1 hour ago, TheHobgoblyn said:

Wait... what?.... This just makes me think you just aren't remotely familiar with half the clans in the game.

Crab has engineers, berserkers, witchhunters, scouts, merchants and defensive fighters....

Scorpion has fighters, ninja, wizards, and politicians.... (the main weird thing about Scorpion is that their politician family and their fighter family are the same family which isn't true for any other clan but Mantis)

All Phoenix has is... wizards, wizards, wizards, wizards and... a few fighters who exist to be bodyguards to wizards.

And Crane? Politicians, Craftsmen, Duelists and Fighters... That's a shorter list than the Crab or Scorpion right there.

Seriously, I might agree that Lion and Unicorn might seem a bit limited (after all, the idea that all Unicorn must ride horses does limit what you can do with them) and that Dragon shows a decent amount of diversity, but every other clan you listed seems completely backwards as to what category they should fall in.

What singular mechanic would you even think of building Crab around that would represent all their families?

What singular mechanic do you think remotely represents Scorpion?

Here's an example. Crab in Samurai edition - https://imperialassembly.com/oracle/#hashid=7e4427c817d0af33312e2e76e7a5b517,#page=2

74 Personality Cards. 38 of them are Hida (more then half). 12 are Hiruma. The other 24 are split up between the other 3 families and a couple personalities who aren't part of any family (9 Kaiu, 8 Kuni, 1 Toritaka, 5 Yasuki) - Kaiu, Kuni, Yasuki......these weren't decks you could run. Meanwhile you could run Berserker OR Hero Hida decks. What mechanic represented the Crab? Big Force.

Lets look at lotus - https://imperialassembly.com/oracle/#hashid=e7b44b40bfcabacc926c3875cdaf6c1c,#page=1

This time they had 75 personalities. 43 of them were Hida. 14 were Hiruma (including the Kami) - which leaves 16 slots for Kaiu, Kuni, and Yasuki. When the 3 non-military personalities make up only 21% of your clan, the family that makes up almost 60% is defining the clan.

47 minutes ago, Jedi samurai said:

Here's an example. Crab in Samurai edition - https://imperialassembly.com/oracle/#hashid=7e4427c817d0af33312e2e76e7a5b517,#page=2

74 Personality Cards. 38 of them are Hida (more then half). 12 are Hiruma. The other 24 are split up between the other 3 families and a couple personalities who aren't part of any family (9 Kaiu, 8 Kuni, 1 Toritaka, 5 Yasuki) - Kaiu, Kuni, Yasuki......these weren't decks you could run. Meanwhile you could run Berserker OR Hero Hida decks. What mechanic represented the Crab? Big Force.

Lets look at lotus - https://imperialassembly.com/oracle/#hashid=e7b44b40bfcabacc926c3875cdaf6c1c,#page=1

This time they had 75 personalities. 43 of them were Hida. 14 were Hiruma (including the Kami) - which leaves 16 slots for Kaiu, Kuni, and Yasuki. When the 3 non-military personalities make up only 21% of your clan, the family that makes up almost 60% is defining the clan.

You can't copy links that contain filtered options. All your links go to main page of Oracle.

1 hour ago, Jedi samurai said:

Yes, and no one cares about those engineers or witchhuners or merchants etc.... The Crab were defined up until Emperor by the Hida and Hiruma. Period. The Bayushi and Soshi dominate the Scorpion clan. They have 2 shugenja families and hardly ever had a viable shugenja deck.

Shiba were the 3rd dueling family for a long time and they have been trying to figure out the right Shugenja/Yojimbo mix for a LONG time. And their other shugenja families (unlike the scorpion ones) actually have their own flavor, decks and function. The Crane are not defined 1 family the way the Crab and Scorpion are.

Seriously, You're missing the point - it isn't what the clans have in terms of the story, its what they have in terms of deck building and functional themes - what they ACTUALLY have. The Crab, for example, until Emperor really would have 3 Hida family military decks and 1 Hiruma military deck. The Scorpion would have a military deck full of Bayushi, a Ninja Deck full of Shosuro, and a dishonor deck full of Bayushi with one of two Shosuro backing them up. They were clans defined by what 1 or 2 of their families did. And you made list of 4 things for Crane, 4 for Scorpion, then claimed the scorpion had more..........

You said the Unicorn were a bit limited, and I agree, but I could make "your type" of argument and tell you the Unicorn have wizards (Iuchi), scouts (Shinjo), fighters (Moto), battle maidens (Utaku), merchants (Ide) - but that wouldn't be honest take of the clan which was basically defined by its horsemanship.

And how exactly is the Phoenix having 3 completely interchangeable shugenja families a demonstration of any more "variety"? Just because they have more family names doesn't mean there is any more variety with them.

Unless what you are just trying to get at is that certain clans have a lot more win conditions available to them than others. Which is... fair enough. There was no clan that was ever TRULY functionally incapable of running a military deck-- after all, everyone has ways of eliminating personalities and if you win just one battle, you wipe out their whole army and can start taking provinces, but doing an honor run with most clans was functionally impossible unless you were facing a completely inept opponent.... and Enlightenment was generally off the table completely unless you were running primarily monks or shugenja and had short-cuts for getting ahold of the rings. Dishonor really hardly an option for anyone but Scorpion and during most of the history of the game, even that was made intentionally impossible to do (and until the Shadowlands became Spider, they were flat out immune making such a deck pointless in a random tournament.)

So... sure... a deck that has the option of either popping provinces or racking up honor points had more options available to it than one whose only possible win option was to destroy all provinces. But that doesn't mean there was less depth. Because Enlightenment victory was so terribly designed and Dishonor victory was basically discarded early on in the game and struggled to ever make any sort of come back, the game was really entirely contingent on two victory conditions.... which basically meant that most factions had to try to destroy provinces but a few special factions had the "I automatically win if you don't beat me fast enough" victory... which, when you think about it, makes it pretty **** crazy that anyone ever considered any edition of the game to be reasonably balanced.

But, you know what? It is something FFG can fix now that they have the option of redesigning the game from the ground up.

That being said, you bring up Personality count as your examples... but the work of the Kaiu and Yasuki was not demonstrated through having personalities on the board, but rather through holdings and fortifications.

Specifically speaking, I really enjoyed the Phoenix Clan's "shugenja backed by samurai" thing. However, save for a few brief moments in the game's history, such a deck really wasn't ever top tier. I think it would be cool for them to rework the idea a little bit. Maybe tinker with the bonuses that personalities get for being with a "buddy", that sort of thing.

Thematically, spells after, say, Time of the Void, felt incredibly stale and watered down. The first few sets had spells with super-powerful effects (torrential rain), and the Black Scrolls took things to another level. Aside from the occasional Kuro's Fire, it never really felt like spells were strong enough to bet the house on. I hope that if spells exist in the new iteration, we'll see some uniquely powerful effects on them.

i'm skipping over the acrimony to jump in and say thats one thing i really liked about emperor, even tho i know it ended up being kind of a mess and didn't work as well as intended ultimately. expanding each clan's themes was a really cool idea, and really opened up the narrative space well. from a gamedesign standpoint, it was a much less successful effort, but i think generally it did a lot to bring forward the elements of the clans that hadn't spent as much time story forward as they had in the past. by giving them strongholds and decks, it generated opportunities make those parts of the clans more visible both in the fiction and the game.

it also meant a diluted card pool, but ya know. whatevs.

On 2/3/2017 at 8:19 AM, Ryoshun Higoka said:

The Kaiu should definitely still specialize in siege warfare, just as the Hiruma need to have whatever the new game's equivalent of "scouting" is going to be. As with all of the clans, the different families have different specializations; Hida smash, Hiruma scout, Kaiu build, and Yasuki swindle (and Toritaka tussle with ghosts).

Also, I know I'm forgetting something about the berserkers - was Amoro Tainted? And there were un-tainted Berserkers, right? Not mechanically, I know, because the concept hadn't been put on the cards yet, but lore-wise? Help an old fogey out.

Of course, without knowing any of the LCG's mechanics, it's pretty difficult to figure what they'll do!

Amoro became tainted when he died and became Undead. There were untainted berserkers.

Is there a way to delete our own post?

double posted

triple posted

On 2/10/2017 at 6:49 PM, cielago said:

i'm skipping over the acrimony to jump in and say thats one thing i really liked about emperor, even tho i know it ended up being kind of a mess and didn't work as well as intended ultimately. expanding each clan's themes was a really cool idea, and really opened up the narrative space well. from a gamedesign standpoint, it was a much less successful effort, but i think generally it did a lot to bring forward the elements of the clans that hadn't spent as much time story forward as they had in the past. by giving them strongholds and decks, it generated opportunities make those parts of the clans more visible both in the fiction and the game.

it also meant a diluted card pool, but ya know. whatevs.

It was a mixed bag - some of the added theme's worked some didn't. Some clan base's wanted the diversity, others couldn't care less.

The problem does exist, when you let every clan have access to 2 or 3 victory conditions you lose some of the flavor that attracted people in the first place. I you remember correctly, each clan would get support for 2 of its themes per arc. It was very......odd to have environments were Dragon Kensai and/or Dueling wasn't a thing, or Crab weren't running big force etc....

58 minutes ago, Jedi samurai said:

The problem does exist, when you let every clan have access to 2 or 3 victory conditions you lose some of the flavor that attracted people in the first place. I you remember correctly, each clan would get support for 2 of its themes per arc. It was very......odd to have environments were Dragon Kensai and/or Dueling wasn't a thing, or Crab weren't running big force etc....

Don't agree. That was great twist, especially for hardcore clan loyalists. Forcing them to change point of view making Tier1 decks from totally opposed themes like brutal control dishonor for Crab or 100% passive honor for Lion in Emperor. From my experience this change was refreshing and many players (at least here) liked this.

1 hour ago, Jedi samurai said:

It was a mixed bag - some of the added theme's worked some didn't. Some clan base's wanted the diversity, others couldn't care less.

The problem does exist, when you let every clan have access to 2 or 3 victory conditions you lose some of the flavor that attracted people in the first place. I you remember correctly, each clan would get support for 2 of its themes per arc. It was very......odd to have environments were Dragon Kensai and/or Dueling wasn't a thing, or Crab weren't running big force etc....

You couldn't be more wrong. If there are going to be multiple victory conditions at all, at least two of those conditions absolutely must be within reach of every single clan. Two big reasons for this.

1) Someone should not be able to sit down across from an opponent, take one look at their faction and know exactly how to beat them before the first move.

2) There is always the risk of a card or cards being played that are designed to counter a particular victory condition that are just way too strong. Just because one victory condition can no longer be reached shouldn't shut down an entire faction completely-- there should always inherently be a back-up strategy, if not always within the same deck-- then at least by swapping out some of the cards for other ones.

The Crab is an excellent example of a faction that is inherently hosed. Its primary deck time is "defensive, build up army over time" and well... if you concentrate too much on that defensive part? If a necessary part of your strategy is that you need them to attack you? Then you are outright screwed against anyone who never needs to attack you, they are just paying solitaire and when they get enough solitaire points, they automatically win the game.

So the Crab needs something else that is going to have to make it so that unless the other person attacks, the Crab is going to win the game-- or at least prevent the opponent from ever gaining enough honor points to win. Is that going to have to be dishonor? I guess so. Even though despite the Crab having more families than any other clan, they really don't have one that would fits into that concept. But... short of there being an "economic victory" (maybe not a bad idea as it would be that missing piece Crab, Mantis and Unicorn could all use), I am not sure what else could be done.

1 hour ago, kempy said:

Don't agree. That was great twist, especially for hardcore clan loyalists. Forcing them to change point of view making Tier1 decks from totally opposed themes like brutal control dishonor for Crab or 100% passive honor for Lion in Emperor. From my experience this change was refreshing and many players (at least here) liked this.

I think the players you talked too were the minority. Some clans and some themes were welcomed - the Crab really liked their dishonor (honor not so much) for example, but almost every Dragon player I know hated it when they couldn't play Mirumoto or Monk decks. You had a lot of people who attached themselves to a clan because of the theme of that clan, and then that theme taking a back seat. I can understand their desire to make clans more diverse and well-rounded, but when you can't support the defining families/themes/decks of those clans for an arc.......thats a problem.

55 minutes ago, TheHobgoblyn said:

You couldn't be more wrong.

Honestly, when you see you say that, I know Im on the right track.

and no, not every clan needs multiple victory conditions because players are able to play multiple clans. If you are only interseted in military, then Crab might be for you. But if you're no, then its not the clan for you. Simple. Clans need to have victory conditions to make sense in context of the clans and families. Again I get the idea behind giving each Clan multiple victory conditions, I'm not against it in general. But when you have to sacrifice the main themes of the clans to achieve it, its a mis-step.

2 hours ago, Jedi samurai said:

Honestly, when you see you say that, I know Im on the right track.

and no, not every clan needs multiple victory conditions because players are able to play multiple clans. If you are only interseted in military, then Crab might be for you. But if you're no, then its not the clan for you. Simple. Clans need to have victory conditions to make sense in context of the clans and families. Again I get the idea behind giving each Clan multiple victory conditions, I'm not against it in general. But when you have to sacrifice the main themes of the clans to achieve it, its a mis-step.

Does everything you write have to be garbage? You are wrong. Get over it.

There should be no "simple" clans. If there are multiple win conditions in the game, it makes utterly no sense for one faction to be able to win 3 ways, another to win 2 ways and another to have only one path. The idea that one is going to say "Well, these two clans both have armies and can both fight and either could win.... but one of them automatically wins of the other doesn't defeat them in however many turns."

And, again, there are counters-- meta-- to certain victory conditions. If the meta to stop military is accidentally made way too strong, then every clan that can only win via military instantly loses every single game against those who auto-win if they are not beaten in a certain number of turns.

It isn't about players choosing different factions. Players choose their factions often for reasons that don't have much to do with gameplay, but even when they choose them for gameplay-- if your faction suddenly becomes crap because the only victory condition they could reasonable achieve has become something that basically everyone is not immune to? The game is broken-- how is it to go forward with factions that flat out cannot win? Yet the nice thing about L5R above Magic the Gathering was the idea of people being loyal to their faction and making what wasn't the mathematically most powerful deck for narrative reasons. Maybe YOU need to give up L5R and go play Magic the Gathering which is CLEARLY more suited to your mentality.

The only thing I agree with, which I already covered in my previous post.

The easiest solution is... if more than 1 of the 4 existing victory types do not make sense for the clans in the game, that is a major game design flaw. Just add one more.

And the one that seems to fit those who are lacking a clear 2nd is "Economic Victory" to the game. Each turn you can choose to put aside extra gold and if you gain enough, you win-- just like with honor, but in this case with money. It would generally force you to sacrifice buying things in order to achieve this victory-- unless you are so flush with extra gold that it would go to waste. As long as there are ways of destroying holdings in the game, and presumably there would be printed actions to allow one to steal the gold from opponent's coffers or such, one would also be able to fight back against someone winning in this manner. That way if anti-military cards become way too strong and there just is no possible way to beat the opponent before they honor out, clans like Crab and Mantis can just focus on building up their wealth and that in and of itself is a path to victory.

It should be available to all clans, but be particularly accessible to those that have families who are all about trading and generating wealth such as Crab, Mantis, Unicorn and Crane-- all of which are generally more limited on victory conditions compared to other clans. And it would give a **** reason to print Crab personalities for the Yasuki and Kaiu families since apparently the only thing ever being printed is Hida, so why does the clan even have 5 families? There are only so many Hida force-heavy personalities one can print before one is effectively just printing duplicate personalities. Even if you give them all slightly different battle actions that one is basically never going to have cause to actually use.

3 hours ago, Jedi samurai said:

Honestly, when you see you say that, I know Im on the right track.

35 minutes ago, TheHobgoblyn said:

Does everything you write have to be garbage? You are wrong. Get over it.

Hot take: You are both extremely bad.

7 hours ago, Buttlord said:

Hot take: You are both extremely bad.

Double take: What's worse than extremely bad? Self-righteous condescension!

I will say that private beef is best left out of public forums, but Hobgoblyn and Jedi Samurai have been contributing interesting (if opinionated) ideas to the ongoing conversation.

1 hour ago, FunTimeTeddy said:

Double take: What's worse than extremely bad? Self-righteous condescension!

I will say that private beef is best left out of public forums, but Hobgoblyn and Jedi Samurai have been contributing interesting (if opinionated) ideas to the ongoing conversation.

you clearly are unfamiliar with Buttlord

5 hours ago, FunTimeTeddy said:

I will say that private beef is best left out of public forums, but Hobgoblyn and Jedi Samurai have been contributing interesting (if opinionated) ideas to the ongoing dual monologues .

Fixed!

Sorry, I couldn't resist. But let's get real, both are talking, yet none listen to the other point of view, which ends up a monologue at the end...

17 hours ago, TheHobgoblyn said:

Does everything you write have to be garbage? You are wrong. Get over it.

There should be no "simple" clans. If there are multiple win conditions in the game, it makes utterly no sense for one faction to be able to win 3 ways, another to win 2 ways and another to have only one path. The idea that one is going to say "Well, these two clans both have armies and can both fight and either could win.... but one of them automatically wins of the other doesn't defeat them in however many turns."

And, again, there are counters-- meta-- to certain victory conditions. If the meta to stop military is accidentally made way too strong, then every clan that can only win via military instantly loses every single game against those who auto-win if they are not beaten in a certain number of turns.

It isn't about players choosing different factions. Players choose their factions often for reasons that don't have much to do with gameplay, but even when they choose them for gameplay-- if your faction suddenly becomes crap because the only victory condition they could reasonable achieve has become something that basically everyone is not immune to? The game is broken-- how is it to go forward with factions that flat out cannot win? Yet the nice thing about L5R above Magic the Gathering was the idea of people being loyal to their faction and making what wasn't the mathematically most powerful deck for narrative reasons. Maybe YOU need to give up L5R and go play Magic the Gathering which is CLEARLY more suited to your mentality.

The only thing I agree with, which I already covered in my previous post.

The easiest solution is... if more than 1 of the 4 existing victory types do not make sense for the clans in the game, that is a major game design flaw. Just add one more.

And the one that seems to fit those who are lacking a clear 2nd is "Economic Victory" to the game. Each turn you can choose to put aside extra gold and if you gain enough, you win-- just like with honor, but in this case with money. It would generally force you to sacrifice buying things in order to achieve this victory-- unless you are so flush with extra gold that it would go to waste. As long as there are ways of destroying holdings in the game, and presumably there would be printed actions to allow one to steal the gold from opponent's coffers or such, one would also be able to fight back against someone winning in this manner. That way if anti-military cards become way too strong and there just is no possible way to beat the opponent before they honor out, clans like Crab and Mantis can just focus on building up their wealth and that in and of itself is a path to victory.

It should be available to all clans, but be particularly accessible to those that have families who are all about trading and generating wealth such as Crab, Mantis, Unicorn and Crane-- all of which are generally more limited on victory conditions compared to other clans. And it would give a **** reason to print Crab personalities for the Yasuki and Kaiu families since apparently the only thing ever being printed is Hida, so why does the clan even have 5 families? There are only so many Hida force-heavy personalities one can print before one is effectively just printing duplicate personalities. Even if you give them all slightly different battle actions that one is basically never going to have cause to actually use.

You think the # of the victory conditions = equality. It doesn't, being very good at one thing is better then being spread out. Nor does it always make sense within the setting. Assuming 1 victory condition = simple is a simple view of things. And as I said, when you can't support all 4 at once, you end up with arcs where clans can't do what defines them, that's a problem.

You seem to be arguing that the game was at its best when it was dying at AEG. When the game was at its peak you did have military and honor exclusive clans, players would go to the clan that best suited them. You just hit on it - players in L5R are loyal to their clan(s), and players are/were generally drawn to clans that fit their play style. If you are a player who likes control decks, the Crab or Lion weren't the clans for you and players were fine with that. Trying to make all clans be for all people doesn't/didn't make the game better, if anything it just waters the game down. It only alienated the loyal players who had to go 12-16 months without being able to play their clans defining deck/family/style.

54 minutes ago, Jedi samurai said:

You think the # of the victory conditions = equality. It doesn't, being very good at one thing is better then being spread out. Nor does it always make sense within the setting. Assuming 1 victory condition = simple is a simple view of things. And as I said, when you can't support all 4 at once, you end up with arcs where clans can't do what defines them, that's a problem.

You seem to be arguing that the game was at its best when it was dying at AEG. When the game was at its peak you did have military and honor exclusive clans, players would go to the clan that best suited them. You just hit on it - players in L5R are loyal to their clan(s), and players are/were generally drawn to clans that fit their play style. If you are a player who likes control decks, the Crab or Lion weren't the clans for you and players were fine with that. Trying to make all clans be for all people doesn't/didn't make the game better, if anything it just waters the game down. It only alienated the loyal players who had to go 12-16 months without being able to play their clans defining deck/family/style.

i think you should be careful to assume that because the game was at its peak, that this design element was the reason or even a major factor. ccg's were at the upswing at that time. l5r got away with a lot of really questionable stuff that would have tanked the game during its back 5 years. the mono-victory condition era resulted in incredibly skewed matchups. autolosses were much more common then than later in the game. i'm not saying that every clan needs every victory condition, but assuming that giving one clan one condition means == best the game ever was is, i think, the same kind of simplification you were warning against yourself. thats not to say you can't do it, and do it well, in the new addition. but i think one can argue that l5r did not, in the past, do so. i think that era had a lot of other factors contributing its popularity besides mono-condition clans, or near enough to.

4 minutes ago, cielago said:

i think you should be careful to assume that because the game was at its peak, that this design element was the reason or even a major factor. ccg's were at the upswing at that time. l5r got away with a lot of really questionable stuff that would have tanked the game during its back 5 years. the mono-victory condition era resulted in incredibly skewed matchups. autolosses were much more common then than later in the game. i'm not saying that every clan needs every victory condition, but assuming that giving one clan one condition means == best the game ever was is, i think, the same kind of simplification you were warning against yourself. thats not to say you can't do it, and do it well, in the new addition. but i think one can argue that l5r did not, in the past, do so. i think that era had a lot of other factors contributing its popularity besides mono-condition clans, or near enough to.

The game certainly wasn't perfect in its heyday. But pretending it only got better when every clan was given access to multiple victory conditions and the flavor was diluted isn't correct either. As I said, when you have entire arcs where clans can't run decks that reflect their most identifying traits or popular families that's a problem. Its very safe to say that Monk's and Kensai/Dueling is what attracted most Dragon players to that clan, so when you have an environment where Dragon Shugenja and Magistrate honor/dishonor decks are what is supported..........

Personally, I think it should be and was best in the Samurai/celestial era were it was a clan by clan basis. Some clans has access to multiple victory conditions, others didn't. Maintaining the flavor of the world and the clans should be the top priority. Wasting design space on and making Hida unplayable for an arc because of an Kaiu honor deck that no one wants is just as bad as taking away Mirumoto military because Dragon can only win via Monk based enlightenment.

I've said before, I think with the LCG we will no longer get different types of deck for each clan, but just Clan Decks - a Crab Deck, a Crane Deck, a Dragon Deck etc... - and while there won't be multiple victory conditions (I think it will be something like GoT - you need to collect X amount of tokens that represent Y) there will be multiple ways to earn said tokens and clans will be better in some areas and worse in others. As time goes on and the card base grows, we will obviously see more and more variations on the clan decks but I don't think we'll get to a point there a player can simply ignore one area of the game to focus on another. But thats just my thought on how they will build this game up.

7 minutes ago, Jedi samurai said:

Personally, I think it should be and was best in the Samurai/celestial era were it was a clan by clan basis. Some clans has access to multiple victory conditions, others didn't. Maintaining the flavor of the world and the clans should be the top priority. Wasting design space on and making Hida unplayable for an arc because of an Kaiu honor deck that no one wants is just as bad as taking away Mirumoto military because Dragon can only win via Monk based enlightenment.

I've said before, I think with the LCG we will no longer get different types of deck for each clan, but just Clan Decks - a Crab Deck, a Crane Deck, a Dragon Deck etc... - and while there won't be multiple victory conditions (I think it will be something like GoT - you need to collect X amount of tokens that represent Y) there will be multiple ways to earn said tokens and clans will be better in some areas and worse in others. As time goes on and the card base grows, we will obviously see more and more variations on the clan decks but I don't think we'll get to a point there a player can simply ignore one area of the game to focus on another. But thats just my thought on how they will build this game up.

i have a perverse love of CE since thats the edition i came back in (took a break during lotus) and i fell in love with Kyuden Suzume and Isawa Fosuta. That said, i don't know how much support you'd garner for the notion. CE is not a beloved edition (HI BREEDER!). I think samurai has a slightly better reputation.

i haven't played the GoT lcg, but that sounds like an interesting way to do it, and it simplifies things at least from a tracking standpoint. i'm not sure that it actually makes things easier tho from a design standpoint. you still have multiple victory conditions, they are just abstracted one layer away. instead of dishonoring X times to get to -20, you dishonor Y times to get enough tokens. Military probably changes the most.

n/m

3 hours ago, cielago said:

i have a perverse love of CE since thats the edition i came back in (took a break during lotus) and i fell in love with Kyuden Suzume and Isawa Fosuta. That said, i don't know how much support you'd garner for the notion. CE is not a beloved edition (HI BREEDER!). I think samurai has a slightly better reputation.

i haven't played the GoT lcg, but that sounds like an interesting way to do it, and it simplifies things at least from a tracking standpoint. i'm not sure that it actually makes things easier tho from a design standpoint. you still have multiple victory conditions, they are just abstracted one layer away. instead of dishonoring X times to get to -20, you dishonor Y times to get enough tokens. Military probably changes the most.

Samurai and Celestial weren't perfect. Every edition has its balancing issues. But the ways the clans were handled, I think Samurai and Celestial did it best. Hobgoblyn was right in that you don't want to force clans into 1 box and 1 box only, but you also don't want to force those that belong in one box into multiple boxes or lose what makes each clan unique in the name of diversity.

If they do make L5R similar to GoT (which I could see happening with the clan and family set up being similar) I would say you go with Military, Political (including dueling) and Spiritual elements. Each clan is strong in one and weak in one. I would go with: (Clan - strongest, middle, weakest)

Crab: Military, Spiritual, Political
Crane: Political, Spiritual, Military
Dragon: Spiritual, Military, Political
Lion: Military, Political, Spiritual
Phoenix: Spiritual, Political, Military
Scorpion: Political, Military, Spiritual
Unicorn: Military, Spiritual, Political

Lets use favor as the victory condition. Military victories, gaining honor and spiritual achievements (like characters becoming englightened or putting ring in play) earn you favor tokens. Dishonor personalities allows you to steal favor tokens. Obviously each clan would have its strengthens and weaknesses. Its way to earn favor and in some cases steal it from others. Only 1 victory condition but many ways to skin the cat.

Of course that's me because I think GoT might influence the L5R LCG. A friend of mine thinks they do something closer to Warhammer 40,000: Conquest . Or we'll get something 100% original.