Hey everyone. I found the original Feng Shui at my FLGS when I was 13 and fell in love with it. Unfortunately, it was always one of those games I wanted to run but could never interest my group in playing. When Feng Shui 2 came out, I thought it was my second chance. Unfortunately, I havn't been able to convince my new group to give the game a chance either. So I was wondering if anyone knows a good play by post site with a strong Feng Shui community. I was also looking for any tips people have on selling Feng Shui to gamers. My current group is mostly open to new things, so I was surprised that no one was interested, and wondered if anyone had good stories about how they sold the game to their players.
I'm ignorant about play-by-post stuff, although I've heard that gamersplane.com/ has a good community.
I've had a lot of success getting people into the system, mainly through one-shots. I'd just tell them "Let's try a single adventure. Just pick a character archetype, make up a melodramatic hook and we're off to the races." Then I improvise an adventure based on their hooks. It's generally simple but I encourage the characters to go way over the top with their descriptions and it usually gets the feel across pretty well.
Feng Shui 2's pick-up-and-play nature is its best asset, to me, in terms of getting someone to play it. You don't have to know anything about the rules to understand that the Killer is Chow Yun-Fat (or Keanu Reeves as John Wick), Maverick Cop is John McClane, the Everyday Hero is Jack Burton, the Karate Cop is Jackie Chan, and the Sifu is Jet Li.
Usually I describe it to people in those terms. "It's based on a world where portals give you access to different time periods, so you can combine characters and stories inspired by almost any different action movies you can think of. You can fight sorcerers and demons in Ancient China, kung fu martial artists in Past China, heroic bloodshed gangsters and cops in the Contemporary Era, and Mad Max-style apocalypse in the Future Juncture."
By then, if they like even some of those things, people are usually interested 