57 minutes ago, WHW said:

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.

"and so on" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Perhaps we simply disagree about how complex combat is. Knockdowns and stance dancing are simply ways of modifying subsequent attack rolls and TNs. Same can be done with social skills.

50 minutes ago, WHW said:

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

Here is an example of more modern social mechanics.

Thanks for the link. I can't say it looks very appealing on first viewing. But I'll come back to it later and read it more carefully.

Then I would like to ask you to provide examples of the social system complexity from the book. Not from homebrew, not from Rule 0, but from a corebook. Especially for the paper tiger of Glory/Status/Honor triangle.

I'm kinda with Rawls here. I think that social mechanics mirror combat mechanics very well, if not even better as it is more natural to role play social encounters (even if not skilled) than to role play a melee engagement. I actually tried to be more descriptive in melee combat in a session I was running once, and it really threw it off for the players who were looking for more specific keywords like "You hit them, rolle damage" or "They missed you, you can activate your parry / riposte."

Part of this (and any RPG setting) comes down to how well the players understand, or desire to enact the situation. If players, or the game master are not familiar with a social setting it could be tough to run, but setting up a simple "it's like it's melee, they have 10 social clout and they roll xkx dice against your xkx dice, a success will remove 1 clout from them. If you get them to a 5 you get a favorable reaction to your request, if you get them to a 0 then the Lord immediately sides with you over them." does help. This is what the book tries to do, but most role players who DO understand social situations are going to want to role play, and aren't going to care for the smaller trigger words like "You out-speak them, and deal -3 to their made up social hp for this scene" rather than hearing a description of the Lord banishing them from the room.

I enjoy combat and have done some reenactment fighting, I think I might enjoy an RPG that had more with stances and weapon positioning and other role playing descriptions defining the combat more than a few dice rolls.

The tricky part is deciding if the Lord is going to banish you from the room, listen to your plea, start to pick his nose and not listen. The option game gives you to determine this is "roll your dice pool versus his dice pool", resulting in a binary situation decided mostly by who gets the random dice explosion.

Just because roleplaying is rewarding in itself doesn't mean it can't be enhanced and given structure by good rules. You can roleplay and roll. There are other expressions of achieving your objective than taking down their social hit points to 0. L5R RPG really could use a system injecting Honor, Duties, Loyalties and Ambitions into it's social dynamics, just like Shugenja really could use some kind of mechanical reinforcement of their Priestly role.

"You can do it without game system" is true, but so is "you can do it without a game at all", or "you can imagine a fantastic story without watching a movie", or "you can just figure out a cool plot and not read a book". Game offers you tools to express certain concepts, emulate genres and provide enjoyable experience. Good social system informs you of the possible goals, possible objectives and possible moves, utilizing the open ended nature of RPGs to create new content within preestabilished structure resulting in infinite replayability.

There isn't much structure to work with in "do a contested roll". In fact, even your roleplaying is kind of meaningless in that mode of resolution, because with a static TN you could argue that your decisions expressed through roleplaying might modify the final TN by reframing your goal as something of varying difficulty ("Seducing Bob in full armor" might be Hard, thus TN X, seducing Bob naked is Normal, thus TN Z, seducing Bob while flashing your manly Kakita chest and ABS while drenched in sweat after a training session is Easy, thus TN C")

So let me rephrase that: what you do to who is less important than what are your compared contested social stats.

Even your example contains pretty significant amounts of homebrew. The core rules don't have anything like "social clout" or multiple rolls to resolve social interactions.

Smallville, Masks, ASOIAF RPG and Exalted have all taught me that having social mechanics as interesting as your combat mechanics is one of the best things an RP system can do. L5R flat out lacks it. It has a few bells and whistles that might make you think otherwise, but I can tell you that I've been playing the game since before 3rd edition (the d20 games were out, but 2e was still too old to say I started in 2e) and never once used Status or Glory, and only barely has honor ever mattered to our group (usually because we have a class that gets a bonus from it). Which is a shame, because it's flavorful to the setting to have those traits, but boring to keep track of essentially useless stats.
Honestly you should look at some of those systems and how they handle social combat if you're arguing for L5R's contested rolls and flat tn's.

I'm not saying the game is perfect - I'm just saying that the rules aren't that bad. They give you a framework to work with, and at the time I started L5R I hadn't seen anything even covering social settings in an RPG really.

Personally - I almost always see the book as a set of guidelines, not rules. Since I first played an RPG as a kid I've always injected my own representation of the fantasy at hand, starting with a DBZ RPG in high school we fabricated as fans of the show so that we could play in that universe instead of DND. Currently I enjoy the Fate rpg system for it's simplicity allowing the narrative to take the front of any situation. At this point I intend to use a modified Fate system for the next L5R RPG I run. I own all of the books for 1st ed L5R but I mostly use them as ideas to create individual and unique characters from, not as rules that define my character.

imo - the Game Master really has the power to define the system as needed for any situation. If you give me character sheets and stats I will write my game to encompass them as best to fit the narrative I want to share, the game the players want to play, and the challenges we can face. In every game some stats are going to be pretty much ignored, largely because the fantasy we (game master and players) are all enacting doesn't encompass that stat. Not that these are "free weaknesses" but more that it isn't a real strength OR weakness in the setting, so it goes by. IF the game master and player wanted honor to matter, they would make it matter.

That's my opinion / experience at least.

The Game Master can define the system, but not every Game Master wants to be or is a good Game Designer. I pay for RPG books because I expect them to be actually designed.

Still, it's important to take the context of time in the analysis here. L5R is an old game. It tried to do some new things and estabilish its identity as not-dnd. While I constantly diss John Wick's design (mostly because of his contradaictory and ill defined design goals), I think the fact that L5R didn't progress very much over it's four editions is not the original designers fault, but the fact that the game didn't try to modernize, instead being fueled on nostalgia and trying to resell the original experience over and over again.

That's why I hope for a new, fresh, modern take on the concept of L5R RPG which learns from the past 20 years of game design while still caring for the themes and what makes L5R L5R.

1 minute ago, WHW said:

The Game Master can define the system, but not every Game Master wants to be or is a good Game Designer. I pay for RPG books because I expect them to be actually designed.

Still, it's important to take the context of time in the analysis here. L5R is an old game. It tried to do some new things and estabilish its identity as not-dnd. While I constantly diss John Wick's design (mostly because of his contradaictory and ill defined design goals), I think the fact that L5R didn't progress very much over it's four editions is not the original designers fault, but the fact that the game didn't try to modernize, instead being fueled on nostalgia and trying to resell the original experience over and over again.

That's why I hope for a new, fresh, modern take on the concept of L5R RPG which learns from the past 20 years of game design while still caring for the themes and what makes L5R L5R.

I certainly agree with you here. I have all of the 1st ed L5R books and still use them for setting constantly. They are great sources of story and flavor. I use the Fate system for actual character sheets and rolls. If a new L5R system comes out I'll certainly buy it, and I might even use it... lol

You have a point about game design - part of my history with gaming, and part of why I love pen and paper RPG is because I can absolutely change any aspect of the game to suit my needs. I am not looking to a game book to give me more than some awesome ideas, I'm not likely to stick 100% to the book anyway.

20 minutes ago, llamaman88 said:

Smallville, Masks, ASOIAF RPG and Exalted have all taught me that having social mechanics as interesting as your combat mechanics is one of the best things an RP system can do. L5R flat out lacks it. It has a few bells and whistles that might make you think otherwise, but I can tell you that I've been playing the game since before 3rd edition (the d20 games were out, but 2e was still too old to say I started in 2e) and never once used Status or Glory, and only barely has honor ever mattered to our group (usually because we have a class that gets a bonus from it). Which is a shame, because it's flavorful to the setting to have those traits, but boring to keep track of essentially useless stats.
Honestly you should look at some of those systems and how they handle social combat if you're arguing for L5R's contested rolls and flat tn's.

[Emphasis mine].

You've never used Status? Really? Do you allow your Bushi player characters fresh off their gempukku to challenge clan Daimyo to duels? That you didn't explicitly use the status system included in the rules to demark status isn't an indictment of said system.

And to be clear, I am not arguing that L5R is as complex as these modern systems. Rather, I am arguing that social interactions in L5R:

1. are about as complex as combat,
2. include sufficient metrics like honor, status, and glory to allow you to quantify social interactions in a fun way

Finally, it's not clear at all to me that the extra complexity of the modern social interaction systems are a good thing. Though, I must admit that I am not very familiar with them.

Okay... by the same token do DnD characters attack Kings? There's not a stat to my knowledge that makes an NPC a King, it's just assumed that you don't murder the King because he has power and influence. Using the setting expectations and using the mechanics are not the same thing.
And to be clear, I'm not denying that those metrics exist, I'm arguing that they're almost completely superficial. Honor adds to a few school techniques, fear tests and like resisting intimidation? Status doesn't add to anything except setting expectations. And Glory only really matters if the Story Teller goes to the effort of making up NPCs that should be famous.
Meanwhile the stances have tangible effects, raises can be declared for maneuvers, there's movement and tactics involved in combat. Wearing armor and using weapons change your stats, not just in what you can describe but in what your mechanics are. Hit points and wound penalties are clear and meaningful metrics. You can tell you're winning or losing a combat.
Honestly, how fun are status and glory? Who even takes high enough Lore: Bushido or Lore: Heraldry to matter? And honor isn't fun so much as a penalty for playing the setting. Which maybe I'd be fine with if there weren't so many ways to ignore it. Again, just from the mechanical side of it, A Crane or Lion can like... endure an insult to his family vs a Mantis or Scorpion who can be an accomplice to a heinous crime for the same honor loss. In return for what? The Lion and Crane have less chance to wet their armor against Oni? That's lame.

Also they totally killed 2 Crab Champions, but they had it coming.

12 minutes ago, llamaman88 said:

Okay... by the same token do DnD characters attack Kings?

Is... that a trick question?

Social mechanics in games like D&D are hard, because D&D has to simulate a wide range of cultures and interpersonal interactions. The way that two goblins interact is different from the way that two elves interact, and the way that a human would interact with each would be different again. Since the social norms of each of those interactions would be different, the situations under which one would "win" or "lose" a confrontation would be different.

There's also the horrendous issue of what to do if the dice say that your character has been persuaded by their mortal enemy. Do you now play that character in the opposite direction from the one you wanted? A lot of people would rather quit the game than do that.

By contrast, L5R is easy because social interactions are extremely codified. Samurai interact with one another under a strict ruleset, which is pretty much the same everywhere. Interactions aren't about convincing someone to do something; they're about maneuvering them into a position where they have to do it or look dishonourable, no matter how much they hate you. This solves the I-persuade-your-character issue.

I wouldn't like to have to write a social mechanics system for D&D, but writing one for L5R might be fun.

My personal preference for a seamless combat / social system would be Legends Of The Wulin.

13 minutes ago, Kitsu Seinosuke said:

There's also the horrendous issue of what to do if the dice say that your character has been persuaded by their mortal enemy. Do you now play that character in the opposite direction from the one you wanted?

The idea would be that you build up to actual persuasion in stages, but not that the social element works as mind control. The PC is still in total control of their faculties, but now they have a choice - do they go with the results, which is its own penalty, or against the results, and receive an actual mechanical penalty?

13 minutes ago, Kitsu Seinosuke said:

Samurai interact with one another under a strict ruleset, which is pretty much the same everywhere.

This is true ... except most of them don't follow that strict ruleset at a perfect rank 10 equivalent. They simply aspire to such (some don't even do that), and behave at somewhere around rank 4-5.

On 30/06/2017 at 7:22 PM, Kinzen said:

I'll get back to you. :-)

Oh, I can't thank you enough, Kinzen! =D