Mount Zion Ryan

Thanks to an Amazon gift card for my birthday I was reading some new (to me) volumes of Usagi Yojimbo last night. And this got me churning on Dokkodo.

I started by reviewing GRG’s Usagi Yojimbo RPG. I love this game–even though I’ve never played it. It reads really well and captures the feel of the game. Usagi Yojimbo’s Japan is perfect for an RPG, just enough depth to be satisfying, but with plenty of room for players and GMs to bend and stretch without “screwing-up.”

I also like the “rock-paper-scissors” combat mechanic. But parts of it don’t seem well integrated with Instant Fuzon and I am still not sure how the normal Instant Fuzion combat maneuvers work with rock-paper-scissors. Also, some of the special abilities aren’t mechanically well defined (Dog and pig for example)

So I made a character. I didn’t dig too deep, just species (dog), occupation (retainer), and extra skill points. As I was doing this I was also digging around the combat rules…which led to notes on Dokkodo.

Some Design Goals:

• Edo Period
• Fights are quick
• vs. minions/mooks 1 hit=1 kill; also dispatch many easily
• vs. named opponents combat is very deadly (what do I mean by very deadly?)
• Duels have a “stare-down” phae with mechanical impact
• Duels have a “testing oponents technique” options that look for a weakness. These techniques would kill a mook
• lethality of combat encourages social solutions
• culturally relevant mechanic (cho-han, shoji, go, prayer slips as inspiration)
• 5 attitudes of Swordsmanship from Go Rin No Sho
  1. Upper
  2. Middle
  3. Lower
  4. Right side
  5. Left Side
• Use of Ryu and Okuden
• 21 Precepts of Dokkodo–this should be obvious

I immediately started thinking about how the 5 Attitudes could be used in combat. I am no martial artist, and hove no idea how these things really work, but as part of an RPG here’s my current thoughts.

Characters are trained in a specific Ryu. Each Ryu teaches some weapons and other techniques.
For combat each Ryu has an attack and defense rating for each attitude. So If you take the Upper attitude, you might have a 4 Strike and 2 Defense.

Oppents choose to attack or test. Test is a way of finding an opening in your opponent’s technique.
Opponents secretly choose what attitude they are using (playing cards would work well for this: Red for Strike, Black for Defend). Opponents compare the Strike and Defense of their attitudes (which are different for each Ryu) and determine the results.

If Attacking: Strike>Defense=Damage (difference of Strike and Defend as a multiplier?)*
If Testing: Strinke>Defense=Bonus to next turn (difference of Strike and Defend)
If Defense is greater, no change.

* I want single strike kills possible. Need to calibrate this so that minor strike is wounding, major strike is crippling, and a fatal strike is fatal.

I still need to figure out how ones skill in combat works. Perhaps rated 1-5 and added to the Strike/Defense values.

Before any of this, I want to have a sizing -up your opponnent, wherein you may get some indication of their abilities.

I love how fatalistic this is. There is no randomizer beyond the picking attitude in secret.

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