Wushu is a hot little indy game with attitude. It likes to do triple back flips while shooting down a hundred mooks with double pistols blazing, long coats flapping like raven wings, and painfully trendy-cool shades that never fall off. It revels in style over substance, and demands constant hyper-kinetic detail of appearance and flash. In short, it is a rules-nearly-non-existent game of Matrix style action that laughs in the face of reality, detailed systems and stats, and the idea that more ninjas is ever a bad thing. While it achieves this goal with aplomb, it does so only with help from the GM, and at the cost of being enough of a real heavyweight for long-term play.
The Book
Wushu is a 27 page .pdf available through www.rpgnow.com written by Daniel Bayn. Laid out in single column text with no art other than on the cover, it is eminently readable and easy on the printer’s ink supply. It’s also rather boring to look at. If you like pretty games, don’t look here for anything new or hot in the layout department. Of course one doesn’t buy Wushu to read, it isn’t that type of game. It is meant to be played, and so the formatting seems to be considered only as an afterthought.
The Rundown
Wushu is a small book, and so it doesn’t waste a lot of time with fripperies. Unfortunately the space it does waste comes all at the front, with a full page of hype and links to other games by the author coming just after the rather bland title page and the very useful introduction. Given that Wushu is a non-traditional RPG in many senses of the word, I must applaud the author’s use of space for the introduction, as it clearly and quickly sets up what Wushu is about and how it tries to fulfill the author’s design goals. Unfortunately after this lovely bit of work we get the unnecessarily large linkage to other games, which could have been quite easily shoved into a sidebar.
In the next 3 pages the book gives the core of the Wushu system, complete with examples, in a method that is perfectly pitched to be used as an introductory handout for new players. While it is not the whole of the system, as there are other permutations later in the text, these three pages give a marvelously compact and eloquent statement not only of what the rules are, but the why and how for them as well.
The core system of Wushu works as follows: Characters have traits rated 1 (a weakness) to 5 (ultimate bad-ass). These traits act as the target number for dice rolls. The number of embellishments you add to your base action determines the number of dice you roll. Embellishments are cool descriptive items that add flash and style to your description. You get one dice for doing anything, plus one dice for every embellishment you add. You then roll all your dice, and each one that comes up equal to or less than your relevant trait is a success. The number of successes then determines how effective you are at what you do.
An example of how this works from the book is:
“A player who kicks someone gets only their default (1) die. A player who kicks someone (1) in the throat (+1), making their trachea collapse with an audible "sssssnap" (+1) gets 3 dice. A player who kicks someone (1) so hard that they crash through a window (+1) and fall screaming to the street seven floors below (+1), crushing the roof of a taxi (+1) and causing onlookers to run screaming in all directions (+1) gets 5 dice.”
In addition there is an included system for “scab rolls.” This rule is for times when you want to roll to see if an action is successful, but don’t want to narrate (and thus don’t want to embellish) the actions involved. This little side rule keeps the game flowing at times, and is a very nice element that shows the author has put enough time and testing into the game to know that gamers sometimes like to roll without having to blow off their whole clip of ammo on describing the effects.
After these “basics” pages are 9 pages of additions, complications, and extra fiddly bits for the system. The way health and luck (both combined into a single trait: Chi) work, the way combat modifies the basic system by splitting pools into Ying and Yang dice (attack and defense), the way the mook system works, how Nemeses (big bads who kick PC ass) work, and how to handle social actions, technical actions, and magic are all covered. Given that all of this is in 9 pages, you can rightly guess that none of it is heavily detailed, and none of the rules are all that surprising when compared to the base system. However, the rules are flexible and the examples are all very well written, which helps give the rather short section a lot of verve it might otherwise lack.
Character creation then takes up a whole page of rules. Yes, one page. As the author says: “Creating characters for Wushu is so simple it'll make you vomit.” The process of creating a character involves coming up with 2 – 4 traits that describe what your character is/does, and 1 weakness that describes what your character sucks at. You then assign a number of points, as determined by the GM, to those traits and you’re ready to rock and/or roll. My playtest experience of this was that players unfamiliar with “make it up on your own” mechanics tended to freeze and needed GM help to make it through, where players with some experience in the area (such as from Over the Edge or Unknown Armies) tended to be able to make characters in about 5 minutes.
The next (and last) 10 pages of Wushu are given over to “adaptation,” which I would call the fine art of ripping off ideas from movies and tv. Here we get examples (generally about 2 pages each) of how one can easily use common movie and TV tropes to make a game of Wushu in less than 15 minutes. Included examples are: “The Chosen” wherein chosen saviors of mankind fight vampires and stop demon dimensions from overtaking the earth (this section includes my favorite character, Hortense: the Vampire Hunter), “Live By the Sword” in which immortal bladesmen fight each other for power and glory, “Die By the Sword” in which tormented spirits escaped from hell are lead by animal guides to put right what once went wrong, and a link to the Matrix rules (http://www.Bayn.org/games), which are extensive enough to get their own document.
There is no index, nor table of contents.
The Good
Wushu does what it wants to do; it makes a game where the focus is on flashy, stylistic, non-tactical but utterly cool action. Once a group overcomes some of the challenges involved in getting their heads around the game (more on this below), play is very fast, very furious, and full of visceral descriptions that would make the Wachowski brothers blanch.
Wushu is also very good at being a simple game with a few flexible rules that cover most situations. (Not in detail, mind you, but in spirit.) Thus it is very good at being used for a pick up game or a random one shot of beer n pretzels style gaming – especially if not everyone at the table wants to have to learn lots of game rules. It can also be used to introduce non-gamers into RPing, so long as they’re the type who want to do creative and insane things and need little support or guidance in doing so. (Those who want “a game with rules” and/or need some help getting started would probably best be started elsewhere.)
The Bad
For such a short document, Wushu often suffers from annoying organizational issues. While there is nothing that will not be clear by the time you finish reading the whole work, there are times where a rule is first introduced in an incomplete or confusing manner. The rules for using Chi for luck, for example, are introduced before the rules for using Chi as your hitpoints – which is Chi’s main purpose in the game. Similarly some of the best examples of how the game actually works and runs are in the “Adaptation” section rather than in the main rules, which means that you can go through the whole of the rules without getting a clear idea of how the rules might work in practice or in different settings.
Now these are minor gripes, as one only has to finish reading the 27 pages and full understanding will come in zen-like manner, but I would still like to see a clearer and more linear text throughout the work.
The Ugly
The biggest problem with Wushu is not what it does, or what it does not do, it is in what it assumes. There are a lot of un or partially-stated assumptions as to how a game of Wushu runs and what the mechanics are built to support that could very easily lead to trouble for a lot of people trying to play the game.
The clearest example I can give of this problem is in the way the mook rules work. Essentially, the GM has a “threat pool” that abstractly represents mooks. Players reduce this pool with their successes, and when the pool runs out the mooks have all gone down. What this system leads to in practice is that players are not rolling for the outcome of individual actions; they are rolling to determine part of the outcome of an entire scene. You don’t really roll to shoot mooks a, c, and t – though you can certainly describe it that way – you roll to reduce the “total mook threat” of the scene.
To give an example: In one of my playtest games the PCs were facing mooks with a Threat Level of 20 (lots of mooks). I described there as being about 10 mooks, with SMGs, in the room. The first player to roll then described killing them all, and rolled very well – so all of those mooks were dead, but the Threat Level was only reduced to 14, so there was still “mook threat” left over. The result was that more mooks came out of the woodwork in the “popcorn ninja” effect. However, for a second before I came up with this solution, I had a brain-blank. All the mooks in the room were dead, but the mook threat was not finished. There was a gap between the way most games handled combat, and the way Wushu handled combat – in that the specifics of which opponents are where doesn’t matter, only the resolution of the scene matters.
Now, using this set up for handling mooks is not a problem, and in fact I now very much enjoy it. The problem is that Wushu never makes this “scene resolution” vs “action resolution” divide clear. If it wasn’t for the fact that I was familiar with games like Ron Edward’s Sorcerer, which base themselves around scene resolution rather than action resolution, I might have gotten stuck much worse than I did.
Similarly there are other issues, such as the ways that communal resolution of scenes can be used (as opposed to turn based resolution), that are given only a very short and essentially lip-service based description of how they work and how they can effect play in Wushu. In a game in which everyone is describing multiple over-the-top stunts that both act on the scene and react to other things going on in the scene, normal turn based ideology doesn’t work so well. Having everyone describing their actions, reactions, and counteractions then all rolling at once to determine success works much better. However, there are a lot of tricky things to work out in such a situation, and gamers who are not used to such methods, or who have not had them explained in the context of other games, will get almost no help from Wushu in making it work.
I know that a lot of people have accused other games, especially ones that take as radical an approach as Wushu, of spending more time on essay-like explanations of how to run a game than they do actually giving rules. In the case of Wushu, however, I think that such a setup would probably be for the best. There are a lot of ideas behind Wushu about the way that scenes run, that fights work, what dice are supposed to be used for, and so on that are never sufficiently explicated, and this lack of coherent and focused explanation can lead to people getting confused when the games rules lead them into a situation they weren’t prepared for.
The End
Everything else said, there are three questions to be asked about Wushu and you:
Q. Will I like it?
A. That depends on what your taste in games are. If the idea that someone doing a triple back flip in the middle of an attack, for absolutely no reason other than that it looks cool, will radically increase their chances of both succeeding in the attack and doing the backflip gives you a headache, then you will not like Wushu. If, on the other hand, the idea that you are more likely to be successful in gunning down 100 mooks if you jump out of an exploding plane while doing so gets you hot, then chances are you will like Wushu. If you want rules for the number of times per round you can use The Unstoppable Devil Tiger’s Paw per round, then you will probably not like Wushu. If you want to be able to make up moves like Celestial Peony-Blossom Protection and use them whenever the hell you feel like it, then you will probably like Wushu.
Q. If I like it, will it replace Feng Shui or Hong Kong Action Theatre?
A. Not in general, but it might in specific situations. FS and HKAT both have a more standard gaming approach than Wushu does, and as such include things like rules for long term experience and growth, supported campaign play, and detailed characters. As such, I don’t see Wushu replacing either in most gamers’ arsenal. However, Wushu may well replace them for one off or pick-up games, especially with new players who have rules phobias. For one night of fun Wushu is far easier to get up and running than either of the other games, requires less rules knowledge of the participants, and can be gotten up and running in about 20 minutes (15 if the GM steals a plot from a movie the players haven’t seen).
Q. If I like it, and understand that it is not trying to replace Feng Shui or Hong Kong Action Theatre, is it worth $5?
A. Yes. Really, it’s 5 bucks. If you play it even once its worth the price of admission. (If you never play it, however, it isn’t – but that’s true of any game.)
For having clean, simple layout with clear, easily read prose but no real attempt at formatting or art Wushu gets a 3 in style. For having a kick ass rules-almost-non-existent system for description driven wire-fu insanity it gets a 3 in substance.
