Customer Reviews

Feng Shui: Action Movie Roleplaying

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a role-playing game for people who want to shed angst-ridden melodrama and sweeping tactical rules and go straight for the one-on-one action of a fast-paced action movie. With character concepts such as "Scrappy Kid", "Killer", and "Everyday Hero". This system puts an emphasis on style and action, where almost anything can be resolved with 2 six-sided dice. The book also provides an in-depth world to put the characters in, but it is easily altered to suit the GameMaster's desires. Many of the descriptions of skills and Schticks (essentially powers) are tongue-in-cheek, again putting emphasis on the genre.

Combat is made to be quick and furious, with almost everyone having the same basic attributes. Other than Bruisers, everyone has the same amount of damage that can be absorbed. An attack will have the character go into detail as to what he wants to do to the villain, then rolls. Success means that whatever he said just happened. Thus, where most games would say "I shoot the guy with the sword", Feng Shui would prefer "The hero brandishes his gleeming pistol and vaults over a counter while he fills the air with his hot vengeance." Again, an emphasis on style.

Feng Shui is a perfect game for the action of martial arts-movie lover. Instead of just watching your favorite hero fight evil, you can assume the role of title character and plunge headlong into the adventure that you always wanted, from the grimy streets of ChinaTown, to the forbidding Himilayas, to different places in time. Anything is possible, limited only by your imagination.

This rules-lite game is focused on having fun, fun, fun! And its action-flick background makes it more appealing to non-gamers than other popular RPGs where you may have to spend substantial time explaining the setting and character races, classes, etc. Most people are familiar with typical action-movie settings, so that familiarity helps immensely in drawing players in. Feng Shui does have its own setting, but it's really an elaborate excuse to have all kinds of action-flick character types (like ancient sorcerors and futuristic cyborgs) coexist. A GM can easily come up with his own settings to suit his story. If it would work in an action B-movie, it'll work in Feng Shui!

Perhaps the most telling rule in Feng Shui is the one about Named and Unnamed Characters. Any NPC (aka GMC) who has a name is an important character with a full complement of stats. Any NPC without a name is a dime-a-dozen goon who, in most cases, will be knocked out with just ONE punch (or kick, shot, whatever). So in a typical combat, the PC party will mow through waves of Unnamed enemies, until an NPC with a Name enters, which is when the PCs go, "Ah, finally a worthy opponent. I'm all warmed up now. Let's fight!" Fun stuff.

Dice rolling is kept to a minimum, and emphasis is on imaginative, stylish storytelling (or fight choreographing), on both GM and players' parts. My only gripe is that I wish the book had some guidelines on creating a new character type, but there are plenty of character types included already, so a GM can either modify an existing one, or have a pretty good idea on how to create one from scratch without throwing the game balance off too much.

If you like realism in your games, then Feng Shui is not for you. But even so, I think a lot of gamers will find much to learn from Feng Shui's lighthearted approach to roleplaying.

Highly recommended.

The problem, at least for me, with most RPGs is "hyper-reality"; that is, they have statistics and rolls for everything, turning the gaming experience into a whole bunch of numbers juggling rather than a role-playing experience. This game, however is not one of them.

Up until "The Matrix" came out, Hong Kong action films remained the interest of only a few hardcore Western film fans. In these films, reality takes a backseat, if not thrown completely out of the car. Stories and action scenes are performed with virtually no restraint whatsoever, resulting in some truly eye-popping action sequences. But the action is not the only one to receve this shot of adrenaline. Stories receive the same treatment. Granted, the logical aspect has been thrown out the window, but the discuss very basic themes, like crime, family, honor, and loyalty, very basic issues that can appeal to everyone.

This game honors that ideal. Against a backdrop of a time-hopping "Secret War", players take on the roles of stereotypical roles found in Hong kong action films: the gold-hearted assassin, the cynical veteran cop, the grumpy old martial arts master, just to name a few.

Attributes are kept to a minimum, and there isn't one that determines how good you look. Skills encompass a large range of skills, so a character skilled in martial arts is also familiar with melee weapons, knows about martial arts styles, and has contacts in the martial arts world. Tired of trying to convert those copper pieces to gold? Here, you don't bother. You are either rich, a working stiff, or poor, able to afford what a person of your financial background could. Using up too much paper with all the information on your weapons, like length, weight, and range? Here, all you need to know is how much damage it is, its overall size, and how much ammo it can hold.

But the real meat of this game is its emphasis of style over action. Instead of saying, "I shoot my gun, let me roll the dice", players are encouraged to describe their actions as if they were seeing it on the screen, and if it is cool enough, the GM may award a bonus to your roll. Allow me to demonstrate: "Clutching my signature pearl-handled .45s in each hand, I make a slow-motion dive towards the bar. Just as I fall behind it, my .45s spit flame and the bullets leap towards the mook, hitting him in both his eyes, and he falls back into the giant aquarium, causing it to tip and spill its contents." See what I mean?

This is a game in which the session can be only as good as the players' contributions to it. Now some of the pressure is relieved on the GM from being the one trying to do everything.

If you are a gamer and a fan of Hong Kong action films, stop reading and pick this book up RIGHT NOW.

Back in the day (circa 1996) D&D was the king of pen and paper RPG's. However, not everybody was happy with the reigning champion. People felt the setting didn't have enough role play elements, and didn't focus on that aspect of the hobby. People felt that D&D was to much of a board game and focused to much on rules over story and style. Out of that train of thought White Wolf came out with Vampire the Masquerade, which made them a lot of money. Around the same time Feng Shui came out, and sadly while successful wasn't the monster that White Wolf games were. Which is sad because Feng Shui is a very good game, and in some respects a more successful game, at least for my gaming group and style.

It's a very rules light game that is designed to simulate Hong Kong Action Cinema, although honestly any sort of action movie genre will do (my buddies have already brought up the idea of a Lethal Weapon-esque supercop game). The mechanics are very simple, roll 2d6. One of the d6 is a positive number, one is negative, you put those together and apply it to a skill modifier and that is the result (for example +3 and -5 = -2, your skill is 13, so 13-2 = 11 and that is the result of your check). Which feels a little clunky to me, but I haven't actually run the game yet so who knows.

Characters can draw action movie inspired powers from a few backgrounds. They are guns, kung-fu, magic, transformed animal (your ancestor was an animal that willed itself to be human, because of that you get animal powers and a fear of magic that can transform you back into an animal), arcanoweave (magical technology, looks more like cybernetics and far future equipment), and supernatural creature (which covers everything from demons, to ghosts, to vampires, to werewolves, to immortals, to whatever you can come up with). Basically, you have enough to come up with any action movie stereotype that ever was.

Character creation is designed to be simple. There are quite a few character concepts, such as scrappy kid, sorcerer, supernatural creature, kung-fu cop, kung-fu master, etc. Each concept comes with a lot of information pre-generated, and then tells you to fill in the last few numbers with what you want to customize it.

Where Feng Shui really shines is in the combat rules. The game encourages players to do and describe the awesome, superhuman things there characters do. This is not a game where you move your miniature around a board and use an ability on another mini. The game goes out of it's way to say don't use miniatures as it takes the focus away from the awesome action in your head, onto a static board. Feng Shui is a game where you say "I pull out my gun and shoot the guy in front of me with my right hand, then without looking with my left I pull my other gun I tucked away in my belt on my back, pull it and shoot the guy to my right." In short characters are encouraged to do the types of things you see in action movies. Furthermore players are encouraged to never do the same thing twice. If on round one they go "I shoot that guy," and on their second turn they say "I shoot that guy again," that is basically the same thing twice. Which gives the player a stacking -1 penalty to their roll. If on the third round they say "I shoot that guy again," they are now at -2 to their roll and so on. If players are basically doing something that would result in them making a simple combat roll, then they don't get a negative, no matter how improbable their description is. In fact GM's can give them bonuses for style. Anything thats goes above and beyond simple actions are stunts, and stunt rolls are usually really really simple.

Also Feng Shui, as far as I know, is the first game that came up with the minion rule for enemies. In Feng Shui if a character is "unnamed," which means they are so generic and unimportant that they are the nameless rabble that die all the time in movies, then all you need to do to kill them outright is damage them. If you beat the to hit on a unnamed character by 5 or more they die (or are knocked out), anything less and they are injured but still able to fight. Named characters are like the player characters and are much tougher to killed.

The setting of Feng Shui is based on the Shadowfist card game. To shoe horn in every Hong Kong action movie idea the games basic setting has a time travel element. Basically by traveling through the "netherworld" you can go to four fixed points in history, 69, 1850, 1996, and 2056. People in every era are fighting throughout history for Feng Shui sites. Feng Shui sites are places strong in Chi energy, and the more of them you have, the more history flows in your favor. Because it is possible for players to change history, such as by killing their own grandfather. Any person who enters the Netherworld is immune to changes in the time line. If history is altered by their actions, or other people actions in the past, the world changes around them, and they remember how things were and are not affected by this change. For example, if David Long from 1996 goes back in time to 1850 and kills his great great grandfather, he may come back to 1996 and find that nothing has changed, except for his ID which now reads David Wong. If David Wong goes back again, and assists his new descendant in controlling a good Feng Shui site, he may come back to 1996 find himself now rich, powerful, married, with a family. He remembers nothing of doing any of this, but everybody else who hasn't entered the Netherworld does. Its interesting, but I'm not sure I would use it in my own game.

Feng Shui is a great game, it does what it sets out to do very well. Given this focus is fairly narrow, simulating Hong Kong Action Movies. You can extend this to any action genre with a little work. But if you are like me and are finding the current edition of D&D a little to much like a board game with a focus of rules over style. Pick up a copy of this game, it's a good read, and a good game.

Herein lies a simple system for any High Action setting. The origional thought was to emulate the action of the Hong Kong Action Genre. But it's not a huge stretch to use the system for Star Wars, the Mummy, or any setting where Larger Than Life stunts and Over The Top special effects reign. There is, for the most part, ONE die-rolling mechanic for everything. You don't need to look at charts and figure numbers, you just need to throw some dice and keep going. You get bonuses for describing your actions as vividly as possible, and making them entertaining. (What we call the "Looks Cool!" bonus.) And remember, there are very few problems that cannot be solved by beating someone up. Unlike many games, the flashy combat is the focus, and the roleplay is that thing you do between fights. (YMMV)