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Anyway, it's fair to say a fabulous time was had. Madcap action with strong familiar archetypes. Indeed, for a con game, encouraging players to lean on familiar tropes is much easier than expecting them to embrace unknown pregens with unique personality traits.

Big, brash, obvious: works a treat. The setting was less familiar - I knew the basic premise of Feng Shui nodes and protagonists. I hadn't appreciated how this could take PCs not only to fixed points in time, but literally anywhen

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There was a brief adjustment as we tried to figure out how to integrate 20th century action heroes into 17th century France, but Guy's masterful handling smoothed made this much more straightforward. A brief "What strange clothes you are wearing" followed by an immediate leap into highly narratively-driven combat scene. Two other combats, linked with a Skill Challenge and a Montage (two techniques Guy expands on at http://burnafterrunningrpg.com) made for a dynamic engaging, fast-paced one-shot

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But this is where it becomes clear why I didn't @ Robin into this thread. Because... I didn't particularly enjoy the system. It wasn't terrible. It certainly wasn't #Rolemaster. But equally, I'm not sure it particularly helped to reinforce the action movie genre that much.

Now there was lots of GM-led and player-led narration that absolutely reinforced the larger than life genre. But I'm not sure the system drove that or reinforced it particularly. You could have got much the same

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result with pretty much any streamlined RPG system.

In addition, there were a few areas where I bumped up against the system a teeny bit. Firstly, the Shots system: at the start of an encounter, you roll 1d6+Speed (rated 5-8 IIRC) and that gives not only your initiative score but in effect how many actions you get (each attack usually costing 3 Shots, so PCs getting 2-5 actions). In a one-shot game, we rolled this maybe 5 times, which involved a lot of randomness and real disparity in play

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On average, the Slow PC is going to have 10 fewer actions per session than the fast PC, (that's about 40% less), which genuinely means they are getting a lot less game to play. Not a fan of this. I'd want all PCs to get equal number of actions, and reflecting faster characters in other ways (e.g. multi-attack actions)

Another aspect that was a minor irritation was the PC abilities. Each character is a strong archetype and has particular abilities that differentiate them.

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However, in play these differences really didn't shine. I'd like to see either greater mechanical differentiation or then some narrative indication that shows when a PC is doing their special thing - that may be a play thing rather than a rule thing, and that's fine, but if that's to be the case the archetypes should detail what the narrative cue should look like.

inally, the dice mechanic was surprisingly tricky. One positive d6, one negative d6, and if either roll a 6, they explode.

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In practice, simple, but at some point everyone stumbled over this, and the disappointment of spending a Fortune/Chi point to gain +1d6 only to have it entirely nullified by rolling a 6 on the negative die was really tangible. And not in a fun Yay Fumble Table way, but in a really deflating Wasted Resource kind of way. So couple of things on this, for me.

Firstly, I'd want to give Fortune points a bit more weight. Not much,

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but perhaps they don't only give you +1d6 but they also stop the negative die exploding for that roll. So you know they're always going to do something good.

Secondly, the whole 1d6-1d6 thing was actually a bit annoying. So I created a spreadsheet

The bell curve it produces is a little bit quirky but actually not that different to several other dice rolling mechanics.

This is probably going to be really hard to make out.

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I compared the Feng Shui 1d6-1d6 exploding dice to four other dice-rolling options.

1. Straight 3d6-10. Now, the main issue with this is that 1d6-1d6 has a midpoint, whereas 3d6 has two, hence the plateau. If only you could use 3d6-10.5 and you'd have a near perfect match, albeit without the long tails caused by the exploding dice.

SO, I created...

2. 3d6 "Special". This is the grey line if you can see it and it IS as close as perfect as you can get.

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It's a straight 3d6, but two of the dice are designated "special" die and any time they are a pair (not 3-of-a-kind), you count the total as 0.

This is a perfect beautiful construct... except, the other thing you have to do is subtract 9 if the total is 10 or lower, but subtract 10 if it's 11 or higher. In other words, theoretically wonderfully, practically useless.

Which leads us to...

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3. 3d6 +/-1d6. It's like 3d6, but one die is special. If it's a 6, roll again and add. If it's a 1, roll and subtract. This largely replicates the tails of the Feng Shui dice, but is crap in the middle. Bin it. But it leads to...

4. 2d6 +/-1d6. Like above, but fewer dice. And with the exception of a lower chance of getting the +0 point, this maps against the Feng Shui curve almost perfectly. It requires two different coloured dice (as Feng Shui does), but

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instead of always subtracting, you're always adding (and subtracting 1 roll in 6).

The beauty of this is you don't need to make the roll 2d6-7, you can just subtract 7 from all the skills (which are generally rated from 12-15) and bob's you're uncle.

Personally, I way prefer this. For many others, they'll be asking why I've taken 13 toots to make such an insignificant change. They wouldn't be wrong. There's no accounting for taste.

13/

I guess the final thing to say is that Feng Shui seems to actually encourage gonzo OTT silliness. Partly, this is down to the GM and scenario, of course, but when you throw strong action movie archetypes together and invite players to lean into cliches, inevitably it gets a bit silly. So, even though it has published campaigns, makes me put Feng Shui firmly on the Paranoia "fun for a con" pedestal

/End At Last

@thedicemechanic We played it for a day-shot and I was running. I think I came to a few conclusions.

Needing to have a sheet or rolls in advance on the 'GM' side was great but also slightly nuts.

The disparity in attack values was interesting. It tended to mean the brick guy rarely hit and the martial arts master actually got serious hurt (it's a while back, so generalities).

The schticks didn't add as much as we thought or really just created repetitive actions each time.

@thedicemechanic We also had the same challenge in that while it was great it had zero to do with the system we felt. I think it was 'pushing the envelope' of difference when it was originally released when it was a culture that needed nudging - but once that is accepted the system doesn't add much itself.

We did decide not to play a long campaign in and keep in mind our long is 8-12. The 2.5 - 3 was enough.

@thedicemechanic In a typical 'any game where the tone was being set by the core trio of the old gaming group' fashion ours wasn't as gonzo. Yeah, action was epic. Mooks dying. Helicopters being taken down by the killer. A close-quarters battle in a casino safe, etc.

I think it came down to the melodramatic hooks - which can be great.

@NarrativeEscapes I think here the tone was kinda set from the off. Guy played it very tongue in cheek. We were 20th century action heroes in renaissance France. The whole thing started silly, so inevitably it carried on silly.

I guess if the GM sets a more The Expendables or Ocean's 11 tone from the off, you'd get different results.

@thedicemechanic definitely. It can go both ways and be good either way. It came down to the melodramatic hooks, which meant it was a bit more like The Killer / Kill Bill due to the interconnected melodramatic hooks, the tone of them and as you say the 'kick off' event.

We did traverse time though. Hopping vampire horde FTW.

@theredcaps if this is replying to me, that's exactly what I did - you can see all the little padlocks on every toot after the first

@theredcaps perhaps because you follow me?

@theredcaps was it the same on both Home and Local?

@thedicemechanic @theredcaps for me I could see them all on home but local only had the one. Not sure what it's supposed to do.

@thedicemechanic @theredcaps I'm not fully convinced unlisted hides it from a followers timeline, but I'm still figuring it out.

Unlisted means that everyone can see your post, but it won't appear on the public timelines - either Local or Federated. Anyone who follows you or views your profile can see the toot, though.