Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5021490" data-attributes="member: 4937">For me, it's not necessarily the game effect that is at stake here when I consider the the mechanic to simulate wuxia.  It's a combination of the flavor and mindset of the mechanics.To begin with, the Bo9S is explicitly about blade magic.  It's a book of martial magic.  If you choose your spells right and pointedly ignore the spell-like basis of the mechanics, you can sort of pretend that they aren't spells but the book itself makes little effort to do that.  The classes are sort of interesting and a campaign where the only base classes allowed were Bo9S classes would be interesting (the classes appear to be balanced with each other as best as I can tell).But as I said, it's more about the mindset here.  The approach to combat simulated by the mechanics, that of stances and of strikes and of secret techniques is even when stripped of all flavor still inescapably wuxia/anime.  If you watch a few movies, you'll hear characters talk about their 'Flying Gullitine Manuever' or their 'Crouching Toad' stance or whatever and as the battle rages back and forth the characters will move through a series of poses and strikes.  Finally, at some point in the battle the hero will decide to make use of his highest level manuever, perhaps even announcing his intention to do so.  Then things will go slow motion and their will be a mighty clash.  This is the world described by having mechanics like stances and strikes.  It's a world that ought to be familiar to anyone that has seen Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers.The western approach to combat is not that you decide now, "I'm going to use my Hammerhand Strike now!"  Western combat is all about a natural flow.  It's formless.  Western styles don't teach you a set of forms.  In Western combat you are taught to create and exploit openings.  The idea is a series of reactions and counterreactions until someone makes a mistake and fails to defend themselves quickly enough.  A mechanical system that modeled this idea of combat would have some manuevers perhaps ('trip', 'bullrush', etc.), but mostly it would be reactive.  You might have a super combat technique that dealt 100 damage, but you wouldn't choose when you could use it like you were casting a spell, but it would be something that you did in responce to something that the opponent did - an opening. I think the heart of the system would be 'Attacks of Oppurtunity' - the idea that you can exploit weaknesses based on what the opponent is doing.Yes, it is.  You have to throw out the entire idea of 'stances' and 'strikes' as they exist and create something entirely new.  You might have a stance, but it would be more like, "If you are in this stance, and the opponent attempts a trip attack, you can make an attack of oppurunity and if the attack succeeds the trip attack is countered."  Mostly what you'd have is reactions.  The counters, properly considered and reflavored, are about the only thing you could salvage from ToB.  I think you'd pick up alot of conditional immediate actions, and alot of things along the lines of, "If you are in this circumstance, every attack you make that hits automatically threatens a critical hit."But really, I think all of this misses the point.  What the fighter really needs isn't better attacks or better ability to deal damage in combat.  What the fighter really needs is better ability to defend himself.  If anything needs to be a class ability for fighters, it's some mechanic which relates to the fighter defending himself. That, and some problimatic spells need to be fixed so that they keep their flavor and 'wow' factor, without being absolutes.  Games deplore infinity, and that's what an absolute mechanic like, "You die" or "Immunity" means.</blockquote>

Verification