RPG Review: Wushu
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.
Combat is a big part of Wushu, in fact one could say the whole thing is based on it, being an action movie game, so I’ll use it for the following example. On a player’s turn, he announces what he wants his character to do, in relation to the current “scene” and enemies. Instead of “I attack” or even “I attack the bad guy with my sword”, players are encouraged to come up with simplistically detailed, over-the-top, cinematic action – the more embellishments you include, the more dice you get to add to your dice pool for your action, as adjudicated by the GM. You always get 1 die just for performing an action.
The boring old “I attack the crook” gives you one normal six-sided die (the whole system is D6 dice pool based), while “I take a running dive and slide across the hood of the car, firing both pistols the entire time, and do a roll off the vehicle, landing on my feet, dropping both empty clips.” This gives you dice for every “segment” or “detail” of the action, as follows (even if a detail isn’t directly an “active” one):
I take a running dive = 1 die
and slide across the hood of the car = +1 die
firing both pistols the entire time = +1 die
and do a roll off the vehicle, landing on my feet= +1 die
dropping both clips = +1 die
The challenging part is that, if you remember, this is designed as a tabletop face-to-face game, and your full action is allowed to be only be as long as it takes you to narrate it without having to stop or pause for a couple of seconds. If you have to say “Um”, stop and take a breath or hit a “period” in the sentence, your action is cut and complete where it is, encouraging players to come up with short, succinct and exciting actions that can all fit into one brief bit of narration.
The above action nets the player 5 dice to roll. The roll is against your relevant stat, so if you have a 4 (stats only go to 5), every one of your dice that come up 4 or less is a “success” or degree of effect. If you have no successful rolls, the action still happens just the way the player narrated, including the reaction of the enemies, but it has no appreciable or significant effect on the scene or the enemies’ Threat Rating, which is a collective measure of how much enemy resistance the player faces.
Threat Rating is an abstract stat to represent an also abstract number of “mooks” (nameless, faceless henchman that tend to die or get knocked out in droves by heroes) – you don’t generally fight “12 kobolds”, but the quantity-non-specific “a gang”, “a large group” or some other wording.
In the same way, multiple enemies may be specified in an action, with no penalty, because they are just part of the general mass and don’t have individual stats, so it is all for color. In general, in a scene, there is no concrete “distance” or relative spatial location for anything – you don’t have to get “closer” to one enemy unless specifically stated, and you can target anyone in the scene, and include whatever items are the whole scene into your actions.
Mooks also don’t get their own attack turns. In general, each player has 1 automatic attack against them on their turn, which determines how the player wants to divide their action dice pool up between Yin (attack) and Yang (defense), because if you fail to defend yourself, you take 1 Wound, and when you reach 3, you’re knocked out/killed.
Scenes can also have Threat Ratings or their equivalents for things besides Mooks, such as dangers with time limits or some other requirement; for example, a ticking time bomb may have an Explosion Rating, that requires a player to get a success to reduce the Explosion Rating, until it gets to 0. But this explosive also has a Countdown counter, which ticks off 1 point per turn, and when it reaches 0, it explodes, so the players need to reduce the Explosion Rating to 0 before the Countdown reaches 0. You can also have an Info or some other Rating, where players may have to get enough good rolls to find relevant information in a library, again possibly with a Countdown rating to beat before some horrible event happens.
Named Villains in Wushu stand apart from mooks in that they are more like Player Characters with their own stats and attacks, and the GM narrates their stunts for them, against the players. This is the more involved aspect of Wushu, in that in general, PC vs. Named Villain fights involve alternating details by each side, so a player that starts off “I make a leaping elbow strike to Brazz Brazz Bearclaw’s head”, then the GM responds with “But the steel plate in his skull absorbs most of the impact, and he grabs Johnny Cool and slides him down the bar”, etc. once each side has generated about 4 or 5 dice, they then divide them up into their respective attack/defense pools, and then roll, and apply the effects. To me, PC vs. Named is the least intuitive and most requiring narrative cooperation and compromise, which some players might have trouble with (I know I do).
There are no predefined stats in Wushu – no Strength or Vitality or Intelligence. Players are given a certain amount of points to spread between however many very broad stats they want, usually about 4, with no stat exceeding 5, and named whatever they want. In general, they need one attack stat of some kind, whether it’s called “Guns”, “Fisticuffs”, “Ko-Thraxian Martian Kickboxing” or “Ninja Buttkicking”, and the other stats should be whatever the player feels defines their character and could be of use, such as “Nimble as a Cat”, “Genius Scientist”, “Consulting Detective” or “Studmuffin”. As you can see, stats are pretty freeform and take some thinking and decisions on the part of the players and GM, though the player may argue his case for using a stat to perform a seemingly unrelated action, and if he can come up with good or entertaining reasoning, the GM usually allows it. “Of course my Cake Decorating skill will come in handy in this fight in the warehouse! Here’s how…”
If you think this treatment of attributes and stats, that most people assume are a hard-and-fast rule in a roleplaying game, is strange, Wushu also handwaves something else always assumed to be hard-coded: money and gear. There is absolutely no equipment list, no weapons, armor, or anything else. Characters are equipped with whatever logic and cinematic license (and the GM) dictates – in general, unless it comes down to something very specific that can make or break a vital scene or action, it’s generally available, within reason. No writing down “wallet, belt, clothing, pocket knife, .357 Magnum”, etc. unless you want to, of course, and that can be fun, but isn’t usually necessary. Unless singled out, equipment is abstracted, to the point where even your weapons are mere details used for color – want twin katanas? Combat shotgun? Claw gauntlet? Bare hands? They all do the same, so players can concentrate on their character and gameplay instead of quibbling over buying boxes of ammo or a notepad and paper.
Lastly, there is the Player Veto (the GM has his own also but is encouraged not to use it unless absolutely necessary), which is simply, if the majority of players don’t like another player’s narrated action, it is overruled and he must come up with something else, period. “I kill all the enemies, hack the mainframe and take all the money for myself” is not likely to go over well, and the other players have the power to cut such a ridiculous action off at the knees. Like almost all RPGs, Wushu is a game of cooperation and equal “screen time” and fun for all players.
Wushu is available in PDF form, and there are a few supplements for it, allowing you to get a little different results in each, such as Wire-Fu (for styles like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), Car-Fu (for modern car-chase action), etc. though from what I can tell, there isn’t all that much different in them for the most part, except a few genre-specific rules or mechanics have been added in. I bought original Wire-Fu for $5.00 and I’d say it was worth it, as I printed it out (not that long a document), but the best news is that there is an open-source free version that the author has made available, called Wushu Reloaded, which contains pretty much the whole system and rules, which is usable without having to buy anything, but which can help someone decide if they like the system if they do want to purchase a full version, which does have a few extras and tips.
Wushu is the game system I’ve used for about 95% of the forum roleplaying games I have GM’d, and it is nearly perfect for online play, and I’ve had lots of glowing reviews from the players, who really enjoyed it. Part of their enjoyment though, was the incorporating their narration (everybody is an aspiring writer it seems), directly into the game mechanics themselves. This is where I have the most trouble; people like to write three paragraphs of actions and details (I’ve even had some write in entire flashbacks and inner turmoil), which makes it extremely hard as a GM to just grab the relevant details or embellishments and reward them with the proper number of action dice. The GM needs the players to write out simple but exciting actions with good details, as in the example I gave above, which the GM can easily pick apart to determine to determine the number of dice rolled. Online, the GM usually has to roll the dice for the players as well, because otherwise everybody would have to post their actions, then he’d post and announce how many dice each got, then they’d all have to post their rolls, then he’d finally be able to resolve and post all the results, which would really bog down the game.
All in all though, free or $5.00, I consider Wushu a total no-brainer for a great almost-zero-prep, pick-up-and-play game for when you’re not wanting to keep track of every iron ration or check for traps every ten feet, but just want to kick teeth in and blow things up!
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