Ironsworn fixes Wushu, 7th Sea, etc

  Several years back, I used to play a lot of a rules-light RPG called Wushu. And two years ago, not long before the pandemic started, I was for a few months running the 2nd edition of the 7th Sea RPG. While I liked both of these games, I noticed that they had a flaw in common. (And I feel like I've played a few other indy RPG titles that had a similar flaw as well, back in the before-times when we'd get together for one-shots in Ballard every week.) 

This flaw (which I'll describe below) used to bug the crap out of me when it would manifest, but, I'm happy to say, there's a solution for it in Ironsworn, that can be relatively-easily ported over to other systems. 

The flaw in question is at times hidden, because it comes wrapped in a strength. Wushu and 7th Sea Second Ed use very light and flexible rules, with a single robust action-resolution mechanic, rather than the more fiddly mechanics and individualized monster stats of more traditional RPGs.  For the most part, that's great. Their systems are so elegant and flexible that you don't have different die-rolls for different types of actions. You're not really forced to narrate your actions in narrow ways. If we're playing a scene where the party needs to get 10 successful rolls to defeat this group of mooks and/or complete our scene goals of saving the magistrate, I get to contribute a roll toward that group goal regardless of whether I describe my action as killing a bunch of mooks, or as something more abstract and outside-the-box, such as swinging from a chandelier to escape the mooks, then rushing across the room and untying the magistrate. Not much of a problem, right? It sounds like it's all up-side. I get to narrate whatever sounds fun to me, and still chip in to the goal. On paper, that sounds great. Derring-do and narrative freedom for everyone!

Problem #1: The problem that gets entangled with it is that it's fairly common to have someone in the group who is either not goal-oriented, or not good at paying attention to how close we are to accomplishing the goal, or just not feel very inspired in this specific scene tonight. It's come up again and again with different groups. Someone will narrate their action as something that doesn't really move us closer to the goal. For example, maybe they are so focused on swinging on that chandelier that it's all they narrate for the turn or action. I swing across the room, but don't think to untie the magistrate or narrate any sort of attack against the mooks or even mention how swinging at least gets me out of their way. If this happens early in the scene, it's no big deal, but if this just happens to be the last roll we need to complete the scene goal of X successes, it's anticlimactic and a little weird. You do a totally unrelated thing, and suddenly the fight is over. There's potentially a huge disconnect between the narrative fiction and the scene progress.

Now systems like this often have some built-in advice on how to avoid this. Pay attention at the table, craft your actions and narrations to respect how close the goal is to completion, and try to avoid stating definitively how many henchmen you're fighting in the first place. All of which is good advice, but they only work if all of the following conditions are met: 

a) everyone's paying attention and no one's getting distracted between their turns, and 

b) everyone playing understands the mechanics and probabilities of the system well enough to know if this turn's roll is statistically likely to complete the goals of the scene, and

c) the dice cooperate by not giving you super rare results when you were banking on an average roll.

If any one of assumptions a, b, or c is wrong, then the flaw described above will rear-up and overturn your applecart.

Here's how Ironsworn fixes it: 

Ironsworn doesn't automatically end the fight when you've accomplished X successful rolls. Ending the fight is instead its own special Move, with the fate of the entire battle riding on it. In order to qualify to make that Move, the party has to have gotten X number of successful rolls first. 

This means goofy actions that don't really advance the narrative goal can't accidentally roll well and end the scene, at most they can unlock the ability to have someone else's next aggressive action end it.  So instead of counting down to "we win", you're counting down to "our next roll determines if we win or lose the whole thing". 

It's basically moving the goal-posts, and I feel it's surprising how well it works for being such a tiny shift. Instead of needing "10 successes to end the fight", you need "10 successes, and then one last successful roll, to end the fight." That single extra roll means you can't accidentally blunder into a win, you have to intentionally make it. This awareness will color your narration when the moment comes, and empower the person after you take some crazy big risk and narrate in an appropriately epic fashion.

Now with less Pirates!

Yesterday, about 5 hours before my weekly one-shot group got together, we all realized no one had volunteered to GM that day. Throwing out ideas quickly, I said "I could run pirate-themed wushu."

My day was a little busy, so I didn't have much time to prepare. I didn't think it'd be a problem, because I'd written a little 7th Sea / Wushu hybrid adventure several months back. Or so I thought. I hunted and couldn't find it in my notebook, on my computer, or on my blog. Luckily, it was wushu, so I didn't worry. I figured I'd just put the PCs on a ship, have pirates attack, and improvise from there.

I spent the rest of my limited prep time grabbing some props. I grabbed a few painted minis from roughly the right era (there's not nearly as many pirate minis out there as you might expect), and a few of the little Pirates of the Spanish Main ships. Wushu isn't the sort of game where minis are needed, but I wanted them on-hand in case it was ever unclear where things were.

I also brought a gaudy piece of costume jewelry from one of my wife's old halloween costumes. The pirates would attack to get this family heirloom of one of the PCs. I figured the large amber-colored glass "gem" in the middle of it could be a lens for reading the hidden code on a treasure map or something. PCs have tons of narrative power in Wushu, so I didn't really want to plan out too much.

During character creation, it was bandied about that the PCs might be Pirates, so while they hashed that out, I started thinking that I'd need to jazz up the game a bit. I decided the villains would be creepy supernatural pirates, so that even if the PCs chose to be pirates I'd still be able to have an evil villain. I mentioned that I'd nearly run 7th Sea, and that I'd be okay with PCs having magic, as long as it was flavorful magic.

The PCs ended up not being pirates afterall*, but by then I was already excited about the potential of my supernatural baddies. I didn't want to just go with skeleton/zombie pirates - that's too mundane. So I decided to fixate on the term "crow's nest". I decided the villains were evil crows that pluck out men's eyes. It was sort of a riff on vampirism - if your eyes were plucked out, you became an evil pirate who could turn into a murder of crows. Your pirate form would be blind, because it had no eyes, but being able to turn into big flock of birds had some fun possibilities.

Shortly into the session, I had the Crow's vessel appear on the horizon and start chasing them. I said it was a chase scene, and treated it like Mooks. PCs could take actions to sail off or fight, and either would reduce the Threat Rating. I expected more of a chase, but it turned into a fight, which was fine by me. When a player eliminated the last of the Threat Rating, she narrated that the Crow ship was on fire and burning and turned away, but two more ships were now on the horizon.

There was a groan across the table. No one veto'd, but it was clear that 3 out of 4 players had had enough ship-to-ship combat for the moment, and weren't looking forward to fighting two more boats. Since no one reacted in-character, I took the reigns and identified the two new ships as English pirate-hunters who'd been chasing the Crow-pirates. To apply a bit of foreshadowing or tension or whatever, I had the pirate-hunters say the Crow-pirates had hit several ports, every place the PCs ship had stopped to resupply in the past two months of voyaging. Players instantly made the connection that the Pirates had been chasing them for a long time, and I think that everyone had figured out (at least out-of-character) it had something to do with the gaudy jewelry prop.

Around this time, one of the PCs narrated the "land ho!" They moored at an unexplored island for a day or so to make repairs to the ship.

One of the PCs had a fancy (almost steam-punk) spyglass he'd been using, and had "Student of the Sciences" as one of his traits, so I told him he could see an ancient temple in the jungle. I was picturing some stone ziggurat or aztec-y temple, but my actual description was foolishly vague. Next thing I know, the PCs had described it's a Greek Temple, meaning that the Classical Ancients were actually a world-wide power. Thanks to wushu's Principle of Narrative Truth, that's what it was. I could work with that, it was an idea with merit.

The PCs narrated they started hacking at the underbrush, cutting a path to the Greek Temple. So I improvised wildly. The underbrush was populated by Dryads, who were being harmed by the chopping. So one cries out in Greek "Father, avenge us against those who butcher us!" That's when Pan (or at least a Satyr) shows up. It ended up being a pretty cool fight, but kinda weird. The PCs were against a Satyr, Dryads, animated trees, and the tropical flying squirrels that Pan's pipes had whipped up into a frenzy. At an opportune moment I had the Satyr point at the gaudy family heirloom (with it's huge amber gemstone) one PC was wearing, and shout out "They have the Eye of Demeter!"

As that fight was winding down, one of the PCs narrates that the Crows are flying in again. Unfortunately, on the Satyr's last action, he and one of the other PCs killed each other. I'm now down one PC, with an hour left in the one shot, and no convenient place for a new PC to come from. So, I have the crows land and pluck the eyes from the PCs corpse. He arises as a blind Crow-pirate, but not yet turned evil. There's some negotiation, and the Crows decide not to attack the PCs this time. They explain to the newly "crowed" PC that they're trying to get the Eye of Demeter, because only it can open the temple, where the Golden Fleece is contained. Only the Fleece can return their humanity.

The PCs head up to the temple, and rather than being locked in some way, they describe it as pretty airy and open, but there's a statue of a goddess with one amber eye and one empty eyesocket. Rather than insert the family heirloom into the statue, though, one of the PCs steals the other eye!

Desecrating a statue in a temple on a heavily-supernatural island seems pretty crazy to me, and needed to have consequences. I'd said Eye of Demeter on a improvisational lark, but sadly Demeter is a Goddesses I don't know jack about. Rather than worry about that, I just decide it's an older pre-myceanean form of Demeter lost to the mists of history. So the goddess that shows up is a naked-breasted snake-wielding bull-dancing Minoan goddess. That seemed to be historical enough for people to grok it, but unusually cool enough no one would quibble over cultural accuracy.

We were running short on time, so the battle was perhaps not as epic as I would have liked. Devon was playing the youngest of the PCs. Her character was a teenage urchin boy, who'd never seen a topless woman before. So instead of helping fight the Goddess, Devon's character tried to placate her. The urchin stole the family heirloom from the other PCs and gave it to the Goddess. She said "It's been centuries since the villagers gave me a virgin sacrifice," and that was pretty much that. Fade to black.

I'd gone in expecting a pirate story, perhaps with some minor supernatural elements, and instead ended up with high-fantasy alternate history in which pirates were only a very minor background theme. We didn't really use the minis (ships or people) at all, either. So nothing at all like I'd planned, yet it was a lot of fun.

---

*: Well, most of the PCs weren't pirates, anyway. Erik's PC, semi-retired, drubbed-out-of-the-navy "Uncle Evilbeard" was pretty piratical. I should add that "Uncle Evilbeard" is probably the coolest character name I've heard in a long time. It captured the heart of his character perfectly, and defined the tone of the game more than any other detail in the initial set-up. Well done, Erik!

Simple Systems Are The Best

Last night, I played Risus.

• Of the rules-light RPGs I've played lately, Wushu is still my favorite. Wushu, however, is very much a "Hippy Game" - it's got an unconventional structure, that takes some getting used to. It's very easy for a new player (or GM) to miss the point of Wushu and fail to make it deliver to it's full potential. If I was GMing for a new group of random players I'd never gamed with, I'd run Risus over Wushu. Both have about the same potential for abuse by a player who defines excessively-broad attributes, but Wushu adds to that the potential to fall flat if the players are timid, since the GM does less in Wushu than in most RPGs, and the players have all the power.

That said, Risus, too, is not without it's problems. At it's core, Risus is a game with a terribly broken fundamental flaw. Yet despite that glaring problem, both times I've played it, I've really enjoyed Risus. The rest of the rules are so simple, that both GMs were able to compensate for the flaw and keep it from mattering. There were no ripple effects to account for when you altered one of the games handful of rules / paradigms.

The primary mechanic (and source of the flaw) is that each player has a small number of attributes/skills (known as "Cliches") numbered from 1 to 4. Whenever you take an action, you roll d6s equal to your relavent cliche and add them together. Where this breaks down is how it relates to damage. Each point of damage (you get one each time you're hit, or each time you fail a roll) reduces one of your Cliches by one die. As you can imagine, this leads to a quick and nasty spiral of death. I get one bad roll and mydie pool drops by one. Which makes it more likely I'll have another badroll. One unlucky roll means you're going to lose the entire fight,unless your foe rolls even worse (despite now being a die up on you) twice. Once you hit zero dice in any Cliche, you're incapacitated.

The two GMs I've played under have both managed to entirely sidestep this fatal flaw.

1. Honestly,I don't recall how Jeremy dodged it, probably because the game he ran was 2 to 3 years ago. If forced to guess, I'd say it was via a house-rule that changed how damage worked. I remember him discussing the flaw before the game started, so he was aware of it, and probably had a work-around.


2. Last night, Malachi got around it by providing healing potions at various points during the game. This felt pretty forced, he was obviously pulling our fat out of the fryer. Not that we complained. Still, it didn't feel balanced or natural, and therefore eroded his verisimilitude.


3. Solving it via the age-old tradition of fudging the dice is unlikely to work. There's 99% transparency on the monster stats. Die pool equals one stat minus damage, so if you see the GMs roll just once (not even the result, just the number of dice rolled) you can conclude the monster's strength, hit points, and capabilities. Therefore, it's fairly hard for a GM to fudge things without the players noticing he'd just thrown them a bone.

The secret to why I've enjoyed Risus is that it's so incredibly freeform. The system lends itself to light-hearted goofiness, and both one-shots started out ostensibly serious but quickly developed unique quirkiness. This can be directly attributed to the Cliche system.
Cliches can be:

• traditional ("Ranger" or "Smart"),


• over the top ("Blood-Sucking Vampiric Fiend"),


• damn-near useless ("Philosophy Major"),


• a wee bit odd ("I know I've got one of those around here"),


• or truly bizarre ("Oh, dear God no, don't tell me I'm actually a Unicorn").

Description is just that - flavor text only. Yes, "Hollywood Vampire" allows forsome cinematic effects that are harder to justify from "PhilosophyMajor", but mechanically it's no better. Nothing really stops you from doing damage with "Philosophy Major" as long as you think quick and describe how your actions make the enemy doubt themselves. One or two bad die rolls while turning into a Bat, and your vampire stops being so fanciful and cinematic.

That said, there's a definite advantage to having just a couple of broadly-defined Cliches, and rating them as highly as you can. Standard character creation involves spending 10 dice, and you can't take anything above a 4. Three stats at 4/4/2 respectively seems pretty darned optimal, though I could see a case for a 4/3/3 build if you didn't have two Cliches you felt were likely to cover everything you'd want the character to do. That said, PCs with just three defining characteristics/concepts tend to besomewhat flat.

One or two of the 6 PCs last night were built differently than those two models, and it was noticable. The player with 3/3/2/2 had trouble being useful - she could do a lot of very different things, but none of them very well. Further, a 3-Cliche PC could fail 7 rolls and still be on their feet (though reduced to one very vulnerable die in everything), where as the 4-Cliche PC is in that dire strait after just 6 failed rolls. Luckily it was a one-shot, since being the unintended sidekick would suck heavily after the second or third session.

I'd recommend Risus for one-shots and short-shots, especially if you don't mind the game getting a little goofy. However, you'll need to be prepared to handle the out-of-control PC-death-spiral, and you'll want to keep an eye open for PCs that are spread too thin at character creation. Still, Risus is free, so you expect it to be a little rough around the edges.

Reprising self-imagined greatness

Last thursday, I played Hollows & Hobgoblins at the Emerald City Gamefeast. H&H is a Wushu-derivative. I'd played it before for Manu's first playtest. I got to reprise my character from that Gellur, the overly flamboyant warrior/metalmage, who liked to remind people that he was a hero. It's the most annoyingly pompous I've ever played, and remember - I've GM'd Amber.

The character's a bit like Zap Branigan, except with some magical talents so he's not completely useless. I'd share more, but one of my cats just decided he and his claws need my attention. The game was fun. Manu improved greatly on the first session, which itself was a very enjoyable game to begin with.

The Zap Branigan comparison isn't entirely accurate. Gellur was/is more flamboyant, and less lecherous. He's also a lot more heroic. I spent much of the session assuring the other PCs that I'd protect them (not that they wanted protection, or my assurances thereof, but I didn't let a little thing like that stop my character's ego), especially the "little ones" (half the party was hobbits). As a result, I took a lot of damage (but surprisingly little of it was inflicted by the rest of the party).

I named Gellur after the famous spoon-bender / charlatan. Hollows & Hobgoblins has a cheaply available magic, much of it with an elemental theme. So, I made him a Metal Mage. His Signature Move is making inanimate objects that people are holding grow mouths and bite them.

My wife starts teleworking in half an hour, and needs the computer, so she's clawing and biting me just like the cat was. Gotta go again.

Wushu Tools

I'm now convinced a good Wushu game could use a couple of props / tools:

1. A scoreboard (or tokens?) to keep track of the current threat level. Keeping the remaining potency of the mooks secret doesn't really add to the drama as much as I would have expected it to, and having a 'ticker' the PCs can see encourages them to describe actions corresponding to the relative threat remaining. More importantly, a fight with Mooks and a Nemesis gets tricky (it seems like they'd stack, IMHO) - the PCs can easily forget to count the Mooks when anticipating how many defensive successes they're gonna need. With large attack-pool-to-chi ratios, the game is somewhat unforgiving of such mistakes.
   
   
2. A Dry Erase Mat. At the start of the fight, the GM makes a very vague and sketchy map - practically blank. Whenever an action (from a PC or NPC) improvises a terrain detail into being, you sketch it in quickly. This makes it easier for everyone to come up with wicked stunts and actions. The trick, however, is that only one person (probably the GM) should be in charge of modifying the map. If everybody can draw stuff it'll quickly become a miniatures game. The idea is to just have a map, and it gets updated if something major changes or a detail gets filled in. You want people imagining the action, not concentrating on how to best rearrange miniatures. The action takes place in your head, not on a board.
   

Conveniently, both needs could be addressed by a single battlemat.

A touch more Wushu goofiness

I ran a short Wushu game last weekend. Me and three players, and I let them pick a genre. They chose Post-Apocalyptic, flavored as more Tank Girl (and Gamma World) than Mad Max or Terminator. It was a pretty goofy, light-hearted little adventure, with characters that included a hovering nanite hive, a legless dog, a powerpuff panda, frag chickens, and The Arnoldinator. Overall, it was pretty darned goofy. Not really an adventure - more like two scenes, one of which was kinda long.

Wushu (longer review-ish, plus Wushu/7th Sea hybrid)

Two days ago, I GM'd Wushu for the first time. I'd played it once before, a week and a half ago. This week's game was set in the world of Theah, the setting of 7th Sea. Here's some observations:

• In general, I really like Wushu. The best innovation it has is that the paradigm of "state what you want to do, then roll to see if you do it" has been done away with. Instead, you state what happens, and once it's been said, it happens. If you say "I stab him" then you stab him. The die roll determines how effective the stab is, but the die roll can't make you miss.
• The second best innovation (which, honestly, is just the second half of the first innovation) is that you aren't describing a single action, nor just your own actions. When you watch a sword fight in a movie, it's not a matter of one person moves, then swings, then the other person moves, then swings, then the whole series repeats. Instead, the fight takes both parties all around the scenery, and involves aggressive flurries, combo moves, and colorful stunts. If you say "I swing across the room on the chandelier, and drop behind him. He spins around just in time to barely parry my initial assault. I beat my blade against his several times, making openings and forcing him to give ground all the while. He manages a few counter-attacks, but eventually I back him in to the corner from whence there's no escape, and that's when I carve my initials into his shirt," it happens. If someone narrates an action that your character would never do, you may invoke a veto, but otherwise what's said happens, no matter who said it.
• Wushu is light and flexible, and readily ported to other settings. It's easy to use it to handle games (like 7th Sea) that have great, fleshed-out settings, but slightly clunky rules sets. A complicated system from 7th Sea, like a Swordsman School or any one of the 5(+) styles of Full-Blooded Sorcery, can be boiled down to a single Wushu attribute. Rather than having to memorize and understand a complicated system, you can use it as a summary and springboard for stunts and ideas. This will of course work best when all or most of the players have read large sections of the complicated rulebooks, so that everyone knows roughly the kinds of things various powers are allowed to do within the setting. It's still worth buying and reading more complicated games, but you now only have to understand the nutshell concepts, not the fiddly minutia.
  

That said, the Wushu system isn't without its flaws. It's a good system, but not perfect.

• The decision to make low dice successes on pool rolls was a strange one. Players are trained by the majority of games to feel like a high roll is a good roll. Going against that isn't a big deal, but neither would it have been a terrible burden to invert the number system. Doing so would have made character creation a tiny bit more difficult to explain, but certainly no harder to play. It's also worth noting that the game uses two types of rolls: pool rolls and scab rolls. One one type of roll you want to roll low, on the other you want to roll high, and there's no mechanical need for this discrepancy. Given the choice between two decisions, one of which will save 1-2 paragraphs in the rule book, and the other makes play more intuitive and more psychologically rewarding, I know which decision I would have made.
• Wushu Open has pretty much nothing in terms of timing rules. With the right group, that's a big plus, but I think they may be limiting their market to experienced RPG groups by doing so. The lack of timing is the only thing that keeps this from being the sort of RPG to cut your teeth on. New players, especially those new to gaming (not just new to this game) need a little more structure. Without it, more boisterous players will hog the glory while quieter casual gamers sit around doing nothing. Similarly, inexperienced GMs would probably get overwhelmed (out-of-character) the first time the PCs decided to dogpile on an NPC Nemesis.
• Wushu is at it's best when the PCs are heroes. The lack of timing rules, coupled with the lack of actions for mooks, requires the villains to do some villainous at the start of the scene to justify the PCs smacking them around for the rest of the scene. If the PCs are anti-heroes, or if the NPC villains are initially passive, flaws with the (lack of a) timing system become much more pronounced.
• Likewise, the mook battles don't leave much for the GM to do. This is especially pronounced in a one-player game, where by the rules, a GM's only action in a minor fight scene might be to announce the arrival of the mooks. With 2 or more PCs, there'd be more interaction, but with 1 PC and a GM it's almost a solitaire game at points.
• Our 7th Sea / Wushu hybrid game was a one-player (plus GM) scenario, in which Sarah's character was a Pirate. Man, did that ever make the first scene awkward! She picked [as in started] the fight, and at cannon-range it's pretty much just a mook battle, so there wasn't much for me to do. She'd only played Wushu once before (and never actually RP'd a high-seas cannon battle) so she was having a hard time getting into the feel of the system and what kind of stunts are appropriate during a cannonade. The only way I could help was by breaking the rules. Which I did eventually, and thus it all worked out, but the first 5 minutes were really odd. Having learned that lesson, it won't be a problem the next time we play.
• Other areas that are a little weird in the Wushu Open rules is the transition from 'acting' to 'action'. There's really no GMing advice in Wushu Open, and with no timing rules, it's hard to say exactly when a parlay becomes a melee. Again, this is the type of problem that sorts itself out with familiarity and experience with the system, but it's gonna be slightly awkward the first time it happens. (Why would this be awkward in Wushu, when it isn't in most other games? Because in Wushu, when you act, you aren't just narrating your own actions, you're also saying what the foes are doing, what's happening in the background, etc. But prior to the fight breaking out, the GM is presumably the one playing the NPC. When and how the transition happens isn't clearly defined).
• The flaw/weakness system in Wushu is just so-so. On paper it looks good, but in practice it doesn't quite feel right. The vampire example (given in the Wushu Open rules file) doesn't just make Vampires take more damage when struck by a wooden stake, it makes the Vampire significantly less effective on it's own attacks, less capable of using it's magic, etc, any time the foe is holding a stake. It doesn't seem logical that holding a stake should protect me from his hypnotic gaze.
• When we do the 7th Sea / Wushu hybrid again (which we will since, despite all the above complaints, we both really enjoyed it) I have a "fix" to solve the weakness of weaknesses. We'll do away with the weakness rules as written. Instead, each PC (and major NPC) will have a Flaw or Hubris, chosen from the corresponding charts in the 7th Sea books. Obviously, we won't have Drama Dice to activate them as one would in 7th Sea. So instead, the Flaw will be revealed (a peek behind the curtain, so to speak) at the start of the scene. That way all parties involved know what the weak spot of the enemy is. Rather than affecting dice rolls, it'll just be stated that no one can use a veto to over-ride a situation where a described action plays into their Flaw/Hubris.
• Wushu has no experience system or character advancement. That makes it somewhat unappealing for a long-term campaign. If it had a finer scale of gradation (d10 instead of d6, for example) it might better support an XP system, and thus have longer legs. As is, it's a sweet little one-shot engine.
  

For those now interested in Wushu, here's some links:

1. download Wushu Open the free version
2. various Wushu PDF books priced from $2 to $5 at drivethruRPG
3. Wushu resources
4. a very thorough and insightful Wushu review
5. a short Wikipedia article (which doesn't meet their notability guidelines, and thus may disappear sometime soon).

Brute Squads of the 7th Sea

At the Scion forums there's a discussion of how to streamline the use of followers, a topic brought up by someone with a 12-player Scion campaign. This made me think about the 7th Sea RPG, which really handled followers and squads well.

7th Sea had "Brutes". Brutes came in squads, and could act independently, or under the direct command of a named character.

If acting independently, they had kinda meager stats, simplified a bit and toned down (like Extras in Scion, but taken to a further extreme). One hit was enough to drop them. The cool part was you could choose to raise the difficulty of your attack roll in order to take out an entire squad at once, instead of having to harm them individually.

If used as a bodyguard / assistants, Brutes wouldn't get an action of their own. Instead, they'd act when their boss did, and simply add bonus dice to his roll. They also added their health levels to the boss. You'd have to take out the brutes before you could do any actual harm to the Villain.

It was a pretty sweet mechanic. Elegant and streamlined, and lots of fun. It really captured the feel of cinematic battles, where the mooks aren't really important, yet having dozens of underlings is an advantage somehow.

• I've considered adapting it to Scion on more than one occasion, but have never gotten around to it. I could see such brutes work as a Charisma Knack, or as a War Boon, or as just a general tactical rule not unlike Coordinated Assault, or as a specific type of Creature/Follower you can buy. The big flaw with using it for Scion has to do with the greater extremes in character power level. In 7th Sea, PCs were human, and so were the brutes. They moved about the same distance, had similar biology, etc, and the rules were abstract enough to make that work. Scion is bit more crunchy, and a much higher power level. You could have a Hero-level PC that can leap 25 yards or run 72mph accompanied by his followers that can only manage to jump 8 feet or run 18mph. At that point, it stretches credibility for them to move with him and assist his rolls.
  
• This is one area that Wushu doesn't handle as well as I'd like it to. That game seems to take the abstraction to slightly more of an extreme than it needs to. The lack of timing rules doesn't seem to support using mooks and a nemesis at the same time, and there's nothing to stop PCs from just concentrating on the big bad since Mooks can't fight you if you don't fight them. There's also "nothing" for the GM to do in a scene where the PCs fight only mooks, since Mooks don't act or roll. This could be very easily and elegantly house-ruled, though, so I may just do so if I ever run Wushu.
  

Hollows & Hobgoblins

3 posts about Thursday:Part 1 Part 2 Part 3

Last night, we played Hollows and Hobgoblins. It's a dark fantasy RPG based on the Wushu rules. Humans were the minority, forced to live in the impoverished wastelands, not far from the haunted Hollows. The setting had a lot of depth behind it, I could tell, but our one-shot about a bar besieged by corrupted animals and something akin to a barrow-wight didn't provide us much opportunity to explore. We had fun, though, and I'd enjoy a chance to explore the setting further.

Wushu is a great system, a "hippy game" as they called it, since it's rules light and very flexible. Our characters were three descriptors, a magic item, and a signature move, all of which we made up. I made a somewhat Bleys-ian flamboyant warrior type, spiced up with magical power over metal. The magic was fast and loose: I made a doorknob bite a badguy, directed a coat-rack to grapple someone, and when the leaded window-glass shattered it fell onto the floor as caltrops per my command.

The best part of the mechanics is the huge amount of power granted to the players. On your action, you say what happens. Not what you want to happen, but what actually happens. The thing you described happens regardless of how you roll, but the roll quantifies the effects. For example, we faced an unspecified number of mooks, so we could freely narrate how many any given action killed and how we drove the enemy legions back. But until we scored 20 or more aggregate successes, there'd always be more mooks.

The cooler your description of your action, the more dice you roll (like Scion's stunt system, but more integral and more potent). The battle against the big bad was a bit more structured than the mook fight, but we were still empowered to describe amazing acts of heroism and skill. For example, we couldn't chop his head off until and unless we'd worn him down a lot, but nothing stopped us from using our actions to throw him off balconies or into the fireplace.