HellHound
ENnies winner and NOT Scrappy Doo
I remember when this game was announced by White Wolf, and the general reaction was “Why Street Fighter? Why not Mortal Kombat? I want Fatalities!”
I used to play Street Fighter II pretty religiously in University. We had a crew who would gather in Orleans, dump a roll or two of quarters into the machine, and play away a few hours in a round-robin tournament style. My primary fighter was Chun Li, quick and agile, able to double-jump and lay out a mad fury of feet. My backup character was Dalsim, with whom I specialized at sliding kicks to get under fireball attacks, and his own yoga fire attacks for use against people who preferred to use Chun Li’s fancy footwork. However, I stopped playing SFII when the later editions (World Warriors, Alpha, etc) were released, and moved on to other games.
I pretty much ignored the RPG when it was released, although I was running regular Vampire games and irregular Werewolf chronicles at the time. It was only some eight months later that an old friend dropped by Studio Phoque (the piercing and tattoo studio and counter-culture bookstore that Dextra and I owned at the time) with three of the books for the game, offering them in trade for a piercing.
Since it was a boring day with few clients and a piercing costs us about a dollar in materials, two dollars in jewellery, plus labour, I agreed. He walked out with a piece of steel in his nipple, and I gained three books to read during the more boring hours at the shop. After a few days, I had figured out what the most broken moves and character options were in the game, and Half-Mad (who ran Phoque Books) and I were making characters and beating each other up, but we never took the game anywhere else – it remained one of the games played at the store on rainy days (along with “Dealer McDope – the Official Dope Dealing Game” and HeroQuest). Half-Mad had a cartwheel kick guy (the most broken move in the game) and I made a cyborg-enhanced animal hybrid kicking machine. To beat the cartwheel kicker, I also had to make someone specialized in high-speed grappling moves (a difficult combination).
Re-reading the game later, as I sat down to run it again, I realised where the real issues were. The game itself is very well designed and balanced, as long as you stick to the core rules. The player’s guide and the Contenders book added a lot of new moves and new martial arts styles that were vastly superior to those in the core book. By eliminating these new styles and a few key moves (cartwheel kick and improved pin), the game suddenly works a lot better.
Further, the Storyteller system seems perfect for this game. In its original incarnation (prior to the nWoD version that we have now), the system was very random – you could have results all over the spectrum from horrible failures to incredible successes, all with the same die pool, and with no real forewarning of what would happen. While this was seen as detrimental to the role-playing intensive Vampire games, they work great for a rough-and-tumble beat-em-up game.
The use of cards for handling combat declarations is also a great addition to the game. Pick your move from your deck of manoeuvres, and play it when your initiative comes up. Each manoeuvre indicates its initiative count, its attack pool, and its damage pool as well as any special effects. Initiative is handled from lowest to highest, and when you play your card, someone with a higher initiative can interrupt your move to play theirs instead. The end result is remarkably like the video game with a few minor exceptions: blocking doesn’t negate damage, it reduces it; and characters can only fireball a few times in a fight because it relies on a resource that renews very slowly to be used – fireball four times in the first bout, and you are shafted in later fights.
I ran the game again, as a role-playing game this time (more akin to a kung-fu movie than just a series of martial arts bouts like in the video game), this time with my two daughters the summer we introduced them to D&D. In a role-playing environment, the other shortcomings of the game become apparent – character design is based entirely on the rules from other Storyteller games, and with the combat focus it seems foolish to prioritize stats other than Physical / Mental / Social. If I were to run it again now, I would change the stat arrays from 7 / 5 / 3 to 5 / 5 / 5 or maybe 6 / 5 / 4 so that each fighting star isn’t also a useless social git.
I also threatened the existence of the game during a Vampire chronicle where the players discover an underground fighting circuit – but we never went heavily into detail with it. I would certainly consider the opposite however, introducing a vampire or werewolf NPC as a badguy in a Street Fighter game.
In the end, I really appreciate the design that went into this game (well, at least into the core rulebook, if not the expansions), and I definitely enjoyed playing it. Using cards to designate combat actions is a simple tool that can be applied to just about any RPG – especially those with complex combat actions. The cards inside Fiery Dragon Productions BattleBoxes provide a close approximation for D&D games where you need a card to describe grappling, another for bull rushes and so on.
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About three months ago a very close friend and one of the core team of the original Ambient d20 team committed suicide. This really struck deeply into me, and I haven't been able to concentrate on anything RPG-related since then - I haven't prepped a game, written a supplement, edited anything, or even put anything through layout. I even dropped off the RPG message boards I love, especially ENWorld.
So, I've started to think back over all the games I've played over the years and what makes gaming fun for me. And I'm collecting them into roughly 1,000 word posts about the various games, with the intent to write and post one every weekday that I'm not on the road, and then re-invest this energy into running games and writing again.
I used to play Street Fighter II pretty religiously in University. We had a crew who would gather in Orleans, dump a roll or two of quarters into the machine, and play away a few hours in a round-robin tournament style. My primary fighter was Chun Li, quick and agile, able to double-jump and lay out a mad fury of feet. My backup character was Dalsim, with whom I specialized at sliding kicks to get under fireball attacks, and his own yoga fire attacks for use against people who preferred to use Chun Li’s fancy footwork. However, I stopped playing SFII when the later editions (World Warriors, Alpha, etc) were released, and moved on to other games.
I pretty much ignored the RPG when it was released, although I was running regular Vampire games and irregular Werewolf chronicles at the time. It was only some eight months later that an old friend dropped by Studio Phoque (the piercing and tattoo studio and counter-culture bookstore that Dextra and I owned at the time) with three of the books for the game, offering them in trade for a piercing.
Since it was a boring day with few clients and a piercing costs us about a dollar in materials, two dollars in jewellery, plus labour, I agreed. He walked out with a piece of steel in his nipple, and I gained three books to read during the more boring hours at the shop. After a few days, I had figured out what the most broken moves and character options were in the game, and Half-Mad (who ran Phoque Books) and I were making characters and beating each other up, but we never took the game anywhere else – it remained one of the games played at the store on rainy days (along with “Dealer McDope – the Official Dope Dealing Game” and HeroQuest). Half-Mad had a cartwheel kick guy (the most broken move in the game) and I made a cyborg-enhanced animal hybrid kicking machine. To beat the cartwheel kicker, I also had to make someone specialized in high-speed grappling moves (a difficult combination).
Re-reading the game later, as I sat down to run it again, I realised where the real issues were. The game itself is very well designed and balanced, as long as you stick to the core rules. The player’s guide and the Contenders book added a lot of new moves and new martial arts styles that were vastly superior to those in the core book. By eliminating these new styles and a few key moves (cartwheel kick and improved pin), the game suddenly works a lot better.
Further, the Storyteller system seems perfect for this game. In its original incarnation (prior to the nWoD version that we have now), the system was very random – you could have results all over the spectrum from horrible failures to incredible successes, all with the same die pool, and with no real forewarning of what would happen. While this was seen as detrimental to the role-playing intensive Vampire games, they work great for a rough-and-tumble beat-em-up game.
The use of cards for handling combat declarations is also a great addition to the game. Pick your move from your deck of manoeuvres, and play it when your initiative comes up. Each manoeuvre indicates its initiative count, its attack pool, and its damage pool as well as any special effects. Initiative is handled from lowest to highest, and when you play your card, someone with a higher initiative can interrupt your move to play theirs instead. The end result is remarkably like the video game with a few minor exceptions: blocking doesn’t negate damage, it reduces it; and characters can only fireball a few times in a fight because it relies on a resource that renews very slowly to be used – fireball four times in the first bout, and you are shafted in later fights.
I ran the game again, as a role-playing game this time (more akin to a kung-fu movie than just a series of martial arts bouts like in the video game), this time with my two daughters the summer we introduced them to D&D. In a role-playing environment, the other shortcomings of the game become apparent – character design is based entirely on the rules from other Storyteller games, and with the combat focus it seems foolish to prioritize stats other than Physical / Mental / Social. If I were to run it again now, I would change the stat arrays from 7 / 5 / 3 to 5 / 5 / 5 or maybe 6 / 5 / 4 so that each fighting star isn’t also a useless social git.
I also threatened the existence of the game during a Vampire chronicle where the players discover an underground fighting circuit – but we never went heavily into detail with it. I would certainly consider the opposite however, introducing a vampire or werewolf NPC as a badguy in a Street Fighter game.
In the end, I really appreciate the design that went into this game (well, at least into the core rulebook, if not the expansions), and I definitely enjoyed playing it. Using cards to designate combat actions is a simple tool that can be applied to just about any RPG – especially those with complex combat actions. The cards inside Fiery Dragon Productions BattleBoxes provide a close approximation for D&D games where you need a card to describe grappling, another for bull rushes and so on.
---
About three months ago a very close friend and one of the core team of the original Ambient d20 team committed suicide. This really struck deeply into me, and I haven't been able to concentrate on anything RPG-related since then - I haven't prepped a game, written a supplement, edited anything, or even put anything through layout. I even dropped off the RPG message boards I love, especially ENWorld.
So, I've started to think back over all the games I've played over the years and what makes gaming fun for me. And I'm collecting them into roughly 1,000 word posts about the various games, with the intent to write and post one every weekday that I'm not on the road, and then re-invest this energy into running games and writing again.
