Apparently it’s Martial Arts Day here on Thou And One.
Rich Forest finally put together a draft of his real-time combat game Fist of the Assassin, which I had the pleasure of playtesting with him in Hong Kong in 2005, right before I got on a freighter and sailed to Seattle (true story). This game is the only RPG that I know of in which fights take place in real time, with players throwing down cards to represent the various attacks / defenses that their characters are doing. There are some non-collectible card games that do this, I think, but it’s about damn time this got imported into fighty roleplaying games.
I am deliriously happy. Now my only problem is figuring out whether to run this or Mist-Robed Gate at SGBoston this week.
one thousand one 
2008 Apr 15 at 3:27 am
I think the obvious solution to your problem involves two games, a ring, and a bell…
Actually, since Fist of the Assassin is something of a “micro-game of kung fu fighting” at the moment anyway, and a lot of the RPGish elements are underdeveloped, you could always play Mist-Robed Gate for the primary RPG slot and then just play a few hands of Fist of the Assassin on the side, before or after the rolegaming proper.
2008 Apr 15 at 7:04 am
That’s very likely what I’ll end up doing.
2008 Apr 15 at 10:29 am
Wait — I thought Sons of Liberty had some realtime action in it? Am I wrong?
2008 Apr 15 at 10:42 am
Hmm… good question. I’m not sure. FoA predates SoL by quite a while, conceptually, but hasn’t been formally released until just now. I’ll have to ask Joshua if he was aware of it when he started working on SoL.
2008 Apr 15 at 3:13 pm
Can you describe how it happens in Sons of Liberty for those of us who don’t know it first-hand?
2008 Apr 15 at 4:04 pm
That’s really, really cool.
How would I contact Rich if I have a question?
2008 Apr 15 at 4:06 pm
Guy: I don’t own SoL, so I can’t really speak to that.
Lukas: Start a thread on Story Games? He posted about it in the current “Kung Fu” thread, but I’m sure he’d appreciate folks talking about it.