Steven Seagal: Lawman - Player Character Material?

According to Askville.Amazon.Com: “I make a living in the movies, but for the past 20 years, I’ve also been a cop,” begins the network promo for the show, in the hoarse whisper unmistakable to fans of ’90s action film star Steven Seagal.

Steven Seagal is apparently an actual police officer now, going on some actual patrols and teaching other officers aikido. He has in fact been a Deputy Sheriff quite a while, in Jefferson Parish in Louisiana. But WHY?

Probably because his blues and pop music attempts and his own energy drink aren’t netting him enough money. I kinda doubt he’s much of a millionaire anymore, but I think his intent in being a cop could be genuine, or at least he began to believe his own on-screen legend of bad boy law enforcement and crime fighter guy.
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Goliath: Bird-Eating Spider

“Giant spiders! Giant spiders! AAAGH! THEY’RE EATING MY FACE! I’ve only got 2 HP left! Help!”

Although they’re an important part of this nutritious dungeon crawl, this isn’t strictly an RPG-related Giant Spider article, but more inspirational for RPGs, for GMs, as a real-world example of the closest we have to the fantasy RPG/Gygaxian/D&D-esque Giant Spider. They’re not quite as large as those from David Arquette’s vehicle, Eight Legged Freaks, but for people with an aversion (or worse) to them, I think they’re plenty close – speaking from experience.  I’d like to add, however, that I find the tiny ones perhaps more unsettling, in that they are insidious and could be anywhere, LOTS of them could be anywhere – I’m likely going to be able to see something the size of a basketball coming at me and beat it with a tire iron – it doesn’t work like that when you awake to find your hair is suddenly infested with little crawly demons.  Just saying.

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The Group

I’ve posted in various places on some variation of this topic. I personally feel intelligence and analytical or strategic or just knowledge and abstract skills in general, are a constant question mark in roleplaying games.

I can be a personally physically weak player but have a high strength character, but even if I try to play him as Superman, his stats and dice rolls will likely put a quick end to that. There is no real way to argue that – if your Str is 3 out of 20, there’s little room for argument, as Str and other similar and somewhat blatant and concrete aspects of a person, usually physical, are pretty obvious, to anyone. Endurance and Agility or Speed can be measured or estimated or classified, though it might take some effort and trials and stuff, to the point you could fairly accurately map what CON 14 means, in real world terms, because it’s objective and empirical. A player who is very strong himself, but has a low Str character might feel constrained when his character keeps failing his rolls, but he also can’t argue much – Str 3 is Str 3.

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I hate modern-day D20, 3.0+. I make no apologies, and I make no claims about trying to like it but not being able to. I’ve had my encounters with it, and I failed my Morale Check or Save vs. Shitty Systems or something.

I have to qualify my D20 “hate” a little or else I’ll seem really closed-minded. I don’t mind the BASIC system itself, the essential mechanics, a D20 as the usual task success/attack roll, with some percentile thrown in for some skills (I think). That part of it is really almost no different than Redbox D&D, which was the first RPG I bought or played and really is a pretty solid if simplistic system. I do prefer, for the most part, systems with more of a bell curve in their dice mechanic, as any number is as likely to come up as another on a D20, most hits are pure, independent luck, not centered or weighted toward any sort of basic competency.

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Dan Bayn’s Wushu roleplaying game is an extremely fast, “rules-lite” martial arts action movie type game that relies on quick narration and thinking, rewarding creativity and exciting detail and color, instead of penalizing, making the more off-the-wall “stunts” MORE likely to succeed.

If I had to sum up Wushu in one example, it would be: Think of movies with Jackie Chan, Jet Li, Jason Statham, and to a lesser extent (because they’re a bit more gritty and not as high-flying), Steven Seagal, Chuck Norris, Arnold Schwarzenegger, or Jean Claude Van Damme.  Fast-paced, not exactly bogged down in plot, not all that realistic, but full of exhilarating stunts and action.

Wushu takes an interesting approach to gaming, using a novel dice mechanic tied in with what the author calls The Principle of Narrative Truth, which says that whatever the players describe, happens – there’s no roll to determine if it did or not, it just is. This is usually very counterintuitive to gamers who are used to saying their characters are trying to do something, then rolling dice to see if they succeed. This PoNT switches up the order of these steps, to an extent.

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