Has ANYONE played Legends of the Wulin?!

Has ANYONE played Legends of the Wulin?!

what was it like
tell me everything
how the fuck do you find a game

Other urls found in this thread:

nuklearpower.com/2012/01/11/nerding-it-up-with-legends-of-the-wulin/
lparchive.org/Legend-of-Wulin-Heroes/
forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?774794-Sell-me-on-Feng-Shui-2
suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive.html?tags=Wulin Hero Quest
imdb.com/title/tt0093714/
twitter.com/SFWRedditImages

It's pretty good. I prefer Feng Shui 2 though.

How does the experience compare/what makes Feng Shui 2 better? Does Feng Shui 2 do better what LotW aims to do or is it an actual difference in appeal that comes down to preference?

FS2 conveys action better in how its combat flows. Now, LotW is a lot better in terms of cleaving toward the Wuxia genre and power level, but the mechanics can be clunky. The highest compliment I can pay to LotW is that it does Exalted better than Exalted does, and it nails the setting.

How's the character creation? How unique can people be from one another when playing the same class/archetype?

Have you tried reading that bullshit? Lakes, rivers, chivalrous joss, waves, ripples? And the editing is god-awful. It's like they didn't want the system to be read or understood by anyone except people that already knew everything the book was talking about. It doesn't make any effort to reach out to people new to the genre. That's a criminal disservice to fans of wuxia, because they have to explain all of this jargon and these concepts to new players, and the system as well because the book sure doesn't. It's self-insulating and unapproachable. It's in serious need of a second pass and de-obfuscation.

Yes, I have. It is a confusing ordering of information but it's not undecipherable, as with any system it would go a long way just to peak with someone who has played it.

LotWfag who is usually more than happy to go on long, explanatory rambles about how the system actually works. Unfortunately I'm on holiday and away from keyboard at the moment, so my ability to do so is limited. Still, have a bump.

AOPIPAW:JLDK GET BACK IN HERE

RAMBLE ON

Finding a game is the hard part

It's not really that hard to understand. I hadn't even seen Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, that's how blank I was when walking into LotW, but it makes sense with a bit of a brain to understand the terminology.

It's pretty easy to differ between two users of one internal style. (chi-based stuff) Each has five ranks, but rank 2 has a choice between four techniques, rank 3 has a choice between three techniques, and rank 4 has a choice between 2 techniques. There are loresheets that give you access to all of an internal style's techniques, though.

External styles (physical martial arts) are simpler, with only five techniques in total. The combination of internal and external styles allows for a lot of differentiation.

>The highest compliment I can pay to LotW is that it does Exalted better than Exalted does, and it nails the setting.
I used to be able to find a hype review "Nerding it up with Legends Of The Wulin" or something, somewhere, that explained this in detail.

The meme of how horrendously difficult reading the book is, is worse than actually reading the book. It's no harder to learn that any other particularly crunchy system, though it can be easier with a different perspective.

>with a bit of a brain to understand the terminology
Seems to be the crux of the matter.

less playable then Weapons of the Gods. All the fucking jargon, and the what 60+ page errata.

I don't think the book explains how loresheets work very well.

You're thinking of this:

nuklearpower.com/2012/01/11/nerding-it-up-with-legends-of-the-wulin/

I've done a lot of mock games against myself, hard finding people to play this.

Give me a starting place, what do you want to know?

I disagree that it did a bad enough job of explaining loresheets to warrant being singled out for it.

Every character has several layers to them, the first is really who your Character is, what your concept for him is, how you flavor him. Then you have External Style of KungFu that allows for several types of weapon or a special weapon, with that you have an Internal Style which can be any of the available or made up styles. The system is really easy to homebrew for because the actual costs of moves and their bonuses are consistent- same with that every External Style has a total of 35 points in attributes and 20 points of technique to learn.
LoreSheets then change up how you use both the External & Internal style, giving you bonuses for using them in certain ways.
Then you also have Secret Arts, which between each archtype can be entirely different and each character can focus on entirely different things under that secret art.

The lack of a central interested community for this game hurts the most.
Second is that the book is terribly edited.
Funny enough I hear they let the unpolished version get leaked to pirates but apparently this is the only version of the game that has become popular.

>The meme of how horrendously difficult reading the book is, is worse than actually reading the book.

I think people just need to take notes, or someone needs to volunteer to be Wuling Mengzhu and sit in a Roll20 room teaching this shit til its popular again

Also this was a good read: lparchive.org/Legend-of-Wulin-Heroes/

Can you go into how FS2 combat works? I played the original, but while thematic and fun the combat seemed nothing special and lacked much in the way of meaningful choice or strategy, very different to LotW.

As someone who's run both, LotW is smoother in practice. I have fond memories of WotG, but it really is janky as all hell.

As someone who bought the book (before discovering that the company behind it had imploded after the chinese side bailed with all Jenna Moran's kickstarter money), that release isn't much better.

The game could have done with more testing, more editing and generally more work, but it will never get it.

Also, I should mention wulinlegends.pbworks.com to the thread in general. It's a good resource with the same caveats homebrew usually brings. Zechstyr and Sage Genesis are two really reliable guys, basically anything they've made is good.

Someone tell me if this is right or not?

I just made a character and I spent all 20 destiny at the end on both External/Internal jutsu

Does that mean I have 10 Cultivation for having an Internal Style and then 20 Cultivation to spend right off the bat?

Assuming it's all Neutral cultivation, you'll start at 10 Chi, and 30 cultivation between your Internal and starting Destiny spending.

That puts you at 12 Chi and 9 cultivation (30-10-11) towards your next point.

If your GM is using the starting entanglement rules (which IMO they should) you can likely hit 13 Chi at chargen.

Then again, this is kind of why elemental chi is bullshit, at least RAW. An Elemental Chi user can end up with 3 Elemental/11 normal quite easily, giving them more Chi of greater efficiency plus an implicit breath bonus.

I always go
11 Chi
3 Elemental

Don't know if that isn't supposed to be a thing you can do

Excuse me, I'm retarded and didn't read your last sentence

I think its still better to go Elemental since you can use it as normal, just doesn't give you x2 for non-elemental things

RAW Elemental is straight up better. It's one of LotW's implicit balance problems.

This. LoW is an excellent system, an amazing system

But it was written and edited by masturbating retards.

anything legally stopping someone from fixing the umpteen million problems with the game and reselling it under another title?

I bloody well hope mot, since my friends and I are halfway through an attempt.

The company imploding likely helps.

Would anyone be interested in doing some fights?
Don't know how well I could adlib a One-Shot but doing a few meaningless clashes should be fine.

You've got a blog or anything where I can keep track of your progress?
I wouldn't mind throwing my two cents at things-
or we can just trade notes whenever I get around to penning my own version of things.

>How's the character creation? How unique can people be from one another when playing the same class/archetype?
This is something I will never understand. Same class, fair enough, but if you want to be different from one another, why the fuck are you playing the same specialization to begin with?

Hey, they're playing my song.
>Has ANYONE played Legends of the Wulin?!
I have.
>what was it like
The first two times, great, the third, not so great. Having people who "get" the genre helps.
>tell me everything
That's a lot, could you narrow it?
>how the fuck do you find a game
I dunno, I basically only play with people I already know and have known for years.

Characters themselves rather then a random statblock is more important then your archetype in LotW, honestly.
ALL of your combat abilities have nothing to do with archetypes, that's more like the choice that decides your primary secondary skills in one sense.

holy shit! WulinSage is alive?!

I think its a fair question.
Two courtiers don't have to approach being charismatic in the same way.

After all this isn't a game of Ninja Turtles but you can put a different face and catch-phrase on each turtle.
You both can be heavy hitters with different approaches and techniques, you can both be battle brothers from the same house but with mechanics that fit your character better
i.e. Honest Joe & Blossom Harvest and his cantankerous jerk brother Bone-Fed-Wolf John.

>WulinSage is alive

WHAT!? THAT MAN! IT COULDN'T BE

What made the third try so terrible?
I ask because I've often thought of using this system for different things, dbz mostly.

One of my games I ran of it had one player who was an educated scholarly Courtier type-guy who used Blossom Harvest and Iron Body Skill, because in his words "brute force is simply more effective and more efficient when you stop using words and must rely on fists."
He was the kind of flowery effete gentleman guy, except when he tore his shirt off he as built like a dump truck and could break spearheads by flexing his pecs real hard at them.

Nothing yet, although I post pretty regularly when LotW comes up on Veeky Forums. There's a #LotW channel on the sup/tg/ IRC but it's pretty dead most of the time.

as a JoJo fan I find beating the shit out of someone is often the most charismatic thing you can do

, Yeah yeah, I ain't dead.
Don't get your undies in a bunch over it.
Felt wrong to post in a LotW thread without the trip even though I don't usually use it.
Ooooh...well...because the third game had players that thought Naruto was the same thing as Wuxia, basically?
So DBZ might not work, because genre-wise it's pretty similar but changing some of the fluffy words around.
That said, strip away enough terminology and anything can work; there's literally no system for universal "chi blasts", but I guess you could fluff it as a generic ranger attack.

Japanese martial arts fiction stuff works different from Chinese martial arts fiction stuff honestly, with the notable exception of Hokuto no Ken which is really just a post-apocalyptic Wuxia story anyway.

I was in there before.
The people are helpful but they're not very eager to play

>Japanese martial arts fiction stuff works different from Chinese martial arts fiction stuff honestly

seems pretty similar to me.
what are the differences?

>strip enough terminology

All it would need:
>Racial Loresheets
>A generic internal style for 'dumb guy with big fireball'
>Handwave the existence of weapons somehow
>If DB leave zones and footwork alone
>If Z make zones huge

Do you REALLY want me to go into greater detail?
Because I can,!and it would be long-winded and annoying to everyone on here and would probably necessitate me explaing the differences between Japanese culture and storytelling and Chinese culture and storytelling, which I'm pretty sure nobody on here wants to sit through like some useless lecture.

Nanohafag here, reminding folks that LotW is surprisingly flexible and has worked great for our magical girl game for years.

Most of it is just scaling the fluff of things and being okay with fluffing courtiers arts attacks as friendship lasers.

Write it down in a Word doc, bake it into a PDF, and attach that to a post. People who want to read it will do so, people who don't don't have to get bothered by it.

Exactly.
Removing a lot of the fluff makes it able to do it because the system is chiefly narrative in nature; as long as you utilize the narrative part correctly it still works.
The difficult part came from when players in my Naruto-wannabe game seemed to not realize that narratively speaking, Naruto's storytelling system talked about "styles" and "martial arts", but in a very real way was mostly about pulling various completely unrelated superpowers out of your asses, some of which don't even require physical contact or conditioning on your part.
If you replaced "ninja" with "mutants" and changed "forest and mountains" to "city" you could turn Naruto in a very weirdly written X-Men comic book.

I'm on a cellphone, no can do.

Don't be so harsh on yourself man, some of us actually want to know more things.

Sitting here now I'm actually perplexed how a hot-blooded anime character wouldn't fit into a Chinese Wuxia setting aside from most of them being shallow-ish characters obsessed with black & white good and evil and preserving the status quo instead of with their culture.

I can see a Narutard being an obnoxious fuck with a one-note character, but the one-note reference memelording seems to be the only way it would be totally out of place.

>Nanohafag

Will that game ever be concluded? I read through it on rpgnet

So less of a character who wanted to grow and interact with the world- and more of a character who just wanted to hit Super Saiyan and ignore everyone elses cool shit by sheer force?

RPGnet? Might be a different game, the writeups for my campaign are on sup/tg/

And I'm poke the guy who did the storytime threads. The game is still going, but he's been super busy, having his third kid/moving state/getting a new job and such.

My Mistake, I was thinking Nihao Honey.
I'll check yours out

Anyone have some good advice for writing loresheets? I like to throw new stuff into the game, but I run out of ideas really quick for actual bonuses to put on them. What ones in the book make good templates?

Honestly, I just make them up as I go along at this point. A player gets interested in something? Make it a loresheet, talk it over with them to come up with cool stuff that it could do.

Although Entanglement is one of my big issues with LotW. That the exact same progression currency can be spent on one time events, pure fluff benefits and real, potent mechanical bonuses very much rubs me the wrong way, as without careful GM side management you could end up with a significance competence gap between two PC's.

Plus, in general I hate the idea of being forced to choose between between cool fluff stuff and mechanical benefits. It's never fun.

>Sitting here now I'm actually perplexed how a hot-blooded anime character wouldn't fit into a Chinese Wuxia setting aside from most of them being shallow-ish characters obsessed with black & white good and evil and preserving the status quo instead of with their culture.

It actually has to do with the VASTLY different ways Japan and China culturally see things in modern times.
Hot-blooded characters do exist in wuxia; in fact every other character is one of them, but a shouting warrior who overcomes his challenges by shouting louder and drawing on his inner reserves of strength actually isn't a character archetype.
In fact, the hotter-blooded a character is, the greater chance he's going to commit some horribly grievous crime that ruins his life and turns him into a villain or sets him on the run from his old allies.
Exactly.
See, in DBZ there is no interaction between styles and forms and stuff; many characters (Vegeta) don't even have any actual combat training.
They're just MORE POWERFUL then other people, so they win.
It's actually elaborated a bit more in the Dragoball manga; humans had naturally less energy reserves then more powerful races and so kind of developed more elataborate training methods to use it and overcome these limitations, with even seemingly "basic" stuff like the Kamehameha breaking the "rules" of how Saiya-jin understood how inner energy manipulation abilities worked.
The alien races that were more powerful actually never needed to learn any special tricks because you learn tricks when you aren't already so powerful that you can plow through 80% of the universe with zero effort on your part.

>fact, the hotter-blooded a character is, the greater chance he's going to commit some horribly grievous crime that ruins his life and turns him into a villain or sets him on the run from his old allies.
Jesus, THIS. Watched a bunch of wuxia shows, and the "wise" characters are really just characters who aren't total autistic idiots who overreact at everything at all times and display basic common sense when it comes to conflict resolution.

>In fact, the hotter-blooded a character is, the greater chance he's going to commit some horribly grievous crime that ruins his life and turns him into a villain or sets him on the run from his old allies.

I want in on this

One of the Condor Heroes shows?

....yes? how did you know?

They remake Condor Heroes and Return of the Condor Heroes every other year or so, alternating between which one.
If you're lucky you might get Heaven Sword/Dragon Saber, but mostly it's those two.
Condor Heroes has been made into 9 separate TV shows and Return has been made into 8.

Unfortunately for DBZ a lot of things got swept under the rug and entirely taken for granted by the writers/ animators afterwards.

Things like how fast DB & DBZ characters were moving.
That there were actual different styles with different aims;
Crane Style seemed to be an imitation of Evil King Piccolo's Demon Style.
Though by the time Future Trunks & Adult Gohan rolled around it seemed like Demon Style was actually a metaphor for Self-Taught/fatherless.
It wasn't until Piccolo Jr had his first fight that the show then entirely hinged on beam spams.
Vegeta is just introduced too late for his martial style to matter at all.

DB has always suffered the Power Level problem since day one, but its roots were at least kind of near some Wuxia.
I don't want to Dragon Ball Wulin because DB was super Wulin, but because DB benefits from that kind of structure.

If you want I can go on a lore tangent about what was really going on in the Frieza or Cell saga. I have wasted my life to know these things

I already know these things too and my life isn't wasted at all, so no need to stress yourself.
Point is, DBZ has some divergent storytelling then standard wuxia.

As long as we have a semi-active group here

How does the after-battle ripple roll work?

You just automatically create a condition at Ripple Roll difficulty to overcome?

Can't find yours.
The thread comes up empty

It's like one last damage roll using all the accumulated Ripples right after the fight ends.
Unlike regular fight Ripples, the Conditions can be non-violent in nature, like an unhealthy obsession to beat someone after you loose to them so badly or falling in love with them.

If you don't get why it happens, that's actually a Wuxia storytelling thing; injuries people get in fights in wuxia stories are actually fairly rare and they STICK AROUND.
One notable example as a character receive a blow in battle that injures him so badly that his ability to function at full power is nonexistent for half of the novel because the injury is just that severe and difficult to heal.
It makes for an interesting narrative situation where injuries suffered DURING a fight don't matter as much as injuries you suffer AFTER it, as many such injured characters are reluctant to engage in fights after they get hit so bad due to the deabilitating affects of these injuries.

Tell me something cool of one of your good Wulin sessions.
I can't get enough of this game, because there isn't enough

interesting read! someone contrast that with Feng Shui 2 please

having read the nerding up article, can you give a few examples of how Ripples, Conditions and altering your behaviour work in actual practice?

particularly to highlight this:
>These build up and you’ll reach a point where you cannot effectively attack or defend, and you are Taken Out.

>The game could have done with more testing, more editing and generally more work, but it will never get it.
so do it yourself and bleed it anonymously out onto the internet. of course, the author might then sell your work...

I've never touched FS2

But tthere is a trend at rpgnet to make 'sell me' threads for new games.
forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?774794-Sell-me-on-Feng-Shui-2

Of course each & everyone of them is the maker shilling his own game on a faux account

Recommend me Wuxia movies! Do it do it do it!

Jesus, I love when you guys give so much exposition on them wutianlinxia stuff. I'd love to make a game out of It but goddamn I know so little. I recently started reading Spirit Realm and It's super hype to me.
Is there anything I could watch on youtube or otherwise stream to get to know more of this kind of shit?

Snake in Eagles Shadow, Hands of the White Lotus, Dirty Ho, Five Deadly Venoms (careful, some of the translation is really bad), Master of Tai Chi, Iron Monkey, Hero, House of Flying Daggers, Crouching tiger Hidden Dragon, Shaolin Wooden Men, Return of the Five Deadly Venoms.

Oh, also, The Kid With the Golden Arms.

One of the more inventive ways a player used an after-battle Rippling roll was this;
>fight is between a swordsman and a doctor who used poison arts
>fight is pretty even, mostly they just deal superficial wounds to each other and it's a stalemate, so they stop fighting
>fight ends in a draw, after-battle Rippling roll happens
>Swordsman rolls first and gets a Minor Condition that affects his Action.
>Killing Doctor: "It seems as though our skills were even, though you seem to be the worse for wear."
>Doctor gets his Rippling roll, and he rolls TERRIBLY on it, getting a Major Condition.
>Swordsman: "Indeed, though I am the victor in the end."
>Doctor: "And how is this true?"
>Swordsman: "I can train, and one day I will be stronger then you. You however will still be a tasteless hack with no art or class until the day you die."
>Swordsman basically says the after-fight Rippling roll is him delivering the sickest possible burn ever, giving him a Major Breathing issue due to the sick parting insult attacking his sense of character so deeply that he remains butthurt about it afterword for months and causes him to loose his ability to center himself in a fight over how assblasted he is over the insult.

Go watch the Taiwanese Swordsman series.
It's a great example of the genre and has good production values and has a love interest who is at once both the main villain and the heroes love interest.

And she is super cute.

suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive.html?tags=Wulin Hero Quest
This is a good primer to the genre.
I hated Quest Threads and I loved this one, JUST this one.

Oh come the fuck on!
Like I don't ALREADY feel guilty enough for not finishing it, you gotta bring it up on here?

That's RZA's favorite kungfu movie.

Okay, Ripples are basically...combat stress. It's not injuries but it's getting tired, making more and more mistakes.
Conditions is catch-all for "this causes either problems or benefits in specific situations", with injuries being a specific kind of condition.
A good example is if a guy gets his legs cut up by a saberman's bladework, if he fails his Rippling roll he can get an Action Penalty Condition to using any Footwork (movement and dodging instead of blocking or partying basically). Now if he uses his Footwork normally in-game as though he's not hurt, he gets a Penalty to the result of his rolls. If in-character he doesn't fly around or jump a lot and instead has his character act as though his legs are fucked up and his mobility is limited, he gets ZERO penalties.

Basically, you can ignore these penalties if you voluntarily play up the problems Conditions cause, which can actually either help enforce good roleplaying OR simply have said penalties act as accumulated combat damage depending on player preferences.

I'm quite partial to Kung Fu Hustle, Journey to the West, Hero and whatever that netflix movie was about the retired champ who ended up in jail and then has to hunt down some Kung Fu Killer whose running around 1v1'ing every past expert.
I don't know if any of this is specifically Wuxia related.

In combat, Taken Out is achieved either by an extremely high damage roll or by successfully inflaming an already existent Major Injury. The way conditions limit actions aren't directly related to this.

Hustle is, Hero is, Journey isn't, and I don't know the last one.

The 1998 one or the 2013 one?

2013.
It makes some pretty heavy altercations to the original story, but it was still really well-recieved and the changes made the new series fairly fresh even for people familiar with the story.

>whatever that netflix movie was about the retired champ who ended up in jail and then has to hunt down some Kung Fu Killer whose running around 1v1'ing every past expert
Kung Fu Killer?

Speaking of movies with forgotten names; there's one I've been trying to find about a guy who, while in prison, decides he wants to win this tournament. I don't remember a whole lot from it - a scene of him in prison punching his fists into burger meat against a concrete wall, an earlier scene of the same guy as a male prostitute, and the end of the movie where his final opponent is wiping the floor with him, leading to headbutting the guys fist (and breaking it).

I think it was Kung Fu Killer
I just wrote up a big thing about fighting a Centipede throwing motherfucker but looks like these guys got you already:

imdb.com/title/tt0093714/

???????

personally, i would add drunken master. and not surprised to see snake in eagles shadow head that list.

>That said, strip away enough terminology and anything can work; there's literally no system for universal "chi blasts", but I guess you could fluff it as a generic ranger attack.

Oddly enough, I'm using LOTW to run Dungeons: The Dragoning of all things.

But then, as was said: LOTW can run Exalted better than Exalted. So it flows from that.

you can, however, draw plenty of stuff out of chinese/eastern martial art movies in general, regardless of which period they are set in

Yes, of course. Who wouldn't interested in the minutiae of Chinese vs Japanese culture and storytelling? That's crazy talk, man.
I'll now patiently await your detailed and enlightening response.

Not quite. It's asian, and while the training starts in prison, he gets out after that.

Damn. This has been bugging me for a while now. Even trawling through martial arts movies hasn't helped.

Remember any character names or anything?

I'm about to pass the fuck out here, this will be brief.

Basically, "styles" and how they interact with each other is not as important in most Japanese media, and instead individual techniques in those styles are. Example: one guy fights another guy and the other guy is loosing, other guy uses a new techniques, tables a turned, he wins fight. You see it in anime all the time.
In wuxia, while individual Forms might be more useful in certain situations, combat is at heart WILDLY realistic; it plays out like a chess match where if your Forms and skills counter your enemies then he looses because nothing else he could bring out could counter your techniques, akin to being put in martial checkmate. The Laughs At/Fears system in LotW is there to represent this narrative thing, showing how some methods (regardless of how you use them) just will be less effective against certain styles because you're prepared against them.

Next; wuxia heroes NEVER do the "Yamato-damashii" thing where the hero digs deep into internal reserves and arbitrarily creates a new technique or gets more powerful. This comes from how deeply Yamato-damashii is entrenched in Japanese culture; it's like saying the Japanese people are so exceptional that they if they try their best they literally will exceed their limitations for no reason. Compare to say, if someone being held up by a guy with a gun believed American Exceptionalism would allow him to magically get faster then the bullet because he believed in freedom so much and you'll see what I mean. Even though it's not actually CALLED Yamato-damashii anymore it had been so pervasive in so much of their media for so long and you can't really escape it due to how many later creators it's influenced.

Wuxia heroes don't just get more powerful mid-fight; they usually work their asses off for it by learning new styles or refining their skills or improving. They don't just say "I MUST SUCCEED" and then have their power level jump over 9000.

>WILDLY realistic
wildly UNrealistic.
I have to stop posting at 3:30 AM.

Good night man.
Look forward to seeing you again

Wuxia DOES have examples of "heroic spirit", but it never lets them magically become more skillful or more powerful. In fact the usual way it happens is that they pick themselves back up after being defeated and throw themselves with determination into the fight...and then promptly get their asses beaten down again because raw determination doesn't really add up to shit in the genre if you don't have anything backing it up.
Generally a character WILL later win a rematch, but only after training learning some new skill that allows him to beat his foe, or at least match him in skill.

This probably comes from China's greater emphasis on respecting handed down knowledge and tradition; Japan has a respect for that sort of thing too, but recall that in the late 19th century they basically dumped their entire culture in favor of Westernization and fetishizing Western shit, and then when samurai ideals made a comeback after WWII they lost a huge war because of them and then America parked it's ass on them for twenty years; this caused the idea that older knowledge is inherently better knowledge to somewhat fall in favor because they had to deal with some pretty severe long-term cultural consequences because of this belief, so instead of "handed down knowledge and older ways are better" it gets turned into more of a "respect your elders" type thing.

I wish - that would make this relatively easy, instead of being a brick wall to beat my head against occasionally.

What did they look like? Bruce Lee-oid, Chow Yun-fat-esque?