Feng Shui Super Magical Shot Counter for the Masses
How's it work?
What does it do?
The Feng Shui Super Magical Shot Counter for the Masses is a perl CGI script that I put together to simplify the bookkeeping of fights for the fine role playing game Feng Shui. When you get a lot of folks involved in a fight, it can be a real headache to run. This system keeps track of who is involved in the fight, what sequences they go on, and can roll initiative. I personally plan to use it to roll initiative for any NPCs, and allow PCs to roll for themselves.
There are three steps in the use of the Feng Shui Super Magical Shot Counter for the Masses.
Seting up the characters involved.
Setting the initiative for characters that are being rolled for outside of the system.
Going through individual turns.
Step One
The first step is to put in the information about your characters. Each character must be named, and you should put characters into the top rows first. If a row is skipped, any characters after that are lost. Groups of mooks should be put in as one character, and have the number of mooks put into the 'number of characters' field. If the row only represents one character, this field can be left blank. If you want the system to roll for the character (or group of characters), you must check the 'Roll for Init?' box for that character, as well as indicating the speed of the character. If the system is not rolling for the character, the 'Base Speed' field does not need to be filled in.
Example:
Bertie Feng and Patty Shui are being jumped by Baddie Lu and his quintet of thugs because Bertie was hitting on his sister. To start off the combat the GM puts the PCs in the system first (characters will go in order of being entered into the system when there are ties in initiative). He puts in Bertie Feng, not indicating anything but his name. He repeats the process for Patty Shui. When he puts in Baddy Lu, since he's an NPC and the GM has plenty to do without rolling initiative for NPCs, the GM clicks the 'Roll For?' box, and sets his Speed to 7. When putting in the quintet of thugs, he puts them in as one character, incidates that the system should roll for them, indicated their speed of 4, and puts 5 into the 'Number of Characters' field to indicate that there are five of them.
At the end of all this the page looks like this:
Name
Base Speed
Number of Characters
Roll for Init?
Character 1:
Character 2:
Character 3:
Character 4:
Character 5:
Character 6:
Step Two
The second step is to set the initiative for those characters that are being rolled for outside fo the system. I find that players like to roll their own stuff, so I always have the system not roll for them. This step is very simple; the system will present all the characters that you did not tell it to roll for, and you put in the initiatives for them. Ta Da! You're done.
Example:
Bertie's player has rolled a '3', plus his Speed of 6 = an initiative of 9. The GM puts this in on the row that says 'Bertie Feng' in the 'Initiative' field. Patty's player has rolled a 5, plus her speed of 8 = an initiative of 13. The GM puts this into the apropriate field.
At the end of this the page looks like this:
Turn: 1
Character
Initiative
Bertie Feng
Patty Shui
Step Three
The third step is actually several things together. It is everything that actually happens during the turns. There are three things that can be done here. The first is that you can indicate how many shots are taken up in the action that the character whos turn it is is doing. This is done by putting the number of shots being spent in the 'Shots Taken' field and then hitting the ' Go! ' button next to it. The second thing that you can do is indicate that a character is down and out of the fight by hitting the ' Down ' button. If this is done that character won't be shown in the fight anymore. The third thing is that a character can use a shot out of turn to perform a defensive action. This is done by pushing the ' Active D. ' button next to the character using the active defence. Once a character is out of shots they will be shown in the list with a '-' in their Next Action field. The system doesn't make any judgements about how many shots can be used. If the character only has 3 shots left and you indicate that they are doing a 19 shot action, the system will accept it.
Example:
There realy isn't a good example of this step, so I'll just show you the interface. At this point the system has rolled initiative for Baddy Lu and his thugs, as shown in the table of all characters and their info.
Feel free to mail me with any questions or suggestions.
Feng Shui is copyright and trademark Robin D. Laws, used by Atlas Games under license. The use of this trademark here is without permission, and does not constitute a challenge to the ownership of this or other properties of Atlas Games.
