Note: Ugh, I forgot about botches.
Character Creation...continued
Okay, so the Shih have access to nine 5-dot powers called
Qiao. That might seem generous at first, but keep in mind that this isn't like Vampire or Mage where you start off with 3-5 dots of Disciplines of your choice; your first 3 dots are mandatory, and you
might be able to squeeze out one more dot from your freebie points at chargen. These are the exciting powers that are supposed to allow you to go toe-to-toe with hungry ghosts and bakemono. Let's see what we've got.
Qiao of the I Shen
The Shih spends a point of Yang Chi and 15 minutes to inscribe the prayers, then casts them at her target (using a Dexterity + Occult roll; the demon can dodge the attack normally, and the Shih suffers standard firearms penalties for range.)
This is your bog-standard ofuda or paper charm skill. By the magic of calligraphy, you make a little slip of paper that does something bad to supernatural foes. The good news is, you can prepare these things ahead (once created, the magic lasts for a day), so you can meditate and recharge your Chi.
On the downside, you're spending a lot of your character's life writing little charms that
if they hit don't do much. Sure, at 4 and 5 dots you engulf your supernatural enemy in flames or blast them with lightning, but let's be serious: you are
never going to get five dots in any Qiao. It's never going to happen.
Qiao of the Mo Kung
Your second required one-dot power, this allows you to spend Chi to boost your attributes.
The Shih rolls Stamina + Meditation (difficulty 8). Each success increases the character's Stamina by one, to a maximum of 8. The character must expend one Yang Chi This increase lasts for the duration of the scene.
While self-buffing is actually not bad, since you want bigger dicepools, there are drawbacks. First, you have to roll a test - which is bullshit, you're already paying for it, and if you spend too much Chi you take damage. You can literally pump yourself to death. Second, they start off with Stamina, which is arguably the last stat you want to pump - because your combat monster skills are going to be Dexterity and Strength.
Qiao of the Yu An
This step costs one Yang Chi and lasts for one scene. The character can see wraiths, can detect hsien for what they are, and can even notice the hengeyokai in their mortal forms.
It's been mentioned before that there is no sense of balance to WoD powers. The first dot in any given power can be objectively better or worse than the first dot in another power. Hell, they can be worse than just buying a merit. A Shih with the Medium merit is 100% better than one with this power because they never have to spend Chi to use it.
Just to make clear, let's go over the three powers that the PCs start the game with:
- Can make a paper charm that causes minor irritation to supernaturals if it hits
- Can pump Stamina by 1
- Can see Wraiths and other supernaturals (provided they aren't using magic to hide)
...and all of those cost 1 Yang each. That's a tough fight if the PC goes up against a ghoul with a single dot of Potence. Or a liquored up Kinfolk with a shotgun. The second dots in those powers aren't much to talk about either. And...there's no reason for it. The Qiao powers don't really get competitive until you get four or five dots into a Qiao, and even then you're pissing away Chi to do anything. They should have just given each Shih 5-6 dots and told them to pick their own.
But lets do a quick review of the other six Qiao.
Qiao of the Feng (Yin) - Roll Willpower Tests to heal wounds faster. At 5 dots you can literally recover from cancer and radiation poisoning, but you never get to 5 dots.
Qiao of the Shi (Yang) - Combat monster power, let's you unleash a flurry of blows, punch ghosts, cause aggravated damage with unarmed strikes, etc. Why the fuck isn't
this one of the defaults? I'd take it over paper charms.
Qiao of the Chien (Yang) - Supernatural countermeasures. Stops vampires from stealing your Chi (no idea how that works vis-a-vis blood points); at 5 dots you get to be a crappy pseudo-vampire, sortof. But you will never get to 5 dots.
Qiao of the Long Ling (Yin/Yang) - Supposed to be a sort of penance stare, but let's remember that Charisma is almost certainly your character's dump stat.
Qiao of the Meng (Yang) - Helps recover Willpower, correct Chi imbalances, and other Gweneth Paltrow crap. In a long campaign, might be important; there are no long Shih campaigns.
Qiao of the Zhu Mao (Yang) - Wire fu. Literally running over water and stuff.
A lot of these are grab-bags of somebody's favorite kung fu film powers, which is fair. Most of them are explicitly worse than the basic abilities that supernatural entities get just for existing. That's par for the course with WoD. It's not just that you as a mortal PC don't get nice things, but you are so much the red-headed stepchild you make me regress back to my younger self in sympathy.
The Shih have their own style of martial arts, "Mo Chi Kung Fu" (Devil Judgement, or so the guy at the tattoo place said). The basic idea is for every dot above the first in Martial Arts and Melee, you can pick one Maneuver (but the prerequisite for learning these maneuvers if Martial Arts 4, so that gets a little wiggy). There are nine special maneuvers associated with the Shih in this book, and they suggest you also check out the Maneuvers in other books.
The joke with martial arts in WoD is that every singe time someone writes rules for Martial Arts, they manage to write something different from every other martial arts rules in WoD. And it's a deep fucking rabbit hole to disappear down. This book, for example, suggests
World of Darkness: Combat and the
Akashic Brotherhood sourcebook. (Note: The Akashic Brotherhood are a Mage tradition with their own martial art, Do, which gets its own skill and is the focus for several of their rotes, or pre-determined spells, many of which mimic legendary martial arts feats.) For shits and giggles, let's actually compare a couple of these.
Demon Hunter X:
Snout Strike The shapeshifting hengeyokai all have sensitive spots, and for most of them - the mammalian ones at least - the snout is a weak point. The Shih learned this early on and have used it to their advantage when forced to do battle with a shapeshifter who is in animal or half-animal form. The Snout Strike is a short, vicious jab, or in some cases, a grab, to the muzzle. When executed properly, a Snout Strike targets the nerve ganglia of the shapechanger, causing intense pain, sever watering of the eyes, and a weakness in cognitive functions.
A successful strike inflicts normal damage for a martial-arts fist strike, but it also reduces the opponent's Dice Pool by two for one turn per success. A character can choose to keep the pressure on the sensitive area, but there's a serious risk: Continued pressure to the nerve ganglia can cause a hengeyokai to frenzy, at which point, the effects of the Snout Strike are ignored. This maneuver is most often used at the beginning of a conflict, to "Even the odds."
Roll: Dex + Martial Arts
Difficulty: 8
Damage: Special
Actions: 1
World of Darkness: Combat
Note: WoD:C maneuvers are purchased completely differently than the Mo Chi Kung Fu maneuvers, with Power Points; you get PP for every dot in Brawl or Do, Athletics, Melee, Firearms, or Dodge, plus you can buy maneuvers with freebie points or experience points.
Atemi Strike
Prerequisites: Brawl 4, Phoenix Eye Fist
Power Points: 4
Description: The fighter strikes one of his opponent's vital points, causing agonizing pain. The vital points are known as kyusho in Japan, tien-hsueh in China, kuepso or keupso in Korea, huyet in Vietnam, marman in India and rahasia in Indonesia.
System: The fighter must be able to strike an unarmored vital point on his opponent's body; if all of his opponent's vital points are protected, he cannot use this maneuver. If the maneuver is used successfully, damage from it cannot be soaked at all. However, the maneuver can be bocked in which case damage from it may be soaked as normal.
Cost: 1 Willpower
Initiative: -1
Accuracy: -1
Damage: +2
Move: -2
World of Darkness: Combat was released in 1996,
Demon Hunter X was released in 1999, so we're actually looking at the original 1994
Akashic Brotherhood Tradition Book, not the 2001 Revised version. The 1994 book does not, despite what
Demon Hunter X promised, contain any maneuvers; instead it has a couple of Do rotes, which Shih cannot use. However,
Akashic Brotherhood also has a pointer to
The Book of Shadows (1994), and
that book, in addition to having more Do rotes, also contains some Do maneuvers. These are purchased like Shih maneuvers (one per dot after the first in Do):
Kiai
Roll: Stamina + Do
Difficulty: 6
Damage: none
When struck, the Brother emits a loud yell which expels all air from the lungs, tightens the stomach muscles, and draws the testicles up into the abdominal cavity (when applicable). This maneuver allows an Akashic Brother to focus his Ki (or Chi). Like a dodge, the Kiai must be declared during the attack phase of a turn, but other actions may still be taken (the Dice Pool must be split, as usual). For each success on this roll, one extra die may be added to a regular soak roll or an Intimidation roll if the character desires. If Kiai is used as a prerequisite for a Do Rote (see Book Four), the stylist rolls his Arete instead of Stamina + Do. The task is a manifestation of his enlightenment rather than a display of power. The roll may be done the turn before the rote is executed to avoid splitting a Dice Pool.
Also, while none of them mention it, there are martial arts rules buried in the
Kindred of the East book. You have to pick whether it's a hard or soft style, which changes your difficulty for certain attacks and what maneuvers you can pick. The maneuvers work like Shih maneuvers, where you get one for every dot in Martial Arts after the first.
Mantis Stirke: This open-handed blow targets the opponent's vital organs or (against undead opponents) Chi gates and vitae centers. Difficulty 7, Damage Str + loss of one Chi point (if Kuei-jin) or Blood Point (if Kindred). Against mortals, the Mantis Strike inflicts Str + 1 damage.
...and that's not even all of them. You dig deeper, there are more things hiding out there. Some of them are even vaguely useful, but I'm going to harp on three things:
1) These are all completely disorganized and use a crazy mishmash of systems that don't quite interact well with each other, and you and the Storyteller need a come to Buddha meeting about how this shit works. Because many of the individual combat maneuvers from the different sources are straight up better than the powers that the Shih can buy...but the hard limits on buying them (5 dots in Martial Arts and Melee only gets you 8 out of the 9 Mo Chi Kung Fu maneuvers) means you're not going to be able to get all those maneuvers...unless the Storyteller ops to allow you to buy them using the WoD: Combat method (or even lets you buy Do in addition to Martial Arts, so you can get some Do maneuvers).
2) All of these are explicitly combat related, and combat in WoD is a sin. The system is terrible. Even if it wasn't terrible, most of the martial arts maneuvers have ridiculously high difficulty ratings, so while it's cool to literally thrust your hand into a Kuei-Jin's chest and make them unable to spend Chi for a couple of turns, your odds of actually getting that to go off are slim.
3) The designers were obviously not referring to the actual books that they referred the players to. They didn't have a goddamn clue how martial arts worked, they just had vague memories of something and went with it. That's just bad game design. Layer over layer of bad mechanics, and it's up to players and gamemasters to dumpster dive through 3-4 different books looking for...something.
I flipped through
Demon Hunter X a couple of times and couldn't find it explicitly stated anywhere that the Shih couldn't take levels in Sorcery Paths, so that's technically also an option, although not one that's ever presented in this or any other product as far as I'm aware. I don't know why not, the Qiao are basically Sorcery Paths by another name, and you could work in Alchemy and Enchantment into the Shih aesthetic pretty easily. The Tengu-trained Goblin Slayers are explicitly trained in Sorcery in
Dragons of the East (2000). Shih explicitly
cannot buy Numina, however.
Numina
Numina is the plural form for
numen, the Latin term for divine will or presence. In oWoD this was a catch-all for non-vampire powers, which mostly boiled down to True Faith and Psychic abilities. White Wolf sprinkles these throughout its products with abandon, pretty much never consolidating them into any kind of coherent system. Strike Force Zero gives rules for four different psychic powers, although there are a shitload more out there if you go digging. Unlike most of the other powers, there are very few systems involved - it's all a single dice roll and then the storyteller decides if that actually does anything.
Necro-Psi - You talk to the dead. Most of the powers here overlap heavily with the far-cheaper Medium merit, and are objectively worse than pretty much any brand of necromancy. Does not give any actual ability to command ghosts.
Cyber-Psi - You can talk to computers with your mind, kind of like a Scanner or a technomancer from Shadowrun. Has the drawback that you can "catch" computer viruses.
Cyberkinesis - You can control computers with your mind. There's a bit of overlap with this and cyberpsi, but it's hard to qualify the differences, except Cyber-Psi lets you surf the internet with your mind and this...doesn't.
Telekinesis - This is a variant of an existing version that lets you move stuff by expending Yang chi. You're generally limited by weight - it takes 5 dots just to levitate a full-grown human being off the ground.
Why do we have numina? I don't know. They're not very good. They're objectively worse than equivalent magic powers. Maybe people just like to feel special.
Strike Force Zero Enhancements
Like Shadowrun, SF0 divides their augmentations into cyberware and
bioware wetware or bioenhancements. Cyberware is powered by Yang chi, wetware is powered by Yin chi. Like the Shih, the SF0 guys are limited in how much chi they can access. Some choice options:
Emotional Suppressors - Make the user immune to Delirium, etc. for a scene. So if a werewolf goes Crinos, the agent isn't automatically useless. Also causes debilitating chronic nightmares.
Night Eyes - Allow characters to see in the dark. No chi cost!
Spy Eyes - Detachable eyes with six miniature legs. Has to be sterilized before it's popped back in the socket.
Pulse Cannon - Implanted energy weapon. No, seriously. In a World of Darkness game. That's hilarious. 2 Yin chi per shot, which should probably be Yang chi but who cares?
Rejuvenators - Nanite healing system. Spend one Yang chi, heal one health level of damage.
Sheaths - Undetectable body pockets. For when you literally need to pull a gun out of your orifice.
Cyberclaws - Technically should allow you to use certain claw-based combat maneuvers...ah, but that brings us back to Martial Arts again.
Psi-Band Radio - No chi cost. Lets you talk to your team, hand's free. Like a cell phone in you head with no apps. Because this came out before apps were a thing. If this product was updated, would it have
smart Psi-Band headphones?
Enhancers - Prosthetic limbs that give temporary +5 Strength in that limb only.
Webspinners - Thwipp.
Overall, this is...okay? It's not a robust cyberware system by any means. They don't cover going full transhuman by adding a third limb or what the practical limitations are, or what happens to the implant if you become a ghoul or a vampire or anything like that. Like a lot of WoD stuff, it's handwaved. But cyberware of any sort is pretty rare outside of a couple of bad Cyberpunk 2020 mashups and certain Technocracy supplements, and oh shit yes we're going there in chapter four, Storytelling.
