Feng Shui 2: Making Characters Interesting

I went to my Friendly Local Game Store today to see if they had anything on my spectacularly large personal wishlist industry research list, and I found something that I've heard a lot about in passing but never actually read, seen played, or heard talked about at length.
Feng Shui 2.

Feng Shui 2 logo, by Atlas Games
For those who are entirely unaware of Feng Shui, it's a roleplaying game that attempts to bring the style of Hong Kong action cinema to the tabletop. I've not gotten through my reading of it (picked it up after dinner tonight), but I did look over the character creation rules.

So one of the things that Feng Shui 2 does is start everyone out with a pre-generated character archetype, then allow them to branch out. You'll pick something like "Killer" (to reflect your standard Hong Kong action movie hero) or "Big Bruiser" (for someone who hits hard), choosing from a list of archetypes.

I'm not really able to explain this too well, but fortunately they've made a sample pack available online for free, so you can see what I'm talking about.

That's the entirety of character creation: you choose an archetype that sounds interesting to you. A lot of the archetypes are obvious pop culture references, including ones that can fit in as Indiana Jones or Dirty Harry and other Hong Kong cinema heroes.

But that's pretty simple. Overall, Feng Shui isn't talked about for how it diversifies its characters, but I did notice a few things that I want to talk about as far as that goes.

• 40% of many of the character sheets is reserved for special abilities, at least as much as is reserved for the canned attributes.
• Weapons are very simple.
• Vehicles are very simple.
• Armor seems to be actually rather complex, but not many characters have it.
• Characters have very few areas of strength.
• The Fortune/Chi/Magic/Genome pools are pretty large.

I'd like to talk about some of these things quickly, especially as a hobbyist/indie game designer myself.

So the first point, and probably the thing that I like best out of what I see, is the fact that most of the time you'll spend acquainting yourself with any given character involves going over their abilities. Some of the characters have fairly few abilities (the Gambler, for instance, has 3), but these abilities tend to be more broadly applicable or incredibly powerful to balance out that limitation. I don't believe anyone has fewer than three or more than eight special abilities, and some characters have flaws too.

Now, one of the things that's important to note about Feng Shui is that it's a cinematic action game. A lot of what goes on in the game is combat, which I haven't really gotten to grips with yet so I'm not qualified to talk about it yet, and characters pretty much always have at least a couple combat abilities, broadly defined in four ways:

• Get them before they get you
• Be good in a certain situation
• Catch a second wind and recover resources
• Outlast the competition

Archetypes either focus on one to the exclusion of others or are well-rounded but not dramatic, with their abilities often being situational.

The interesting things to note here are that characters can have both strengths and weaknesses in the same area, or have an interesting interface between their abilities. The Gene Freak from the PDF I linked to earlier has a lot of resource use, but also resource recovery, encouraging an all-out fighting style.

The key point here is that the primary axis along which characters are defined is combat, which is fine, but points to the fact that the system aims to go along those lines.

Weapons and vehicles are very simple in the system. Now, from what I've heard, the combat of Feng Shui is fairly complicated, with a certain amount of stuff going on and a lot of action, so this probably exists so that players don't get overburdened. All the same, it means that the primary way in which characters are going to be made distinctive are on their numerical attributes and on their skills.

One of the things that's a potential downside to this is that a lot of weapons will feel the same in play, leading to some role duplication. Looking over the archetypes and ability list, however, a lot of them interact with their weapons in their special abilities. This means that the weapon winds up being tailored to the player's character, and the character to the weapon, in a sort of symbiosis.

All the same, it also means that really exotic weapons aren't going to be a thing, and any weapons that have special effects appear to do so based on the abilities the character has bought as they advance (or gained in their starting archetype).

The different resource types are important–they determine the type of powers that a character gains access to. A Genome-powered character can't gain Magic abilities, at least as far as I understand it. Archetypes are limited to lists of abilities they can advance from.

Which segues nicely into our next point: Characters have few areas of strength on average. No character has more than five skills, and most of the attributes defined in the system only serve to provide characters with attacks and defenses. Some characters have no skills defined at all!

The result of this is that characters are all competing to exist in the same design space. This is something of a design gamble, and I don't know how well the game is pulled off because I haven't had a chance to play it yet. I'd say that the characters seem to be set up to do well in different situations and have different battlefield roles, but outside combat few of the characters really excel at things.

Now, a lot of this is intentional: it's an action-oriented game, and slowing down to have a lot of skill rolls is generally undesirable even in less combat-focused titles. All the same, characters start with a lot of defaulting on skills. This encourages violent solutions to problems, which is probably working as intended but something to consider if you are studying the game for other reasons.

A last note is that the special resource pools seem to be pretty large compared to other games. This does two things:

First, it covers up for the deficiencies left earlier. If I want my character to be a hacker, but they haven't had the ability to take an advance to let them do that (the process is referred to as "Awesoming Up", I can simply add Fortune to my rolls. The result is that I can still get a 1-6 point bonus, which is not that different from having a very basic familiarity with what you're doing.

Second, it really encourages fast pacing and de-emphasizes risk. Using a lot of resources flexibly to bolster defenses and surge into action when required gives players more flexibility and freedom to act how they see fit.

The end result of this is that all characters have a lot of floating narrative resources that can come into play at any moment. This allows for more wiggle room and lets the players make on-the-fly decisions about what they want their character to be able to do, which is a good thing in my book.

I'm not formally reviewing Feng Shui 2, but its characters look interesting. There are design decisions that I wouldn't necessarily make, but I'm not making a game that's a direct analogue to Feng Shui.