Wushu and Fortune at the End

[Drew Stevens]

I'd posted these to RPG.net, and it was pointed out a similiar thread existed over here- dealing with Wushu's 'wacky fortune at the end'-ness :)  These are meant for a highly cinematic, superspy adventure.

WuShu - Types of Challenges

Challenges have four parts: The Difficulty, the Danger, the Time, and the Type

Difficulty is the number of Offensive successes you'll need to finish the Challenge and reach the Goal.
Danger is the minimum number of Defensive successes you need to avoid losing a Chi.  Unless otherwise stated, this is 1.
The Time is the number of die rolls everyone gets before the Goal becomes inaccessible.  The Boss escapes, the target is kidnapped, whatever.  The Time may be extended by someone sacraficing a Cool.

The Type is the general class of challenge.  It helps define what type of narration is and is not appropriate.  Examples are...

Combat: Narration has to do with beating people up.  Or shooting them.  Whatever.
Diplomacy: Narration has to do with convincing people to do as you say peacefully.
Chase: Narration has to do with a chase scene.
Infiltration: Narration has to do with gooing undetected while sneaking in somewhere.

Rules of Narration
WuShu uses Fortune at the End.  The Dice only indincate how close to being overcome the current Challenge is.  Cool is used as a combination vitality and safety net, to make Challenges easier to overcome.
While narrating, you're naming Facts.  Just like the GM, you can describe anything you want, and if everyone accepts it, the embellishment stands.  However, the GM reserves veto rights for two types of Embellishments.
A) Those which dictate success in achieving the Goal before the Challenge is overcome, unless the Goal slips away in the same narration.
B) Those which dictate the continued viability of a Mastermind or Henchman  that has 1 or more Cool remaining.  No killing them until they're at 0 Cool.

If an Agent hits 0 Cool and then loses another for any reason, they are down and out for this and the next Challenge.  They may not be dead, but they're too far gone to be of any use whatsoever.

An Agent may get up to 6 dice from an Action and Embellishments.  However, these must be split between various Skills- an Agent can have no more than 4 dice in any single Skill.  Thus, getting the full benefits of the roll requires bringing in multiple of your talents.

[ejh]

Yeah, I'd always thought of the "anyone can veto" rules as making it impossible that a player will hose the game by narrating too much too soon.  Go ahead and narrate what you want.  If the GM no like, the GM say no.

[MR. Analytical]

So... what exactly are we using the "Resolution" mechanis to resolve?

Maybe I'm just stating the obvious here but it seems to me like you're making THE Wushu mistake.  You're looking at it as conflict resolution as opposed to scene resolution.

So when Dan says that he never says how many ninjas are there it's precisely in order to not get bogged down in whether or not all 4 ninjae are dead or not.  You kill ninjas until you resolve the scene... not until you favourably resolve all of the conflicting actions between characters.

The way I look at it is that a scene poses difficulty X.  Players have tools Y that they use to chip away at X until there's no X left.  Whether you're backflipping, firing shotguns, killing truckloads of mooks or landing kicks on some huge bad guy is just flavour text, all that matters is style and the resolution of the scene, not the tactical substance.

If I'm stating a point that was clearly assumed then I apologise, but it took me a while to understand this about Wushu so I guessed I might not be the only stupid person :-)