If you are looking for something that really reaches out and engages the community, both new players and experienced one, the should go with something that actually engages the community of players and has a chance to engage people who are not allready interested in the games. Things such as LARPS at conventions, such as the one done at origins. Off Course they do need to make sure people know about these events.

Dare I suggest that it's *good* to have events outside conventions, and using alternate methods of communication (besides "you have to be there in person"), for members of the fanbase who for one reason or another can't attend them? I'm not going to make Origins or GenCon ; they're thousand of miles away. What makes you think the community is more likely to be engaged at a con 90% of the community will be lucky to attend once in a lifetime?

There are different types of fans, and different ways to reach out and engage each of them. For some of them, that proved to be Winter Court. For others it wasn't. The same can be said for any method you can imagine.

Unless you've got serious evidence AEG did Winter courts at the expanse of ideas that would have brought new people in, why even make the claims? It's not like WC prevented the organization of LARPs, since WC happened (surprise!) in the *Winter*, when the major conventions were half a year away anyway.

Dare I suggest that it's *good* to have events outside conventions, and using alternate methods of communication (besides "you have to be there in person"), for members of the fanbase who for one reason or another can't attend them? I'm not going to make Origins or GenCon ; they're thousand of miles away. What makes you think the community is more likely to be engaged at a con 90% of the community will be lucky to attend once in a lifetime?

There are different types of fans, and different ways to reach out and engage each of them. For some of them, that proved to be Winter Court. For others it wasn't. The same can be said for any method you can imagine.

Unless you've got serious evidence AEG did Winter courts at the expanse of ideas that would have brought new people in, why even make the claims? It's not like WC prevented the organization of LARPs, since WC happened (surprise!) in the *Winter*, when the major conventions were half a year away anyway.

You are honestly missing the point here. I was not saying that things outside of conventions are bad and it seems I hit a thread with you. What I am saying is that winter court does not reach a variety of people and is honestly very small and not engaging with the comunity. They could for example do things like gamestore adventure where the results of the adventures of reported back. There are honestly a lot of better ways to get the game more well known than it is now. My point was that winter court does not help with that and you can easily engage multiple types of fans in other ways.

than perhaps the best way of handling it would be offering a few choices for each clan to work towards so that every one was on the same page during such an event. I mean, tourney winners don't get to invent their rewards whole cloth, do they?

I don't think that has to be the case. But I think that players in Winter Court players should be warned that this is likely the case. There is nothing honestly more annoying to people who did not play winter court, for one of a million reasons, to hear them come out of the time and here them arrogantly say how everything is cannon when it will not be the case. One example of something that was cool but would have honestly never come up was the Kitsune Rangers and Rokugani National Parks. Sure it was cannon but it would never have been mentioned again. (If you want to here why this is the case feel free to start a new thread.) Does that really make it cannon? I don't think so, especially now. Though my especially now is related ot an outside event.

What about making it a sort of footnote rather than some sort of super important canon. I'm sure people would love to see flavor text that references their win or their clan's win.

One of the big problems with going to timeline independence in 4th edition is that this was really not possible. In past editions story prizes sometimes got their ownly mention in RPG products. It actually allowed the story team an immense amount of flexability. It also encouraged CCG players to pick up the RPG. Though at the time they did not do endnotes as they had started to do recently with fictions.

Fantasy flight should absolutely do this. Sure people will complain that well now they have to buy the book. Well, honestly, the company has to make money and if encouraging people to buy the book. They could even give the players a copy of the book if they win a tournament or such. It all just works better for the company. I agree with you 100%

Coming in fresh at this topic after 7 pages... but here goes...

I'm not a big fan of most of the L5R story. It started with Clan Wars and never came down, it's gods after gods after armageddons with an apocalypse in between... However, the fact that players made choices and those choices were reflected in cards WAS a good thing. I liked that. The story gave life to characters. Characters with clans, clans who you fight against and for. Clan loyalty was is BIG in L5R.

It's a great thing IMO to see a prize card and reading who/where that story prize was won. Without the story and the story prizes you have a semi-oriental flavoured CCG with too many factions to balance and nightmarish base mechaniqs. I'm not saying everyone who played it was an l5r story buff or only played because of the story prizes... but it is unique and creates clan loyalty and clan loyalty was is a BIG part of L5R.

So, keep the clans (If possible), keep the story going (you must), keep story prizes (In some fashion) and you'll have a community who loves L5R beyond game balance and tournament results.

... What I am saying is that winter court does not reach a variety of people and is honestly very small and not engaging with the comunity. They could for example do things like gamestore adventure where the results of the adventures of reported back. There are honestly a lot of better ways to get the game more well known than it is now. My point was that winter court does not help with that and you can easily engage multiple types of fans in other ways.

I'm not going to disagree with that. Winter Court is not particularly accessible, and would be incredibly daunting for a player new to Rokugan (WCIII was actually my first game of 4e, and I'm sure I annoyed a lot of people by constantly having to ask exactly how things worked, but I'd been invested in the setting for a long time). In addition, the massive amount of time you have to spend on it - if you're going to play it seriously, Winter Court will be your life for those few months, and not everyone can afford to do that, entirely understandably - makes it even harder for a wider audience to access. I doubt AEG was aiming to broaden the audience or give the game more publicity with Winter Court, because it would be a terrible way of doing it, and whatever I might think of AEG, they wouldn't have stayed in business this long if they were that stupid. Rather, Winter Court exists to provide a deep level of immersion for players already very familiar with the setting, and willing and able to put a lot of time and effort into it.

If FFG (or AEG, if they still held the licence, or whoever) decided to run a series of RPG events by which a wider audience could impact the story or setting, even in some minor way, and thereby tried to attract more attention and players, I would be very happy. Rokugan is a wonderful setting, L5R is a wonderful game, and the players are a wonderful community (yes, there are obvious failings in all three cases, but really, we are very lucky), and the more the merrier. I would absolutely not object to RPG events designed to make the game and/or setting more accessible to a wider audience. But it would be something entirely different from Winter Court, and would serve an entirely different purpose. In an ideal world, there would be both.

But I think that players in Winter Court players should be warned that this is likely the case. There is nothing honestly more annoying to people who did not play winter court, for one of a million reasons, to hear them come out of the time and here them arrogantly say how everything is cannon when it will not be the case.

In my experience, at least, we were warned - explicitly and on multiple occasions - that not everything would automatically be canon just because it happened in Winter Court (though there are, of course, differences between 'being explicitly rejected' and 'never being mentioned again', in that the latter at least allows people to continue to include them in their own vision of Rokugan). If people came out saying everything was canon, they were either ignoring clear indications to the contrary, or being deliberately misleading. Moreover, I don't see why this is an argument against Winter Court (or something akin to it)- an argument for improvement, yes, and I'm sure everyone even tangentially related to Winter Court could think of several suggestions of their own, but that doesn't mean Winter Court couldn't or shouldn't still take place.

In my experience, at least, we were warned - explicitly and on multiple occasions - that not everything would automatically be canon just because it happened in Winter Court (though there are, of course, differences between 'being explicitly rejected' and 'never being mentioned again', in that the latter at least allows people to continue to include them in their own vision of Rokugan). If people came out saying everything was canon, they were either ignoring clear indications to the contrary, or being deliberately misleading. Moreover, I don't see why this is an argument against Winter Court (or something akin to it)- an argument for improvement, yes, and I'm sure everyone even tangentially related to Winter Court could think of several suggestions of their own, but that doesn't mean Winter Court couldn't or shouldn't still take place.

Also, what you keep in your own vision of the game is imaterial to cannon. If you as a player want to keep all the events in your world and run in your personal games thats fine, but stuff that is never mentioned again should not be forced into cannon because it just clutters up the mess. From a technical purpose yes maybe it is cannon but so is all the stuff mentioned in the Clan Wars Miniture Game and every once in a while people pull that up that as cannonical. On top of clan Wars you also have the years of back editions of the RPG that frustrate newer players. Do you really want to add more to that mess.

I would not harp on this point if AEG had done more to expand their game. One of the big reasons I mention this is the way people are talking about winter court (and 4th edition in general) as a gift from the kami and if any change occurs they will quit the game. Change will come and FF is a very different company from FF; I would not expect FF to do something like this becuase they have been more focused on makeing decisions that expand their products than appease a small group. I hope to express these reasons so people will keep an open mind about what FF will do and start to think about this change before it comes. Winter court had problems that were fundimental to its inception, I can mention others but this was enough to point out why I believe FF will not even consider doing it.

Coming in fresh at this topic after 7 pages... but here goes...

I'm not a big fan of most of the L5R story. It started with Clan Wars and never came down, it's gods after gods after armageddons with an apocalypse in between... However, the fact that players made choices and those choices were reflected in cards WAS a good thing. I liked that. The story gave life to characters. Characters with clans, clans who you fight against and for. Clan loyalty was is BIG in L5R.

It's a great thing IMO to see a prize card and reading who/where that story prize was won. Without the story and the story prizes you have a semi-oriental flavoured CCG with too many factions to balance and nightmarish base mechaniqs. I'm not saying everyone who played it was an l5r story buff or only played because of the story prizes... but it is unique and creates clan loyalty and clan loyalty was is a BIG part of L5R.

So, keep the clans (If possible), keep the story going (you must), keep story prizes (In some fashion) and you'll have a community who loves L5R beyond game balance and tournament results.

I get your point here, clan loyalty does actually sell a lot of cards. Though I also get why people claim clan loyalty is problematic, or more so that it gives people a reason to whine when you had a difficult to balance situation that the L5R CCG had.

I agree that clan loyalty is an important thing to the game. I also wish though that people would just accept that their clan will not always have a good chance of winning. This is not a reason to stop clan loyalty, that is to stop the whining. Though at the same time the gamerunners do have to investigate if some clans may be overpowered (or underpowered) but most claims of that over years have been overstated.

Coming in fresh at this topic after 7 pages... but here goes...

I'm not a big fan of most of the L5R story. It started with Clan Wars and never came down, it's gods after gods after armageddons with an apocalypse in between... However, the fact that players made choices and those choices were reflected in cards WAS a good thing. I liked that. The story gave life to characters. Characters with clans, clans who you fight against and for. Clan loyalty was is BIG in L5R.

It's a great thing IMO to see a prize card and reading who/where that story prize was won. Without the story and the story prizes you have a semi-oriental flavoured CCG with too many factions to balance and nightmarish base mechaniqs. I'm not saying everyone who played it was an l5r story buff or only played because of the story prizes... but it is unique and creates clan loyalty and clan loyalty was is a BIG part of L5R.

So, keep the clans (If possible), keep the story going (you must), keep story prizes (In some fashion) and you'll have a community who loves L5R beyond game balance and tournament results.

I get your point here, clan loyalty does actually sell a lot of cards. Though I also get why people claim clan loyalty is problematic, or more so that it gives people a reason to whine when you had a difficult to balance situation that the L5R CCG had.

I agree that clan loyalty is an important thing to the game. I also wish though that people would just accept that their clan will not always have a good chance of winning. This is not a reason to stop clan loyalty, that is to stop the whining. Though at the same time the gamerunners do have to investigate if some clans may be overpowered (or underpowered) but most claims of that over years have been overstated.

I can see the loyalty thing being minimized because of the lcg card distribution. With that being said, loyalty should mean something. What this means might be limited to just playing that clan even with other options or whatever prize support will exist.

This is the internet age so I actually expect more whining.

Sorry late to the party but I always like the player involvement in the game and keeping maybe not in the same way that aeg had it. But with a new home new traditions should come. I know some old choices will be keep and some will be lost I just hope that when we move forward that we the people will still be able to make choices.

Someone had posted something in another thread about keeping the card game and rpg plus separate. I think this would be best. Card game tourneys decide things for the card game, winter courts and maybe something added like "fire of war"added for those of us who prefer the Bushi side of things.

Also Pretty late to the party.

My vote would be Yes, however, it should not be the ONLY way for storyline to be affected.

That said, the storlyine prizes for world finals and euros should be the "biggest" decisions imo.

Storyline prizes are fine in certain cases....

"Who is going to strike the deathblow to the big bad?"

"Which of these 4 equally valid candidates will become emperor?"

"Who will take the recently vacated position X?" (Granted, doing this too often led to Imperial Families getting defunct)

Stuff like that is generally fine.

Other good prizes tend to be "Make a personality card for the next edition", but obviously that can't be done too often. But if it results in an extra card in the set that is Shosuro Dejae, Scorpion Clan Musician and Master of Ceremonies.... or, hell, even if it results in a Phoenix Clan Ratling or one Ronin running around the empire calling himself the "Pufferfish Clan Champion" or anything else that can be dismissed as non-canon silliness unless it is proves very thematically consistent and very popular-- it just isn't a problem. One or two silly cards per an expansion set is not going to ruin everything and would be a prize I think a lot of people would seek.

I don't know that I ever saw AEG truly guilty of staking so much on the line that they ended up having to derail a lot of their future plans. The closest might have been at the end of the 4-Winds saga, it seemed like they intended Tsudao to win and instead Naseru did and Tsudao was killed. But even that might have been an issue of "one of them will be killed!" rather than who got to be on the throne.

Also Pretty late to the party.

My vote would be Yes, however, it should not be the ONLY way for storyline to be affected.

That said, the storlyine prizes for world finals and euros should be the "biggest" decisions imo.

Something along these lines. I also agree with those folks who've said that these wins shouldn't be allowed to create silly, disruptive lunacy (see the Pufferfish example in the previous post ).

The RPG folks should be given the opportunity to influence things as well. Some of us simply can't afford to be competitive CCG players, but are heavily invested in the storyline nonetheless. While the LCG format may help with that some, there are still going to be folks that are solely invested RPG players.

At times, the relationship between CCG players and RPG players under AEG was downright antagonistic. Many RPG folks felt neglected and that the CCG storyline wins allowed for lunacy that negatively impacted the setting/story they enjoyed. Allowing multiple ways for folks to impact the storyline would keep that sort of attitude, and the problems it caused, from popping up again.

There should definitely be story effects from tournament play and Winter Courts. This is what makes L5R special. I think that the story team needs to understand what they are doing, and what choices or effects should be available, but these are what drive players to keep playing their chosen clan even when that clan is not the hot new net-deck.

In order to do this right, the story team needs to know the setting and story, and realize when a choice would knock L5R off the rails, and stop it before that happens. Whatever problems came up in the past were not the fault of the players, but those in charge who allowed effects that did not make sense in the L5R setting.

Fighting for your clan rather than personal glory is what makes L5R great (and what makes those that play net-decks for personal glory great villains). If there are no story rewards, then the only reason to play is personal glory. People may have a favourite clan, but playing a weak clan in a tournament with no story rewards would be a waste of time.