We're crazy guys. We did a crazy system switch: Spycraft to Wushu.

It's like the 6th game in the run, and we bailed on poor d20, which was boxing us in. My chief complaint about d20 I think is that it provides a lot of information about what a player and character cannot do. Your opinion may differ.

So anyway, Wushu. It's not for the lazy. No time to space out. You gots to be thinking up cool ways to earn those embellishment dice. And what a great idea. It's like Ron's bonus die concept from Sorcerer, squared.

The way we played the game (I need to read the rules better), John, the GM, made use of fast and furious scene framing, to the effect that the framing created immediate things to react to. "Okay, this scene starts with you parachuting in above the military complex. Go. " or "This scene starts with you looking down into some kind of hangar. You see the UFO and a control room. Go."

Our group really got into it by the end of the session, really riffing off each other's narrations, gaining embellishment from things that other players had worked into the scene. It was very satisfying, and I like the potential the system gives for real collaboration. It reminded me of improv theater when it really clicks.

Hi Matt,

Have you run into the issue of exhaustion? I tend to feel pressured, after a time, by systems which require imaginative/kewl input simply in order to play.

I confess that Donjon seems very draining to me; unless I'm all fired up about beating the GM "at his own game," it's hard to keep up the drive to keep embellishing and elaborating upon the scene. The Dying Earth has a bit of this problem, although its multiple options helps. I try to stress that bonus dice in Sorcerer arise from out-of-game as well as in-game input, so that simple engagement of whatever sort is all that matters.

Best,
Ron

Ron Edwards wrote: Have you run into the issue of exhaustion? I tend to feel pressured, after a time, by systems which require imaginative/kewl input simply in order to play.

Have you run into the issue of exhaustion? I tend to feel pressured, after a time, by systems which require imaginative/kewl input simply in order to play.

Ron Edwards wrote:
I confess that Donjon seems very draining to me; unless I'm all fired up about beating the GM "at his own game," it's hard to keep up the drive to keep embellishing and elaborating upon the scene. The Dying Earth has a bit of this problem, although its multiple options helps. I try to stress that bonus dice in Sorcerer arise from out-of-game as well as in-game input, so that simple engagement of whatever sort is all that matters.

I found Dying Earth exhausting in this way, more for the demand of keeping up the flowery, formal Vancian dialogue. Shorter game times help, as well as recognizing when you're approaching burnout and calling things off at that point.

Best,

Blake

Playing “Ranjeet” in the current Spycraft/Wushu run…

Confessions:

1) I thought I disliked d20.
2) I thought I would love Wushu.

Something clicked for me in the last session in which we used the d20 system. I looked at the system and saw that it was simply a realism dial. I embraced it and went on to describe in flowing detail the actions that Ranjeet did and to embellish (for no effect, just for the love of it) details within those actions (a clove cigarette sailing though the air behind the boat and being extinguished in the water at the same moment as my foot connects with the bad guys jaws and darkness consumes them).

In Wushu I had the feeling part way through the session of why not just hand out all the dice to all the players all the time? Most of the time people will get all of them anyway. Yeah, I saw where that was heading and promptly slapped myself in the face three times. Still, I have to confess that Wushu left me a bit, well, discombobulated.

I am not sure where this leaves me, and am still mulling it over.

Hafaza wrote:
In Wushu I had the feeling part way through the session of why not just hand out all the dice to all the players all the time? Most of the time people will get all of them anyway. Yeah, I saw where that was heading and promptly slapped myself in the face three times.

I'm not surprised you were discombobulated, Mark. Wushu, despite being a very simple system, is very challenging in actual play. It's flipped on its head. It's "fortune at the end". Everything you embellish happens when you say it. Then you roll to see if those things you just did help to overcome the current challenge or not.

I've never played another game like this. It requires a significant shifting of mental gears. No longer is the GM the one responsible for managing what is and is not possible (either by fiat or the management of difficulty levels or such). It's every player's responsibility to keep the right tone going, from moment to moment, and yes, it can be exhausting.

About the dice: I think players are supposed to always have the max dice pool. The process of going around and collaboratively building up embellishments until the pools are full -- that's the primary "meat" of gameplay. By setting a dice-pool cap (and/or threat level) from scene to scene, the GM manages how much attention is focused by the group on any one particular challenge.

I don't see embellishments as a Gamist mechanic of any sort. You're not "earning" more dice in order to get an edge in the game system. The act of describing embellishments is the point of play, and I don't think there's meant to be any competition among players to build bigger pools or any incentive to develop a "best" strategy for gaining dice. In this way, Wushu and Donjon are very different.

I wanted to share my favorite moment from the last Wushu game.

We're doing the big fight in the hangar with bad guys and the UFO. Dan's character, Robert, the ultimate sniper, has hidden himself on an upper catwalk and is picking off baddies left and right. Now it's Matt's turn to embellish. He describes how his character Veronica gets into perfect position near the control room, pops around the corner with her gun leveled, and just as she's about to fire -- BLAM! -- the guy falls over with a hole between his eyes. She spins to take out a soldier coming up behind her but -- BLAM! -- he drops too. "Dammit, Robert!" Veronica whispers into her comlink.

What a great moment. Matt used his embellishments to spotlight his character while protagonizing another character. Brilliant stuff. This set the tone for the session, I think. Everyone was riffing off of everyone else like that. Wushu really delivered what I had been craving.

Interesting thread. I've been on an "I want to do Wushu!" kick for a while. Earlier tonight I was describing it to a gamer friend and I tried to riff Embellishments off the top of my head for dice to show him how it worked, completely out of context, and I found myself gasping like a fish out of water.

I tried again, with a different action and had the same thing happen.

Now, that's not real play, it's an out of game explanation, but the point is I thought it'd be easy and it was way hard.

It occurred to me as I thought about it later that maybe Wushu would be a heck of a lot harder than I thought it would be, for the reasons described in this thread. "Do cool stuff! Do cool stuff!" might be as paralyzing an imperative as "Be funny! Be funny!" tended to be in Toon (which is why I don't think I played Toon more than once or twice).

Obviously it works for some people, and the key to it working seems to be getting away from the idea that you're trying to build up dice by doing cool stuff -- instead, assuming that you're gonna get all the dice and they're just there to kind of punctuate the cool stuff that you're obviously going to say.

But the rules certainly push the "dice as a reward for cool stuff, try hard so you'll get a lot" way of viewing it. If that leads to paralysis and/or burnout, that's a problem.

It made me wonder if I wouldn't be happier with a game system that *allowed* me to do cool embellishments than a game system that tried to *bribe* me into doing cool embellishments.

I dunno. Everything in this post should obviously be taken with a grain of salt because it's not even about Actual Play but an attempt to simulate Actual Play off the cuff for purposes of explanation. But I did find, in this thread, the very things that had knocked Wushu down a few notches on my "I gotta DO this"-ometer.

I think its probably a bit easier if you try to think like a movie director setting up a shot. We've all seen enough action flicks to know the various elements that add that extra oomph to an action scene. I haven't had the chance to play Wushu, but I think if I did I'd actually go about describing the "cool stuff" in terms of camera pans, cut shots, close ups, and the like.

ejh wrote: It made me wonder if I wouldn't be happier with a game system that *allowed* me to do cool embellishments than a game system that tried to *bribe* me into doing cool embellishments.

gobi wrote:
Unless explicitly forbidden, doesn't every system allow for embellishments?

Rune RPG wrote:
Some Hordes don't want to let a bunch of fancy descriptions get in the way of their hacking and slashing. They're content to call out numbers, roll dice, and rack up their point scores. They may be vividly imagining goblins flying left and right as their implacable heros wade through columns of cave-dwelling enemies, but they keep such images to themselves. For these players, elements of play-acting are just a distraction from the game.

Hmmm. I'm disappointed to hear that this thread might be discouraging Wushu play.

Wushu ain't easy. True. Is it a hell of a lot of fun? You bet. It certainly is for our group. I've run it for veteran gamers (the current group) and total novices (the Matrix game) and it was a success in both cases.

Ed, I can see how your off-the-cuff demonstration must have been very hard. It's tough to "be cool" at a moment's notice, out of context, into a total vacuum. But Wushu isn't like that. The GM sets the scene, like any traditional RPG. You have a location and a situation to riff off of, as well as the cool ideas of the other players. Embellishments ebb and flow as the game progresses. Sometimes they're jaw-droppers. Sometimes they're simply saying what your guy does. Any detail you choose to empart to the "audience" counts as an embellishment. Talk about how cool your guy's sunglasses are... there's an embellishment die.

Ralph is right about using cinematic language to describe your embellishments -- it helps a lot. Your job is to hold the interest of the other players. Sometimes you'll be cool and everyone will go "Whoah." Other times, you'll just describe how it looks when your guy cuts loose with his machine gun and the next player will jump in with his own cool bit based on that.

Like Universalis, or The Pool, no one player has to carry the whole game on his back. Everyone is working together to make a cool action game happen. I suggest you give it a try. Pop in the Chateau fight from Reloaded first to get everyone in the mood. :)

(edited for clarity)

Approaching from the cinematic standpoint definitely helped a lot.

We started out the night kinda fumbling a little, searching for ways to get embellishments. As the session moved along, the descriptions became much more director storyboard in nature and seemed to get much easier, at least for me. Once I started to think in terms of 'oh, how about a half second cut shot with the smoking shell spinning slowly towards the floor', even a single action could become the source of two or three embellishments. Need to drop a few mooks? How about just a few zooming jump cuts, with sound effects overlaying the bodies hitting the floor. Matt and Mark dropped from the overhanging support beams and that became call for a quick multiple angle actions shot, showing the scene from above, below and a long distance shot from the floor.

By the end of the night, it was more like describing a movie we were all watching while we created it. Very rewarding.

-DaR

Matt - Holy crap! You guys did something I've been trying to get players to do for months: communal narration. People improving off of each other's actions... cool! (It was just a vague idea back when I wrote the Wushu pdf, so there's not much in the rules for it.) We're way too dependent on turn-based play around here, which can make burn-out an issue.

Which brings me to the dominant topic. Yep, Wushu requires a lot more cognitive effort than more traditional RPGs. For those who like Wushu, however, I think it's effort they try to put into every game they play. I know I always approached games like a fight choreographer, rather than a board gamer or tactician, but modifiers and penalties always seemed to smack me down.

Anyway, I think communal narration is the best way to prevent burn-out and keep the Embellishments flowin'... if you can get it to work. Failing that, I try to keep my players inspired by setting each fight in a new and exiciting location, filled with new props & improv weapons. (I write up a new one each month for my RPG.net column, so I have a lot of material to work with.)

My games rarely go more than 3-4 hours, which also helps ;)

My best players are usually the ones who spend their "down time" between turns, scenes, or sessions thinking up new embellishments. Coming up with cool shit on the spot is never easy. Oh, and I'll second the Chateau fight recommendation :)

As always, YMMV. Burn-out can hit Wushu games hard, but there are lots of ways to deal with it. When/If I do a second edition, I'm definitely going to spend a few pages on this topic.

Great discussion, BTW. I'm happy to see so many people with Wushu actual play experience!

L8r, --Dan

Hey Dan,

Welcome to the Forge! Thanks again for making such a great game.

Here's a little rules variation we're trying out. For this Spycraft/Wushu game, we have the concept of "dangerous mooks." These are elite sorts (commandos, etc.) that have great equipment and training, but are still nameless fodder. They go down just as easy (one success reduces the threat level by one) but are a little more agressive. You need 2 defensive successes per round to avoid getting hurt. If you get only 1 or zero successes, you lose a point of Chi.

We've only used it in one fight so far, but it seemed to work as intended.

heh :) I did the same thing in a recent Star Wars game, to represent mooks with weapons that were more dangerous to our heros. Except my guys actually _did_ two points of damage per round. If you only got 1 Yin success, you lost 1 point of Chi. If you got none, youn lost 2 points of Chi. It worked pretty much as intended: the players switched to a more defensive style & still ended up more badly hurt by the end of the fight.

L8r, --Dan

Do you have to embellish everthing in Wushu or is there a mechanics for dealing with things that are not *that* important? Is that the purpose of scab rolls?

Yep, that's what the scab rolls are for. They give you general guidance on level of success based only on one's Trait rating, no embellishments.

L8r, --Dan

ReverendBayn wrote: Holy crap! You guys did something I've been trying to get players to do for months: communal narration. People improving off of each other's actions... cool! (It was just a vague idea back when I wrote the Wushu pdf, so there's not much in the rules for it.)

I'd love to hear more about what you and your players did, as I continue to have trouble encouraging this style of play. If you'd rather not start a thread for this, just shoot me an email (dan@bayn.org).

Grazzi, --Dan

Well. I was struggling for a moment to understand the question because the idea of kibbitizing to share ideas about what everyone thinks would be cool just seems like a pretty natural one.

"Yeah, and dude, when you do that back flip over the tanker, they shoot a rocket at you and it hits the truck which explodes, so that when you come down and land on the guys's car you're back lit by this huge fireball".

"Yeah, that would be cool...sweet"


Perhaps "doing it" is as simple as encouraging such kibbitzing, if your players are the sort who've been carefully trained over the years not to do that.

Alternatively (and I may be demonstrating how weak my Wushu Fu is here) you could allow the kibbitzers to earn the bonus dice for their suggestions instead of the player whose character uses them, as a way of providing a mechanical carrot, if you think that's necessary.