LostKnightsRPG.org

In what spare time I've made for myself I've returned to game design. The Rollingtime franchise is returning for the moment to the original concept that started it, the Wushu setting. This is a setting I have never run, and only discussed with a few on rare occasions. The core system is very close to completion and proof-of-concept testing, and by the end of the semester or before a core rulebook will be complete. Anyone interested please email me or something, the game is very cool, and no it's not Feng Shui. I would be willing to sponsor a 'thank you' dinner to playtesters, and required of them would be reading the rules as best they can, building characters, and running through a starting campaign. "The Burial of Glorius Tzu" is intended for about 4 players with a full mix of striking, grappling, and weapon arts, if the GM wishes to play a PC that's fine, so only a total of four players would be needed. If a lot of interest is generated then I can adjust the scenario for more fighters. Avilister can I have a forum for this?

Rollingtime Alpha is based on the same ideas that Rollingtime 6.0 is, though they have been excecuted in such a fashion as to capture the feel we were going for with Wushu.

Attributes essentialy start at 0 and range from -3 to +3, though these numbers are an aside to a title for each rank. 0 is average. In contrast to most other game systems, having a 'low' attribute, like a -1 in Resilience, is not actually an all bad thing. Yes, you have less physical toughness, but you traded that for reduced food and sleep requirements, and some arts would gain a benefit from a specific attribute being negetive. Further, certain attributes are 'double positive but polar opposite'. For example, the Charm attribute. If positive, you are charming and people like you for your kindness and pose, if negetive people obey you out of fear.

The skills and fighting abilities are organized in styles or arts, each of these has five levels, and the fighting arts are organized into five general categories. Hard and soft striking, hard and soft grappling, and weapon arts. Having a particular art active gives you benefits dependent on your level in that art, and once you reach 'master' or level 4 out of 5, you may use that art in concert with another art, and stack certain benefits. You may, in fact, have an unlimited number of arts active at one time, with the sole condition that no more than 1 of them is ranked below master.

All aspects of the character sheet, post character creation, are improved through satisfying in game achievements. For example, to pick up the first level of a style, Apprentice, you need to put in a certain number of hours of training, with tutelage, generally totalling one month of full time study. Essentially, down time is when characters improve. Give a group of starting characters a year of down time and they could be mid level by the time it's over.

Attributes improve in a similar way. A player has to carefully plan his training time in order to improve evenly, we felt that this was realistic and by requiring training time for everything as well as acheivements such as defeating 10 opponents (requiring 2 days of reflection and training each) to reach Student (level 2), though for attributes it's much harder.

There are a variety of paths of improvement that lead to goals that a player can follow. If the spirit attribute reaches +3 (Yang purity) then the player becomes an Immortal (template added), of if he reaches -3 to spirit he becomes a Ghost (template!). This attribute is extremely hard to increase or decrease, and if it's a goal for the player to reach it then it should be considered as early as possible. Also, the quest for perfect master is a challenging one (reach Master or Grand Master in 10 fighting arts), and opens up a whole new range of adventure, including access to Legendary fighting arts, the spirit realm, and other places. If your perfect master is also an Immortal, then venture into the 1000 hells or the myriad heavens via the spirit realm and do battle there.


Like Rollingtime 6, initiative is ascending rather than descending. Unlike rollingtime 6, the governing factor of when you may act is not the time it takes you to act, it is how much power you have. On any moment (shot) you may make up to 4 attacks + alacrity attribute, or move 4 squares (3ft diameter) + stature attribute, or some combination. however, in order to attack, you must use a power die. You gain power dice at the first moment of a fight, and every (5 - [spirit]) moments therafter. (note the use of absolute value, a -1 to spirit still decreases your refresh interval). You will gain 1 power die plus bonus dice from your styles. Most styles provide 2 or 3 power dice by master level. (so your perfect master immortal is gaining 30+ dice every 2 moments). Dodging and resisting come with an autodie, unlike attack, and arts usually contribute bonus dice to one or the other. Power dice are cumulative, so if you are fighting someone faster than you and can't hit them with your 1 or 2 power dice at low levels, try dodging for a dozen moments or so and charge up 6 dice for a stunning attack or counterattack.

In the spirit of the Rollingtime franchise, enjoyable, improvable systems exist for economic, political, and social interactions. A game can be played without any fighting whatsoever as ministers vy for position and status, or as a musician reaches for stardom. 'Course, we'd all rather break stuff, but even a combat game needs some of these interactions as players recruit students for that long hard road from practitioner to master, found schools to work towards grand master, or quest for enlightenment and attract disciples. A large retinue is a staple of the game and a deterrent that allows high level characters to avoid low level fights. (A perfect master with grandmaster in every art could have either a permanent or an itinerant school of some 100 students and teachers not including support staff, though students and teachers would be able to handle a lot of that stuff on their own.)

I welcome any questions about what has and has not been done, and the time is soon approaching when the 88 fighting arts for the basic book are going to be made under the fighting art construction rules. (I'm not a capitalist bastard, I did say basic book, yes more arts will be made later and released in standalone supplements, I'm making a basic book to get the game playable.)

So, as I said before, at least 3 playtesters would be needed, and if more than 6 are interested I would ask the groups to split up the work, one group tries to have fun and the other tries to break the game.

Thank you all for reading this diatribe, love and smoochies to all. Especially you zack.

first off, the good:

I like seeing a non-symetrical system. Despite my own love of symmetry and things that follow recognizable patterns, it lends itself at times to a flavorlessness not at all suited to good storytelling, and sometimes stretches itself to fill in a pattern (hmm... i need a sixteenth attribute... basket weaving?).

I like tick based initiative, and it sounds like what you have going. good.

the fighting style ideas seem good and interesting. Variety, complex combinations, stuff that will diferentiate characters and at the same time allow them to min max w/out raising their abilities so far beyond the opponents' that the game escalates upon any experience being gained. from what it sounds like, arts will be more like feats, instead of like levels gained, which is good. it provides power w/out making a character totally superior. Imagine a first level fighter with no feats versus one with 18. yes, the one with all the feats is better, and would likely be able to win against the other one everytime. But it would still take a little time, and the accomplished fighter would still be working with the same hp, base attacks, and number of attacks, so they could still theoretically be killed, and lower level characters could still interact with them, and groups of lower level characters would still present a challenge.

the templates seem interesting and promising, though i would advise avoiding going to far with them. they can be unbalancing. that said, this goes into that non-symetrical thing (good) and gives a potentially limitless number of options (mix and match skill, path, attribute, social status to get entry pre-reqs for different titles/social positions/templates/special abilities).

the bad:
Multiple attacks = bad.
D&D is moving away from them supposedly w/fourth ed. WoD did away w/them in third ed. Many video games deal with it by real-time play, but even they tend to avoid multiple attacks/per button press usually. Why?
1) a bunch of attacks lets one character overwhelm another all at once, without any response. even in a system where there are counters, if a character min/maxes their #attcks they can usually exceed the defensive potential of characters. in our conversation you said this problem had been solved, and it did sound as though it was mitigated, but it did sound like there was still room for game breaking here.
2) multiple attacks slow the game down. you end up working a single fight for hours, and anyone that isn't awed by bullet time and fight scenes that take up more time than the story will be bored. fights are, idealy, exciting and dynamic. multiple attacks create repetitive, slow, and usually highly rules dependent, fights.
3) Multiple attacks are less interactive. While your counter system makes this a bit better, i'm not sure it totally resolved it. When one person, or two people interacting, take a bunch of actions in a row, everyone else has to sit and watch and be bored until their turn pops up. 5-10 minutes may go by without them ever doing anything. Bad.
4) Multiple attacs are confusing. it is really easy to lose track of things w/4+ attacks flying around. Even for the attacker, there is a tendency to forget bonuses, forget to do important things, or improperly alocate resources that your character would have naturally utilized.

solutions? not sure. limiting to 1-2 attacks per tick is often best. and a tick system represents the passage of time rather nicely, so attacks can be shot-costed to represent rapid sequence of attacks (a simple mantis strike could be given low damage but extremely high speed in the form of a low shot cost, or a discount to shot cost based upon alacrity attribute, for example, allowing a deadly attack based on nothing more than rapid simple strikes), rather than used all at the same time. this also has the benefit of letting (idealy) other people take turns in between, and more accurately reflects martial arts, in which seldom is an attack done simultaneosly, and usually such actions involve countering others rather than making attacks, since any maneuver requires force to use, and a person is best off dedicating all their power to a single action (grappling gets around the one at a time thing by using other people's force, but when used aggressively still requires 1 at a time).
Basically, i would say that an attack per shot would be a good idea, multiple counters/dodges allowed. an energy system helps this by balancing out resource to action ratios too (and it looked like you had one, so good good). If you can make multiple counters but only one attack in the same time frame, then the balance of power shifts towards defense, but if you add in a power cost, then it easily swings back to balance by setting up attackers with low cost attacks and defenders w/higher cost maneuvers. everything occurs in roughly the same time span, but eventually the defender is overwhelmed by the rapid attacks before they can gain back their energy. another way of doing that is to set it up so that counters have different shot costs, so styles with faster attacks can get in past the ability to counter (bob uses a 2 cost counter that lets him redirect any attacker into another on the given shot. since larry and zeke have already declared their actions they have to continue and attack, knowing they will likely be attacking each other instead of bob. But on the next shot, Bob is open, and Zeke, a practitioner of the heavenly mountain mantis of the four shining virtues style, used only 1 shot last turn to attack bob, so he attacks again on this shot, too quicly for bob to do anything but passively defend against).

Requirement for LVLing:
not bad per se, but problematic. when d&d used to require training at every level, people just generally ignored the rule, opting to just advance upon gaining the appropriate xp. if you aren't using xp this is mitigated, but can still be a boring grind toward leveling, sometimes more so than the normal xp grind.
and with a non-operationalized advancement system, you run into the problem of people easily meeting requirements. as you said, in downtime characters can easily move up to a much higher level. this puts limits on the types of stories GM's can tell (can't have alot of downtime or long term planning style games, and still tell the kind of stories that lower lvl characters would be involved in, for example, because they would be too powerful after a few months of story-time and would steam roll the plot).

answers? not sure. just something to keep in mind. this can be dealt with, either by having requirements be a fun story element (they are always supposed to be, but often they are just another pointless grind), adding an xp cost to the requirements, increasing time required (not alot of young masters; they are called old masters for a reason), or killing the duck.


that's all i've got for now. feel free to call me later. i think your phone hung up on me earlier.

We've been struggling with shot costs for a while now. We decided that we really wanted to have a variable power dice refresh, and that we didn't also want a shot cost from actions. We originally were doing that, but it essentially meant a double initiative, and it would be largely irrelevant at low levels because you'll usually start the game refreshing 2 power dice every 5 moments, so a 3 moment action doesn't really change the fact that you can't attack again until 5. Here's how things go so far:
Roll initiative, winner goes first and so forth.
Attack costs power dice
counterattack costs power dice
When you attack you roll vs dodge, everyone gets at least 1 dodge die, more depending on style bonuses
if you hit, you roll damage vs resist, everyone gets 1 damage and 1 resist minimum, more from style bonuses
damage is status effects like we did with jovian, sorta.
Striking arts, Grappling arts, and Weapon arts have seperate damage success charts. This is where we're working now, I wish there wereW a way to make it more simple, but you simply won't wind someone by twisting their wrist like you would for gut punching them.
You can substitute a capture or a counterattack for a dodge.
A formal dodge requires an adjacent square to be empty, you don't have to move into it necessarily, but it has to be open. Hexes are 3ft in diameter.
striking arts may attack someone adjacent to them
grappling arts must move into the hex with someone
*This represents Mai, in that a person almost completely occupies a 3ft square and mai falls about halfway into the next 3ft square.
Also, without special techniques you can't strike someone while grappled.

there are about five techniques that everyone starts with, and beyond that you learn stances and techniques that further characterize the styles. Some are common to all martial arts, say mountain stance, or a fighting pose. Basically where we are now is we're almost ready to have two untrained ruffians fight eachother on default everything, to see how it goes. Then we'll be ready to start writing styles and techniques and skills and stances.

the core rules will contain 88 hand to hand arts
half will be hard, half soft
and half of each will be striking, and half will be grappling
so that's 22 hard striking and so on
subdividing that further, these will be split into basic, advanced, secret, and legendary, and a few esoteric will be thrown in as well
you can start with basic ones
secret have quest style prereqs or are guarded by monasteries
legendary are perfect master only
esoteric are odd, like drunken boxing

And here's your attribute breakdown
Brawn - Gentle to strong (an art like aikido might get negetive brawn to hit)
Grace - still being worked on, low is 'clumsy' and high is 'dextrous'
Resilience - low is scrappy, requiring less food and sleep, high is tough
Stature - small to big
Alacrity - deliberate to fast
Charm - fearsome to glorious
Scholarship - this one is double positive. negetive levels are 'clever' and help with sneaky things and deceit, but also help you eyeball how many power dice a character has. Positive is 'wise' and allows you to gain more benefit from fighting manuals, and you may be able to learn styles techniques and stances from watching someone fight, and you can identify what styles are being used.
Spirit - Yin to yang, neither are 'bad' but they do have life and death affiliation. Pure yin (-3) results in death defied through undeath, the Ghost, and pure yang (+3) results in death defied through agelessness, the Immortal. Both open up new aspects of game play, powers, styles, and an open ended timeline to learn styles in. the land of wushu has no technology advancement, so a game may span a thousand years and still be the same as it was when it started.

All arts add an attribute to damage, an attribute to dodge/resist, and subtract an attribute to hit. These additions are multiplied by the level of the art. So at apprentice your mod is essentially the same as default, but at student you double it.
(progression is: Apprentice-Student-Practitioner-Master-Grandmaster)

Stances provide modifiers to how you fight such as move, dodge, hit, damage, resist, or give special attacks like tiger style would give you a special type of damage. (tiger stance)

techniques are the spells of the game, only hard striking has techniques that you start with, everything else is aquired through training and study. This is another point that we're working on. Keeping track of dozens and dozens of techniques. Advanced techniques do improve upon and replace basic ones. The default 'punch' is not realy that great compared to the King's Fist punching technique.

As you addressed cheyne, the accomplishment system could turn into a grind. We're about to address what they are and how they are done, and basically what happens when your starting party takes a couple months off is they all hit practitioner but stall out there. Master requires quite a bit more, and these progressions are intended to meld seamlessly into play.

One thing we're doing is trying to avoid any 'points' of any kind. Suppose you have a +3 in charm. This actually affects play in a number of ways, including how people describe you. We're trying to integrate the metagame with the in character game as much as possible. To the point that your best attribute (or your choice of good attributes) is used as part of your name. You pick a name, and suppose it is Rydi. Then you buy charm to +3. Everyone knows you as 'glorius rydi'. The same goes for the other attributes. Rydi the Bull, Mountainous Rydi, Sagacious Rydi. The intent is that when you describe your character to the other players and then introduce yourself and your training, you have essentially read your character sheet to them.
Glorius rydi is tall and strong. "I am Rydi, pracitioner of Iron Boxing, Master of Bear's Grasp, and student of the quivering blade style."

We want the game to be fun in all aspects of play. There is an emphasis in asian warrior mentalities towards a fine art to contrast a martial art. In this way we're looking at essentially buffs from appreciating or performing arts. Suppose Rydi and his friends have finished a full days travel on the road, and they camp by the side. Rydi is an accomplished flautist, and so he plays for an hour. He makes his skill roll and it turns out well, so Rydi and his companions each receive 3 bonus power dice for the next day, usable once and then gone, but bonus none the less. This also keeps rydi practicing so he records the hour he played towards improving his skill. The fine arts vary in the duration of their effects. If Rydi were a master chef he could not only satisfy the food requirements of his party (starving loses power dice, hence the benefit from a low resilience) but also provide a similar buff, though only until the characters would have to eat again. (again a benefit from a low resilience, at -3 you can go several days without sleep or food and therefore benefit from rydi's cooking for longer).

I'm going to study now, and I'll try to continue to fill in what we have so far.

I think I may have found a way to mitigate multiple attacks that works out, it's a little hairy and may need to be tweaked a bit, but here goes.

First, it's a martial arts game, and pummeling with a flurry of blows is pretty important, it just wouldn't feel right without it.

So, suppose you make a four strike combo at your enemy. You roll one attack roll, and divide by 4, rounded down. You do get 4 times your normal attack bonus to this, and all the power dice you want. Your opponent gets his usual choice, Dodge vs Counter vs Capture. If he dodges your attack value then he's dodged, especially if he dodges into an adjacent square. If he counters than he aborts your attack as normal, same as if he successfully captures, because now he's moved into your square and has you in a grapple.

If you hit, then you roll quad damage and he rolls quad resist and you both divide by four, and he suffers four copies of the damage inflicted. This is interesting because you can build your combo however you want, including your target areas. For example, you could punch at his throat, chest, groin, and then uppercut his face. (groin counts as 'abdomen', unless you have a technique that offers a better damage chart). So you would take the same damage success rating and modify it appropriately for each strike and location, suppose you get a 2, which is to say your damage beat his resist by 2. for the chest that's 2 wounds, face (head) that's 2 stuns, abs that another wound and a winded, and then throat that's 2 more windeds. (total of 3 wounds, 3 windeds, and 2 stuns, very nice). You essentially just beat him up really good. The kicker with this is that you have to spend a lot of power dice for a decent attack pool, and he doesn't have to spend a lot to dodge successfully. This is where the timing comes in. While a person is attacking, they may not dodge, and the moment after a kick, they still can't dodge because they're off balance. So you dodge his kick, and then the next moment duck in and quad punch him while he can't dodge. He'll dump his power dice into resist cuz he doesn't want to die, but still, this is where tactics and techniques come in. A faster kick an avoid this, but you have to learn it. I think this sounds fairly realistic both for the way multiple attacks would play out, and for mitigating the time requirement.

If I understand correctly from what you were saying cheyne, the problem with multiple attacks is the die rolling aspect, they still add power and damage to the game, but don't facilitate rapid and smooth combat.

With this solution, rolling multiple attacks with the same big roll, I think we solve that issue, and lose only a little realism. The attacking player loses on odd rolls because he's rounded down, and techniques could modify all this very well. This also means that with the right timing even a starting character can punch an off balance (just kicked) opponent five times in the groin.

Quick note though, the better locations (throat, face) have a higher difficulty to hit, IE they subtract from your roll to hit and escalate your roll to damage. so that one value to hit may hit the chest and not the neck, if a character gets a dodge.

Does this break the no dodge rule? I don't think so. That rule is for default attacks and kicks, and a fighter that is likely to kick the most would be some kind of hard striking fighter, who would have a nice resist from somewhere. A soft striking artist should avoid kicking often as he knows he has a resist for shit. And that's how it is in real life. (BTW, the best example of 'soft striking' that we can think of is Tai Chi Boxing. Also, the art of Aikido is a perfect example of a program. They teach both soft striking and soft grappling as 'aikido'. Examples such as unbendable arm would be used to say 'thats a strike'. Of course, this is excessively soft striking, and would be a technique to put someone off balance and facilitate either making them fall or lining up a good flip. Judo is a good hard grappling example, and Muay Thai is mostly hard striking, though it does have grabs that make it an interesting art. Muay Thai in the game would be taught as two arts, and then would have techniques that allow for a quick transition to and from it's grappling art.)

So, how does this sound? rolling all your attacks at once. It slows things down with math, and goes into the list of things to remember that you can do at the right time. Timing is, of course, everything.

kempo would be another soft striking art i think.

anyway, i think i need to better understand the initiative/action sequence. give me an example w/three guys fighting, and show me the mechanisms at work allowing characters to pull multiple attacks, move from active player to the next, spend/refresh power points, and what power points do. Cuz what you said at first sounded like a tick based system, but you then said that wasn't what it was. so before i can comment i would like to know how all the stuff comes together.

As far as the multiple hits in one thing, i think it could work. it really depends on the above though, as i can't really make much of a comment yet. what i would do for a game of the genre you are talking about is:
1) assign different options for different styles (some styles teach simultaneous attacks, often at a reduced effectiveness, such as a crescent kick that hits two attackers, or a counter that throws two attackers into one another; others teach rapid sequences of strikes, such as kempo, kung fu, or boxing, that depend upon the cumulative effect to disorient and open up the opponent; still others are slower but more powerful, such as karate, allowing for more effective use of individual strikes).
2) utilize a tick based system that starts at a higher base cost for actions than in feng shui (5-10. This allows for rapid striking arts to drastically improve their speed, and represents their ability to rebalance quickly. It also allows for less drastic improvements, which is much better for the a game of this nature. Attackers making multiple hits in one, or making big attacks, would be able to do so, but at an increased or standard cost, and stay off balance longer, gaining only a passive dodge rather than the ability to active dodge or counter, but would be able to make overwhelming instant attacks)
3) Utilize an energy system of some sort for initiating non-standard techniques, while normal techniques do not require power (feng shui was a good example of this, to an extent, but with changes. a rapid strike style, for example, might just improve all punch attack speeds, while the King Punch would have a special effect and cost power points. Each technique is powerful, but together they have synergy, and appart they represent diverse styles)
4) standardize the attacks within a given style (hard striking, soft grappling, etc), and make the techniques modifiers rather than their own separate attacks (not sure on it exactly, but what you described sounded like an entirely different set up for each of the 88 arts. I would personally set up a standard set of actions and difficulties for each of the 4 over-styles, and then have the individual arts modify those actions, or access the occasional new or more advanced action. Practicioners of multiple overstyles would use the best modifiers from both overstyles, and the lowest difficulties, in cases of overlapping actions, such as strikes)
5) avoid increasing the numeric benefits of characters, instead replacing those gains with extra options, reduced difficulties, combined actions, or some other benefit, at least until much higher levels, possibly using the master levels for bonuses (why? it allows for engaging play, even against mooks, where instead of just rolling a higher number than them, you have to use creative options to defeat them instead. it allows characters to avoid the powercreep and numeric advancement so common to level based games. it limits the numbers involved. it lets mastery count for something, and gives a good tension to the game, the choice between gaining many cool options for attacks very quickly, or slowly gaining mastery and increased proficiency withing one area. for example, low level aikido might give a character the multi-counter technique, intermediate might give a reduced action penalty to throws or shot cost for counters, and the mastery level would give a +1 to all attacks with soft grappling styles and/or a +1 to all dodges. Basically, keep the numbers as low as possible for as long as possible.)

hope these help. honestly, some of this may not apply, since you've already started work down your own path, but at least maybe it will give some ideas.

oh, and i do like the descriptive vs. numeric idea you had for stats. not sure on the stats themselves, i would need more details, but the descriptions are cool. i'm actually doing that with ranks in my dd game right now. i like it.

yes Gideon I have read it all it seems... so when are you going to start posting/sending rules so a beta can be run??

I'm still reading over this topic, but I've created the forum as requested. Let me know if I need to change the names or labels or whatever.

Since we actually have a forum for discussing this I guess it has gained enough interest to not need what's below... *grin*


Memento etiam, Domine, famulorum famularumque tuarum Rolling time et Wushu qui nos praecesserunt cum signo fidei, et dormiunt in somno pacis.
Ipsis, Domine, et omnibus in Christo quiescentibus, locum refrigerii, lucis et pacis, ut indulgeas, deprecamur. Per eumdem Christum Dominum nostrum. Amen.
Nobis quoque peccatoribus famulis tuis, de multitudine miserationum tuarum sperantibus, partem aliquam, et societatem donare digneris, cum tuis sanctis Apostolis et Martyribus: cum Joanne, Stephano, Matthia, Barnaba, Ignatio, Alexandro, Marcellino, Petro, Felicitate, Perpetua, Agatha, Lucia, Agnete, Caecilia, Anastasia, et omnibus Sanctis tuis: intra quorum nos consortium, non aestimator meriti sed veniae, quaesumus, largitor admitte. Per Christum Dominum nostrum.
Per quem haec omnia, Domine, semper bona creas, sancti+ficas, vivi+ficas, bene+dicis, et praestas nobis.

originally by rusty/gideon:

Plans to work on wushu over the mini one weekend wound up not happening. I'm going to peck at it this coming weekend if I have time, which I probably will. The next thing I'll be able to show you is a 'proof of concept' fight between two untrained people.

As far as initiative style is concerned, it's a mixed method. Rollingtime 6 uses a total tick method, in which the duration of actions vary widely. Also, focus dice are used sparingly, have a cap, and generally a character will roll a max of 4 dice at once, and that depends on the 'lucky' perk to ever have. Rollingtime Alpha (wushu) is based on rolling shitloads of dice, or eventually at high levels depending on die rollers. A perfect master might be generating 20+ dice every 2 moments. In 6, the focus is on attribute values and skills, in Alpha, its about generating power (dice). A perfect master might also have up to +10 or so added to an attribute. Though attributes cap out at 3, the grandmaster benefit from most styles is a dynamic attribute bonus that is only applied while the style is active and may go above cap. In this way, a perfect master could defeat an apprentice without spending power dice. This is actually an achievement/requirement for certain things. If the master has +12 to hit without spending dice, he cannot fail to defeat a student with +1 and 2 dice to dodge with. Hence the seemingly effortless defeat that an "old master" inflicts on fighters much less skilled than he is.

Also, I've done a little thinking about character creation. I enjoy point systems or die rolling for this when appropriate. Part of the feel we've gone after with Wushu is a totally integrated metagame, such that it becomes nearly impossible to discuss your character sheet 'out of character'. this has been a problem as far as character creation has been concerned. now, most games 'suggest strongly' that your character have a background, and some DMs require it or provide benefits for players that make them. I think a minimum background for a character should be mandatory, especially in a setting like Wushu.

So, I think a background based character building system would fit nicely with the feel we've gone for so far. You would start from birth, and generally have a time cost chart to build your background with. We would make this tool open ended, so that players could sandbox a little and be creative, without becoming over powered. A max age could be set by the GM, or he could refer players to an overall power limit. Most 'first thing you buy' backgrounds would start you at 5 or 6, cheap ones would have you starting at 4, and expensive ones would have you starting at 7 or 8. 4 is pretty young, and would be the equivalent of 'genius learner in farming community'. and a 7 would include inheritance, titles, and lands. Then you buy up (or down) your attributes and skills, and styles. The default style "Street Boxing", is known by everyone, unless they buy it off for some perk. (Basically it's a flaw which buys you room for an equivalent perk.) This way, a player would build his character within the framework of the setting. Guidelines for a GM to modify or build their own setting would be available to integrate new character creation processes into their setting.

Suppose you want tiger boxing and crane's beak grappling. In the standard Wushu setting, these styles are common in different areas. If you bought a basic background that provides for 'moving around a lot', like a merchants son or something, then you can buy them, otherwise you need to buy a perk 'itinerant master' or pay for the extra time to move around.

I like the feel and room this gives, an unimaginative player who is solely power gaming still winds up with an illustrius background that is by default recorded on the character sheet.

There still exists a plan for the classic "fifteen minute character", in which someone happens by the game at grey knight, or comes along with a friend to the game and doesn't have any prep time. I'm going to build a quick start guide and offer some archetypes. For the test games I would ask that no more than and no less than one player (a volunteer) read the quick start guide and pick a premade character from an archetypal selection for the first game session. If there are more, then they may either keep their character or build a new one at GMs discretion.

Oh yeah, perks and flaws. The current plan is to have a nice list of them, and they are categorized by severity or degree of benefit. No points are spent, just for every 'catastrophic' flaw you buy you get one 'heavenly' perk. Similarly for 'annoying' flaws you get 'nice' perks. Part of the point of Wushu is balance, in that for every benefit you receive you give up some other benefit. There won't be 'equal and opposite' perks and flaws, so you can cancel one out with another. Some flaws are up to the GM and players to make sure happen, and some perks are 'balanced', in that they include a flaw. Suppose you hold lands and titles. This provides you wealth, fame, clout. However, you must either maintain your lands yourself or retain someone to do it, and bandits will recognize you and call their tough friends to help them kidnap you and ransom you for your fortune.

On another Note. For Techniques, the plan is that most of them replace weaker versions. The default straight punch would never be used by a character that knows the King's fist. So it essentially replaces the default punch on the character sheet. Special techniques might build up to quite a list, such as 'no shadow' kick, also secret or legendary techniques should be used sparingly, so that they aren't learned by opponents and don't attract attention. BTW these are controlled by in many cases requiring an oath of secrecy to learn them, and they include internal elements that are very difficult to observe. So if a player goes on a quest to learn no-shadow kick, and then tries to teach it to the other players, not only does he break the internal element, but he wastes time and energy of himself and the other players.

I intend to offer technique and style building rules, and one of the possible acheivements on the road to grandmaster, perfect master, or enlightenment is to design your own style, techniques included. The goal to make these rules balanced, and make them the same rules we use to build the styles in the books.

All in all, I don't feel like this is going to be any more ponderous than managing a Wizard in Dnd.

Any thoughts? reactions? and I might repost this in the forums, or if you wouldn't mind cutting and pasting it in.

the background system is neat. i've always liked them in games. only problem is that they are often clunky and/or not inclusive enough, but what you describe sounds better. however, it's also a lot of work, more than i would want to assign myself. good luck

[quote="rydi"]anyway, i think i need to better understand the initiative/action sequence. give me an example w/three guys fighting, and show me the mechanisms at work allowing characters to pull multiple attacks, move from active player to the next, spend/refresh power points, and what power points do. Cuz what you said at first sounded like a tick based system, but you then said that wasn't what it was. so before i can comment i would like to know how all the stuff comes together. /quote]

*sigh*
I hate you.
So, we did a proof of concept fight. We took two characters with one attribute increase of our choice, and default everything else, which includes apprentice level street boxing.
Street boxing gives:
+Brawn to damage
+Resilience to resist
+Grace to Dodge
no bonuses to hit (triple plus is worth it, also doubled up on resist/dodge)

So, some of the mechanics were unfortunately omitted, such as power die expenditures. With the exception of the two times that additional dice were used, 1 power die was used to attack and at no other times. This was painful and long, mostly because the characters suck at this level. It does however show that the combat system works. A lot of hairiness was worked out of the game system with just this run through. So, here's the transcript. I hope you like it.

Wushu proof of concept fight
Each moment a fighter may make 4 actions (up to 4 attacks + alacrity or up to 4 moves + stature)
(Note: If these two components are unbalanced, they indicate additional moves or attacks beyond 4, or fewer attacks/moves permitted)
Flat terrain with no modifiers
BBBBBBWWWSSS - BBBBBBWWWSSS
10 bruise penalty levels (30 bruises) = Death
8 Winded Levels = Knockout
6 Stun = Knockout
Death = 10 stuns/ >8Windeds for 20 moments/ >=24 wound levels inflicted at once
0 Chest– no mod
3 Abdomen - +4
5 Neck - +6
8 Head + 9
0 Extremities – B only, (Penalties only affect attacks using that limb, 8 bruises to a limb disables it)
Punch – normal, unbalanced 1
Kick - +1 Damage, unbalanced 2
(Each level of unbalanced a technique or grappling damage result gives you is 1 moment that you may not dodge or move, though you may spend move actions to rebalance. You may continue to attack while unbalanced. These are cumulative.)

Apprentice street boxing

Rusty vs Phoenix
Resilience +1 vs Grace + 1
Phoenix wins initiative (8 to 5) (on 2d6)
Moment 1 – Refresh of 1 power die each
Fighters gauge each other for 5 moments
Moment 5 – Refresh 1 power die each
Fighters gauge each other some more. They’re nervous.
Moment 10 – Refresh 1 power die each
Moment 14 – Phoenix breaks mai and punches Rusty
Hit vs Dodge
P – 5, R – 2
Hit!
Damage vs Resist
5 vs 9
Resist!
Phoenix moves away 1 space (spending a move to regain balance)
(That’s 4 actions for Phoenix)
Rusty moves 1 space towards Phoenix
Rusty Kicks
1 vs 2, miss!
Rusty punches
Phoenix counter attacks!
1 vs 3 Hit!
2 vs 7 Resist!
Rusty spends a move to regain 1 level of balance
Moment 15 – refresh 1 die, rusty gains a level of balance
Phoenix kicks rusty
Rusty is unbalanced, so may not dodge, though phoenix must still spend a power die (0 bonus to hit, ties fail)
7 vs 4 Damage!
Rusty takes 3 levels of bruising to the chest (-1 penalty to everything [3 bruise = 1 penalty])
Phoenix uses two actions to recover his balance
Phoenix moves 1 square away
Rusty spends an action to recover
Rusty holds his ground.
Moment 16
Phoenix moves 4 spaces more (5 total)
Rusty moves 1 space away (6 total)
Rusty holds his ground
Moment 17
Phoenix moves 4 spaces towards Rusty (2 total)
Rusty moves 2 spaces towards Phoenix
Rusty Kicks phoenix
3 vs 4 Dodge!
Rusty spends a move to gain a level of balance
Moment 18 – Rusty gains a level of balance
Phoenix stays put.
Rusty moves 2 spaces away
Moment 19
Nothing happens (they moved equal spaces in the same direction)
Moment 20 – Refresh 1 power die
Phoenix moves 1 square forward
Rusty stares at Phoenix
Moment 21
Blah
Moment 25 – refresh one power die
Phoenix taunts Rusty. Rusty doesn’t care.
Moment 26
Phoenix Yawns
Rusty moves 1 hex forward
Rusty punches phoenix
2 vs 7 miss!
Rusty punches again
0 vs 6 miss! I suck!
Rusty spends an action to regain 1 level of balance
Moment 27 – Rusty regains 1 level of balance
Phoenix kicks rusty
6 vs 1 Hit!
(+ 1 power dice!) 3 vs 4 Resist! (at last, invisible castle doesn’t screw me)
Phoenix spends 2 actions to recover his balance
Moment 28
Phoenix moves back one square
Rusty…nothing
Moment 29
Moment 30 – Refresh 1 power die
Phoenix looks damn good.
Rusty looks better.
Moment 31
Moment 34
Rusty moves one square forward
Rusty kicks Phoenix
5 vs 3 Hit!
6 vs 2 Damage! Phoenix takes 4 levels of bruise to the chest (-1)
Rusty spends 1 action recovering.
Moment 35 – refresh 1 power die, rusty gains one level of balance
Phoenix Kicks Rusty
Rusty Counterattacks with a punch!
0 vs 4 Counter-hit! (woo hoo!)
1 vs 4 Resist! (suck!)
Phoenix recovers for 2 actions and takes 1 step back.
Rusty remains where he is.
Moment 36 – Rusty regains a level of balance
Time passes
Moment 40 – refresh 1 power die
Moment 45 - +1
Moment 50 - +1
Moment 54
Rusty moves 1 square forward
Rusty punches Phoenix
Phoenix counters with a kick!
0 vs 8 Counter – Hit!
(Both parties spend 2 power dice)
4 vs 3 Rusty takes 1 bruise!
Rusty spends an action to regain his balance
Rusty moves 1 square away
Moment 55 - +1
Rusty quits
Phoenix chases rusty around and THEN quits.

So, for a decent portion of the fight, we were staring at eachother waiting for power dice. This is Less realistic than we had hoped, but at the 'totally untrained and sucky level' these characters are at, ie rednecks, there is in fact a lot of posturing involved in a fight.

With even a fresh starting character this would happen faster. Apprentice of almost any style gives an additional power die, these characters are refreshing 1 die per 5 moments. Also, a starting character would hopefully have a bonus to hit, and that would allow attacks against an opponent without forcing dice to be expended.

Oh yeah, really important point. Balanced attacks. These come from techniques, so during character creation pretty much everyone will get a balanced basic punch to replace the shitty one. And better attacks.

Also, since we never bothered to declare a target, it was chest by default.

This was played by omar and I after study became impossible and sleep undesireable. The fight was actually pretty fun, and intense, it just eventually got boring because of the total lack of variety for essentially "zeroeth level fighters". This was a pansy slapping contest. Also, in live play you would put dice in your hand or something to conceal the number of dice you're spending, maybe, we'll see how that goes.

So, with balanced punches available and better attacks, the amount of bookkeeping would decrease, but we're still concerned for the GM having to run a fight with a dozen fighters. That needs some work, otherwise it's just too much.

A larger fight is still needed, and one in which people have actual skills. A couple styles are probably forthcoming.

I'd be happy to resolve any confusion about how the fight went. I'm tired though, so it's time to sleep. Stupid school.