Feng Shui House Rules

Buying up stats

Under the current system, the rules for buying up stats are simple, but make the order in which you buy them very important for efficient use of experience points. To avoid worrying about that, we came up with a system that should be very close to the original rules but does not have the order-dependent problems, and does not penalize players for not doing their math ahead of time and planning out the exact order in which to spend experience points.

  1. A primary stat is defined to be the minimum of the secondary stats that were equal to it on your archetype before adding optional bonuses.
    Example: The Chi of an Old Master is the minimum of the Old Master's Kung Fu and Magic ratings. To raise Chi, both Kung Fu and Magic must be raised; if one of them drops, Chi drops.
  2. The first time you raise a secondary stat under a given primary stat to a given value, it costs twice that value in experience points. The second time you raise a secondary stat under that same primary to a given number, it costs the value in experience points. For primary stats with three secondaries, raising the third stat costs the given number; for those with four secondaries, raising the third stat costs half the given number (rounded up) and the fourth costs half the given number (rounded down).
    Example: An Old Master wants to raise his Chi to 11 from 10. To do this, he must pay 22 XP to raise his Fu, and then 11 XP to raise his Magic.

    Because he has acquired a passion for gambling, he decides he wants to bring his Fortune up to the level of his Chi. He pays 2 XP to raise it to 1, 4 to get to 2, and so on (2 + 4 + 6 + 8 + 10 + 12 + 14 + 16 + 18 + 20 = 110 XP) until his Fortune reaches 10. However, it only costs 11 more XP to raise his fortune to 11, since he's already bought two Chi stats up to 11.

  3. When you lose a point from a secondary stat, buying it up again costs twice the increased value in XP.
    Example: If the Old Master uses Shadowfist to permanently damage a foe, sacrificing a point of his own Magic, his Magic drops to 10 and his Chi along with it. To get his Chi back up, he'll need to pay 22 XP.

This set of rules means that buying up a single secondary stat which is below its primary costs the same as in the standard rules, as does increasing a primary stat that is equal to all its secondaries, but does not penalize someone for upping a single secondary stat and then the primary.

Buying Skills

In the beginning of the book and on the character sheet at the end, it seems clear that your skill AV is a matter of adding your Skill Bonus to the appropriate Attribute. However, in the Getting Even Tougher section, buying skills is based on the AV rather than the Bonus. This doesn’t seem to make a great deal of sense— it introduces more order-dependence in making it profitable to up stats after skills. To avoid more order-dependence, we’ve set all skill buying to be with a default stat of 5:

This means there is no difference from the standard rules for people with exactly normal stats of 5, and advancement is uniform once again.

Sorcery