I actually feel that School Scroll System fits the setting better, but I also don't consider adherence to tradition to be "stuck forever in the past never improving and changing".

Personally, in the homebrew I'm working on, Schools give you a single Technique which improves as you increase in Insight rank. This is true for ALL schools. You want to learn another Technique? You have to find someone willing to teach it to you and you must be worthy of it (aka meet certain pre-requisites, which might be Advantages, might be previous Techniques, might be Skills). There is, always, a Path of Least Resistance for each Clan, so if you really want to go from A to B to C to D in your Techniques (like the Ancestors Say You Must), you can. However, since PCs are supposed to be exceptions to the rules and people of awesome, they do not HAVE to. And most NPCs (Extras) only have their one Technique because going back to the dojo as an adult to learn more probably is not something most people have the time in their life to do, between a job for the Clan, having a family, going to war, etc.

I have also greatly expanded the Kata system to make them take over the Combat Manuever system. Instead of "I practice my Kata for an hour in the morning, now I have this blanket benefit", a Kata is an action a Bushi can perform in combat which does something. Striking as Earth, for example, lets you make an attack as a Complex action which has a chance to Knockdown your opponent. Striking as Fire lets you make a complex action to make an attack with additional damage. Striking as Water lets you make a Complex action which lets you both Attack and Move. Striking as Air is a Complex action which lets you make an Attack and gain a bonus to your Armor TN. Striking as Void lets you take a Complex Action, which then allows you to Interrupt someone else's Action with a lower Initiative with an Attack.

There are also School and Weapon specific Kata as well. As someone who has actually trained with weapons in martial arts? This feels like, to me, a more accurate representation of what a Kata should do in L5R RPG, as it is LITERALLY practicing a series of maneuvers outside of combat until the movements are rote muscle memory, then finding yourself suddenly applying that movement IN combat, in real time. There are a limited number of Kata a character can know (3 initially, then 1 per additional Insight rank).

10 hours ago, AtoMaki said:

One reason is R&K's unique ability to offer narrative control over your own rolls. Remember guys, you can deliberately fail your roll here by keeping the low results.

If any player in any of my campaigns in any RPG wants to deliberately fail a test for anything, why the heck would I ever make them roll dice?

That's hardly a feature.

I like R&K. It's got a pleasant probability curve, and it kind of has a good feeling to it. Getting an extra kept die feels like a tremendously satisfying thing, much more so than a "+5 bonus" or whatever. There's just a satisfying feel to throwing a pool of dice and picking the ones you like the best.

But honestly, there's plenty of dice systems out there that'd work well for L5R. As fun as R&K is.

Never saw that have any practical impact outside of niche "I don't keep my 90 exploded dice damage because I don't want to kill them".

R&K works best if you have Glorious Success mechanic where you get your Special Awesome Success for hitting your Target Number exactly.

Which would be VERY in-theme.

3 hours ago, WHW said:

I find 4th editions Kata system implementation bad and ended up cutting it out because no one wanted to interact with it, so no.

We simply let the whole kata system loose. You have 200+ katas, some allow special actions, some can be put into a "passive slot" for constant bonuses, and most of them allow you to create absolutely ch-ru-a-zy wombo kombos by chaining certain katas together. No restrictions: any samurai school can take any kata (even courtiers and artisans), and the Mastery Level only determines xp cost. The only limitation is the kata's Availability , so sidequests might get involved to learn the most powerful ones or to round out your Kata Combo. Some katas can be even used in social combat or mass battles.

Kiho (well, this one is for the clergy), Alternate Paths, and Advanced Schools got the same treatment. In my experience these changes increased character diversity a lot. They also allowed courtiers and artisans to throw their weight in skirmishes.

15 minutes ago, Gaffa said:

If any player in any of my campaigns in any RPG wants to deliberately fail a test for anything, why the heck would I ever make them roll dice?

That's hardly a feature.

Announcing that you want to fail a roll is rather anti-climatic to be honest.

17 minutes ago, AtoMaki said:

Announcing that you want to fail a roll is rather anti-climatic to be honest.

But you just said it's a feature of roll and keep that you can choose to fail after rolling.

If you were already thinking that you were going to fail the test deliberately, why did you roll? And if a player changed their mind in the split second between rolling for any test and deciding that they wanted to fail the test, again, you don't need a mechanic for that. The GM just looks at them weird and then goes "OK, fine, you fail. Why are you failing and how are you doing it?"

Just now, Gaffa said:

If you were already thinking that you were going to fail the test deliberately, why did you roll?

Because you still want the tension and don't want to betray your intention before it is dramatically appropriate?

50 minutes ago, AtoMaki said:

Because you still want the tension and don't want to betray your intention before it is dramatically appropriate?

Can you give an actual example of this in play`?

5 minutes ago, Smobey said:

Can you give an actual example of this in play`?

An example of this would be a life-or-death roll, like avoiding a trap: you obviously does not want to spoil the end as the other players and the GM are watching with expectation, but start keeping the low results as the players gasp with a "WTF is happening?" written all over their faces and the GM laughing his butt off.

1 hour ago, AtoMaki said:

Because you still want the tension and don't want to betray your intention before it is dramatically appropriate?

You can do that in any game system. Just say "I was kidding -- change that natural 20 to a 1. This should be more interesting!"

I can't imagine any GM denying a player a chance to fail at a test willingly. Seriously, you're considering this a feature?

That sounds more disruptive than narratively dramatic.

1 minute ago, Gaffa said:

You can do that in any game system. Just say "I was kidding -- change that natural 20 to a 1. This should be more interesting!"

Yeah, this is far from being the same. You don't have to break the pace (and the game) in R&K to pull this stunt. You just keep the lower results, no words or rule-twisting required. The game can move on without anyone raising an eyebrow on you going off-track.

27 minutes ago, AtoMaki said:

An example of this would be a life-or-death roll, like avoiding a trap: you obviously does not want to spoil the end as the other players and the GM are watching with expectation, but start keeping the low results as the players gasp with a "WTF is happening?" written all over their faces and the GM laughing his butt off.

There are a lot of systems that let you purposefully fail rolls for the sake of resources (like void points) or experience. I personally feel those kinds of systems are far more elegant for this kind of play; you're actually rewarded as a player for making things narratively interesting.

Keep lowest for Void Point..nice idea.

1 hour ago, WHW said:

Never saw that have any practical impact outside of niche "I don't keep my 90 exploded dice damage because I don't want to kill them".

I mostly see this feature in the damage roll, but there's some situation where it is very useful.

For the damage roll. Some of my games had the concept of capturing someone without killing him. In those kind of situation, it is very important to select the dice correctly. It's also something to consider if someone decide to create a character with a vow of none killing. Also, in some dual, where death isn't acceptable, for example in the Topaz Championship, even if the weapon are blunt, mistakes may happened.

In some situation where not keeping the highest roll may be better, mostly in some contested rolls. For example, if a character wants to display restrains in its action toward a weaker target than you. Or even if a character wants to sabotage a situation by slacking off. The way I'm seeing this kind of rolls, it's the same as a talented person who simply doesn't apply at 100%, but mainly at 50% or less.

Of course, there's several ways of doing those kind of situation, but that's what I like, the system allows the players more than 1 way of doing the same thing.

If FFG uses another system or creates a new system for the RPG, I'm now curious how L5R D20 (Second Edition) did as a different system for the setting. Was it received well by the L5R community? Or was it a "Burn it with Fire" type of response?

7 minutes ago, BlindSamurai13 said:

If FFG uses another system or creates a new system for the RPG, I'm now curious how L5R D20 (Second Edition) did as a different system for the setting. Was it received well by the L5R community? Or was it a "Burn it with Fire" type of response?

"Burn it with fire" is a very diplomatic way to put it. It had cool art tho.

D&D L5R stuff was better received by the D&D community as an alternate set of classes/content than by the L5R community. That being said, I never played it, I just played D&D or L5R.

9 hours ago, BlindSamurai13 said:

If FFG uses another system or creates a new system for the RPG, I'm now curious how L5R D20 (Second Edition) did as a different system for the setting. Was it received well by the L5R community? Or was it a "Burn it with Fire" type of response?

This depends Do you mean oriental adventures 2 (WotC) or Rokugan(AEG)?

If oriental adventures 2 it was fine for playing Asian PC in a D&D game. otherwise it was >>>p. example : you paid gold to advance you ancestral sword as a samurai, and had a lot of info from the original oriental adventures setting (Kara-Tur ). All stuff tht could be used in L5R had a five rings symbol next to it.

Rokugan was more geared to the L5R setting but had all the trappings of d20. If I recall correctly only the duel-stat books sold well. Due to them advancing the story and having mechanics for the R&K system. It was also responsible for most of the blot problems in 2nd ed.

One of the biggest complaints I have read or heard about the R&K system is that skills are unimportant after rank 3. I had a few ideas about this and just wanted to run them by.

1. more mastery. one at every even level that get progressively more powerful on all skills not just some. like high skills could give +2,+4,+6,+8,etc insight for levels that don't have a mastery level.

2. change the equation to roll trait+skill/keep skill. ( different of what 2nd tried with its roll skill/keep trait.)

3. give some kind of skill discount (skills over trait cost half,school skills cost less,etc)

what do you guys think

27 minutes ago, tenchi2a said:

what do you guys think

In my experience improving Mastery Abilities and making Skills cheaper by 1 point/Rank is the way to go.

Basically, each Skill should have 3 Mastery Abilities, and all of them should be useful in some way or form. For example:

Quote

Tea Ceremony

Mastery Abilities:

- Rank 3: The TN of your Tea Ceremony Skill rolls is reduced by 10.

- Rank 5: Participating characters regain two Void Points from your tea ceremonies.

- Rank 7: After successfully conducting a tea ceremony you learn the Insight Rank, Honor Rank, and the Void Ring of all participating characters.

Or the universal Macro Skill Mastery Abilities:

Quote

- Rank 3: Gain +3 Insight.

- Rank 5: Gain +0k1 to your Artisan/Games/Lore/Perform/Craft Skill roll when using this sub-skill.

- Rank 7: Gain +7 Insight.

This latter would be especially cool with the xp discount, because a Rank 3 Macro Skill would cost 4 xp (1 to Rank 1, 1 to Rank 2, and 2 to Rank 3)but confer +6 Insight. A pretty good way to boost Insight.

3 hours ago, tenchi2a said:

This depends Do you mean oriental adventures 2 (WotC) or Rokugan(AEG)?

Playing in the setting of Rokugan but using the D20 system instead of the R&K system.