The Crit Chronicles

Feng Shui can be a pretty funny, wild game that fires up the imagination. However we all have times when inspiration fails to strike. What do you do when somebody rolls a stunningly impressive Critical hit or Way Awful Failure? Here are a few examples that those fine folks on the Feng Shui Mailing List have used in the past:

From SgTomServo@AOL.COM

Last session my groups Killer rolled a -42, WITH the help of fortune dice. His new mortal enemy "Three Pistol" Sammy Chung acted on the same shot, Chung rolled a +24 on a BGB attack against the Killer, so what happened was, they both fired at the same time, one of Chung's slugs hit the killer in the chest, the other collided with the Killers shot, and instead of ricocheting or something, Chungs bullet pushed the killers bullet back into the barrel, causing the 2 remaining bullets in the gun to explode.

A few sessions ago, my Everyman Hero was using a ladder as a staff, like Jackie Chan in First Strike, to intimidate the mooks I twirled the ladder above my head, fumbled the Dex roll, and hit myself in the back of the head. All of the mooks had a good laugh.

From: Smitty

A first-time player fumbled bad. This was this players first time gaming period. He was playing a
sorcerer, and the party was in a mall. Suddenly, people started screaming and running out of a store, being chased by gremlins. He rolled a single D6 for initiative, and then for his first attack, the second time in his life he has ever rolled anything for a game, he decided he was going to coat the floor with ice so that the Gremlins would slide off the balcony to their death below. His total roll for the sorcery check was a -21... As in negative! He sent nothing but innocent customers flipping over the railing to their death, or at least severe discomfort.

From: Bradd W. Szonye

In Baptism of Fire, in the very first FS fight ever in my group, the "Journalist" (actually a TransWolf) grabbed Carina Sheng and tried to run back to the kitchen with her. I knew that Papa Sheng was coming out to investigate soon, so I had the Journalist make a Fortune check to determine the timing--if she rolled well, she'd make it into the kitchen before Kar-Wai emerged, thus being able to hide both of them from the Poison Thorns. Unfortunately, she rolled badly negative. I decided that she hit the swinging door just as Kar-Wai approached to open it and *WHAM* she and Carina were lying on the floor in a pool of fresh lobsters.

From: Chuck Burke

Recently, a Transformed Dragon in my game missed (as in failed to kill) a SINGLE mook, in five consecutive attacks. I ruled that "Lucky Chang" was now a named character. Once he was named, the TranDragon had no problem killing him. Go figure.

From: Skyfox

In our hi-power mecha game, I played a character who had been reborn as a kid. I had no mech of my own, and so, borrowed that of a friend, Hotshot.

Fists; I lay down a spray of fire on a group of mooks, and miss terribly.

Then Hotshot says something like "watch this, kid!" and lays down another
barrage of fire, and misses terribly, too.

From: Ben Rasmussen

The Killer spent 2 entire sequences rolling really badly. Every attack he made missed. Even on mooks. I seriously thought the player was going to have a break down. He just couldn't come up with any roll higher than an 8 (that's skill + roll).

Though there were 2 nice fumbles from the Everyman Hero. The first was when he was using a phone as a whip like weapon, swinging the receiver above his head and doing cool wu-shu like kata moves. Except he blew his second attack with it and ended up smacking the Maverick cop and getting all tangled up in it.

Now for the second fumble set up... Earlier in the game they beat up an Ascended cop and ended up with his badge. The Everyman hero snags it. Later the team needs to get into the top floor of the Bank of China building so in goes the Maverick Cop. The Everyman Hero decides he'll go too with his new badge.

The team was trying to bluff their way in. The Maverick cop flashed his badge at the rent-a-cops and then flashed his laundry list and blockbuster movie rental slips as a warrant getting an astounding 22 on his police roll.

The Everyman hero flashes his stolen badge and bones his deception roll, getting a negative 8. Which was interpreted as him leaving the badge open to long along with forgetting to put his thumb over the picture (seeing as he's an American and the cop was a older Asian man, this was bad). Plus the player couldn't remember the cops name. Suffice to say it started to get ugly for the PC's. The Maverick cop just couldn't salvage the situation and finally just punched one of the rent-a-cop with the great stolen line of 'the
conversation was getting boring anyways'.

From: Deird'Re M. Brooks

In the Baptism of Fire adventure in the back of the rulebook, the PCs had found their way to the junkyard and took down every mook but one, who ran away as soon as all of his friends were dead. Every single player character managed to miss this poor guy - I'm talking about eight shots or so.

Anyway, I said that if he made it to the fence, he'd become a named character and seek unholy vengeance on the PCs. Sadly, they figured out a way to kill him (although it took another six attacks to get the needed +5 to do so). They used sorcery to keep him from reaching the fence, see...

From: Anthony Botz

Back in the early days of playing Feng Shui, before we understood how the game really worked, when we thought you could use as many fortune dice on one roll as you wanted. My group was in search of some magical rock, the bad-guys had beat them to the scene and taken it. One of them stayed behind to entertain the heroes, the other ran for his chopper waiting outside. The remaining villain was honorable, and offered single combat with our Old Master.

The Old Master agreed, used his TEN fortune dice (back in the old color book old masters had 10 For) in one attack, pushing him instantly into death check range. But that's not the exciting part of the story. The whole group runs outside to see the other guy taking off, already out of reach of their jumps. He's leaning out from the passenger section holding the stone in-between his thumb and middle finger, laughing triumphantly. The Old Master chucks his cane at the guy, trying to hit the stone...and rolls a 20.

Thinking quickly, I say, "Okay, but you'll have to make a fortune check if you're expecting it to fall out of the chopper." Leaning back in my chair with a smug smile, I knew he had a fortune rating to zero now. The smile
stayed there for all of 10 seconds, by then he had rolled his 3rd positive six. He rolled another 8 sixes before finally rolling a 4 -- totally of 68 after subtracting the negative dice.

This of course ruined my adventure, because their goal was to retrieve the stone and destroy it. They now had it, and destroyed it in the first scene of act 2.

Lesson: don't get smug with players who anoint their dice with holy water.

From: David Eber

Last night I was running a game in which the PC's had to get to the top of a 50 story building, to the office of one of the villains. Problem was, the building had pretty good security, and most of the PC's were wanted criminals, having had their faces splashed up on TV after staging a major shoot-out at the city's hottest nightclub a few days earlier. So anyway, one of the players says:

"Are there any equally tall buildings right next to this one?"

Me: "Err, um, yes, but not that close."

Player: "What I want to do is drive my truck into that building, use the freight elevator to get it onto the roof, and then use it to jump from that building right into the building next to it."

He didn't try it, but it would have been amusing to watch.

From: Alistair Hutton

My players were engaged in a HALO drop over the Ardennes in a shifted version of 2056 (it involved Mecha). The players were being attacked by a couple of English fighter jets and some elite German paradropping mooks. Anyway the Old Master first tried to reverse a missile aimed at him back at the plane (he failed). He then tried to run up a stream of 30mm DU rounds that the plane fired at him (while in mid air). He failed. After that you just had to breathe on him to force a death check.

From: Dave Blewer

During the Molten Heart Takedown, "Funky Cats", The Jazz Ninja scored such a successful killing strike on an Ascended enforcer that it was decided that he had ripped her spine out with his bare hands. This spine was used as a grisly whip to strangle, lacerate and intimidate mooks for the rest of the battle.

I also remember the Magic Cop Jimmy Woo stuffing a grenade down a minor GMC trousers and throwing him out of a thirty storey window during "The Day the Human Race Died."

I recently played a Everyday Hero, a construction worker, with the obligatory tool belt, I had a lot of fun with this character. I remember attempting to superglue my hard hat to a sorcerers face, and using a metal retractable tape measure as a whip, to slit a few mooks throats and finally, to barefoot water ski behind a dragon boat. I reboarded said boat by releasing the lock on the tape.

From: David Lawrence

It Always Pays to be Yourself

For a while I played a character in a Feng Shui Campaign set in Sydney Australia just prior to the 2000 Olympics. He was a Masked Avenger called Grendel, with an alter ego called Alex Kellerman. I played the two facets of the character almost as if they were two different people. Grendel was a dark brooding masked man in a trenchcoat sporting an Ingram Mac 10 as well as a small pistol concealed in his boot. Kellerman was a millionaire food writer, bright and cheery at all times. Kellerman tended to leave the Grendel costume and heavy firepower in his car when out on social occasions, after all it is bad manners to attend dinner with a submachine-gun. Suffice to say that none of his companions copied this stance.

The GM started several sessions with a set piece battle erupting from some sort of chance encounter while out, leaving Kellerman seperated from his mask, trenchcoat and larger gun. In each of these instances he was next to useless in combat, even after snagging a better weapon from some mook or other. As the rest of the party chewed up their opponents in short order, Kellerman would continue to trade blows or shots to almost no effect.

However, let him put on the mask, "My Face" as he used to say, and suddenly it was "Evildoers Beware". In one instance when the group was about to attack a gang of mooks in their house, he went through the back door and had wiped out all the mooks before the rest of the group came in through the front.