System Suggestion Thread

I am indeed rather curious. Is it particularly lethal, or do its mechanics have the potential to swing from dangerous and fast to long and flashy? Is it a gear-heavy game, or do your Externals, Internals, and your Archetype determine most everything a character can do?

Just make your own.

>reservations regarding a few systems is "messing with the mechanics because they're too dependent on their own setting,"
>"just make your own,"

Appreciate the suggestion, but between writing stuff for setting, plots, running the games, and working an 8-14 hour-per-day job, making my own system from scratch would be a tad inconvenient.

It's not a particularly lethal system, although death is still possible. Injuries are represented by Chi Conditions, a narrative clause tied to a mechanical benefit or, in this case, penalty. Break someones arm, for example, and they either take a bonus to actions or avoid using that arm in the fight from then on. It creates an interesting situation where you don't death spiral into oblivion, but you have to choose between mechanical or fluff restrictions, slowly being backed into a corner.

Taking someone out in combat can kill them, but in my experience it's much more often to leave them alive, because of another thing the system does- At the end of each battle, each combatant suffers a final damage roll against them, but instead of creating injuries this can create any kind of condition in the game. Sure, you could kill the bandit you just beat up... Or you could have him gain an inspiration towards redemption, to give up his lawless ways and choose a better path.

Sometimes you do straight up kill a fucker, but the system gives plenty of options to make the consequences of combat interesting and meaningful without that being necessary.

Gear is relatively light. The system uses a set of abstract weapon tags (Sword, Spear, Saber, Staff, Ranged, Flexible, Massive, Unarmed), each of which has a couple of stat bonuses or abilities, and you can combine to tags into a Special Weapon, gaining the benefits of each. Armour is similarly simple, just split into Light, Medium and Heavy, each of which has its own benefits and penalties (although this is one of the things that requires houseruling, RAW armour is more of a downside than a benefit for its huge associated penalties).

There are also Legendary Weapons, but they're something of an endgame upgrade, potent items that cost a lot to buy into and that require you to work to unlock their powers over time.

LotW's gear rules represent a lot of stuff, but they are pretty simple in practice.

*Take a penalty to actions

Apologies, typing at 5AM tends to cause errors like that.

No problem, I've work and need to sleep soon also.

If you don't mind I'd like the combat example you were alluding to. Unless it turns out you need to re-type it fresh, in which case I understand. I'm certainly motivated to read the book in further detail.

I managed to find it, so I'll post it up. Although reading it over I realise I reuse a lot of phrases to describe things, apologies for the repetition.

LotW uses d10 dicepools where you read sets. Dicepools generally have a set value, 7 dice for starting characters, which increases as you gain Rank, a general measure of power, and can also be influenced by spending in game resources or using certain powerful techniques.

When you roll your pool of seven dice you look for sets- That is, multiple dice showing the same number. A set has a value of ten for each die in the set, plus the number on the dice. So two sevens has a value of 27, four sixes has a value of 46. Single dice also have values, ten plus the number they show, but you're more restricted in the actions you can take on a single dice.

This creates one of the most interesting core mechanical properties of LotW- The ability to make multiple actions on a single roll. As long as you have enough sets, you can make any number of actions, giving you a lot of depth of options, especially in combat.

The other key concept of the system is Chi Conditions. Chi Conditions are very simple, being a narrative clause tied to a mechanical bonus or penalty. Beneficial Chi Conditions grant you their bonus as long as you obey the narrative clause, while harmful ones inflict the penalty unless you obey them.

Injuries are a common example of harmful Chi Condition. When you suffer an Injury, it creates a choice- Either limit your actions and descriptions in the way defined by the narrative clause, or suffer a penalty.

It creates a really interesting dynamic in combat, as injuring them doesn't necessarily force them into a death spiral, but always gives them hard choices. Figuring out the most effective ways to restrict your opponents actions is the key to winning the fight, but you always have the option to be creative and keep fighting, preventing it becoming a total death spiral.

I'll explain the flow of combat along with it to give context.

I'll use these two styles for the example, I'm familiar with both since I use them for a current PC of mine-

External Styles define your basic combat stats. They're generally passive and offer broad, general benefits.

wulinlegends.pbworks.com/w/page/59987937/Immortals' Supreme Boxing

Internal Styles are more active, each technique requiring Chi to be expended to use it and can provide a variety of effects, from stat boosts to various strange kinds of utility.

wulinlegends.pbworks.com/w/page/78769307/Ghosts and Shadows Manual

In terms of character building you purchase techniques from within your Internal and External separately, but I'll just point out the ones I'm using for the purpose of the example.

Combat starts with the Initiative Roll. This is something of a misnomer, as while defining your Initiative score is the key action, you can do a lot of other things.

Ah, I should explain Major and Minor actions- Major Actions are necessary actions for a roll. You have to make them, and they can be declared on a single die. Minor Actions are everything else, but can usually only be made on a set.

So, getting an example roll from my dicebot... Say I'm sitting at the following- 29, 23, 10, 12, 14.

The simplest thing to do would be to take the highest set- 29- and add my Speed score of +5 for a total Initiative of 34. However, I have two sets and, as I said above, there are some actions you can only take on sets, while your Initiative can come from a single dice.

Instead, I might take the 14 for my Initiative, a total of 19, and make use of the sets for different reasons. Focus on Breath is an action you can take with a skill depending on your archetype to regenerate extra Chi at the end of the round, so I could toss the 24+10 for 34 Focus on Breath to regenerate extra combat resources, since I'm planning to use some this round.

Those 9's could also be used for quite a few things. Moving between Zones is an action declared with a set on the Initiative Roll, as is assessing an opponents External style, learning its strengths and weaknesses for you to exploit. However, here I think we'll put the dice in the River.

The River is an area you can store dice. It starts at 2 slots for a starting rank character, increasing as you go. Dice stored in the River can be returned to the pool later, giving you an extra set or letting you expand a set to get a nice big number.

With a low Initiative like 19, we'd likely get attacked first, but I'll do my attack roll first to show how it works.

So we declare the target of our attack and roll our dice, getting- 24, 13, 15, 16, 17, 19,

Not as good as initiative, but look! A tasty tasty nine. We can flow the 9's out of our river to make a whopping great set of 39, a very effective option.

Again, the simple choice would be to just add our Strike value of +10 to our highest set, 39, and call it quits. A Strike at 49 is pretty good, but we can do better.

Icy Void Hand, from Ghosts and Shadows, lets you make a Freeze attack at a +15 bonus. Elemental Attacks are a special kind of secondary attack, using their own modifiers instead of your External styles Strike and Damage bonuses. They ignore Toughness and Armour and inflict significantly nastier conditions than normal. So, we can take that beastly 39 set and add 15 for a Freeze at 54.

But we still have lots of dice left. While we could go for an attack on the single dice and do something else with a set, low attacks are often not worth it, so let's use that 24. Our base External Strike bonus is +10, so that'd give us 34, but our Internal style also has a Technique which gives +10 Strike, boosting it up to 44.

So we declare our actions from our roll- A Freeze attack at 54 and a Primary Strike at 44.

And now, because it seems weird but it works for the example, we'll defend against our own attacks

So we roll our dice for defence and get- 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 17, 19,

Which sucks, although not as bad as it might. While Initiative and Attack rolls only have one Major action, on the Defence roll every defence is considered a Major Action, so even if we don't have any sets we can still defend ourselves. Still, without good numbers on our side this is probably going to suck.

Two stats in LotW are used for defence- Block and Footwork. Most styles focus on one, although some go for a balanced defence since some attacks penalise one defence over the other.

For now, with our Footwork of +10 our base values are 27 and 29. Not enough to stop either, but hopefully we can blunt their impact. We can also use another Internal Technique for +5 dodge. However, we have to choose which set to apply it to, as each Internal technique can only be used once per round.

We have another option however. The rank 5 technique of Ghosts and Shadows is, amidst its other effects, a +10 Round Long bonus to Footwork. Round Long means that, as you might expect, its bonus applies to all uses of that skill for the entire round. We'll ignore its other effects for now, focusing on the primary math of the combat rather than the extra utility and depth that can be added by various techniques.

In this case, we use it to boost our defences up to 37 and 39. Now we compare our defence values with the attacks made against us.

44 against 37 has a difference of 7 points. The difference between attack and defence is meaningful in Legends of the Wulin. In this case, a difference of 0-9 mean all we suffer is a Ripple.

Ripples are an abstract measure of the cost of combat, doing nothing on their own but gradually accumulating over the course of the fight, creating more and more danger if you're hit by a particularly successful attack.

Speaking of particularly successful attacks, we're still facing down that nasty Freeze. 54 vs 39 is a difference of 15. It's greater than 10, so in addition to taking a second Ripple we also suffer a Rippling Roll.

A Rippling Roll is, as you might expect, a roll with the total number of Ripples you've suffered in the fight up until that point. Normally a Rippling Roll would make use of your Damage bonus, but as this is a Freeze attack it instead uses the bonus listed in the Technique- In this case +5.

So we roll two dice for our Rippling Roll and, lucky/unlucky us, we get a pair- two sixes for 26. That makes the total value of our Freeze 31.

We oppose this with Chi Aura. Usually, Armour and Toughness would help here, but the mystic ice ignores those defences, leaving us relying on raw dice. Each dice of Chi Aura costs 1 Chi, but we'll spend both points here, hoping to avoid a nasty early fight Chi Condition.

We roll and... 11 and 15. That aint good. We reduce the 31 by 15, leaving a remainder of 16.

From here, we compare it to our Chi Threshold. Chi Threshold is defined by your total amount of Chi. For starting characters, it's generally 12, but Armour increases it by 5. If this was an ordinary attack, the damage value of 16 would be less than our Threshold, so the condition would only be Trivial- Present, but not yet having any mechanical impact.

However, we aren't that lucky. Denied our Armour bonus, we suffer a Minor condition. Freeze penalties always apply to Breath, reducing the amount of Chi we regain each round by one. As an extra fuck you, Freeze conditions also freeze one of your River slots, denying you the option of storing dice in it.

And then we hit the end of the round. This round we've spent our full 12 Chi- 3 for the Freeze, 2 for the +10 Strike, 5 for the Footwork boost and 2 for Chi Aura.

The base Chi regeneration is 2 for starting rank characters. We regain an additional 1 from Focus on Breath, but are denied 1 by the Minor Freeze condition, so we only regain 2 Chi.

Generally, this would be really bad. Running low on Chi massively limits your options and makes you super vulnerable to attacks as you might not be able to buy Chi Aura, so alpha strikes like this are extremely risky. However, in this case it was for the purpose of example.

That's an overview of a single potential combat round in LotW, but there's a lot I didn't get into. Marvels which let you penalise enemy stats or skills, Secondary and Area attacks, the whole mess of Secret Arts... I can get into some of it if you like, but hopefully this'll serve as a decent example of how the numbers actually work in play.

It's also worth noting that at any stage in the turn I could have chosen to do something different. Made use of the numbers presented to me and my resources in different ways. That's the thing I really enjoy about LotW- Almost every time you roll the dice, you look at them and have to consider your options, how to best make use of what you've been presented with to stay in the fight and push towards victory.

Seems pretty involved, but I imagine that like all games it gets easier and faster as you learn it. If nothing else, it actually looks really interesting, and I am very intrigued by the potential for taking either a raw penalty or a very narrative penalty, and the same for bonuses.

I'm certainly going to give this a deeper look-see. Are there any resources--fan or otherwise--that I should look out for? Splat books that are considered necessary by the fanbase, or is it a one-book game?

Given that the company behind it imploded, any hope for splats was lost, sadly.

However, the core book has a lot of content and the Wulin Legends wiki has a lot of homebrew. Take it with a pinch of salt, it's not all super well balanced, but there are a few people on the site who are always reliable, like Zechstyr or Sage Genesis, one of the original designers of LotW.

It's also worth mentioning that there are a few things in the core book that need tweaking. Some of the Internal and External styles are a bit imbalanced, nothing too bad but the Half Burnt Manual and wiki content do a good job of making up the difference.

There's also little things like armour. Usually it imposes a pretty significant penalty to speed, footwork and skills for a paltry benefit. We always houserule it to just a mobility penalty.

Speaking of mobility, that's the other easy fix- RAW, Footwork is innately better than Block, as while both are equally good defences Footwork also covers movement. The fix is allowing Block to be used for covering ground too- While Footwork is moving over or around things, Block represents going Through things. It helps each one have its own identity while closing the utility gap between them.

The one thing that's not easy to fix is Elemental Chi. It counts for double for Elemental techniques, giving characters with it an extremely potent secondary resource pool at little to no downside. There's various tweaks for this, and just not using elemental chi is an obvious one, but it's something that still lacks a strong consensus solution at the moment.

Dope. Thanks for the suggestion, I think it will help.

Sup, was gonna come sing the gospel of LotW, because I figure I've probably joined the LotWfags of this board for now.

I was one of the people asking about it last time, I am actually working on a new character sheet for it (The current one has atrocious lines and is missing key stuff like entanglement entirely).

I'm gonna take my time with it, however, my game is probably still several months away...

If the company imploded though... I could start developing that game idea even further once I get the current one out.

Hmm... Maybe I can try to cultivate this still budding idea to another form. We'll see. And we'll see that in a few months in /gdg/, probably.

To clarify imploded- From what we can tell (based on a post by the ex-CEO on one of Jenna Moran's kickstarter pages), the Chinese side of the business took the Kickstarter money and ran, killing the business completely. It fucked over a lot of designers, especially Jenna, and so far it seems like Eos Press has functionally ceased to exist. It's a real shitshow.

Eugh, sounds bad.

Well, it's not like I planned to use some obvious namesake for the game, like Legacy of the Wulin. Maybe as a project name, but not the name of the finished product, no.

I've never quite found a group to play it with (so I can't really say with confidence), but if you're looking at L5R, you might also consider Qin.

Legends Of The Wulin is pretty awesome, though.

I'd suggest you don't pick Exalted. I like it very much, but it's not easy to play and combat, while rather lethal, is not fast. It's also somewhat setting dependent, so if you're making your own you'd have to go through the list of rules and powers changing some or a few things might stop making sense.

I'd personally suggest LotW as well, although it has some setting specific mechanic as well... kind of. You have something called Loresheets in the game. Basically, it's a list of ties and relationship to an important group or part of the setting which characters buy with XP. Stuff like "you become a member of this Dojo, you can now learn that Martial Art" or "you are one of the possible heir to Dojo and the leaders are discussing whether you should get the title or not". It's very possible to make your own (and I believe the game encourages you to do so as well), but it does mean some involvement on your part to fit the system and your setting.

>>Legends of the Wulin
>I'm simply not familiar with the system and would like people's opinion on it.
Rules are VERY poorly organized, but simple. Interesting (but somewhat distracting/disengaging) dice mechanics.

>So that's what I have, Veeky Forums. Suggestions? Summaries? Opinions? Help?
OSR. Specifically the Mystic from BECMI's Master DM's Book. NOT the Mystic from Rules Cyclopedia. That one is balls.

Godbound could be interesting; seems to have been custom made for this stuff. I have heard it described as an "OSR Exalted".