Games that Changed Everything: Feng Shui

First in a series!

One of the things I really like talking about is the history of the hobby of RPGs, since I was brought up in Wisconsin and played with some of the people responsible for creating the hobby.

As I get older, I see a lot of newer players (AKA “kids”) who don’t have the same history that I do, and I feel that there’s a duty to talk about the hobby and how it came to be. Or in other words:

We needs to do the tellin’ so we ‘member who we was.
(Yeah, that was a Beyond Thunderdome quote, so sue me…)

A Quick Caveat

After D&D started everything, there were a few games that came along that changed the landscape of gaming, moved it forward as it were. There’s always a risk when you talk about RPGs being the first to do something, because the one you think of as first usually wasn't. In fact, if you think that D&D was the first modern RPG, well it really wasn't.

RPG history is full of games from companies big and small that had innovations long before they were recognized by the hobby as a whole. For any article in this series, the Sith recognize that the game we’re recognizing as being the first to do something almost certainly wasn't. What it was. was the first game that really brought this particular idea for gaming to the hobby as a whole.

It ultimately doesn't matter if your game did it first, if no one played it or talked about it, bravo you, but in the larger context of the hobby... well, you're being this guy if you're crabby about it:

Actually, my mimeographed fanzine was the first to do it.

Don't be that guy. Seriously.

Enough with the caveats, the first game I’d like to talk about is Feng Shui.

He totally got punched!

I especially want to talk about Feng Shui because, as of this article, it’s having a Kickstarter for a second edition, which you can read about here.

Feng Shui was released in 1996 by a company called Daedalus Entertainment in a glorious full-color rule book that legend has it, lost the company money on each sale due to the cost of production. It was a big, bold, crazy game, and it had real attitude in the writing. Take a look:

This is a world that rewards heroism. If your heart is strong, you can dodge machine-gun bullets. You can take eighteen slugs to your chest and still come back for one final blazing attack against the bad guy. If your kung fu is mighty, you can run sideways up a tree, bounce off a branch, and clash swords with your opponent who has just done the same from the opposite direction. The world of Feng Shui is a world where it is not a dumb idea at all to cling to the bottom of the bad guy’s Maserati as it screeches down the midnight streets of Hong Kong. It is a world where, armed only with a toothpick, you can face down a ten-foot hybrid of supernatural monster and futuristic machine and still have a chance of winning.

While Feng Shui was by no means the first RPG with attitude (I’d give that award to Paranoia) it did a couple of things to back those big claims up, and thereby change gaming: it introduced a Stunt system and brought us the first use of Mooks.

The Stunt System

The Stunt system in Feng Shui tells us to encourage player descriptions of how they perform an action, from punching the bad guy to navigating an obstacle. It’s the Stunt system that backs up the attitude in the writing.

Feng Shui draws its inspiration from Hong Kong action films like The Killer or Hard-Boiled, along with crazy Hong Kong fantasy movies like A Chinese Ghost Story or The Bride With White Hair. The essence of all these Hong Kong films is that it’s not just enough to do something, you need to do it with style.

As they say in the movie The Last Boy Scout: “Since it's the '90s, you don't just smack a guy in the face. You say something cool first.”

The basic idea is that how you do something is just as important as what you do, perhaps even more important. To put it another way: style, baby!

Characters are encouraged to describe how they’re going to do something, and the GM is encouraged to not make the action overly difficult because of that how. The game becomes somewhat effects driven: if you want to knock someone unconscious, that’s the effect you’re looking for. How you do that isn't important from the game’s perspective, since the effect is the same whether you punch them in the face, or  do a jump-kick to the head.

Full Point!

Whichever you choose, the net effect is the same: bad guy unconscious, all that’s changed is the description.

That is a radical shift from the way earlier games handle action resolution, where if you want to do something that’s more complicated, it’s going to be harder, even if the net effect is the same. That’s realistic, after all.

Feng Shui is not about realism. Heck, if you think about it, D&D or most other RPGs aren't about realism until you invoke the action resolution system.

Instead of being worried about playing safe and doing the bare minimum to get by so that you don’t fail, you can start to think about being a Big Damn Hero. And who doesn't want that?

Who doesn't want to be this?

One of the most interesting things about the Feng Shui Stunt system is that it doesn't actually work the way most people think it does. Most people think that if you describe your actions awesomely, you get a bonus to the check to make them happen. What actually happens is that you’re simply not penalized. In fact, you start to get penalized for doing the same actions repeatedly without changing your descriptions. If all you do is keep shooting or punching the bad guys, the game world makes it more difficult.

In practice, this means you jump through the air firing two pistols, then slide along on a cart shooting at everyone as you pass by only to dive behind cover, taking wild shots as you go. That’s the kind of action you get. In other words, you get this:

(seriously, watch that video, it’s crazy).

So let’s sum up: Feng Shui changed gaming by making actions effect based. What you want to do sets the difficulty, and you’re free to describe how it happens. It opens up limitless creativity by eliminating the notion that doing something crazy cool is also impossible to pull off mechanically.

Mooks

The other thing that Feng Shui did that changed RPGs was to introduce Mook rules. Now even with the caveat I wrote earlier, I’m going to point out that it didn't actually create the idea. Several games already had the idea, including Bushido, an RPG from the 1970s. Did anyone other than me play Bushido, I wonder?

The point it’s an old idea. For our purposes, Feng Shui changed gaming by introducing these rules by actually making them popular, and also by integrating them into the Stunt system.

So what’s a Mook? If you've seen any action movie, you've seen ‘em: they’re the nameless, faceless, characterless bad guys who exist only to get beaten up by our hero. They’re the characters that the hero has to go through to get to the real challenge: the boss or villain.

In most RPGs before Feng Shui, Mooks use the same rules as everyone else. They might not have been particularly good at things, but they used the same rules as the heroes do.

Feng Shui's Mooks have most of the same qualities as regular characters with one critical difference: they don’t take damage. A Mook is either up or down. Feng Shui has a hit point system, so if you have 10 bad guys, as a GM you’d have to keep track of 10 sets of hit points, which would be .. slow and not mesh with the game’s idea of fast-paced action.

Enter the Mook rules: Mooks have a defensive value, and any attack that hits them by 5 or more takes them out of the fight. Anything less than that has no effect. Simple. Easy. No bookkeeping. It works.

When you take the Mook rules and combine them with the Stunt system you have the carnival of carnage that makes Feng Shui the incredible game it is: fighting nameless thugs? The only thing that matters is how you take ‘em down.

Make no mistake: Mooks can hurt you, and can be dangerous in large numbers, but they're really only a special effect for a dangerous scene and something that lets the heroes be awesome. That's their real effect: they let characters be as awesome as they are in the movies they're trying to represent.

Not everyone likes Mook rules, because they make it obvious that the characters are the protagonists and that the unimportant characters really are just that. For some folks, that’s a bad thing and a play style they want to stay away from. For those folks, Feng Shui is not a game they should explore.

Since Feng Shui

A lot has changed since Feng Shui.

If you take a look at most modern game systems, if they’re designed for action, they will have Stunt or Mook rules in place, and probably both. So these rules are baked in to most current game systems. Heck, even Dungeons and Dragons introduced the rules in Fourth Edition. Pretty good, 'eh?

At the same time, many improvements to Stunt and Mook rules have been made since they first appeared here. The biggest is that modern systems typically give bonuses for good Stunts to really encourage them.

Game systems like 13th Age have expanded Mook rules to give them a pool of Hit Points that you can cut into, and where every X amount of damage knocks one Mook out of the fight.

All of that is really not the point, however. The important thing that made Feng Shui change gaming was that it made made us think about style for the first time. Characters do incredible things in their adventures, why not celebrate how they do it and what it looks like?

A good Feng Shui session is full of laughter, high-fives and even a few moments of "whoa, did that just really happen?"

And that's really what Feng Shui is all about: you play a game, why not add an element of style to it?

What did we Learn?

Hopefully you can take away something useful from this post. First, if you haven't seen the movies I mentioned about, and haven't checked out Hong Kong cinema in general, do it. You'll see where a lot of the films we see today take their ideas from, albeit in a low budget sense.

Second, you have a great game to try out if you haven't already. So go pick up that Kickstarter, and until next time, Make Mine 20.