6 minutes ago, Suzume Tomonori said:

I think the jusification would be something like the followers being demoralized and routed by watching their great leader cut down before their eyes. I understand the argument against destroying the followers after a duel, but thematically it fits with the setting of larger-than-life magical samurai deciding the course of history.

Yeah but.. if you are in the middle of a battle and your leader dies you will still fight for your clan, right? (at least the honored samurais should do it)

4 minutes ago, L5RBr said:

Yeah but.. if you are in the middle of a battle and your leader dies you will still fight for your clan, right? (at least the honored samurais should do it)

...and get mown down by the dozen by the enemy's epic heroic Samurai, having essentially the same impact as if they hadn't been there.. I've thought for quite a while that Dynasty Warriors would make a great core for an L5R computer game.

4 hours ago, Ser Nakata said:

If Duels are still in,I'd like to have only duellists capable of initiating "Duel" actions, like Monks and shugenjas could initiate Kihos.

I'd much rather have a without a mini-game in the game.

I agree, even think that only samurai could challenge another samurai to a duel, I mean, what is honored in a samurai to challenge a coutier or a artisan to a duel to the death?

And should not strength rely on the duel? Maybe a sum between strength and chi would be more interesting

And if when you see that you are going to lose the battle you could move bowed the battle units home, dishonoring the characters, and those who were already disgraced made you lose honor, it would be an interesting move..

Ok, lousy idea, no one would want to play against ranged attacks decks..

I personally am enjoying how much y'all bring up Dueling as a mechanic. That being said, it needs to be included in the game, but the mini-game aspect was... unnecessary. I've had to teach how duels work to opponents at a tournament multiple times (I played Crane in Celestial), and in general they were not pleased.

We still do not know how actions will work. Maybe it will be more like the various keyword cards in Emperor where it was "Target your Duelist, they challenge the target, blah blah blah, everyone dies and gains 10 honor".

My biggest question now is: How many tokens will we need? This is an important question for getting some of my friends to play, since they don't like "Fiddly-bits", which FFG is notorious for.

24 minutes ago, Mirith said:

My biggest question now is: How many tokens will we need? This is an important question for getting some of my friends to play, since they don't like "Fiddly-bits", which FFG is notorious for.

hehehehhehhe

9 hours ago, Myrion said:

Yes, but you can have that with or without the minigame aspect of it.

It might even be more single-stroke-y to limit it to the one card that causes a duel, in a sense.

Not really. One of the big things about "Single-stroke battles" is the tension. There is little tension in playing a single card then bow/killing the target. There is a massive amount of tension in the minigame when four cards are focused and neither player knows the result until the 8 cards are revealed.

Failure to give decks meaningful ways to participate in the minigame outside of anti-dueling meta was one of the biggest problems in AEG design.

2 hours ago, TheHobgoblyn said:

But it is a no-win situation there.

If dueling is so crazy powerful and so very easy that a dueling deck can pretty much slaughter all personalities in a non-dueling deck without fear of repercussion or losing unless the other players happens to have an ideal dueling meta card in their hand, then there really is no point in there being a mini-game at all. Once they initiate the duel, they have already killed the personality. Giving then additional bonuses for the "risk" when there was never any more risk than someone takes when firing a ranged attack is rather silly. Furthermore, it requires every single deck to run specialized meta for a mechanic that less than a third of the available factions are really going to be using. It really became a slippery slope to the point that Fate Decks ultimately became nothing but meta.

I believe you are wrong. You are automatically seeing duels as "duelists instantly wins unless metaed." The reason this tended to happened was AEG's tendency to make FVs (a major part of each Fate card) meaningless outside of a few clan limited deck builds. Add in AEG tending to give decks very little reason to focus save for anti-duel meta effects (Discipline and other play from the discard abilities was actually a pretty good step towards fixing this as focusing from the top of your deck turned into a form of card draw) and you end up with a situation where non-dueling players give up on dueling before games even start.

Another problem was that "less than a third of the available factions are really going to be using."

Crab should have had force based bully dueling.

Crane had defensive honor iaijutsu dueling.

Dragon should have had offensive kensai dueling.

Lion should have had dueling Tacticians. (the synergy between the two was stupid good)

Mantis could have had odd-ball dueling. (with effects that messed with "normal" dueling)

Phoenix should have had dueling yojimbos with shugenja support.

Scorpion should have had poisonous ninja dueling.

Spider a mix of force and chi based offensive iaijutsu dueling.

Unicorn should have had jousting based cavalry dueling.

3 hours ago, TheHobgoblyn said:

If, on the other hand, the person issuing the duels is taking a big risk in the duels-- that in addition to requiring a card to initiate the duel, they'd better both have a second card in their hand to ensure victory and pray that the other player doesn't have a dueling meta card in their hand... well, it just becomes not worth doing at all.

The key is to create an environment where winning a duel is nice but not necessary to progress towards the victory conditions on both sides.

Consider the card Hamstrung . During Celestial I won several matches because of this card even though I lost the duels I focused this card in because the honor gain helped me more than losing the personality hurt me.

To much focus on Winning/Losing duels was causing a lot of trouble.

4 hours ago, TheHobgoblyn said:

There is also the issue that gaining honor while wiping out the enemy personalities is always going to be superior to just gaining honor while the opponent builds up their strategy with an ever-growing personality base. This ends up causing the only viable Crane deck to be a dueling deck-- courtiers become an utter waste of space in the deck because they can't possibly do anything on par with the duelists.

No... Courtier honor rocket decks tended to be just as strong if not stronger than honor dueling decks. Once most Courtier decks got their (mostly dynasty based) honor engines up they were able to quickly outpace the far more Fate reliant dueling decks.

4 hours ago, TheHobgoblyn said:

Also, I meant that the "Duelist" action could be taken in either situation-- as an open to try to get them to bow so they can't attack you or a battle action to kill personalities without followers. Either way, it would function like a ranged attack with power equal to the duelist's chi against the chi of another personality.

Ugh... that isn't dueling anymore. I have no interest in "chi" attacks.

45 minutes ago, Mirith said:

I personally am enjoying how much y'all bring up Dueling as a mechanic. That being said, it needs to be included in the game, but the mini-game aspect was... unnecessary. I've had to teach how duels work to opponents at a tournament multiple times (I played Crane in Celestial), and in general they were not pleased.

That was more an example of how exclusive dueling was in Celestial. Only Crane, Dragon, Phoenix and Ronin had anywhere near a viable pool of dueling personalities and only 1 stronghold was a "dueling" stronghold.

24 minutes ago, Ultimatecalibur said:

That was more an example of how exclusive dueling was in Celestial. Only Crane, Dragon, Phoenix and Ronin had anywhere near a viable pool of dueling personalities and only 1 stronghold was a "dueling" stronghold.

Has it been less exclusive since Celestial?

1 minute ago, Mirith said:

Has it been less exclusive since Celestial?

spider got a dueling theme, so i'd call that a yes.

the dueling conundrum is classic l5r, insomuch as its a tension between design and lore. good design would probably have put dishonor and dueling, if not straight out of the game, then certainly in much reduced forms, years ago. but tradition and the worldbuilding mean you can't really do it.

3 minutes ago, Mirith said:

Has it been less exclusive since Celestial?

One of the more popular decks in early Ivory Edition was a Mantis military deck that featured duels (both Weakness Exposed and Come One At A Time ).

8 minutes ago, Kakita Shiro said:

One of the more popular decks in early Ivory Edition was a Mantis military deck that featured duels (both Weakness Exposed and Come One At A Time ).

Still that is 5 out of 9 clans with a specific style of deck. I feel like if you are going to include a complicated mechanic, it needs to be a core focus, not an option, or it becomes a chore, especially to those who don't build around it. I think AEG did a bad job with this. FFG seems to have a better clue on this most of the time (Though I'm limited to really Netrunner experiences).

Just now, Mirith said:

Still that is 5 out of 9 clans with a specific style of deck. I feel like if you are going to include a complicated mechanic, it needs to be a core focus, not an option, or it becomes a chore, especially to those who don't build around it. I think AEG did a bad job with this. FFG seems to have a better clue on this most of the time (Though I'm limited to really Netrunner experiences).

Not really. The Mantis deck's biggest "duelists" were The Dark Naga (Neutral), Ogre Bushi (Neutral), Hiruma Nikaru (Crab), Nishoji the Steel-Eyed (Crab), Moto Ming-gwok (Unicorn), Minikui no Oni (Neutral). Sometimes Bayushi Nitoshi (Scorpion) and Kakita Hideo (Crane). This deck was absolutely a mish-mash of Personalities using Mantis economy to pay for it all. Unicorn could have had a similar deck with their economy.

29 minutes ago, Mirith said:

Still that is 5 out of 9 clans with a specific style of deck. I feel like if you are going to include a complicated mechanic, it needs to be a core focus, not an option, or it becomes a chore, especially to those who don't build around it. I think AEG did a bad job with this. FFG seems to have a better clue on this most of the time (Though I'm limited to really Netrunner experiences).

5 out of 9 was pretty good compared to a lot of times during l5r, when you got maybe 3. crane and dragon pretty reliably could put it together, but beyond that it was never a sure thing.

1 hour ago, Ultimatecalibur said:

Not really. One of the big things about "Single-stroke battles" is the tension. There is little tension in playing a single card then bow/killing the target. There is a massive amount of tension in the minigame when four cards are focused and neither player knows the result until the 8 cards are revealed.

Failure to give decks meaningful ways to participate in the minigame outside of anti-dueling meta was one of the biggest problems in AEG design.

I believe you are wrong. You are automatically seeing duels as "duelists instantly wins unless metaed." The reason this tended to happened was AEG's tendency to make FVs (a major part of each Fate card) meaningless outside of a few clan limited deck builds. Add in AEG tending to give decks very little reason to focus save for anti-duel meta effects (Discipline and other play from the discard abilities was actually a pretty good step towards fixing this as focusing from the top of your deck turned into a form of card draw) and you end up with a situation where non-dueling players give up on dueling before games even start.

Another problem was that "less than a third of the available factions are really going to be using."

Crab should have had force based bully dueling.

Crane had defensive honor iaijutsu dueling.

Dragon should have had offensive kensai dueling.

Lion should have had dueling Tacticians. (the synergy between the two was stupid good)

Mantis could have had odd-ball dueling. (with effects that messed with "normal" dueling)

Phoenix should have had dueling yojimbos with shugenja support.

Scorpion should have had poisonous ninja dueling.

Spider a mix of force and chi based offensive iaijutsu dueling.

Unicorn should have had jousting based cavalry dueling.

The key is to create an environment where winning a duel is nice but not necessary to progress towards the victory conditions on both sides.

Consider the card Hamstrung . During Celestial I won several matches because of this card even though I lost the duels I focused this card in because the honor gain helped me more than losing the personality hurt me.

To much focus on Winning/Losing duels was causing a lot of trouble.

No... Courtier honor rocket decks tended to be just as strong if not stronger than honor dueling decks. Once most Courtier decks got their (mostly dynasty based) honor engines up they were able to quickly outpace the far more Fate reliant dueling decks.

Ugh... that isn't dueling anymore. I have no interest in "chi" attacks.

First, the fact that you think it is reasonable to expect people to throw away half their hand to your little mini-game shows just how out-of-touch you are. It might not be a big deal for you who ran a duelist deck and every card in your deck that didn't initiate duels was special focus to give you special bonuses-- but no one else's deck should have been filled with literally nothing but special duelist cards for your personal amusement and benefit. There are decks out there that are designed for things other than dueling and the fate deck does not exist solely for dueling.

The fact that you can build your deck in such a way that you would even imagine it would be reasonable for people to throw away half their hand on a duel is PRECISELY why no other deck could remotely actually participate in a duel ad the initiation of any duel was an autodeath for the person not participating unless they had anti-duel meta. There is no possible way that a deck that is not designed solely for dueling could ever compete with one where every single card in it revolves around that one concept. Let alone the focus values for non-duelist/non-tactician cards being much lower than those for duelist/tactician cards-- it also wasn't all that particularly difficult for most of the existence of the game to raise the Chi of your duelist 5 points higher than any card you were challenging and thus-- no matter what they focused, as long as it wasn't an anti-dueling card, -- you would automatically win

Your idea that other factions should be dueling ignores a fundamental reality of the game (besides making up things whole-cloth like "Unicorn Jousting"), dueling was fundamentally a personality elimination tool for decks that were trying to stop any battles from taking place and is not concerned with breaking province strengths. Like I said-- only someone who never played anything but a Crane Duelist deck would think that focusing 4 times in a duel is a reasonable thing to expect. Anyone who is required to break a province strength plus the force of any opposing army needs their fate cards for followers, items, movement cards, and terrain. They don't have fate cards to waste on the elimination of single personalities and any honor they would have gained from doing so was effectively meaningless to their victory condition. More importantly, because they had to include things in their decks to allow them to have the army strength to break a province, they were absolutely not going to win any duel they initiated against a deck where every single card in it was designed to win duels.

Dueling was effectively nothing more than a Chi attack that could target personalities even out of battles, even personalities with followers (that virtually all other personality kill actions in the game didn't allow), and one would gain honor for what certainly mechanically resembled some sort of dishonorable assassination mechanic. The fact that there was a ridiculous tacked-on minigame that the person being challenged effectively had 0 chance of winning but allowed the initiator to play all sorts of additional nastiness while expecting the person being attacked to blow through their fate hand and be left unable to take any actions not printed on personalities is why it was such an absolutely loathed mechanic for everyone who wasn't playing dueling. It just had way too many benefits over every other personality kill action in the game... and that was only because if someone was really, really reckless about who and when they issued the challenge, they might not win. I mean, sure-- with a Ranged attack or Fear attack, a target could be 1F too strong to beat before they even target-- while with dueling you actually don't know if the personality + played fate card are too strong to beat until you call for the strike.

Point is, short of each player's focus value being randomly determined and pretty swinging-- such as focus actually works by each player rolling a D6 or something (even playing the top card form the deck is not going to make it functionally 'risky' so long as duelist decks have high focus value cards and special focus effect cards)-- then to a non-duelist deck, dueling was never going to be anything mechanically different than a targeted chi attack that automatically killed any personality the duelist wanted. Trying to rationalize or even build into the game duels that other decks could win is not going to work so long as you expect them to throw away all their fate cards on dueling when they actually need those cards to do other things to have any shot at achieving their win condition.

As for Courtier rocket-- I think you hit on it and didn't even realize. "Dynasty based honor gain". That was the whole thing. Maybe for your deck that sat at home, didn't disturb the enemy's provinces and just wiped out their personalities, your deck would struggle against someone relying on their dynasty deck honor gain. But against a military player, that deck was dead meat-- the longer the game went on, the harder it would be for them to not lose all their provinces in a single turn. Similarly, against decks that were trying to reach enlightenment or trying to drain honor, your deck that would wipe out the opponent's personalities thus preventing them from being able to do any of their abilities or using any of their fate cards would be far more effective than one that couldn't do much more than maybe dishonor a few personalities and then send them home if they were dishonored to continue to do what they do.

All of your ideas on this suggest to me that you really never tried playing anything in the game except for a duelist deck. You really should try playing other decks and you would get a far wider perspective of the game. I have played duelist decks and decks that run far too many expendable creatures for duelists to deal with and decks that rely on big beefy units. I was never a particularly good player, in fact I hamstringed myself by making theme decks instead of trying to find the most effective combos more often than not, but I still tried normal decks often enough to have an understanding of how different things worked.

Dueling was not always extremely effective-- mostly because when it became too strong it was one of the most loathsome mechanics in the game. That is why it would always get nerfed back to being entirely ineffective at times. Probably around Diamond is when they started really devastating duelists by giving duels considerably smaller gains and making it much harder to be reliably 5 chi higher than any likely opponent.

But, fundamentally, it doesn't make any sense for a mechanic that is a super reliable assassination mechanic that can target anyone, anywhere and provides honor gain on top of it, especially if it is treated as though there is some risk involved when there really, really isn't. And especially when it really only exists for a single faction within the game (Crane) with two others having the option to try their hand at it as a secondary theme (Dragon and Phoenix).

45 minutes ago, cielago said:

5 out of 9 was pretty good compared to a lot of times during l5r, when you got maybe 3. crane and dragon pretty reliably could put it together, but beyond that it was never a sure thing.

Yeah, but that is still only 5 out of 9. 4 out of 9 were probably generally ignoring the mechanic during their deck construction. Does it make sense to include such a complicated mechanic for a subset of 3-5 out of 9 factions (Ignoring that usually not everyone who played the faction did something with dueling)? If it is such an essential L5R thing, why didn't every deck include it? I realize that this is AEG's fault for not making it viable, but if it is so essential, shouldn't it have been?

Dueling lives in such a strange place in L5R. It is essential to polite samurai society (as written by the lore), however mechanically in both the CCG and RPG, it was unwieldy to actually do unless you built your character/deck around it, making it a specialized thing that few people would be good at.

2 minutes ago, Mirith said:

Yeah, but that is still only 5 out of 9. 4 out of 9 were probably generally ignoring the mechanic during their deck construction. Does it make sense to include such a complicated mechanic for a subset of 3-5 out of 9 factions (Ignoring that usually not everyone who played the faction did something with dueling)? If it is such an essential L5R thing, why didn't every deck include it? I realize that this is AEG's fault for not making it viable, but if it is so essential, shouldn't it have been?

Dueling lives in such a strange place in L5R. It is essential to polite samurai society (as written by the lore), however mechanically in both the CCG and RPG, it was unwieldy to actually do unless you built your character/deck around it, making it a specialized thing that few people would be good at.

when i say 5 out of 9, i mean they had enough card support to do it well enough to build tournament decks, so no they wouldn't be ignoring it.

the problem with dueling, as i see it, is its high risk high reward. it requires a high degree of investment, from a deck building perspective, to achieve, but you also will dominate any deck that hasn't matched you in that, and the rewards for doing so are often high. additionally, dueling itself is time consuming and confusing. and, as you say, it occupies a lore position that makes it hard to ignore or eliminate (not unlike dishonor, which i think has a similar, if less pronounced problem). i've said it before and i'll say it again. what dueling needs is to be tightened up into a less exhaustive mechanic, and made a subfunction of a deck, instead of its entire function. i think netrunner provides a LOT of examples of how this can be done.

I'm not sure that "high risk, high reward" is necessarily a bad thing for dueling from a thematic perspective (you want duels to have tension and feel important) but a high risk, high reward mechanic is by definition too inconsistent to be used as a deck theme. Dedicated dueling decks could reduce the risk to mostly nothing, while keeping the rewards, which made a focus on dueling consistent and therefore viable. But once dueling becomes something consistent enough that you can issue duels without fear of losing, it loses its risk and hence the tension, turning it into just plain old personality kill / control.

I can't imagine an L5R without dueling, and as much of a pain as the minigame was, it did make dueling feel "special" and different as a mechanic (but let me re-iterate that it was a real pain for a non-dueling deck to go through the motions every time.) Perhaps this is where the conversion to an LCG is a blessing, because it gives FFG a chance to alter the game completely from a fundamental level and re-work mechanics and aspects of the game that needed to be fixed but never could be.

2 hours ago, TheHobgoblyn said:

<content cut for space>

Try being more condescending and dismissive of any other viewpoints but your own; I'm not convinced you're serious yet.

Look, no one is claiming dueling was perfect, and if FFG implements it they should definitely rework it a bit, but it was hardly the auto-win you portray it to be. You don't have to focus in a duel, so if you knew you had no chance of winning and still burned cards you needed while simultaneously giving your opponent more opportunities at Focus effects, that's really on you.

Also, could you please explain why you seem to start off ranting about how OP dueling was, and how it single-handedly ran the entire meta, and how every single deck had to either be a dueling deck or an anti-dueling deck to be competitive; but you end up talking about how dueling was often nerfed devastatingly?

The main problem I saw with dueling was simply that you could target personalities with attached followers. To solve that, how about each follower in a challenged unit adds to its personality's duel stat, to increase the risk when trying to take out large units?

As for decks being too tailorable for dueling, and having nothing but 4-focus Fate cards, this really just goes to the completely crazy way that AEG assigned focus values. An easy fix would be to have cards which cause duels or have good Focus effects have lower focus values. If the duelist wants all 4's, he's going to have to rely entirely on duel actions on personalities, and won't be getting much help from Focus effects.

I'm sure there are some issues with these solutions which would have to be sorted out, and dueling in FFG's LCG could be completely different anyway. However, I hope it's enough to at least show that dueling wasn't some completely unsolvable, Lovecraftian nightmare as some seem to be suggesting.

1 hour ago, JJ48 said:

Try being more condescending and dismissive of any other viewpoints but your own; I'm not convinced you're serious yet.

It's really like 70/30 on whether you are going to get condescending, mean-spirited drivel or something actually insightful.

3 hours ago, BayushiCroy said:

It's really like 70/30 on whether you are going to get condescending, mean-spirited drivel or something actually insightful.

Wouldn't those three things require three percentages? Like 60/35/5? lol

2 hours ago, Sparks Duh said:

Wouldn't those three things require three percentages? Like 60/35/5? lol

Haha, no I meant

" It's really like 70/30 on whether you are going to get: condescending, mean-spirited drivel; or something actually insightful. "

Not wrong, but not clear.

Or even

" It's really like 70/30 on whether you are going to get: condescending and mean-spirited drivel; or something actually insightful. "

9 hours ago, TheHobgoblyn said:

First, the fact that you think it is reasonable to expect people to throw away half their hand to your little mini-game shows just how out-of-touch you are.

I'm not gonna lie; when your start your posts off like this, I pretty much tune out for the rest of it. Even when you do have good points, you really get in your own way by trying to make everything personal. Taking a more measured approach would probably be helpful for both you and everyone reading your posts.

Crab would have more force dueling decks if there were as many cards creating force duels as chi duels or personalities who can use their force as duel stat per arc.

I think we had 1 personality per arc who can use their force for duels except in Lotus where we had Hiruma Hitaken and Kisada xp, both Uniques, for force dueling.

Besides Test of Might and Contest of Power are there any other force dueling cards? Even the lore doesn't show non-cranes or dragons having any chance at winning duels.

58 minutes ago, muzouka said:

Even the lore doesn't show non-cranes or dragons having any chance at winning duels.

Shiba Aikune would have been Emerald Champion if it wasn't for those meddling Scorpion!

But that story was the exception, not the rule (and he still would have had to face Yasuki Hachi, who was like half Crane or something?)