Author: rstehwien (---.vandyke.com)
Date: 06-25-2003 07:39
Feng Shui meets the FIFO requirements. You can be up and playing within an hour of the GM cracking open the book. And shortly after running I found I never even needed to open the book again except when making some new characters that I wanted to use some odd schticks (aka powers, spells, etc.).
If you've ever seen a hong kong action film (or any action film really), there is no explination of setting needed. They have a setting that goes deeper and melds the action flicks together, but you can just start playing your favorite action flick right away and worry about the other stuff later.
Character creation takes minutes pick an archetype, modify it slightly based on the modifications available to that archetype. If you want more depth, you can agonize over your modification choices more.
Feng Shui has given me and numerous others that I know the best gaming experience in years. The game is just plain fun. Even the most stogy social roleplaying lovers who never like combat in their games have changed into gun toteing or martial artist freaks jumping around like they were on wires and shooting people with both guns blazing. FS was a real eye opener for many (including myself) because it encouraged cinematic action to a level not seen in most other games -
Player: "I slide down the stairs on the dessert cart, with my guns blazing. I'll shoot the thug in the back in the knees so he tumbles down the stairs taking out 4 of his firends."
GM: "Sounds like a normal attack against 5 mooks to me, so -5 to your attack. I'll give you a +2 for that cool description."
Sure you can do the above in any game, but FS clearly stated that how you do something doesn't penalize you. In fact you get a bonus for a good description and possible penality for just "I hit him". In most games if you wanted to tumble through the guards, and spring up backwards onto the dessert trolley and slide down the stairs shooting there would be some sort of penalty and extra rolls for all that acrobatcs. Not so in FS.
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