The Wars of the Roses

[Jonathan Walton]

This is another Ma Jiang-based system, but in a completely different style than Shreyas' Refreshing Rain.  While I really like Shreyas' design, I wanted a system that was more closely related to the way Ma Jiang is actually played.  Note that you don't need a background in Ma Jiang to make helpful comments here.

Here's the concept:

My Love is Like a Red, Red War

You remember those photographs from the Viet Nam War era, showing student protesters sticking flowers in the barrels of soldiers' guns?  Keep that image in mind, but imagine a setting where the guns shoot flowers, sending out showers of petals that tickle the skin but wound the heart deeply.  Now imagine a Hong Kong gun-fu action flick, full of gangsters and massive firefights with a high bodycount.  But instead of gangsters, imagine a group of lovers, friends, and family, all armed with automatic weapons that can turn love into an icy ball of heart-death.

These are The Wars of the Roses.  There is no physical combat in the Rose Wars; it is all about emotional combat, where your love fights against their love to see whose will prevail.  There is no setting, as such.  Instead, the characters are archetypes or multifaceted spirits/gods.  The stories told during a particular War (session) are all fragments of the overall battle of love.  Reincarnation is a fact.  You can die for your love a hundred times over without fulfilling or abandoning your dreams.  You can seek out your love in myriad guises, wearing thousands of forms, across centuries of existence and the thousand planes of experience.  You may eventually find it, or you may be fated for tradgedy, doomed to repeat the cycle of failure through all eternity.

But you will never, no matter the cost, give up your love.

This is the basic system:

Set Up

An individual Battle (round) of the War (session) plays out almost exactly like a round of Ma Jiang.  Only four players can officially "play" in any given round, but it's quite possible (an even recommended) to take turns rotating in and out of the lineup, with four players "playing" at a time, while the others watch, provide comments & suggestions, and even spy for the other players.  This is a competative game, but, as in Diplomacy, you need the assistance of others in order to win, even if you must eventually betray or turn on them.

Each character is defined by his/her connections with the rest of the group.  For instance, imagine we have N players and N major characters that need to be defined.

-- P1 declares his character is named Zhang Guoming
-- P2 declares her character, Xiu Zhen, is Zhang's betrothed, but that she despises him
-- P3 declares his character, Lady Xiu , is the mother of Xiu Zhen, who really wants her daughter's marriage to go smoothly
-- P4 declares her character, Li Meihua, is Xiu Zhen's secret lover, but that she is, in fact, already married to a man of the village
-- This continues down the line until we have N characters.

That's all there is to character creation.  Note that, at this point, we don't know what Zhang Guoming thinks of his fiance, but that's perfectly alright.  Most of the story will be created during the first Battle.

The four players involved in the first Battle, set up to play a standard game of Ma Jiang (I'll have detailed rules for people who don't know how to play, but I don't really have time for that now).  If possible, you should set up the rotation (players sit in a circle) so that each player immediately proceeds one who they have a strong emotional connection to, either positive or negative.

So, a good order would be:
N - Zhang Guoming
E - Xiu Zhen
S - Li Meihua
W - Lady Xiu

NORTH is to marry EAST who is the lover of SOUTH who wants to hide their love from WEST who wants her daughter to marry NORTH.  This forms a rough relationship map for this Battle.  Note that, accidentally, there are two positive relationships (the love between Xiu Zhen & Li Meihua, Lady Xiu's support of Zhang) and two negative realtionships (the ill-fated marriage of Xiu Zhen & Zhang, the secret Li Meihua is keeping from Lady Xiu).

The Ma Jiang Set

The three main suits are counted as representing:
-- sticks (the rod-shaped one)
-- stones (the circle-shaped one)
-- the ten-thousand things (the character "wan," ten-thousand)

The cardinal directions (E,S,W,N) represent the characters involved in the current battle.

The "Center" direction represents the discard pile in the center of the playing space, allowing a player (at any point in the game) to switch it with any tile in the center.  A set of Centers (either 3 or 4 tiles) can be switched with any other player's set, as long as that set has been revealed during play.

The bathtub-looking tile represents a bed.  Yup, that means physical love (sex, making out, whatever).

The tile reading "Fa" (normally short for "fa cai," to get rich) now represents "Fa Zhan," development.  I explain what that means once I figure things out more.  I'm thinking in terms of "developing a relationship," but I'm not quite sure exactly how it will work.

The Seasons represent the passage of time.  Anytime someone draws a Season, it is played immediately (replaced with a tile from the back of the "deck") and the scene shifts to Winter, Spring, Summer, or Fall, without detailing the time in between.  Note that, without Seasons being played, the Battle is assumed to start in Spring, and each new Battle always shifts a Season forward from where the last Battle ended.

The Flowers are emotional attacks.  Remember what I said about guns and petals?  That's what these represent.  They are fairly rare (4 tiles out of 144), but should come up in something like every other Battle.

Victory is Mine

There are various ways of "winning" a Battle and you may be trying for different objectives at different times.  Yes, it is possible for more than one person to "win" in a single Battle.  You can either:

-- win the actual game by going out earliest.  This is just winning the game of Ma Jiang being played.  Whoever wins gets to narrate the end of the story.  Note they don't get to narrate the outcome for any character that is "protected" by belonging to another player (see below).

-- get a complete set (3 or 4 tiles) of the direction representing one of the other characters.  This allows you significant control over what happens to them, "protected" from what the actual winner may narrate.  For example, if Zhang or Lady Xiu get a set of EASTs, they would be able to force Xiu Zhen to go through with the marriage.  But if Xiu Zhen gets all the WESTs, she can convince her mother to not support the match.  Basically, they get to narrate the outcome as far as their "charge" is concerned.

I'm also thinking that each player who ends up with a full set (4 tiles all the same), gets to "keep one" as part of a permanent collection.  This is how the entire War slowly moves forward, with the slow accumulation of permanent pieces.  I'll talk about this more in another post once I work out the details.

And...

That's most of what I've got so far...

There are some other bits.  For instance, the relationship cycle means the characters are set up to feed tiles to their friends/enemies (in Ma Jiang, you can choose to draw the last tile that was played, instead of drawing from the "deck").  So you could help your friends and make sure your enemies don't get any help.

The sticks and stones obviously come from "sticks & stones can break your bones," so I'm thinking that they might represent the day-to-day obstacles of corporeal existence.  Not emotional things, but problems of money, work, injuries, sickness, and the like.

"The ten-thousand things" (wan wu) is just Chinese shorthand for "all the things in existence."  This'll either have to do with reincarnation (becoming one of the 10,000 things) or allow you to narrate the actions of some other corporeal things ("Xiu Zhen's favorite cat has run away").

Anyway, this is obviously a work in progress, but I wanted people's thoughts on what I have so far, before I turn it into something that might not work.

[Emily Care]

Jonathan,

Just a few quick notes for now. Wow.  I am most impressed by the streamlined character creation.  Am I correct in thinking that the game of Mah Jhong is concurrent with players translating the tile they draw into game events? Love it. Especially the seasons=time passing. I recall a novel (chinese I believe) in which every so often a stock phrase would recur that compared the passing of time to the movement of a shuttle in a loom.  Like a refrain, this would serve to set the pace of events just as would the season tiles.  

Question: one wins by winning the hand, would the progress of the events be matched to this in some way?  

This reminds me very much of the Chinese novel "Dream of Red Chambers" also known as Honglou Meng, and Story of the Stone.  Bao-Yu, Bao-Chai and Lin Dai-yu are a natural  North, East, West.  Add in lady Phoenix (Feng-xi?) could be S etc.

Is the game limited to 4 players?  

--Emily Care

[Jonathan Walton]

Am I correct in thinking that the game of Mah Jhong is concurrent with players translating the tile they draw into game events?

Yeah.  That's the part I'm working on now.  The storyline will be guided by the pieces that get discarded.  So, you have a "hand" of tiles that you play, but ultimately you win or lose by what remains in your hand.  You have to balance the value of playing/discarding certain tiles with the value of winning an individual round.

Basically, each tile gives you narrative rights over a specific portion of the game (as with the "bed" and "development" tiles, which I described a little bit.  I'm mainly trying to figure out what the main suits will do and how they interact with the rest of the tiles.

They'll be specific rules for what happen to the story if you "pang," "chi," or "gang" (that is, if you make sets by "eating" recently discarded tiles), basically involving one player stealing story control from another.  Should be fun, once I get it all working.

Question: one wins by winning the hand, would the progress of the events be matched to this in some way?

Probably.  Right now I'm imagining each hand is a seperate story, since play is going to move pretty slowly.  A single hand might take 20-60 minutes, depending on various factors and then the winner narrates the end of the story.  Then, for the next hand, all the players take on new characters (really, facets of a single overarching meta-character archetype) and begin a new story.

The archetypes develop over time, thanks to the permanent pieces that begin to accumulate.  Soon they'll be more and more defined and themes will begin to develop that weren't obvious in the beginning.  At least, that's the plan.  You should probably be able to fit several hands into a single session and then just mark down any permanent tiles ("Let's see, so far Emily has an East and a 6 of Sticks..."), if you're going to continue the War another time.

Your comment about Honglou Meng is a good one, though I've never actually read the book.  It's one of those things you learn a lot about through osmosis as an EAS major.  Still, I'll probably get around to reading it eventually, once my Chinese is good enough to tackle the original, and that could be a couple more years.  Maybe I'll try to find a good translation, just to look at the Ma Jiang parallels.

Is the game limited to 4 players?

You must have missed this paragraph :)

"Only four players can officially "play" in any given round, but it's quite possible (an even recommended) to take turns rotating in and out of the lineup, with four players "playing" at a time, while the others watch, provide comments & suggestions, and even spy for the other players."

That answer your question?  Hopefully the hands will be quick enough that people won't have to wait too long to rotate in.  I'm also thinking of creating some specific game-based powers and responsibilities that can be used by those who aren't actually playing.  We'll see how that goes...

[Shreyas Sampat]

I love this.  It's beautiful and weird, and the real Ma Jiang gameplay is awesome.

I really want to know more about the specific mechanics, particularly the emotional attacks, but I guess that'll have to wait.

Actually, I have a lot of sort of unformed questions about the game which all boil down to, 'Tell me more about everything'.  So, I'll just sit on the sidelines for a while and cheer.