GMed my first session of a new campaign last Sunday through Discord, HUGE success. Had one veteran friend, my girlfriend that is knowledgeable about RPGs but only played a couple L5R sessions before and two complete noobs, both to L5R and to RPGs in general. We didn't use video, just voice, and used both a dice bot and a music bot that can play stuff from YouTube. We played using 4e because nothing will ever make me use specialty dice, with no house rules but a severely different setting that I traditionally use in my games. Basically, I make Rokugan more like Japan geographically and culturally, make the social castes actually usable and without slurs and make Taint more similar to the concept of "Kegare", or at least my severely limited understanding of it. For this campaign, the players are a group of yokai hunters being trained by an old monk that was the formar patriarch of their clan. The adventure basically involved them responding to a letter from a vassal of their lord's clan, complaining about yokai annihilating caravans near the city every couple of nights. The character's sensei told them to solve that by themselves, as a test of their training and competency. He was actually following them the whole time to observe and intervene if the beast was too powerful for them, but he trusted the group to be successful. And OH BOY were they successful! They managed to kill 8 "bakemono" and a "swamp witch" without getting hit ONCE! Also, the two melee characters, a Hida Bushi and a Hida Pragmatist, managed to kill the witch during the "surprise round" by exploding damage dice MULTIPLE times EACH! It was like 90+ damage, completely bonkers!

Amen. Just take a look at the PC and NPC name list of my current, just barely initiated, campaign:

I basically agree with everything AtoMaki said in regar to the Investigation skill, but I would just like to comment on this: ...couldn't the characters just look at the body, see it was full of arrows on his butthole and know fro a fact that he was shot from behind just like that? Why demand this absolutely unnecessary test from them?

Speaking from my own homebrewed edition of L5R point of view, I've being considering linking Combat Maneuvers (and Social Maneuvers, and other stuff) to Honor Rank (and to Glory and Status Rank as well in Social Maneuvers). For example, having a very low Honor score would allow you to use maneuvers like kicking dirt on you opponent's eyes, something that medium Honor characters would have to spend Honor and make more Raises to do and high Honor characters wouldn't even have the option. On the other hand, high Honor characters would be able to ignore a certain amount of Wound Penalties automatically, medium Honor characters would have to spend Void or make an Honor Roll to do so and low Honor characters wouldn't be able to access this capability. Whatever the actual mechanics are in the FFG L5R, I can only see Honor/Glory/Status becoming truly important to the game (to the game, not to the setting) with more conspicuous mechanics like these.

I beg to differ. HARD. Anecdotal evidence: I'm introducing my girlfriend to RPGs, we started playing Pathfinder. She never played RPGs before, except for (ironically) two sessions of the L5R 4e system in the Dragon Age setting. She isn't having any problems with Pathfinder at all so far. Those are player problems, not system problems. Its very hard to believe that players had such a hard time to do absurdly simple addition operations. Although... its 10k10+21, not +30. Each Kept dice above 10 is +2 to the result of the roll. Seriously, I suck at math, but this couldn't be simpler. In my games, I had a rule: during combat, when your turn came up, you had 5 seconds to make up your mind about your action. If you can't, you lose you action. You had the entire round to see what your action was going to be, that is enough time to even consult the rulebook if necessary, while still keeping attention to what everybody else is doing. There is no need to stall the game with humming and hawing before taking your action.

Absolutely agree, that's what makes me so disappointed.

Certainly by using the power of Jigoku...

What!? Where was this stated? This is absolutely ridiculous and breaks my suspension of disbelief more than freaking magic and dragons! If this was stated in regard to Kaiu Blades then I would understand, because they are borderline magic weapons. But a normal katana? The only thing they would do to a rock is cover it with its broken pieces... Just wanted to say that I agree with everything here above the (...) sign. Absolutely. But people should also remember that the samurai were **** pragmatic in their time. The "katana cult" came to prominence when they were already in decline (and brought back by massive weeaboos in the current era...), when there were no more massive wars to fight and rifles and cannons were the rulers of battlefield. A sword is a "civilized" weapon, to be used in the city, for self-defense and to wash one's honor. In the battlefield, a samurai would use a battlefield weapon. Yes, they are. More specifically, the people commissioning those artworks and writing those stories were. Massively wrong. That seems perfectly congruous to me. Swords are slightly more effective than pillows against heavy armor. Unless you do Half-swording and Mordhau, which samurai wouldn't do.

Dude, "searching in an organized manner" is the whole point of learning how to search for things. Randomly looking in places is just incompetency that gets you nowhere most of the time. The only thing you where successful in describing was the difference of someone that have the Investigation skill and someone that doesn't. No, they are basically the same. The way you divide the area you are going to search into sectors, search them in a certain order, what and how to look for... Using the same techniques to do similar but different things is precisely why it is a Skill. Yes. And what I do if I want Investigation? The fact that all the last editions had both the Perception attribute a Investigation Skill makes it very clear what the problem is. That makes no sense whatsoever. If this is the most rolled skill in every RPG, isn't that a sign that Investigation is goddamned important and a point for its inclusion in the game instead of against it?

Only if Tactics is the main skill for finding my keys in a messy room or looking for someone in a crowd, in an efficient manner. They are the same skill, they work the same way, you use the exact same techniques to do each of those "actions" in real life. At that point, Tactics just becomes the "Investigation+" Skill.

Why not wait to do a revision of the full rules when they release? That's basically what I'm waiting for.

Success also doesn't need to be a penalty. Which, in the current system, it often is because of how much Strife it forces upon the character. Also, I don't see why tying the Void Point gain because of a Disadvantage to a necessary failure in the roll. Why not tying it to the invoking of the Disadvantage itself, regardless of the result of the roll? It makes no narrative sense. Making it a result of a success would be better than it currently is, even. Actually, all forms of gaining Void Points currently are terrible, in my opinion.

Dudes and dudettes, Investigation is absolutely a skill. Another poster said that you could just look at training given to the police or military to see confirmation and that is absolutely true. I served in the army and we had to train extensively in things that would could as the Investigation skill when translated to a game. That is 100% a skill that you learn, just like shooting a gun or repairing a car engine. I could even agree that someone familiarized with some field should have an easier time finding stuff related to his field and agree that there is an intrinsic aspect to it as well, but the search itself is something that you can learn to do correctly and effectively. In a way, the old editions represented it perfectly, with you Perception attribute and Investigation skill both contributing to your roll.

Just wanted to add this: 4e wasn't "perfect" or "finished" by a long shot. It absolutely needed a new edition or, at least, a massive rework. Is this the new edition/version it needed? That is for each one of us to decide.

Good link, but I made this post for discussion of the last one, posted yesterday. I believe the RPG forum should carry the tradition of discussing the fiction every time it is posted.