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## Adapting Feng Shui

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TheWorid
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### Adapting Feng Shui

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Post by TheWorid » Mon Nov 22, 2010 10:44 pm

In terms of the ease with which one can throw together an interesting and half-way balanced character, Feng Shui is one of my favorite games. The Archetype+Shtick system allows for rapid character creation.
I've seen the system adapted before by Frank for God of War, but the basic concepts seem flexible enough to me to cover many action-y genres and settings. For that matter, the creation of more non-combat shticks could theoretically allow for even less action-y games. So the point of this thread it, how can the clever designer adapt Feng Shui's system to other things?
This thread is something of a spin-off from the "Getting rid of ability scores" one, so the first thing that comes to mind is to drop the attributes and give a standard, "level-appropriate" score for important things, and allow the purchase of shticks that modify it.

> FrankTrollman wrote:Coming or going, you must deny people their fervent wishes, because their genuine desire is retarded and impossible.

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Ferret
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###

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Post by Ferret » Tue Nov 23, 2010 12:57 am

This kind of system is used to pretty great effect in Over The Edge.
I only got to play a few sessions (we used it for one-shots) but I loved the Archetype + 3 skills areas + flaw + secret character generation, specifically because the skills were (or could be) so broad.
We did everything from living cartoon characters to a direct translation of JC Denton from Deus Ex to The Matrix to gritty cthulhu-esque survival games, and we could make characters in about 10 minutes.
The down side to it was that the skill areas were pretty much entirely arbitrary, so there was some DM-cocksuck implied if you had different opinions on whether what your skill that read "007" meant you could actually do.
Not being familiar with Feng Shui, how mechanically specific are the individual schticks?
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TheWorid
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###

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Post by TheWorid » Tue Nov 23, 2010 3:39 am

> Ferret wrote:Not being familiar with Feng Shui, how mechanically specific are the individual schticks?

Shticks in Feng Shui aren't skills like in Over the Edge; Feng Shui also has skills. A shtick is like a d20 feat, expanded to include magic, cybernetic upgrades, and so on. Your Archetype gives you parameters for your shtick choices (for example, the "Monster Hunter" gets 1 gun shtick and 2 Arcanowave devices for their picks), and you select several off of a list: these include things like Fast Draw, Carnival of Carnage (sort of like Cleave for guns), Dim Mak, or magical spheres like Fertility or Influence. These go along with your attributes scores and skills to define your character.
The reason they're good is that they allow a significant degree of customization without delving into point-buy madness.

> FrankTrollman wrote:Coming or going, you must deny people their fervent wishes, because their genuine desire is retarded and impossible.

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Username17
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###

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Post by Username17 » Tue Nov 23, 2010 2:08 pm

Schticks in Feng Shui are basically like "abilities" or something. Some of them are like class features, that an archetype simply gets and others are selectable off of lists. It's hard to write for, but it's easier to balance, because the different schticks don't have to be balanced with each other.
Both the Everyday Hero and the Big Bruiser have unique schticks that change the fundamental accounting of the game and would be totally broken in the hands of a character who had a high action value. But they have low base action values, so neither character overwhelms anything. And that's possible, because those schticks are unique. There is no expectation that an Old Master could pick up a Big Bruiser's nigh invulnerability and become essentially invulnerable. There is no expectation that a Karate Cop could grab an Everyday Hero's ability to get extra bonuses with Fortune Dice and become a one-punch machine gun. Those schticks are written specifically for the classes they appear in.
There are also schticks that appear in selectable list format. But again, you can't hop between lists. So different powers can run off of different resource management schemes without that being a huge problem.
But yeah, writing that shit out is a large amount of work.
-Username17
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