Ideally the RPG would support any era, and include information about era-appropriate rules in the official storyline for people who care. Things like the Agasha family changing from Dragon to Phoenix, or that Spider Clan doesn't exist so those rules shouldn't be used in a Clan War-era campaign, etc. It might be a ton of work to get those game era caveats into the book in an accurate and easily referenced fashion, though. In the end, though, what rules and story you use is going to be up to each group that plays. Some people want to play in the official canon, so that's fine. Some people are okay with re-telling stories such that hey steer away from the official version, and some people are just going to ignore canon altogether and do whatever they feel like. An ideal RPG would have enough rules and story information to support all of these groups. It would be up to the play group to decide what rules their story does or does not allow. But to get back to the OP, if I could only have one era to play in I would probably want Clan War, with rules for Scorpion characters even without their Great Clan status, of course, and plenty of support for minor clans such as the Mantis and Wasp. I think splat books for stuff like KYD and Dawn of the Empire eras would be really cool too, though.

You know, if it becomes "the casual hipster gamer's favorite game," but is still an enjoyable game, I really don't see a problem. Being bland and vanilla would be a problem, though.

I think we've opened this can of worms on this board before, but we've got to talk about something for the next two weeks. At first the idea of all victory advancing actions (destroying provinces, gaining honor, causing honor loss, putting rings into play) giving "points" to a single victory counter seemed a bit lame and un-L5R, but the more I think about it I can see how, if done well, it might actually be a good thing. Military decks always got honor for defeating armies anyway, so it's thematically not too much of a stretch. I had more than a few Phoenix decks that could do military switch back in the day, so a common "victory point" system would not be too dissimilar. It also could make alternate victory condition events easier to design and streamline, but then again I don't know if there was ever any real complaint about alternate victory conditions being unviable.

Gotcha. I wasn't playing at the end so the newer set names are fuzzy for me.

Are you talking about this one? https://imperialassembly.com/oracle/#cardid=11811,#hashid=d9257a99509d932a7b864f743e4dc444,#cardcount=1

I'm probably just crazy, but I always thought the game would have been better if playing out of clan personalities was easier / more practical, but that's from more of a flavor viewpoint. Done poorly, it could result in every deck looking the same.

Finally read the URL correctly. Now the whole thing makes more sense.

Well great, now we're going to have to make another speculation thread dedicated to discussing which parts of this article were or were not just April Fools jokes.

Yes, that bit was a little unexpected, but the contents of the article are all in the realm of possibility.

If this is an April Fool's joke, it's missing anything shocking/unexpected/over-the-top.

The material all sounds reasonable (as in, things we would expect FFG to do) but the April 1st posting date at the same time makes me wonder ...

My point is that not that generic nameless personalities didn't exist, it's that they were the exception rather than the norm, especially for human personalities. I would say there were "a few" examples, but I don't know if I'd say "quite a number", especially in view of the total number of personalities printed.

Wow, that is very thorough. Thanks for the link!

I'm curious, since I've been unable to find one, is there a list online somewhere of the winning clan at the Gencon championships every year, along with the story implications of the win? It seems given the nature of the internet that it should exist somewhere. Something like: 1996 - Crab - Hida Yakamo gets the Ancestral Sword of the Hantei 1997 - Lion - Toturi slays Fu Leng and becomes emperor. etc.

This has always been an issue with L5R. Players getting to influence the storyline is good and all, but because certain clans are going to be more viable than others at different times, game balance issues also have an effect on the story to some extent. I seem to recall that most tournament seasons were not dominated by a single clan, but generally there were a few favorites. It also meant that when the championship season at the end of each arc rolled around you would have some clans that were basically not in contention, and thus had less ability to affect the story. While that is unfortunate, I don't know if it's realistic to expect 9+ factions in any game to be so well balanced that they all have an equal chance of winning.

Indeed. In my experience every expansion usually alters the meta. It is a bit annoying, but I will admit it keeps the game a bit fresh. More importantly for FFG, if the meta requires cards from the new expansion then they make money. That is just the way these games work, though. Sparrow clan gets no respect. ?

We are all spending our time on these forums wildly speculating about this, but as of yet there has been no official announcement.

Old L5R had factions that would become dominant or at least much stronger after a certain set was released, even when each clan received the same number of cards in a set. While that could be disappointing for people not playing those clans, it was part of the CCG beast. At any given time some decks / factions / victory conditions are just going to be better than others. Usually each expansion did focus a bit on a few factions more than others. Correct me if I'm wrong, but for much of L5R's life I think each expansion would give three clans new strongholds, often with cards focused on the new stronghold themes. Sometimes that would propel a clan to be competitive at tournaments, though odds were just as good that the new stronghold and its associated cards would be crap. After each new set was released we'd go on forums and complain about how design clearly had it out for our clan in particular, and obviously were biased toward whatever clans we didn't play, but that was the nature of things. I doubt the LCG will be much different, both in terms of imbalance between factions and forum complaining. I anticipate the complaining threads to show up promptly on April 19th, depending on how much info they give us about gameplay and cards.

"Quite a number of other examples." You say quite a number, but as a percentage of total personalities how many are there? And have there ever been any generics with clan affiliations?

Too soon, bro.?

Actually, while Ogre Bushi also happens to be an ogre bushi, Ogre Bushi is the name his parents gave him.

It could just as easily be assumed that a card like Bayushi Kachiko represents her and her retinue (bodyguards, servants, ladies in waiting, and all of the other assorted entourage that would probably accompany her to court), though game-wise it has no effect either way; it's just an abstraction. The point I'm trying to make in regards to naming personalities is that while you could still provide flavor and world building with unnamed "personality" cards, you could do the same and also provide an enhanced level of player involvement in the story of the game if the personality cards have names that are tied to real characters in the story. More to the point, I don't think players would have nearly as much interest including "Scorpion Seductress" in their deck as they do "Bayushi Kachiko."

Yeah but then if design wants to make another basic but mechanically different crab berserker, what do they call him? Crab Berserker 2? Crabby Berserker? Crab Berserkest?

If my memory serves, I think that originally a single personality card was supposed to represent a unit of people in a very real sense of a named hero leading a group of retainers and attendants etc., which is how, say, "one" personality could destroy an entire province. So the suggestion of having cards that are generic groups of soldiers and monks does make sense in that way, but I can't help but feel such a card would lack... ...personality.

They did the "Soul of" mechanic in the past to justify using the cards of characters long dead in the story. It confused new players most of the time, but fit with the idea that most personalities (especially non-unique ones) represented archetypes even as they also represented story characters. That being said, if I have to play with personalities named "Phoenix Yojimbo", "Isawa Water Shugenja", and "Order of Rebirth Monk", that might actually be a deal-breaker for me.