Refreshing Rain: Wuxia Pathos and Astrology

[Shreyas Sampat]

The water barely shimmered as Li Mu Bai ran across its surface.  Jen followed, marring the lake with expanding rings.

Wuxia is not about the kung fu.  It's about the people.

"Do you know why I am going to defeat you?"  He shifted his weight effortlessly, shifting from one pose to another like an eel.
"No."  She struck at him, again, again, again.  The air shivered as the humming blade passed.
"You're like the fire: swift, determined, hungry.  But the unfathomed sea of patience will extinguish you."  Still effortlessly he rippled out of the way of the blade, parrying absently with his staff.

Refreshing Rain is about the emotional struggle of wuxia.  Sort of.  It's set in the misty forests and snow-capped peaks of Imperial China.

Characters in Refreshing Rain are all masters of this or the other style of kung fu.  It's just the way things are.

Characters have scores in five Elements: Water, Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal.  These have certain associations about them:
Water: Solitude, privacy, introspection, philosophy, mystery, truth, honesty, anxiety, nervousness, insecurity. (Images: Black, Night, Winter)
Wood: Leadership, assertiveness, creativity, planning, decision-making, competitiveness, conflict, anger, frustration. (Images: Green, Morning, Spring)
Fire: Self-expression, emotional extremes, empathy, extrovert, attention-seeking, sociable, talkative. (Images: Red, Mid-day, Midsummer)
Earth: Caring, supportive, nourishing, family-oriented, stability, grounding, "mother hen", worrier. (Images: Yellow, Afternoon, Late summer)
Metal: Precise, meticulous, logical, analytical, moderation, self-control, morality, tendency to pessimism (Images: White, Evening, Autumn)

Characters also have five Virtues that they associate with their Elements; the Virtues are Poise, Compassion, Conviction, Grace, and Quickness.
Poise: governs demeanor, stillness, silence, balance.  The bamboo scene in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was a use of Poise.
Compassion: governs emotions, perception, inner strength.  Qigong healing is a use of Compassion, as is reading another's emotions or fighting style.
Conviction: controls force of mind and body.  Winning an argument, forcing open a door, breaking another's weapon, withstanding torture, all these things are Conviction.
Grace: controls precision and beauty.  Swordfighting is often an act of Grace, as are some forms of wuxia flight.  Walking silently across a nightingale floor, speaking eloquently, playing music, composing poetry, all are uses of Grace.
Quickness: represents speed of body and mind.  With Quickness, you can solve puzzles, run across grass, find someone in time.

In addition, each character has a Constellation, in which each star represents something important to him, and each line represents a relationship.

Conflict Resolution:
Each player rolls 3d12 for the appropriate Virtue, chooses the second-highest die, and they compare.
If one Element Destroys another, then the Destroyed Element chooses the third-highest die.
If one Element Creates another, then the Created Element rolls an extra die.

Characters have two Resources: Yin Qi and Yang Qi.
Yin Qi is external; it can be spent to make an opponent roll fewer dice.
Yang Qi is internal; it can be spent to choose a higher-ranked die.
With either use, it must be declared before the dice are rolled.

The Creative cycle of elements: water > wood > fire > earth > metal > water ...
The Destructive cycle of elements: water > fire > metal > wood > earth > water ...

In addition, there is a Sky, the space where all the Constellations are placed.  Five Planets move across the Sky; a player can move one whenever he wins a conflict.  Each Planet is governed by an Element; the player can only move the Planet that he won with or defeated.  Whenever a Planet moves into a particular Constellation, the scene changes to something appropriate for that Constellation.

Finally, there is the Weather.  I'm not sure how I will implement this yet, but I think that each character will have a Weather condition in which they regain Qi, or each character will have a Weather condition that prevails whenever the game is in their Constellation.

Now I have to ask a couple of things:
How will I implement mystical objects, things like the Green Destiny sword?
Second, how do I differentiate characters of different levels of competence?

[Tim Denee]

Hi Shreyas,

I like the angle on wuxia. It's very interesting. However, there seems to be a heck of a lot of things to keep track of and remember; not only the constellation, the sky, the weather, the elements, and the virtues, but also yin and yang, what the different elements embody, and which ways the destructive/creative cycles go. With a good character sheet though, a lot of that probably wouldn't be an issue.

Could you please show an example character and an example of conflict resolution? I'm not quite getting it at this point.

Thanks,

Tim

[Shreyas Sampat]

Tim,

I see this as a game that takes a good deal to set up, but once you've done that it more or less runs itself.

Expanded Sky rules:
I think that the Sky can be drawn up on a sheet of graph paper or something, and the Planets can be little chips or stones, which have rules governing their movement like chess pieces...
Water Planet makes knight moves.
Earth Planet makes rook moves.
Wood Planet makes bishop moves.
Metal Planet moves one square diagonally and then makes a rook move.
Fire Planet moves one square orthogonally and then makes a bishop move.
Any Planet can jump over any other... it doesn't make sense they they obstruct each other's movement.

Whenever a Planet enters a Constellation, a scene begins involving the relevant Element and the Constellation, more specifically the Stars that the Planet is closest to.


The Weather:
The Weather is a manifestation.  Each Character has a Weather condition that occurs when he triggers a scene by moving Planets.

Keeping Track of Qi:
I suggest that this be done via chips or something; my example of the main part of a character sheet has two little "pools" where Qi chips can be kept.

I have a little image of part of a character sheet here : http://www.geocities.com/torchbearer_rpg/rain.jpg
Each Element has a little mini-symbol for the Element it Creates to its left, and the one it Destroys to the right.  As you can see, this isn't really necessary; I could just as easily have set the Elements at the vertices of a pentagram...

Conflict Resolution:
Li Kai and his cousin Li Wu are fighting a plum-blossom duel barehanded to determine who will succeed their master as the patriarch of their school.  (A plum-blossom duel is a duel fought atop many wooden poles loosely sunk into sand, arranged to form a plum blossom when seen from above.)

They declare their intention: to win the duel.  The duel can be lost be concession, or if one of the wighters falls off the poles.  This being mainly a challenge of balance in motion, the players agree on Grace as the conflict's Virtue.  They check their character sheets: Li Kai's Grace is Water, while Li Wu's is Fire.  Consequently, Wu's Virtue is Destroyed; his result will be the third-highest die he rolls.

They roll the dice.  Kai gets 3, 4, 10; Wu gets 8, 9, 11.  So Kai's final result is 4, while Wu's is 8.  Wu wins; they narrate the results.

Li Kai stood motionless atop the center pole as Li Wu ran around him, trying to disconcert him, occasionally approaching as if to make an attack.  Seeing an opening, Kai lashed out with a kick, but Wu wasn't there when it landed, and Wu landed in the sand, defeated.

[Jonathan Walton]

Shreyas, the link to your character sheet doesn't work.  All I get is an error message from Geocities.

Besides that, I love the design of your game.  The Sky reminds me of "Pale Continent" except on a metagame level, which, simply put, is one of the coolest ideas I've heard in a while.  A very neat way to simulate an astrology that is constantly changing.  Do you have any plan for what the Sky's going to look like and how you're supposed to interpret it?  I know Western astrology has a lot to do with planets being in particular "houses" or how their positions relate to each other (sing with me now: "when the moooooon is in the seventh house, and jupiter aligns with mars..."), but I would imagine Chinese astrology is a bit different.

A couple comments:

-- it's non-intuitive for me to see how reducing the number of dice the opponent rolls (using Yin Qi), is necessarily beneficial.  If you're normally choosing the second-highest die, rolling one die would seem to be better than rolling two, because you just pick that one instead of picking the lower of two.  Note that it just SEEMS that way, I don't know what the actual odds are like.

-- as for dealing with objects, I think you have a bunch of options.  One would be to associate each object with an Element (Green Destiny would be Wood, I imagine, both for the color association and because of it's association with conflict and violence), and provide bonus dice that can be drawn on when using the object.  Another would be to allow the object to affect the way the associated planet moved.  Perhaps, while you bear Green Destiny, the Wood planet is your friend (or your enemy).  If you don't like either of those, there are others...

-- on the competence issue, it would seem logical to expand the "Created/Destroyed" mechanic to reflect those.  Perhaps Li Mubai is such a master of Metal Conviction that the trait never counts as being Destroyed, even when conflicting with someone of Fire Conviction.  Likewise, weaker characters might have traits that count as being Destroyed by more than one Element.  So a younger Li Mubai might have his Metal Conviction smelt by Fire or rusted away by Water (the Element that proceeds Fire on the Destructive Cycle).  Just one idea.

-- Finally, have you decided you like pinyin after all? :)  No "Ch'i"?  No "Li Mupai"?

[Emily Care]

Shreyas,

This is such an excellent marriage of genre appropriate materials and mechanics.  Your approach (it being about the people and their emotional conflicts, not the fights) captures what's most stirring about Crouching Tiger and other such films.  And the different systems you have (constellations, elemental associations) are unique and refreshing in their novelty.  Good job. I can't wait to play!

Now I have to ask a couple of things:
How will I implement mystical objects, things like the Green Destiny sword?
Second, how do I differentiate characters of different levels of competence?

Hmm...the two thoughts I had on the second question are not so elegant, but are fairly simple to implement:
1) instead of having all characters roll 3d12, give your characters levels in the virtues and assign dice pools accordingly: more dice to higher levels.
2) how do characters gain qi? Give higher level characters access to more qi, more easily.

Basically, the problem I see with these is that they don't enhance the narrative one bit.

Maybe a better approach:
What are the true differences going to be? As you said, everyone is a master of some style or the other.  The differences could be weaknesses the character has (anger, recklessness, over-confidence, etc.) that could be incorporated into narration.  Jade Fox's inability to read and vengefulness comes to mind.  This may be far from your conception of the game, but if characters also had flaws, that disadvantaged them, higher level characters could be ones with fewer flaws, and more virtues.  Characters could be dynamic and get rid of flaws over time. Younger masters could have flaws related to their age and more ability to shed them.  


Mystical objects:
Objects like Green Dragon Sword have narrative oriented function. Although they are talked up and attributed great power, they don't really end up giving the characters greater power (no +12 Hackmaster sword here). Instead they motivate character actions.  Like a classic macguffin, Green Dragon Sword brings Jen and Jade Fox out of the wood work, allowing all the other characters to do their part.  Jen's comb sort of does the same thing, even, now that I think about it.

The objects symbolize an externalized source of power that the characters have attachment to and agenda for.  Since your scene framing mechanics are expressed by the constellation mechanics, items might be related to this in some way. Wish I had a specific suggestion, but I can't think of one as yet.

--Emily Care

[Shreyas Sampat]

Reverse response to replies, as usual:

Thanks, Emily.  Yeah, this game is based almost wholly on CTHG and the occasional martial-arts anime, not so much on wuxia; I'm really not up on my wuxia lore.

I was seriously considering the varying dicepool element, but it has the glitch that a dicepool always has to have at least two dice.  I can't think if any way to make this elegant.

Qi might vanish in a later rendition... it's not elegant either.

Your idea of specific disadvantages is really cool, though I'll have to think on it more carefully.  I want some mechanical model of it...
...one option I was considering was a Puppetland-style "I can do x, y, z; I can't do u, v, w." thing.  Then the shifting relationship of things that a character can and can't do is part of the model of his competence.

I like both of your suggestions for tieing magic to the Sky.  That's quite a concept.

Jon,

Oops... Geocities doesn't like remote linking to files.  I'll throw up a little page tonight, I think, of my embryonic game designs.  Until then, the link works if you copypaste it into the address bar, rather than clicking it.

I really know nothing at all about Chinese astrology; one of my ideas for the Sky was to have a Go board with Stars marked by white tokens, with black tokens marked with the Planets' signs moving around between them.  The larger styles of Shogi boards, too, with neat Shogi-moving pieces, would be fun to mess around with.  I once designed a chesslike game with variable board and army sizes (defined at setup), and a set of pieces much larger than was playable at once; you chose out of the pieces your army and its arrangement; some had very exotic moves.

Reducing the dicepool is only harmful, if my math is right, up to a limit of two dice.  Rolling one die is clearly better than that.  Now, this unfortunately requires that at least 2 dice have to be rolled every time.  This is one of the things that bothers me about Qi.  Possibly, I could use Qi to temporarily 'rotate' Virtues through Elements, so if you had Fire Conviction you could turn it to Wood with Yin or Earth with Yang, triggering the proper Cycle effects.

Again, I like associating objects with Elements.  I think that it's possible for objects to be of two different kinds: one is an Element-Virtue pair, the other has some kind of Sky mechanic.  *muse muse*

Finally, I like this extenting the Cycle idea, but now I'm late for class...  more later.

And yes, pinyin.

[Jonathan Walton]

Thanks, Emily.  Yeah, this game is based almost wholly on CTHG and the occasional martial-arts anime, not so much on wuxia; I'm really not up on my wuxia lore.

Make sure you see "Hero" when it comes out in March.  Zhang Yimou (arguably the most talented Chinese director ever) directs Jet Li, Zhang Ziyi, Donnie Cheung, etc. etc.  He filmed it in three colors and from three different points of view (plus a $30 million budget).  Should be the greatest wuxia movie ever.

I agree that you might want to ditch Qi altogether or use it for something completely different.  I feel like it should be a resource-for-distribution as opposed to a resource-for-spending.  Maybe you could declare one trait or Element to be "Yang-aspected/focused" and another to be "Yin-aspected/focused" and then shift those around during play.  What effect this might have, I'm not sure.  Still special stuff could happen when a Yin-trait interacted with a Yang-trait, or if two similarly-focused traits interacted.  Just another idea.

Looking at your character sheet draft, I feel like there should be some trigrams thrown into the mix, since you already have the other basics of Chinese cosmology there (the Taiji, the 5 Elements).  Feel like a little Ba Gua?  I have notes on that stuff here somewhere...

The idea of using a Go (Wei Qi, in Chinese) board is terrific.  If you're already going to go with chess-like moves, you might think about looking at the Xiang Qi (Chinese chess) board too.  It's basically like the Western one, except...

-- pieces move on lines instead of squares, as in Wei Qi.
-- there's a river in the middle that the Elephants can't cross :)
-- there's a "castle" area that limits the movements of the King and his Bodyguards.

I could see a really cool "Sky" board being created by mixing elements of both boards.  The "River" could represent the Milky Way and could be a twisted path cut irregularly across the Sky.  Likewise, you could have various "houses" or "crossroads" where movement worked a little different, like the "castles" in Xiang Qi.

Anyway, can't wait to see where you're going to go with this.

[Shreyas Sampat]

Okay... my philosophy lecture gave me some time to think, and then you throw this Ba Gua idea at me... whatever to do...

As for Constellations... better idea: Lucky Stars.  The Sky is set up at the beginning of the game, with each player putting down a number of Stars which represent people, and Ties between the Stars representing conflicts.  A scene is triggered by a Planet moving through a Tie; the scene is about that particular conflict.  If the conflict is resolved, the Tie is removed.  If a scene ends in one or more Stars having no Ties, the player who triggered them takes those Stars.

Maybe the board can have a Ba Gua embedded in it, performing the functions of the River and Castles of Xiang Qi.  More on that when I get a Sky Board drawn up.

On competence - I was thinking of the interaction of Elements, as Jon said, as the main measure of this.  An Element has a measure of 'cyclicity'; its interaction with other Elements.
Cyclicity ranges from -5 to +5.
At -5, an Element Creates all other Elements, and is Destroyed by all other Elements.
At 0, an Element Creates no Elements and no Elements Destroy it.
At +5, all Elements Create it and it Destroys all Elements.

Qi is looking more and more like an embellishment to this...

[Emily Care]

I really know nothing at all about Chinese astrology

Chinese astrology relates in large part to the time when a person is born.  You look at Year, Month, Day and Hour of birth (known as the Four Pillars).

There is a twelve year cycle of years, each associated with a different animal. The years are also associated with an element. I was born in 1971, so I'm a metal pig (oink)  There's a chart of the years for last century  here. And some history here.

"The inner circle had the eight trigrams and the outer circle the 24 directions (based on azimuth points)." This is a description of a 1000 CE chinese compass.  This page has a picture of one from 220 BCE.  

More star related astrology info:
from here:
"The seasons were also related to constellations. The oldest tradition in China connects the seasons with stars
which rise above the eastern horizon after sunset. (This is also the part of the sky where the full moon is
seen.) Thus the heart of the Blue Dragon of spring is the red giant star we call Antares in Scorpius. "

from here:
"The scientific and technological achievements of the Warring States Period (475-221 BC) are very impressive. The various feudal states all had their own court astronomers. The most famous among them -- Gan De of the State of Chu and Shi Shen of the State of Wei -- together wrote The Gan and Shi Book of the Stars, which accurately record the positions of 120 stars, constituting the world's earliest star chart. The lid of a lacquer chest of the Warring States Period unearthed in Suizhou, Hebei Province, has a list of the 28 constellations, China's earliest record of the entire list of the constellations."

from here:
"The '28 Constellations' ( er4 shi2 ba1 xiu4). The 28 constellations may have originated in China in the Zhou dynasty (1100-221 BC) and subsequently found their way to India, where they were reduced to 27 and imbued with superstitious content. Another theory is that the Chinese and Indian constellations developed independently of each other, with the Indian being older.

   In China, the 28-day Chinese version gradually displaced the Indian one for astrological purposes.The Chinese divided the heavens into 28 constellations located along the Equator and the ecliptic, each named after a star in the vicinity. In the course of a month, the moon would progress through one constellation each day. The 28 constellations were divided into four groups: the seven stars of  the east, the seven stars of the north, the seven stars of the west, and the seven stars of the south. This effectively divided the month into four lots of seven days."

--Emily Care

added later:
And link to a site with a description of wuxia.

[Jonathan Walton]

Found my notes on the trigrams :)  Read them from right-to-left as if it was top-bottom, and the URLs all link to an online character dictionary, so you can see what they all look like (you don't need Chinese language support to view them).  The transliteration is pinyin.

|||  Qian (Heaven) - http://www.zhongwen.com/d/176/x174.htm
::: Kun (Earth) - http://www.zhongwen.com/d/169/x91.htm
::| Zhen (Thunder) - http://www.zhongwen.com/d/190/x95.htm
|:: Gen (Mountain) - http://www.zhongwen.com/d/166/x225.htm
|:|  Li (Fire) - http://www.zhongwen.com/d/214/x195.htm
:|:  Kan (Water) - http://www.zhongwen.com/d/167/x162.htm
:|| Dui (Marsh) - http://www.zhongwen.com/d/167/x73.htm
||:  Xun (Wind) - http://www.zhongwen.com/d/180/x83.htm

Note that there are two main ways that the trigrams are arranged, so you're either going to have to pick one, or use different ones for different purposed (which could be interesting).  

Also, the yang/yin bars that make up the trigrams could somehow relate to yang/yin Qi if you wanted (or not).  Maybe you could keep a running tally of what Qi had been spent and use it to form trigrams?  If not, I might steal that idea for one of my own games.

For example, say you start out with ||: (Wind).  Then, Li Mubai's player spends a point of Yang Qi, shifting the trigram to |:| (Fire) and changing the tone of the game (NOTE: I'm just adding the new bar to the bottom and shifting everything up, you could also do this backwards, adding bars onto the top).  Next, another point of Yang Qi would shift things to :|| (Marsh) and etc. etc.

[Tim Denee]

What if Qi was not so much a resource to spend as a by-product of your actions/the movement of your planets? In some way (?), the more imbalance there is between your yin and your yang qi, the more bad it is for you. Perhaps character compentency is measured in the ability to level out that imbalance. Powerful objects like the Green Destiny sword cause an overload of either yin or yang, and thus only very experienced characters (who can balance out the excess yin/yang easily) can safely use them.

Also: is there any particular reason you went with d12s?

[Shreyas Sampat]

I actually hesitate to add that extra layer of complexity; I'm going to hold off on any thoughts of Qi for a while.

On the other hand, I was thinking about some posts that have been bouncing around - your question on d12s, Jon's thread in Theory about dice, the earlier thread on game based on cool dice ...
All this led me back to Jonathan's old idea of using Ma Jiang (Mah Jongg) as a resolution mechanic.  I'll post more on that later tonight; I have some ideas, but I don't want to air them until they're pretty well developed.

Edit: posted links.  Also added the below.

On Ma Jiang:
Okay, this takes ideas from Alyria's dice mechanic and some other stuff...
A full Ma Jiang set has four each of:
Ten numbered tiles each in three suits
Three "Dragons": White, Green, Red.
Four Winds for the four directions.
And one each of:
Four Flowers and four Seasons.

Instead of rolling dice, players pull tiles out of a bag.  The tiles are ranked this way, from lowest to highest:
Numbers, from lowest to highest
Dragons
Winds
Flowers and Seasons

Again, players choose (under ordinary conditions) their second-highest ranked tile and compare that to the other player's tile.  If the tiles are tied, then the characters' Virtues are compared; the one with higher Cyclicity (this needs a better term) wins.  If this does not break the tie, draw again.

Except when a player draws a Flower or Season.

A player drawing a Flower or Season automatically wins the conflict, but the conflict must be narrated to include, or at least evoke, the tile.

New Rules for Planet Movement:
The Planets do not have their own movement properties.  Rather, each player has a set of movement abilities that he has access to; he can use these on any Planet, but only within the restrictions of the previous rule: it must have been involved in a conflict he won.

I'll come up with some movement abilities to play with later.

Thoughts on rules emphasis:
This seems to be exactly where I want to be going; a sort of subtle description mechanic that kicks in at the rare case of really high-powered successes, and a very complex scene-framing mechanic.  I like that; it's very cinematic in a way; players fighting in the Sky for a handle on their plotlines.

[Thor Olavsrud]

Hi Shreyas,

I think you're right on the money when you note that Wuxia is about relationships. Specifically, it's about how love and desire are bound up with family, honor and obligation, often with tragic results.

These qualities are what made Wang Dulu's Crane Precious Sword Crouching Iron Pentalogy one of the best known and most well-loved Wuxia fiction series in the world. Wang Dulu, whose real name is Bao Xiang, can almost be seen as an Eastern Tolkien. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is the fourth novel in the series. I also think it's a crime that these novels haven't been translated into English, but that's another story.

Anyway, I can't help you much with the rules tinkering, but I can point you to some sources that might help you.

First, since you seem to be struggling with Qi, I would like to point out that Qi Gong is fundamental to many Wuxia novels. The stronger your Qi Gong, the greater your respect in Jianghu (the River-Lake, or Martial Arts Underworld).

Generally, someone with weak Qi Gong would not even bother to fight someone with strong Qi Gong. There's no way they could win. Someone with really strong Qi Gong also wouldn't usually stoop to fighting someone with weak Qi Gong because it would be beneath their honor.

Also the person with stronger Qi Gong can seal a weaker fighter's pressure points -- or partially seal them. This can either paralyze a person, inflict great pain, or simply make their Qi Gong and therefore their Kung Fu unaccessable. Only a person whose Qi Gong is as strong or stronger than the Qi Gong of the fighter that did the sealing can release the pressure points.

With that out of the way, here are some resources you might find helpful:

An Introduction to the Wuxia Genre

Wuxia Fiction: Key Inspiration for HK Action Films

A short biography of Wang Dulu

The Jin Yong Reading Room: Jin Yong, also known in the west as Louis Cha, is one of the most well-known Wuxia authors. You can check out the novels The Book and the Sword and The Smiling Proud Wanderer from this site.

Hope this helps. What I see of your game looks awesome so far.

[Shreyas Sampat]

Thor, thanks for the links; I've come across that first one already and am making a project of seeing as much wuxia cinema as I can over my vacation month... that should be an experience.  The possibility of wuxia writings hadn't even occurred to me; I'm excited.

As for Qi Gong...
This is something I don't know how to model in this system, but I was thinking about a system of 'stunts', tied to the Ma Jiang mechanic: If you beat the opponent by a certain margin, then you can 'disable' part of their kungfu. by setting limits on what kind of tiles that they can use, say by outlawing the Circles suit...[/quote]

[Thor Olavsrud]

Thor, thanks for the links; I've come across that first one already and am making a project of seeing as much wuxia cinema as I can over my vacation month... that should be an experience.  The possibility of wuxia writings hadn't even occurred to me; I'm excited.

Great, I'm glad I could help. I love HK films, but I think for your purposes, the novels are probably going to be more helpful (when you find translations). Most HK martial arts films are based on novels, but they suffer from the same problem that western films based on novels do; namely, the stories often lose a lot of their detail when translated into film.

While I have been unable to read Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon because it is currently unavailable in English translation, I get the sense that part of the reason it was so successful in the west is that Ang Lee stayed very true to the novel.