I certainly didn't want to seem like a Star Wars RPG apologist. It was just the system someone brought up, but it's definitely what Deraforia said. Insight is a limiter on the RPG as it is. AEG did a wonderful job with L5R and each incarnation has, in my opinion, been better than the last, but that said there are some sacred cows of the rules that I think could use with some slaying, and among them is character creation and advancement.

And Tenshi2a, a lot of your solution are popular fixes to the current system and ones I agree with. Averaging rings, giving skills like Artisan, Lore, and Perform some benefit for advancement beyond RP, making the mechanics evoke the living realities of the setting. These are great ideas, but I think there is also benefit to looking at a new system entirely that adapts certain concepts or ideas into a new format.

58 minutes ago, SonofScarlet said:

These are great ideas, but I think there is also benefit to looking at a new system entirely that adapts certain concepts or ideas into a new format.

I think the main problem of those who oppose the SW system is that the benefit of looking into that system is... questionable at best. The special dice system simply does not fit L5R (mechanically... maybe - thematically... definitely not) and it simply does not bring as much to the table to merit a change.

Oh, and I'm the first to agree that unique dice is a difficult basis for a game. There is a reason that 99% of all tabletop rpgs use standard numerical dice and its because they're relatively cheap and most gamers already have them for their table. It makes a new or small game marketable. I do not believe FFG does themselves any favors by creating a game that has unique dice (though I know they love them). It makes it intimidating to new players and that much harder to explain than your basic modifier systems (take this, plus that, and add it to your die roll, simple, eh?!).

As a helpful suggestion that I've mentioned elsewhere, All FFG needs to do is clean up the R&K system (which is now different enough from Wicks R&KE that it's not much of an issue), and product some D10's with Clan symbols on them. They will sell. Done

On 4/22/2017 at 10:55 AM, AtoMaki said:

I think the main problem of those who oppose the SW system is that the benefit of looking into that system is... questionable at best. The special dice system simply does not fit L5R (mechanically... maybe - thematically... definitely not) and it simply does not bring as much to the table to merit a change.

The Star Wars dice system (technically the FFG RPG system, as they first used it in Warhammer Fantasy 3rd Edition) would work perfectly fine in Rokugan, mechanically and thematically. It's a great system for anyone wanting narrative strength over simulationism.

1 hour ago, Gaffa said:

It's a great system for anyone wanting narrative strength over simulationism.

I dunno but in my experience the SW system likes simulationism a lot. I mean, individual weapon degradation is a thing not even R&K bothers to do. And I dunno about narrative strength either: Destiny Points are nice (tho I found the crunchy bonuses to be a lot better), but I wouldn't necessary call all those LULRANDUM results you can get "narrative strength" - it is quite the other way around in my opinion.

On 20/04/2017 at 1:54 AM, BayushiCroy said:

Especially since it's been all but confirmed.

On 21/04/2017 at 2:00 PM, AsakoDaihmon said:

Honestly, I think they can take something else CGL has done with Shadowrun and have the reporting system for their living world.

Currently they have new modules & story progression released for SR supplements with PDF story session report logs. They take the feedback of how story progressed at both big conventions and home game play, take the best ideas and progress the story in that manner.

RPG affecting story was only really done well - I feel - through the PbP Winter Court boards (still have some of my writing on canonized on those stories) and could have done so much more with it.

2

Agreed on both sides.
I feel the RPG should influence two the story, even if it's something that will only be noticed by those adveturing through Rokugan instead of smashing some provinces.

(technically the FFG RPG system, as they first used it in Warhammer Fantasy 3rd Edition)

Warhammer Fantasy Third Edition was a terrible game that did not understand the point of the 2nd edition of that game and died a horrible death. Let us hope for our sake that we get Legend of the Five Ring roleplaying game and not an encore of that debacle.

55 minutes ago, AtoMaki said:

I dunno but in my experience the SW system likes simulationism a lot. I mean, individual weapon degradation is a thing not even R&K bothers to do. And I dunno about narrative strength either: Destiny Points are nice (tho I found the crunchy bonuses to be a lot better), but I wouldn't necessary call all those LULRANDUM results you can get "narrative strength" - it is quite the other way around in my opinion.

I have to agree. In my experience with the SW system, the threats and advantages often end up just being modifier dice added to other rolls or what-have-you. The "narrative strength" of the die results is entirely up to the play style of the group. You could just as easily do something similar with "barely meet the TN" or "barely failed to meet the TN," but not have to buy a set of dice you won't be able to use with any other game.

Also, the fact that triumphs (or whatever the "super success" was called) and despairs didn't cancel out made for some problematic story telling. I succeeded but also didn't? I also felt it ended up being a disappointment for the players when they got an otherwise great roll with a despair. Despite succeeding by a large margin, Something Bad happened anyway. Situations like that detracted from the fun of the game at times, I felt.

7 hours ago, Suzume Tomonori said:

I have to agree. In my experience with the SW system, the threats and advantages often end up just being modifier dice added to other rolls or what-have-you. The "narrative strength" of the die results is entirely up to the play style of the group. You could just as easily do something similar with "barely meet the TN" or "barely failed to meet the TN," but not have to buy a set of dice you won't be able to use with any other game.

Also, the fact that triumphs (or whatever the "super success" was called) and despairs didn't cancel out made for some problematic story telling. I succeeded but also didn't? I also felt it ended up being a disappointment for the players when they got an otherwise great roll with a despair. Despite succeeding by a large margin, Something Bad happened anyway. Situations like that detracted from the fun of the game at times, I felt.

I agree, I would say the issue is that at the core the SW system is still about success or failure, and so most players don't play it in a narrative way but continue to play how the learned it in other role-playing games. But that said, as much as liked the old L5R RPG (I have almost everything ever printed in that regard), it also fell too often into its own pitfalls. So, I think we get a new system with custo dice for L5R, but I hope that FFG will do the work like did for the card game and build on their experience to deliver the narrative experience many would like to have.

(And I would offer to help, but I doubt they would consider me, since probably go with people in-house, so my experience on working on narrative games is moot. But it is maybe for the best, so I can focus on designing my own games).

1 hour ago, Drudenfusz said:

(And I would offer to help, but I doubt they would consider me, since probably go with people in-house, so my experience on working on narrative games is moot. But it is maybe for the best, so I can focus on designing my own games).

You never know, they might want the insight of someone who does their own game design and such for play-testing. Can't hurt to ask.

But as to your point, I totally agree. In the end the narrative applied to die rolls is going to depend on each group and how they approach the game. For some groups the FFG custom dice might help facilitate that, but for my group it didn't really aid to the narrative enough to warrant buying all the custom dice (and official dice-rolling apps, for that matter.) And my group had a number of first time role players who were having a hard enough time wrapping their head around the rules in general that all the symbols made everything even more confusing.

I'm sure FFG will make a great product and I'll probably even consider buying it, but I would just rather not have to buy a bunch of new dice to play it.

4 hours ago, Suzume Tomonori said:

You never know, they might want the insight of someone who does their own game design and such for play-testing. Can't hurt to ask.

But as to your point, I totally agree. In the end the narrative applied to die rolls is going to depend on each group and how they approach the game. For some groups the FFG custom dice might help facilitate that, but for my group it didn't really aid to the narrative enough to warrant buying all the custom dice (and official dice-rolling apps, for that matter.) And my group had a number of first time role players who were having a hard enough time wrapping their head around the rules in general that all the symbols made everything even more confusing.

I'm sure FFG will make a great product and I'll probably even consider buying it, but I would just rather not have to buy a bunch of new dice to play it.

Roll and keep d10 is the heart of l5r rpg. It would be a disaster to change this.

34 minutes ago, Isawa Syd said:

Roll and keep d10 is the heart of l5r rpg. It would be a disaster to change this.

Why? (not being an *******, but I never played the RPG)

I can understand mechanics give a certain feeling to a game but in the end dice are their to randomise results. Wether they use D20, D10/D6 Rll and Kp, exploding dice, custom dice or every dice in every possible combination like Earthdawn (if i'm remembering my old school rpg's correctly) in the end it doesn't really mater.

55 minutes ago, Isawa Syd said:

Roll and keep d10 is the heart of l5r rpg. It would be a disaster to change this.

I am curious about this too. While I personally like the system as being a generally elegant solution to the problem of balancing probabilities, I don't think it is core.

However, in terms of improvements for a new RPG, would be a rebalancing of the various schools to make them more appealing. About 90% of the published base schools outside of the main book, and probably about 30% of them in the main book, are all mechanically trash. I would love to see more minor clan and various non-corebook schools be more mechanically viable while maintaining the flavor of the idea. The alternate paths and advanced schools were at least a decent way to work around this, but I still felt like they could have made the minor clans more appealing.

I would love a way to play a School more than once without feeling like I'm - mechanically - playing the same thing again, and to have a mono-Clan group where player characters don't feel like carbon copies because they all wanted to play a Bushi without grabbing Different School.

I'd be kind of tempted to do every school like the ronin paths - Here are a large selection of generic maneouvers / kata; Here are some clan-specific ones; Here's a selection of common 'schools', which is just a list of which maneouvers they teach in which order.

I would be tempted to do them in a form of School Scrolls, using similar model to the Careers in the Star Wars. Each Clan gets Courtier / Bushi / Unique School Scrolls, you spend Insight to pick things from any Scrolls you have unlocked, with the ability to unlock School Scrolls from other Clans at a small fee.

Here is an example career path. You start at the top, in the first row, and can only purchase things that are connected to your pr evious purchases - so for example, you can always buy Know Somebody / Smooth talker / Wheel and Deal / Grit, but in order to get Toughened, you must buy Grit first.

For a slightly different map- note that there are multiple ways to proceed here.

6 hours ago, Isawa Syd said:

Roll and keep d10 is the heart of l5r rpg. It would be a disaster to change this.

Why? The roll and keep mechanics aren't that good. Other systems could do as well; other systems have got the feel of their setting better also. Roll and keep is serviceable, but it's hardly a polished gem that makes the L5R RPG special.

I think the RPG won't come out until a couple of years after the LCG. I think they'd want to have a good handle on their version of the setting and storyline. They almost certainly won't use any of the previous rules set as a starting point.

8 hours ago, Mig el Pig said:

Why?

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.

Otherwise, I think R&K is just too unique in general. I don't think that there is one other game out there that has this system (7th Seas no longer has it). And this is something worth considering, because mechanically, the game has nothing else special to offer: I can pick up GURPS and play the setting with it just fine.

Also, I'm really unsure about Talent Trees. For one, I think they are a good idea. For another, the Gadgeteer Talent Tree still haunts me in my nightmares.

All I'm going to say is I am tried of companies trying to shoe-horn every licences into one game system. I am a firm believer in the system must be made for the setting and, not the setting should be modified for the system.

On ‎4‎/‎20‎/‎2017 at 11:49 AM, AtoMaki said:

I (and my gaming group) think the combat system and the skills system are in a dire need of a revision. The rest are (largely) cool tho.

I would agree with this and add on three things specifically:
•Dueling is nowhere near as lethal as it should be. (Nowhere near as many "move to skirmish" duels as the 4th mechanics would have you believe in the setting canon...)
•Weapons need to be overhauled (using a Yari should not be in every way inferior to using a wakizashi. Suspension of disbelief = shattered.)
•Spells need to make sense with their element. (Water is the "healing" element because of our modernistic understanding of how cleanliness is imperative to health, but that's an irrelevant point where true magic is concerned and the body is represented by the Earth element. Meanwhile, the Strength side of the Water element goes entirely unrepresented. Did they just forget? Fire is pretty well done. If every element could be done like Fire was, there would be no complaints).

My 2 zeni.

13 hours ago, WHW said:

I would love a way to play a School more than once without feeling like I'm - mechanically - playing the same thing again, and to have a mono-Clan group where player characters don't feel like carbon copies because they all wanted to play a Bushi without grabbing Different School.

Just expand Kata and Advantages. I homebrew advantages for weapon focus, Dojo, provinces and a lot of other things.

Having some very fixed and traditional (basic school) fits the setting but customization should happen.

I actually wished they expanded more the advantages mechanics than the bloody alternate path mechanics (which are quite often useless, since you must be of THAT rank and have THOSE prerequisites).

Advantages are easier to take and better suited to allow customization much more than talent trees or paths or advanced schools.

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

Advantages also don't fit because you can't set up advantages chains - where you need A to pick B which unlocks C - and which is important for the feel of progressing in a "school". And if you *do* set up advantage chains, they tend up becoming little abominable monsters because their presentation is weird, and they weren't really created for that.

There was some talk about Honor in the negativity thread, so I'm going to repost it here because my post drifted into RPG territory - and I suspect some people who could find it interesting wouldn't bother to scuba dive the negativity threat.

We did it basically this way:

You have Honor "Slots", any number between 0 and 10. You pick a number you feel comfortable with and then fill these individual Honor Slots with Virtues. In the Odd Numbered Slots, you have to insert something that's either from Bushido, or your Clan's/Family Favored List (which might *also* consist of Bushido). In the non-odd numbered slots, you can write whatever you want.

First slot is special, though, as it contains 4 Virtues - this is your "core".

What these Virtues actually do? As we noticed that spending Void Points is fun and introduced more and more ways to do so, we realized that spamming Meditation/Tea Ceremony to regain Void Points was quite rythm breaking. So I used the opportunity to play with that using Honor. Upholding your Virtues, embracing them and putting them into practice restores your Void Points, and can give you up to 1 Void Point abovce your normal limit. This makes you want to actively act honorable, in order to regain your primary resource. I also love the philosophical and spiritual implication - tying Void Points to Honor mean that Honor leads to enlightenment and attaining harmony, which really enhanced our play experience.

However, you might ask, why not just go 10 Honor then and get much much much Void?

What Honor can give, Honor can take away. Failing to uphold your Virtues, not acting when someone is violating them, and violating them yourself has the exact opposite effect - you lose Void Points, and can end up at negative one, where you will need to regain 2 Void Points in short time window in order to "pay off the Void debt". Some of the Scorpion Techniques now interact with the concept of provoking this Honor Void Loss.

So if you pick too many Virtues, or if you pick conflicting ones (as sometimes upholding one means you end up neglecting other), you will struggle to keep your Void Fuel Tank replenished. As mentioned, we are used to spending lots of Void, so not having access to it is a serious complication.

Pick not enough Virtues, and you will lack opportunities to fuel your Void Tank, and will face bad rep from other people, who will consider you undisciplined and unable to dedicate yourself to higher causes.

But how they can know? Easy. We reduced the ridiculous TN of "Honor-sensing", and it's a pretty standard practice now. The fun part is that you don't just get the "Her Honor is 5", you get "Her Virtues are this, that, and this". And of course, some sneaky deceptors might trick you into thinking that they have different set of Virtues than in reality.

Practical implications? People don't look at you and see "Honor 6, gotta respect the dude", but see "His Virtues are trash, they don't align with mine or my Clan's at all, I'm gonna smack talk him and provoke some Void Point loses" : P

I can share the list of Clans and their Virtues later, if anyone is interested.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/17Cl5Ftr0zz0ghr3GCout6m4ZCkUzULJ1ATHziMNhnCg/edit?usp=sharing

13 hours ago, WHW said:

I would be tempted to do them in a form of School Scrolls, using similar model to the Careers in the Star Wars. Each Clan gets Courtier / Bushi / Unique School Scrolls, you spend Insight to pick things from any Scrolls you have unlocked, with the ability to unlock School Scrolls from other Clans at a small fee.

[snip the rest]

At this point, it's really a matter of opinion and preference, but I really don't like the "Star Wars model" because it removes a lot of flavor to the setting. The fact that it create a "Unique path" for each type of School removes all the idea of following the path of the ancestors. Knowing that Rogukan is really strong on honoring their ancestors and following their path, a tree progression removes entirely that feeling.

For me, removing that aspect means that immersion is removed. If I don't want that kind of progression, I would play another game. The current 4th edition might have some flaws, but it's still a great version. I don't think there's a need for a totally new system, it just need a few changes.

Sorry but I cannot see what works on Star Wars for L5R, it's not the same setting, not the same concept, not the same universe, not the same culture, not the same pace. Geez... Star Wars went through how many different systems? 4-5? Star Wars feels like "another version of Monopoly" at this point. It's not what I want L5R to look like.