Wushu Run

[Bryant]

I ran Wushu for our monthly quasi-indie one-shot gaming group last night; here are some unorganized thoughts about how it went.

Setting

The setting was a grimmish near future. The protagonists were psychic warriors in service to one of two megacorps striving to immanentize the eschaton -- Omegacorp wanted to bring humanity together into a big group mind, and Velodrome wanted to let every human express his or her own maximum individual potential. The PCs were Velodrome ops sent after a McGuffin in the form of a set of personal journals; said journals belonged to the mysterious Lawrence Wyr, the first and most powerful psychic on the planet, who had vanished several years ago in a psychic firestorm that left San Francisco devastated. His company, Wyrbond (apologies to Key20), split into Velodrome and Omegacore in the aftermath.

Key influences were the Matrix for fashion, Dark City for deserted cities, and Trinity for the basic powersets.

The PCs were just an incredibly cool range. I am blessed to have such an excellent creative group. We had Pluto Pachinko, a forever-young Taoist master healer and martial artist; Jack Voltaire, sexy thang, adventurer, rock and roller, neurosurgeon, and body hopper; Aku, creepy alien thyroid-eating shapeshifter; Smith, a merciless master of neurolinguistics and swordplay; and Horizon, radical haxorkinetic anarchist grrrl.

The cool thing about Velodrome as a patron was that there's plenty of excuse for the PCs to be wildly different and in some cases clashing. I had this in mind and it worked out very well.

Some notes on the style I was using as a GM: fairly Narrativist, I think; I was focused on story. I kept authorial control in my hands, but flexed it to accomodate the roles and abilities of the PCs. More on this as I describe what happened.

Plot

I pretty much railroaded them into San Francisco, although if they'd balked I would have worked around it. The setup itself demanded that the PCs were interesting in completing the mission, though; magician's force. Once in SF, they moved fairly quickly towards the Wyrbond Building until they were slowed by a barrier of cars. One of the players noted at this point that I was undoubtedly working out my Bay Area dot-com crash angst, and I think that was actually accurate; it was a useful fuel for describing a desolate San Francisco.

While the loose Trait system of Wushu is very flexible, it means you want to think about the capabilities of characters before sketching out the scenario, if that's the way you work. I wasn't trying out No Myth, which obviously eliminates that problem. At this point in the game, there were no characters with any kind of a spot skill.

Fortunately, Aku had shifted into a vulture form with a great sense of smell, and I used his successes on that descriptive roll to determine what he noticed at the barrier -- which was actually a GM bluff on my part -- I was trying to simulate the bit where you build a little tension by calling for a Spot roll. The barrier was a block I threw in there to generate a little extra roleplay and characterization opportunity. I think that the way a PC gets past a blockage says a lot about that PC.

I think if I were running it again, I'd ask PCs in general to describe their style of movement through the city up front. That way I'd have successes at hand for all of 'em. As it was, I had 'em for the only really perceptive PC, so he noticed some gangbangers a little ways after the barrier.

Aku went into a snooping around form, followed quickly by Pluto. They found the gang leaders in a sushi shop. Pluto tried to negotiate but failed, while Aku kept looking for trouble elsewhere. Combat ensued.

The mook combat worked /brilliantly/. The players asked if they could do multiple attacks a couple of times, and I went over the mook system again, and they loved it. Just keep whacking away until the threat level is zero. Smith did the final blow with a single neurolinguistically packed word. Lovely stuff.

The gang leaders were Nemeses, and that was also interesting. Combat in which one party doesn't worry about defense is brutal. Pluto got knocked way down in Chi in the first round, and although Horizon came in and cleaned up things could have gone worse for our heros. Two on one combats are particularly merciless, because the one just can't compare in terms of dice.

Imagine, for example, that A and B are fighting Z. There's nothing stopping A from putting all her dice into defending herself and B, while B provides pure offense. Z will almost certainly go down very quickly, particularly with only three Chi. Possibly PCs should have five Chi. Not sure.

Anyhow, after the fight, the PCs got to the Wyrbond Building via a spiral path chosen by Pluto. Very nice riff on the poster he saw in the sushi shop -- this was a great moment. The player made a Serendipity roll, then narrated the way he suddenly saw an unexpected but peaceful object in the middle of the carnage, and handed the description of the object off to me. I tossed in some descriptive elements along the path to validate his choice, and when Aku took to the trees I said that it was lucky he did, since it allowed them to avoid the wild buffalo herd.

In the building, they split up nearly immediately. Horizon went down and got the generators working, then hacked into the building computer system. I decided it was an AI on the spot, and that provided some fun roleplay. It also served as a useful cross-cut mechanism, since she had vision throughout the building.

The other four went up and caught an Omegacore team carrying a book out of the building. The Omegacore team split up into three groups, one trying to get the book away and the others trying to hold back the PCs. This was because I was nervous about doing a big combat.

As a GM, I was worn pretty thin by trying to narrate effectively for the Nemeses. The burden of creativity is significant. In retrospect, I should have made most of the Omegacore team mooks again, which would have saved me for the big final fight I had planned. Ah well.

The PCs split into groups of two; Smith and Aku went after the book and Jack Voltaire and Pluto took on the rest of the team. Jack and Pluto entered into psychic combat in a kind of mindspace (this was a predefined setting aspect) -- it turned into an awesome rock and roll giant robot fight against a pair of Tiresian psychics. There was some interesting psychosexual heat in here -- I gave it a little nudge, since Jack was a very sexual character and Pluto had chosen to be explicitly non-sexual by remaining a child. The players seemed to like it.

Smith and Aku got the book at about the same time that Jack and Pluto defeated their nameless opponents. Horizon was finding out about Wyr's disasterous attempt to separate the hemispheres of his brain, and learning that the real Omegacore team was up grabbing the real book from the apex of the Building. Smith read his book and realized instantly it was a forgery. Cue mad rush to the top of the building.

Originally I'd had four enemies up there, but it was clearly not viable and the hour was getting late, so I cut it down to two and presented the PCs with manifestations of Wyr's split brain. As I'd hoped, Smith and Pluto went onto the mindscape to fix the brain and Jack and Aku held off the pair of Omegacore ops.

I wound up cutting the fight scene a little short. I hadn't defined a mechanical method for fixing the brain; I just had the players describe their character actions and roll dice while I took notes on total successes. I wasn't going to narrate success until the Omegacore ops had posed a serious threat, though. If I'd had another half an hour or so I could have done a better job of this but I think it worked out OK in the end. Everyone got to show off, even Horizon, who projected herself up into the room via hologram.

I cut the scene abruptly when the brain was fixed, narrating victory over the Omegacore ops. Pluto got off one clever line and I asked the players to narrate where the PCs were five years later. I wasn't really happy with the pace of the ending, but I figured providing a chance for some final narration would let the players write their own resolution; I think it worked.

Thoughts on the game

It worked well for all-out action. We discussed trying the system in, say, a gritty cop show game, with a social contract that forbids over the top moves. I'd be interested in trying it sometime, but the game really is geared towards big action.

There's no natural mechanical rampup. The PCs were getting five or six dice from the first fight onward. Since it's actively harmful to your chances of success not to narrate like a coke-fiend weasel, there's no slow buildup of fights. I think this is a problem, although it doesn't make the game non-fun.

The GM gets really tired. My throat is still sore. On the way home, I considered some alterations; for example, you could just give antagonists a die roll and skip the narration unless the GM wants to be florid. This would help pacing some, I think, and it might solve some of the problems we had with "narrate it and it happens."

I did not do a good enough job with "narrate it and it happens." I should have been more careful about accepting absolutely everything the players narrated, and I should have encouraged them to describe effects more. They were very gungho about it with the mooks; if they'd done the same with the Nemeses it might have been more fun. Not that it wasn't fun as it was.

Combat takes a long long long long time, due to the aforementioned "crank it up" factor. Long time. Have plenty of dice on hand, too; you really do want to have enough to roll offensive and defensive pools for everyone in the combat at once. I would have had an easier time running combats if I'd done that.

The splitting of the dice pool can easily be taken another step: you don't need to just split into offensive and defensive, you can split into as many tasks as you want. "I want four dice into separating him from the book, one die into hurting him, and one die into defense."

[Jeph]

Sounds awesome; this is the kind of game I had in mind when I designed NINJA!. In running my Wushu-ripoff matrix game, I have also struck the problem of narrating moves for a bunch of non-mookae. However, I haven't been able to come up with a satisfactory solution...giving them a default of 3 or 4 dice or something just feels like "cheating". (Down, gamist! Down!) I like your ruling on seperating dice into multiple tasks, it builds off of the core mechanics in a sensible, useful way.

Smith just smacks of Hiro Protagonist to me (you have read Snow Crash, right? RIGHT?). And that's a good thing.

-Jeff S.

[Bryant]

Smith just smacks of Hiro Protagonist to me (you have read Snow Crash, right? RIGHT?). And that's a good thing.

But of course. Dunno if that was the inspiration or not -- one of Smith's Traits was (as I recall) Obscure, which is not very Hiro-like. But he had that deadly aspect to him.

[Brand_Robins]

IThere's no natural mechanical rampup. The PCs were getting five or six dice from the first fight onward. Since it's actively harmful to your chances of success not to narrate like a coke-fiend weasel, there's no slow buildup of fights. I think this is a problem, although it doesn't make the game non-fun."

I agree with this completely. Because of the way Embellishments work you get a bit of "blowing your load" when you play the game -- a lot of the players best stunts and descriptions come when you fight the first set of mooks, and there is a lot less freshness and a lot more strain by the time you get to the big bad.

I'm seriously considering adding a sliding scale for the maximum number of embellishments based on the point in the story and possibly the importance of the scene. In the very first fight, for example, PCs may be limited to a maximum of 2 or 3 embellishments, but in the brawl for it all at the end the cap may be 7 or 8. This would lead to later scenes in the game having more pyrotechnics, and might encourage players to save some of their more insane ideas to the end.

Another idea, put forward by one of my players, is that embellishments be capped by rounds in the fight, with a limit of round +1 or round +2 embellishments. This system would allow each fight to be spectacular if it goes on long enough, but would still create a system where the fight only really gets rolling once the momentum is on. It would also make Mooks a threat early on in scenes, encouraging players to start off small and only move into mass-slayer mode after a few rounds.

I suppose the two could even be put together, but I'm not sure the increased record keeping (small as it might be) would actually improve the game.

Edit: I did a review of the game for RPG.net which can be found at: http://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/9/9431.phtml -- the review itself is probably only moderatly interesting, but some of the discussion about "say it and it happens" play in the attached forum is very good.