Jadeclaw
First, get past the furry thing. Jadeclaw is a game about anthropomorphic animals in a fictional China. I don’t care about the furries, I don’t have any interest in defending or condemning the furries, and if furries bug you, they’re not that integral to the game, and could easily be removed with a minor effort. I’m currently running it with furries, because they don’t yet bother me enough to warrant the work to remove them.
So why does Jadeclaw work? It’s a ‘fistful of dice’ game, and I’m usually repelled by games that use more than a couple of dice at a time. The answer is deep in their design philosophy: Jadeclaw has no math.
Task resolution happens without math. Combat (mostly) happens without math. The effects of being injured are resolved without math. You never add a die to another die, and you never add a fixed number to a die.
It works like this: You have some characteristics that determine what dice you roll when you want to do something. Your career, your race, your skills, special traits you’ve purchased with character points, all contribute dice. So to swing a sword at someone, you might have a d10 from your skill, a d8 from your career, and your Speed stat of d6. You roll d10, d8, d6. Your opponent rolls a similar motley collection of dice, and whichever of you has the highest number on any die succeeds.
Task resolution is really fast. Particularly if you have prepared fistfuls of dice to grab, your only chore is finding that highest number. Rather than have static ‘difficulty numbers’ where you need to beat, for instance, a 10 to leap from a rooftop to another rooftop, Jadeclaw rates even static challenges in terms of dice. That jump might be an easy 2d6, or a very challenging 2d12. Because the possible lowest roll for any challenge is always 1, any amount of skill is sufficient to attempt any challenge with some chance of success. This neatly works around the D&D problem of some challenges being simply beyond most people, and lends a more cinematic feel to the action.
There’s a price for this simplicity and ease of use, however. It’s called the Bonus system, and it’s terrible. When you have a bonus — for instance, when you’re attacking someone from behind, you have a bonus to attack — you increase the size of your dice. A d10 becomes a d12. A d4 becomes a d6. And (here’s the tricky part) a d12 becomes d12, d4.
Bonuses increase the size of every die in the pool, but d12 is the maximum die size. So a bonus applied to a d12 is pushed down to the next available die, and if there is no additional die, it becomes a new d4. In some cases, this is easy:
d10, d8 + bonus = d12, d10
In other cases, it’s less obvious, but still pretty straightforward:
d12, d6 + bonus = d12, d10 (because the bonus increases the d6 to d8, and the cascade off the d12 increases the d8 to d10)
And in some cases, it’s ridiculous:
3d12, d10, d8 + bonus = 3d12, d12, d10 + 3x cascade off the d12s = 3d12, d12, d12 + 2x cascade = 5d12, d6
And that is not something you’re going to be calculating quickly in the heat of battle. Where helper software for any other game might do math for you, helper software for Jadeclaw would be most useful telling you what the hell to roll. And god forbid you get multiple bonuses, each applied sequentially.
Penalties, at least, are simple; you roll twice and take the worst of the two rolls. Statistically very different, but so much easier to manage. Bonuses work the way they do, of course, because they have the potential to add more dice, and increase the maximum possible roll, both of which are independently valuable. Nevertheless, figuring out a bonus is the biggest time-eater in a Jadeclaw fight.
There’s another weakness, and one I’m not sure has ever been addressed to my satisfaction in any game: Movement. Movement in games is always my least favorite system, because it fails to model a football game. Football is my gold standard for movement: can I react to you moving past me? Can I change directions in response to your actions? What if I sprint past you and you want to turn around and tail me?
The two problems are ‘necessity’ and ‘interruptibility’. Do I need to move in this system? Can I prevent someone else from moving past me? D&D3e offers the attack of opportunity for the second problem, but doesn’t do much for the first. A 3e combat involves a lot of shuffling sidesteps to get a bonus for flanking, but once that’s in place there’s little incentive to do more than just stand there whacking each other. In fact, you’re penalized with additional free attacks against you if you try to move once you’re ’set up’. It gets the interruptibility, at the cost of static combats where people are unlikely to leap off a banister or weave through opponents to reach a goal.
Trying to model the wuxia genre is a particularly difficult problem because fights in wuxia are all about motion. Every exchange of blows is followed by each combatant moving, looking for better position. At the extremes of Crouching Tiger, combatants are essentially flying around the battlefield striking one another as they pass. Dodging blows causes movement; the environment provides countless options for movement, whether it’s backflipping off a tree, running along a wall, or leaping from above to strike.
Jadeclaw gives advantages for movement; ideally, you want to be behind your opponent, and you don’t want your opponent to be able to get behind you. Unfortunately, the scale of movement is so small that either you can never accomplish this, or you can always trivially accomplish this. Also, while some of the special martial arts maneuvers require movement and terrain, they’re very specialized, and don’t give much advantage relative to their difficulty to obtain. Sure, you can add your Jump dice to your attack if you backflip off a wall, but you need enough prerequisites that it becomes questionable whether your character creation resources were well spent — or whether you might have been better off simply increasing your ‘normal’ attacks, which don’t require walls at all. Jadeclaw’s answer to interruptibility involves anticipating the need to interrupt someone well in advance of doing so, which is useful in limited tactical situation (such as defending a narrow pass, or aiding someone’s retreat) but in normal combat, mostly seems unused. Why waste your single action on standing around waiting for your opponent, when you could close with him and hit him?
I’m not going to say it’s broken, because I don’t have enough data yet. For one thing, I believe the game is intended to be played on a hex map, and my battlemat is a grid. That will certainly alter movement somewhat, as circling completely around someone will require 6 moves, instead of 4 (assuming diagonals, which you kind of have to assume in order to make grid movement work). For another thing, we’re still exploring the options. Movement might be more common if, for instance, combatants were using the ‘retreat’ option, where you get additional dice for defense if you agree to back up a step.
All of which is to say, it’s a well-considered approach to the problems of system usability and cinematic combat, but it has some flaws which may or may not be crippling. After several weekends of GMing continuous D&D3e combat for hours on end, it’s at least a change of pace.