Small-scale inter-clan warfare between provincial daimyo of the clan (as depicted in the early RPG sources) sounded fun, but it's something that we never saw in L5R proper. In fact, we barely ever saw any nod to the notion that there were daimyo besides the great family and a handful of vassals.

2 minutes ago, Himoto said:

In fact, we barely ever saw any nod to the notion that there were daimyo besides the great family and a handful of vassals.

One of the problems is that there aren't that many provinces in Rokugan. Each Family has roughly 3-4 provinces (including the Family Capital), and that's it. Not a lot of space to explore, if you ask me.

That's how it ended up being when they actually divided the place up, yes. Older versions hinted at considerably more provinces, which would have been more sensible.

Since the story is being reset the past could also be reset. I really don't want to see another Scorpion coup but I think turning the current Emperor into another Hantei XVI could work. A paranoid Emperor that is manipulating the various clans to take action against each other in order to weaken them would make sense for a civil war. The Emperor mostly stays out of the conflicts to see the clans weaken and may only intervene if he sees one getting too strong.

After a while he could be assassinated by an heir whom takes over or one of the clans could bring his mad reign to an end, which could lead to a new race for the throne. Personally, I'd rather see a Hantei remain in power.

1 hour ago, TechnoGolem said:

Since the story is being reset the past could also be reset. I really don't want to see another Scorpion coup but I think turning the current Emperor into another Hantei XVI could work. A paranoid Emperor that is manipulating the various clans to take action against each other in order to weaken them would make sense for a civil war. The Emperor mostly stays out of the conflicts to see the clans weaken and may only intervene if he sees one getting too strong.

After a while he could be assassinated by an heir whom takes over or one of the clans could bring his mad reign to an end, which could lead to a new race for the throne. Personally, I'd rather see a Hantei remain in power.

Bring in P'an Ku and let his madness effect the Emperor and the Empire as a whole!

13 hours ago, TechnoGolem said:

Since the story is being reset the past could also be reset. I really don't want to see another Scorpion coup but I think turning the current Emperor into another Hantei XVI could work. A paranoid Emperor that is manipulating the various clans to take action against each other in order to weaken them would make sense for a civil war. The Emperor mostly stays out of the conflicts to see the clans weaken and may only intervene if he sees one getting too strong.

After a while he could be assassinated by an heir whom takes over or one of the clans could bring his mad reign to an end, which could lead to a new race for the throne. Personally, I'd rather see a Hantei remain in power.

In historic Japan, the Imperial dynasty was never overthrown, but eventually weakened to the point that the Shogun became the de facto ruler of Japan, even while the Emperor was the official ruler. Could something like that work, where the clans keep a Hantei on the throne, but a military leader arises (Toturi, perhaps?) who actually rules Rokugan (in the name of the Emperor, of course)?

In our RPG games, we basically introduced a Shogun-Emperor struggle where it's pretty cyclical. Weak Emperors fall prey to Shogun, Strong Emperors either put a sycophant in the officer or declare that it isn't needed anymore. Which then allows weak Emperors of future to bribe Clans with that office in exchange for support and backing.

Kind of like the Emerald Champion, I suppose.

I agree the general sense that the Emperor is too strong, and it breaks a lot of things. Everyone is loyal to the Emperor and Wants A Strong Empire so player input is constantly for there to be less conflict, because they shouldn't war with each other, because they Want A Strong Empire. This forces them to offload all the conflict duties on the External Threat, which the setting isn't built to accommodate happening so often. That's part of what made Jigoku so broken and deforming to the setting: every conflict then has to be about Jigoku, and you can't have supernatural things without Jigoku. And Jigoku's setting-deforming influence is a huge part of why shugenja make no sense and have nothing to do and the whole world feels spiritually dead instead of wondrous. And I agree, this all stems from the setting being built to ONLY function up to the Second Day Of Thunder. The setting had to pantomime that same conflict again and again and again and again because the setting doesn't WORK without that conflict happening. You have to constantly "break the rules" because actually following the rules results in nonfunctionality. (This is why I was always saying "put the Spider in from the beginning of the relaunch and make them able to participate in society": so you can have rules that allow you to set up the conflicts you want to have without constantly needing to fudge, break, or ignore them. It was endlessly frustrating that everyone saw this as "giving the Spider nice things and making other Clans accommodate them" instead of "letting the antagonists be able to do their jobs in making the entire game world function without constantly having to break how the game world functions")

There are a lot of things in the setting put there because they were appropriately Asianey but there aren't actual reasons for them to be there. Shugenja were mentioned earlier; the things that make them make sense just aren't there. But there's more. Like Monks. As I mentioned elsewhere, they don't make sense, because the Buddhist ideas of "personal purity and perfection through forsaking worldly desires" don't really exist in the setting. Shinsei is supposed to be the Buddha figure but he doesn't do the Buddha things that make ascetic monks work, and the justification is Shinsei said "Oh, even though I didn't say all the things Buddha said about worldly desire being the source of suffering, there's this thing called the Path of Purification and you guys should totally act like I said all that stuff."

And there's a lot of courtiers, everything we see about courtiers focuses on how they interact with other clans, and there's not NEARLY enough things going on to justify them. What the heck are most of them doing? Winter Court is the big attraction, those guys have enough to do, but we're told there's MANY other regional courts and that's where most courtiers are -- what are they doing, what justifies them? How are there all these places where multiple Clans' courtiers are interacting and politicking with each other when most Courts are regional and Clans mostly run their own stuff, and how are these courts not "a bunch of Scorpions backstabbing each other about internal politics, and then elsewhere a bunch of Crane passive-aggressiving each other about internal politics, and elsewhere a bunch of Hida deciding leadership and resource allocation via drinking contest?"

So you can't really engage with those things on fundamental levels, you have to be superficial enough to not hit the parts that make it stop making sense. You can't show the "common" courtiers in detail because you run out of things for them to be doing and ways for them to interact with other Clans, which the setting says they should be doing, so you can only hit the higher-level important guys. Enlightenment has to be this weird unrelated thing to what everyone is doing because the path to Enlightenment doesn't go from the common experience, and thus attaining Enlightenment can't be about questions people have or things they experience.

23 minutes ago, Huitzil37 said:

and how are these courts not "a bunch of Scorpions backstabbing each other about internal politics, and then elsewhere a bunch of Crane passive-aggressiving each other about internal politics, and elsewhere a bunch of Hida deciding leadership and resource allocation via drinking contest?"

Loved that .

I think that the emperor should work like in Dune - stronger than each clan individually, but with no chance if they all unite against him - that's why he need to keep the constant strife between them.

That or the already mentioned idea with weak empire and an office of Shogun/Emerald Champion/whatever.

15 minutes ago, Doji Makoto said:

I think that the emperor should work like in Dune - stronger than each clan individually, but with no chance if they all unite against him - that's why he need to keep the constant strife between them.

But that only makes sense if their constant strife makes sense. It doesn't if they all love him, because then the Emperor is manipulating them into fighting each other, so they won't unite and overthrow him, when the thing that unites them is how much they all love him.

The Emperor needs to not be divine, and not particularly respected. People should be going behind his back and undermining him constantly, and "we all love the Emperor and Want A Strong Empire" should be a mutually-agreed upon fiction that people only participate in so they can accuse other Clans of not loving the Emperor enough so they can get an advantage against them.

1 minute ago, Huitzil37 said:

People should be going behind his back and undermining him constantly, and "we all love the Emperor and Want A Strong Empire" should be a mutually-agreed upon fiction that people only participate in so they can accuse other Clans of not loving the Emperor enough so they can get an advantage against them.

Yep. Exactly.
And that's why I want the Scorpion Clan Coup (or something similar) to happen again - to remove Hantei bloodline from the throne and choose an emperor without all that divine mumbo-jumbo.

Then again, I like more realistic settings, and Rokugan is very much fantastical.

I would like to see the Emperor being, like, almost full-on divine and safe from infighting because he can go "THIS! IS! ROKUGAAAAN!" on any challenger's butt.

13 minutes ago, Huitzil37 said:

But that only makes sense if their constant strife makes sense. It doesn't if they all love him, because then the Emperor is manipulating them into fighting each other, so they won't unite and overthrow him, when the thing that unites them is how much they all love him.

The Emperor needs to not be divine, and not particularly respected. People should be going behind his back and undermining him constantly, and "we all love the Emperor and Want A Strong Empire" should be a mutually-agreed upon fiction that people only participate in so they can accuse other Clans of not loving the Emperor enough so they can get an advantage against them.

The Otomo Imperial family's job (apart from running the bureaucracy), is to make sure the Clans have plenty of reasons to fight one another. Quoting someone's word out of context so an reasonable comment turns into a major offense to someone else's honor is their specialty, and they have dirt on any samurai worthy of mention. (What separates them from Scorpion is how they use this information. Scorpion blackmails people and Otomo just gives away that information to other Clans when they need a war)

And the Emperor is far from divine. Hantei and his son were pretty much supernatural in nature, but the line got dilluded so much over time it's much more about tradition than anything else. I totally agree the Clans should plot against the throne as well as against each others, but differently. Open warfare against other clans is perfectly approriate, while againast the throne it is a more of an influence wa, like stripping the Emperor from his power, gozoku-style.

33 minutes ago, Tetsuhiko said:

The Otomo Imperial family's job (apart from running the bureaucracy), is to make sure the Clans have plenty of reasons to fight one another. Quoting someone's word out of context so an reasonable comment turns into a major offense to someone else's honor is their specialty, and they have dirt on any samurai worthy of mention. (What separates them from Scorpion is how they use this information. Scorpion blackmails people and Otomo just gives away that information to other Clans when they need a war)

That's what they told us about the setting, but it's not what they showed us, and it's totally incompatible with how they ran the game as one driven by player decisions. The players are never fooled by this Otomo trickery, the players always vote to avoid conflict because they Want A Strong Empire. So every time the Otomo create conflict this way, players cry foul and want it to end. So the Otomo do not often create this conflict and the world we can observe does not align with how they tell us it works.

1 hour ago, Huitzil37 said:

I agree the general sense that the Emperor is too strong, and it breaks a lot of things. Everyone is loyal to the Emperor and Wants A Strong Empire so player input is constantly for there to be less conflict, because they shouldn't war with each other, because they Want A Strong Empire.

This forces them to offload all the conflict duties on the External Threat, which the setting isn't built to accommodate happening so often. That's part of what made Jigoku so broken and deforming to the setting: every conflict then has to be about Jigoku, and you can't have supernatural things without Jigoku. And Jigoku's setting-deforming influence is a huge part of why shugenja make no sense and have nothing to do and the whole world feels spiritually dead instead of wondrous. And I agree, this all stems from the setting being built to ONLY function up to the Second Day Of Thunder. The setting had to pantomime that same conflict again and again and again and again because the setting doesn't WORK without that conflict happening. You have to constantly "break the rules" because actually following the rules results in nonfunctionality. (This is why I was always saying "put the Spider in from the beginning of the relaunch and make them able to participate in society": so you can have rules that allow you to set up the conflicts you want to have without constantly needing to fudge, break, or ignore them. It was endlessly frustrating that everyone saw this as "giving the Spider nice things and making other Clans accommodate them" instead of "letting the antagonists be able to do their jobs in making the entire game world function without constantly having to break how the game world functions")

There are a lot of things in the setting put there because they were appropriately Asianey but there aren't actual reasons for them to be there. Shugenja were mentioned earlier; the things that make them make sense just aren't there. But there's more. Like Monks. As I mentioned elsewhere, they don't make sense, because the Buddhist ideas of "personal purity and perfection through forsaking worldly desires" don't really exist in the setting. Shinsei is supposed to be the Buddha figure but he doesn't do the Buddha things that make ascetic monks work, and the justification is Shinsei said "Oh, even though I didn't say all the things Buddha said about worldly desire being the source of suffering, there's this thing called the Path of Purification and you guys should totally act like I said all that stuff."

And there's a lot of courtiers, everything we see about courtiers focuses on how they interact with other clans, and there's not NEARLY enough things going on to justify them. What the heck are most of them doing? Winter Court is the big attraction, those guys have enough to do, but we're told there's MANY other regional courts and that's where most courtiers are -- what are they doing, what justifies them? How are there all these places where multiple Clans' courtiers are interacting and politicking with each other when most Courts are regional and Clans mostly run their own stuff, and how are these courts not "a bunch of Scorpions backstabbing each other about internal politics, and then elsewhere a bunch of Crane passive-aggressiving each other about internal politics, and elsewhere a bunch of Hida deciding leadership and resource allocation via drinking contest?"

So you can't really engage with those things on fundamental levels, you have to be superficial enough to not hit the parts that make it stop making sense. You can't show the "common" courtiers in detail because you run out of things for them to be doing and ways for them to interact with other Clans, which the setting says they should be doing, so you can only hit the higher-level important guys. Enlightenment has to be this weird unrelated thing to what everyone is doing because the path to Enlightenment doesn't go from the common experience, and thus attaining Enlightenment can't be about questions people have or things they experience.

1. Players wanting no-one to fight and everyone to get along can be dealt with by the right kind of communication, I think. If FFG personnel post on the forums any time people are complaining about the Crane having to fight the Dragon and how it's totally wrong and they want peace, and just say "Our vision is that L5R is about fierce Samurai having wars with each other, and any clan can and will fight any other clan. Try to have fun with it; it's about telling an epic story" I think that could go a long way to causing a rethink. I didn't see a lot of complaints about inter-clan conflict during the race for the throne, because it was a context where it made sense and people were behind it.

2. Yup, except the stuff about the Spider, post acceptance as a clan. There are lots of better ways to have an antagonist than the Spider, which as presented would never have not just been destroyed by the other clans immediately, and screw the empress if she says otherwise. Which she would never have said otherwise, realistically. Honestly, if nothing else, the Scorpion and the Crab would have just murdered them all and denied doing anything. The Spider were great when they were a hidden faction.

3. Is shinsei supposed to be a buddha figure? I don't think so, I think he's supposed to be Taoist, roughly -- hence the Tao of Shinsei. And Taoists are not ascetic.

4. Courtiers never need to do anything. The main 'function' of the aristocracy is to spend all the resources the peasants give them. How they do that is up to them. Courtly life is basically trivial. Most aristocrats that are interested in practical matters will be interested in divvying up tax revenues, arranging marriages, and brokering alliances to fight advantageous wars. These things will happen at court, but most of it is of no broader significance outside of which aristocrats gain an advantage for their immediate family compared to their competitors.

5. You can show the lower level courts in detail if you bake into the setting what must be the case, that for any particular little Samurai family their fiercest rivals are other people from their own clan. This is not relevant to the card game, since these rivalries are mostly set aside during inter-clan conflict, but it's relevant to the RPG.

1 hour ago, Huitzil37 said:

That's what they told us about the setting, but it's not what they showed us, and it's totally incompatible with how they ran the game as one driven by player decisions. The players are never fooled by this Otomo trickery, the players always vote to avoid conflict because they Want A Strong Empire. So every time the Otomo create conflict this way, players cry foul and want it to end. So the Otomo do not often create this conflict and the world we can observe does not align with how they tell us it works.

The players also voted to have Iweko Seiken dismantle the Imperial bureaucracy. Ask anyone who played an Imperial in the Winter Court games about how much fun it is to be Imperial in a canny setting (hint: it is no fun).

The Emperor is best used as a high, distant moral authority that does not get involved in such things as wars and conflicts, as long as they are not too loud. They have more important things to pay attention to than the squabbling of local daimyo or Clans. If the Emperor is stepping in, something has gone BAD, and someone is about the lose hard. Mind you, this is all supposed to be how it "appears". I also like having an Emperor who knows incredibly well the limits of their power, and is in quiet mortal terror that one day, one of these powerful daimyo might just go "F--- this," and decide to overthrow them, and as such, keeps out of smaller affairs as not to be a tyrant who people WANT to get rid of.

Save, you know, Emperors who are either brazenly evil (Hantei XVI), incompetent (Hantei during the Great Famine), or insane (Iweko Seiken).

1 hour ago, Huitzil37 said:

That's what they told us about the setting, but it's not what they showed us, and it's totally incompatible with how they ran the game as one driven by player decisions. The players are never fooled by this Otomo trickery, the players always vote to avoid conflict because they Want A Strong Empire. So every time the Otomo create conflict this way, players cry foul and want it to end. So the Otomo do not often create this conflict and the world we can observe does not align with how they tell us it works.

There is often a difference between the setting as written and how the story unfolds, I'll give you that. Part of this perception probably comes from my experience in the RPG, where such decisions are usually beyond the characters.

In my campaign, most courtiers are kept plenty busy keeping their own clans running. "Foreign affairs" are a much smaller matter than all of the work that goes on within their own borders.

Is that kind of bureaucratic work narratively sexy? No -- but then, neither are all the routine patrols your average bushi goes on. In both cases, it's only the more unusual stuff that gets much screen time.

Courtiers (and Magistrates, and overall bureaucracy) makes much more sense if you remember that Rokugan probably follows the model of "government by man" instead of "government by law", which requires quite a cadre of well educated courtiers to keep everything running smooth.

On 5/2/2017 at 0:37 PM, Eugene Earnshaw said:

1. Players wanting no-one to fight and everyone to get along can be dealt with by the right kind of communication, I think. If FFG personnel post on the forums any time people are complaining about the Crane having to fight the Dragon and how it's totally wrong and they want peace, and just say "Our vision is that L5R is about fierce Samurai having wars with each other, and any clan can and will fight any other clan. Try to have fun with it; it's about telling an epic story" I think that could go a long way to causing a rethink. I didn't see a lot of complaints about inter-clan conflict during the race for the throne, because it was a context where it made sense and people were behind it.

2. Yup, except the stuff about the Spider, post acceptance as a clan. There are lots of better ways to have an antagonist than the Spider, which as presented would never have not just been destroyed by the other clans immediately, and screw the empress if she says otherwise. Which she would never have said otherwise, realistically. Honestly, if nothing else, the Scorpion and the Crab would have just murdered them all and denied doing anything. The Spider were great when they were a hidden faction.

3. Is shinsei supposed to be a buddha figure? I don't think so, I think he's supposed to be Taoist, roughly -- hence the Tao of Shinsei. And Taoists are not ascetic.

4. Courtiers never need to do anything. The main 'function' of the aristocracy is to spend all the resources the peasants give them. How they do that is up to them. Courtly life is basically trivial. Most aristocrats that are interested in practical matters will be interested in divvying up tax revenues, arranging marriages, and brokering alliances to fight advantageous wars. These things will happen at court, but most of it is of no broader significance outside of which aristocrats gain an advantage for their immediate family compared to their competitors.

5. You can show the lower level courts in detail if you bake into the setting what must be the case, that for any particular little Samurai family their fiercest rivals are other people from their own clan. This is not relevant to the card game, since these rivalries are mostly set aside during inter-clan conflict, but it's relevant to the RPG.

1: They weren't objecting to fighting each other in the RftT, but they were objecting to how often RftT-type events happened to cause conflict. You don't want your game, which relies on player investment in the story, to have to fight what people want from the story -- you want to build the story and setting in a way that will get them to be behind the conflict without having to go "Come on, you guys!"

2: The whole point was to remake the setting, from the ground up, to solve this and other problems, not to have the Spider as presented in AEG's game and add things onto that. Because the way AEG did the Spider was messed up and defective, but "doing the Spider" was a problem they needed to solve. And while we're fixing factions, we can also fix "Phoenix and Dragon are ill-defined and don't have enough to do", "Unicorn forgot their identity and had to keep stealing the Mantis", "Crab have to fail all the time", and "nothing about the Lion's role actually makes sense and their primary role in most stories is to have the sentence 'So this Lion guy is being a jackass for no reason...' kick off some interpersonal animosity".

3: "Taoists are not ascetic" is a strike against the monks because monks ARE ascetic and what I was pointing out was "it doesn't make sense that Shinsei told these guys to be ascetic when that doesn't tie into anything else he's about". And Shinsei is a singular teacher figure whose religion is named after him who was very visibly plain and humble and whose wisdom is primarily shared in the form of short, pithy sayings -- he's pretty clearly supposed to be Buddha.

4-5: If that's how it works, then the setting should tell us that is how it works, instead of telling us something different than what we can see.

Shinsei is less of a specific person and more of a frankenstein monster of every possible "wise asian master" archetype.

Despite all the references to "The Tao", Shinseism very much strikes me as a Buddhism analogue. The monks, the search for enlightenment, the syncretic relationship with Kami no Michi... these are all lifted from Japanese Buddhism.

2 minutes ago, Yoritomo Reiu said:

Despite all the references to "The Tao", Shinseism very much strikes me as a Buddhism analogue. The monks, the search for enlightenment, the syncretic relationship with Kami no Michi... these are all lifted from Japanese Buddhism.

Yeah, and very little about him is Taoist, except the parts where Taoism is like Buddhism (the whole "reveal wisdom through self-contradictory statements" deal, for one). Like, the Path of Man is pretty Taoist, but again, it doesn't tie in to the Path to Purification or anything else he said, for that matter. There's no fortune-telling and no occultism -- and come on if you were making a religion for your fantasy game setting and you were basing it off of a religion that sometimes has occultism and fortune-telling and alchemy why would you not include these things. The summary of his statements says that everything is really the Void and all returns to essence of etc etc but nothing ties into it, and all of the actual quotes from him are about dealing with yourself and not the nature of reality.

And then if that wasn't muddled enough he goes off to the Burning Sands and teaches them an entirely different philosophy that is way, way, way more jerkish. And in that capacity he's clearly supposed to be the Prophet Mohammed but he's such a complete failure at doing that it feels offensive to even point it out.

Just a side note, but I always thought that the Rokugani Buddha was Fudo.