Jammers with typewriters.

But as I try to draw lessons from the development of Feng Shui to design my own rules-light action-heavy RPG, I find myself facing the problem of what design space even exists here. After all, the game is mostly a setting and a combat engine, and while the combat engine is pretty good, only needing a bit of streamlining and refinement, it is a cramped environment. The RNG is short, and modifiers accordingly need rigorous discipline.

It should be noted here that I've been doing work on the mathematical side of things, expanding the RNG to 2d8 rather than 2d6, fitting AVs on a range of 8 to 12 - 8 being generally for mooks and secondary skills, and 12 being for the high end specialists like Old Masters. Adjusting the precise values of all the different archetypes is obviously a work in progress.

But even once you, for the sake of argument, have gotten the math to work for the normal set of actions anyone can do, and calibrated the AVs and other numbers of the different archetypes to be balanced, what you've got is pretty finely tuned - what is there room for the various Guns, Fu and Magic schticks to even do, besides break it?

Giving out more combat options, special attacks and (especially) bonuses to things characters are already good at seems to pose game-breaking pitfalls left and right, but if so, what does the Killer do, besides shoot people with a high Guns value and good weaponry? How is that different from an Archer? And what's the difference between a Karate Cop punching you in the face, and an Old Master doing the same thing?

FS 1 wants there to be a mini-game of Chi management and secret technique rock-paper-scissors, and while I have seen that work and it is really cool when it does, I don't think you can do that in a game where some characters are supposed to be Jack Burton and John Wick and not really interact with that side of things at all. It's more of a thing for Weapons of the Gods where everyone has their own Kung Fu. Probably, even though everyone's power sources are thematically different, their resource management needs to be mechanically the same - static bonuses, at-will options and per-session Fortune point uses. But that implies that when a martial artist uses a death punch, it's the same kind of plot point as when a spy finds a critical clue or a sorcerer performs a major ritual. And I don't know how tenable that is, or what the equivalent plot beat for the gunslinger character is.

So far, I've had most success in playtests with those Unique Schticks that let players make narrative declarations, and don't really interact with the combat system at all - like the Spy's ability to force people to monologue and drop clues, the Karate Cop's ability to get aid with righteous speeches and the Thief's ability to get into and out of any situation, no questions asked - but while Magic schticks can fit into such a paradigm, Gun and Fu schticks can't really.

The appropriate role of schticks that give bonuses seems to be limited to circumstantial massaging, like making sure the Big Bruiser can deliver appropriately Big punches (but still not outdamaging a combat shotgun or a swordmaster) and the Thief is great at daredevil stunts while not also being the best at hitting peope in the face (since both run off Martial Arts skill). That's all fine as far as it goes, but given that the specialist archetypes are also thematically supposed to be deeply invested in their appropriate schticks, it's obviously not sufficient.

Thoughts? Suggestions?[/i]

[Username17]

Feng Shui was at its best when it was played very loose. Which is another way of saying that most of the game was pretty bad. The big combats were pretty fun, but the fact that the Old Master and the Sniper were best on mook clearing duty and the Big Bruiser was best used tying up the enemy leader until the mooks had been cleared was actually deeply counterintuitive.

Bottom line: Feng Shui's RNG is really short. There's no room for advancement. Character archetypes are either playable as-is or the game falls apart. Many of the character types didn't really get enough shticks to do their thing as a starting character and those characters did not get played.

The game would be better if characters who had non-combat shticks like the driving skills of the Maverick Cop or the Seduction skills of the Spy had any real meaning. That's probably the biggest space for design.

-Username17

[Schleiermacher]

So if I'm reading you right you're saying that yes, as fun as they are to read, all those pages spent on Gun and Fu schticks are in fact a waste of space from the perspective of actually playing the game, and if you wanted to write an edition of Feng Shui that aspired to being good, you'd cut them down to the bone and focus on expanding the play space beyond set piece fights.

Is that correct?

[Username17]

So if I'm reading you right you're saying that yes, as fun as they are to read, all those pages spent on Gun and Fu schticks are in fact a waste of space from the perspective of actually playing the game, and if you wanted to write an edition of Feng Shui that aspired to being good, you'd cut them down to the bone and focus on expanding the play space beyond set piece fights.

Is that correct?

Pretty much. FS1 had big dreams about tech trees of gun and kung fu shticks and a whole grip of weird transformed animals that had their own tech trees and some asshole could maybe play the transformed dragon who had the special power to unlock other tech trees and so on and so forth. None of that actually worked. In reality there were only a few builds of Killer and Martial Artist that were meaningfully functional and the vast majority of the things on shtick lists might as well not exist.

Cutting the archetypes down to just functional builds would be a step in the right direction. There's no reason for guys like the Soldier to even exist - no one plays them except people who have so little system mastery that they end up doubly excluded by ending up with a trap option.

But then you'd want to build up the number of playable archetypes by giving people actually meaningful narrative actions that can happen. The fact that a Ninja character routinely gets a 15 action result on Infiltration checks doesn't mean anything unless you make it mean something. But if you made super stealth actually do something in the game, then the stealth character might be a reasonable life choice.

-Username17

[OgreBattle]

I've read the Feng Shui 1st edition book but it all fell out of my head, I'm not really clear on what makes the core mechanics 'great' for what it does (action against hordes and big boss fights?)

FS 1 wants there to be a mini-game of Chi management and secret technique rock-paper-scissors, and while I have seen that work and it is really cool when it does, I don't think you can do that in a game where some characters are supposed to be Jack Burton and John Wick and not really interact with that side of things at all. It's more of a thing for Weapons of the Gods where everyone has their own Kung Fu. Probably, even though everyone's power sources are thematically different, their resource management needs to be mechanically the same - static bonuses, at-will options and per-session Fortune point uses. But that implies that when a martial artist uses a death punch, it's the same kind of plot point as when a spy finds a critical clue or a sorcerer performs a major ritual. And I don't know how tenable that is, or what the equivalent plot beat for the gunslinger character is.

I like games with secret bidding. When it actually is RPS I've found I didn't like it as much as I thought, a dungeon board game had straight up RPS for combat (ranged attack, melee, magic I think) and it felt random and tiresome.

[Whipstitch]

It really just is that the RNG is so short and that you roll so few dice. That whole bit where the tiny rng borks character advancement is partially counterbalanced by the fact that you actually kinda do want the specialized mook killer class to push mooks off the RNG and just murderize them like Chow Yun Fat.

[Josh_Kablack]

I've read the Feng Shui 1st edition book but it all fell out of my head, I'm not really clear on what makes the core mechanics 'great' for what it does (action against hordes and big boss fights?)

Here's the elevator pitch list of what FS1 had going for it to distinguish it from other RPGs of mid90s:

• Genre Emulation
• Attitude
• Quick Chargen
• Easy Learning Curve
• Mechanics support Starting Characters being badasses.

Now a lot of those bullet points have caveats when you dig a little deeper, and not all of them were unique to Feng Shui, but the overall set was enough to easily sell gamers on trying out this game.