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I'm working on that with my GM now, to try to keep the game fun after hitting AV17 or so. But the deterministic part is definitely the worst part of the game, as is how much of stunting, etc, is assumed to just be fluff in the rules. He got frustrated because my PC can easily Willowstep up to 19 or Foxdodge to 22 and was even managing to dodge around Battlechimp Potemkin, even though I couldn't really hit him back (and when I did, getting around Tgh13 with my bare hands and all my Fu going to dodging and my Blue Spear jammed up was impossible), until the fight just kinda ended with him leaving after a few rounds of mismatched combat. Similarly, the base mook rules are *terrible* in the original FS1. Their AVs are so low they might as well not be at the fight, yet they take a ton of time to roll for if you do them RAW. The +5 To Kill thing was a huge mistake, I think. Mooks should've been more like 7th Sea Brutes, dangerous in numbers or if you leave squads of them unattended, but fragile as hell. Giving themselves that huge gap means they had to balance the average PC Combat AV around being 5 higher than the average mook, which with the dice means they're really never going to hit anything, but at the same time they can be frustratingly hard to actually kill. Allowing them to form squads to get bonuses to their rolls helped, but we're thinking of testing just raising base Mook AVs to 11-13 (depending on eliteness) and making them go down to anything that hits them.
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Nov 19, 2014 00:22
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FS 2 uses AVs of 7-9 for their attack, and defenses of 13. However, they immediately go down if they're hit. They changed it between playtest versions, and I feel like it makes mooks definitely more like how people imagine mooks in action movies. Unrelated to all this, I just found there was some Feng Shui chat in the main chat thread about the metaplot/setting/whatever, and was wondering if someone could sum up the big changes going on in the timeline push forward? I'm trying not to read too much into the setting info because I'm mostly a player right now, but I want to know if there were neat things I'd be missing just by sticking with the FS2 setting as written if I decided to run the game.
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Dec 22, 2014 04:56
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The timeline push-forward is accompanied by two major, major events that shuffle the way the world works. The first is that the core junctures change--some close up, some open. 69 AD becomes 690 AD, 1850 stays the same, 1996 becomes 2014, and 2056 becomes I think 2072. As a result, the core base of the Lotus is cut off, and this produces interesting ramifications for their agents scattered throughout the 'verse. These mostly relate to the fate of their leader, who they know died but they know where, and should they revive him to lead them, or to steal his power? Also their demon island, that's still a thing. The other thing that happens, to spoil things, is that the Jammers win. They set off the Chi Bomb, and it annihilates 2056. Anyone attuned to a Feng Shui site from that timeframe dies. The Buro is gone--completely obliterated, excepting possibly anyone who wasn't high-level enough to be attuned. Most of the population from that time is gone. All the Buro infra in the Netherworld is obliterated and taken over by the natives. The world has gone from Blade Runner to Mad Max. The Jammers partially survive. Potemkin is among them, and he realizes that, no, he didn't ACTUALLY want this. He gets in a big fight with Furious George, who is just fine with the future being hosed because now they're the Kings of hosed. The Jammers undergo a split--Potemkin takes a small detachment back into the Netherworld to go poke around in the past and try to undo the Chi Bomb he just did. George takes the bulk of the Jammers' more radicalized elements and starts a monkey empire in the ruins of the world. To give a little bit of framing, Potemkin closed down the Genocide Lounge. He didn't find it funny anymore.
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Dec 27, 2014 06:33
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I feel like resolving their quandary, after running something similar for awhile, does a lot of damage to the Jammers. Like, definitively saying 'Yes, their detractors are right, the Jammers are going to kill everyone' isn't actually interesting at all. I thought it might be, considering that I tend to view Potemkin as one of the strongest villains in the setting and a really interesting antagonist, but after playing with it it really doesn't help them. It just sort of makes them more grimdark and boring.
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Dec 27, 2014 07:18
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Well, I think the problem was less with the Jammers, which is why they stuck around, and more with the Buro, which is why they got evaporated. The Buro is every right-winger's most paranoid nightmares made reality--a one-world government with enforced tolerance to the point of insanity, no freedom of anything, no individuality, nada. Try to change this, the government evaporates you from space. Take what you have now, instead, which is every LEFT-winger's most paranoid nightmares. The world is hosed, libertarian nongovernmentalism taken to its extreme. Mad Max. And in what's become of George's Jammers, the other variation of that nightmare--a complete dictatorial fascist slave state based on racial superiority (just, y'know, ape-racial). They're both Bad Futures, they're just Bad Futures for a different time. The Buro was the Bad Future of the direction of 1996, a gradual bureaucratic grinding towards a forcibly harmonious OWG. Ape Is King World is the Bad Future of the 2010s--the new far-right radicalism that is currently sweeping the world wins, HARD, and society blows apart in a no-taxes-no-government frenzy, with what's left being possibly worse to live in than death. That's the point of the update--if all the game needed was mechanics tweaks, they could have released a new mechanical update for the classic setting and left it at that. The zeitgeist has changed, and the flow of the chi has to change with it. Redeye Flight fucked around with this message at 09:11 on Dec 27, 2014 |
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Dec 27, 2014 08:52
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It's funny, because the Jammers have always actually been fascists, not anarchists. A nebulous enemy, a great and beloved leader, the sense that there is treachery holding them back from the rightful order of the world that their strength should give them, the desire for the strongest and most violent to rule, an image of a golden age before 69 and the intervention of the chi-manipulating wizards, and a strong authoritarian bent backed by anti-state violence. Hell, just read Major Hottie's background; turns on Buro for ordering her to kill civilians, etc, for the greater good and then joins the Jammers, justifying following the orders of the Battlechimp and blowing up civilians by 'it's for the greater good'. They're really funny because they're silly hyperviolent monkeys, but they're also pretty horrible dudes. Like, that's really not a new strain underlying their basic concept. E: Heck, thinking on it, that's the entire point of the Genocide Lounge. An actual Anarchist encounters them and is like 'Holy poo poo these people are crazy, I need to try to educate them.'
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Dec 27, 2014 09:01
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Also, don't necessarily focus too much on Bad Future. 2014 provides some interesting stuff but 690 is a WHOLE new kettle of fish. In China, you're out of the hard years and in the middle of the powerful Tang Dynasty, which is operating a golden age of Chinese history. Taoism has come into the picture, and religious turmoil is boiling. The Imperial Examinations actually properly begin shortly before this juncture. The Silk Road is thriving. Moreover, WU ZETIAN makes her ascendance to the throne in October! Look up her life story, you'll see that poo poo REALLY loving gets real when she gets involved. More importantly than ANYTHING else, however. 69 had Rome at its peak. 690 gives us something completely different. Islam. In 690 the Umayyad Dynasty, the first of the great Islamic Caliphates, has just arisen. Islam is spreading like MAD. War is rife in North Africa--the Berbers are going to be fighting the Umayyads for years. The Sassanids in Persia just got crushed forty years ago, and the Caliphate is clashing with Tang China since the last Sassanid ruler defected to them and has set up shop in Afghanistan. The Byzantines are going to fight the Caliphate in two years and get their asses kicked. Baghdad hasn't even been built yet but Damascus has never been greater. Education, madrasahs, scientists and laboratories, gardens and poets! Europe is kind of a shitpit but the Byzantines are still around if you really want it, Constantinople's kind of cool I guess, WHO loving CARES?! Islam!
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Dec 27, 2014 09:11
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Yeah, I really like 690 as a time juncture. The rise of Islam, the poo poo going on in China, all of it is some good stuff, though I'd have personally removed the Lotus to make room for some new villains as long as they were trying to clear Obvious Villain House since they're specifically founded in the actual eunuch palace corruption that went on in Han China. Don't get me wrong: I love the Lotus as much as I love Buro for Obvious Villains with Sinister Plans, but it feels like they could've gone with someone more grounded in 690. Have you ever noticed this thread has a lot more fun discussing the setting than the mechanics of Feng Shui?
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Dec 27, 2014 09:19
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You can only discuss mechanics for so long before you've said everything there is to say. I could dream up character ideas and discuss history for days on end.
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Dec 27, 2014 09:21
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Also, Feng Shui's mechanics are kind of pants. Some day, I really want to play Roman Jack Burton as a lost merchant Everyman Hero in 69 AD China who just wants his cart of goods back.
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Dec 27, 2014 09:22
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Redeye Flight posted:You can only discuss mechanics for so long before you've said everything there is to say. I could dream up character ideas and discuss history for days on end. Yeah, I think it's more this than bad mechanics. Feng Shui's mechanics are basically there, they work for their stated goal of emulating beats. They work well enough as a pacing mechanic and a resolution mechanic without getting too much in the way of the game, and are made to create excitement in ways outside of success-fail. They are straightforward and don't have many pieces. They could be better, they could probably be worse. This is my entire opinion on the mechanics of Feng Shui. It would be a very boring discussion. The awesome setting and emulating Honk Kong style action movies are the two major reasons to play this game. That's why these get talked about. Speaking of, if I was running a new Feng Shui game with people who've never played the game before, would it be advised to start in the Modern juncture? Are any of the other junctures as open as the modern one in terms of using right out of the box and not bothering with trying to move shticks around to fit the setting/situation? Do the other settings have a lot more Chi War stuff baked in?
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Dec 27, 2014 18:26
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The mechanics actively create stalls in any combat between people with relatively equal abilities and make combat drag on quite a bit sometimes, and the authors never actually considered how much d6-d6 changes the math on modifiers when originally designing the game, I'm sure of it. The mechanics are outright bad in a lot of places, but I overlook them because I goddamn love the setting and concept. Yes, the modern juncture is the easiest to start with primarily because you can start the PCs not necessarily knowing much of the wider setting and have them discover it alongside their characters.
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Dec 27, 2014 18:37
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Redeye Flight posted:The timeline push-forward is accompanied by two major, major events that shuffle the way the world works. The first is that the core junctures change--some close up, some open. 69 AD becomes 690 AD, 1850 stays the same, 1996 becomes 2014, and 2056 becomes I think 2072. As a result, the core base of the Lotus is cut off, and this produces interesting ramifications for their agents scattered throughout the 'verse. These mostly relate to the fate of their leader, who they know died but they know where, and should they revive him to lead them, or to steal his power? Also their demon island, that's still a thing. Dunno if it really needs to be spoilered, but Gao Zhang isn't dead; he's stuck in 69 AD because he didn't jump ship before the Netherworld portals slammed shut. The Lotus in 690 are trying to get him back by either trying to force 69 AD to re-open as a pop-up juncture or by trying to find his remains in 690 or later to raise him from the dead.
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Dec 27, 2014 18:41
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Night10194 posted:The mechanics actively create stalls in any combat between people with relatively equal abilities and make combat drag on quite a bit sometimes, and the authors never actually considered how much d6-d6 changes the math on modifiers when originally designing the game, I'm sure of it. The mechanics are outright bad in a lot of places, but I overlook them because I goddamn love the setting and concept. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wYCh5nxyCI What if the stalling is intentional? Notice the number of people who die who's most important trait is "have a gun", and then notice that the three characters who mattered in the story were the last three in the fight, often missing one another in the process of a ~5 minute shootout with lots of bullets flying. How many sequences are there here? How much of it is people barely failing dice rolls, just needing a bit of fortune? Just from watching this and comparing it to the mechanics, I'd argue that Feng Shui has a great mechanic that does what it tries to do: Emulate the pacing of a Hong Kong action movie. Now, whether making a mechanic that emulates Hong Kong action movies as well as it does is something worth doing, or is fun..That's arguable and mostly based on opinion. But I disagree that the authors don't know what their dice mechanic does. In fact, I'd say it does exactly what they want it to do, for good or for ill. But yeah, that does sound like the easiest way to do things to keep it in the present. I'm trying to run this for people who haven't really had much experience out of the d20-sphere in the last decade or so, so leaving options open seems like a good idea. I'm not even sure this will turn into a campaign, though, so what would be more important, bringing up the Chi War as a backstory to the events of a one-shot, or just dropping them literally into the middle of a time-travel-caused rumble?
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Dec 28, 2014 21:58
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That's well and good until you're stuck going 'I stunt I miss' for 2 hours. What takes 5 minutes on screen takes a hell of a lot longer in an RPG and it would be better if the 'I missed by inches' exchanges were modeled up to the telling blow as the actual rolled outcome (whether it hits or not) rather than each missed punch and shot.
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Dec 28, 2014 22:01
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Night10194 posted:That's well and good until you're stuck going 'I stunt I miss' for 2 hours. What takes 5 minutes on screen takes a hell of a lot longer in an RPG and it would be better if the 'I missed by inches' exchanges were modeled up to the telling blow as the actual rolled outcome (whether it hits or not) rather than each missed punch and shot. Right, which is why I said for good or for ill. Also, to hit, you just need to tie. If you have the same AV as their defense, that means you should hit a little over 50% of the time assuming they aren't dodging. And if they are dodging, they're spending part of their sequence doing nothing. Plus, there are fortune dice, which everyone gets at least 6 of. These refresh every session, or at least has been what my GM has been doing. This should turn at least 6 near hits into actual hits, possibly even significant hits if you're really fortunate (  ). Alternately, try different things. Do stunts against the environment, use your skills or something. At some point, all dice mechanics suffer from rolls being lovely as well. No mechanic will stop you from feeling lovely if you roll nothing but garbage.
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Dec 28, 2014 22:18
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I think this may be the Feng Shui-est thing ever. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMH29mekU14 Apparently a bunch of the scenes in the trailer aren't in the movie, but that's fine because the trailer is amazing on its own.
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Jan 9, 2015 04:17
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cjLddsTHPA Includes witches and Chow Yun Fat with an RPG... Humbug Scoolbus fucked around with this message at 21:33 on Jan 10, 2015 |
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Jan 10, 2015 21:31
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It really it awesome how much Feng Shui really is Hong Kong Cinema The Setting. The more I talk about 80s Hong Kong movies, the more I find out about the weird fascination with magic, the supernatural and things that are either inspiring setting ideas or flat out pulled into the setting. Unrelated to this, has anyone tried running either Feng Shui game in a PbP format? Are there any good tools online for running what could be a pretty granular initiative system?
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Jan 11, 2015 23:24
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thelazyblank posted:It really it awesome how much Feng Shui really is Hong Kong Cinema The Setting. The more I talk about 80s Hong Kong movies, the more I find out about the weird fascination with magic, the supernatural and things that are either inspiring setting ideas or flat out pulled into the setting. Feng Shui is nightmare enough to run on something like IRC. I would never even attempt it in PBP. The initiative system and the nature of the fights just don't lend themselves to 'Each battle takes an irl month.'
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Jan 12, 2015 23:42
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New KS update:quote:Fully edited and in the last stages of layout this week, the Feng Shui 2 core book is looking amazing. We've got almost all of the gorgeous full-color art in hand, and after this weekend the book gets passed around for internal last-stage proofing post-layout in order to catch anything we missed. Based on our current rate of progress, all of you who backed at the $10 level or higher should be getting your PDF copies this month!   Do we want to do a new thread when that happens?
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Apr 2, 2015 21:44
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Evil Mastermind posted:
Maybe working on a new OP, making it a little cleaner and give more good info. Also, 2015 art is so much better, and I'm hoping we get more of it before the PDF comes out.
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Apr 2, 2015 23:29
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Hot drat. I can't wait. I think a new OP sounds like a great idea.
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Apr 2, 2015 23:37
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Good, because I really like making OPs. 
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Apr 2, 2015 23:43
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Clearly a signature ride. Just smashed through a concrete highway barrier and the bumper isn't even scratched. 
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Apr 3, 2015 00:42
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Evil Mastermind posted:New KS update: This. This is the most Feng Shui image possible. They should have sent a poet.
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Apr 3, 2015 21:29
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Did they make the new rules for Feng Shui 2 better than they were previously or will there still the old "kinda boring combat" problems?
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Apr 3, 2015 22:04
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Impermanent posted:Did they make the new rules for Feng Shui 2 better than they were previously or will there still the old "kinda boring combat" problems? Prefacing this with the fact that I didn't really play any extensive FS1 due to getting into that party a little late. Also, I like the narrative function of misses in action movies, so I never felt that the old system was boring the few times I got to play. The combat mechanics, at their base, still have the same game flow to them. The major changes are in how most of the attributes are gone, and the ones that remain have been rebalanced against one another in a more concrete fashion. There are no more derived statistics, and the primary attribute list has been shrunk down quite a bit: Primary Attack (Guns, Martial Arts, Sorcery, Scroungetech, Mutant), Secondary Attack (same list as primary, some don't have this), Defense, Toughness, Fortune Stat (Fortune, Magic, Chi, Genome) and Speed. At game start, none of these can change and even in game, you can only increase them on every 5th advance. This allowed them to do a better job of balancing things out so that everyone can have a bigger part in combat, and remove giant stat gaps. So, no more really big speed or attack variations from the start of the game, but enough to give people niches in their combat abilities. Everyone now has a minimum of 6 fortune points which refresh at the end of a session. This makes combats slightly less miss-filled, since you can boost after the roll to try and make a barely-miss actually hit. In addition, many of the shticks have added pieces that take the sting out of missing, which smooths out the misses and either increases the damage values of a hit or the chances to hit. Overall, this increases how much players feel like what their characters do matter, and allows to have more fun without hitting. Overall, if you just didn't like the flow of the game or the level of swing in the dice, Feng Shui 2 is not for you. But, if you just felt that Feng Shui 1 was close to something good, but could use a little more polish and a little more consistency, along with a little more balance between archetypes, than Feng Shui 2 should be your thing.
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Apr 3, 2015 23:24
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I really, really wish they'd dropped the d6-d6 mechanic entirely and started fresh. Surely they could find a better way to do resolution.
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Apr 3, 2015 23:29
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Night10194 posted:I really, really wish they'd dropped the d6-d6 mechanic entirely and started fresh. Surely they could find a better way to do resolution. We know. I will say that 2nd edition is a lot more understanding of how to work with the d6-d6 than 1st edition. Having the unskilled roll be a 7 and reducing difficulties to non-combat actions shows that they put some thought into making d6-d6 work for the game that they wrote. They're never gonna make everyone happy with d6-d6, but this is a second edition through and through. Keeping what did work, cleaning up what didn't.
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Apr 3, 2015 23:49
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I'm so excited to hear this project is going forward, especially since one kickstarter I backed around the same time has cancelled, another is running late and for some reason I couldn't get kickstarter to let me join The Dracula Dossier or the new Paranoia campaigns. So I've very excited to see how quickly this has been coming along part of me has been hoping that maybe we'll start seeing some of the physical rewards before August. Though I have been wondering, have the PDF packs for Feng Shui 1 been given out to those that backed at those levels/added it on?
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Apr 5, 2015 06:07
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Yeah, I think it was done through BackerKit.
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Apr 5, 2015 06:16
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Yup, got my PDFs a few months ago through backerkit. Should still be able to get in there.
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Apr 5, 2015 16:45
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Okay thanks. I deleted all of the emails in my gmail recently so that email got deleted crap. I guess I'll send them an email tomorrow to see about that getting fixed.
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Apr 6, 2015 03:08
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Hello, alternate take on the future juncture. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCHmqJgs1ow
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Apr 6, 2015 21:53
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For those who feel like they spend way too much time rolling for mooks: http://fs2.lostpapyr.us/
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Apr 6, 2015 22:15
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So included in the most recent announcement was the bit where the pop-up junctures mini-sourcebook was out to freelancers. Not long after, Jon Rogers (Leverage, the Librarians, Fell's Five, some RPG sourcebook work, etc.) who was promoting the kickstarter on twitter pretty heavily, tweeted: JonRog1 posted:So now I need to find collections of the North China Herald from 1929 thru 1937. This'll be fun. The North China Herald, was, of course, the English language Shanghai newspaper. Note that the last date he needs it for is the year that the Shanghai Popup juncture happens in. I am not saying he's writing it, but...I think maybe he's writing it, and I am super-hyped.
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Apr 7, 2015 11:42
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So, I'm running a Feng Shui 2 game at 1d4 con in a couple of weeks, and it's unclear whether or not the book will be released to backers by then. Has anyone made prettified versions of the Feng Shui 2 archetype sheets? The beta ones are understandably pretty rough.
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Apr 9, 2015 01:11
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LeSquide posted:So, I'm running a Feng Shui 2 game at 1d4 con in a couple of weeks, and it's unclear whether or not the book will be released to backers by then. Has anyone made prettified versions of the Feng Shui 2 archetype sheets? The beta ones are understandably pretty rough. As a matter of fact, yes I do! It's the ones from the playtest doc, just reformatted for readability and so they're all one-page. I don't remember if they're for the original doc or the updated one, though.
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Apr 9, 2015 03:20
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Evil Mastermind posted:As a matter of fact, yes I do! It's the ones from the playtest doc, just reformatted for readability and so they're all one-page. Looks like the updated one, since the Full Metal Nutball has his proper Bag Full of Rules! This is fantastic. Thanks so much!
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Apr 9, 2015 03:37
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