Gunfest OtherKind

Emily and I have been on-again-off-again working on a Hong Kong Action Flick rpg for, what, Em, four years now? (Feng Shui doesn't do it for us.) This popped into my head last night.

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Bwa!

Check this action out. The Beat Takeshi / Chow Yun Fat rpg! Built out of OtherKind!

When you roll, divvy your dice between Narration, Progress Toward Your Goal, Personal Safety, and (something like) The Regard of the People You Care About. More about this last in a sec.

When you go into a situation, the GM gives it a Suckiness rating (I haven't settled on a name). This replaces Iron; it's an objective rating of how logistically, tactically, and practically bad the situation is. Free of emotional content, I mean: Suckiness is the guy with the machine gun in the tower, the guy with the two submachine guns on the motorcycle, the car full of Yakuza, the hospital ward full of babies. Suckiness subtracts directly from your Progress die or your Safety die; going into a Sucky situation straight is a recipe for disaster.

You counter Suckiness with ... ready? Your Capacity for Violence. Every point of CfV you spend lets you undo one point of Suckiness, and you have to describe being violent! I'm thinking of the Sucky Sucky scene at the start of Hard Boiled, the teahouse full of gun-toting gangsters, and Chow Yun Fat spending four points of Capacity for Violence to drop guns in the potted plants and shoot everydamnbody. Gotta watch that movie again.

You get Capacity for Violence by ... ready again? a. Bonding with people who don't know you're a killer, or don't know the extent of your killer-tude, anyway, like the blind woman in the Killer, your girlfriend in Hard Boiled, or your wife in Fireworks. b. Working effectively with people who're violent alongside you, like your partner in Hard Boiled or your brother's friend in Brother. or c. Being violent when there's no earthly reason to, or being way more violent than the situation calls for, like tossing the bullet in the fire in Fireworks, or shooting during the roman candle fight in Sonatine, or hitting your brother's friend with the bottle in Brother.

It's worth pointing out that you don't get any Capacity for Violence at all from your big bad enemy. Instead, you build up your Capacity for Violence from your other actions and relationships, in order to kick ass in the final showdown. In other words, Marky Mark macked Lou Diamond Phillips in the video store with points he'd gotten from the chicken-sex scene.

And so but so, if you put a low die into the Regard of the People You Care About, that means that you do something that undermines one of your CfV relationships, type a. or b. You're late for your date with your girlfriend, you betray your partner's trust, you (a la Jackie Chan) get caught in an embarassing circumstance with another woman, you -- let me see if I can come up with any from the actual flicks. Ah! You get your partner shot, paralyzed for life, and ultimately divorced, in Fireworks. You blind the woman, in the Killer.

I'm detecting a Dial, here, for how-bad-can-it-be-for-your-loved-ones. Supercop on one end, Violent Cop on the other.

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So that's in the queue. I'm not going to do anything with it for a while, what with being psyched for OtherKind, but I had to share.

-Vincent