KillingGoblinBabiesIsDishonorable
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Posts posted by KillingGoblinBabiesIsDishonorable
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1 minute ago, Exarkfr said:We are talking about investigation, which means stuff that will happen. Not people attempting impossible things.
Would you let a player use Recall / Medicine on a pool of blood to see where the footprints are leading ?
I will let him roll, and hopefully while he's preparing his dice for inevitable failure one of the other players asks to survey/survival to actually have a chance. The way I see it is it's not the DM's job to tell the player what to try and do. A player tells the DM what he's trying to do, and the DM tells him what happens as a result of trying to do it. If someone said, "I want to recollect deeply on my medical studies and research in hopes of remembering where these bloody footprints go", then I as DM am obligated to say, "Okay, that would be a recall / medicine roll, you can try if you want."
Best case scenario he successfully recollects his medical studies about blood and is no closer to following bloody footprints. Worst case scenario he can't even properly remember his medical studies and is still no closer to following bloody footprints. It's a strange world one lives in where no one ever has bad ideas or tries something impossible because the magic voice in the sky/their heads tells them the TN is too high, or that combination of skills can't possibly achieve that result. -
15 minutes ago, Exarkfr said:The main problem I have with that is: if you can let anyone use nearly any skill with their best Ring, why bother with all the system ?
It looks like, in the end, every one is a Kitsuki.Just remove the investigation part, give the players all the info they need, and move on trying to catch the culprit.
I always end up finding that this system is either too complex, or not enough.
It's a matter of letting them try not letting them succeed. You can try to jump 100 feet in the air from a standing position. You can roll for it and everything, but it doesn't mean it's going to happen
19 minutes ago, AtoMaki said:This example is bad because the player must get his intent (find the murder weapon) with the success, regardless of the Approach used. So if the player uses Theorize to find a clue, and he succeeds, then he will find a perfectly usable clue with the Theorize Approach. Maybe not the murder weapon, but a possible suspect or a motive.
That's the realm of opportunities. Failing to find what you were looking for but finding something else of value is textbook opportunity usage. If you're using fire ring to theorize where something could be, that's your intent. During a fight you want to kill your opponent, but your roll isn't a roll to kill the opponent, it's a roll to attack in hopes of killing the opponent, just like a roll to theorize a solution is a roll to craft a theory in hopes that it will provide you with something, it isn't a roll to get the thing. With success you successfully come up with a theory, as you were intending to do. It doesn't have to be a fruitful or correct theory in any way, and if you would always give the player something worth while for any roll they do that's just you being very generous as a DM.
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2 hours ago, Exarkfr said:Might be a problem with me, but as a GM, I would not let someone attempt an approach that makes little sense just because it's their best ring.
I'll let 'em. My approach is to let anyone try anything, go ahead and give it a roll! 2 successes? You theorize that you might find the murder weapon tucked behind the armoire. Oh you check? It's not there. Afterall, it was only a theory. Meanwhile the guy who gets 2 successes using his eyeballs to just survey the scene notices the lamp over there is covered in blood!
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22 minutes ago, Doji Meshou said:..()
- Go with what's there: Mirumoto Niten School.
- Play with its mystical orientation: Mirumoto Adept School.
- Play with its wandering-swordsperson aspect: Mirumoto Wanderer School.
- Emphasize its relationship with the Kakita: Mirumoto Duelist School.
..()
"Mirumoto Honor and Soul as One; Blade Chasing Blade Just as Lady Sun and Lord Moon Danced Together in the Heavens... School"
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16 hours ago, Doji Meshou said:To each their own. My beef is ultimately that I don't think conflicts are very interesting when they're (1) primarily determined by character stats or (2) primarily determined by dice rolls. It's why I don't and won't use the Intrigue rules, for example.
I can +1 this. I think that there could be more tweaking to the balance of duels, In my experience the optimal approach is actually to just spam strike and never use center. Provoke is just terrible, too. I like the concept, but there's some refinement to be done there, I believe.
I've also turned to using intrigues as a guideline more than anything and it seems to work well. I have the players make a case, actually debate their point, and then adjust the TN based on how good of an argument it was. A bit of skill, a bit of luck, and if they're using an npc's preferred approach there's a high chance that a good argument just auto-succeeds and hands them the point. If they give such a good argument I can't think of a way to retort on the NPC's round, they immediately gain 1 or 2 bonus points and the intrigue usually ends either right then, or after just a bit more coaxing if it's a task with real stakes and high threshold. -
On 11/9/2017 at 6:00 PM, FFG Max Brooke said:Greetings L5R Testers!
This week, our discussion topic is Intrigues and Duels! These are major ways of settling disputes in L5R, and thus we want to hear about your experiences with them!
•Have you run an intrigue or duel? If so, who were the participants?
•How long did the intrigue/duel take to resolve (how many rounds and how many minutes)?
•In your ideal L5R campaign, how often would you want to be undertaking either of these activities?
•Have you run into any points of confusion in intrigues/duels?
•I've run both duels and intrigues multiple times each. All of my players have dueled and intrigued against both each other and npcs.
•The longest duel was probably a bit over 3 minutes where as the average intrigue was the same, 3-5 minutes, though they were meant to be fast-paced and had low point requirements (3-5) and had back and forth RP between each roll to determine the TN.
•True duels should be something to be avoided, unless you have a death wish. Intrigues arn't bad, but i'll probably stray away from using them too often, only when the situation feels appropriate. Alot of social interaction can just be single roll or rp'd out.
•At first I was adding the +2 from two handing a katana after doubling the deadliness, instead of considering it deadliness 7 before the doubling when it came to finishing blows. Needless to say quite a few people got off lucky during the first session until I realized my mistake. Other than that, it all seems about right.
I wish there was an action like the opposite of a calming breath, a provocation action that gave someone +1 strife or something. Finishing blows make duels really interesting and tense, but not when both duelists just take water stance and use calming breath+opportunities to grind away strife every turn. At that point it's just a 1 on 1 skirmish with no range rules. -
On 11/2/2017 at 11:28 AM, FFG Max Brooke said:..()
•Searching without knowing what you're searching for is tough sometimes. I tend to make it based on location. If you're searching the woods, survival, if you're searching a blacksmith shop, smithing. If you know what's supposed to be there, you can usually tell if something's amiss, right?
•Nope they all seem pretty straight forward, even if I keep calling courtesy sincerity on reflex.
•We've only ever brought up advantages/disadvantages in seemingly the worst time. "Hey..Wouldn't your illness prevent you from running away from that wolf like that?" Would like to bring them up more in the next sessions, though.
•Hero of the People, Prodigy, Great Potential, Inner Gift, Gaijin Gear. For disadvantages, Black Sheep, Consumed (The Shourido), Hostage, Lost Love, True Love,
•Not really. Daredevil makes me a bit apprehensive since I don't want someone to be able to use it every single round of combat (after all fighting is risking your life!), a daredevil duelist would be insane if that were the case, but none that I have actually had trouble with yet. -
3 hours ago, Drudenfusz said:..()
I kind of hope your interpretation is wrong purely because I don't want to think that the dev's believed that a system in which you could move 3 units closer to something 5 units away and still have it be 5 units away when the units did not change was an intuitive system that need not further explanation.
rcuhljr and TheVeteranSergeant reacted to this -
57 minutes ago, jmoschner said:Range bands are not linear so 4 minus 3 doesn't always equal 1.
How do you propose? What in the book indicated that range bands "aren't linear" and that 4-3 doesn't always = 1? Range bands are a measure of distance between two points. If you move one range band closer, you're decreasing the range between you and the second point by 1. What leads you to believe that doesn't translate to 4 range band difference turning into 3 range band difference?
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15 minutes ago, jmoschner said:..()
The system isn't intuitive and isn't easy for a lot of people to visualize. The devs need to clarify and need to add illustrations for various scenarios.The way the system works, it is possible to start within range 4 from a target, move 3 range bands toward the target and still be within range 4 of the target because bands 4+ are so much larger. Unless a character makes the roll to move 4 bands in one turn, they could end up taking 9 or more turns to reach the target.
..()How? If I move one from standard, one from manuever, one from water and one from an opportunity on my manuever roll, whether I add that up and say "I move 4 bands closer to band 5, 5-4=1, i'm in range 1." or "I move 1 band closer, now he's in range 4. I move another closer, now im range 3. I move another closer, now i'm range 2. I move another closer, now i'm range 1." it comes out to one either way. There is nothing in the rules that dictates you could ever move 3 range bands towards a target and end up in the same range band as you started unless you're purposefully going forward and back for some reason.
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4 minutes ago, Exarkfr said:I... was making fun of the system.
The rules never explains how you are supposed to move, and range bands are only defined as "distance between 2 things handled abstractly".
How are you supposed to handle every thing else in the scene, if all you ever do is "change your relative distance to 1 other thing"
This all breaks when more than 2 things have to be tracked, as your "3 Samurai problem" showed.If you track 3 points (your scenario), it fails.
If you track only a pair of points (my "extreme" scenarios), it fails.
If you use yourself as the reference when moving (thus not really using range bands, but discrete movement), it fails too.Whew. Is it bad that I really thought "You're trying to move relative to two things at the same time. Of course it breaks the system." to be someone's sincere attempt at a defense? Probably because it's not the worst one i've seen so far...
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2 hours ago, Exarkfr said:But... you're trying to move relative to two things at the same time.
Of course it breaks the system.What you should be doing is either:
- move away from your friends, but not closer to the enemy. Not very useful.
- move closer to the enemy, but not farther from your friends. Much better, as it lets you face the enemy while allowing your friends to Guard you.Unless samurai have access to the Spice Melange, and are in fact Navigators, with "the ability to fold space. That is travel to any part of the universe, without moving."
How does one go about moving closer to the enemy without moving farther away from your friend if your friend is right next to where you were before you moved and isn't moving? If an enemy bushi is standing range 1 from his two friends and then charges 4 range bands towards you, are all of his friends still range 1 from him? Are they all range 1 from YOU now too? Is there a celestial belt tying their waists together, or does he exist in two places at once?
36 minutes ago, mortthepirate said:But this is abstracted for ease of use, not accuracy. Your looking at a hammer and getting mad it's not a screwdriver. Near, far, really far, and too far to matter. That's all that really matters. Lots of really good games use range bands (or abstract zones) rather than any kind of accurate movement tracking.
Come to think of it movement rates are kind of like exuberance rules: you either think they are really important or are a huge waste of time. There are lots of people in the second camp.
I'm looking at a hammer and wondering why it's not a screwdriver because it's labelled as "screwdriver" in the box. I'm not making up faults or going out of my way to find little loopholes to complain about, I'm taking the exact rules exactly as they are printed and using them, and these are the kinds of problems that arise. If you feel comfortable hand-waving them away and saying "don't think too hard about it" then that's fine, more power to you, but that doesn't change the fact that, as written, movement involves bending space and time around you every time you take a step. If they wanted it to be abstract they shouldn't have defined the exact ranges, and if they wanted accuracy they shouldn't have made it so abstract. It's like they wanted both and got neither.
Yoritomo Kazuto reacted to this -
2 hours ago, Yandia said:I think you are refering to "To move a distance of range 6 or farther, a character must generally undertake a journey in narrative time."
So you can argue that moving is to or from range band 6 is not allowed by the normal move one range band thing, because it takes narrative time to get there.
Two problems with that:
1. From 5 to 3 is still 400m to 10 m, which is on a round length of 15s about 26 m/s. That is a fast moving car (100km/h or 60miles/h), but we are not breaking the sound barrier.
2. The 3 samurai problem:
Kakita A is 400m from Doji B, who is attacked by Tsuruchi C further down the line (also 400m). Kakita A tries to reach Doji B to protect him, so she moves up to 10m close from range band 5 to range band 3. From Tsuruchi C perspective Kakita A is in Range band 6 and should not be able to join the fight, but after her turn she is now in range band ... and here I really have problems. Still in 6 because she can't move closer? Is she in 5 because she is now roughly in the same spot as Doji B, or is she in range band 4 because she was in range band 6 before and moved 2 range bands and is now closer to Tsuruchi C in terms of range bands dispite being further away in terms of meter?
The range band system looks good on paper, but as soon as you really want to apply the rules they break appart. The range band rules are only good as long as you ignore any movement rules and handle movement narratively (which I would not have a problem with, but that is not what is written in the book because for some reason you can move 2 range bands).
My favorite 3 Samurai problem:
You and your friend are hugging (Range band 0), an arrow whizzes by your head from range 5! You cannot let this stand! Entering water you simple manuever one range closer, range 1 from your friend, range 4 from your enemy. Then you take your once per round move, Range 2 from your friend, range 3 from your enemy. You are now 4 meters from your friend, and 10 meters from the enemy, *even though your friend and the enemy are 400 meters away from each other still*...Not to mention you're now 390 meters closer to the enemy, by moving 4 meters away from your stationary friend...Truly a samurai's greatest ability is to bend space around them, I don't know why that's not brought up more often in the narrative... -
30 minutes ago, Lindhrive said:Ah, fair enough! I think I may not have brought across what I was trying to say, though...
Given the profound effect that the nastier scars have on many characters and their concepts, are people finding that bits are flying off of bushi too readily, as the hits stack up? Death, at least, is clean and has closure - figuring out what to do when your character's got no hands left is a bit more awkward.
I mainly ask because when my local group played Warhammer Fantasy, we were reduced to about seventy-five per cent of our total limbs and sensory organs just a few sessions in - we didn't actually find it to be a great deal of fun, and that's a game where you're supposed to get maimed and die in an amusing way.
In our very first session one of the PC's got a maimed arm and the other permanent brain damage. It was a few days later I realized all those critical hits that were temporary wounds should have been much worse, as I wasn't adding the two-handed weapon bonus properly. All in all, yea, limbs go flying off, so you'd almost rather get hit with Dying (3 turns) than "Where'd my leg go."
"I would like to keep this single blank die for my fitness test."
"But you can keep four.."
"I choose to just keep the one. By the way, can one of you guys come heal me?" -
1 hour ago, AK_Aramis said:You can, however, recall prior hotel rooms, and what you've found there. A room in an inn is pretty much similar to any other room in an inn.
Plus, it's explicitly allowed to use any ring..
So you walk into a hotel room and roll recall. "I recall that hotel rooms had things in them." What good does that do you? Without an accompanying survey check to see what among that list of things you recall were in your last hotel are missing from this one you're not going to note that this room doesn't have tiny shampoo. And even if you do, what then? "Hmm, Usually there would be a bucket in the bathroom for rinsing yourself off after you soap up.." tells you you're missing a bucket, it won't tell you the bucket is hidden under the sofa.
You can use any ring for any skill, Yes, it does explicitly say that. However, every ring does different things. You can use earth with composition, and you can use air with composition, but the results of those checks are not going to be the same, even though they're the same skill. If you're after a specific result, then you have to pick the specific ring (or rings in some cases) that will give you that specific result.Yoritomo Kazuto reacted to this -
16 minutes ago, Magnus Grendel said:..()
- It gives you an excuse to trigger your ambidextrous distinction*
*
"You don't seem concerned."
"That's because I know something you do not."
"What's that?"
"I...am not left-handed." [swaps grip]
I asked my DM after our last session if I could wield my Chokuto in exclusively my left hand and get ambidextrous bonus on every attack because i'm using my offhand. His bewildered silence leads me to believe that's not the case.
Regardless, I for one am kind of glad that the Katana isn't the end all be all greatest weapon. Your sword in war-times is supposed to be a sidearm to a better weapon, like a polearm or zanbatou if you're feeling particularly shonen. Staves doing gratuitous amounts of damage aside, It was always my assumption that the trade off was if you walk into a town with a Katana on your waist no one bats an eye but if you walk into a (non-crab) town with a otsuchi slung over your shoulder or armor strapped to your chest that you were going to be assumed a hostile invader and met accordingly. Why would you wear war gear into town if you weren't going to war with them, after all. Swords are good for what they're meant for, the ceremonial duel, they are a ceremonial weapon, more symbolic than practical on a battlefield. Not to say you can't be the cult-of-swords guy who charges at the army with just his grandfathers blade, but you better be a supremely skilled swordsman, because being poked to death by a naginata or bashed away by a tetsubo is much more likely an end result, and for good reason. -
8 hours ago, AK_Aramis said:No - since any ring can explicitly be used, albeit at higher difficulty - I can recall where things were in any similar space. May be harder, but by the RAW and the AAW, it's a valid approach.
Theorize, same thing. It can be used to find it. As in, "It should be here" and actually pulling it out is then TN0.
for it to wind up under there, either it was kicked, or it was falling off of him as he came in. One can find the scratches it would have left in the floor and follow them
And again, the GM doesn't get to reject an approach, only to penalize it with a high TN.
Again, you're ignoring that void is explicitly allowed to find that thing, AAW. Perhaps the Kansen make it rattle, or a bug skitters to it, but RAW & AAW, I can use void to find it.
Note, even if the GM is being a ****, in this edition, I can still help him, by direction, and thus participate in the roll, and NPC rolls are not expected to be hidden, as players have a chance to interfere by activating the NPC's disads.
As for Fitness - finding the object is TN0 if it's exposed to direct view. Fitness in all modes is a way to put it into plain view... and thus make it TN0.
Page 91 of the Beta Rulebook
"However, because it can only build upon a solid foundation, a character cannot Recall information about something completely novel or unfamiliar, and they must use other approaches to gather enough context to know which facts are relevant to the situation at hand."
You cannot recall that something you don't know exists is under a sofa. You don't know it exists. It's pretty clear that you're supposed to HAVE to use multiple different ring approaches throughout your game to achieve different results. If you want people to be able to use the Refine approach of your air ring to forge a suit of armor from scratch that's your prerogative as the DM, but the intention of the game is clearly to make you use fire ring invent approach for that task.Yoritomo Kazuto and Magnus Grendel reacted to this -
Another thing to note on the "why wouldn't I just us my best ring all the time" that no one seems to be pointing out is that, for most skill checks you literally cannot achieve a result with any ring. Any ring can be used to attack, but not every ring can be used to paint a picture or craft a blade. If you're not using fire ring you cannot smith a new katana into existence, just like if you can't try to repair that same katana by bashing on it in a passionate frenzy. Both of those things are "Smithing" checks, yes, but it's more like every SPECIFIC ACTION is assigned a default ring, not every specific skill. Honing a blade is an action using the smithing skill and the air ring. If you want to hone a blade, you use those things, just like in 4th ed if you wanted to swing a sword you used kenjutsu and agility.
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When range bands are left as abstract distances "This is the distance you shoot a bow, or whatever", I didn't really mind it. However, when you look at the actual ranges given the range bands some..really weird issues start to arrise.
(Page 166.)
Range 1 = 1-2 Meters
Range 2 = 3-4 Meters
Range 3 = 5-10 Meters
Range 4 = 12-100 Meters
Range 5 = 100-Hundred(s) of Meters
Range 6 = Hundred(s) to Thousand(s) of Meters
The exponential nature of the range bands disturbs me because(correct me if i'm wrong) there doesn't appear to be an exponential difficulty in travelling that number of range bands in a single turn. A man is at my range 5, lobbing arrows at me, the maximum effective range of his bow. I see this, and I say, "I can't let this stand."
Entering water stance, with a water 4 and fitness 1, I can immediately move one range band, I have traveled 1-2 meters, then take the movement action and immediately move another range band, I have traveled 4-6 meters, but i'll roll for this test aswell.
Assuming on 5k4, across any exploding or not, I can get 2 successes and 2 opportunities, thats +1 movement range from the successes, I have now traveled 9-16 meters, and then +2 movement range from the 2 opportunities (Table 3-19 Page 98) I have now ran hundreds of meters, potentially a thousand feet depending on how many hundreds, all before this guy could notch another arrow and take another shot?
Not to mention, if I then use my water stance bonus action to take another standard move and move an additional range band, putting me into 6, I have become swift wind and blow past this archer, traveled miles in the span of a single turn...But would still be within range 1 of the guy I just ran kilometers away from, even though range band 1 is supposed to be only 1-2 meters? -
Before the update strife only went away after the scene in which you had an outburst, because of this, you could keep gaining strife and it didn't really impact anything. However, with the new unmasking rules, a strange situation now appears. If you become compromised and unmask, you immediately lose all your strife and begin unmasking until the end of the scene. Right. But there's nothing that says you don't regain strife while unmasking. One could argue that if you're already pouring your emotions out, you're not bottling them anymore and you shouldn't gain strife, but that's where the clarification would be appreciated.
If you keep gaining strife while unmasked, you could quickly hit your composure limit and become compromised again, this time with no way to unmask and wipe it clean, which would be an incredibly bad situation to be in. -
We playtested on saturday and one of the players died in the first session because he got shot by an arrow with a 4k2 dice pool. Another nearly had his arm ripped off by a bokken in a pretend duel in the very first round, with a 4k3 dice pool. Guy would have died if it was a real fight with real weapons. Game seems plenty deadly enough as is. Competitively just as deadly as standard 4e in my experiences, perhaps more-so because the lack of wound penalties means if you don't put that guy down with your single hit, chances are he's going to put you down instead, where as in 4e you knew the TN penalty even if he survived the first attack was going to be so huge he had no chance.
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For effects such as the earth opportunity "remove one strife from a character in the scene per opportunity spent" or similar, does the player using the ability count as one of the characters in the scene that can be targeted? It seems like it would just be a better version of the water opportunity in that case.
Beta Rules Update v2.0 and Preview Material
in Legend of the Five Rings Roleplaying Game Beta
Posted
This is boiling down to the semantics of what an action consists of. An Attack roll to swing your sword at a man and hit him. To me, the action is swinging your sword to hit the man. Nothing should stop your character from trying to hit that man. Doing damage, however, is a lateral result of that action, not that action itself. You cannot take an action to "kill this guy", just like you can't take an action to "Find this thing." You can take an action that you hope results in that. I would say that the action you are taking is remembering, theorizing, or surveying. That is what your character hopes to achieve, they hope to remember something, come up with a theory, or scan an area. As a result of that action, they hope to find insight in the investigation, but just like it's possible to land an attack and not do damage, it's possible to come up with a theory or completely survey an area and not achieve anything from it beyond the success of trying.
I guess it's all personal preference on how you care to read it. I interpret it that way because I want a world where characters try impossible tasks, It's strange to me that individuals would only ever pursue avenues they had a chance of success in, just based on celestial intuition of divine meta intervention. If your character attempts something stupid, they are attempting something stupid, people attempt stupid things all the time, and if you just say "no you can't even try because it's stupid" then you're creating a world where the PC's, in universe don't have that flaw as people.
Rokugan your way and all that.