[The Last Gasp] A Cherry Blossom Rain playtest

[Mailanka]

So, we finally got around to digging out our old tokens, our character sheets, our hex map and our beads for another round of samurai action, this time explicitly to test the Last Gasp and see if it would fit into play.

You must understand, first of all, the Cherry Blossom Rain is a "deep detail" Martial Arts game. We have lots of complexity turned on, with things like grip changes, alternate rules for Beats, and many more. The idea is to make a game where every sword-blow is described, every flash of steel detailed in the roll of the dice, and it works surprisingly well (nowhere near as agonizing as I would have thought: One guy who complains that D&D and LotW fights are "too slow" finds Cherry Blossom Rain pretty decently paced). If there was ever a place to use the Last Gasp, this is it.

Allow me to introduce the two players who participated in the playtest. First, we have Kenta. Kenta is a tanky character, with magical scale armor called the Dragon's Scale that provides him with DR of 6, and his father's sword called Mountain Splitter, which is a Legendary Katana with an armor divisor 2. He's very strong (ST 15), and tough (High Pain Threshold). He has an HT of 12 and sufficient martial arts to grant him 9 extra action points, giving him a starting total of 21. He has a chi power that grants him a force field with a DR of 2, but it costs him 1 fatigue (or 10 action points) to activate. The second is Daisuke. Daisuke is an intelligent and agile samurai who focuses on iajutsu. He often waits patiently and then uses a fast-draw stop-hit to defeat his foes. While not particularly strong, he's highly skilled, has enormous levels of power-blow, and plenty of Body Control and Breath Control (and the Inner Balance to improve both) from his years of meditation. He has an HT of 11 and sufficient martial arts for 12 additional action points. He wields a Legendary Katana named Old Soldier, a recent acquisition after he gave up his ancestral Legendary Katana, Legacy, to his brother. It had no pertinent powers in this fight.

First, I threw each player, individually, against 4 ashigaru spearmen and 1 ashigaru archer. These are mooks, and per the rules, a single blow is enough to "eliminate" the character (in my practices and playtests, I found this was generally the case anyway, so this is a shorthand to keep the fights from being too involved). I didn't track their fatigue, merely rolled a d6 after any major action on their part and on a 5-6, had them rest the next turn. For Daisuke's fight, we used the bonus action points from skill, we charged 1 AP per attack in a rapid strike, and we set the fatigue cost to 10 AP per fatigue point. Players also had three "character points" that they could spend on things like removing critical failures or to use the flesh wound rule.

Daisuke's first fight went well, but the player was rusty and screwed up, getting stabbed by a spear after taking down his first ashigaru. He spent a character point to reduce this to a flesh wound and managed to finish the fight without ever tapping into fatigue.

For Kenta's first fight, we ran with the same set-up, but removed the bonus Action Points, simply starting him with 12. Here, Kenta began demolishing his opponents, but found defense not really worth his time as his armor generally protected him well enough until people started stabbing his legs. He took 6 damage to one leg, which wasn't enough to stun him, but seriously hampered his action points. He was forced to spend 1 fatigue to finish off the four Ashigaru, and then began to walk towards the Ashigaru bowmen. Kenta has Parry Missile Weapon and noted that you can Step for free and still defend while Doing Nothing (rereading the book, I see that you can make no movement while Doing Nothing, but I think I'll let that slide). So we had this samurai swatting arrows out of the air while casually walking towards this archer while catching his breath as the archer increasingly panics until Kenta gets close enough and recovers enough to burst into a full run and cut the guy down (that is move and, on the next turn, attack). The player found that fairly evocative imagery.

The next fight stuck out more in my mind. Daisuke and Kenta joined one another, back-to-back badasses, against 8 ashigaru, 3 archers and 2 samurai. The samurai were lieutenants, so you needed to actually remove all their HP to kill them (that is, drop them to 0 HP) and I tracked their actual fatigue. This was a fairly typical, if slightly easy, Cherry Blossom Rain fight. We returned to the bonus Action Points, so they were sporting more than 20 each at start, but the players divided them into two pools, with the bonus pool "not recoverable" during the fight. This was my interpretation of Cole's "only after a flurry is done."

At the beginning, Daisuke Waits for the samurai on his flank to attack. Kenta simply cuts down the ashigaru enemy after spending. When Daisuke's samurai attacked, he drew (one action point) activated power-blow (10 action points) and then stop hit (one action point), instantly cutting the guy, through his armor, in half. The following Chiburi managed to scare off half of the remaining spear ashigaru, as they failed their fright checks (even with the +5 for fright checks in combat). One the other side, Kenta had a quick sword duel with his samurai, forced back a step until Daisuke turned and did a second stop hit on Kenta's samurai, intervening in their duel and removing the samurai's head, his chiburi frightening off one more ashigaru. By the time the two finished the spearmen and archers, Kenta needed to spend 1 fatigue to recover from him exhausion, but Daisuke's patient technique and his Breath Control kept his Action Point total up. The two advanced on the archers at a full run, reached their opponents, and cut them down.

The general consensus was this: It didn't "slow" action nearly as much as expected. Actually tracking the action points was easy, thanks to the beads I issued, and knowing what cost what was very easy. The players didn't actually play much differently than they normally did, but they said that the action points made them conscious of their fatigue and made them "feel" the strain of their actions. Daisuke's player said it added a new dimension he liked. I worried too that the very detailed fatigue rules would ruin things, but in practice, players spent fatigue very sparingly, because spending much was too dangerous. Both agreed that if a second wave had come, they would have really begun to grow weary, which is just what Lasp Gasp is for.

We felt that these rules should replace, rather than supplement the "spend 1 fatigue after a battle" rule, though this makes encumbrance less of an issue. I might penalize HT on Action Recovery rolls by your encumbrance level, making heavy armor harder to recover in. We were unclear on the "step" and "retreat" rules, and judged that you could make multiple steps and retreats in a single turn, at one additional AP each. This might not be the intention of the rules, but it fights with the high mobility of Chambara.

All in all, we thought it was a success. The rules answered the questions we had. It added a new layer of thought to play. It made HT much more valuable (particularly breath control), damage more visceral, and added a new layer for players to think about. Taking a moment to pause and recover became normal, and fit better than we expected ("getting back action points" doesn't feel like a waste of a turn, but like a reward).

The conclusion was to definitely include this in our campaign.

[DouglasCole]

Wow. Just wow. Thanks for this report.

FYI...definitely replace losing FP after the battle!

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by DouglasCole

FYI...definitely replace losing FP after the battle!

This is probably a clarification that the article actually needs, IMO.

[JCurwen3]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

This is probably a clarification that the article actually needs, IMO.

Don't have it in front of me right now, but I could have sworn it said that in the article... could be wrong though.

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by JCurwen3

Don't have it in front of me right now, but I could have sworn it said that in the article... could be wrong though.

I've looked for it, and didn't find it (that doesn't mean it's not there, of course).

[Refplace]

I like the Penalize HT roll for Encumbrance myself and wish that had come up in the play test.

[DangerousThing]

One thing that I'd like to ask you: how did you define Flash Step for your initial play test?

It would fit my current campaign.

[Humabout]

Awesome to read this report. I've only gotten to try out Last Gasp once so far in earnest and found that it didn't slow things down at all, either, and that was with players who are relatively new to gurps (they'd read Gurps Lite and played through one adventure prior to this). So while we had a pretty similar experience to Mailanka's (was easily worth the tiny extra bookkeeping), it is also pretty intuitive even for new gurpsites.

[vierasmarius]

Originally Posted by DangerousThing

One thing that I'd like to ask you: how did you define Flash Step for your initial play test?

It would fit my current campaign.

This probably wasn't the right thread to ask that question (though I thank you for reviving it; I had somehow missed reading it the first time around). From what I gather, Cherry Blossom Rain, while heroic in nature, doesn't go so over-the-top as to include teleporting ninjas. Flash Step has been addressed elsewhere, though. A quick search turns up these two threads you may want to check out.

[Keiko]

What are Action Points?