Best wuxia RPG?

[Voadam]

I played ninjas and superspies and I really love its martial arts but it did not feel full on Wuxia to me.

I also really like 1e D&D OA martial arts and 2e Dragon Fist.

I have not played a full on wuxia system game.

The closest I came to feeling Wuxia in play was a 3e monk and narratively leaning into it, despite the mechanical combat weakness of the 3e monk.

 

[Gnostic Goblin]

Jadepunk: Tales From Kausao City

Authors: Ryan M Danks, Jacob Posen, Mike Olsen.
Artists: Nicole Cardiff, Conrad Javier, Kurt Komoda

The world setting is great. Mafia's have taken over running the city. Characters are Jianghu, street-level members of the underground resistance movement.

It takes some understanding how Jade can be used. There are 5 supplemental books one for each type of Jade. Even with those, it is not always easy to integrate it into a cohesive world, especially if you flood the game with Jade. The stuff is treasure to be used rarely, to maximise its impact and importance. Most people use it for banal but necessary reasons, purifying water, lighting fires, but a few people discover they can use it in other, magical ways. Exploring that is the purpose of the game. Which requires a simple backdrop of simple noir gangster martial arts stories for the exploration to play out in.

 

[jian]

I haven't followed up on where development for this is at, but may be worth looking:

Wandering Blades | Not DnD

I’ve now read this (it seems to be still in development) and I think it’s pretty great. A simple d20 mechanic with Pathfinder-style initiative (Fast and Slow Turns) forming the basis of a clever action economy (Actions and Reactions) and Qi use rounding out the options. It’s great that everyone can use Qi.

I wonder whether it needs a wizard option but the two classes that there are (youxia and outlaw) are fine, and basically both kick ass but the youxia is better at fighting and the outlaw is better at skills.

Not sure if it needs rules for Lightness (run across water and up walls etc) or you just assume everyone can do it on general principles.

 

[jdrakeh]

Wuahu, with one caveat - it's greatest weakness is that it demands its players are extroverts who can think on their feet and improvise speech. If they can't, the game immediately falls apart.

 

[jian]

Wuahu, with one caveat - it's greatest weakness is that it demands its players are extroverts who can think on their feet and improvise speech. If they can't, the game immediately falls apart.

Yeah, the thing with Wushu is that it gets very repetitive - there’s nothing tactical or meaningful about your choices, it’s just fridge poetry with action tropes. And your actions shouldn’t be more meaningful the longer they take to describe. I found it’s paradoxically best to keep action scenes to a minimum so that having to do the action poetry remains a novelty or a pleasant change of pace rather than routine.

 

[aramis erak]

Wuahu, with one caveat - it's greatest weakness is that it demands its players are extroverts who can think on their feet and improvise speech. If they can't, the game immediately falls apart.

That's as much a factor of the whole Wuxia genre...
... the heroes have a quick retort to everything in the Wuxia I've watched.

Much of the same for the chanbara genre...

Oriental films seem to be fights as time to break out both the social and physical combat rules and give every major character (PC/NPC) one action each...

 

[jdrakeh]

That's as much a factor of the whole Wuxia genre...

No. In Wushu, players earn dice to resolve actions for adding details to their description of said action. Each detail earns an extra die. The more detailed your description of an action, the more dice you get to roll. So, mechanically, the rules are punitive to players who aren't good at improvisational speech or are introverted. That's a rules issue, not a genre issue.

 

[aramis erak]

No. In Wushu, players earn dice to resolve actions for adding details to their description of said action. Each detail earns an extra die. The more detailed your description of an action, the more dice you get to roll. So, mechanically, the rules are punitive to players who aren't good at improvisational speech or are introverted. That's a rules issue, not a genre issue.

It's a rules issue mirroring the genre issue. Not as profound, but Feng Shui 2 gives a bonus for colorful descriptions, too... And it's an option in a lot of storygames to give bonuses for colorful narrations.

It's the kind of "enforcing the genre" rule I tend to like, but I do realize the PITA it can be for the shy or slow on the retort.

 

[jdrakeh]

It's a rules issue mirroring the genre issue.

I don't associate "excessive detail" as being a feature of the Wuxia genre. Or any film genre for that matter. My point is that Wushu doesn't award dice for colorful narration, just detailed narration. You could spit out a dozen boring details and earn a dozen dice. It's not about the quality of the narration in Wushu, just the number of details/words you can conjure up extemporaneously (everything is a detail).

As for story games awarding colorful narration I think that that, too, often has more to do with simply promoting a desired play style, not genre emulation. Sometimes it coincides with genre (e.g. a lot of Noir games use third person narration as a genre enforcing device), but not always.

 

[jian]

I’ve now read Strange Tales of Songling, which is the third in the wuxia RPG trilogy by Bedrock Games (the other two are Wandering Heroes of Ogre Gate and Righteous Blood, Ruthless Blades). It uses a slightly lighter ruleset than the other two games and aims mainly to deliver strange fantasy and horror stories like A Chinese Ghost Story, Painted Skin, or Green Snake, and I think it does that very well. It’s particularly valuable for its bestiary and adventures (there are four full adventures and lots of story seeds).