This is a post about our wuxia game that's currently in development. You can check it out here.
When I pitch the game to someone who's used to D&D, here's the three main features I like to highlight. They were the first three ideas that my brother came up with and have remained pillars of the game's design ever since then.
The Elements
Everything in Rivers & Lakes revolves around the elements. This is inspired by the wuxing, an elemental-based system of natural philosophy that's been prominent in Chinese culture for a couple thousand years. And I mean, come on. All fantasy worldbuilders know how much fun it is to use "the Elements" as a pattern for constructing their setting.
The elements' most important role is to serve as the core character attributes. Instead of Physique, Agility, Will, and those sorts of things, your stats are Wood, Earth, Metal, Water, Air, and Fire. What does that mean? Well, we made sure that each one would have a lot of applications, but would still feel distinct from the others in play. Allow me to make a comparison.
In modern D&D, warrior characters boil down into two basic types of build: Strength-based or Dexterity-based. Prioritize high Strength, then you should use a traditional melee weapon and pair it with some hefty armor. But if you prioritize high Dexterity, then you're going to use either a ranged weapon or a finesse weapon, plus you can rely on your Dexterity for good AC without having to invest in armor. But what about high Constitution, you say? Well, there's not much you can do with that. And the mental attributes? For warriors, they mostly just dictate personality. For spellcasters, they take on a more mechanical role, like how a Fighter makes use of Strength or Dexterity, but each class only gets one that they can be built around. Wizards use Intelligence, Sorcerers use Charisma, and Clerics use Wisdom. And even then, they still function pretty much the same as one another. If you swapped them around, with Wizards instead using Charisma and Clerics using Intelligence and whatnot, then the classes wouldn't really play any differently.
But in Rivers & Lakes, right from the get-go, we could assign each attribute its own category of attack, category of defense, category of mobility, and so on. It goes like this:
So we get a lot of mileage out of each one. There is no "attack stat" or "defense stat." Each element is relevant in all parts of the game. And each category of attack, of defense, of mobility, etc. functions differently from one another, so no two elements are interchangeable.
But there's another cool quality to the elements that has grown on me: they're very abstract ideas.
In most games, the core attributes are recognizable as simple, essential character traits. How good are you at carrying stuff? Well, that depends on how strong you are. How likely are you to convince this guy? Well, how charismatic are you? In general, an RPG's list of attributes should be intuitive. This is surprisingly tricky for a designer to do well. People pick apart D&D's list of six attributes because they seem to have overlap in some places, they leave gaps in other places, and names like Dexterity and Wisdom are misleading. Play often devolves into debates about which is the most appropriate attribute to assign to this-or-that roll because it's easy to rationalize multiple answers.
But the elements? They're completely nebulous concepts. You have no intuition for them at all. What does it mean to have high Fire? What does it mean to have low Metal? Well, it means whatever the rules tell you it means. You'll never argue about whether it makes more sense for X roll to be a Water check instead of a Wood check, because the only authority on that question is the text. Because these ideas are totally abstract, they're able to mean whatever we, the designers, want them to.
Now of course you're probably thinking, "doesn't that create a comprehension barrier for the players?" Yes, it does. But maybe there's an unexpected strength in that. See if you can follow this argument:
Different games are about the different kinds of thinking they involve you in. In an OSR game, the prevailing logic that answers most questions is, y'know, real-ish common sense. That's why it's my comfort genre: I can always handle playing an OSR game with little mental effort. As long as your thinking is informed by common sense, you'll play well.
By contrast, in a crunchy, tactically opaque game with lots of moving parts and terminology and character builds and whatnot, just trying to rely on your common sense alone isn't going to cut it. You gotta learn those rules. You won't play well unless your thinking is informed by a thorough familiarity with the system. Some people love this, others really don't. Personally, I'm divided. I've definitely had fun sinking my teeth into a crunchy game, learning all its ins and outs, slowly attaining system mastery. But I also find it kinda draining, and I can't really transfer my mastery from one system onto any other, so it's a big investment of time and energy for each individual game I learn. It can totally be worth it every now and then, but there's a reason it's not my "default" mode of gaming.
By contrast-contrast, another genre I like are comedy games. I've run an Alice in Wonderland campaign, Og: Unearthed Edition, and, of course, Labyrinth: the Adventure Game, and I've played in Paranoia, Space Kings, Crash Pandas, and Honey Heist, and all of them were a blast. But the prevailing logic was usually a sort of "cartoon logic." They are all profoundly silly games, and that's a different mindset you have to adopt. They don't necessarily reject common sense, but as long as your thinking is informed by the laws of comedy, you'll play well.
This is how I see the elements in Rivers & Lakes. The world of this game is governed by a different logic than the kind you're familiar with from your everyday life. It often defies common sense. I mean, why is it that someone who's good at talking to people would also just naturally be good at jumping, and also would have a natural advantage at shooting a bow and arrow, and also would have a talent for playing bamboo instruments like flutes? What do any of those have to do with one another?
And yet, you can learn its logic. Like Alice in Wonderland, at first you'll feel like you've entered a nonsense world where everything is topsy-turvy and disorienting. But given some time, you start to pick up on it. You become fluent in the native tongue. Eventually, the whole elemental scheme becomes seamlessly intuitive. And I've found that to be electrifying. If one of the primary appeals of fantasy fiction is that magical experience of escaping into a secondary world, then this is kind of the "ludic equivalent" to that. By entering the world of this game, you have something strange to discover. Plus, I think it's a brilliant way to simulate the heightened reality of wuxia fiction.
Like a game that demands system mastery, this does ask of you a greater commitment of time and energy than most other games would. But to me, it's worth it.
Kung Fu
Characters trained in Kung Fu have a Rank from 1-5 (i.e. your level) and a matching Kung Fu die (Rank 1 is a d4, Rank 2 is a d6, etc.). Additionally, all characters trained in Kung Fu have two elements which they focus on. So even though you still make use of all six, you might specialize in, say, Earth and Water, for example.
Here's something that will sound familiar: the core mechanic for attempting a risky action is to roll a d20 and add the appropriate element to the result. But if the element is one of your two focuses, you also add your Kung Fu die.
If we're comparing this to D&D 5E, then the elements are analogous to ability modifiers while the Kung Fu die is analogous to your proficiency bonus. All rolls add an element because you're always drawing on some innate quality of your character. But actions that you've spent time training and practicing get another bonus on top, one that represents your accumulated skill and experience. In fact, this is functionally the same as the somewhat-popular "Proficiency Dice" houserule suggested on page 263 of the 2014 DMG.
This is not at all a revolutionary mechanic, and personally, when I'm playing a D&D-like, I prefer to have just one modifier to my dice roll, at most. But I actually really like this sort of thing for a wuxia game because, in my opinion, the thrill of rolling dice and the chaos of randomness are a pretty effective way to simulate the thrill of an intense kung fu fight. Rolling an extra d6 is more exciting than adding a flat +3 bonus because it has the potential to roll high and make you feel unstoppable. Fight scenes in martial arts media aren't mundane slugfests, but they aren't nonstop epic, devastating beatdowns, either. Rather, they're usually a tense back-and-forth, built from sequences of smaller moves that are punctuated by sporadic moments of astonishing power and deftness.
Outside of combat, you roll your Kung Fu die alongside the d20 whenever you use it. But within combat, it works a little differently. Instead, you roll your Kung Fu die once at the beginning of each round, and you use that one result throughout the whole round that follows. This is important because you're likely to make quite a few attacks and counter-attacks throughout the round, so that one roll has big consequences. And because you know the result of one of your dice rolls first, you can then plan your turn based off of that.
I enjoy this because it reflects the natural ebb and flow of the energy on the battlefield. Combat is like a dance. On some rounds, you’re recovering from the last move, regaining your footing, and setting up the next move. On other rounds, the momentum is with you and the moment is yours. When you roll poorly on your Kung Fu, you'll probably want to play it safe and bide your time. But when you roll high on your Kung Fu, you know it's time to go all-out and whoop some ass.
Counters
Every single time a character Attacks a target, the target gets to declare how they Counter the Attack. For example, Alice says she's going to smack Bob with a quarterstaff strike. The GM then asks Bob, "how do you Counter?" and Bob says he's going to try Sweeping Alice, tripping her with his leg. So even though it's Alice's turn, both players have an opportunity to do something.
Alice has numerous choices in how to Attack. Melee strike? Ranged weapon strike? Grappling? Charging? Feinting? Disarming? There's so many options. And Bob has just as much freedom in choosing a Counter! It generally boils down to three main ones: Block, Dodge, or Attack. But if he chooses Attack, then he gets to make the same choice that Alice does, picking from all sorts of options. The possibilities are dumbfounding.
The order in which the Attack and the Counter are resolved is based on the priority of each type of action, which are tracked along the chart on the right.
So continuing our example, Alice would attempt her quarterstaff strike after Bob's Sweep, because Sweeping is a Grappling Stunt and a quarterstaff is a type of heavy melee weapon. But if Alice had instead declared an attempt to Charge at Bob, that would have priority over his Sweep.
Most of the time, they'll both still execute anyway. But if the fight is down to the wire, then getting to go first can become a matter of life and death. And sometimes, if a player is clever, the action with priority may render the other character's action impossible. Imagine that, instead of Sweeping, Bob decides to Disarm as his Counter. That would have priority over Alice's quarterstaff strike, so Bob could potentially take it right out of her hands before she even has a chance to attempt her own attack.
The many types of Attack have a complicated rock-paper-scissors relationship going on, yet there are never any "true" winning matchups. For one thing, the outcome is still decided by dice rolls. And for another, the likelihood of those dice rolls succeeding or failing depends on your elements and your enemy's elements. Sure, maybe on paper we could say that Bob's best option against Alice is to Disarm. But what if Bob sucks at Disarming, or Alice is really good at defending against Disarms? Everyone has different strengths and weaknesses.
And on top of all that, even if you've "solved" the Attack-Counter problem for every possible combination of factors, then there's still another variable: the many arts of Kung Fu fighting. That's right, you have your own personal fighting style, with all kinds of fancy goodies you've trained in. Characters assume fighting stances and employ special techniques which completely break the normal rules, meaning that the Attack-Counter decision is a unique puzzle for you to solve in every single fight.
What does all this add up to?
These foundational ingredients of Rivers & Lakes create an experience that's familiar to anyone who's played modern D&D, but manage to enrich all the parts that normally feel shallow.
Your attributes are grounded more deeply in the system's many ins and outs, creating a greater variety of playstyles than you get in normal D&D, as well as rooting the gameplay in the themes of the setting.
The gamble of a basic dice check is intensified, where one good Kung Fu roll in combat can be capitalized on to generate a winning streak in roll after roll throughout the round.
And the most common action of all, the humble attack roll, is elevated into a dynamic, never-ending puzzle, as well as an opportunity for both players involved to participate and make an impact, keeping everyone at the table active for a much greater percentage of the time.
Maybe my favorite part of the game is when I see all of these ingredients coming together: the players start reading their opponent. They pay attention to the attacks they use, the mobilities they favor, and the attacks they're resistant to. They figure out what their foe's elements are, and they use that to inform their own choices.
This dude in heavy armor wielding a big glaive? Probably high Metal, so maybe normal melee strikes aren't the way to go. Ah, but he's not going out onto the river, even though it takes up most of the battlefield. Maybe he has a low Water, meaning you should try Grappling stunts to deal damage. For a couple rounds you're rolling low on your Kung Fu, so you bide your time and try to dodge his attacks. But when the moment is right and your Kung Fu is high, you YEET that chump straight over the mountain.
-Dwiz
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