What's a good system/module/whatever for running a Wuxia campaign...

Wuxia is a modern invention, but
>wuxia without a historic setting
what the fuck am I reading? There is no other good setting for Wuxia.

GURPS exists in the sense that Ikea sells complete, ready-made furniture.

You can get a small selection of furniture and walk out the door with it in usable condition, but the reality is that if you want the whole thing, you're going to have to do some assembly at home.

This, it's also pretty easy to find a download.

If you want a deep and crunchy system for martial arts, GURPS is probably the only real way to go

If you don't mind it being a bit more pulp / actiony then either Feng Shui or FATE would be good

Attached: gurpsboi.jpg (307x309, 43K)

There's a very good reason why GURPS is the go-to answer for situations like this. It is the Generic Universal Role Play System. Check the second word. UNIVERSAL. GURPS can and will do *ANYTHING*. Any setting, any genre, and concept. The only time it breaks is when you try to mix too many sourcebooks simultaneously.

Have you ever tried it? Have you ever sat down with the core rules and just read it?

I'll recommend Legends of the Wulin, with a lot of caveats.

It is my outright favourite system of all time, and the RPG I have played the most. It is also a fucking mess and actually learning it is a total ballache. The system is badly edited, a bit imbalanced and in general just janky enough to be annoying. You can get past that, and the Half Burnt Manual fan supplement makes things vastly easier, but there's still a few bits and pieces here and there that show it was a game pushed out the door early (not long before its publisher ceased to exist) rather than being given the time to become a truly great game.

And that sucks, because if you and your group can push through the editing and figure out the bugs and how to fix them to your liking, the game is fucking phenomenal. But it's hard to recommend it just because of how hard it can be to get to that point.

What about wuxiapunk?

But yeah, the easy answer for OP is Feng Shui. The moderate answer is Jadepunk/Tianxia, Fate systems. Hard mode is what said.

It's happens that a lot of people shitpost about it so when it's actually relevant OP think it's bait, but unironically GURPS has the best martial art supplement with in depth research, if it exists, chances are there's a rule for it, either in supplements or the pyramid magazine, it is universal after all.

>tfw still no vehicles

Jadeclaw.

Yes, it's a furry game. No, you don't have to play it like a furry game.
Rooster best boi

Attached: JC_ROOST.jpg (515x700, 121K)

Yes, and it's probably my favouriye sysyem, I've used it for years now

But sometimes people want to play a different system

God, sometimes you guys are exactly like 3.5 fags

>I enjoy this drill, I've been using it for years! It can screw screws in, drill holes in things, and a bunch of other features!
>You know what I need? A change! I'll go get a shitty chinese drill, that can't screw in screws, but can drill holes in the wall in a more haphazard way than my normal drill. It's always nice to have variety, even when the best tool is sitting their ready to use!

The fallacy is that GURPS, for all its claims of being generic and universal, isn't. It can theoretically emulate anything but it's only at its best if you're doing a relatively narrow slice of things, and outside of that you're better off using another system.

With the martial arts thing, for instance, it's great if you're going for realistic martial arts, all that research comes in handy. It's not good if you're in the mood for more high flying Wuxia while handwaving a lot of the details, since GURPS's granularity inherently works against that. And yes, I know, you can strip out most of GURPS and make it a super light system, but then it's having to compete with a lot of games that are designed to be light systems, some of which are entirely built around the idea of martial arts.

File related, a rules light martial arts game that isn't exactly Wuxia but is pretty fun anyway.

Attached: Final Stand.pdf (PDF, 303K)

When it's doing a more rules-light thing, it still fares well against other systems. GURPS can even compress itself down to under 20 pages if you get rid of all the unnecessary material in GURPS Lite, at which point all you need to do is throw down some more martial arts rules on it.
Combat is also a lot more fun than most rules lite systems. There's lots of choice, both in individual combats and in how you want your style to look.

>only at its best if you're doing a relatively narrow slice of things
I have often heard this quoted, but have never seen any evidence of it.

Echoing this. Legends of the Wulin is a really good system, it's really easy to learn and homebrew for; game plots pretty much write themselves once everyone has made their character.

Wandering Heroes of Ogre Gate is pay what you want and it is exhaustively detailed because it was written by a fan of the genre. It also has an adventure.

>it's really easy to learn

As someone who loves the system, fucking what?

Although the homebrew thing is pretty true, there's a lot of great content up on the Wulin Legends wiki.

How would GURPS do a game like DRYH where it's not really about your actual capabilities whatsoever (Since you can almost certainly succeed at anything if you are willing to push/risk)? Or heck, Nobilis. That one seems a bit out of GURPS' wheelhouse.

GURPS isn't about emulating mechanics, but emulating events. Anything the characters are capable of doing can generally be modeled in GURPS fairly easily, with only a few exceptions.

Regarding Don't Rest Your Head, simply make all abilities cost FP (or an ER) and have the character not be able to regenerate FP. Any kind of resource based system is similar, though with it's own ways of managing things. While I don't have any experience with Nobilis, from a quick wikipedia read it seems like it could all be easily emulated in GURPS.

But for something like DRYH, why would you want to emulate it? DRYH is a system built from its core mechanics to support its specific premise, using systems that are a lot faster and more intuitive than any attempt GURPS could make to emulate them.

This is kind of the point. GURPS's ability to emulate is better at some things than others, and when you have to go to such lengths to actually make a thing work in GURPS, it does beg the question of why are you not just using a system more inherently suited to it, rather than trying to wear down the edges of a square peg to make it fit in a round hole?

>GURPS isn't about emulating mechanics, but emulating events. Anything the characters are capable of doing can generally be modeled in GURPS fairly easily, with only a few exceptions.

But the mechanics are most of the selling point of DRYH and how they represent the world.

I also seriously doubt it with Nobilis. As the events in Nobilis tend towards the nonsense, Alice In Wonderland-style madness. The mechanics are there to give any sanity to the events themselves.

>GURPS isn't about emulating mechanics, but emulating events.

And thus we run into the core issue with GURPS. It's not very good with stuff where the actual events are not the core focus. For example, Masks is more based around your character's mental state and self image rather than how much they can lift of what they can do and how said mental state and self image changes over time. That's rather antithetical to GURPS' 'What is actually happening' design.

It's inherent to the design of a system. Your core mechanics will bring with them tendencies and assumptions that shape the rest of the system around them, even if you add things on top to counteract those inherent assumptions, you'll still be doing so in a clunkier way than a system built on a different set of assumptions.

GURPS's core assumptions are those of granularity, realism and detail, its dice system is made to promote reliability over variety of results, and all its core mechanics are built with a granular, detailed and realistic model in mind. The cinematic rules you can add don't actually change these core assumptions, they just paste things over the top of them, and the more you have to build on top of a foundation to make something work, the less elegant and intuitive the emulation is.

This isn't a specific slight against GURPS. This is an inherent flaw in the idea of a generic RPG. No matter how broad a system is, it will always have systemic tendencies that make it better at some things than others, whether you're talking about Mutants and Masterminds, FATE, HERO or GURPS.

Oh fuck off. You don't understand GURPS if you don't think it can run any sort of game. It's literally the best game for any concept due to just how much material there is and how versatile it is. There is no sort of game it can't run if you are willing to put in the slightest effort to actually apply variant rules.

A lot of people dislike learning a ton of new systems. Besides, it's not like any of this is hard, or takes up any real amount of times once you have a small amount of system mastery. You act like you have to go to extreme lengths to fit things in, when it's really not that hard or time consuming.

The other good thing about GURPS is flexibility. Something you don't like about the game/setting? Change it. No matter what you want, it'll be easily added and balanced by the excellent framework already provided by GURPS.

I do tend to agree that GURPS is bad at newage-english-degree games. If the game is trying to be art, telling a complex story about the inner soul while teaching you a moral lesson about highschool through mechanics, you're probably better off running your game in that system, as it comes pre-bundled with the hipster pretentiousness and emotional depth you're looking for, already prepackaged for easy understanding.

The 3d6 bellcurve is much better, from a narrative sense, than any single die distribution will be.

>I do tend to agree that GURPS is bad at newage-english-degree games. If the game is trying to be art, telling a complex story about the inner soul while teaching you a moral lesson about highschool through mechanics, you're probably better off running your game in that system, as it comes pre-bundled with the hipster pretentiousness and emotional depth you're looking for, already prepackaged for easy understanding.

So any game GURPS can't run well is 'Hipster pretentiousness'?

>The 3d6 bellcurve is much better, from a narrative sense, than any single die distribution will be.

How does that work?

>The 3d6 bellcurve is much better, from a narrative sense, than any single die distribution will be.

But that's nonsense. Reliability isn't always what you want out of a narrative. If you're wanting to tell a story about extreme highs and extreme lows, where individual dicerolls should be more tense and have more dramatic results, then a bell curve is antithetical to your design goals.

There's no inherent superiority in a bell curve, just a different set of inherent traits and biases that can be better or worse for different games.

I understand GURPS perfectly. It seems like you didn't understand my post.

Show me a game that GURPS can't run effectively that isn't about something like "self image"

But you've never actually offered any argument as to why people should take the time to adapt GURPS, no matter how long or short it is, if there's a system already designed for it that does it out of the box.

'It can do anything' isn't a selling point if you're unable to point out things it actually does better, when it's pretty easy to see a lot of ways it does things worse than a system specifically built to support a premise as opposed to GURPS's emulation of it.

Nobilis. It's about high concept gods with nebulously defined powersets you can use in any way that can be justified rather than specific abilities.

I mean, Legends of the Wulin?

A core mechanic of the system, and something that is essential to the feel of the experience, is the ability to make multiple actions on a single roll.

LotW's dicepool system is such that you can pick up the dice, roll them once, and get a random number of sets of dice, each with a different value associated with it, that you can then assign to different actions. This intuitive ability to multitask, allowing your characters to accomplish a lot of things at once, really lends a lot to the feeling of being an incredibly competent martial arts master.

That mechanic, and the tangible effects on how the game feels to play associated with it, is impossible to replicate in GURPS without having to homebrew up an incredibly inelegant and clunky solution to try and achieve the same mechanical feel.

Well, it's not universal or generic if it can't run something as simple as 'Superhero teenagers coming to terms with themselves and who they are'. I mean, that's the basis of like a dozen different comic book series.

Honestly, GURPS tends to do superheroes rather poorly in general because superheros have broad and ill defined stuff rather than specific stuff. Batman in one issue isn't the same as batman in a different issue and is definitely not the same as batman in a crossover with superman but they are all the same character despite rapidly changing capabilities and skill levels. Spiderman's weight lifting changing between his solo book and avengers or even two issues of his solo book based on who he's facing. There's a lot of narrative wiggle room and fluff that GURPS doesn't do well.

A single die system makes no sense. It makes even less sense when you have something like critical failures.

In a single die system, luck is what really matters. That's all. Stat modifiers can help you, but really all that matters is the dice screwing you.

With a 3d6 distribution, Critical Hits are actually rare and notable. They're much more dramatic than a single die system, because of their rarity. As such, you can assign great effects to them which will appear as often as any other single number.

GURPS can easily run that exact same setting without the mechanics. Will it feel different from a gameplay perspective? Probably. Will the stuff that really matters, such as the game world, change? No. You can get all the same feelings, such as being an incredibly competent martial arts master, without using the mechanics the authors chose to use.

GURPS can easily do "Kid X-Men", it will just focus more on external relationships, as well as how your mental anxieties will effect your behavior. Read more into the system of social interaction/mental health that sourcebooks have established, there's a lot there.

Regarding powers, that's generally not an issue in a self contained game. The kind of power fluctuation you're talking about isn't handled well by dedicated systems either, as it's the antithesis of a roleplaying game if strength varies wildly without reason.

Why would you buy 30 tools when your sonic screwdriver can do all of them? GURPS also can do most of the concepts just as well as the game meant to support them, just differently. It doesn't make it worse, just different.

Power sets done in the style of Realm Magic, perhaps. Characters won't be hugely mechanically different, but it's still possible within established frameworks.

>Why would you buy 30 tools when your sonic screwdriver can do all of them?

Might not have been a good example, considering the Sonic Screwdriver was gotten rid of because it was boring.

No, it's worse. GURPS will always feel like GURPS, but a system specifically designed from the bottom up can achieve more elegantly and intuitively what GURPS has to be bent to emulate. This is an inherent thing to the difference between specific and generic systems. All things being equal, a specific system will be better at its focus than a generic system trying to emulate it.

Beyond 'It can do anything', why use GURPS?

>Power sets done in the style of Realm Magic, perhaps. Characters won't be hugely mechanically different, but it's still possible within established frameworks.

So...GURPS would be worse than using the dedicated system? The thing people have been saying all these time?

>A single die system makes no sense. It makes even less sense when you have something like critical failures.

This? This is literally you asserting your personal playstyle preference as some kind of objective game design statement. It's not universalizable, and it's not broadly true. It's just you stating a preference.

If you like it? More power to you. But bell curves are not superior to linear distributions, and attempting to claim they are is just ridiculous.

>Will the stuff that really matters, such as the game world, change?

But mechanics do matter. How a system works can have a massive impact on how a game feels to play. While GM and group are important, choice of system also plays a factor, and having mechanics that are properly tailored to an experience will always be an advantage.

From the sound of it, you're saying GURPS is a good system to use if you don't actually care about mechanics, and don't think they matter? That seems like a very odd selling point.

>Regarding powers, that's generally not an issue in a self contained game. The kind of power fluctuation you're talking about isn't handled well by dedicated systems either, as it's the antithesis of a roleplaying game if strength varies wildly without reason.

Except trying to go 'I can lift X much' is kinda antithetical to the idea of superheroes and trying to emulate it is missing the point of the Genre. It's something a lot of superhero RPGs fuck up as well, trying to map out the exact capabilities of someone. Something like SOTM RPG or Marvel Heroic does a better job because they are more focused on 'How important is this to the character' rather than 'Are they they actual strongest'. Legacy is massively physically powerful (Being the superman analog) but his highest die is in Charisma because the thing that's iconic about him is that he's inspiring, not that he can benchpress three other superstrength heroes at once.

>The kind of power fluctuation you're talking about isn't handled well by dedicated systems either, as it's the antithesis of a roleplaying game if strength varies wildly without reason.

But it's not that their strength varies wildly without reason. It's that such things are contextual and rely on a system that places its priorities on things like emotional context, pacing and the needs of a scene, narrative systems like FATE or the upcoming Sentinels of the Multiverse RPG, which can achieve that sort of thing effortlessly.

Feng Shui 2 is very good. The setting is a little baked in, and picking it out takes a little work, but nor more work than making another system actually function for Wuxia.

I couldn't tell you, because I haven't read Nobilis. It's probably not hard conversion if you've actually read GURPS and know what it is you want to emulate.

Linear distributions would never appear in fiction. How often does someone win solely because of luck, instead of because the enemy made a mistake, the character took preparations against the person, or one person was more skilled than the other?

Read how Lifting actually works in GURPS. It's not just "I can consistently lift X!"

The game will play differently, but it will be just as competent of role playing game, if not more so due to having a guaranteed established system that you know works well. GURPS is good because it's a guarantee you'll have a good, well researched system, no matter what you run.

>I couldn't tell you, because I haven't read Nobilis. It's probably not hard conversion if you've actually read GURPS and know what it is you want to emulate.

And I've played both and I'd say that GURPS does a pretty shitty job of running Nobilis. I like GURPS I just don't think it's what I'd use for every single RPG.

>Read how Lifting actually works in GURPS. It's not just "I can consistently lift X!"

You missed the entire point of the post, didn't you? Lifting was an example of measured capabilities, rather than the sole thing in question. It was about hard measured capabilities in Superhero fiction.

But you're just confusing IC and OOC at this point. While a dice might be a force of RNG in the system, it doesn't just represent luck in universe. It's a combination of factors, and there are plenty of stories that rely on extreme highs or lows, amazing success or failures that occur frequently that would not be well served by a bell curve.

Discworld springs to mind. That's a setting where everything is either going amazingly or terribly the vast majority of the time, and the variation is what makes it funny and fun.

All you're doing is repeating personal preferences and asserting that everyone should do it your way, but that's just not true, and it's why people often get annoyed by GURPS evangelicals.

Merely an opinion with no backing.

And yet the best Discworld RPG is powered by GURPS.

>Merely an opinion with no backing.

As much as your statement is, yes. I mean, you admitted that you've not even read Nobilis.

The only discworld RPG, and IMO one that completely misses the point of the setting given GURPS's incompatible approach.

>And yet the best Discworld RPG is powered by GURPS.

Absolutely not, I don't know why they released books for GURPS, it simply does not fit the system and its rigid magic systems

>GURPS BLABLABLABLA

GURPS is indeed SETTING neutral... like 100% setting neutral. It can run any setting. GURPS is, however NOT GENRE or TONE neutral. With GURPS, I can put my players' characters in literally any setting I want, and it will run smoothly... however, if I want them to feel like the chosen heroes of that setting, or even just the true protagonists of the story they are watching right now, GURPS... tries and fails. Every system it has that attempts for cinematism or narativism, while functional, are far too granular, crunchy, and fiddly to FEEL cinematic or narrative. For example.

I CAN run a game about realistic gun combat with GURPS

I CANNOT run a game about Gunslinging Action Heroes in a late 90's early 00's modern action movie with GURPS.

I CAN run a game about martial artists in a fictionalized version of China that has magic with GURPS

I CANNOT run a game that feels like a Wuxia movie in which the PC's are the heroes with GURPS.

I CAN run a game where the PC's are adventurers trying to survive and explore Lemuria with GURPS.

I CANNOT run a game in which the PC's feel like Conan and/or Conan-esque heroes of a late 80's early 90's pulp fantasy movie wth GURPS.

I CAN run a game about Mecha pilots fihting a war against other Mecha pilots, or even Kaiju using GURPS

I CANNOT run a game about the chosen Gundam Pilots saving the day using GURPS.

see the difference?

Literally anything in which the PC's are the protagonists of the story, around which the world is centered, rather than potentially exceptional, but ultimately unimportant individuals, without whom the living breathing world will continue to turn.

Except that's not the case at all, other systems are also quality.

You know that GURPS isn't the only good game system in the world, right?

Right?

Jojo's Bizzare Adventure

Fuck right off with your bullshit, GURPS can run all of those fantastically and better than most dedicated systems. It can run heroic gunplay and Wuxia better than Feng Shui can without any bullshit art degree I Want To Do Emotions and Genre Conventions bullshit.

>cant do Gunslinging Action Heroes
Wrong, read Action, especially Action 2.

>can't feel like a wuxia movie
Wrong! Read the martial arts section on Wuxia.

>Can't do Conan
Wrong! There's a GURPS book for Conan.

>Can't do Gundam Pilots
What makes you think that? Mecha are easy to do, and you van do them multiple ways, including with lots of larger than life Newtype pilots.

Ahh, I think that's the problem here.

Where GURPS fails is in areas you don't care about, therefore you assume nobody cares about them.

But people care about them. Because they're important to those themes and genres. Which is why they say GURPS can't do it as well, or at all.

High level Supers

At least not without reading 4 300+ page books

Are you intentionally missing their point?

Can GURPS run a game set in a system where the OP said he already knew about GURPS and was looking for something else?

What makes you think this?

Missed the analogy. GURPS can do anything with guarenteed results, other non-generics systems can generally do one thing potentially well (but might not even be able to do that).

What's their point? The GM can't run a game effectivley?

>GURPS can do anything with guarenteed results

You keep saying that but people also keep saying that there are things it can't do so 'anything' seems a bit broad.

>Lite
>Characters
>Powers
There we go, only 1 300+ page book. Less than D&D.

...Are you just incapable of understanding their point? Like, are you just completely blind to that entire aspect of RPG's?

>, other non-generics systems can generally do one thing potentially well

Wrong

D&D is very very good at D&D fantasy

Feng Shui is very very good at action movies

Warhammer is good at Grimdark spess fantasy

Yes, I could potentially run it in GURPS, but it's significantly more work on the GM, and those systems have tailored mechanics that don't require me to hunt across multiple books or homebrew things, no matter how easily slotted in they can be

No one has said anything it CAN'T do, only things it might do differently.

Alright, gonna take a while to even parse Characters or Powers though

Sure, you understand the system, try and get a newbie to understand how powers work, and how to balance a high level super character

Except for the couple of things it was acknowledged it couldn't do, but were handwaved away or changed to 'Well it could do something vaguely similar'.

Nobilis keeps coming up and so far it's been 'Well, it might be able to do it but all the characters will be samey'.

I said potentially good. When you get a new RPG, you have no idea how good it is. Once you have GURPS, there's a guarenteed good system for any setting you want.

WFRP is fun, but also an unbalanced mess. I generally prefer to run Warhammer stuff in GURPS.

Masks was expressly admitted it couldn't do that.

If you like GURPS.

Personally I find it to be utterly antithetical to my preferences in RPG's.

So, your argument boils down to 'GURPS is a good RPG if you like GURPS'.

It can almost certainly do it. I just don't have enough information to spoonfeed you, not knowing how your obscure game works.

No one had acknowledged anything as impossible without someone else saying it is.

So your argument is 'Well, it's good enough, I shouldn't look for better'?

If you're not doing genre conventions, then you're not doing Wuxia or Heroic Gunplay, you're doing Martial Artists In Magical Alternate History China and Modern Gun Battle.... neither of those is a bad game, but they are NOT Wuxia and Action Movie Gunslinger.

>Read blablabla
I have. I know GURPS. Hell, I frequently RUN GURPS. However, I only use it when I want the world to feel bigger than the PCs. If the world is bigger than the PCs, then you're not running Wuxia, Action Movie Gunslingers, Conan, or Gundam; you're running a different genre/tone set in the same setting. One of the central tropes of each of those genres is that the protagonists personal struggles matter more than the world as a whole, and that the world largely serves as a plot-device to drive forward the plots of the protagonists... rather than the protagonists serving as plot devices to promote more exposition/exploration of the world. Both are fine, but only one of them does GURPS do better than, or even as well as, other systems.

>It can almost certainly do it. I just don't have enough information to spoonfeed you, not knowing how your obscure game works.

As someone who's run both, no it really can't.

See
Same thing, different mechanics.

What is your preference if you don't like a system designed to never break and be able to run either incredibly light or simulation complex?

>GURPS
>Good

That's where you're wrong buddy

100 points in guns

And before you make the "Muh GM won't allow it" argument, we're talking RAW. Any system could be made better if you slap tons of restrictions and homebrew on it, 3.5 is a lot more balanced if you don't allow spell casters to take certain spells

You keep saying this, but you haven't shown us anything in Nonilis impossible to replicate.

>Same thing, different mechanics.

Except that's not the same thing. If you can't emulate the actual focus of the game (The character's mental states and self image being the core, most important thing), you are not emulating the game worth a damn.

Savage Worlds or FATE is probably your best shot

Much better balance than GURPS, much less reading and a larger fanbase

>designed to never break

As someone who plays a lot of GURPS

HAHAHAHA JESUS CHRIST NO. GURPS, much like M&M and most generic systems snaps in half if the guy running it isn't paying careful attention to everything being taken by players.

...Can you really just not wrap your head around the idea of someone not liking GURPS? Is that actually a concept you struggle with?

Just use templates if you think it's too hard. Or actually cooperate with your players. GURPS is in fact bad for gtoups who don't communicate about expectations.

>Obsession: Shitposting, Vow: Never leave thread without GURPS unsullied

>if you don't like a system designed to never break and be able to run either incredibly light or simulation complex?

>GURPS
>Never designed to break

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHA

M.U.N.C.H.K.I.N
100 points in Guns
TK in general

I love GURPS, but dont you dare tell me with a straight face that it's "Designed to never break"

>No one has said anything it CAN'T do
Run a game in which the PC's actually feel like the protagonists of the story they are in, rather than explorers of a living breathing world that doesn't care about them, or explorers of a living breathing world that doesn't care about them with a "cinematic subsystem" stapled on.

Someone who doesn't like GURPS is someone who hasn't actually read GURPS beyond skimming, and only likes Rules Lite games. If that's all you like, that's fine, but Veeky Forums is for RPG players.

>Obsession: Shitposting, Vow: Never leave thread without GURPS unsullied

>Vow: Never leave a thread without suggesting GURPS even when OP is asking for non-GURPS games.