Now that we have a mch better idea of how organized play will work, I'm still torn about what to think of all this. Regarding the good parts, the Seekers and Keepers cards are a very good idea and the Hatamotos is a great way of showing how important such players are for the good of the game (as well as promoting clan loyalty).

However, there is no mention of an evolving storyline and how the players will be able to influence it apart from an easily overlooked mention hidden between other announcements: the Hatamotos will fight for the Emperor's Favor every year. In itself is a cool concept, and I totally understand the need to remove some narrative control from the player compared to the AEG era, but the ability to control what is happening in the storyline, unless something else is announced soon, will be missed, and I'm sure not only by me.

And then I got an idea. During the two years hiatus, I had major story urges and going cold turkey was out of the question. Therefore I contacted tournament organizers for the numerous unofficial tournaments that happened in the meantime and created with the help of Coyote Walks and a small team an alternate storyline while we were waiting for the real deal. What about doing the same? I know everything might change and there is still time for FFG to post more stuff before the game is released, but I'm not the one to wait and hope for good news instead of trying to make things better.

What if the community takes matter into its own hands? Right now, most of the stories focused on the Clan Champions and the other big shots of Rokugan, and if story prizes will be awarded down the line, they will probably have global consequences (like having the Emperor's favor for one year, as previously mentionned). It is also very likely lower-level tournaments like Store Championships and maybe even (Kotei) will have very limited impacts on the grand scheme of things. What if a group of volunteers unite and create a parrallel storyline, one focusing on the little people, the samurais on the very bottom of the food chain with little to no influence, but having to make choices just as hard fighting bandits, hunger and unreasonable authority figures. With enough people, we could offer story choices to those ''lesser'' tournaments and their respective winners, allowing to steer the story in a direction or another. This is still only an idea, but story choices could take many forms:

1-Name a character: At first, we have a blank state. No main characters, no establish storyline, I would find interesting to give the opportunity to the first winners to select one non-unique, unamed card, (like Bayushi Manipulator or Serene Warrior, for example), name it and promote him to ''main character'' status.

2-Develop a character: Having a name and a general concept is not enough. Story choices could also be about giving them depth by selecting a virtue they consider more important than others, creating important individuals in their lives like parents, friends, lovers or superiors or even giving them flaws.

3-Voting on an important story branching point: Should the hero kill or spare its enemy? Should he do the right thing and suffer dishonor, or keep his honor intact but fail in his mission? etc.

The ''volunteer Story Team'' would then take the story outline they had, and add these elements to the story. It would be perfect for simple, personal storylines like a courtier and his yojimbo both in love with the same person, or a band of soldiers having to deal with an incompetent captain. I have more than a few ideas, but I need people to make this work. Amateur writers, people willing to offer new ideas or just supporters to read these stories.

Comments welcome as always.

From the "Organized Play" page https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/op/l5r-lcg/:

" The World Champion will be declared Shogun, and make a critical story choice that will influence the very future of Rokugan! Expect more details to be coming soon!"

So there will be player's decisions influencing the story (and maybe the selected roles will have an impact too). I would not be too worried

https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/op/l5r-lcg/preview/#prizes-section

Also states that the Kiku Matsuri hatamotos at Gen Con will discuss and vote on the very first story choice as well. Not sure if character creation is going to be part of it, but I think it's safe to say FFG intends to keep player influence on story development as a central role in the game's organized play environment.

EDIT: Not sure if they plan to wait and include the Friday/Saturday tournament hatamotos for that decision or not, since the Kiku Matsuri looks like it'll only promote undefeated players out of the pool of 700 to hatamoto status...I'm curious how many players will manage to win all 5 of their rounds.

1 hour ago, franzvong said:

From the "Organized Play" page https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/op/l5r-lcg/:

" The World Champion will be declared Shogun, and make a critical story choice that will influence the very future of Rokugan! Expect more details to be coming soon!"

So there will be player's decisions influencing the story (and maybe the selected roles will have an impact too). I would not be too worried

I missed that, thank you for the info. That's good, and like you said more can be announced later, but it's one guy making one decision a year. And I understand that perfectly from a business point of view and the last thing I want to project is me being mad at FFG. They are doing way better than what I geared at first and they are continuing to surprise me so yeah FFG!

It doesn't mean this project cannot fill a blank. Chances are there will be less interaction between players and the story, and this project or something similar could help scratch that itch.

I love what they're doing with this. Supported weekly events? Sign me up. I can play my way into a holiday to play at a world tournament? That would literally be a dream come true for me.

To be honest, one of the biggest issues with the story before was the number of story prizes that had been made available throughout the year. Spring Kotei, Fall Kotei, Jeweled Championships, Regional Championships, Store Events and more. Most prizes ended up being fairly minor, with minor effects. Vote for this. Select a Title or Trait for a character. Gain this for your clan. Many of these story elements were reduced to a passing mention in a fiction at best, because there wasn't much room to illustrate these results in weekly fiction that was also portraying the larger plot of the overall story arc. There are lists on various clan sites of prizes that were never addressed.

In my opinion, fewer story prizes are better, especially with the story and the game restarting from scratch. As it is, we are receiving fiction every two weeks and there appears to be a team of writers in place to continue that. As the game and the story progress, we may see more prize opportunities available. Or, we may not. Maybe there will be a desire to supplement FFGs stories with more from the community. But, it would probably be best to allow them to actually launch the game before planning that.

The other thing to consider is that FFG is building the new world of L5R, one that will be represented in the LCG and, likely, an RPG, and possibly miniature games, board games and other products. All of these could also offer opportunities to affect the story in ways AEG was never able to implement. But, that can only be accomplished with careful planning and time.

3 hours ago, Zesu Shadaban said:

EDIT: Not sure if they plan to wait and include the Friday/Saturday tournament hatamotos for that decision or not, since the Kiku Matsuri looks like it'll only promote undefeated players out of the pool of 700 to hatamoto status...I'm curious how many players will manage to win all 5 of their rounds.

At minimum 21 assuming all people who are signed up for the tournament don't drop before playing all the rounds. If you start with the pool of 700 people and assume that the maximum of half of the previously undefeated people lose (there is some issues when people can get paired up or paired down in the win/loss rankings but let's just assume you'll always be facing someone undefeated if you yourself are undefeated) then after 5 rounds you'd end with 21.875. Now practically speaking I could easily see there being less than that if a bunch of people grab the boxes and run or have to bow out after the early rounds even if they're undefeated but I'd bet on at least 15.

36 minutes ago, Klawtu said:

At minimum 21 assuming all people who are signed up for the tournament don't drop before playing all the rounds. If you start with the pool of 700 people and assume that the maximum of half of the previously undefeated people lose (there is some issues when people can get paired up or paired down in the win/loss rankings but let's just assume you'll always be facing someone undefeated if you yourself are undefeated) then after 5 rounds you'd end with 21.875. Now practically speaking I could easily see there being less than that if a bunch of people grab the boxes and run or have to bow out after the early rounds even if they're undefeated but I'd bet on at least 15.

Fair enough! Props for running the numbers. I'm sure some of the folks playing with proxies will likely have a bit of advantage there, too.

1 hour ago, Zesu Shadaban said:

Fair enough! Props for running the numbers. I'm sure some of the folks playing with proxies will likely have a bit of advantage there, too.

Thanks it's always nice to be appreciated.

I'm actually thinking proxies may end up being a double edged sword. Imagine making a deck that relies on having 3 copies of a card that there is only 1 of in the core box, or finding out there is a card that totally wrecks the strategy you were thinking of going with. Most of the proxy players are taking a (slowly growing) portion of the different cards that will be available and making full decks of them. It's kind of like if 2/3 of the way through preview season for an MTG set someone decided to proxy up a deck only using the cards they'd seen in those previews for a full deck whereas the tournament will be more like a sealed pool. Same mechanics but totally different deck viability depending on the cards available.

The ones I'm actually worried about are the ones who actually got their hands on the core sets early for review and article purposes. They know exactly how many of what card will be in the set and have had the actual rules for long enough to have found some of the more uncommon interactions already. I had a friend who was really upset when they heard that one of those groups will both be at Gencon and apparently participating in the tournaments (unless they also suffered from the inability to get into the tournaments).

Anyone in Boston and want to play?

3 hours ago, Kitsuki Edogawa said:

To be honest, one of the biggest issues with the story before was the number of story prizes that had been made available throughout the year. Spring Kotei, Fall Kotei, Jeweled Championships, Regional Championships, Store Events and more. Most prizes ended up being fairly minor, with minor effects. Vote for this. Select a Title or Trait for a character. Gain this for your clan. Many of these story elements were reduced to a passing mention in a fiction at best, because there wasn't much room to illustrate these results in weekly fiction that was also portraying the larger plot of the overall story arc. There are lists on various clan sites of prizes that were never addressed.

In my opinion, fewer story prizes are better, especially with the story and the game restarting from scratch. As it is, we are receiving fiction every two weeks and there appears to be a team of writers in place to continue that. As the game and the story progress, we may see more prize opportunities available. Or, we may not. Maybe there will be a desire to supplement FFGs stories with more from the community. But, it would probably be best to allow them to actually launch the game before planning that.

The other thing to consider is that FFG is building the new world of L5R, one that will be represented in the LCG and, likely, an RPG, and possibly miniature games, board games and other products. All of these could also offer opportunities to affect the story in ways AEG was never able to implement. But, that can only be accomplished with careful planning and time.

I agree time will tell, but it never hurts to show an interest and to see if people would like to participate in such a project. I wondered if it was too soon go post this, since we do not have all the information yet, but we were saying this since the sale and it hasn't stop us for making wild claims and starting different projects.

1 minute ago, Tetsuhiko said:

but we were saying this since the sale and it hasn't stop us for making wild claims and starting different projects.

The party don't stop til the C&D drops!

I do think it's an interesting idea, mostly curious on how you would effectively implement it over a broad player base. And as a newcomer to the setting, I have to ask... is this playerbase likely to get invested in this idea to care about effecting changes for characters/stories that are, for all intents and purposes, fanfiction? Genuine curiosity.

The majority of the playerbase will not even know its existence, but several projects that are basically fanfictions thrived during the AEG era. For example, Heroes of Rokugan was a fan-driven RPG setting with adventures and stories set in an alternate universe. You can also count the Winter Courts events. Although they did have official support, most of what happened during these events were never made canon, basically making the whole thing a big cooperative fanfic with a few official events thrown in for good measure.

It all depends on having a reliable Team of fans that can deliver good fan fictions on a regular basis.

2 hours ago, Taki said:

Anyone in Boston and want to play?

I'm about 90 minutes away from Boston and my brother and I would love to play.

It isn't unprecedented. There are several role-playing groups and fan fiction collections that present alternate Rokugans and there likely always will be. I also seem to recall tournaments that presented original fan fiction as promotion for the event, along with special titles and such. There isn't anything wrong with the idea. But, presenting it as a failsafe in case FFG doesn't handle the story the way you would like, seems premature. Let them show us what they have in mind, before suggesting it won't be enough. I can't wait to see more fiction, either. That's why I play in so many play-by-post games.

Quote

It all depends on having a reliable Team of fans that can deliver good fan fictions on a regular basis.

That is basically what we are hoping the new story team is. So far, I feel pretty good about it.

I'm good with it all. Even the stuff I don't understand yet because my brain is fried from work.

13 hours ago, pikaphanpooh said:

I'm about 90 minutes away from Boston and my brother and I would love to play.

In which direction? I ask because I'm often in Providence for business.

3 hours ago, Taki said:

In which direction? I ask because I'm often in Providence for business.

In mason, nh

12 hours ago, pikaphanpooh said:

In mason, nh

wow that's a hike. I'll keep you posted on Boston events, and I hope you'll do the same for NH stuff. We have a group already playing with proxies here

19 hours ago, pikaphanpooh said:

In mason, nh

6 hours ago, Taki said:

wow that's a hike. I'll keep you posted on Boston events, and I hope you'll do the same for NH stuff. We have a group already playing with proxies here

Dudes, that's like the most random topic derailment I have ever seen. Start a new post or continue in PM please.

On 2017-08-02 at 0:07 AM, Kitsuki Edogawa said:

It isn't unprecedented. There are several role-playing groups and fan fiction collections that present alternate Rokugans and there likely always will be. I also seem to recall tournaments that presented original fan fiction as promotion for the event, along with special titles and such. There isn't anything wrong with the idea. But, presenting it as a failsafe in case FFG doesn't handle the story the way you would like, seems premature. Let them show us what they have in mind, before suggesting it won't be enough. I can't wait to see more fiction, either. That's why I play in so many play-by-post games.

Just to clarify, I'm enjoying what FFG has to offer, and I'm not afraid the stories will be really good.

4 hours ago, Tetsuhiko said:

Just to clarify, I'm enjoying what FFG has to offer, and I'm not afraid the stories will be really good.

I was referring to how much interactivity and influence the community will have with the story. We have some idea of it now, but we won't have a full impression until the game is launched and FFGs plans are implemented. It does seem likely that it will be more restricted than it was previously, but this is just the beginning.

Maybe it's a matter of perspective. Your original post seemed like your concern was that influence would be too limited and that the community should organize something to make up for that. I prefer to think of anything like this as a way to add something extra to what FFG will provide, rather than a supplement to make it more fulfilling.

48 minutes ago, Kitsuki Edogawa said:

I was referring to how much interactivity and influence the community will have with the story. We have some idea of it now, but we won't have a full impression until the game is launched and FFGs plans are implemented. It does seem likely that it will be more restricted than it was previously, but this is just the beginning.

Maybe it's a matter of perspective. Your original post seemed like your concern was that influence would be too limited and that the community should organize something to make up for that. I prefer to think of anything like this as a way to add something extra to what FFG will provide, rather than a supplement to make it more fulfilling.

That's exactly it. I was afraid my original post sent the wrong message and I've been trying to find a way to better express myself, but you did it instead.

Thanks