Anyone ever play Fung Shui

Cafe Society
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Feng Shui by Atlas games gets me vote for most underated role playing game

Fung Shui is the game meant to replicate the type of over the top action found in Hong Kong action movies. Templates for characters are those often found in action films such as The old master, Every man’s Hero (Jack Burton from Big Trouble in Little China), the Killer (Chow Yun Fat in any movie except CTHD), Martial Artist (Jet Lee in everyone of his movies).

The system is really easy and completely unrealistic (it’s near impossible to die). But the system is really not important (it’s only meant to make things some what random). What really makes Feng Shui shine is that the game is all about calling out crazy impossible shit or as the book calls them stunts.

One of the best stunts i heard about from a friend who ran a game. The group was in the middle of a shoot in a bar and grill when the Ever Mans Hero tossed a pan into the air shot his 2 Uzi’s in to the pan bounced the bullets off the pan and hit every mook in the room.

I just love the way it’s played mostly by the players trying to one up each other by coming up with most over the top description they can com up with, it’s really refreshing after playing more rule heavy games like Shadow Run, or more serous character driven games like Call of Kuthulu or V:tM. I have never laughed so hard while role-playing before; There’s just something really fun about tossing 6 bottles of whiskey at a bunch of ninjas and then lighting them on fire

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My only problems with Feng Shui are mechanical–things tend to bog down in mass mook combat on the GM side, primarily because the average mook hitting anything requires the positive die to explode a time or two. That’s a lot of repeated rolling with the numbers of mooks that FS characters need to have coming out of the woodwork.

Now, it’s not as slow as less cinematic systems can be in large combats, but the whole style of FS demands fast fast fast. It’s entirely possible to house-rule-tweak this slowdown away, but increasingly I want systems that work solidly as-written.

I do enjoy the insane critical and fumble ends on the probability curve from the dice mechanic–that’s the one shining aspect of it, IMO.

The stunt system as-writ doesn’t work too well because it makes the error of still penalizing over-the-top actions–it just penalizes them far less than systems more involved with behaving more believably. This turned, again, into a house tweak in the games I ran, in favor of eliminating the penalties entirely, and in fact giving bigger bonuses to cooler actions.

I keep intending to use Wushu one of these days in place of Feng Shui. Its bare-bones system does everything I wish FS did–abstracted mook handling built right into things, stunting not only supported by the mechanics but an integral part of it. The only loss is the wonderful exploding fumble/crit frequency of the 2d6 FS core.