4 minutes ago, Eugene Earnshaw said:

Note, though, that the green apple and red apple fossoways are Tyrell bannermen and if Westeros used Rokugani names they'd be called 'Tyrell' too. I think adding more character and personality inside the clans is way more important than adding more clans to the mix. I mean, to continue the GOT comparison, I can't even think of a GOT equivalent of a minor clan, because everyone's allegiance ultimately goes up to one of the great lords (which makes sense).

I would love love love it if we got to see some use of 'local' family names inside the clans, because you know they have to do it. Yeah, I'm a Bayushi, but I'm from the Arunsa family inside the Bayushi (named after my great grandfather) so they call me Bayushi Yuuji of the Arunsa. Or something like that.

I think the main different is in each setting how the family identifies and how the social structure is defined. It feels like at least in old L5R the clans were mostly homogeneous. Maybe that was just for simplicity. When a family went against their clan it was a huge scandal. In ASOIAF it seems like that happens constantly, Loyalty is something that the banner lord must maintain (see Tywin and House Reyne or Robb and the work he needed to put in to keep his banner men loyal). That's a great dynamic and it's part of the reason why I liked the new Lion fiction we got so much. It showed that even though outside the clan they may speak with one voice inside the clan they are anything but unified. More of that please.

To be clear I'm interested in both things. What is it like when a great clan family is disloyal (Yasuki, Agasha...) and what is it like when a minor clan has a split loyalty. They are different things and are both interesting.

2 minutes ago, phillos said:

I think the main different is in each setting how the family identifies and how the social structure is defined. It feels like at least in old L5R the clans were mostly homogeneous. Maybe that was just for simplicity. When a family went against their clan it was a huge scandal. In ASOIAF it seems like that happens constantly, Loyalty is something that the banner lord must maintain (see Tywin and House Reyne or Robb and the work he needed to put in to keep his banner men loyal). That's a great dynamic and it's part of the reason why I liked the new Lion fiction we got so much. It showed that even though outside the clan they may speak with one voice inside the clan they are anything but unified. More of that please.

To be clear I'm interested in both things. What is it like when a great clan family is disloyal (Yasuki, Agasha...) and what is it like when a minor clan has a split loyalty. They are different things and are both interesting.

I agree completely: I would just add that having absolute clan unity in a feudal setting like Rokugan is, in my view, a problem and a weakness in how the original setting was often portrayed. It just isn't how these kinds of societies work over long periods. Plus it's boring. So from both a historical and narrative perspective, I hope we see more intra-clan rivalries, feuds, and competition.

To be fair, I think the reason was simplicity. GRRM has a lot more space to develop the social context and inject the realistic feudal details than the L5R folks did. But it doesn't take much to inject little hints and snippets into the fiction -- little references to whether or not a daimyo can be relied on, or things like that.

5 hours ago, Bayushi Tsubaki said:

The Shiba are a fluke of Void mechanics and aren't designed with dueling in mind; they're just amazing at anything they get to spend Void Points on, and that includes dueling. (In fact, I'm pretty sure the only reason Hojatsu's Legacy path was introduced was because of all the online complaints that the Dragon stood no chance against a Shiba in a duel, even though that flies in the face of the lore of the setting.)

As a family who serve as yojimbo to some incredibly annoying, condescending, and arrogant gits, it makes sense that the Shiba would excel at Iaijutsu. Phoenix still have to go to court, and when Isawa Bigmouth spouts off, Shiba Longsuffering has to be able to defend his charge.

4 minutes ago, Shiba Gunichi said:

As a family who serve as yojimbo to some incredibly annoying, condescending, and arrogant gits, it makes sense that the Shiba would excel at Iaijutsu. Phoenix still have to go to court, and when Isawa Bigmouth spouts off, Shiba Longsuffering has to be able to defend his charge.

I think I'd enjoy seeing as Isawa doing the three cuts one time

arrogant gits indeed

Really, I think the takeaway is this: to create interesting politics, you need complexity.

What type of complexity? Pretty much every type. If it's just "the Lion and the Crane hate each other; they go to war; the Lion win because they have a better general/the Crane win because they send a duelist to defeat that general," it's not very interesting. But if you work in not just clan-scale alliances and oppositions but factionalism within a clan, individual relationships (these two people are friends, those two are related through marriage, these guys are related by blood but loathe one another, that dude owes this woman a favor, these three were all students together at the same dojo and know each other's tricks), available resources (this area had a bumper crop while that one had a disastrous flood, this side has craftsmen who make better siege weapons, that side has a better intelligence network, the alliance over here means horses that allow the other side to field more cavalry than usual, the peasants there are super-loyal and mustered a huge force of ashigaru), the specific goals on both a faction level and a personal one (take over this village, destroy their sake industry, take back your grandfather's captured armor, humiliate somebody, kill every last motherless bastard, the end result doesn't matter much so long as you can show your mettle, etc), the history of prior conflicts, the individual skills or weaknesses that might tip an event one way or the other, and sheer bloody luck . . . at that point, there's real meat on the bone.

Of course, telling that story also takes a lot of words. But I'd rather have one really rich political or military conflict than half a dozen that get tossed off without much detail.

Sorry for interrupting slaying sacred lions, but I will forget otherwise:

- Assuming that after the Kami and Family Founders died, Nothing Ever Good Was Figured Out and Literally All Progress In Thought And Philosophy Froze Forever. That's not how tradition or even traditionalism works. It's not about mindlessly praising the old, but about going forward while guided by the past.

...which is i guess another lion complaint. Truly, slaying sacred lions!

12 minutes ago, WHW said:

Sorry for interrupting slaying sacred lions, but I will forget otherwise:

- Assuming that after the Kami and Family Founders died, Nothing Ever Good Was Figured Out and Literally All Progress In Thought And Philosophy Froze Forever. That's not how tradition or even traditionalism works. It's not about mindlessly praising the old, but about going forward while guided by the past.

...which is i guess another lion complaint. Truly, slaying sacred lions!

'Going forward' is not something the Rokugani seem to excel at.

I've always liked the interpretation that the rest of Rokugan is moving forward, it's just the samurai caste who are frozen in traditionalism.

Day by day the cities grow, and the towns swell with craftsmen. With every year that passes, the economic and technological power of the merchant classes grows. Samurai income, based largely on taxing agriculture, becomes overshadowed even as they spend it on more and more elaborate weapons, costumes and temples. The great merchant syndicates begin to negotiate directly with one another, bypassing their feudal lords.

Inevitably, some generation of samurai must answer the question: do we remain warriors and so cede power, do we keep power and thus cease to be warriors, or do we attempt to halt all progress so that we remain in power, an artificial and bloody-handed power though that may be?

2 hours ago, WHW said:

Sorry for interrupting slaying sacred lions, but I will forget otherwise:

- Assuming that after the Kami and Family Founders died, Nothing Ever Good Was Figured Out and Literally All Progress In Thought And Philosophy Froze Forever. That's not how tradition or even traditionalism works. It's not about mindlessly praising the old, but about going forward while guided by the past.

...which is i guess another lion complaint. Truly, slaying sacred lions!

Amen!

2 hours ago, Kuni Katsuyoshi said:

'Going forward' is not something the Rokugani seem to excel at.

That's precisely the "sacred cow/lion" that need slaying. Samurai, in real life, where very much adept at learning new things that gave them advantages. Just ask the Takeda cavalry about Nobunaga's riflemen some day.

2 hours ago, WHW said:

Assuming that after the Kami and Family Founders died, Nothing Ever Good Was Figured Out and Literally All Progress In Thought And Philosophy Froze Forever. That's not how tradition or even traditionalism works. It's not about mindlessly praising the old, but about going forward while guided by the past.

The Lion, though, have solid reason to not move forward. Their ancestors literally are watching and judging, while the kami follow the Kitsu because they change so little from their early Rokugan ancestor shugenja.

Also, frequently Rokugan is not frozen. Later mortal insight doesn't compare to the insight lost when the Kami and Family founders passed on, but they haven't been idle in trying to re-achieve those heights. Kaiu is a good example, because he was so far ahead of his time in old canon that his contemporaries couldn't recreate most of his work. When Kaiu's diary was found centuries later, it was still leaps and bounds ahead of what the Crab were doing, but it they could handle more of it.

2e also had the example of (IIRC) Kakita Noritoshi discovering and practising an iaijutsu style that had fallen out of use by technique evolution over the last few centuries. Even if you can simplify the image that paints of Crane iaijutsu techniques down to a rock/paper/scissors circle, there's still movement there.

Agasha was the same way, when they started to notice the chemistry and elements scribbled into her journal

11 minutes ago, Mirumoto Saito said:

Amen!

That's precisely the "sacred cow/lion" that need slaying. Samurai, in real life, where very much adept at learning new things that gave them advantages. Just ask the Takeda cavalry about Nobunaga's riflemen some day.

True

but I doubt we'll see firearms as a staple, outside rpg 'alternate' settings or homebrew.

7 hours ago, Shiba Gunichi said:

As a family who serve as yojimbo to some incredibly annoying, condescending, and arrogant gits, it makes sense that the Shiba would excel at Iaijutsu. Phoenix still have to go to court, and when Isawa Bigmouth spouts off, Shiba Longsuffering has to be able to defend his charge.

Since yojimbo and champions aren't the same thing, and since the Phoenix/Crane alliance is tight enough that an Isawa in need of a champion can likely expect to be represented by a Kakita-trained duelist, I think your argument works better for the Scorpion and championing their gossip-spreading, dishonest, seedy courtiers. Their dueling "expertise" is demonstrated by having Iaijutsu as a school skill (woo /golfclap).

4 hours ago, Kuni Katsuyoshi said:

True

but I doubt we'll see firearms as a staple, outside rpg 'alternate' settings or homebrew.

Oh!!

That reminds me of another holdover from the old game that we could do without.

No gunpowder!

Outlawing it by imperial decree, but still having it technically exist in the setting, was dumb. It was just an excuse to stop us from having samurai with rifles while still having fireworks.

This time around, have it not exist at all and just avoid the headache.

37 minutes ago, Yogo Gohei said:

Oh!!

That reminds me of another holdover from the old game that we could do without.

No gunpowder!

Outlawing it by imperial decree, but still having it technically exist in the setting, was dumb. It was just an excuse to stop us from having samurai with rifles while still having fireworks.

This time around, have it not exist at all and just avoid the headache.

No arguments here

I like the theory that gunpowder was banned for the same reason that dealing with kansen was banned: it's a form of military power which levels the field between peasants and samurai, and thus breaks the samurai caste's monopoly on violence.

(I might be overthinking this.)

1 hour ago, Yogo Gohei said:

Oh!!

That reminds me of another holdover from the old game that we could do without.

No gunpowder!

Outlawing it by imperial decree, but still having it technically exist in the setting, was dumb. It was just an excuse to stop us from having samurai with rifles while still having fireworks.

This time around, have it not exist at all and just avoid the headache.

Aw, I was hoping we'd get some matchlocks! T_T

4 minutes ago, Kitsu Seinosuke said:

I like the theory that gunpowder was banned for the same reason that dealing with kansen was banned: it's a form of military power which levels the field between peasants and samurai, and thus breaks the samurai caste's monopoly on violence.

(I might be overthinking this.)

Kinda sorta,

It was more gunpowder=evil gaijin sorcery,

the practical reasons were defintely there, just not spoken of in 'polite company'

2 minutes ago, JJ48 said:

Aw, I was hoping we'd get some matchlocks! T_T

Awww dont be sad

We have magic, who needs. guns

7 minutes ago, Kuni Katsuyoshi said:

Awww dont be sad

We have magic, who needs. guns

But guns are cool!

Also, imagine if we had some really, really BIG guns; so large that they'd need a ship to carry them! Then we could actually sink other ships, rather than just engaging in boarding actions and fighting just as if we were on land!

Just now, JJ48 said:

But guns are cool!

Also, imagine if we had some really, really BIG guns; so large that they'd need a ship to carry them! Then we could actually sink other ships, rather than just engaging in boarding actions and fighting just as if we were on land!

........You just want to play pirate, don't you?

of course if we had canon, The Mantls couldn't do as much of their double kama schtick.

1 minute ago, Kuni Katsuyoshi said:

........You just want to play pirate, don't you?

of course if we had canon, The Mantls couldn't do as much of their double kama schtick.

Meh, who cares about the Yolobozo family? I'm a Tsuruchi! I want to attack from a distance! XD

Just now, JJ48 said:

Meh, who cares about the Yolobozo family? I'm a Tsuruchi! I want to attack from a distance! XD

Well....you have all those nice bows,

7 hours ago, Kuni Katsuyoshi said:

True

but I doubt we'll see firearms as a staple, outside rpg 'alternate' settings or homebrew.

Sadly true...

2 hours ago, Yogo Gohei said:

Oh!!

That reminds me of another holdover from the old game that we could do without.

No gunpowder!

Outlawing it by imperial decree, but still having it technically exist in the setting, was dumb. It was just an excuse to stop us from having samurai with rifles while still having fireworks.

This time around, have it not exist at all and just avoid the headache.

OR... Or, heard me out, lets just have samurai with rifles! Just like in real life!

1 hour ago, Kuni Katsuyoshi said:

Awww dont be sad

We have magic, who needs. guns

Bah, guns are WAY cooler than magic. Better yet, lets have magic guns!

28 minutes ago, Mirumoto Saito said:

Sadly true...

OR... Or, heard me out, lets just have samurai with rifles! Just like in real life!

Bah, guns are WAY cooler than magic. Better yet, lets have magic guns!

For magic guns I politely point you towards the Iron Kingdoms rpg

I don't have any cogent arguments againts guns in L5R (yet), that isn't just personal bias.

BTW; That bias says 'no thank you'