Agasha_Kazusinge
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Posts posted by Agasha_Kazusinge
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Getting ready to run the module and I've been taking a final pass through the mechanics to try and get them down.
And I ran into something. As written Wounds are John McClane damage--superficial cuts and bruises that don't do anything telling. Wounds that actually hinder you are Critical Strikes, which don't happen until after your Resistance is overcome and you're unable to fight.
Here's the rub. You're unable to fight. You're not even unconscious. Yet there's no actual narrative reason why you can't fight? It's all still just minor cuts and bruises, right?
So what happens in play? This huge Crab Clan warrior gets smacked around by a smirking Scorpion who sneak attacks him and goes off to go kill his lord in his sleep. The Crab warrior *can't* stop him, but yet he isn't dead. He isn't even unconscious or gravely injured. So...he's okay? No. He can't fight--he just isn't injured beyond, y'know, being defeated.
That feels so game mechanicky I think my players would try to lynch me.
Might I suggest that dropping to zero resistance just means all bets are off and you start taking Critical Strikes, but that you can still act? That the only thing that keeps you from fighting is an actual Critical that keeps you from fighting?
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I thought I'd downloaded the newest version--but I think I might have the first version. It's the one up on Drive Thru RPG, right?
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The Mirumoto family write up for the Dragon Clan makes a big deal of the fact that they get niten and can use two katanas at once. One of my players saw that and flipped out and just thought it was the coolest thing. He immediately picked a Mirumoto.
Then he found out the Dragon don't have a real bushi school and that he had to make an investigator or a monk. He doesn't even get one katana much less two. Worse it seems as though, flipping through the rest of the packet that there's no rules for niten fighting anywhere in the rules as they exist now. Which, I mean, it's a playtest and all--but why mention them in the family write up, get a new player excited and then quash it by not releasing the rules yet?
Is there some way to emulate niten in the meantime? So he has something he can do?
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I agree that the Akodo Commander way outpaces all the others. A lot of the school abilities feel pretty similar and not particularly good or flavorful at this point. It would be nice to see the other abilities get another look to see if they can be reworked so they can rise to meet Akodo levels of awesome.
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Looking over the rules for the effects of different stances the effect you get from Earth Stance seems far better than any of the others. Water lets you take a free move or fiddle with gear and drop two Strife. Fire is a crapshoot--if you get a lot of Sakuras, you get to use them for bonus successes. Air adds +1 to your TN. Void lets you ignore Sakuras. All of these feel pretty balanced against each other if not tremendously evocative of their flavor text (which is great and I wish was reflected more in the mechanics to be honest).
Then there's Earth Stance. It makes you immune to exploding dice used to strike critical hits against you or triggered special abilities that inflict conditions or persistent effects. Wow.
I can't see a reason why any fighter, whether PC or NPC wouldn't use Earth Stance all the time. Am I reading this wrong? It seems like they protect you from just about everything you really want not to happen to you as a character. I wonder if it doesn't remove some of the danger and fun from the game that you can basically adopt a stance that gets rid of criticals and ongoing effects. Still I can't imagine wanting to use any other stance.
What do you folks think?
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I love the advantages and disadvantages they offer. I think they're great. A mechanic for creating custom ones would be awesome mind you, but I think I could make characters forever based on what they have here. Besides pretty much every Question ends with the line: "If you want to create your own ____, consult with your GM using the guidance in Creating Custom Advantages and Disadvantages". So I feel line with it.
I just think the 20 Questions model would be strengthened and the book flipping could be reduced a lot if they consolidated the Distinctions, Passions, Adversities, Anxieties, Allies and Rivals right into the Questions they pertain to.
Suzume Chikahisa and JorArns reacted to this -
So I did a little research this afternoon and was able to dig up how the idea of Outbursts work in real world japanese culture. The results were interesting. I'm not sure if they're particularly helpful.
Tatemae is the word for what you genuinely feel, your true human feelings. It is your 'true sound' as though you were a musical instrument. You are expected to hide that under what's called honne, your guise.
In America we would call this being suave or politic. It's how you are at work, when you're with a customer. A true lapse in honne isn't some dramatic moment where under stress the clouds part and you see a glimpse of the true person within--it's more a moment of social awkwardness that's seen as unhelpful, selfish and childish. There's a social lubricant that everyone uses to smoothly navigate the day and here comes a guy who doesn't have any. Typically if you're being nice, you cover for them. You work extra hard to smooth over the interactions in the way they are failing to. This is you doing them a solid for them not having their crap together and they would be remiss at not being grateful for it.
Thus there's not really a word in japanese for what we want Outburst to mean--because real honne doesn't work like that. The actual words for outburst are boppatsu (something that happens suddenly), gekihatsu (when something flares up or spasms, like a sore knee) or bakuhatsu (when something explodes in an unexpected, damaging way--like a bomb). None of these are really things that describe people and I think in japanese were you to try to use bakuhatsu to describe a breech of civility they would think you didn't speak very good japanese.
Words that do seem to describe what we're looking for are more like:
Haji: embarrassment, chagrin, humiliation, disgrace, scandal, shame, mortification (this is the most common one used to describe a breech of honne ettiquette)
Samoshī: mean, selfish or self-centered
Wagamama: disobedience, brattiness, self-indulgeant
See how there's not much romanticizing going on here?
I thought maybe something like a word for nervous breakdown might help get us to where we want to go. It certainly seems like what's going on with a samurai who under the weight of too much Strife, just can't take it anymore. There's Shinkei Suijaku, but that seems to be a clinical term that doesn't have the informal conversational sense I think we're looking for.
There is a phenomenon in modern japan of kids snapping under the pressure of japanese society and becoming teenage shut ins called hikikomori. They don't break it down that I can find but hiki means to carry, ko means young or little, and mori means forest--children getting carried off into the forest?
https://alumni.berkeley.edu/california-magazine/september-october-2006-global-warning/japans-nervous-breakdown Here's an article about the phenomenon.
Shinkei suijak
Shinkei suijaku
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I would imagine (not based on the rules in any book, just going on common sense) that the leaders of a family at court can raise up vassal families to serve them. Clan daimyos create clan families in the exact same way. The Emperor creates clans in exactly the same way. What they're called is just a matter of which tier of the feudal structure you're talking about. There's political consequences for all of this, of course, which is why it doesn't happen all the time. The more vassal families, clan families, and clans, the less attention and resources there are to go around--so for every new one, everyone gets less once they divvy up what there is.
Less attention means less opportunity for glory. Less resources means poorer arms and armor, less magical research, less funding for works of art and literature. New groups tend to capture the eye of court, which means the established ones have a tendency toward resentment.
A good way to think about it is a family with a ton of kids who decide to have another. What does this mean for the other kids?
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I really enjoy Outburst. It feels like common use english rather than gamey jargon and it's evocative of what it is--emotion built up to a breaking point where you can't help it anymore and something slips out. You cry or you smile or you laugh. That seems pretty straightforward.
Oh and awesome!
That this is the central focus of the game; a game with magic and gods and zombies and kung fu.
That the central focus is on the human drama of these people shouldering responsibilities that are so all pervasive and huge that they are supposed to literally negate who they are as human beings--and the impossibility of carrying around that kind of burden without your emotions suddenly and uncontrollably manifesting in startling ways.
I love that so much.
blut_und_glas reacted to this -
This is the first time that Fantasy Flight has introduced funny dice to a game and I've been genuinely this excited about it. The dice are easy to read--basically nothing, success, success and a reroll to maybe get another success and a sakura blossom that represents some internal conflict sparked in your character from the situation which pushes him closer to emoting true feelings--which is the bane of any samurai.
I love this so hard.
That and I love the idea that you're not looking at endless situations where you succeed at a roll but something bad happens, or you fail at a roll but something good happens. All that random weirdness made it hard to tell a consistent story--things kept veering off into madcap Keystone Cops territory.
Plus some of the other symbols were so obscure I couldn't even tell if they were good or bad things, much less what they meant. I always had to keep a cheatsheet on hand. This? Super easy.
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I love that idea about a drinking contest as an intrigue challenge. That the folks involved are all getting less and less in control of themselves and its about who lets compromising information slip first. Everyone involved keeps drinking in the hopes that they'll get some information out of the other people at the table, but each round it's just as likely that they'll be the one who ends up blabbing something they shouldn't or being more forthright with their opinions than is wise and maybe end up getting blackmailed.
That just feels like an incredibly dramatic way to run it.
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Thinking back, yeah it does seem like it was easier to deal with in previous editions. You were looking at the spread for your clan, and there's the schools and families in with your starting gear. I think it made it easier to grasp. It still made it a hard game to run, keeping all the family names straight--and truth be told, I still am not 100% sure we need families to be in the game as prominently as they are now, or at least not ALL of them. But it feels like a sacred cow to folks so I understand that.
But yeah, I agree with you. I think just tweaking the organization would clear up the problem for the most part.
I'd be happy if there was a way to do that without divorcing character creation from the 20 Questions...but I'm not sure you can.
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It seems like a bit of an odd decision to me to build character creation around the 20 Questions model and then have the answers to most of the last half of those questions involve flipping back and forth to the Advantages/Disadvantages sections that correspond to each question.
In previous editions Advantages and Disadvantages were optional rules that used a point buy system so it made sense for them to be off on their own. But when you ask a question like #11 "What activity makes your character feel at peace?" and then direct them off to a subsection of Advantages called Passions on page 77--you could easily just rewrite most of those Passions as a bulleted list right there in the text of the question.
The same with Distinctions and Question #9, Adversities and Question #10, Anxieties and Question #12. #13 "Who has your character learned the most from during their life" feels like a great chance to bake the idea of Allies and Rivals right into the fabric of the game so everyone starts with one. I would love that.
In fact it seems like the strongest Questions, the ones where the answers feel most satisfying to me, are the ones where the output is in the form of an Advantage or Disadvantage you get. They're super flavorful and the mechanics feel heftier and more important than a +1 in a skill or a Ring. Other than the big central choices of Clan, Family, School and Giri I would sort of love if all the rest of the questions gave you something like an Advantage or Disadvantage. I really love them.
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I think that would help a lot. The further into character creation and the more gelled the idea of who the character is in the player's mind, the harder I think it will be to throw them.
Maybe it's as simple as your guys' idea of just shifting the family material into the section on clan. Simple, but I think it could really help.
It does sort of mess up the whole 20 Questions theme the new edition is trying to weave character creation around (which would be a shame, because I like it a lot) but I really think it would do a lot to fix this complexity issue.
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I like the idea that much like minor clan that there's a concept of minor family and minor school where basically you have a block of potential bonuses that aren't as good as the major versions, but you get to customize your own and name it. I like the idea that you can be dressed in dragon colors and introduce yourself as Hagiwara Yota from the Chiben Spearmaster Bushi School. And everyone is like WHAT...
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With regard to the issue of schools for the different clans, I do feel like it's more interesting to have something like: "Clan A monks are like this" rather than "Clan A doesn't have monks, play a Dragon." Same with courtiers or what have you. We'll get there though.
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And yeah I think these are great ideas. Honestly if it was just a matter of home games I would probably just implement my idea of cutting families and just let people choose between using the Great Clans and Families or else make their own minor ones. I just like that. It breathes some fresh air into a very rigid and developed setting. Plus it feels like a nice subtle protest to this being a setting where so much is being cut anyway.
This being a playtest though I've been resisting that impulse to homebrew. I've been trying to play things pretty much by the packet exactly as written. The tough part is that might mean my group may not go for it and then I'm sidelined for the playtest.
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And you know, it might be different if it was in a book with all the art and everything all prettied up. I just saw that families section and got really worried. The other thing is, having tried to pitch L5R to my game group, none of whom have ever played L5R their opinion has been "that game is super complicated. It's ton of weird names that don't make any sense to me."
When I look at that complaint, what I see is families. It's not the clans that have the weird names. It's not the courtier/samurai/ninja/monk/shugenja thing. It's the five families per clan thing.
And looking at the playtest packet with just reams of names for most of a chapter and what so-and-so family does for their Clan. I can't say I disagree.
But strangely that seems very much in the minority here.
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So you'd think, if you're in the "it's better to have it and not need it" that you'd want to keep all the history and lore from the old edition and then choose what you want to use...
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I feel like there's this weird dichotomy here:
On one hand overwhelmingly it feels like folks favor the reboot of the timeline. The battle cry here is "clean it up for the new players, there's decades of lore out there and it's going to freak them out!"
On the other hand when talking about character creation for a game that we're talking about streamlining so new players can get into it, (which is getting timeline rebooted anyway so it's not like the families have stories to preserve) all of a sudden the battle cry switches completely around and it becomes "don't dumb down my L5R--if new players don't like it they can just play something else"
That's interesting to me.
I would imagine that one of the key benefits of trimming all the fat off L5R and taking it back to the beginning would be to remove complexity. But it doesn't seem like that's the case at all. It seems like people overwhelmingly want a game that's so complex that it can't all fit into a single beta test version. Like they aren't mad that there aren't a bajillion minor clans and schools because it's the playtest--but feel pretty ironclad that they better all be in the core book!
I would have imagined the pressure would have been totally the other way--that the world had gotten too big, all the details too filled in, that people would want more control to shape the details of the world so it isn't such a beast to try and run.
I sort of wonder if people have an underlying reason for why they want to keep what they want to keep and cut what they want to cut or if it's just entirely whim. It certainly seems that way--it doesn't seem like there's any reason to it. Yet at the same time there seems to be a clear consensus.
It's odd.
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I'm an old hand at L5R and even I have a hard time wading through all the families. Are we worried at all that new people are going to see a text wall of Hirumas and Kakitas and Kitsukes and Kitsu and Shibas and Soshis and Shinjos and just turn off?
I get the Clans. There's seven of them. Geographically they're distinct and they're based on animals that have a strong tie with the theme of the clan. That feels like a nice number, enough for variety so you don't feel like after making a character or two you've burned through your options but not so many that you get intimidated.
Schools likewise are pretty manageable. Two for each clan. They're distinct. They focus on different things. That works.
There are 29 different families.
That's a lot.
To make things somewhat worse, a lot of the names of the families are confusingly similar. That and there's no real conceptual framework that ties a particular fantasy Japanese name to the theme of that family. It's a lot.
I wonder if it wouldn't be better to take the main Kami-run family for each clan and maybe the second most powerful and stat those up--then just have a nice satisfyingly ample mechanic for creating your own minor families. That way folks who have a family from the old lore or the fiction and want to represent them in their game can pretty easily build them, but folks who are new to the game don't get scared off.
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So I came to L5R later than some folks. I got told continually how terrible the storyline was and how Clan War was supposed to be so much better. From my point of view the storyline seemed to have unfolded pretty naturally from the story threads that had been introduced. I didn't get the feeling that it was moronic. I genuinely enjoyed all of it. My friends, for the most part old school Clan War guys, hated this.
I'm sure that you could just continue the story from where it left off without stepping on any toes. I think most folks would have just been happy to see the Great Clans fight their way back out of exile and oust the Spider Clan. So long as what was left was a stable and recognizable Rokugan I seriously doubt anyone would have had any problems with how it happened. Personally I find scribbling out decades of story to be more "toe-stepping" than any new direction they could have taken the story.
The funny thing here, for me, is your second point. I feel like cutting out all the baggage of twenty years of storyline could have created the kind of clean slate you're talking about. And if that's what looked to be what was going on I would have been all for it: pare down on the families, named NPCs, towns, forests, rivers. L5R has long suffered as the setting where you could walk down a road and practically every branch of every tree will have been detailed, given stats and a proper name. How cool would it have been if this version of the game presented a world where the map gave you maybe named regions, but with enough blank space that you can make your own towns, villages and NPCs to your heart's content. Imagine if each clan had the main Kami-descended family and maybe the second most powerful family, but that's it--all the other families are minor ones that you're allowed to make yourself! Or same with minor clans, that you're encouraged to introduce your own minor clans rather than have to use the dozen or so from the various eras and editions from the past.
As much as I like the old history and how it was generated organically by the players themselves as the various tournaments results got woven into the setting's ongoing story--man I would love it if they rebooted it so they could make it simple and accessible like that.
No chance though. Everything I've seen tells me this game is going to be as packed with minutiae as any edition of L5R. They're wiping the slate clean with one hand, sure, but only so they can junk it up again with the other.
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Anything that makes combat in L5R quick, bloody and brutal meets with my approval. I just made a Lion Clan samurai for the playtest. The idea that the Lion "lives three feet from death" needs to be a real thing.
I'm not sure how I feel about "living three feet from a couple of painful wounds, and maybe another one that might leave a scar, and then another one that makes me feel woozy, and then I'm unconscious and unable to be damaged more because my poor character might die...boo."
Samurai are about meditating on their death at all times. Serving their Emperor. Dying for their Empire. Refer all questions to Question 20.
Tashiro and GhostSanta reacted to this -
I think the idea of creating a whole genealogy for characters would be fun, but there's a couple of concerns. The character is going to be getting a skill or other boost from each ancestor--the more they roll up, the more free stuff they get. The other thing is going by the table any ancestor you get is going to be some storied legendary samurai of lore who did some great thing that is remembered in the modern day. I can see most Great Clan samurai having someone like that somewhere in their past--or at least being able to make up a legend about one if they need to. But more than that? Is everyone in this samurai's family famous and awesome? If another chart was made that allowed ancestors who ran the full range of reputations from sad failures and traitors through average samurai of minor note with a chance at having one that was known for something awesome, I'd feel a lot better about that being something players could roll on multiple times.
Does Niten Even Exist in This Version of the Rules?
in Rules Questions
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Where do you go to get those? I've had a hard time finding the update packets.