#fowf

It's a tabletop roleplaying game system I've been designing on & off for about four months now!

Originally, it was an unarmed combat minigame I made for D&D, with the intention of making unarmed combat, like, actually interesting. Like, with D&D's default set of rules, there's two ways to handle unarmed combat: roll a contested skill check (or series of checks) or punch each other (for minimal damage unless you're a monk) until someone goes down

The way I decided to spice it up was with a series of Moves:

Swing (big damage but risky)

Jab (lower damage than Swing, but is, in fighting game terms, "plus on block")

Guard (weakest but safest move, and very good against Swing)

Taunt (forces enemies to Swing if successful)

Grapple (enters a grappling minigame where they try to escape while you choke them out)

Everything had a multilayered rock-paper-scissors relationship. For example, if I'm remembering correctly, Swing was good against Jab and great against Taunt, but bad against Grapple and terrible against Guard.

Both players would pick a Move simultaneously, then consult a 25-item table detailing all the possible matchups of Moves. Each player would then roll a skill check based on their Move & Matchup, and then the winner of the contested check would get an advantage based on their Move & Matchup: stuff like making progress towards winning, gaining a bonus on your next turn, stuff like that.

If you won the contest by 5+, it would be a crit and the bonus would be bigger, stuff like moves that don't normally hit your opponent now hitting, or moves that do hit now instantly end the fight in certain matchups

We played it once or twice, and it was pretty fun! Then I realized that if I just made it have its own character creation rules instead of using D&D's, I could make a pretty solid little martial arts game

I swapped out Grapple for the more generic debuff-inflicting Afflict, introduced what would eventually become 80 different special abilities to mix and match in the form of Powers, and allowed players to customize their Moves through the use of Modifiers and custom outcomes

It was originally meant to be a 1v1 "fighting game tournament" sort of game, as a sort of combination deckbuilder/rpg where you compete with friends to make the most optimal build, but then I decided that (a) it actually had a lot of potential as a more traditional rpg and (b) introducing allies would open up a lot of design space for more supportive gameplay

the first playtest was an incredibly unbalanced 1v1 test of white-room optimization that showed promise but revealed a lot of deep issues in the system. the second playtest, months later, was a fucking glorious traditional dungeon crawl through the expansive basement of a missing crime lord, and everyone had a blast with that. it still revealed a shitton of issues, because that's how playtesting goes!

it's gone through a shitload of changes in the time I've been working on it, with currently around 12k words of rules text and customization options, compared to the original "one page and a reference table" that I made for a D&D minigame

I am fervently against anything being so good that you have no choice but to take it on every character if you want to be competitive, so Stances have a duo of downsides that should mitigate the lasting value they bring to the table:

Stances have a downside roughly equivalent to their upside. The Stance that increases the damage you deal also increases the damage you take. In order for a Stance to be a net positive for your build, you have to dedicate some amount of resources to working with that Stance

Because of the downsides of Stances, you don’t always want to be in one. Which means you have to dedicate a little bit of resources towards having a way out of your Stance when you need to exit it. Functionally a Stance costs two Move Modifiers rather than one, because in most builds you have to add an Exit Your Stance Modifier to another Move. And that then limits Move choice in combat: if you NEED to exit your Stance you have to use the Move that takes you out or build multiple exit Moves.

You absolutely could make a build around staying in one Stance all the time, but that’s great! That’s the goal! You are now built around that! It is not something that you can just throw onto any build and improve the build! Mission McMotherfucking Accomplished

Field of White Flowers takes its name from the gaming trope of having a climactic duel in a field of white flowers, going back to its original roots as a 1v1 system.

The whole system isn't 100% dedicated to having climactic duels anymore, but the name is pretty, the acronym doesn't suck, and it's definitely better than the old placeholder name that I called the google doc while waiting for a good name to occur to me (Fighting Game System)

The general idea with Field of White Flowers is that it's got a ton of high power anime bullshit. While I do intend on eventually making a unique setting for it, it's currently vaguely setting-agnostic. The rules make a few assumptions, but those can be mostly ignored:

There is a multiverse: one power allows you to easily step between universes while out of combat. There will likely be a note about the potential banning of this Power for GMs who want to be able to somewhat curtail the movements of their players (at lower ranks it "merely" allows you to easily travel between/across continents)

People can get VERY powerful: from level one, it's possible to be a lich, or to instantly kill anyone weaker than you within a mile of you, or to do the aforementioned multiversal-range teleportation, and you only get stronger from there. Many player character powers are absolute: no one can see you outside of combat, pacts you make cannot be broken, if killed you will return to life. Shit like that

that's about it though.

the "intended" setting of Field of White Flowers is something along the lines of the webcomic Kill Six Billion Demons: modern weaponry exists, some people have technology beyond modern levels, but at the end of the day the guy with the sword and super speed still has a chance against the guy with the gun. magic is fairly commonplace. the world is big and the edges of it are dangerous.

It's meant for a blend of wuxia, standard-issue RPG sword-and-sorcery, and multiversal sci-fi.

As for the second question: combat is essential to Field of White Flowers. If you don't plan on ever running combat, there are a thousand better systems out there. It does currently have a solid set of narrative rules for handling extremely powerful and varied player characters, much of which are centered around the Tension mechanic:

Because this is a system where the player characters are extraordinarily powerful and just generally all about that power fantasy nonsense, players have the option of turning failed skill checks into successes by raising the Tension. When the Tension maxes out, it Breaks, and the GM gets to inflict something bad on the party, such as "the sleeping dragon wakes up," "your ally was a traitor all along," or "the damaged villain escapes through a portal." Certain especially strong powers can also be fueled with Tension, and certain bad things happening can raise the Tension too.

But at the end of the day, much of the narrative gameplay comes down to a simple "describe your approach, roll against a DC, the GM narrates the results." There are simply better systems out there if you have no intention of using the combat rules.

The combat rules, though, are fucking phenomenal if I do say so myself. Combat is very abstract (works perfectly with theater of the mind play), very cinematic (given that nothing in the game has a default flavor, it's up to the players to narrate how their character does what they do), and, crucially, VERY fast. Turns take a minute, tops. Anyone can act whenever they want, as many times in a row as their teammates are okay with.

Combat turns boil down to declaring an action, rolling a die, and narrating the results, while combat remains solidly tactical between choosing if/when to interact with the terrain, choosing the order of player turns, deciding whether to target a main enemy or minions, and working towards your build's custom-tailored gameplan.

Obviously you don't need a combat every single session. I think FoWF's narrative rules clear the low, low bar of being more enjoyable than D&D 5e's "there's skill checks and spells and that's it," and in my D&D game we frequently go a solid few sessions without any real fights. It slots pretty neatly into my preferred DMing style of "do a few sessions of downtime, then go exploring and take a ton of fights." How frequent combat is going to be is up to the GM, but the combat rules are rad and most of the character creation process is centered around customizing how your character fights.

First thing's first: Field of White Flowers doesn't have weapon types. Characters are assumed to have the best version of their preferred gear and armor that they can get their hands on.

Rather than, say, D&D's gear progression system, which entails upgrading your sword and getting a new ability from that, FoWF goes in the opposite direction: you unlocked a new ability, maybe you want to flavor it as upgrading your sword. It's a flavor-first system where nothing has any default why it does things.

Additionally, weapon types simply wouldn't really work with the combat system. Damage output is static & small (typically you're looking at one or two damage a turn), and positioning is abstracted. Without positioning, range doesn't matter, and without damage rolls/variance weapon damage doesn't matter.

So there's nothing that flail build "has" to look like.

HOWEVER that's a boring-ass answer so what we're gonna do is make a piece of Legendary Gear, and then talk about a build that might like to have it.

Legendary Gear is, like, your signature item. In a system without much in the way of actual "loot" that matters, Legendary Gear serves as something to quest for. The default effect of Legendary Gear is giving a specific Power, without needing to pay EXP for it or meet its prerequisites, but GMs can also pass out custom Legendary Gear, and there are a few examples of those in the rulebook at the moment.

So first off, let's determine the general vibe of using a flail. First character that comes to mind is the Witch King of Angmar and his huge ass flail. Typically, the flail calls to mind a brutal and heavily-armored fighter who thinks they're too fucking good for a mace. alternatively they're a cleric

Anywho, that's some textbook Aggression/Endurance shit. There's two solid builds that I'm aware of that use both Aggression and Endurance:

the bruiser focused around Love the Pain and Fight Response that goes to low health and then kicks the everloving shit out of you

the debuff/support focused around Crown of Thorns and Helping Hand that buffs allies while constantly applying Bleed to enemies

Let's go with the latter. Crown of Thorns is a fun fucking Power and it could always use some extra swagger.

Step one: gotta name this thing. lets do some wolf motif shit, between the supportive playstyle and the violence inherent in bonking someone with a flail. call it some shit like Gholir, the Hungerchain. fuck yeah that rules

Step two: what does it actually do though? Crown of Thorns builds care about a few things: stacks of Bleed on the enemy, gaining Momentum, and losing Momentum. When Bleed is fully stacked, it does damage to the enemy. What if this item gave the option to heal off of Bleed instead?

Headseeker

Cost: requires 5+ Perfection, costs 2 EXP Rules text: The amount you must win a Contest by in order to CRIT is reduced by 3. Translated rules text: you crit more often

Originally this Power was called Headshot, but its intended usage was always to be combined with a Modifier called Heartbreaker which similarly makes it easier to get critical hits. Headseeker Heartbreaker simply is more fun to say than Headshot Heartbreaker, and when two abilities are going to be on the same sheet 90% of the time you want them to flow nicely. Crit fishing builds are commonly abbreviated to HsHb

In FoWF, your attempts to harm your opponent are opposed by their attempts to harm you: the Contest. Roll a d20, add your Modifiers, whoever rolls higher does their thing. If you win by 10 or more, that's a critical hit. Headseeker brings that down by 3, making the requirement 7+. Heartbreaker brings it down by another 2, meaning you crit when you win by 5 or more. This was the ORIGINAL crit range before playtesting revealed it made crits wayyyy too common and swingy. Luckily, common crits are exactly what we want for high level Perfection gameplay

Someone already did 69 AND 42 so i'm just gonna take this as a free pass to talk about whatever Power i want

here's 74

Magnum Opus

Cost: requires 5+ Adoration, costs 5 EXP Rules text: whenever you spend one or more 1/combat abilities or created resources, gain a +2 bonus to your next Contest. Translated rules text: whenever you deplete your resources in like any way, your next attack roll gets a bonus

Magnum Opus is one of the best-scaling Powers in the game, and like any proper capstone Power, it is useless at level one. The EXP cost to raise a Stat to 5 is 7 EXP, so this Power has a total cost of 12. You have 15 EXP to work with at level one. You CAN buy Magnum Opus at level one, but you won't have the resources to spend so you can actually get value from it.

Now let's fast forward to 65 EXP, forty or so sessions of the campaign later. Here's a non-comprehensive list of resources you might be spending:

Ammunition from the Ammunition Modifier, which makes a Move stronger in exchange for it having limited uses

Grit from Outlaw Stance, which builds up over time and is then consumed to turn a non-crit into a crit

Meter from Chronos Gauge, which gives your character a meter to manage like you're a fighting game character, for if you want more complexity and power

Clones generated by the Shadow Clone Power, which rewards crits by giving you Clones you can spend to boost later attacks

Allies from Supporting Cast, which starts you off in combat with a few Allies (summons, minions, whatever) that you can spend much like Clones

Literally any of the like 20 different 1/combat Powers

Oh by the way there's a Will Power called The Abyss Gazes Back that gives you an extra use of all of your 1/combat Powers

Now suddenly you're spending 2 or more resources a turn, replenishing those resources because they're all created by different sources with their own interactions, and now you're normally passing +4 to your next Contest roll (on a d20), but after a big turn you could be looking at +8 or more

i've already talked about 9 because it was part of the context of another one (it's Red in Tooth and Claw) so here's 8, which currently exists as two version of the same thematic ability (the red being the old ability, the blue being the new one)

Crown of Thorns

Cost: requires 4+ Aggression, costs 3 EXP Rules text: lose Momentum: apply Bleed to an enemy Translated rules text: whenever you have Momentum and then lose it, an enemy suffers Bleed (they have to choose one of their stats and reduce it by 1. Bleed stacks. if they would reduce a stat below 0 they take a Hit instead)

The old version of the ability, Bloodletter, was one of the oldest abilities in the game, back when I was first fleshing out how character creation and all that jazz worked, and things were much simpler back then. It was originally going to be a "Fighting Style" a sort of "class" that represented an approach to combat.

Fighting Styles were scrapped because they sucked and I knew I could do better, so the Strength-Drinker fighting style that leeched enemy stats turned into the much more reasonably-powered Bloodletter, which let you apply bleed when you crit with an aggressive Move. It had a lot of synergy with Perfection's love of big numbers and frequent crits, and for a little while represented one of the more powerful abilities in the game before getting powercrept by cooler newer more expensive things, and in its final days it was one of the most boring "build-around" Powers in the game

the new Crown of Thorns shares a lot of design space with Bloodletter:

Bleed takes a lot of stacks to be effective, so there needs to be a Power that helps apply extra Bleed if I want Bleed to be a playable archetype

The strong Perfection synergy remains, as the Move associated with Perfection, Jab, generates Momentum automatically if it connects