Playing Final Stand

[Rich Forest]

Played Tim Denee's Final Stand last night.  It was a short adventure, with just one player and one GM.  It was a blast.  

The Character: Fai Yuan, the Mysterious Stranger and master of the Way of the Stone Mantis.  He wore a long charcoal overcoat and his face was always partially obscured, his hands and knuckles were heavily calloused, and he was lanky with particularly long arms.  

The Doom: A secret underground society of sewer dwellers has begun carrying out guerrilla raids, attacking streetcars in Big City.  These raids are actually cover for information gathering.  Soon, they will invade the city en masse and take it over for their leader, the lord of all the beggars, the great King Rat.

The Tie-in: The mysterious stranger was just passing through town when he stumbled across one of the raids and got caught up in it.  Now he's staying long enough to rid the city of this vermin.  

The Adventure: Mostly action.  I didn't have a lot prepared.  Fai Yuan spotted one of the vermin in a misty graveyard in a bamboo grove, digging his way out to sneak into the city.  Fai Yuan fought and defeated him.  Then Fai Yuan met up with a Street Bum, and master of the Way of the Gentle Cobra, named "Filthy Wang," who told him that King Rat was holding a tournament in the sewers to find his new general.  They went down there, meeting up as well with "Specter Shin," a Reformed Villain and master of the Way of the Flowing Eagle.  Together, they entered the tournament, eventually facing each other (Specter Shin was quite the snide bastard, and Fai Yuan's player was itching to face him).  Fai Yuan defeated all his foes and faced King Rat himself, defeating him and scattering the vermin back into the deepest levels of the sewers to no longer plague the good people of Big City.

Notes: We were using the original draft, which was the version I had printed up at the time.  At first we were a little confused about starting Inner Peace (now "Chi")—it might be a good idea to add a line in the character creation summary about starting characters beginning with a zero.  We found it under the section, "Inner Peace," but it took some looking.  

We both LOVED the ways to get Inner Peace/Chi.  The player went full bore at all of them and scored a lot of Inner Peace.  Better yet, they all contributed to making the game fun, fun, fun.  I can only imagine how fun it would be with a bunch of players.

Fights were fast.  Most of them were over in one round, though we had a couple that lasted two or three.  We didn't use the basic moves very often, tending to focus heavily on the more powerful special techniques.  A lot of the strategy that began to develop by the end was centered on trying to find ways to make the opponent spend/use more dice than you, so that you had a couple left over at the end to get in solid free hits.  This worked out especially well when the player spent Inner Peace to Improvise, jacking up the damage of his final moves at the end of a round.  Most of our matches ended at the end of a round, as one character with more Action dice used them to finish off the other.  

I think I can back up Kenway's experience with Action Points.  They were a lot more important in our strategies than Energy.  

I wasn't looking at the rules at the time, so I was working by memory, but we did initiative like this: if you have more Action Points, you have initiative until you are tied or have less.  If you are tied, initiative goes to whoever hasn't gone most recently.  

We liked the way Action Points and initiative worked, actually.  It has a big effect on strategies, of course, and if someone has enough of an Action Point advantage, I can see that person just winning the fight.  In fact, there were times when someone decided to just take a hit, basically giving up Energy in order to get an Action Point advantage.  

There is a lot to think about during fights.  Most of the time spent running the fights was spent deciding what to would be the most strategically sound move rather than actually dealing with the dice.  This was good.

We used a color code for Punch, Kick, and Throw dice (white for Punch, black for Kick, and green for Throw) because we had tons of d6s of various colors between us.  I think it made things flow even more quickly.  It also affected strategies.  We could see what kind of defenses the opponent had available based on the dice sitting in front of them.

I used the three descriptors rule from character creation for all NPCs as well.  I liked it, and it made me kind of excited about preparing more characters for future adventures.  It also was fun for the player, who used the descriptors of NPCs as clues to their styles and stereotypes.

At the time of play, I didn't have the summary sheets for Inner Peace/Chi and for the combat abilities.  After the game, I planned to make some.  I've noticed that you already have.  Thank you.

The combat will need more play before I can really say much for certain about how it runs.  After the half dozen matches that occurred in this adventure, we were only just starting to develop consistent strategies.

I made all NPCs in the tournament equal to the PC in abilities: in fact, I made them using the same character creation rules.  The difference was that the PC had Inner Peace, and I didn't give the NPCs any.  The Inner Peace made the difference—Fai Yuan won all his matches.

Rich

[Tim Denee]

Hey Rich,

Good stuff. Based on what you and Kenway said, I'm pretty sure I'm going to double all the energy values (pending a personal playtest). If my calculations are correct, this shouldn't have any effect except to double the fight times.

Comments:

- Did Fai Yuan use the shocking revelation quirk (just out of curiousity)?
In fact, now that I think about it, I realize that shocking revelation isn't really suitable to multiple sessions... There are only so many skeletons one person can have in their closet. I suppose after a couple of personal revelations, the mysterious stranger could use it to reveal amazing things about the plot, NPCs, or other player characters.
- Initiative is like so: at the start of a round, whoever got the most action successes (has the most moves) is the attacker. After that, "attacker" status switches when the defender successfully defends, when the attacker passes their go, or when the attacker runs out of moves.
- don't forget it's ok to beat the player character(s). The opponents should be a good challenge, anyway. With the combat quick-sheet, it should be ultra-easy to gradually ramp up your NPC creation until they're a challenge (give them a little more energy and action each time and slightly better techniques).
- Did you use the structure section? Fluff, levels, rewards, and what-not? Did you let Fai Yuan narrate plot twists if he won levels?
-what volume-setting was it? Did that have any effect whatsoever?

I'm going to play it myself real soon, promise.

Thanks for taking the time, Rich.

Tim

P.S: I had a dream last night that there was a movie from the 80s called Final Stand with Tom Cruise in it, a romantic comedy. I was mortified.

[Valamir]

P.S: I had a dream last night that there was a movie from the 80s called Final Stand with Tom Cruise in it, a romantic comedy. I was mortified.

You are a sick sick man and I am now officially scared of you ;-)

[Rich Forest]

Hi Tim,

I think doubling energy would work nicely.  I had even thought about that option myself.  

Fai Yuan didn't use the shocking revelation.  I think you're right--it's a pretty dramatic thing, and it could be hard to use too often.  It is very cool, however.  Also, I think Fai Yuan's player wasn't quite sure how to use it, so he didn't.  Now, considering that our story was a start to finish, deal with the doom in one shot kind of game, he could have used it.  I think an example of a shocking revelation would make it easier to figure out what kinds of things it includes.  I realized it after the game, but at the time we were kind of making characters quickly, and I don't think we quite got it.  I like you're solution regarding the plot, etc.  

Initiative: check.

Yeah, I do know it's ok to beat the PCs... in this case I just didn't manage.  Of course, I had some hand in that, considering that I didn't give the NPCs any Inner Peace to play around with, but in our fights it was really that factor that made the difference.  

I didn't get to use the structure section.  Basically, we didn't even decide what game we were going to play until Fai Yuan's player got to my place.  He chose the doom and the tie-in, and I improvised everything else, including all the NPCs.  That was a bit of work, mechanically, because at the time I didn't have the combat quick sheet, but it flowed pretty well.  

I would like to try the play structure, however.  In fact, since playing that session I've been thinking about other ideas, and now I'm ready to plan something very Power Stone like in style.  

We set the game at cranked.  I think it definitely had an effect of keeping our descriptions at roughly the same power level.  I'd have to play it set at a different level to see the difference, however.  When I run something Power Stone inspired, the game will probably be set "to the max," so then I'll be able to tell you more about how those settings affect play.  
 
It's a fun game, Tim, I'm sure I'll play it again.

Well, I'm off to Gen Con,

Rich