Wire-Fu Blossoms?

[phasmaphobic]

Recently I've been re-watching some of my favorite movies of all time:

Hero
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
Iron Monkey
Curse of the Golden Flower
House of Flying Daggers

I do this in preparation to see the upcoming movie with Chan and Li, The Forbidden Kingdom. How do you think The Blossoms Are Falling would work in creating a wu xia story with a wire-fu feel to its action? Would it simply be just a matter of adding some extra descriptive oomph to actions and results, or should there be some mechanical tweaking along with it?

[luke]

Honestly, I love those movies too (except CT, HD), and I wouldn't use BW to recreate them. BW is too gritty; each blow is telling. Whereas in those stories it takes 1000 blows just to get started.

[skandall]

Recently I've been re-watching some of my favorite movies of all time:

Hero
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
Iron Monkey
Curse of the Golden Flower
House of Flying Daggers

I do this in preparation to see the upcoming movie with Chan and Li, The Forbidden Kingdom. How do you think The Blossoms Are Falling would work in creating a wu xia story with a wire-fu feel to its action? Would it simply be just a matter of adding some extra descriptive oomph to actions and results, or should there be some mechanical tweaking along with it?

While I do like the mechanics of BW, it's really not meant for something so cinematic. You'd be much better off with Silhouette CORE or Hong Kong Action Theater! (not the version from Guardians of Order!). HKAT! is specifically aimed at emulating movies exactly like those, but the system has some odd quirks (like tracking of damage being so complicated compared to the fact that the difficulty to hit is based solely on how import the target is to the film). For this reason I've settled on Silhouette CORE as it is sufficiently generic and designed such that it can scale from gritty to cinematic easily.

I did at one point attempt to modify BW/BE for use as a cinematic game system but it really just doesn't work because all of the mechanics and the lifepaths are so carefully interwoven that one little change can have untold and undesirable consequences. In the end I came to the conclusion that BW is a one trick pony. Not saying that's a bad thing at all because few games exist that do their one track anywhere near as well. Rather, as Luke said to me, "just play the game as written."

Best Regards,
Craig

[quixoteles]

But what about the armor mechanics? Right now it's used for armor, but if you found another way to use it, so that armor-type dice were more common, wouldn't it be a much more cinematic system?

Perhaps changing the counter rules with a sword or how the block mechanics to work to be similar to how the armor rules work? I know that the game is supposed to be gritty, but what would happen if you did do that?

Is there a rules problem that I am not seeing if you did do something like that where you could pile out the armor dice?

[skandall]

But what about the armor mechanics? Right now it's used for armor, but if you found another way to use it, so that armor-type dice were more common, wouldn't it be a much more cinematic system?

Perhaps changing the counter rules with a sword or how the block mechanics to work to be similar to how the armor rules work? I know that the game is supposed to be gritty, but what would happen if you did do that?

Is there a rules problem that I am not seeing if you did do something like that where you could pile out the armor dice?

BW was not designed to be cinematic. You change one rule, you offset the carefully planned balance of the entire system. If you want cinematic you need to play a totally different game or at the very least ignore all of the rules. Just use the skill test mechanics. Don't worry too much about the details.

I'll put it another way; how many times do people ask how the combat scripting works when there are more than two people fighting? Combat scripting isn't all that hard, but it has the wrong feel for battling nameless hordes of bad guys. Faced with a thousand elite warriors and no escape half way through the movie, you KNOW the good guys are going to win, the question is how. In game terms that's just a bloody versus test. Each player faces off against a large group (10, 100, 1000) of bad guys. Each group is assigned an obstacle. If you beat it then the Player gets to describe how their character goes about defeating his foes. Want the fight to last longer? Make the players accumulate a certain number of successes to defeat their group. What about if the player fails their test? They get roughed up a but, but nothing serious and another player has to jump in and save them. Simple, quick, rules lite. Never look up a rule, they're not important enough to interrupt the flow of the story, just wing it and move on.

Of course, that's exactly the kind of GMing that BW was designed to protect players from.

In cinema, the bad guys are either in the fight or they're out. They're not tactical geniuses, but rather cannon fodder to hold the audience over until the big showdown at the end. When it's time for the players to face that big villain, THEN you worry about the details. That's when you break out the scripting sheets and make them work for their victory. Track every wound. Use every rule, but not to the extent that you're always looking stuff up. Keep it simple, just make it harder and more challenging.

Can you do this with BW? Sure, it's the only way I've ever really run BW. People had an great time with scenes involving a duel of wits between a cannibal mom and her estraged son where she talked him into remaining with their cannibal family for one more season. Great times, many a sore face after those three games. However, you can pretty much forget about the rules for advancement. The Character Burning isn't much use either as there's way too many details and restrictions. It's a lot of work to change BW to something cinematic and in doing so you're really not playing BW anymore.

Best Regards,
Craig