STILL BETTER 

"Mirumoto Honor and Soul as One; Blade Chasing Blade Just as Lady Sun and Lord Moon Danced Together in the Heavens... School"

"Mirumoto Honor and Soul as One; Blade Chasing Blade Just as Lady Sun and Lord Moon Danced Together in the Heavens... School"

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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?
 
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.

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.

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...

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...

Independent from the fact how much the combat matters in this game, the rules for it and every otehr conflict that can come up should still be crisp and good. Just because it might matter less is not a reason to write up bad rules for it. 

That said I don´t really see a problem with the movement as in "The land of the magical Samurai" called Rokugan it is not that much of a deal to move like that.
You also can do the reasonable thing and just ignore the messurements given as example and just say rangeband 5 is range 6 and thats it so when you move 2 range bands you move a range of 2 but than
stop there and don´t translate it into  meter.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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?