Thursday, August 7, 2008

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.

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