I just bought the books on DrivethroughRPG and I am considering to run the game for my group. I have played Feng Shui 2 only once before, so I started to get familiar with the currently updated (1.4) rules. While some things have been weirdly formated. There is one schtick that seems obviously broken.
Neural Stimulator that reads:
Add +X Speed until end of fight; take 5 times X Wound Points.
Seems fine enough until you consider the following situation. As the last action in a sequence, during the last fight of the night, activate Neural Stimulator and choose X of 3 000 000. Yes thats right 3 million. Sure you take a mark of death and 15 million wounds, but so what? Use fortune to not keel over at that moment and you will have 1 000 000 standard actions to do whatever you want. Sure those actions are at impairement of -2, but you have enough rolls for it to not matter. Sure there is a chance you will die with the two mark of death, but considering you just bended space time it is a small price to pay. At the end of all that session will end and you are fully healed.
A sane GM can easily rule that you can at max double your current speed or something similar, but considering how long Atlas has bother to do erratas it seems like an odd oversight. I hate to do this to the only +X schtick that is not hard limited, but there is a reason why it is usually required.
Hmm. That's problematic, but most GMs will probably be able to hand that on the fly. Insist on resolving death checks and make sure the fight goes one more sequence, or cap it so that the wound points cannot go above 35/50/whatnot. I'd have to go through the rulebook and see if I could find all of the "ignore wounds/death check" abilities and see if there are any obvious "walk away from a plane crash" loopholes.
The first Up Check would happen as soon as they trigger the schtick, before they get to act, so they might just keel over until healed above 35 wound points. Good luck with that.
The GM could simply have the boss escape and end with a cliffhanger.
The sane way to handle it would just be to cap it (either at a hard maximum or based on 5X maxxing out your wounds). There are a couple other "add +X" powers in the game, and they have caps, so that seems reasonable and the lack of a cap may just be an oversight.
Better hope your GM doesn't have a Tranimal Boss use Fleet or Fast in response. Muhahaha, you just killed the party.
Even Lightning response would probably be a party wipe. A Martial Arts boss can likewise use Contract of the Fox or Horse Stance.
Personally, if the player was going to argue with me about letting it work as written, I'd let them win the first fight with it. Bosses aren't supposed to be omnipotent or omniprepared; if the players have some awesomely cool idea, let the bad guys get caught with their pants down and let the dragons use it to win. But IMO uber bosses should be cagey. Master strategists, sending out their minions to probe and test their opponents' strengths and weaknesses. They should learn from their minions' defeat. And so it would seem perfectly reasonable to me that an uber-boss would respond to the loss of one of their bosses to such a dragon by sending out a 'speed stealing' (i.e. initiative switching) boss to deal with that dragon the next time.