Favorite System

Post that writeup!

This is going to be weird, because first I'll start with why I love it, and then I'll give you a boatload of reasons not to play it.

Legends of the Wulin is a truly unique game. A Wuxia game (Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon shit) with an extremely unusual set of design principles, combining a level of crunch, depth and detail with more narrative and story focused ideas. Usually, narrative design and crunch are considered opposites, but the game brings them together in a very novel way.

The best example of this is the combat system. Fights in LotW are great. They're mechanically engaging, with your mix of Kung fu styles interacting with your opponents in surprising and enjoyable ways, and they're also strongly narratively driven. Your ideals and beliefs, what your character cares about and why they're fighting, all these things can be just as important as the weapon in your hand. This even carries over to the damage system. Winning a fight might not mean killing your opponent- Conveying your sincerity through the clash of blades to win them over to your side, proving your skill and impressing them or even just coming to a greater mutual understanding are all perfectly valid consequences of a fight, and the system mechanically supports all of them just as much as injuring or killing a bad guy, giving them real mechanical weight.

There's a lot more I could say... But now I need to get on to the downsides.

The first thing to say is that LotW is a very atypical system. It does a lot of things differently, meaning assumptions you've learned from other roleplaying games can trip you up, and things can seem very unintuitive until you grasp the systems internal logic. Even simple things like the idea of rolling dice first, declaring actions second can trip people up.

This is made oh so much goddamn worse by the terrible editing of the core book. I cannot stress this enough. For all the love I have for this game, it is oh so much harder to actually learn to play than it has any right to be. Internal contradictions, rules buried in the middle of fluff paragraphs or only stated offhand in an unrelated section, important rules not being explicitly said fucking anywhere in the book, and instead needing to be divined from implications and extrapolations... It's absolutely fucking appalling.

The system also has some core balance issues. Some Kung fu styles are way too strong or too weak, some things are really inconsistent, and there's a few insidious mechanical bugs that you notice more and more as you play the game. There's a fan made supplement, the Half Burnt Manual, which makes a good go at improving a lot of these, but even with that there's a lot of issues.

I love LotW, but that's why I think it's important to be honest about it. If you like the sound of it, then you might want to persevere in trying to learn it, there's a few people around on Veeky Forums, a IRC channel and a Discord server I'm aware of that are dedicated to it who can help explain some of its more twisted concepts and help clarify how it's meant to work, but even with a guide it isn't an easy road.

It also isn't a system for everybody. I've seen it rejected from both 'sides', narrative storygame lovers turned off by the crunch, and crunchy groups turned off by the narrative aspects.

Still, if you think you fit in that section of the venn diagram and are willing to get ready for an arduous journey into deciphering the ancient Kung fu manual that is the rulebook, I promise you it'll be a game experience unlike anything you've ever played.

Can't find a hires picture if the cover for the life of me, but Agone us my favorite system. It's based on a series of novels by a French author, Mathieu Gaborit, so it's git a lot of setting info, and it has a huge variety of character options, both magical and mundane. If you want to, you can literally build a magic sword that possess anyone who wild it and play as that.

It has extremely creative schools of magic that are nothing like the more common wizard, warlock, cleric at all. You can either have a hist of small fey like creatures called dancers that cast spells as you direct them, summon Demons, or use poetry, music, painting, or sculpture to cause magical effects. Most of tge nonhuman races also have their own forms if magical abilities, ranging from magic tattoos, to raising plant monsters.
There are even rules for fusing several of these magic systems to make even stranger effects, like Witchcraft which fuses dancers and Demons.
A lot of these were not translated to English though... But I've been doing this myself (and sharing the finished products on the pdf share thread).
This game is still fairly popular in France, but the company has long gone bankrupt, and the game never got a second edition because a few of the rights holders refuse to allow it...

I'm very much a fan of Dragonquest. It's a medievalish fantasy system where they do a very good job of balancing out the magical skills with other more mundane ones. Magic can be extremely powerful, but all the really good magical stuff are these rituals with casting times in the hours to days, and often requiring hard to find, exotic components. You need the mages (adepts) to often do stuff, but you almost always need big burly guys with weapons to keep them alive, since magic is near useless for combat.

Also, it has this mixed point buy and rolling character generation that's really neat, along with an astrological system that influences the fate of everyone. This is a game where you really do get mechanical benefits for the climax of your evil mass undead raising ritual to come at the stroke of midnight on Walpurgisnacht.

That actually sounds really cool. Have you ever considered looking into republishing your translations/adjustments as a 'new' game? Change the setting enough to make it generic and so on. If you're putting all that work in it seems like a shame to not be able to popularise it more. I'd never heard of the game before now, but I really want to give it a try.

Yeah, I really want to love it, and I love a lot of it. But the game don't make it easy.

Define clunky? I mean it follows the OSR methodology of "tables for everything because the GM should be intelligent enough that all he really needs is a list of options and an explanation of how to use them," And I would say it's a bit more hefty in the way of having rules for survival or seafaring, or other stuff, but as far as what the Player will actually look at and use, it's on par with 5e or AD&D. The GM is not really any worse, just a bit more reading.

The wager system from Houses of the Blooded.

It's for a specific style of game, mainly one with heavy narrative control by the players and where the players are engaging in generating there own conflict and drama.

But it is the most amazing system for cooperative narrative I've ever seen. Combined with the blessings system it could result in some of the best and most surprising game sessions.

Give us the details