Wushu, Kung-fu, Wuxia

Context: I was reading an article on tabletop RPG design philosophy regarding crunch (aka number crunching, a short hand for "complex rules" in the TTRPG space) when I ran across some examples being given and suddenly have to headdesk as I realized the person is missing the point in terms of the literary difference between all the "Chinese kung-fu movies." Ok, let me explain a little more.

In the section titled "Different Rules for the Same Fictional Activity can be Completely Different" (scroll down or use Ctrl+F to find the section), the article uses three different games to illustrate how martial arts is mechanically different in three different games. The three examples are:

1. Rivers & Lakes, a game that focuses on using mechanics to generate tactical decisions during a fight that encourages learning the opponent's moves and devise a tactical move that leverages your strengths against an opponent's weakness.

2. Wushu, a game that rewards players mechanical benefits to encourage narrating complex choreography of fight scenes by handing out more dice for each detail the player includes in their "attack".

3. Hearts of Wulin, a narrative game that resolves fights in a single roll because it's more concerned with the narrative drama/consequence of the fight than the technical aspects of the fight itself.

Now, the article sums up this discussion with this:

Personally, I take a bit of issue with this (to me this combat system would be ideal for something like samurai fiction, westerns, gangster and crime fiction, etc. but is terrible for most forms of wuxia)... A Knight at the Opera

So my problems with this pointless aside is many. At the forefront, it speaks to a lack of understanding about Chinese martial arts movies. specifically a lack of nuanced understanding of the Wuxia genre. In fact, the three games listed as examples actually captures the three core engagements of the sub-genres of Chinese martial arts movies.

Allow me to get into the weeds a bit:

Chinese martial arts movies can be largely categorized into three sub-genre's:

1. Wushu (武术): in this genre, the movie's main theme is to communicate, ostensibly, anti-war messages. For you see, one of the unifying philosophy in Chinese martial arts schools is to stop war by improving one's self-defense strength. The belief is that military/martial strength is in service of defense and only defense. Expect some lesson about "self improvement to ward off bullies" to show up at some point. And if they fail on the philosophical aspect, the movie at least hopes to educate the audience a little bit on the actual design philosophy of a school of martial art, such as how Taiji was invented.

2. Kung-fu (功夫): this genre of movies is less concerned with the philosophy and more interested in showcasing awesome technical ability. Kung-fu (功夫) literally translates into "effort". In other words, the goal is to showcase the actor's ability to pull off stunts that took decades of training to perfect. This is the main type of "martial arts movies" that makes it into the West.

3. Wuxia (武侠): movies in this genre are less interested in the martial arts itself and more interested in the heroism and the interpersonal/political drama. The martial arts is more of a framing device to focus on the character rather than any interest in the actual fighting. And the books that inspired these movies often handwave away the nitty gritty details of the actual martial arts stuff.

So this is my very long winded way of explaining no, actually choosing the narrative focused resolution system when mimicking Wuxia is actually very appropriate. The game Wushu is inaccurately named and should have been called Kung-fu (or Gong Fu if you want to be culturally sensitive). Finally, Rivers & Lakes is more of a "Wushu"-esque game because it intends to use actual martial arts philosophy in the game design.

Aaand... yeah. That's my rant over.