7 hours ago, ricefrisbeetreats said:

Sacred cows...hmm...

I'd like to see the majority of bad guys as clan personalities and ones where you can justifiably pick either of them. I liked the Noritoshi/Jimen arc that kind of fizzled, but while most people would say that Jimen was the bad guy, good writing could make both of them have plenty of supporters.

Scrap the need to have all clans in all fictions. Remember the Samurai edition comic, Death at Koten? I have a copy and some of it feels like they needed to throw in a few personalities from a certain clan (Mantis) for the cards. Let the story be more organic and not feel like we're checking off boxes to make sure that there's a Phoenix reference every story.

I really want to see Yakumo, Hitomi, and Tsuko as heroes to their clan. I want them all to do things to help their clans. And then I want them to over step, to hurt, or overreact to the other clans. I want a lion player to be like 'Sure Tsuko is a jerk, but she keeps saving people's lives' or a dragon player going 'Sure Hitomi went on a murderous rampage but she only killed people who stood in her way so she could kill that blood speaker'.

Last time Yakumo, and Kachiko were both done well. I want the other two done much better. And I want some more clans adding in their villains. Crane and Unicorn need more villain support.

*edit* although, unless I have been misinformed, Kachiko lived too long to stay interesting.

13 hours ago, Eugene Earnshaw said:

Yeah, with regard to 'live' duels, the duel is over when it is over, and concession is legit. Usually that means one guy dead, but you can, for example, concede such a duel if your opponent's stance tells you you cannot win, or if the opponent, say, cuts off your sword hand and chooses not to decapitate you immediately afterward. Or if one duelist just falls unconscious or clearly cannot continue. The winner will generally have the option to then slay the opponent, depending on the circumstances, , but might not, and in any case need not.

With regard to odds: I don't think there is any way in the real world to actually determine this, but I would suggest that generally speaking school will realistically be a pretty minor factor. The most important factor will be experience, followed by natural talent. Compare it to tennis. Tennis has player rankings, down into the rec level. If two tennis players are playing each other, it might give you some information to know that one of them was coached by a famous coach, or went to a prestigious tennis school. But it probably tells you more to know how old they are and how long they have been playing seriously. And the thing that tells you the most is their ranking, whether it is a rec ranking or pro. A 3.5 rec player who is taking private lessons from Andre Agassi is still going to get wrecked by a 5.0 with no formal instruction. And a duel between two bushi is, in my opinion, going to be probably won by whoever has practiced the most and has the most natural talent, and this factor will dominate what school they went to generally speaking. Saying that a Kakita duelist has a 55% chance of winning is to me basically meaningless: if what, the bushi are of equal skill? No, in that case the chances are even. If both Bushi have practiced the same amount? Well, what are the odds of that? And what about natural talent?

The realistic thing to say, I think, is that in a duel between two bushi, it is very likely that one of them has a big advantage over the other, because it is very unlikely that two randomly chosen people who practice a particular skill will be close to each other in ability. If you were to pick a random member from each of two tennis clubs, or from each of two MMA gyms, the odds of it being an even match are very slim. And the individual variation within each club, gym, or dojo dwarfs any systematic advantage that one gym, club or dojo might have over another.

That's the way I think about it, anyway. Even if there is a real superiority to the Kakita and Mirumoto schools, it doesn't make that big a difference in the 'real' world: the bigger advantage is these schools have a reputation that it is advantageous to have. Probably much like prestigious schools in the real world.

Agreed with the first paragraph. A duel can end in various ways. That said, the duel's intention is to resolve to First Blood or to the Death. The winning party need not carry it through to death, but the end conclusion of a duel is designed/framed to be death.

A 55% probability to win on aggregate is meaningful. It's a data point based upon Duel success rates over time. This includes samurai of relatively equal skill, disparate skill, varying talent levels etc... across all clans, not just Crane and Dragon. All would be factored into making such a determination. If over the largest sample of duels, Kakita and Mirumoto duelists were quantified to have a higher success rate when compared to the other clans then they are seen to have an edge at the margins. This edge can be attributed to school because we have controlled for the varying skill sets and talent levels of the general duelist population (of varying schools). That's how a school would garner it's reputation, in my opinion. It's not that they produce the only elite duelists, or even the most elite duelists in absolute terms, it's that on average their duelists tend to edge out opponents at the margins based on historical duel success rates and the total in clan/out of clan population.

Something like this is easier explained using the 'advanced metrics' seen in hockey or baseball... if we wanted to explore it. Wouldn't it be amazing to collect data for this by sifting through RPG books/other? Needless to say, when dealing with the largest sample of duels and duelists, theoretically, we could determine which school was better adept at producing more quality duelists per capita. Of course we don't have the data to do this, but I think it reasonable to assert that historical success rates would favour those two schools. They've got a lot of wins... just from reading fluff source material.

5 hours ago, Devin-the-Poet said:

*edit* although, unless I have been misinformed, Kachiko lived too long to stay interesting.

For all intents and purposes, Kachiko didn't do much after the Day of Thunder. She somehow didn't do jack to protect the Scorpion after they were accused of kidnapping Toturi, got mistaken for a goddess in Legend of the Burning Sands, and upon return to Rokugan dragged Shosuro into Sleeping Lake before noticing Hoturi's spirit showed up. The final story is good, but Kachiko's character suffered due to WotC's decision to shunt the Scorpion over to LBS without having the clan do anything worthwhile there.

9 hours ago, Anemura said:

A 55% probability to win on aggregate is meaningful. It's a data point based upon Duel success rates over time. This includes samurai of relatively equal skill, disparate skill, varying talent levels etc... across all clans, not just Crane and Dragon. All would be factored into making such a determination. If over the largest sample of duels, Kakita and Mirumoto duelists were quantified to have a higher success rate when compared to the other clans then they are seen to have an edge at the margins. This edge can be attributed to school because we have controlled for the varying skill sets and talent levels of the general duelist population (of varying schools). That's how a school would garner it's reputation, in my opinion. It's not that they produce the only elite duelists, or even the most elite duelists in absolute terms, it's that on average their duelists tend to edge out opponents at the margins based on historical duel success rates and the total in clan/out of clan population.

Something like this is easier explained using the 'advanced metrics' seen in hockey or baseball... if we wanted to explore it. Wouldn't it be amazing to collect data for this by sifting through RPG books/other? Needless to say, when dealing with the largest sample of duels and duelists, theoretically, we could determine which school was better adept at producing more quality duelists per capita. Of course we don't have the data to do this, but I think it reasonable to assert that historical success rates would favour those two schools. They've got a lot of wins... just from reading fluff source material.

If you're just talking about a frequency, it's not very informative about whatever the underlying factors are. Suppose [which is already a little bit silly] that we were to comb through the fictional literature and come up with the frequency with which Kakita duelists win their duels, and it is 55%. Does that tell us that this 5% increase margin of victory is due to the training of their school? Certainly not.

I don't really want to get into a big discussion about probabilities and correlation and causation. I will just say 2 things:

1. you cannot infer very much about a cause from a raw frequency

2.The most important cause of success in any skilled endeavor is likely to be the amount of practice that the person has in it.

Even if it is the case that Kakita duelists win 55% of the time, the explanation should probably be that in about 55% of duels involving a Kakita-trained bushi, they have practiced Iaijutsu more than their opponent. There are many possible reasons for that, and the main thing it might say about the Kakita school is that perhaps that it encourages its students to practice Iaijutsu more than alternative schools do. But, for example, another explanation might be that Kakita duelists win 55% of their fights because in order to protect their school's reputation they try to avoid duels unless they are reasonably certain they will win. Or it could be that, because of Crane's mastery of storytelling, Kakita losses are less likely to be recorded than Kakita wins. Or it could be that Crane political skill means that Kakita duelists are less likely to be trapped into a duel against a superior opponent.

Look, I get the appeal of the secret superior technique. It's handy for RPG's. In the RPG, Kakita had a real mechanical advantage in Iaijutsu duels against most opponents with a similar amount of karma and/or similar rings/skills. I am just saying that there is no reason based on either the setting or reality as it applies to the setting to suppose that there is anything all that special about the Kakita school. We know it has a great reputation. We know that a lot of the best Iaijutsu duelists come from it. But in my interpretation of the setting, that is because the school is old and therefore respected, and the status of the Crane clan gives it a good rep. This is backed up by the fact that the school emphasizes Iaijutsu more than other Bushi skills, so its bushi tend to be more practiced at Iaijutsu then the average bushi. Furthermore, truly elite Iaijustsu duelists -- that is, the few Bushi with elite natural gifts who have practiced Iaijutsu obsessively -- are disproportionately likely to come from the school, mostly because its bushi are more likely to consider Iaijutsu to be the most important bushi skill. But take a Battle Maiden or a Shiba Bushi who has practiced Iaijutsu as much as their Kakita opponent, and the result could go either way, and there is no inherent advantage the Kakita will have over their opponent.

14 minutes ago, Eugene Earnshaw said:

If you're just talking about a frequency, it's not very informative about whatever the underlying factors are. Suppose [which is already a little bit silly] that we were to comb through the fictional literature and come up with the frequency with which Kakita duelists win their duels, and it is 55%. Does that tell us that this 5% increase margin of victory is due to the training of their school? Certainly not.

I don't really want to get into a big discussion about probabilities and correlation and causation. I will just say 2 things:

1. you cannot infer very much about a cause from a raw frequency

2.The most important cause of success in any skilled endeavor is likely to be the amount of practice that the person has in it.

Even if it is the case that Kakita duelists win 55% of the time, the explanation should probably be that in about 55% of duels involving a Kakita-trained bushi, they have practiced Iaijutsu more than their opponent. There are many possible reasons for that, and the main thing it might say about the Kakita school is that perhaps that it encourages its students to practice Iaijutsu more than alternative schools do. But, for example, another explanation might be that Kakita duelists win 55% of their fights because in order to protect their school's reputation they try to avoid duels unless they are reasonably certain they will win. Or it could be that, because of Crane's mastery of storytelling, Kakita losses are less likely to be recorded than Kakita wins. Or it could be that Crane political skill means that Kakita duelists are less likely to be trapped into a duel against a superior opponent.

Look, I get the appeal of the secret superior technique. It's handy for RPG's. In the RPG, Kakita had a real mechanical advantage in Iaijutsu duels against most opponents with a similar amount of karma and/or similar rings/skills. I am just saying that there is no reason based on either the setting or reality as it applies to the setting to suppose that there is anything all that special about the Kakita school. We know it has a great reputation. We know that a lot of the best Iaijutsu duelists come from it. But in my interpretation of the setting, that is because the school is old and therefore respected, and the status of the Crane clan gives it a good rep. This is backed up by the fact that the school emphasizes Iaijutsu more than other Bushi skills, so its bushi tend to be more practiced at Iaijutsu then the average bushi. Furthermore, truly elite Iaijustsu duelists -- that is, the few Bushi with elite natural gifts who have practiced Iaijutsu obsessively -- are disproportionately likely to come from the school, mostly because its bushi are more likely to consider Iaijutsu to be the most important bushi skill. But take a Battle Maiden or a Shiba Bushi who has practiced Iaijutsu as much as their Kakita opponent, and the result could go either way, and there is no inherent advantage the Kakita will have over their opponent.

You see that's the thing a battle maiden or a Shiba won't be as good at Iaijutsu for a reason and that reason is that their schools focus on a very different curriculum and if they took the time to learn Iaijutus to the standard of the Kakita most of them would be scolded for not focusing on the areas the schools feel are important .

Don't forget the fact that even the rank-and-file Kakita bushi will be superior duelists as well, as the Kakita school is the only one to grant a bonus (and a rather large one at that) at Rank 1 (let's not count Ronin paths, eh? They... complicate things... )

So the average non-Kakita bushi npc is likely going to lose a majority of the time to the average Kakita bushi npc.
Which fits the accepted lore, but the accepted lore is part of the issue. lol

I might be mistaken, but I lived under the impression that the loser in a duel to death that didn't end with his death was supposed to commit seppuku, along with anyone who he was championing?

11 hours ago, Willisbatman said:

You see that's the thing a battle maiden or a Shiba won't be as good at Iaijutsu for a reason and that reason is that their schools focus on a very different curriculum and if they took the time to learn Iaijutus to the standard of the Kakita most of them would be scolded for not focusing on the areas the schools feel are important .

I think this is making the 'schools' out to be much more homogenous than they are, and also underestimating how seriously other schools take Iaijutsu. Iaijutsu duels are not only a thing in crane lands. The test of the Emerald Champion is not only won by crane and Dragon. There are Iaijutsu masters from every major bushi school that teaches Iaijutsu.

'School' does not denote a school like we have in the West today. It is not a building, although the schools are associated with a main dojo (such as the Kakita 'dueling academy'). It is more like a lineage of training. If you were trained by someone from the school, you are from the school. You do not have to travel to Kyuden Bayushi to join the Bayushi Bushi school. If the sensei in your dojo is a Bayushi Bushi and teaches you, that is the school you are part of. And so it is very much up to your sensei what you study, and past a certain point, it is also up to you what you choose to practice and focus on.

Just to give you one example of a Shiba Bushi who was very good at Iaijutsu, Shiba Aikune was one of the semi-finalists in Iaijutsu portion of the Test of the Emerald Champion that Yasuki Hachi won. And for all we know, he was better than Hachi, since they didn't actually get to compete. We also know that Kaneka was a better Iaijutsu duelist than Hachi, from the fiction.

21 hours ago, SirEuain said:

The final story is good, but Kachiko's character suffered due to WotC's decision to shunt the Scorpion over to LBS without having the clan do anything worthwhile there.

Yeah, Wick quit L5R over that ridiculous ultimatum by Wizards.

I was at GenCon when Wick premiered 'The Last Kachiko Story'. He read it to the players; it was the first time in years he'd stepped into the role of 'L5R storyteller', and he nailed it. Wick had his faults, but he's a good writer most of the time, and a very good live storyteller (Orc World was excellent as well. Bashthraka!!).

14 hours ago, Eugene Earnshaw said:

If you're just talking about a frequency, it's not very informative about whatever the underlying factors are. Suppose [which is already a little bit silly] that we were to comb through the fictional literature and come up with the frequency with which Kakita duelists win their duels, and it is 55%. Does that tell us that this 5% increase margin of victory is due to the training of their school? Certainly not.

I don't really want to get into a big discussion about probabilities and correlation and causation. I will just say 2 things:

1. you cannot infer very much about a cause from a raw frequency

2.The most important cause of success in any skilled endeavor is likely to be the amount of practice that the person has in it.

Even if it is the case that Kakita duelists win 55% of the time, the explanation should probably be that in about 55% of duels involving a Kakita-trained bushi, they have practiced Iaijutsu more than their opponent. There are many possible reasons for that, and the main thing it might say about the Kakita school is that perhaps that it encourages its students to practice Iaijutsu more than alternative schools do. But, for example, another explanation might be that Kakita duelists win 55% of their fights because in order to protect their school's reputation they try to avoid duels unless they are reasonably certain they will win. Or it could be that, because of Crane's mastery of storytelling, Kakita losses are less likely to be recorded than Kakita wins. Or it could be that Crane political skill means that Kakita duelists are less likely to be trapped into a duel against a superior opponent.

Look, I get the appeal of the secret superior technique. It's handy for RPG's. In the RPG, Kakita had a real mechanical advantage in Iaijutsu duels against most opponents with a similar amount of karma and/or similar rings/skills. I am just saying that there is no reason based on either the setting or reality as it applies to the setting to suppose that there is anything all that special about the Kakita school. We know it has a great reputation. We know that a lot of the best Iaijutsu duelists come from it. But in my interpretation of the setting, that is because the school is old and therefore respected, and the status of the Crane clan gives it a good rep. This is backed up by the fact that the school emphasizes Iaijutsu more than other Bushi skills, so its bushi tend to be more practiced at Iaijutsu then the average bushi. Furthermore, truly elite Iaijustsu duelists -- that is, the few Bushi with elite natural gifts who have practiced Iaijutsu obsessively -- are disproportionately likely to come from the school, mostly because its bushi are more likely to consider Iaijutsu to be the most important bushi skill. But take a Battle Maiden or a Shiba Bushi who has practiced Iaijutsu as much as their Kakita opponent, and the result could go either way, and there is no inherent advantage the Kakita will have over their opponent.

The crux of this discussion is: Do schools provide enough advantage (at the margins) to their students so as to be deemed 'significant' (statistically speaking). Or, is that training deemed to be insignificant 'noise' in the overall sampling. You're position is either that it is insignificant, as in it has no real effect in duels, or that it is significant. From reading your posts, I find your position confusing because you posit that the school may emphasize Iaijutsu training compared to other schools, while maintaining that this in itself does not provide an advantage at the margins. Further, your determination is that dueling skill is cultivated through Iaijutsu practice, and that the Kakita may emphasize Iaijutsu practice, but this doesn't make the school necessarily better at producing better than average duelists? That does not follow. If practice is paramount, and their curriculum emphasizes practice, then the school's training has a direct impact on dueling ability. If we were to follow that rationale, that is. And of course, this disregards the quality of that training compared to the quality of training provided by other schools.

Back to the initial statement: The 55% frequency win rate of Kakita duelists does not alone provide a correlation from which we can infer. The win rate of other schools would have to be tallied. Then the win rates are plotted over number of total duels (total population, not clan specific), over a large enough sample of time. This is to reduce noise in the data set. If after plotting these points, we see that a greater number of Kakita duelists populate the upper right quadrant of the chart, we can determine that they are on average better duelists than the field. We can further prove this by determining the mean for all duelists. Plot that in a bar graph. Then, take the success frequency of each school (adjusting for disparate population), to finally get to the difference in clan specific success rates vs. average duelist success rates. This difference would likely to point to the impact of different schools. It's a correlation, not causation. Causation would have to be determined by clan samurai training at disparate schools, and then tracking the success rates of duels thereafter.

After even that, we could get to +/- 50% probability where duels won/lost by each individual determines their probability for future success (again, at the margins). Then look at how this differs across members of each clan. My guess is that Kakita duelists will/should be on the higher side of 50%, which means they are more than likely to win their next duel given the historical averages. In other words, I expect the correlation to persist, without the need to have a definitive answer for causation.

Ok, so let me clarify -- I don't want to be confusing.

The main idea I am arguing against is the idea that school identity determines who wins or loses, and that Kakita and Mirumoto duellists have a special and nearly insurmountable advantage over other duellists due to some kind of unique aspect of their training. This could be seen as corresponding to some mechanical aspects of the RPG, where some schools really did have such advantages, especially Kakita, Mirumoto duelist, and (somewhat oddly for lore) Shiba.

By contrast, what I am saying is that amount of practice and (to a lesser extent) individual natural gifts are what matter in the real world, and I see Rokugan that way as well. On this view, any Bushi that has natural gifts and practices Iaijutsu a lot can become a master at it, and the Kakita school gives no advantage relative to someone with similar amounts of practice and talent.

This is, as I explicitly said, quite compatible with the idea that the Kakita school encourages its students to practice Iaijutsu more, as a consequence they do actually practice more, and as a consequence they are as a whole a better than an average group of bushi at duelling.

Ths is a causal hypothesis, which is true or not by fiat since this is a fictional setting. And there is no point investigating this via statistical techniques -- although such techniques are part of how scientists concluded that quantity of practice is the key explanatory variable in skilled performance.

11 minutes ago, Eugene Earnshaw said:

Ok, so let me clarify -- I don't want to be confusing.

The main idea I am arguing against is the idea that school identity determines who wins or loses, and that Kakita and Mirumoto duellists have a special and nearly insurmountable advantage over other duellists due to some kind of unique aspect of their training. This could be seen as corresponding to some mechanical aspects of the RPG, where some schools really did have such advantages, especially Kakita, Mirumoto duelist, and (somewhat oddly for lore) Shiba.

By contrast, what I am saying is that amount of practice and (to a lesser extent) individual natural gifts are what matter in the real world, and I see Rokugan that way as well. On this view, any Bushi that has natural gifts and practices Iaijutsu a lot can become a master at it, and the Kakita school gives no advantage relative to someone with similar amounts of practice and talent.

This is, as I explicitly said, quite compatible with the idea that the Kakita school encourages its students to practice Iaijutsu more, as a consequence they do actually practice more, and as a consequence they are as a whole a better than an average group of bushi at duelling.

Ths is a causal hypothesis, which is true or not by fiat since this is a fictional setting. And there is no point investigating this via statistical techniques -- although such techniques are part of how scientists concluded that quantity of practice is the key explanatory variable in skilled performance.

So you'd want Dairya to actually have a chance in a duel with Toshimoko, God Among Swordsmen?

9 minutes ago, Eugene Earnshaw said:

Ths is a causal hypothesis, which is true or not by fiat since this is a fictional setting. And there is no point investigating this via statistical techniques -- although such techniques are part of how scientists concluded that quantity of practice is the key explanatory variable in skilled performance.

Well put, but I'd like to offer two additional points.

First, will this make a better story? Here I'm talking about the story itself, rather than the card or RPG mechanics. In general, strong archetypes help readers recognize characters, especially in stories with a large cast - in which category it's safe to say L5R falls. As such, the superior Kakita/Mirumoto duelist opens up several immediate stories. You could have the bully duelist from either of those houses who doesn't consider himself a bully, just someone from a truly superior school. You could have the striving Shiba duelist who wants to prove himself against the best schools, or the cunning Scorpion who uses the Kakita's underestimation of him to his advantage. Just based on the background information of the Kakita/Mirumoto schools being superior, all these stories get a quick jump as we automatically fill in background details.

Second, can a school add more than just extra practice time? The case you make is excellent for modern times. But Rokugan still has a medieval flair to it, and medieval guilds did horde secrets. I'm unaware of any dueling guilds, to be fair here, but craftsmen guilds were common in medieval Europe, and they managed to keep their secrets for extended periods of time, even while the items their members made were in open use and available for study. Extended times, by the way, were not infinite, more like decades - the guilds did need to advance, because their secrets were eventually figured out, but some guilds did manage to stay on top of their fields for over a century. Royal patents forbidding competition helped - and there is ample room for Imperial Edicts filling a similar role in Rokugan.

Ah, see "will this make a better story" is really the key question, isn't it? And the main reason I prefer the fictional fiat of "no secret insurmountable technique advantage, everyone who practices has a shot", is exactly because it makes it easier and more satisfying to have Iaijutsu play an important role in the setting and stories.

People are only going to use Iaijuutsu in a meaningful way if the result is not a foregone conclusion. The story where 'Scorpion bushi manages to avoid a hopeless Iaijutsu duel against a Kakita bushi through his sneakiness' can be fun, but it is also one where Iaijutsu's role in the setting is sidelined and we do not actually get a duel. All the same story purposes can be served if the Kakita and Mirumoto have a unbeatable reputation, without having any secret mechanical superiority. Then people can be legit intimidated by a Kakita duelist, but at the same time there is nothing really all that weird about a Dairya or a Shiba Aikune being in the conversation as among the best in Rokugan.

7 minutes ago, Eugene Earnshaw said:

People are only going to use Iaijuutsu in a meaningful way if the result is not a foregone conclusion. The story where 'Scorpion bushi manages to avoid a hopeless Iaijutsu duel against a Kakita bushi through his sneakiness' can be fun, but it is also one where Iaijutsu's role in the setting is sidelined and we do not actually get a duel. All the same story purposes can be served if the Kakita and Mirumoto have a unbeatable reputation, without having any secret mechanical superiority. Then people can be legit intimidated by a Kakita duelist, but at the same time there is nothing really all that weird about a Dairya or a Shiba Aikune being in the conversation as among the best in Rokugan.

From the part I put in bold, I suspect we're not really holding different positions here... Having an 'unbeatable reputation' is largely what I'd expect to see from the superior schools. Again, whether that comes from secret techniques (or rumors thereof), better trainers (never underestimate the value of a good coach/teacher), or just more effort from the students to maintain the school's reputation, the effect is largely the same.

As to members of other families being considered among the best in Rokugan, that was never a sacred cow that needed slaying. Aikune, at least, was considered as such, which is why he was at the Emerald Championship at the beginning of Gold - the story implied he would have won if not for Scorpion machinations and connivance with Naseru. Of course, the leading schools have a big interest in tamping down such conversations, so they don't tend to make the histories much. But I never saw the clans in the stories being shocked when a non-Crane/Dragon won the Emerald or Topaz Championship.

There's a very powerful disconnect between story and mechanics that should really be placed into consideration here.

Anyone important to the story can end up a powerful duelist in a fiction if the story calls for it. That's how you end up with your Aikunes and your Kanekas. Plot trumps stereotypes every time.
In the RPG however, the Devs very specifically designed the Kakita to be head and shoulders above all others in a duel.
The Mirumoto have a rivalry, so they're thrown a single "okay" technique (that makes them better than the rest, but still not really a match for Kakita).
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 to members of other families being considered among the best in Rokugan, that was never a sacred cow that needed slaying."

Well, maybe, maybe not. There definitely is a section of the fan base that, partly based on the rpg, has assumed that the only duelists that matter are Crane and Mirumoto. And one got that impression from the fiction sometimes, although not so much in the stories around the iaijutsu tournaments, since it so obviously didn't make sense in that context. I hardly remember any discussion or emphasis on the duelling abilities of any non crane or Mirumoto character who wasn't Dairya, Kaneka or a clan champion. Mind you, I didn't read all the fiction, so there might well be examples I am unaware of.

Part of the reason I care about this one was that I played and had a lot of tournament success with scorpion duelling decks, but there was never any hint in the fiction that I saw representing a scorpion Iaijutsu duelist, despite their being plenty of personalities with the trait and decks that had success with it.

I mean, I liked that Jimen won his match against Noritoshi via blackmail, but the idea that he got to the finals without being a stellar duelist was ludicrous.

2 minutes ago, Eugene Earnshaw said:

I mean, I liked that Jimen won his match against Noritoshi via blackmail, but the idea that he got to the finals without being a stellar duelist was ludicrous.

To be fair, he beat Hideo fair and square.

(For Scorpion dueling, ya gotta go back to 3rd Edition, and that opens up the can-of-worms that is the Art of the Duel that everyone and their mother hates... probably exactly because it lets every other clan have an avenue of dueling competition with "the best" families. )

4 minutes ago, Bayushi Tsubaki said:

There's a very powerful disconnect between story and mechanics that should really be placed into consideration here.

Anyone important to the story can end up a powerful duelist in a fiction if the story calls for it. That's how you end up with your Aikunes and your Kanekas. Plot trumps stereotypes every time.
In the RPG however, the Devs very specifically designed the Kakita to be head and shoulders above all others in a duel.
The Mirumoto have a rivalry, so they're thrown a single "okay" technique (that makes them better than the rest, but still not really a match for Kakita).
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.)

True dat, but I don't like that about the RPG. And I don't consider RPG mechanics to be particularly faithful guides to what the setting is or should be like. I think the story and realism should come first, and RPG mechanics are just a fun and imperfect way to play games in the setting.

5 minutes ago, Eugene Earnshaw said:

I mean, part of the reason I care about this one was that I played and had a lot of tournament success with scorpion duelling decks, but there was never any hint in the fiction that I saw representing a scorpion Iaijutsu duelist, despite their being plenty of personalities with the trait and decks that had success with it.

I love my dragon clan, but having a scorpion duelist could only make my clan more interesting. Dueling a weakling brings me no honor.

Story idea. A scorpion master duelist who trades masks constantly, so that everyone at court stops challenging scorpions to duels. Because of who might be behind the mask.

Man, this talk about the Kakita Bushi reminds me that guy in my gaming club who maxed out the School in our homebrew system, and wombo-combo'd the Ultimate Strike together (learning the final piece from an old hermit swordmaster with a classic and super-cheesy training montage), receiving something, like, a +10k9+15 bonus to a single attack per turn (he could also do nothing else but power-up and strike). He effectively became a walking death machine, and nuked some of the greatest duelists of the setting. Then, one day, he ran into a random guy who knew the Rare Technique of "LOL I Ignore Your Attack Completely For A Simple Action", did exactly that in the ensuing fight, and rendered the surprised Kakita utterly useless by disarming him. It was both glorious and sad as the 100+ xp build was hard-countered by the ~6 xp kata (not even a good kata in general).

The problem with dueling, in my experience, is a setting verisimilitude one: if someone can be *good* at dueling then it defeats the point of dueling. It's supposed to be a fair method by which samurai can test their skill against one another in a formalised and (often) nonlethal manner. If someone beats you in a duel, then they should also be able to beat you in a regular fight. This is why people generally accept the results of a duel.

If one can be good at dueling without also being good at fighting in general, then it encourages people to find ways of solving their disputes other than dueling, and so devalues the whole concept of a duel, which in turn devalues the special dueling techniques. Paradoxically, the super-Kakita techniques leave them standing in an empty playground wondering why nobody will play their rigged game with them, and thus never able to use those techniques.

If the GM cares about an internally consistent setting and isn't afraid to rewrite chunks of canon, this can be resolved in one of two ways:

1) Iaijutsu duelling doesn't happen outside of the Kakita academy; most samurai and resolve their disputes via normal fights. This works well, but robs the setting of a cool element.

2) No school has iaijutsu techniques; everybody duels with their basic stats. This also works well, but requires a GM to homebrew new Kakita school techniques. (L5R has never been at home to Mr Game Balance, so this isn't that hard.)

Personally, my taste is for #2, and that's what I've done in some of the campaigns I've run. It works because dueling (especially in 3rd edition) was a fairly good proxy for combat, requiring high Agility and Reflexes, and lots of Void Points.

Minor clans, playable Shadowlands, playable nonhumans.

17 minutes ago, Kitsu Seinosuke said:

The problem with dueling, in my experience, is a setting verisimilitude one: if someone can be *good* at dueling then it defeats the point of dueling. It's supposed to be a fair method by which samurai can test their skill against one another in a formalised and (often) nonlethal manner. If someone beats you in a duel, then they should also be able to beat you in a regular fight. This is why people generally accept the results of a duel.

If one can be good at dueling without also being good at fighting in general, then it encourages people to find ways of solving their disputes other than dueling, and so devalues the whole concept of a duel, which in turn devalues the special dueling techniques. Paradoxically, the super-Kakita techniques leave them standing in an empty playground wondering why nobody will play their rigged game with them, and thus never able to use those techniques.

As a side note, that's why I eliminated the Iaijutsu skill from my games, and made dueling a function of the Kenjutsu skill as normal.

I'm will disagree with the idea that setting realism should come first. Rokugan is a game setting first - the setting should serve the game and if an element leads to worse gameplay, it's the setting that should be changed, not the other way around. And as it was said, "L5R wasn't bought just for a card game", so I think making things RPG and arkham-horror-lcg-style friendly should be important when revising the setting too.

The post about dueling being kind of a simulation of a real fight and thus it's results being respected is a way more elegant way of saying what I meant earlier when I said that dueling was turned into kind of a caricature of itself, or even a sport.

Anyway, my biggest beef with the iaijutsu dueling was that it always was badly designed for the RPG game and it had very low interactivity and didn't offer you choices. You could create a program to run the duels for you and just resolve them that way. Iaijutsu was always a "character building game", where all your important decisions were about what points do you put your XP into - but even then, ti was a very binary choice of "do I go for iaijutsu or not", because there weren't multiple viable paths towards Iaijutsu dueling viable. So not only you had no real choice or interactivity when participating in the duel, but you also had no real choice in building your character towards duel other than "am I kakita and do I spam Void and Iaijutsu skill ranks". One of the very important things about a good RPG system design is making sure that there is fun in "leveling up" and a feeling of progress, getting new toys to play with. In dueling, you never get new toys to play with, because you never gain new abilities that can be used for dueling. Only thing that improves are your raw stats, which modify your % chance of winning the duel. You could of course say that it's the same for things like courtier skills or Lore, however, it's not actually true! You have multiple uses for these skills and can decide how to use them, and increasing your raw numbers actually directly translates into giving you more options by allowing you to declare more, better and different raises, which basically means that when facing Fat Governor-sama, your decision to use a Courtier skill on him is still followed up by multiple decision points - like what do you use that Courtier for, what do you Raise for, and so on.

In Iaijutsu, you are always doing the same sequence of rolls that have binary results and offer you no choice or interactivity. You get no new tools or toys to play with as you character ranks up, and you can't even Raise for different and interesting things. Characters in dueling are basically reduced to their raw stats, offering no gameplay style or unique flavor. If you played one duelist, you played them all, with the caveat that certain duelist schools will make you just better at the raw numbers.

So I'm still going to argue that iaijutsu dueling in RPG games was designed very very bad and one of biggest reason for that was fetishization of the one strike first blood dueling and making an objective of "emulating it as closest as possible" instead of "making it a good gameplay mechanic".

EDIT

To make it worse, Iaijutsu as a skill is relatively useless - outside of dueling, it offers you nothing. You cant use it for anything other than the very specific action of dueling. It has to compete with useful and broad skills like Sincerity, Courtier, or even weapon skills (which also suffer from problems of often feeling like wasted points), but only exists for a purpose of either bully dueling your opponents (because dueling is nothing more than a game of numbers void of tactical decision points that can compensate for your lack of dice, you want to stack the dice as much as possible), or protecting yourself from being bully dueled. It's basically designed to be yet another skill and xp tax for bushi who need to get it to respectable levels in order to not be ridiculed by someone who decided to get that mastery with +5 to the Focus and who might be barely able to lift a sword otherwise.

...well, unless you are a Kakita, who are always designed in a way that allows them to cheat the system and gain some stupid bonus from having high Iaijutsu, so for them it's not a tax, but a scaling bonus that also allows them to project more bully dueling power. Sometimes I really felt like the game was designed by Crane Clan players...