Profile Comments

[razar]

By comparison HKAT is fun to play as long as you realise you're actors in a movie.  But the combat system is very shallow by comparison (and totally broken if your a Gamist looking to min max).

As far as Feng Shui goes....I've heard ALOT of people rave about it, but I couldn't get past the setting which did not interest me at all (truth be told I thought it was pretty lame) so I never played it to get a feel for the mechanics.

Yes HKAT can be fun until the broken rules start to annoy you, but for me Feng Shui has often been less fun because of the rules as well.  FS fights are supposed to be spectacular and exciting but they allways take to long due to the body mechanic taking away from damage, and the fact that the standard attack roll (assume oponent defends and is equal skill) has less than 50% chance to hit.  So if you like to either miss or hit and do shit all damage more than 75% of the time then play FS but otherwise I would suggest finding a better rules system.  Heck I think we have had a lot more fun with HKAT even though I knew the rules were stuffed the first time I read them.  FS looked great and had the disapointing effect of being very average when played (personally I think the setting if fine, and would be nice if played using a suitable mechanic, maybe something like donjon ).

[Bankuei]

I guess Feng Shui worked for me because I did two things:  1) I threw out the 25 body hit point rule and went with what seemed appropriate for the characters.  2) Explosive dice rules made for more interesting narrations(plus my players typically had 3 or 4 outrageous critical/fumbles a session).  In fact, most of the time I didn't even keep track of hits for players or npcs.  I guess Feng Shui was one of the easiest and most fun games for me to practice Hack Narrativism on.

Chris

[Jürgen Mayer]

Ressurect this puppy, sans the license (!) and I think it would do well. Release it as a kind of street-level "Fight Club"-esque combat game, tweak the mechanics to do more with the whole Honor/Glory thing and it would do VERY well.

Hell, I'd say the work for an indie game designer from beyond the grave never stops.

[Bailey]

Ressurect this puppy, sans the license (!) and I think it would do well. Release it as a kind of street-level "Fight Club"-esque combat game, tweak the mechanics to do more with the whole Honor/Glory thing and it would do VERY well.

Hell, I'd buy it again.

Working on it, but it certainly ain't Fight Club.  It's more like the Swayze movie Road House.

[Jared A. Sorensen]

Ressurect this puppy, sans the license (!) and I think it would do well. Release it as a kind of street-level "Fight Club"-esque combat game, tweak the mechanics to do more with the whole Honor/Glory thing and it would do VERY well.

Hell, I'd buy it again.

Working on it, but it certainly ain't Fight Club.  It's more like the Swayze movie Road House.

Road House? Good enough, says I! :)

I've started prelim. work on a d20 supplement called PUNCH CIRCLE. Hell, I figure that if there's one thing D&D players want, it's material on Player vs. Player, one-on-one duels and combats. We'll see...

[unodiablo]

I missed most of this discussion, just wanted to say 'Thanks!' for posting about Street Fighter. I own it (thanks Jared!), but have never really read through it, and I love the action movies (and RPG's to a lesser extent).

Has anyone played or read the Tri-Stat / 2nd edition of HKAT? How does that compare to the 1st?

Sean

[Valamir]

Has anyone played or read the Tri-Stat / 2nd edition of HKAT? How does that compare to the 1st?
Sean

2nd edition takes everything that was unique and interesting about HKAT and sterilizes it.  It is essentially Big Eyes Small Mouth with chinese kung-fu guys instead of japenese anime guys.  If you really love BESM 2nd edition HKAT is a good adaptation of those rules.  If you liked the stuff that made HKAT something you've never seen before...well HKAT 2 has NOTHING that you haven't seen before.  Not that's its a BAD game, just that I found it bland by comparison.

The only real failing of HKAT 1, was that somebody didn't playtest the game with gamers who were dedicated character optimizers and a lot of min max loop holes were left open that could have been easily closed.

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

I agree with Ralph, as well as to say that HKAT also suffered from terrible resolution problems in terms of handling time.

The game was brilliant in concept and vision. I was not surprised to discover that reports of "amazing" HKAT play were, when hunted down, revealed to be coming from groups that had jettisoned just about all the resolution mechanics.

Best,
Ron

[xiombarg]

The game was brilliant in concept and vision. I was not surprised to discover that reports of "amazing" HKAT play were, when hunted down, revealed to be coming from groups that had jettisoned just about all the resolution mechanics.

So, has anyone considered doing HKAT "correctly"? Since the mechanics blow, and aren't copyrightable anyway, and the 2nd edition is "bland" (tho I like BESM), why not do it right? Call it "Hong Kong Action - Period." Then the abbreviation could be HKAP. ;-)

HKAT wasn't the first game where, in a sense, you play an "actor". First game to do that, IIRC, was "It Came From the Late, Late Show". (Actually, I should do a re-write of THAT sometime to get rid of some of the wonky percentile-based semi-Simulationist mechanics while keeping the cool meta-mechanics, like the PCs getting out of a bad spot by having the film break...)

[unodiablo]

I would have to say I haven't considered it... I did consider updating Extreme Vengeance with Tony Lee, the games' author, which I think is a far superior game, and more to my tastes as well.

What I eventually ended up doing was combining the d6-based dice mechanics of EV with things I liked about HKAT, Feng Shui, etc and creating a rules-light system to use in place of those systems. And thus was born 2 Page Action Movie RPG. There's a thread about my groups' play of it in the this forum. For it only being 2 pages, it's a suprisingly powerful rules set. I really need to update it and re-organize it after we play a few more sessions.

And thanks for the info! I don't need to spend another $25 on a more bland 2nd ed... I thought the dice mechanics were pretty wacky in the first one, was wondering if they 'fixed' it by replacing the system with Tri-Stat. I needs me a game with as little handling time as possible!

On a side note, I just found a book entitled 'Action A-Z' published by U of Indiana press. Pretty entertaining so far, tho I have a few complaints about it. It's good enough that I'm writing a review of it for RPG.net.

Sean

[amiel]

xiombarg wrote:

So, has anyone considered doing HKAT "correctly"?

Does anybody else remember "Gravity is Not For Me"? Anyone know where it's located?
                                                                          -Jeremiah J Davis

[Matt Gwinn]

Does anybody else remember "Gravity is Not For Me"? Anyone know where it's located?

You can find it here

http://www.sexundgewalt.de.vu/

,Matt G.