10 by 10 room

From YouTube, a clip from a possibly epic movie, “District B13″, where the backstory is: Paris, 2010. An isolation wall surrounds the ghetto cities. Without effective law enforcement, within these walls, gang rule is absolute.

In other words, rogue renegade cop walks into a casino and kills everyone with a dynamic mixture of gun-fu, martial arts, parkour and a pretty shirt.
In many ways, this is like a free ad for Wushu!

My friend Shreyas was making this post on RPG.net. He was looking for a system for a game that presumably had emphasis on high action…
(15:30:02) willows: my xiaolin showdown thread sucks
(15:30:14) willows: “i wanna run this with not exalted or wotg“
(15:30:18) willows: person 1: “hey use wushu“
(15:30:32) willows: “didn’t you see that i want toy quality, wushu is a bad toy”
(15:30:37) willows: person 2: “but use wushu anyway”
(15:30:40) willows: “uh”
(15:30:44) willows: person 3: “what else is there”
(15:30:53) willows: “i did start this thread for a reason”
(15:31:14) willows: person 4: “hey use wushu it’s light hearted”
(15:31:31) willows: person 5: “i know you rejected wushu but use it anyway”

Me? I like Wushu. Why not just use that?

Shortly after Dan Bayn released Wushu under a Creative Commons license, a popular Wushu Wiki soon emerged, with both the original rules texts as well as suggested modifications and ideas. Kiero took the initiative start building a Wushu Index of the various RPGnet threads about the game. In the same thread, several posters (and especially the wiki owner Emprint) worked together to despamify and revive the Wiki. Good job!

Interesting RPGnet thread on Wushu. In case you’re not familiar, Wushu is a game by Dan Bayn that’s focused entirely on action – the mechanics basically just do two things:

• pacing a conflict (usually a fight)
• incentivizing free narration, where each extra embellishment on your action gets you an extra die to roll towards your ultiamte goals

And beyond that, it’s quite nearly free narration. So reading this thread (and hwo people have internalized how Wushu works) is interesting, because I see two things going on here.

Firstly, Wushu’s rules are focused towards just those two things there (pacing conflicts and incentivizing narration).

But secondly, Wushu’s rules don’t give you ANYTHING else towards playing into a genre, and it seems like the consensus is that while you can add crunch to Wushu to fit it into a genre, it runs contrary to how many people play. Getting play to fit a genre or other expectations seems to be accomplished by the group at the social level, and with the rules just getting out of the way.

So it’s both: focused rules that also get out of the way. (It reminds me of dicussions of designing what matters vs designing what doesn’t matter.)