As the title of this thread implies, this is a discussion of how would a prospective L5R RPG incorporate the foundational concept of mono no aware into its mechanics and game play.

As this is something apparently central to the LCG, I expect to see it appear in some form in any prospective RPG released by Fantasy Flight Games. However, is this something players would want to see? If so, how would it be best implemented?

My thoughts:

1) Implementing mono no aware would by its very nature make the Story being told the important focus of the game, not the characters participating in that story. There would need to be a mechanic central to the game which would allow a rotating cast of characters to enter into the Story of the game for a time, before exiting. These would be the Player Characters.

2) Death and injury would still need to be a frequent, ever present threat. Get rid of effective magic healing, and allow characters who become injured to "sit a session out" to recover from their injuries. In fact, I might suggest taking the step that Player Characters cannot (randomly) die in most scenes without the player's consent, but they can be sufficiently injured that they will need months to recover. If you are a PC, you are hero. You are not going to get shot by a random arrow and die. Your Destiny in the story is too important. However, you cannot avoid death in story appropriate situations (seppuku, duel, grudge match against your Sworn Enemy).

3) Death and retirement would need to be something in the control of the player, to some degree. Injury / exhaustion would need to stack up penalties, but players need to be entrusted with the choice of saying "No, this is where my hero's story ends." And then give them a scene of awesome, where their injuries / exhaustion does not hold them back. But that is their last scene as a PC. Ever.

4) Focus an "advancement" mechanic (XP) around the story itself, not the characters involved. You would need a fairly flat progression tree with the ability to easily bring characters in at a starting level that still feels powerful when appropriate.

Just my thoughts. What are yours? Or is the concept of mono no aware naturally antithetical to how you would like to play an L5R RPG?

Sounds like the basic rule from my L5R games still stands. "Katanas are sharp". Death was always possible, and frequently easy to achieve if players acted rashly. An arrow could fell a character, and a sword strike could kill you quite easily.

Go all-in on the Pendragon stuff, and make it a generational game, where the family is the important part of it, but individual members come and go.

I think the Glory mechanic already represents this thing quite well. One day, you are the greatest hero, beloved by all. Wait a few months, and you are a nobody. Have some Infamy too, and you go from greatest hero to hated villain.

4 minutes ago, AtoMaki said:

I think the Glory mechanic already represents this thing quite well. One day, you are the greatest hero, beloved by all. Wait a few months, and you are a nobody. Have some Infamy too, and you go from greatest hero to hated villain.

You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.

Having a generational game where, between adventures your characters gradually grow older and die would add a lot of weight to the "family over self" elements of the setting. "Death before dishonor" when death just means switching to a new character, but dishonor means a stain on all of your characters until you can redeem yourself.

On 18/5/2017 at 4:40 PM, Tonbo Karasu said:

Go all-in on the Pendragon stuff, and make it a generational game, where the family is the important part of it, but individual members come and go.

Yes! That's something I always wanted to homebrew mechanics for in L5R 4th ed.

I do not know if I'll ever go 5th edition (IF it will ever exist), I've spent too much money on 4th edition.. but sooner or later I'll homebrew those pendragon-like generational rules!

The old L5R roleplay had a karma rule, which allowed characters that get replaced to start with more XP and thus mitigate the XP discrepancy between new and longer played character. So, I never saw an issue with keeping the XP low, but always awarded plenty of XP, far more than the rulebook suggested one should do, but I prefer to keep my campaigns short and don't worry about the player character getting powerful. Probably since I took that advice:

Also, instead of having a combat focus, I usually prefer to play around the obstacles the players choose themselves that they would like their characters to face, thus I can greate dilemma which leads to the characters having to make hard choices which they can regret or try to atone for and such things. That makes for me mono no aware work, not how fast hit points can get refreshed. It is about the fugacity of life, not necessarily about mortality.

When I first played the GM suggested that we come up with a few different ways our characters could die. I started with some taint, I dueled too much, and my Kitsuki investigation was leading me too deep into the shadowlands.

On 5/19/2017 at 0:40 AM, Tonbo Karasu said:

Go all-in on the Pendragon stuff, and make it a generational game, where the family is the important part of it, but individual members come and go.

Blood & Honour?

I'd implement Mono no Aware a little differently: instead of it being about character death, it'd be about character fulfillment.

Let's say that my character is a Matsu warrior. Somewhere on her character sheet she'll have a number of "character goals"; three sounds like a good number. In her case, these might be:

- Avenge the death of my mother at the hands of the villainous Ide McMinorVillain.

- Become recognised as a master origamist.

- Travel to the Wall and fight in its defence.

Together, these three elements are her own personal story, which is part of the larger story of the campaign. When she achieves them, her part in the campaign is over. She's done. She might die heroically in the process of achieving the last one, or she might stop adventuring in order to accept a place in the Lions Pride. Either way, I retire her and build a new character with a small bonus for having achieved the goals of my previous one.

This helps the GM a lot too, because it makes it much easier to build a plot that characters are hooked into. If each character has three goals that the players picked, then for a five-player game that's fifteen plot elements which the players are pretty much guaranteed to want to chase after. Assemble those together into some sort of overarching framework and you're good to go.

11 hours ago, BitRunr said:

Blood & Honour?

Probably not, since that's apparently the name of a neo-nazi music network!

4 minutes ago, Tonbo Karasu said:

Probably not, since that's apparently the name of a neo-nazi music network!

Research is important! More important is not to find something irrelevant and assume that's the correct point to stop.

http://johnwickpresents.com/product/blood-honor-hardcover-samurai-tragedy-in-old-japan/

You recognise that name in the URL, right?

Just now, BitRunr said:

Research is important! More important is not to find something irrelevant and assume that's the correct point to stop.

http://johnwickpresents.com/product/blood-honor-hardcover-samurai-tragedy-in-old-japan/

You recognise that name in the URL, right?

Oh, he used the american spelling. I was searching for the British spelling, based on your post :).

Yes, I'm not American. Funny that.

It's also a terribly-chosen name, as B&H is rather well-known as the Neo-Nazi thing. I kept thinking that it must be named something else, as no one would name a game like that, surely, but...

Oh well. I personally just think of it as "John Wick's other Samurai RPG".

Oh, and if anyone can be accused of not doing their research, it has to be John Wick. B&H, for one, but also plenty of things in Rokugan...

Although some of those are also fine elements of "Rokugan is not Japan".

On 7/2/2017 at 0:37 AM, Kitsu Seinosuke said:

I'd implement Mono no Aware a little differently: instead of it being about character death, it'd be about character fulfillment.

Let's say that my character is a Matsu warrior. Somewhere on her character sheet she'll have a number of "character goals"; three sounds like a good number. In her case, these might be:

- Avenge the death of my mother at the hands of the villainous Ide McMinorVillain.

- Become recognised as a master origamist.

- Travel to the Wall and fight in its defence.

Together, these three elements are her own personal story, which is part of the larger story of the campaign. When she achieves them, her part in the campaign is over. She's done. She might die heroically in the process of achieving the last one, or she might stop adventuring in order to accept a place in the Lions Pride. Either way, I retire her and build a new character with a small bonus for having achieved the goals of my previous one.

This helps the GM a lot too, because it makes it much easier to build a plot that characters are hooked into. If each character has three goals that the players picked, then for a five-player game that's fifteen plot elements which the players are pretty much guaranteed to want to chase after. Assemble those together into some sort of overarching framework and you're good to go.

We actually used homebrew rules back in 1st/2nd edition to do exactly this. Each character had predefined goals at character creation: personal goals that the character would accomplish. The GM throughout the game could add or remove additional plot specific goals. The campaign structure was as follows:

The campaign itself was split over many smaller modules. Players create their starting characters - These were our core characters. As we played, we moved towards our personal and plot goals and our fate was over when either: 1. Our characters died (in any way, planned or not), or 2. When all of our initial story goals were achieved. Once our character was retired in this way, we created a new character, who had at least 1 goal that was tied to the old character in some way. Perhaps he was a crab that died in the shadowlands and your goal for the new character is to find the creature than killed your kin and slay it. This ties all the characters together down the line.

After each main story arc, the GM ends the fates of all characters left when the arc ends. Then he had tables that we had made up where he could check things that hed been keeping notes on, like if your core character died an honorable or dishonorable death, did he commit seppuku, was he consumed by taint, etc. The characters for the beginning of the next story arc were ancestors of the old characters, and the campaign would continue at some point in the future in the same world. Each 2nd arc character would gain an ancestor and bonus xp or traits based on their prior 1st arc character based on the results of the table and how that character performed.

It was all really neat, I'll have to see if I still have any of our old tables. The only downside was that these campaigns required a lot from the GM to tie it all together, but it was a cool experience. Eventually though, to streamline the process, we cut out the goal system and changed it to where at the end of each "campaign", you got to pick one character you played previously (or the only one if you never died), and apply the end of arc stuff from above where your new character is his ancestor. This cut out a lot of character creations during the game. It was all still super fun though

Tell your players that for each $5 you pay them at the beginning of the campaign, their character lives that many sessions.

13 minutes ago, Mirith said:

Tell your players that for each $5 you pay them at the beginning of the campaign, their character lives that many sessions.

Unmitigated Evil, or Untrammeled Brilliance. I can't decide.

On 02/07/2017 at 11:15 AM, Myrion said:

It's also a terribly-chosen name, as B&H is rather well-known as the Neo-Nazi thing. I kept thinking that it must be named something else, as no one would name a game like that, surely, but...

Oh well. I personally just think of it as "John Wick's other Samurai RPG".

Sure, you can never touch something a neo-nazi uses ever again. But letting them take possession of whole words forever is basically letting them get away with what they want, so...

3 hours ago, Mirumoto Saito said:

Sure, you can never touch something a neo-nazi uses ever again. But letting them take possession of whole words forever is basically letting them get away with what they want, so...

I don't think Neo-Nazis are that concerned with taking possession of whole words forever. Based on the slogans I've seen, I have the suspicion that they mostly want to **** and/or kill large numbers of people. If all they get is a few words then I'd call that a win.

(Besides, humanity will get the words back eventually. "Inquisitor", "Crusader" and "Leveller" are terms that people can use innocently nowadays, despite those having been hateful and murderous groups in their time. It's not unreasonable to hope that some future generation might be able to use the term "1488" just as innocently. However, today is not that day.)

Yes, because an obscure Samurai RPG is going to reclaim those words from the Neo-Nazis...

The RPG might not do much by itself, but allowing that these homophones for racist propaganda haven't been claimed by neo-nazis? Yeah, I think that's how it's done.

... Getting back to the topic....

This is definitely an interesting question, sndwurks! A good mechanical treatment of mono no aware could really elevate it as an important theme.

I like especially like #3. I've always thought a last stand mechanic would be cool.

I have a couple ideas myself, but they definitely need more work.