I tried some experiments in my Demon Haunted Feng Shui game the other day, and it worked out well enough for me to want to write about them.
Love Letters
The first one was Love Letters, stolen from Apocalypse World. The concept in a nutshell is one-off character-specific mechanics intended to get people back into the swing of the campaign after a hiatus. For a great podcast on the topic, see Dice Exploder.
I got pretty player/character specific here. For example, Yue’s player is a bit of a gun bunny (love you, Bonnie) so I stuffed more mechanical advantage options into her choices. Tanya is a Gambler, so I themed her options some. I also know she loves interpersonal roleplay so I gave her an option that would encourage it. Kai got options to push his personal dramatic hooks forward. It was really fun writing these.
On the mechanical side: Feng Shui runs on a 2d6 roll where you subtract one die from the other and add the outcome to your Skill value. It’s the same as 2d6-7 but cooler. The perceptive will notice that the probabilities for my Love Letters are mechanically nearly identical to the Apocalypse World “roll 2d6; failure on a 2-6, success on a 7-9, strong success on a 10+” die roll. The specific difficulties were calibrated to each character’s relevant skill. I wanted to keep this feeling like a Feng Shui roll so I didn’t make it a simple “check your Outcome” roll.
So this worked awesome. I wanted to get people back into the feel of the game, do a quick refresh on mechanics, and most importantly push the plot forward. Everyone liked this. Use Love Letters, they’re great.
Oh, and I printed these out and put them in envelopes, which I addressed to each player with a little icon sticker representing them. Took me like 20 minutes, completely worth the effort. The little stuff counts when you can find the time to do it.
Siege Mechanics
This was more complicated. The PCs were down in the Netherworld hanging out with a distant cousin of the Thunder King at his new castle. I wanted to run a fight scene where the Queen of the Darkness Pagoda sent a bunch of troops to try and take over the castle, and I wanted it to feel cool. I wanted it to feel spread out and bigger than a single scene.
Generally, as with the Love Letters, when I’m trying to build a new mechanic I like to build on existing material. So I said OK, let’s try this. Let’s say that there are three zone to this fight – the walls, the gate, and a sneaky invasion through tunnels which will not be immediately obvious. I wrote up three named foes, one for each zone, and gave each of them a bunch of mooks.
Then I decided that each zone would have a health pool and a Defense rating, and if there weren’t any PCs at the zone, the enemies would just roll and chip away at the health pool. I also added a couple of special mechanics for each zone – for example, the gate had a portcullis:
- Portcullis: A PC can drop the inner portcullis as a 1-shot action, raising Defense to 15. One use. Represents falling back to a stronger position—but also signals things are getting serious.
I’m not adding a lot of complexity here. The fight scene plays out as usual with initiative and defenses and all. I didn’t bother adding in stats for the defensive troops – that’s abstracted away by the Defense rating for each zone. As the attackers chipped away at the defenders, I planned to just narrate it. Darkness troops successfully getting ladders up against the walls, demons eating Thunder knights, that sort of thing.
In practice, it worked… OK?
I should have put the new mechanics on index cards rather than just explaining them. The Feng Shui character sheets have everything written out and it’s great for players. If my new stuff had been on cards, they might have interacted with them more. As is, they weren’t used much.
I should have made the countdown of zone health visible. I even had a whiteboard! Making it visible would have boosted tension a bunch.
The PCs split between two zones, which was cool. They didn’t move back anf forth much, but I didn’t expect them to. I needed to make a list of cool things to happen during the fight – it’s part of the core rules! – and I felt the lack of prep when I was improvising. Not a big deal.
The sneak attack zone didn’t come into play at all but I didn’t really think it would. It served as an excuse to move the friendly named NPCs off screen, which is plenty of justification on its own. I didn’t even bother rolling dice for that enemy.
Mooks were not very meaningful. (Isn’t that always the way?) In general the fight felt pretty easy for the PCs. I think that’s because a single named character in a fight can always have a bad streak of rolls. Also my players like stun locks and delays so they’re well stocked on that sort of power, and when you’re only fighting one bad guy, reducing their actions is hugely powerful. I don’t expect to reuse this kind of fight in the near future, but if you do this, maybe set up some super-mooks with high attack values?
And everyone had fun, plus it ran just as quickly as a normal fight. So I’m calling the siege mechanics a success with room for improvement. The thing I bet I will reuse soon is the idea of making environment-specific mechanics. Everyone likes new powers. This is a way to put those into play without imbalancing anything.