Wushu overview/review

I ran my first game of Wushu last night. If you're not familiar with Wushu, it's a wuxia emulating system that rewards description and over-the-top narrative accounts to resolve conflict. One of the important features of the system is called The Principle of Narrative Truth. What a player says happens, happens. If a player, or GM, says something happens that is out of sync in some way with the game - not thematically appropriate, logically impossible - then another player can veto this action, but otherwise the dice rolls do not tell you if you succeed, but how much further your actions advance the scene. 

I find this kind of game refreshing. When playing pen and paper rpg's I want to do things with these games that I can't do in a video game. This is because I believe video games do certain things very well, and that pen and paper games that try to emulate the video game experience or those that have been replaced by the video game are simply slow and dull competitors. The use of imagination to resolve conflict, or do anything, is something that a video game cannot capture, and so the more that this is done in a pen and paper game, the more I like that game. 

The only things that didn't go well with the session were my own fault: I didn't plan out "Nemesis" fights well enough. Fighting in this system is divided between Nemesis fights and fights with "mooks". Mooks do not roll against player characters, they simply come at them in droves to provide the opportunity to perform crazy actions against many enemies at once. This is especially fun because there is no initiative, or division of time to resolve combat. It simply happens as the player says it does, unless vetoed, and dice rolls happen after this (dice pools are based on the amount of description a player gives about their character's action), and the amount of successes determines not IF the players succeed, but if their actions advanced their ultimate goals (knocking all the mooks out, disarming a bomb, evading security, et cetera). For nemesis fights, the nemeses are treated like players and can make rolls, describe their attacks and defensive maneuvers, and have "chi" which counts as health when attacks are not properly defended against. My nemesis fights were pretty standard fair (I thought more about the setting I wanted to run the game in than the story itself), but afterwards I did find this great list of nemesis tactics to use in the future.

I'll write on the setting we used for this game later (I'm currently refining it to try and use again), but overall I found Wushu to be a great system for quick flowing, action intensive games. I downloaded Wirefu and there are several other pdf books for it if you want greater detail on specific settings/play styles for $5 bucks a pop. Or just download the free open rules from the creator (Daniel Bayn)'s website.