Oh, how i love improvised adventures... The best sessions i had as a
GM even now all of them had as much planning as saying to the
players "You're in city X. What you wanna do?". Proably that's why i
love so much games like Wushu or Risus, as they make it easier to
make NPCs stats out of nowhere ^^.

But ansering the main question. I may be wrong about this - and if i
am, feel free to correct me - but i think the Narrative Truth
principle works for both the players AND the GM. That is, if the
players can dictate NPCs actions when they're kicking their ass, so
can you when you it's the opposite situation. And this goes for the
Mooks fights and for the Nemesis fights as well.

As for the thing "you can't cut off his arm", this is barely
discussed in the open rules; players can't "kill" the Nemesis until
he have no Chi points left (when the GM can let them do the
finishing blow and all). "Kill", in an RPG, of course, means
more "make him unable to battle" more then actually "killing him";
that is, if the fact of losing an arm will put the Nemesis out of
battle, you have all the right to veto that detail. But in Wushu, as
far as i'm concerned, having just one arm rarely means not being
able to keep fighting...

But the real thing is, to a Wushu game to run really well, it's
necessary for the players and GM to be in tune to what's apropriate
to the game, so that this kind of thing doesn't got to happen. It's
proably one of the biggest concerns many people have with this kind
of mostly narrative based rules, where the players can decide what
to do or to be without much concern with mechanics. I know we had
this kind of problem here in Brazil not so long ago, with a very
sucessful game system that had some common principles, but that did
get a lot of bad critics and concerns because of the same thing.

--- In wushurpg@..., "Andrew Dr Rotwang! Reyes"
<areyes@k...> wrote:
>
> ##NOTE: This message was originally posted to RPG.Net, in modified
> form. ##
>
> Well, I just ran a totally impromptu game of Wushu for my group.
(Two
> of the five players couldn't make it, so the Serenity game will
hafta
> wait for next week.)
>
> It went OK; they really had fun being able to describe their cool
> stuff without fear of, you know, rolling a bunch of dingus and
failing
> at it all. For me, though, it was a pretty big paradigm shift -- it
> seemed a totally different way of running a game. To wit:
>
> I wasn't sure how to describe Chi loss. Since everything happens
just
> the way the players say it does, I was just adding descriptions to
> account for damage taken -- which felt kind of shoehorned it. "I
flip
> him over, throw him to the ground and kick him in the ribs! Oh, I
got
> 2 yang successes and no yin." "Okay...another guy tugs you by the
> shoulder and punches you in the face." I couldn't get it in there
> smoothly. Like I say, it felt awkward.
>
> Also, I stumbled a bit during a Nemesis battle. It wasn't a rules
> problem; it was a matter of describing the Nemesis' actions without
> violating the Principle of Narrative Truth. In other words, it was
> hard not to say, basically, "Oh, yeah? Well he's gonna DODGE, so
you
> CAN'T cut his arm off!"
>
> That said, I think we all enjoyed the game, even though I was
totally
> making it up and had NO PLOT AT ALL. Still, like I said, everyone
got
> to thump some rumps without fear of failure.
>
> Any suggestions on how to work around my problems? Thanks in
advance!
>