On 3/7/2017 at 6:14 PM, TheHobgoblyn said:

It would be a bit difficult to see that every faction could support every ring equally. No matter how you make the rings, some will just have more synergism.

We have already seen that with Sensei and Winds, both of which were basically what you are proposing here.

Who said anything about rings? Or about every faction supporting them equally?

This was purely a way of expanding which factions had access to which cards, so that more factions would be playable from the core card set. It was somewhat inspired by Romance of the 9 Empires. Ixhasa, for example, also had the Zealous keyword on its stronghold, which gave it access to any other card with Zealous, as well as the Ixhasa cards, making deck-building more feasible.

As for the rings, it's tempting to have them set up as tokens, which someone suggested, kind of like the Imperial favour, maybe even replacing it. Let's see, you may bow a personality to take a Ring card/token when that ring permits it, and discard it for an effect. If you hold all 5 rings at the start of your turn, you win. These are entirely out of thin air, without much thought, merely to prompt discussion.

• Air: when you have the highest Family Honour, you may take this Ring. Discard to prevent an honour loss.
• Earth: when you have the most personalities in play, you may take this Ring. Discard to send an unopposed unit home.
• Fire: when you have the highest Chi personality, you may take this Ring. Discard to give a +2 bonus to a duel.
• Void: when you have no cards in hand, you may take this Ring. Discard to draw a card.
• Water: when you have the highest Force personality, you may take this Ring. Discard to move a unit to a new province.

Or you could go the opposite way, and have the effects switched round, so that high chi sends people home, void makes you a better duellist etc...

That wouldn't be as bad, except.... well... it is particularly fun mechanic to effectively make it "you are winning the game by a small margin, here a free bonus to make it a bigger margin."

Seems like it would lead to far more on-sided games.

Well, oddly except how you described Void there. One could be out of cards because they are showering down destruction by playing card after card after card.... or they could be out of cards because they were forced to discard everything.

With imperial favor, at least it was "you have forgone building up a strong military in order to gain these victory points which can't really be utilized for in game effects. If you give up one of the personalities you have available, you can get a small bonus."

In other words, at least theoretically, it was giving the player who was more vulnerable a small bonus to try to stave off defeat.

So, really, if they replaced the imperial favor, I would think the exact opposite of what you suggested in most cases would be better-- "you are outnumbered, overpowered, outplayed, or overrun? Pay some small cost in exchange for this always universally available card."

On 3/8/2017 at 11:47 AM, TheHobgoblyn said:

And yet you were drudging up the naga of all things?....

At first brush, 4 factions doesn't seem particularly appealing. But... okay... it would be 4 alliances, I guess. And then each alliance would have 2 strongholds. You'd effectively still have all your clans, they would just each have an allied clan that they could bring in for cheap. At least I hope that is what you would be going for.

They were going to be, and this is general because we never really hammered out anything more than the most basic concepts, but essentially they would be 4 'faction' Strongholds, each with dual or multiple clans aligned to them (ie Naga, Lion, Crab for example). We would release sensei that had aspects of each individual clan in the alliance, so if you wanted to, you could use that faction to play only Crab or Lion or Naga. Anyway, that was the general idea. As to those 4 alliances, like I said, we only vaguely talked about it. In the end I think we might have even discussed cutting it down to 3; Crab + Lion + Naga, Crane + Phoenix + Unicorn, and Spider + Scorpion + Dragon. It's been a while, though, so I don't 100% remember.

On 3/8/2017 at 11:57 AM, cielago said:

they've mentioned in the past that they actually were, but i'm not sure i connect those dots either.

The idea of cutting factions down actually came up seriously after we (the Design Team) were told that we would be moving L5R to an LCG, though I think I pitched it in a meeting once before then. It was a bit after this we were told it was being sold to FFG. I believe Sept. 11th when the news broke online was a Friday, I had only found out about it at the beginning of that week.

Though keep in mind this was 2 years ago almost, so take the finer details with a grain of salt.

Thanks Tetsuro! always appreciate your insight into these things.

2 minutes ago, cielago said:

Thanks Tetsuro! always appreciate your insight into these things.

Just keep in mind that 'There were going to be three or four factions' is technically true in the sense that there was a set with a Shadowlands Nitoshi and an Undead Moto Taigo is true (they were both in a very early layout for a set we never actually started officially designing, so neither had final approval from ST or even any abilities). It's 'technically' true.

5 minutes ago, Tetsuro said:

Just keep in mind that 'There were going to be three or four factions' is technically true in the sense that there was a set with a Shadowlands Nitoshi and an Undead Moto Taigo is true (they were both in a very early layout for a set we never actually started officially designing, so neither had final approval from ST or even any abilities). It's 'technically' true.

gotcha, yeah. its just interesting to hear about what the design process was like, especially going into onyx, given that it was such a volatile (maybe too strong a word?) period both for rokugan and the game itself.

4 minutes ago, cielago said:

gotcha, yeah. its just interesting to hear about what the design process was like, especially going into onyx, given that it was such a volatile (maybe too strong a word?) period both for rokugan and the game itself.

I just hope FFG seriously revamps attachments. They could cut so many unnecessary cards and rules annoyances out by getting rid of them or curtailing them. From what I have heard I honestly don't expect this game to resemble 'Classic L5R' at all, so I just hope it's an entertaining game on its own.

20 minutes ago, Tetsuro said:

I just hope FFG seriously revamps attachments. They could cut so many unnecessary cards and rules annoyances out by getting rid of them or curtailing them. From what I have heard I honestly don't expect this game to resemble 'Classic L5R' at all, so I just hope it's an entertaining game on its own.

From the rumours that have been going round it does sound as though it's going to be quite different.

I don't really mind as long as it's a good enjoyable game, and whatever I'm playing feels like samurai and Rokugan. I would have also been happy with a cleaned up version of the original game. (Kinda like what they did with AGOT 1st ed -> 2nd Ed)

Regarding attachments, I'm curious what you don't like about them, do you just inherently dislike them or do you think they just continuously got out of hand?

I always felt like the main problem with attachments was more to do with the structure of player turns, rather than actual attachments themselves!

Because of the need for attachments to efficiently contribute to force, there was relatively little design space for them compared to the number of attachments printed. You end up with a whole bunch of 2 force for 2-4 gold with low impact abilities.

If you balance force to province strength so that attachments are no longer necessary for that purpose (or have a different way to determine military results), you can print fewer attachments with greater variety. Using GoT as an example, a rather small portion of attachments provide a strength bonus. Instead, they modify characters in a variety of ways.

2 hours ago, Tetsuro said:

Just keep in mind that 'There were going to be three or four factions' is technically true in the sense that there was a set with a Shadowlands Nitoshi and an Undead Moto Taigo is true (they were both in a very early layout for a set we never actually started officially designing, so neither had final approval from ST or even any abilities). It's 'technically' true.

The best kind of true!

2 hours ago, Tetsuro said:

Spider + Scorpion + Dragon

There's one faction I am not going to mourn never seeing the light of day.

5 minutes ago, Daramere said:

There's one faction I am not going to mourn never seeing the light of day.

Gotta be Dragon

6 minutes ago, Daramere said:

There's one faction I am not going to mourn never seeing the light of day.

That would have been amazing. I already miss it.

5 hours ago, Tetsuro said:

Crab + Lion + Naga, Crane + Phoenix + Unicorn, and Spider + Scorpion + Dragon.

I'm getting a "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" vibe now.

If you lumped Unicorn + Dragon + Naga together, you could end up with three Naga Clan Champions in one faction.

Those faction lineups seem a bit... odd. Especially given where Brand was heading with the Path votes.

I AM curious about how they envisioned Unicorn's playstyle working out of the same baseline allegiance as the Crane and Phoenix- the two birdies have a history of defensive honor as their basic schtick... or were the faction alliances going to be less like strongholds and more like Winds?

Quote

Crab + Lion + Naga, Crane + Phoenix + Unicorn, and Spider + Scorpion + Dragon

these definitely feel like story driven groupings and not mechanical ones. unicorn is all kinds of odd man out there. crab, lion and naga are like three sides of a three sided coin. they're all kind of militaristic, but all SUPES different about it.

1 hour ago, cielago said:

these definitely feel like story driven groupings and not mechanical ones. unicorn is all kinds of odd man out there. crab, lion and naga are like three sides of a three sided coin. they're all kind of militaristic, but all SUPES different about it.

The Unicorn were capable of being a good honor-running group if you focused on the Shinjo and Utaku rather than the Moto. I think the clan had just gone "Full Moto" for so long that people had forgotten that such was the case. So Crane, Phoenix, Unicorn would still be an honor high faction and then you would choose how much dueling, spells or cavalry-military you would run-- all of which can be used to great effect on defense.

Crab is military, usually very defensive unless you get Berserkers. Lion is very military, on the offense. So these two could synergize-- perhaps dangerously so, you can have an early game offensive rush and a late game big personalities build. Not really sure what Naga are supposed to do. If I recall, they were a bit like Goblns and Ratlings with the more of them you put on the board, the more powerful they would each become.

Spider and Scorpion are both dishonorable, one military and one political. The Spider also have a monk theme which I suppose could synergize with Dragon monks.

Utaku Honor was always a different animal from Doji/Kakita-style or Phoenix piety... and much as I love the Ide, they've never been the "face"of the Clan from a meta-perspective- the Shinjo were plenty face-stompy long before the Moto took over.

For all the rumbling about bringing the Clans back to their bare essentials that we got out of both Brand and Story, stripping the Cavalry Guys of their mobile military style seems a bit odd, and I doubt it was what they were planning.

Most of these trios look weird- many contain a duo that could make sense, but the third one is almost always a weird choice.

A Unicorn-Phoenix_crane trio actually makes a lot of sense. These are the three clans that had the most humane behavior towards the heimin.

I guess the trios were split like this :

- Crab/Lion/Naga : the strong ones, battling the monsters unleashed by Jigoku

- Crane/unicorn/Phoenix : the gentle ones, trying to prevent as many deaths as possible among the humans

- Spider/Scorpion/Dragon : the sneaky ones, waging the secret war of collecting the information needed to close the seals again, or preventing them from doing so.

I'm worried about that "won't look like classic L5R" thing. I only hope that they keep the victory condition variety. That's what made the game so special to me.

1 hour ago, Barbacuo said:

I'm worried about that "won't look like classic L5R" thing. I only hope that they keep the victory condition variety. That's what made the game so special to me.

I would recommend checking out how the Game of Thrones game works.

It might be that there is a singular victory condition, but multiple ways to achieve it. I.e. whether you kill or do honor or dishonor, you collect points towards victory.

15 hours ago, Moto Subodei said:

Regarding attachments, I'm curious what you don't like about them, do you just inherently dislike them or do you think they just continuously got out of hand?

I assume it would have to do with the fact that every expansion had to have enough of them to support Draft. There are only so many variations of +2F/+1C Sword you can create.

43 minutes ago, Kakita Shiro said:

I assume it would have to do with the fact that every expansion had to have enough of them to support Draft. There are only so many variations of +2F/+1C Sword you can create.

And while FFG does create draft sets for some of its LCGs (AGoT and Netrunner), the draft card pool is separate from the constructed card pool (though they overlap).