Adam

As for tone, well it varies. There's the generic Big Campaign, with variable player cast that goes on for about a year up until a big finalé. Each eipsode can have a different tone- varying from one long continuous fight to 'talk and think' to planning a detailed extraction.

Unlike some other systems, where the mood is determined by the game, Feng is a lot more flexible. In some systems, if the players don't go along with the mood it hurts the game, but in Feng you can roll with the punches. I generally let the players set the tone for a particular episode. Like the source material, the mood can undergo switchback changes- or even have a completely different mood with different members of the party.

For example: one time the party werre captured by Jammers. Most of the party are in a big cage- being taunted and threatened with a plasma ejector (tense mood). The Magic Cop is in the clutches of a vivisector having just been slugged with and arcanodrug (comedy mood- no, really) and the Spy is interrogated (dark mood) then released by someone he'd helped earlier (romance mood). The switches were seemless and it was a very good session.

Imagine this guy in the arena of the darkness pagoda (we played the scenario from the old "Blood of the Valiant") shaking his hips and clapping his hands to make the spectators cheer.

So most of our fights are comedy and we laugh a lot at the descriptions.

Stefan

We play a more Hollywood-action style game, though, as opposed to Hong Kong wuxia style. Our mood reflects that; it's mostly fast-paced action. No deep dark undercurrents or over the top melodrama like Hong Kong cinema, really.

The mood sticks pretty close to a typical Hollywood action movie, with a few Hong Kong flavors worked in from the source material. It's not a particularly "deep" as far as roleplaying goes:

Q: Why are we going here?
A: Because this is where the next fight scene is.

Q: Why are we fighting these guys?
A: Because they did not immediately run away when we rolled for initiative.

Q: Why should we care about this particular NPC/plot point/story?
A: I don't care as long as I get to use my Flying Windmill Kick.

The game really kicks up to another level when most of the players "get it", and I sometimes have a hard time trying to explain what "get it" means in Feng Shui terms. Mostly, it's about putting the focus of the game on player creativity... it requires a completely different mindset from "what's my total to-hit bonus?" to "what piece of furniture can I do something completely cool with?"

In D&D, whenever you do something other than "I hit him" you quickly get bogged down with penalties, modifiers and special-case rules. In Feng Shui you're pretty much begging the players to try things like,
"Hey, can I shoot the gas tank on the fork lift so the explosion propels the forks into two mooks at once?" Likewise, when you throw a player into an armory with every firearm known to man, and he picks up the chainsaw instead because he can do more interesting things with it, then you know he "gets it".

The creation of archetypal, outside-of-the-faction long-term villains and people who Keep Showing Up have over time given the players _plenty_ of reasons to care. Throwing a little Grant Morrison/UA/OvtE/Delta Green vibe goes a long way towards making evil forces that people care to kill. We've got Mister A and Mister B (the archetypal bad-asses for hire that play hit-and-run), the Bad Man (always has his finger in things around the edges, but rarely gets directly involved), the Three (a ex-Ascended tactical team that has powerful masters), The King in Yellow and the oncoming of the 2010 cataclysm that eventually wrests away power from the Ascended...honestly, the best way to create these sorts of People You Want To Get is set up a situation that the players can't neccessarily get out of, but won't kill them the first time. Feng Shui players hate to get beaten. The game is so combat-heavy that you get in the mindset that you don't want to lose.

Getting them to care has never been a problem for me. My only problem is letting go of my favorite bad guys.

The pay? What, boxes of coconut bars and the occasional gun?

no, sadly, he wasnt buying any of the other reasons to join up, so i had someone who is an underling for the friends (underling of the professor) offer money..

i probably should have just said, "ok then, see ya", instead of offering money, but the guy never said how much

Hey, whatever works to keep the troupe together...

true, but it pretty much immediately cxhanged the focus from "doing good", to "getting paid"..lol

course, i only have 2 players currently, ones playing a Techie, the other is playing a Killer

My last campaign used this to great advantage. The party's handler kept promising to pay up real soon after each job, and just as the party were convinced he was going to stiff them he said he was going to pay them. The party turns up just in time to see him get kidnapped.

Much later, he actually does pay them. Then gets them to trigger a critical shift that renders the money worthless.

I know he also prefers the tone. Our D&D game is generally epic quests with deity-level antagonists, tension, impossible odds and a good chance of frustration. The Feng shui game is much more in the line of black-comedy meets high action. We have a huge range of interests too, so while we started off pretty deep in HK-style gangsters and wire fights we have moved on (across 6 or so years) to allsorts of games - Wizard of Oz 'was it just a dream' types, outright graphic horror, westerns, sci-fi, comedy of errors, detective stories, etc. Feng shui is very adaptable, just make sure you all enjoy!

Just when you think you've got your characters sussed out they throw you a real curve ball. I'm running an interesting side game for two of my dragons (The killer and the ninja) which involves investigating and hunting the vampire presence in hong kong. Not hopping vamps, but full-on fangs & opera capes bad guys with powers and minions. It was a minion that they had captured, a ghoul to be precise, that they were interogating. They were aware that in my vampire mythos that ghouls are insanely loyal, unlikely to talk even if tortured, etc.
Didn't stop them from trying though. Then when he clammed up after revealing the only clue they were gonna get, they set him on fire and left.
Now i know he was the minion of the living dead and had tried to kill the dragons previously, but i thought that they would have just scared him with the petrol. They are the good guys right?
Still, it gives me a horrible idea for the dragons, a pissed off vampire and an animated crispy ghoul corpse....

no matter how many times i say "you are the good guys"... they just dont always see that

That is not my view of a silver dragon. I wrote him that he could play his character this way if he wants to. But since the other players didn't like his style, too, I would doubt if they really can form a group to fight for the ideals of the silver dragons. And I argued, that if their enemies get to know his character's character, style and way to get things done, it would be easy for them to manipulate him for their own purposes. It should not be so difficult for the Architects to convince a guy, who is short-tempered, violent and aggressive, that Dr. med. Darius Brunkovich is threatening him, because he is inventing brain-washing tools that are tested on poor ukrainian street-kids. Of course this person only threatens the Architects because of his newest research results in neurobiology and neurophysiology that can be used for an ACM (arcanowave counter measure). So this guy might kill Dr. med. Brunkovich and Dennis Clech from the Architects laughes up his sleeve.

Stefan

Adam

come to think of it, give nthe imagination that some players have when it comes to improvised weapons, death is probably preferable to survival.

If player brutality is a problem, bring in the idea of karma- for every unnecessary death a player causes they gain a point of hoodoo. You can spend a point of hoodoo as an additional negative dice on one of that player's actions. Let some sage NPC warn them about it beforehand, though. Let them agonise over which deaths are unnecessary- you might not even have to use the rule if you set up the background for them.

Eddie the Fireman tends to try to knock out his opponents and use no-lethal force. However, he's a Magic (Cop) Fireman that occasionally uses Pyrokinesis (Blast Fire). So, occasionally it pops out of control and someone explodes, like Percy the Scrappy Kid Cyborg. And sometimes Eddie makes kills accidentally, like his set-off remotely of SACQ (nerve poison gas from OvTE), thinking it was 'knockout gas'. Eddie's player usually plays his characters to the hilt, so we will likely see some character ramifications from that in upcoming sessions.

Chon La, Legendary Drunken Master (just ask his fans), prefers not killing. Prefers, however, is not quite the same as 'never kill'. Chon's player has sort of the default setting for kill/not kill in the game. Similarly, Gabrielle Summers (Spy) does whatever looks most stylish. Is someone more stylish bursting apart from a gun round to the head, or from a blackjack to the back of the noggin? Well, it differs if it's before Labor Day.

Snorri the Abominized Viking is a little bipolar. His player is a good bloke with a heavy set of morals about what you Should and Should Not do. Then he got Sucker Rounded, rolled terribly, and turned into a full Abomination with an insane 14 Bod and Signature Weapon. The attack of CyberForce 5 (afore-mentioned Scrappy Cyborgs) put him in a great role-playing quandry. Bunch of little kids trying to kill him, but few did much but burn his clothes a little. So he helped push an airplane through a portal, ignored the kids' attacks (taking damage all the while), saved the day...and then pulled out his axe, went berserk, and hewed through the Buro mooks on the other side. And took out his aggression further on anything not child-shaped. It was a great moment of role-playing and carnage.

(actually, I _really_ am growing to love Snorri's character. He started out slow because he was a bright duck-out-of-water wacky character that didn't quite fit with the cop, spy, old master, and fireman...getting hit with the Sucker Rounds and turning all horned and purple really does wonders for bringing a character into the game world...and it gives them an instant vendetta with the Architects.)

Adam

Cop
Fireman
B-movie actor
Private Eye
Spy
Abominized Viking

If I was to do it all again, I'd probably have encouraged people to take the more normal archetypes. Ok, that last one is a little out of the ordinary, but I think you get the point.

Actually, it is much more interesting - to me, at least - for the players to gain interesting traits than it is for them to have them from the beginning. Below the facade, that same group is:

-Tactical ops genius who knows far more about infiltration than any cop should.
-Pyrokinetic who became a fireman for his own dark, personal reasons
-Master of the Drunken Path - killer of gods - sous chef
-The only person who has likely ever performed a Rock Bottom on a space demon in a mecha - lover of beautiful women
-Initiate on the Path of Blinding Light with a personal beef against the Darkness Queen's meddling in her life
-Abominized Viking...who loves kids

It's a lot easier and more fun to tag neat stuff to everyday people than it is to unusual ones.

the group is a Killer, and a Techie.... i pretty much hit em straight on with the secret war..

first combat though was again a small army of zombies on a college campus... thankfully we misread the death check rules, or the killer would have died 3 times over, as the zombies were using simple revolvers, but thanks to this game being a open ended d6 game, i rolled an outcome of 25 on more than a few occasions (had to though, he had a 20 dodge)

the group ends up getting taken away from the fight before they could finish by a guy they learn later is named Mason (a cripple, witha personal attendant, who luckily hasnt had to say anything, still working on her stats)

mason sent a clean up crew to kill the zombies, and fend off the named character (a zombie clown, minion)

secret war stuff gets brought up, the techie had more trouble beleiving dead things were walking, then beleiving in magic or time travel...

turns out this expostal worker turned circus clown has been coming into town and basically collecting bodies for an army... they find out that the architects have an interest in "Jangles", but he isnt working for them, and likely doesnt know anyhting about the secret war, even though he is a sorceror..

he was hold up at an old mansion, whos sole occupant was a bum (who when asked about the clown said "how do you know about my dreams"... unfinished plot hook..lol)

they end up burning the mansion down to the ground, because the basement was filled with newly reanimated zombies, but no Jangles..

they decide the only way they can ensure that this place stays out of evil hands (since its a fairly major feng shui site) is to go to 1850 and secure it.... which brings up interesting and fun little challenges, as the game is set in boston... so in 1850, there probably was quite a bit going on..

i have already told them they are gonna have to do alot to keep the events from happening... except that we know the house already burns down (the cause may be different, but its already happened in the story..lol)

thats where i left em, wife gave birth, so i havent gotten back to game just yet

typical, but it makes a point... plus you can only use it once a fight

the real hassle comes from the fact that the player is used to not using his surroundings... so, i just gotta make him

And if a mook does something interesting with a weedeater or pizza oven, then he might get a big AV bonus, since if a mook thought of it, then he's being really really clever (for a mook). And it's not a bonus because the GM thought of something really clever, and wants to make darned sure it inflicts damage on *somebody*. Nope, couldn't be that. Ahem. (Moral for players: you don't always have to out-do the GM, but you gotta at least keep up.)

HA HA HA HAHAHAHAHAHAAaaaaaaaaaaa! [gasp!]

This has got to be the absolute best start to any adventure story I've ever heard in my life.

hehe

seriously, im not really sure where the postal worker part came from..lol