7 minutes ago, Kinzen said:

So there's a sacred cow to kill: "RPG mechanics must look like CCG mechanics." :-P

I'd say that the sacred cow is this: "Game mechanics focus principally on the methods of violent conflict."

That said, L5R isn't exactly alone in this when it comes to RPGs.

L5R rpg culture is very bizarre when it comes to the violent conflict thing, IMHO mostly because violence mechanics were too punishing and too random in the first edition (mostly due to the fact that John Wick was of the school of thought that if you got into a physical conflict, you already failed and should be punished for failure - which is about as bizarre for me in a game about warring samurais as considering honor to be "for the losers"), which made people naturally flock towards non violent resolutions and kind of created the "court based no combat" culture that joins many RPG players together, while also somehow turning that IMHO design flaw of combat (game about samurai warriors warring each other shouldn't have a combat state be designed as a failure state to be punished for!) into a revered feature ("because it's so lethal, you don't want to fight, so you turn to other measures, which means L5R is the bestest rpg ever because it's not dnd where you do fighting as a primary method of conflict resolution, because fighting is for reasons inherently less good than not fighting").

Of course, there wasn't much support of the social conflict resolution in the mechanics, which "allowed people to focus on the roleplaying" (or something; as you probably can guess from my posts, I'm of school of thought that good rules design actively enhances roleplaying, bad rules design actively damages it)...a phrase I heard a lot when people praise RPGs of the olde, often actively forgetting how clunky these games were in practice (looking at you, old World of Darkness whose mechanics were so clunky, heavy and convoluted everyone ditched them and pretended that it was this way in the books :P)

3 minutes ago, WHW said:

L5R rpg culture is very bizarre when it comes to the violent conflict thing, IMHO mostly because violence mechanics were too punishing and too random in the first edition (mostly due to the fact that John Wick was of the school of thought that if you got into a physical conflict, you already failed and should be punished for failure - which is about as bizarre for me in a game about warring samurais as considering honor to be "for the losers"), which made people naturally flock towards non violent resolutions and kind of created the "court based no combat" culture that joins many RPG players together, while also somehow turning that IMHO design flaw of combat (game about samurai warriors warring each other shouldn't have a combat state be designed as a failure state to be punished for!) into a revered feature ("because it's so lethal, you don't want to fight, so you turn to other measures, which means L5R is the bestest rpg ever because it's not dnd where you do fighting as a primary method of conflict resolution, because fighting is for reasons inherently less good than not fighting").

Of course, there wasn't much support of the social conflict resolution in the mechanics, which "allowed people to focus on the roleplaying" (or something; as you probably can guess from my posts, I'm of school of thought that good rules design actively enhances roleplaying, bad rules design actively damages it)...a phrase I heard a lot when people praise RPGs of the olde, often actively forgetting how clunky these games were in practice (looking at you, old World of Darkness whose mechanics were so clunky, heavy and convoluted everyone ditched them and pretended that it was this way in the books :P)

*standing ovation*

5 minutes ago, WHW said:

Of course, there wasn't much support of the social conflict resolution in the mechanics, which "allowed people to focus on the roleplaying"

This.

You can roleplay in any game. As John Wick said, you can roleplay in chess (but you shouldn't expect to win if you do.) A mere absence of social rules is therefore nothing to be proud of. The problem is that what social rules there have been in L5R, were often terrible. This is a shame because Rokugani concepts such as face are almost perfect for adversarial social mechanics.

I like the combat system though. L5R combat is fun, and the swiftness of it means that it doesn't last all session. Most of the fights end up being nonlethal (in my experience) because it's easy to disable someone with a single blow but hard to kill them with one, which in turn adds a lot of drama to a campaign because one can have recurring adversaries.

4th ed is a weird game that perfected the basic design of the 1st ed, making the OK good and bad either good or really bad (looking at you, Shugenja and Kiho). Combat being actually fun was one of the improvements I found most pleasant. It isn't perfect, and definitely could use a rule or two reining in random damage expolsions ("mooks don't explode their damage dice", or as we play it currently, "you can have one explosion on damage per mastery ability on the fighting skill, so 1 explosion on 3, 2 on 5 and 3 on 7).

For the face - I'm meddling with the idea that Glory is form of a social capital that you can spend on things, and social losses hit you directly to the Glory, making it harder for you to achieve stuff. I want Glory to be something to be actively sought and rewarding to obtain. "I spend 10 Glory to make sure official I'm going to visit knows that I'M THE BIG DEAL" is fun and rewarding, and it gives you potentially interesting decisions to make.

Again, I wish many of the points of the settings were reinforced mechanically like hunger for blood is in vampire games.

46 minutes ago, WHW said:

For the face - I'm meddling with the idea that Glory is form of a social capital that you can spend on things, and social losses hit you directly to the Glory, making it harder for you to achieve stuff. I want Glory to be something to be actively sought and rewarding to obtain. "I spend 10 Glory to make sure official I'm going to visit knows that I'M THE BIG DEAL" is fun and rewarding, and it gives you potentially interesting decisions to make.

Again, I wish many of the points of the settings were reinforced mechanically like hunger for blood is in vampire games.

This sounds interesting. If you make progress on it, I'd be interested in seeing more.

We have a proto-table of "things you could spend glory on", with quite a lot of entries. The problem is, it's in polish, because im a dumb person who does half their work in english and half in polish when doing cooperative projects with my players and gm, instead of doing everything in english :P.

1 minute ago, WHW said:

We have a proto-table of "things you could spend glory on", with quite a lot of entries. The problem is, it's in polish, because im a dumb person who does half their work in english and half in polish when doing cooperative projects with my players and gm, instead of doing everything in english :P.

Is it a 100 point scale ? Like standard glory 9 is 90 'points'?

Ha, weighing the points is going to be the hardest part of this, so things are described as "low medium high cost" instead of numbers :P. I intend Glory to be self balancing - I want you to spend what you get, and keeping the numbers low enough to not overwhelm, while also high enough to allow spending it

36 minutes ago, WHW said:

We have a proto-table of "things you could spend glory on", with quite a lot of entries. The problem is, it's in polish, because im a dumb person who does half their work in english and half in polish when doing cooperative projects with my players and gm, instead of doing everything in english :P.

Oh, I would really like to see that, if you ever translate it to english!

-------------------

All this talk about Shugenja makes me want to adapt the Miracle system from the New Gods of Mankind RPG as the new spellcasting for L5R. And also, to revise and post my Appeasement mechanics!

10 minutes ago, Mirumoto Saito said:

Oh, I would really like to see that, if you ever translate it to english!

-------------------

All this talk about Shugenja makes me want to adapt the Miracle system from the New Gods of Mankind RPG as the new spellcasting for L5R. And also, to revise and post my Appeasement mechanics!

Go for it.

5 hours ago, Kinzen said:

What would an actual priestly approach look like? Less DPS, less AOE damage; more things related to the cosmology and religion of the setting -- especially the non-Tainted parts of it.

I agree with 90%+ of what you're saying, but I gotta disagree that "more of X" need come "at the expense of Y."

Rokugan is still a very war-like culture, and the idea that these samurai didn't immediately realize the lethal potential of the primal forces of the universe answering your requests in a very literally sense is, well, kinda silly to me.

You're absolutely right, however, when you say that the mechanics never had anywhere near enough "spirituality" present in their representation of the setting. (Though, Benten's Touch is called that because some samurai communed with the air kami enough times for that effect that he/she simply named that prayer "Benten's Touch;" it's not because Benten-fortune is actually supposed to be involved. )

I'm gonna quote some Soshi Shugenja description for consideration, because I'm under the impression that players tend to generalize about the kami in the same way most Rokugani do - mistakenly.

Quote

The Soshi understand better than most that the kami are not honorable beings as many envision them, but rather completely alien creatures with no firm concept of human behavior or even of honor itself. They can and will do virtually anything asked of them if properly entreated, so long as the request is not a violation of the natural order such as blood sorcery. The Soshi excel at exploiting this to channel the kami into feats of stealth, trickery, and deception.

One of the things I liked in the AEG ST's send-off care package was the bit where Moshi Ikako shamed Isawa Koiso into remembering a shugenja's actual duty...

While it's certainly too late in the macro-scale, the idea that having your shugenja bless your army is a better use of their time than having them slinging fireballs around had a definite appeal.

2 minutes ago, Shiba Gunichi said:

One of the things I liked in the AEG ST's send-off care package was the bit where Moshi Ikako shamed Isawa Koiso into remembering a shugenja's actual duty...

While it's certainly too late in the macro-scale, the idea that having your shugenja bless your army is a better use of their time than having them slinging fireballs around had a definite appeal.

From a fiction? I may have skipped reading stuff at the very end, so if it's on kazenoshiro that'd be awesome.

4 minutes ago, Bayushi Tsubaki said:

From a fiction? I may have skipped reading stuff at the very end, so if it's on kazenoshiro that'd be awesome.

Released well after the sale, it's sort of a swansong for the old canon at this point- Onyx Dawn. The relevant bit is in the stories that start on Page 24.

1 hour ago, Kuni Katsuyoshi said:

Go for it.

....and I just can't find my Appeasement rules anywhere.

If someone here that used to wander in the Homebrews section of the old AEG forums and, for some reason, have those rules saved in their hard drives, I would really appreciate if can throw me a line.

1 hour ago, Bayushi Tsubaki said:

Rokugan is still a very war-like culture, and the idea that these samurai didn't immediately realize the lethal potential of the primal forces of the universe answering your requests in a very literally sense is, well, kinda silly to me.

You're absolutely right, however, when you say that the mechanics never had anywhere near enough "spirituality" present in their representation of the setting. (Though, Benten's Touch is called that because some samurai communed with the air kami enough times for that effect that he/she simply named that prayer "Benten's Touch;" it's not because Benten-fortune is actually supposed to be involved. )

Not using those primal forces to kill is not silly at all in a metaphysical framework where death is spiritually polluting.

As for the spell, I know -- my point is that naming a kami effect after a Fortune is the closest the system comes to making the Fortunes relevant to shugenja-ing. And it isn't very much.

11 minutes ago, Mirumoto Saito said:

....and I just can't find my Appeasement rules anywhere.

If someone here that used to wander in the Homebrews section of the old AEG forums and, for some reason, have those rules saved in their hard drives, I would really appreciate if can throw me a line.

I'll get back to you. :-)

5 hours ago, Kitsu Seinosuke said:

This.

You can roleplay in any game. As John Wick said, you can roleplay in chess (but you shouldn't expect to win if you do.) A mere absence of social rules is therefore nothing to be proud of. The problem is that what social rules there have been in L5R, were often terrible. This is a shame because Rokugani concepts such as face are almost perfect for adversarial social mechanics.

I like the combat system though. L5R combat is fun, and the swiftness of it means that it doesn't last all session. Most of the fights end up being nonlethal (in my experience) because it's easy to disable someone with a single blow but hard to kill them with one, which in turn adds a lot of drama to a campaign because one can have recurring adversaries.

Um, I guess I'm in the minority but I thought there were tons of social rules in 4th edition. Skills like Courtier(Manipulation) being countered by Etiquette. Sincerity(Honesty or Dishonesty) being countered by Investigation. Status rank vs. Glory rank vs. Honor rank affecting interactions. I'm not sure what more social rules there could be without abstracting out all interactions entirely.

7 minutes ago, Rawls said:

Um, I guess I'm in the minority but I thought there were tons of social rules in 4th edition. Skills like Courtier(Manipulation) being countered by Etiquette. Sincerity(Honesty or Dishonesty) being countered by Investigation. Status rank vs. Glory rank vs. Honor rank affecting interactions. I'm not sure what more social rules there could be without abstracting out all interactions entirely.

The things you mention are very bare-bones for an actual system of representation.
Imagine if combat worked the way court does: The bushi who wins the contested kenjutsu roll kills his opponent.

I like to point people to the A Song of Ice and Fire ttrpg for a good example of a mechanical system for politics. The issue one mostly runs into is many people scoff at the idea that dice should be used at all in political dealings, and that everything should simply be role-played out to completion (something I disagree with personally, as that style of play very heavily favors players who are capable speakers, even if their characters aren't.).

3 minutes ago, Bayushi Tsubaki said:

The things you mention are very bare-bones for an actual system of representation.
Imagine if combat worked the way court does: The bushi who wins the contested kenjutsu roll kills his opponent.

That is how combat works. First bushi to win 4-5 Kenjutsu rolls versus Armor TN wins.

There's no reason why the GM can't make people roll 4-5 Courtier vs Etiquette rolls instead of 1.

1 minute ago, Rawls said:

That is how combat works. First bushi to win 4-5 Kenjutsu rolls versus Armor TN wins.

Oh no no, that's including significantly more mechanics than simply a contested roll (Armor TN, Wounds, penalties, etc.)
I mean very literally, "I roll Kenjutsu, you roll Defense. If I win, you die. If you win, you don't die." That's kind of how politics works in Old5R.

Just now, Bayushi Tsubaki said:

Oh no no, that's including significantly more mechanics than simply a contested roll (Armor TN, Wounds, penalties, etc.)
I mean very literally, "I roll Kenjutsu, you roll Defense. If I win, you die. If you win, you don't die." That's kind of how politics works in Old5R.

I'm not trying to be facetious here, but I'm truly not seeing it.

I roll Kenjutsu vs your armor TN. If I succeed enough times, I kill you. If you succeed enough times first you kill me instead.

Similarly, the GM can call as many contested Courtier/Etiquette, or Sincerity/Investigation rolls as she likes until one of the parties has "won". Hell, you even have social "hitpoints" in the form of Honor/Glory/Status.

That's not the same. Bushi "wins" by reaching a game status where his opponent is unable to continue the fight (or whatever bushi objective was). They can do it by utilizing multiple tools at their disposal, including movement, various attacks and so on. Most importantly, Kenjutsu rolls have quantified, specific results of depleting your opponents health bar, which can also be modified in a codified way (which doesn't cover every possibility, but gives at least you a room to extrapolate from). You can do damage, you can knock people down, you can stance dance, and overall, there is a pretty complex system that allows you to address the conflict from many angles, arriving at a single destination via multiple different roads.

Social mechanics are just "Uh, roll X vs Y" (and Contested Rolls are one of the worst parts of the game, because they are very inconsistent and don't interact with the Raises system, which *is* the primary way of adding complexity to your rolls by modifying base actions on the fly). They are also kind of lazily assigned, with the game heavily favoring Awareness and certain social skills which are universally useful, while leaving certain other social skills as only situationally useful while still charging full price for them (Intimidation is a good example of this - it's designed in a way that it's almost never a good pick for anything, and in many cases you are actually putting yourself at a disadvantage by using it over Courtier, because your target gets to add their Honor to their roll).

Social Raises are undefinied and there are no examples that allow you to extrapolate your own from. This is very lazy design, and it forces a lot of homebrewing on the GM who needs to find out how to price their Raises, what effects should be worth how much Raises, and what skills should allow what kind of Raises, and so on. You also need to figure out all the TNs by yourself, and for a new GM it is a nightmare. And properly adjusting TNs is *critical* in this game, because it directly decides the success rate of your players, which means that by misadjusting it you could ruin their game experience by making it accidentally oppressively hard, or boringly easy.

Social mechanics are bare boned and simplistic.

https://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?770267-Exalted-3e-Social-Influence-301

Here is an example of more modern social mechanics.