Tian Shang lead designer Q&A

I'm writing the sequel to Legends of the Wulin and Weapons of the Gods. Ask me anything today; it's my day off.

Other urls found in this thread:

mushroompress.blogspot.com)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zizhi_Tongjian
wulinlegends.pbworks.com/w/page/119662914/Dvarapala's Vigil
mushroompress.blogspot.com/2017/11/linking-rules-to-shared-mindspace.html
youtube.com/watch?time_continue=960&v=wrr6nXG54O4
twitter.com/SFWRedditImages

prove it homo

Is this actually a thing? I fucking adore Legends of the Wulin, I run and play in loads of games of it and I'm working on my own homebrew version of the system.

Is this actually official in any way? How does this relate to the death of Eos Press? How were you involved, if at all, with Legends of the Wulin, and what's your plan for the potential sequel?

Hell yes it's actually a thing. David Ramirez grabbed me off of the big purple a few years ago and we've been working on it since then.

It's not endorsed by Eos Press (they're defunct) but Eos press was two guys, one of which gave us an endorsement to continue working and is considering future work with us if it's successful.

Eos died *right after* we started working on it, so it was a bit of a clusterfuck for awhile. Ultimately, David decided to keep working on the system with us under his direct guidance.

I was originally tapped to write "LotW light" and the new system is based off of my work towards that. There's a preview up on the design blog. (mushroompress.blogspot.com)

Anything we can look forward to?

Yeah; the quickstart is planned for four parts, each pay what you want.

First part introduces the combat and action mechanics (the full demo thing is on the blog now) and also has the core mechanics.

Second part introduces more GM mechanics (NPC creation, character advancement, travel and game prep rules, etc.)

Third part is planned to show the domain-conquering and army stuff, but it's in an early stage.

Ditto the last installment; it's meant to show off the "boss as a planet monster" stuff, but it's only in planning.

So if any of that sounds cool then yes, look forward to it. I sank over $700 and years of my life into this project, so it's happening.

How are you fixing warriors and scholars?

Interesting. It looks like you're making a very different beast, whereas what my group is currently figuring out is more just a cleaned up version of LotW. Can you go into what you want to do differently this time around? Beyond improving the editing, which you'll absolutely, certainly want to do.

LotW is highly regarded for its narrative driven combat and cool mix of fluff and mechanics. Although this was weighed down by some of the more arcane bullshit attached to it, do you intend to preserve these elements?

We went back to a version of the archetypes from WotG. You can be a warrior, mystic or courtier, basically. The classes gain power by learning kung-fu techniques to advance.

Social and mystical arts don't do "damage" like ripples anymore; they specifically target the imbalances that they're aggravating, so a warrior can just beat your ass down and kill you better (which I mean, no duh right?)

Have you read The General Mirror?

Yeah editing for clarity has been a big push.

Let me see... Well, the narrative stuff is still there, just more concrete. I stole the power scalar from the old faserip marvel game so that you could have "your character can do what a person can do" AND "goku can lift a battleship" in the same system.

I put a LOT of thought in to the incentives, game theory, and strategy of combat, both within a combat and in an ongoing campaign. Just looking at LotW and asking "what does this mechanic actually induce?" helped a lot.

Nope! What is it, and do you have a link?

What do you mean by "Sequel?" How will it be fundamentally different from Legends of the Wulin? Are you doing Wuxia with a new system, or are you using the old Legends of the Wulin system for a different theme?

Looking over site, what you've got so far seems really solid. A lot less weird and inde/arcane than LotW tended to be, but that's probably a good thing for usabilities sake. Even if I'm one of the few weird people who fell in love with LotW's stranger elements.

Only the most important book(s) in Chinese history, considering it's guided most emperors and was Mao's favorite book. Every member of the current politburo has read it.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zizhi_Tongjian

It's about as much a sequel to Legends as Legends was to Weapons. Which is to say, there are familiar elements, and the rules are based on the previous iteration and meant to evoke the same thing (Arik Ten Broeke has been reading over my changes and updates, so at least one of the previous designers is tacitly involved)

After the redesign, I feel more confident calling the genre evoked Shonen rather than Wuxia, although it's pretty modular and you could hack it pretty confidently to do either.

You look to be going for a more indian aesthetic from the terminology involved.

I'm kinda curious, as I recently designed a LotW External style based around the theme of the guardian statues found outside temples in India.

wulinlegends.pbworks.com/w/page/119662914/Dvarapala's Vigil

Could I achieve something similar in Tiang Sheng?

I like the arcane stuff too. One of the issues with making it like we have is that we didn't want to retread too much ground. Which is kind is a shame, because that daoist alchemy stuff was fucking fantastic.

>56552962

Cool. It's got to get in line after dreams of the red room though, which is currently in line behind my reading of romance of the three kingdoms.

The use of Indian terminology rather than Chinese is just to make sure we're doing something that has elements of previous systems, without necessarily all their baggage. You're not calculating Chi Threshold anymore, so we wanted it to be clear that this stuff is "similar but unique"

As for the style? Yeah you could do something like this. We typically tie a kung-fu style directly to a loresheet in our redesign, so if you beefed up the underlying organization that trained these guys, you could get something really meaty out of it.

The core setting is the impossible kung-future, but it's got a "past-as-future" jack kirbyish thing, so this stuff would fit pretty well I think.

>We typically tie a kung-fu style directly to a loresheet in our redesign

Is this like in LOTW where if you don't have a speciifc loresheet you can't fully learn a style?

>got to get in line after dreams of the red room though
yeah good luck with that, see you in 10 years!

Have you considered the problem LotW had with loresheets having a mix of combat and non-combat things listed, potentially a source of imbalance with entanglement spending?

Two players ending up with an imbalance in combat strengths because ones entanglement went into something combat useful, like a Transcendent Technique or Legendary Weapon, while anothers might just go on relationships or reputations proved a problem for our groups a few times. Eventually we just removed everything potentially mechanical from the Entanglement system, so people could focus on the aspects of the setting they cared about rather than there being a necessity of going for the big combat boosts.

>postapoc posthuman cyberpunk with hindu/buddhist overtones

Oh god it's Asura's Wrath RPG i didn't even know i was waiting for.

Thank you, thank you from the bottom of my hinduboo heart.

It would be cool if there was a document that streamlines Wulin too, though. I can FEEL the system is great; i just can't find the way to approach it.

LotWfan here, we're working on our own more direct translation, but it's hard to say whether we'll make it postable or just keep it as a scrappy resource for our groups. I'd like to do the former, but it's a question of whether we will.

Oh yeah, I considered this big time.

Basically loresheets describe a character's relationship to an organization that considers a style "their property"; I don't give a damn if you trained with them, stole it, or whatever. Your relationship to that organization manifests as mechanics; if they like you, they train you and trust you (and expect you to further their agendas). If they see you as an embarrassment or foe, then they send hit squads to kill you (or fuck you over with curses or whatever; depends on the organization).

The only thing you spend XP on in this system is kung-fu; the ancillary benefits of an organization are something best dictated by the actual developments in the campaign.

>>Is this like in LOTW where if you don't have a speciifc loresheet you can't fully learn a style?

...Kind of? The cost of a loresheet is an ongoing entanglement with it's organization, not a "buy this for # XP" thing. So if you stole a style's manual from the Vajra Lotus then they'd be gunning for you, and you'd have difficulty figuring out the style from half-ripped pages, but yeah, you'd have it.

Even if it won't be very postable please release it. I'm working on Wulin/VELOcity hacktogether for my group and i need every bit of help.

This exact fight scene is planned as the crowning jewel of the quickstart. I fucking love Asura's Wrath

Interesting. Loresheets were a great concept that weren't particularly well implemented, IMO. Are there only large, External-tier loresheets in Tian Sheng, or are there smaller, fluffier loresheets available too?

Will do user. Any particular rules things troubling you? Might be able to answer them there, since we're LotW-adjacent.

I'm not sure. When i read i can understand individual points just fine but all together it just piles up on each other. Probably making a scheme of combat flow (step by step) and a scheme for inflaming/transforming/doing other voodoo with conditions.

Re:loresheets

Right now there are just big ones, because I'm essentially the only person writing for the game and David is technically our setting guy.

I've been designing some space for smaller ones, though. The trick is making them basically a version of GM notes that is accessible to players, but doesn't completely kill the GM/player divide.

Like, I think a little loresheet for like, a hidden temple or crashed spaceship would be cool (and I've got the fragments it could be built from, in generic terms). the thing is, how much should be purchasable from a metagme angle, and how much should players just explore the damn temple/ship in-game? You don't want to turn an adventure (which is content delivery in-game) top a set of metagame options (which is content delivery pre-game)

I think loresheets should be strictly "what happened to your character before the game/during timeskip and/or training montage". Furthermore, each one should offer both advantages and disadvantages. Something like SURGE quality in shadowrun - you buy a loresheet and it gives you a certain limit of points which you use to buy positive aspects for sheet (new techniques, contacts or wepons), BUT you also have to balance the positive with negative (enemies, nasty rumors or complications).

Why not do more? I did

It's a difficult thing to balance, but I can see there being a lot of really cool conceptual space to explore there.

And since it's worth a shot, if you ever want any extra hands for testing or working things up, I'm probably one of the people who's spent the most time fucking around with LotW trying to make it work/work better, and I've got a consistent group who plays multiple LotW based games regularly. When playtesting comes around, we're likely to go pretty hard on it.

In general, if you haven't I'd suggest taking a look at a lot of the ideas posted on the site above, Wulin Legends. A good amount of people put a lot of thought into the game, experimenting with the design space with some experiments being successful and others being less so, although they all contains lessons to learn.

Will fire suck and how much? I mean, it's a venerated tradition by now.

Here's a breakdown of just the combat system, in four pages, with a shitload of LotW intact. You could use this as the basis for redesigning LotW if you really wanted. It's also a handy tool for grokking the LotW combat system (although what's in here is my "official" work towards "wulin light", so there are some differences)

It's my gift to you. Once the actual quickstart gets released, I hope people start making content for LotW with it. That game never got a fair shake, and god dammit I aim to see that it does.

I guess I broke that tradition. It hits you like an attack; hotter fire=better attack.

I was genuinely surprised that every other version of the game fucked that up.

You are doing God's work, user.

I'm not sure how I feel about all your actions being tied to a single roll for the round. My experience with groups is that they tend to laser focus single enemies, and just from reading the quick start, this seems like a fast way to completely deny single targets any sort of action. Can I assume there is going to be some sort of mechanic from the GM's side to prevent this from happening, and, if not, some solid guidelines for setting reasonable action pools for enemies?

Also, you should put on a tripcode, or at least a name, so it's easier to pick out your posts in the thread.

Oh yeah, action pool draw-off is a strategy. There are guidelines for NPC generation, and the initiative bid, health tracks and prana resource management factor into the overall strategy of battle.

Yeah I should do a tripcode... Let me try one out, I never did one before

It's name #tripcode in the name field, putting whatever you want in for name or tripcode

Too bad I can't go back to old posts. I guess I could compile them?

Here we go; things I said, mark 1:

"Hell yes it's actually a thing. David Ramirez grabbed me off of the big purple a few years ago and we've been working on it since then.

It's not endorsed by Eos Press (they're defunct) but Eos press was two guys, one of which gave us an endorsement to continue working and is considering future work with us if it's successful.

Eos died *right after* we started working on it, so it was a bit of a clusterfuck for awhile. Ultimately, David decided to keep working on the system with us under his direct guidance.

I was originally tapped to write "LotW light" and the new system is based off of my work towards that. There's a preview up on the design blog. (mushroompress.blogspot.com)

Yeah; the quickstart is planned for four parts, each pay what you want.

First part introduces the combat and action mechanics (the full demo thing is on the blog now) and also has the core mechanics.

Second part introduces more GM mechanics (NPC creation, character advancement, travel and game prep rules, etc.)

Third part is planned to show the domain-conquering and army stuff, but it's in an early stage.

Ditto the last installment; it's meant to show off the "boss as a planet monster" stuff, but it's only in planning.

So if any of that sounds cool then yes, look forward to it. I sank over $700 and years of my life into this project, so it's happening.

We went back to a version of the archetypes from WotG. You can be a warrior, mystic or courtier, basically. The classes gain power by learning kung-fu techniques to advance.

Social and mystical arts don't do "damage" like ripples anymore; they specifically target the imbalances that they're aggravating, so a warrior can just beat your ass down and kill you better (which I mean, no duh right?)"

"Yeah editing for clarity has been a big push.

Let me see... Well, the narrative stuff is still there, just more concrete. I stole the power scalar from the old faserip marvel game so that you could have "your character can do what a person can do" AND "goku can lift a battleship" in the same system.

I put a LOT of thought in to the incentives, game theory, and strategy of combat, both within a combat and in an ongoing campaign. Just looking at LotW and asking "what does this mechanic actually induce?" helped a lot.
It's about as much a sequel to Legends as Legends was to Weapons. Which is to say, there are familiar elements, and the rules are based on the previous iteration and meant to evoke the same thing (Arik Ten Broeke has been reading over my changes and updates, so at least one of the previous designers is tacitly involved)

After the redesign, I feel more confident calling the genre evoked Shonen rather than Wuxia, although it's pretty modular and you could hack it pretty confidently to do either.
I like the arcane stuff too. One of the issues with making it like we have is that we didn't want to retread too much ground. Which is kind is a shame, because that daoist alchemy stuff was fucking fantastic.
The use of Indian terminology rather than Chinese is just to make sure we're doing something that has elements of previous systems, without necessarily all their baggage. You're not calculating Chi Threshold anymore, so we wanted it to be clear that this stuff is "similar but unique"

As for the style? Yeah you could do something like this. We typically tie a kung-fu style directly to a loresheet in our redesign, so if you beefed up the underlying organization that trained these guys, you could get something really meaty out of it.

The core setting is the impossible kung-future, but it's got a "past-as-future" jack kirbyish thing, so this stuff would fit pretty well I think."

"Basically loresheets describe a character's relationship to an organization that considers a style "their property"; I don't give a damn if you trained with them, stole it, or whatever. Your relationship to that organization manifests as mechanics; if they like you, they train you and trust you (and expect you to further their agendas). If they see you as an embarrassment or foe, then they send hit squads to kill you (or fuck you over with curses or whatever; depends on the organization).

The only thing you spend XP on in this system is kung-fu; the ancillary benefits of an organization are something best dictated by the actual developments in the campaign.

>>
...Kind of? The cost of a loresheet is an ongoing entanglement with it's organization, not a "buy this for # XP" thing. So if you stole a style's manual from the Vajra Lotus then they'd be gunning for you, and you'd have difficulty figuring out the style from half-ripped pages, but yeah, you'd have it.
This exact fight scene is planned as the crowning jewel of the quickstart. I fucking love Asura's Wrath
Re:loresheets

Right now there are just big ones, because I'm essentially the only person writing for the game and David is technically our setting guy.

I've been designing some space for smaller ones, though. The trick is making them basically a version of GM notes that is accessible to players, but doesn't completely kill the GM/player divide.

Like, I think a little loresheet for like, a hidden temple or crashed spaceship would be cool (and I've got the fragments it could be built from, in generic terms). the thing is, how much should be purchasable from a metagme angle, and how much should players just explore the damn temple/ship in-game? You don't want to turn an adventure (which is content delivery in-game) top a set of metagame options (which is content delivery pre-game)"

Why not do more? I did
Here's a breakdown of just the combat system, in four pages, with a shitload of LotW intact. You could use this as the basis for redesigning LotW if you really wanted. It's also a handy tool for grokking the LotW combat system (although what's in here is my "official" work towards "wulin light", so there are some differences)

It's my gift to you. Once the actual quickstart gets released, I hope people start making content for LotW with it. That game never got a fair shake, and god dammit I aim to see that it does.
I guess I broke that tradition. It hits you like an attack; hotter fire=better attack.
I was genuinely surprised that every other version of the game fucked that up.

(That PDF is my work, yeah)

Read through the quick start rules you posted, looks pretty interesting. Is laughs at/fears gone from the system? That was something I always really liked in LoW.

Also, is there a ballpark on when you plan for a release?

Yeah, laughs and fears had this effect of making the more concrete tactical stuff sort of open for negotiation. It's not gone, exactly, but it's within the emergent strategy of the kung-fu, rather than being something that we ask you to act out as an emergent property of the kung-fu.

I'm waiting on word back from our editor and line editor, but aside from that a some layout for POD the first part is done. I'd like to release in a few weeks, but things have taken notoriously long so far, so I'm not certain. I'm doing this thread rather than formatting the damn thing myself and just putting it up on drivethru or lulu

That's all for today folks! Keep making noise about the game and it'll help me out.

Until then, peace oooooooooout

Have a nice day.

I'm seeing what appears to be a post apocalyptic sci-fi wuxia game with rules for Mass Combat and full scale Warfare that is based on LotW and WotG

My dick is about to explode

How easy would it be to run a GUNNM: Last Order game in this system

So here's a character sheet.
If you replace "potential" with "degree"...
Speed=Finesse
Skills=Intellect
Experience=Senses
Ethics=Spirit
Romantic=Heart

And if there were techniques that matched the things their powers do...

Then you could run it 1-for-1

But for real I should get some sleep. It's just so nice to be able to finally talk about this thing...

bump

...

Don't you play with my emotions. This had better be for real deal.

Please do a better job of editing it this time. Seriously, send it to me, and I'll do it for you-just so that people play the game instead of taking one look at the rules and giving up.

How difficult would it be to hack it into a purely fantasy setting?

Is the ZTJ adaptation worth watching?

>Wulin/VELOcity

This sounds like the best of all possible things.

New blog post, and I forgot we had an out-of-house playtest
Post: mushroompress.blogspot.com/2017/11/linking-rules-to-shared-mindspace.html
Playtest (hope you have an hour): youtube.com/watch?time_continue=960&v=wrr6nXG54O4

Like not even. You'd be changing descriptions, not rules

I already had a playtester threaten my life, bro. Editing, clarity, etc. are top priority. Why do you think we're doing a quickstart and giving it out for free? Half of it is to make sure we're explaining the game to a new generation of players, but the other half is so that, before we get to the big books, we've gotten feedback on how well we edited and explained it

Legends of the Wulin looked so fascinating to me but yeah. I could never get it to process in my head.

Thanks for taking on such an ambitious and beloved project!

...

Looking at the levels those stats get to I can tell I'm gonna like this

Been wanting a system that could effectively run Xianxia

What exactly are wrong with Warriors and Scholars?

Basically that they're really limited compared to other Secret Arts. Warriors have nothing to do outside of fights, and not much interesting to do in fights, while Scholars have one big crazy awesome thing they can do outside of fights... And bugger all else unless you dip into custom loresheets on the homebrew wiki.

With Warriors in particular, beyond a few core Extraordinary techniques their extra ability to interact with combat is trivial. They can fuck with Combat Conditions, but that relies on fighting warriors who use Combat Conditions, and even then is pretty niche.

Scholars, meanwhile, end up only Scholaring very rarely, and when they do it it's awesome, but the rest of the time they basically don't have an archetype.

Something that's been considered in my LotW groups is breaking the Scholar up, having different flavours of prediction available to all the remaining archetypes, while Warrior gets a bit more focus on in combat utility- Such as a technique that allows them to treat any Chi Condition used in a fight as a Combat Condition- as well as giving them some more military out of combat utility, leading troops or organising people in ways that could also be useful fluff side. Still something we were figuring out though, never entirely nailed down.

That's the silliest analysis I've ever heard. The entire *point* of Warriors is that they are combat autists. They have the most accessible Chi Conditions for combat. That's their shtick.

Scholars only scholaring "very rarely" is a weakness in a player's play, not a the archetype itself. The Joss economy is there to support it. If the player isn't earning a handful of Joss every other session, he's not really trying.

Being able to get Major conditions easily is powerful, but it isn't interesting and doesn't really allow you to vary up your playstyle in the way the other Archetypes do.

Meanwhile, in my experience Scholars are more limited by the scene long requirement for making predictions, since it requires a period of downtime but also knowledge about how things are going to go in the near future, when downtime often happens before you know the next step to make, while the times you're best informed rarely coincide with the ones you have most free time.

>Being able to get Major conditions easily is powerful, but it isn't interesting and doesn't really allow you to vary up your playstyle in the way the other Archetypes do.

That sounds like a personal issue than a systemic one. It's a wuxia game. Combat is going to come up. Being especially good at it is the entire purpose of the Archetype, and its failure to do tricky shenanigans like giving people colds by pinching nerves or making them want to be your friend is not a flaw, it's just how the classes were designed.

Nobody pays heed to the RAW description of how Warriors can make Secret Art attacks to wreck other Warriors' Chi Conditions, either, which diminishes the importance of most of the Warriors' Extraordinary Techniques. Why would you need Mirror Reflection Technique if the Warrior you're fighting is never going to try to adopt a Combat Condition that Laughs at yours and subsequently Soothe your Combat Condition until he has a huge advantage? Even the Half Burnt Manual tries to say that Warriors can't make Secret Art attacks out of the misperception of how that Combat Condition interaction system works.

The perceived lack of depth in the Warrior's system exists wholly because nobody wants to interact with it. If you're willing to play with Combat Conditions in a similar way as you might play with Emotional Conditions or Medical Conditions, you'll find your concerns vanish. Sure, it can only happen in the context of combat, but that's sort of the point.

Same way I've been fixing like 9/10ths of the system: develop the parts of the game that aren't combat.

One of the biggest probelms to making long-standing campaigns out of LotW and WotG was that it wasn't really clear what was accomplished from combat outside of wounds and "we did something cool!". Like, there wasn't really an examination of land or honor changing hands, and what that meant for the status quo.

Once victory and loss mater in an ongoing campaign you find that you're a lot more appreciative of the warrior's increased asskicking capacity.

I know I'm being trolled, but it's more fun to play along instead of calling you retarded so let's do it.
Why, if you are who you say you are, risk your career by coming to the most garbage, bottom-of-the-barrel community on the internet? You realize that all it'll take is one twitter screencap and you will be fired, right?
That and everyone here is pirating whatever you write.

I'm kinda torn on replying to this? Like on the one hand, don't feed the trolls but like, on the other...?

Yeah ya know, screw it. Let's just swalllow this hook.

1) I don't have a "career"; I hesitate to say that anybody in RPG game design has a "career" in it. I'm some nobody from a forum that David Ramirez tapped to write Wulin Light, and I happen to know how to make RPGs because I love doing it. IRL? I'm in college to be something totally unrelated to designing games.

2) I don't know how bad this community really is; I've spoken more freely, and with more encouraging feedback, here than on either the big purple or the pundit's site. Ya'll have been pretty welcoming, asked good questions.

3) Take a screencap and send it to David. Go on. You know what he'll do? Probably email me. You can't fire somebody you don't pay. I make my money in residuals, and I don't anticipate I'll have a big payout even if we do get a kickstarter together for it. That's not why I'm writing this. I don't work for a company, and I'm not a freelancer. I'm one of four people working on a shared project, and managing like a business so we can keep making books if people like it.

4) Pirate it, motherfuckers! The plan is to give it away for free! Take this shit! Run with it! Make people excited to play it! You'd be doing me a gigantic favor, I promise you!

See now I'm glad I responded. this has been a fun thanksgiving :-)

How exactly are you handling weapons in this new system
Is it leaning closer to Weapons Of The Gods or Legends Of The Wulin?

One of the things I loved about LotW was how flexible its weapon system was

Good questions!

Weapons right now fall into categories similarly to how they were handled in LotW. Because of the change in the action economy, they don't give out a statline of bonuses. Instead, they have a "rank 0 technique" which is a little less powerful than your standard weakest techs that they give you once per round for free (so that, if you're only able to attack once, it can be with a boost from your weapon). You can use Prana to access the weapon's power multiple times during a round, although doing so is less efficient than using a technique.

Man, it's hard to say. I've stolen a lot from both systems. I would say the speed and strategy of wepons was a top priority for me to steal, but the integrated secret arts and flexible movement and action rules from Legends were pretty high on the list too. I think I'd put it closer to weapons in a lot of ways, mostly because it's trying hard to be concrete, rather than the more diffuse approach that legends took.

flexibility is a big thing in my design. I'm not kidding that I want people to have this for as free as I can make it. It needs to be something you can confidently hack to run whatever tickles your fancy; people tried to hack LotW to exalted and avatar and everything else, but the system fought them a lot because of how integrated everything was. I've been pushing for a more "lego bricks" style of design, where each piece of mechanics have a purpose, but GMs can confidently monkey with them without toppling the thing over like a house of cards.

Dammit, posted this backwards. Ah well.

I approve of this thread.

Unarmed is still viable right?

One of my longest running characters in Legends fought primarily unarmed

How many years of study are you expecting it to take before someone can comprehend the book enough to run a game? As I'm pretty sure I ranked up deciphering the LOTW book.

Yeah you can be unarmed. There's a clear advantage to having a weapon, but having magical kung-fu is better.
Importantly; I didn't *reward* being unarmed, I simply didn't punish it.

Real talk; I've had two out-of-house playtests. One of which is linked above in video form. In both cases, the groups grasped the fundamentals of the system as soon as they were done reading (The quickstart is around 50 pages or so, including the lion's share of the game's rules text). If it takes you more than a couple of readings to grok it, I failed.

Notably, there were some mistakes and questions, *and I re-wrote the offending text to make it easier to understand* I've had the luxury of time and external playtesters, which has immensely improved the game.

...

>Importantly; I didn't *reward* being unarmed, I simply didn't punish it.

Does that mean that a weapon is an advantage over unarmed in general/unarmed has nothing recommending it on it's own?

>Notably, there were some mistakes and questions, *and I re-wrote the offending text to make it easier to understand* I've had the luxury of time and external playtesters, which has immensely improved the game.

That's good. I joke about how bad the last book was to read through but it legitimately is one of my favourite systems.

Read your sentence. Does that make sense to you? Because it makes sense to me.

But to be not a complete jerk about it: yes, having a weapon against an unarmed foe is an advantage. Specifically, it is an advantage once per turn, for one attack. After that, it intersects the same economy of prana and technique mastery that they have access to.

Weapons are less powerful than techniques, and cost more to utilize more than once. So their advantage is substantial, while not becoming overwhelming.

This state of affairs conforms to my
expectations, and I think the expectations of a general audience.

But for real; unarmed, a character can be as powerful as the Tzar Bomba. You gotta master that kung-fu for true power, son.

Also, I don't know who keeps bumping this with art, but thanks!

Gotta keep this thread alive

Get views for this project

>But to be not a complete jerk about it: yes, having a weapon against an unarmed foe is an advantage. Specifically, it is an advantage once per turn, for one attack. After that, it intersects the same economy of prana and technique mastery that they have access to.

Ah, that's a bit of an annoyance. I rather liked LOTW giving unarmed it's own upside (Even if they ended up a bit too commonly picked because nothing else gave +footwork)

Truth? I liked it too. My favorite character was a blossom-harvest, unarmed "tough guy" monk. He was a fuckin' blast I kid you not.

But I had to consider the build-behavior that I was incentivizing. Your analysis is correct; people took unarmed more commonly than spear. And here's the thing; as I continued to grow the game beyond the combat system, I recognized that there *was* an advantage being totaly unarmed gave you: nobody assumed you were looking for a fight. You bring a spear or a gun into a place, people assume you're going to start some shit. But like, they can't check your *hands* at the door.

Well rock on

>And here's the thing; as I continued to grow the game beyond the combat system, I recognized that there *was* an advantage being totaly unarmed gave you: nobody assumed you were looking for a fight. You bring a spear or a gun into a place, people assume you're going to start some shit. But like, they can't check your *hands* at the door.

Yeah but that's a very narrow bonus compared to well...an actual system bonus. It also relies on people assuming that you are not looking for a fight because you are unarmed. If someone knows that you can punch a hole in a wall unarmed no one is ever going to assume you are not looking for a fight because you still have hands.

I dunno, unarmed is visually iconic enough that I don't particularly like it being mechanically weaker (I mean, that's part of my annoyance with unarmed in a LOT of games. They go 'Unarmed is fine because you can't ever have it taken away', something that's not a worry 99% of the time.)

I might be overly worrying but I'll admit it's the first thing I've heard of that I'm not much of a fan of. The issue with unarmed was less that 'Unarmed being equal to the others was bad' and more 'Unarmed offered unique things as nothing else was +footwork, while Spear, Saber and Massive both for example had +damage.'.

You're entitled to your stance on it. If it makes you feel better, you can hack it however you choose. Like, considering that other weapons just give a boost to attack/defense/whatever, you could just give unarmed fighters a similar mechanic easily. You play this game your way, brother, and do it with my blessing (and with my assurance that you're not breaking anything).

Also, don't devalue elements that don't have a direct mechanical bonus. That way lies madness. If I had to put in painstaking modifiers ala 3.5 or totally abstract them ala Fate, I would be developing a fundamentally different game. Trust in the tactical infinity; it is your friend.

>Also, don't devalue elements that don't have a direct mechanical bonus. That way lies madness.

No but I'd also not try to put 'Not a direct mechanical bonus' as a trade off with 'Is a direct mechanical bonus'. That and a LOT of bitterness about being burned by quite a few different games over the supposed 'Benefits' of unarmed only to have them not matter 99% of the time. So very, very many games handle unarmed very poorly.

Oh, I remember trying to play a monk in 3rd edition. Or throw a punch with a fucking barbarian (with everybody in the same BAR directing their attack of opportunity at my 12 HP). I don't blame you for being skittish.

But here's the thing: this is a goku game. If being unarmed is suicide, I done fucked up completely. that's not been the judgement of two out-of-house playtests or the two in-house ones, so I'm pretty confident it's not *completely* fucked up.

When you get the quickstart here in the near future, be vocal with any criticism you have, be public. I promise I'll be watching everywhere because *if I have truly fucked up*, I want that feedback. I want to fix it.

Nothing is set in stone; I'll be using feedback from the reception of all 4 parts of the quickstart to improve the system for a new wave of pre-kickstarter playtesting.

If there's like, Exalted Second Edition level problems with this system, that shit needs to *get caught* I'm a big boy, I can take the feedback. Dish that shit out, man!

Have you ever seen Anima: Beyond Fantasy? It's like LOTW if the editing was done by someone translating from Spanish to English and didn't speak either language. One thing I rather liked with it was that unarmed wasn't one attack type, it was 'So HOW are you unarmed fighting?' with each giving you a different bonus like a weapon. So someone trained as a boxer has a different bonus to someone fighting as a wrestler.

It would likely be pretty easy to go 'If you want to fight unarmed, pick a weapon type based on how you fight unarmed. Done'. Then again, I like doing weird things design-wise and have a high tolerance for 'It's not supposed to be realistic')

Oh hell, that's gold. Yeah you could just use the existing bonuses as a template for different "styles" then.

Since it’s more or less relevant thread:
Which movie/cartoon/animus I should watch for an inspiration to a Wuxia game? Especially for a high-power one?
Right now, I’m kinda can’t write a intro to a game and looking for an inspiration.

Chinese ones. Like, go on to netflix, go to the foreign films, and just check out some of the Chinese ones. The Monkey King. Sword Master. Iceman. Moujin: the lost legend. Monster Hunt. Call of Heroes.

Movies like that are frothing with Wuxia tropes, beats, and character. Sink deep within their quicksand.

Yeah, it's something I really liked with LOTW how it was easy to refluff the various weapon types/combinations. It's been a life saver in a Modern LOTW game I ended up playing.

I'd be concerned, if I were to add that to a supplement or something, that I would be changing the incentive structure for taking weapons at all.

"But Jack's guy can shot bullets with his HANDS, why do I need a GUN?" And at that point, you basically have to say "Because Jack is smarter than you, stupid"

The question of how to alter "style" weapons from "real" weapons arises, and I don't have a ready answer for how you'd do it. Like, my gut tells me that you should put a 3-prana surcharge on the first invoke of the weapon's bonus, so that the excuse for why you can fire bullets from your hand is "because MAGIC, duh"

But I don't know how much I'd want to commit to "3 prana" being the effective game-mechanic value of being unarmed? Like, that's highly situational and table-specific.

I think it's a fine ad-hoc rule, though. This is the way I think a table might handle it if it came up. But in the "official" rules, I feel like I'd be abdicating the promise of thorough design to add something like this in.

>"But Jack's guy can shot bullets with his HANDS, why do I need a GUN?" And at that point, you basically have to say "Because Jack is smarter than you, stupid"

I'd lean more on 'Because that's what Jack's character can do'. Then again, I tend to mentally work with Superhero Teamup logic and I'll freely admit it. Yes, Hawkeye is just as valuable as another person with his bow because he's hawkeye and that's what he does. Weapons/Unarmed/Magic are more...the channel your character takes than the direct source of power itself.

I might be rambling incoherently here.

Yeah and you know, if that works at your table? Then that's exactly the fix I'd recommend. Different tables have different tolerance levels for that sort of thing.

The strength of building the rules so that they can be confidently hacked is that it empowers GMs and their groups to make these kinds of decisions.

The big balance points in the system are the Prana economy, the action economy (and action pools, the new lake), health... Stuff that isn't really aesthetically different between naruto and bleach, or dbz and romance of the three kingdoms. Any setting in which characters have a chi-analog, and use that resource to power crazy martial-arts techniques, those things have enough in common that you can run them with this system and have just a grand fucking time.

God now I'm rambling...

>Any setting in which characters have a chi-analog, and use that resource to power crazy martial-arts techniques, those things have enough in common that you can run them with this system and have just a grand fucking time.

I know I've seen people on Veeky Forums talking about using LOTW for Nanoha (A magical girl show with big fight scenes) before.