Not really, since they're not Details. GM still has a lot of control over the plot, although if the players are taking it towards one direction, it's easier to change things up. Like make it the Butler until the last second, when you find out it was the widow all along.



Oh, not even close. You can look it up for yourself Here. But basically, in Shadowrun, you say what you're trying to do and roll the dice to see if you do it. In Wushu, you say what you just did, and roll dice to see how effective it was. It's a big, huge difference.

No, not really.

For example:

The bad guy is running away from the party, they give chase. But ninjas attack to try to buy the bad guy some time.

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Game stats description

you are having a battle vs mooks
you must inflict total five hits to get rid of them
Every turn that they are still there, the are hazard 2 (they inflict 2 damage if you don't block)

Each player normally has 5 dice, which they can split between attack and defense.

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Player 1:
With a contemptuous sneer Bubba says, "Ah don't have time to wrassle with you guys now." He carjacks a garbage truck and drives off in after the bad guy. As Bubba is busy with his criminal enterprise, several ninja throwing stars imbed themselves in his back.

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Game mechanics:
Player 1 is worried about the bad guy getting away, so he is allocating all his dice to 'attack'; since he's a tough guy, he'll just soak up the (automatic) damage the mooks do every round. If he had allocated some dice to block, he'd have a chance to negate the mooks damage. Since he knows he is going to take damage, he has already narrated it in. But narrating in the damage would still be ok, even if he had allocated dice to block and been completely successful at blocking the damage. If he had completely blocked that damage, the throwing stars he got hit with would just do cinematic wounds.

Player one rolls his 5 dice, getting 3 hits. As he has allocated no dice to defense, he takes 2 damage.

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Player 2:
Weasel is cowering in the back of the garbage truck, behind its thick (and comforting) steel walls. As he notices ninjas driving on mopeds after the garbage truck, he cries out for his mommy and throws down sacks of garbage in their paths, causing several to crash.

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Player 1: veto, as amusing as ninjas on mopeds might be, these ninjas are supposed to be creations for the darkest shadows of (bad guys) mind, remember? So they are probably hopping from rooftop to rooftop, or creeping along in the shadows of lightpoles, or something, not riding mopeds.

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Player 2: ok
Weasel is cowering in the back of the garbage truck, behind its thick (and comforting) steel walls. He almost fails to notice as several ninjas appear in the shadowed back of the garbage truck with him. With much screaming and flailing, he manages to activate the garbage compressor. To avoid this fate, Weasel madly clings to the back bumper of the garbage truck, crying out for his mommy the whole time.

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Game mechanics:
As weasel is more concerned about getting beaten up that Bubba, player 2 allocates 3 of his dice to defense, leaving him only 2 dice to attack.

He rolls hit three defense dice, getting 2 hits. He blocks the damage the mooks do. He rolls his two attack dice and gets two hits. This is five total hits to the mooks, so they have been defeated. One of the players (or the GM) will give a short closing scene to the mook fight, and the chase will continue; except now the PCs are driving a carjacked garbage truck, rather than on foot.

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Note that any actions taken to get rid of the mooks could have worked. They PCs could have stopped and fought them, they could have used their awesome pornomancer powers to convert the mooks to the cause of righteousness, or whatever else they though they could do without a veto that sounded cool.

Cain:

This comparison reminds me of a social studies lecture back in junior high when we were discussing a religion where it was believed that whether or not you go to Heaven or Hell is already decided before you're even born, because God is omniscient and already knows where you will deserve to go. Someone in the class then asked the obvious question of why bother doing good deeds if your fate is already decided, to which the teacher responded, if you live a naughty lifestyle, then you're just proving to yourself and others that you're going to end up in Hell, whereas if you lead a righteous life, there's still a chance that you may have been selected to go to Heaven. The whole thing seemed ass backwards, the end result is the same: people do good deeds so they can go to Heaven.

I skimmed the link you provided though, and I am beginning to understand where you're coming from. The Veto, which Wushu apparently relies on to keep narrative consistency, is pretty much the same thing as giving GM powers to everybody. The problem with that model is that not everyone is equally qualified to have GM powers, with the most qualified person obviously being the GM. A Wushu GM does not have less power than a Shadowrun GM - if he wants to be a dick, he can just Veto every single one of your descriptions except the ones that end up with you getting killed, which is the equivalent of a Shadowrun GM dropping a piano on you every time you walk out the door. But players have significantly more power, since they can also Veto, but that power doesn't improve the quality of the story if your GM is any good. All the descriptions that are problematic would already have been Veto'ed by the GM, since he's the one who created the game world, and he's the one who's directing the overall flow of the story. He knows what's consistent and what's not. There's simply no point in giving Veto powers to the players.

Not to mention Veto totally kills suspension of disbelief. It's like listening to someone tell a story to you, and then halfway through they go "Oh wait, nevermind, ignore everything I just said, this happened instead." That makes for a worse story, not a better one.

The thing about the Veto is that, surprisingly, it makes for a cooler story. The GM isn't always the best qualified to tell the story, although it's better that way. What usually happens, though, is that the players often have a lot of suggestions that they can make, which would significantly add to the story. This means that the Veto tends to be used more like: "You know what would be more fun?" and allows you to give input on another player's story. Not everyone can come up with cool descriptions on the spot, so riffing and Vetos are good ways to give someone feedback.

Going back to an earlier point in the discussion, a Wushu GM is still a dictator, since he also has Veto power, and apparently you don't get to vote on Vetos. He also gets to define what constitutes a Coupe de Grace, where you can't describe your way into an instant win. When it comes down to it, he just dictates on a large scale instead of a small scale. To take the government analogy a little further, Wushu is kinda like a dictatorship where there's no police force and you can go stab your neighbor in the face anytime you want, but if you try to overthrow the ruler, he can still bring the beat down on you with his military.

You only get a coup de grace after you have mechanically won the fight.

So if you were fighting the bad guy and run him out of hit points, you can then narrate your coup de grace however you want; but you can't narrate it until you have mechanically beaten him.

Which is exactly how it works in Shadowrun. If a player faces off against a main baddy in an epic sword duel and wins, I have no problems with him saying that his character executes a finishing move where he lops off the dude's head and then drop kicks it into a garbage can. But he can't do that before he's beaten the guy on the dice.

Actually I would have a beef with that specific description if I was running a game leaning towards the side of realism, but that's a totally different issue entirely. If it was Shadowrun, I would just make him roll for the fancy maneuver, where he'll likely fail miserably. If it was Wushu, I would just outright Veto it. Actually, now that I think about it, the GM probably has more power in Wushu, not less.

I would tend to agree with Krayola Red. I only really describe my PCs actions when they fail to do so themselves, and they're welcome to describe their actions however they please, as long as it makes sense, without a group veto.

This idea seems sort of backwards to me still though. I imagine, 'Smashtron lands in the middle of the group, spraying the area with his flamethrowers and deadly doses of gamma radiation. He watches, laughing, as ninjas go up like candles, screaming in pain,' and he rolls a critical failure. At best, it comes off as silly. At worst, it leads to a break between mechanics and game description. Exalted (and, well, every onther system's method) of describing the action, then rolling, then discussing the result seems to make more sense.

I can see Wushu being especially good for two purposes;
1) "Riffing". I've never really seen this in any game I've played, although Cain seems to feel it's really good. I have to imagine I could get the same effect by rewarding it, or just asking players nicely to do it.
2) Helping GMs draw on the experience of their players. I personally have been running Shadowrun, off and on, for about ten years. I trump most of my players in regards to experience, and books read, so they seem, overall, to feel I have a pretty complete knowledge of things. Sometimes we go into an area I'm not experienced with, and I try to do my research beforehand, but I have had to draw on players to tell me "what's right". However, I'm also playing in a game with a GM whose sum-total experience is playing in my game for half a campaign, and it has two other PCs with a ton of experience, either reading the books or GMing. It seems every other post we're sending private messages about how it's done in canon, which he can ignore or not at his convenience, and pretty regularly he asks us for advice on how to do things. So I feel in his case, the veto bit might help. In mine, I don't feel like it would help for the sake of making the game more realistic.

Because, among other things, it lets your PC look cool, even if he mechanically wasn't able to contribute much to the scene. If you wanted him to look dumb, you'd have narrated him as looking dumb.

It still seems like that would work better if you knew whether you had succeeded beforehand, though. If you roll a failure, you could at least amend it to 'Smashtron lands in the middle of the group, spraying the area with his flamethrowers and deadly doses of gamma radiation. He watches, laughing, as the ninjas shriek and scurry out of the way of his indiscriminate blasts'. He still looks cool, but you don't have the jarring discrepancy of describing a success while the roll denotes a failure.

Because the threat isn't reduced to zero, more ninjas pop out of the woodwork. So, you fry a lot of ninjas, but it's not effective, because reinforcements come pouring in.

What if it doesn't make sense to have more ninjas? What if there were only 5 ninjas and Smashtron's player describes Smashtron killing all of them? Then he'll just get vetoed and he'll have to come up with a new description that's more in line with what he can actually do. If you roll the dice beforehand, you won't need a veto, because you'll know the mechanical results of your actions before you make a description.

"Looking cool" is just a matter of abstraction. On one extreme, you have to roll for every single action your character takes, so unless you have a massively high dice pool, you won't be able to pull off crazy stunts constantly. On the other extreme, you have a completely free form game where you can describe your character doing whatever he wants, so you can create a dude named Goku who uses an energy blast to blow up the planet. I think that the best games are run somewhere in the middle of these two extremes, so that you're not rolling dice all the time, but you can't change the entire topography of the game world on a whim either.

I mean, as an SR GM, I usually allow, and even encourage, players to come up with their own descriptions for cool stuff and not to only rely on my descriptions, because I have better things to do than to describe every single thing in a room down to the last piece of old gum on the floor. If someone is shooting at Joe the Runner, and Joe's player says Joe vaults over the burnt out husk of a Eurocar Westwind to take cover behind the hood, I'm sure as hell gonna let him do it even if I never described the car being there. Shit, I'll probably give him extra karma for being creative. But if Joe's player says Joe focuses the psychokinetic powers he got from being an Ares genetic experiment and makes the bad guy's head explode with the sheer power of his mind, I'm gonna go wtf son.

Then five more come in from wherever the ninjas came from. They just keep coming, which happens often enough in action flicks. This one is a good example of bad guys from out of the woodwork. Also, in Wushu, your description determines how big your dice pool is; so the better your description, the better your chance of pulling off the huge stunt.


That's a genre thing, and enforced via Veto and approval of characters. (Yes, that's still a part of the game. ) If you're playing a Dragonball Z game, then being able to blow up planets is perfectly acceptable. If you're playing Shadowrun, you build a Shadowrunner, not Goku. You also can't change the topography of the world on a whim, since someone's bound to Veto you blowing up the planet.

Right, but sometimes it doesn't make sense to have enemies pouring in from every direction. That's kinda a problem if you're trying to run a game that isn't styled like a B-rated action movie.

Also, who gets to decide how good your description is and how much dice you get for it? It seems kinda subjective and weird.

It sometimes gets to be about length rather than quality, I admit. Each detail you add = +1 die, up to the scene cap. The scene cap is basically an upper limit to the bonus you get, to keep people from talking for an hour solid.

ahhh I see now, but it's highly specific.

It's like Dying Earth system, or HeroWars. Great systems. Doesn't suit to other games though.

By the way, I could see myself running a Wushu game. But never would I use this in shadowrun for the simple reason it favorise US-blockbuster action or chinese kung fu styles action. Which doesn't suit to my perception of SR universe.

I don't see SR as Max Payne or Matrix.

Take cover, react tactically, try to shoot down the biggest threat, opponents try to use tactical moves to put you under pressure.

All this just doesn't suit to SR from what I just did read of Wushu's system.

It looks like a good one, inappropriated to (my) SR.

Well Wushu isn't made for realistic games.

One problem I had with Wushu's "describe then roll" mechanism is that after a while you start to wonder why you bother rolling since it has little to no impact on what's really happening.

Not every player wants to have narrative control. Some players just want to react to what the GM throws at them plot- and threat-wise.

Everything the player does is an attempt at narrative control. When they describe what their character is doing, before or after the roll, they're trying to put their character's actions into the narrative.


Actually, you *can*, it's just a matter of how hard you try. As the saying goes, a good universal system can do any setting, it's just a matter of how it does it. In this case, it's a matter of explaining to the players what you want, then restricting the extremely gonzo action through use of the Veto. I actually saw an example of tactical squad combat, on a more gritty level, pulled off via the Wushu engine.

Another example of the "You might not believe it fits" category is the historical horror setting Roanoke. I actually played in this setting-- I had a fire-and-brimstone preacher. You can read an actual play thread Here. Dark horror and historical re-enactment is entirely possible via Wushu, and it works surprisingly well.

One of my players flat out told me "I don't want to be that active" and asked for more guidance by NPCs when it came to picking a course of action. He likes to tell what his character does, but doesn't want to write a story, or drive a plot, or otherwise take narrative control. All he wants is to play his character, and react to what I throw at him.

Well, to each his own... Personally I think that the ruleset has a huge influence on the feeling of the game and I've never seen any universal system fully replace a good specific ruleset. Kinda like using a knife instead of a screwdriver.

I think this basically described my issue. If I just want my PC to look cool, I'll write a book. The whole thing feels constructed solely for the purpose of a party of Mary Sues which, at least for me, is the opposite fo an engaging game.

Wushu's system looks fun to play a chinese action style game (I watched that old "The One" film this week ).

It can be a real good experience but it can't suit to a tactical game.