except fencing has nothing to do with real fighting, plus european fencing is different from japanese one;

Having faced and watched chanbaraka of various skills, novice and mid-ranked fighers tend to jump at each other's throat more easely, werheas experienced ones take more time to overcome the other's defense. fights are somewhat short in all cases though. an experienced fighter will not likely fall into traps easily, and keep a good posture, not leaving any openings for the adversary.

High TNs to be hit equal slower often less fun game play.

There is plenty of non-realistic stuff in the game. There already should be a suspension of disbelief going on. The fluff just needs to explain why the fighting styles don’t focus on defense as much or how battle is a different beast than training in the dojo and move on.

Mechanically the to roll to hit has to exceed the TN for combat to move forward. The game more or less lives on a scale of one to five so even a small bump one way or another can have a big impact.

If a player really wants to be hard to hit and still wallop on people, then make a void tactics build. You can get to five in your ring and skill faster than other builds, use the kata that lets you strike those that attack you when guarding, and avoid strife via void stance so you can keep 5+ successes on the guard roll. Also with five void ring dice you don’t need to max out a martial arts skill to hit. Stall all you want while the opponent builds up strife or gives up.

Or better yet go intangible and throw hurricanes and kami at people.

8 hours ago, Kyros Skyfall said:

Why? on the contrary I'd say long-trained warriors should have difficulties overcoming the other, and have trouble finding a breach in their defense.

but anyway they're not going to come back on the TN to be hit they made that clear. still it feels odd that you can inflict conditions upon an adversary with the same number of opportunities weather you confront a mere bandit or the emerald champion.

Because whiff-fest combat is boring. It's more interesting to represent the thing you are talking about by both combatants having high Resilence Pool and ability to refresh it instead of making a large % of rolls in the scene fail to change the fiction. And again, remember, there are techniques that cleanse stuff like Conditions, and a lot of Conditions is resisted by a roll - which will be easier for a Emerald Champion than for a bandit noob.

dudes, I keep saying that TN to be hit should NOT increase, why do you keep trying to convince me, we are saying the same thing ! I'm just saying we should maybe look at a system or something that makes it not exactly the same difficulty to afflict two different level characters with a technique. NOT the TN to be hit - I understand that, it's OK

16 hours ago, WHW said:

And again, remember, there are techniques that cleanse stuff like Conditions, and a lot of Conditions is resisted by a roll - which will be easier for a Emerald Champion than for a bandit noob.

yes, that also means that hight level fighter can not use some techniques uppon each others or even uppon mid-level character, wich makes them useless, since the TN to resist won't change either !

I see it like this. I don´t want to have only 1 way of resonable defense. In 4th Ed you allready had the problem that earth ring was an XP tax for everyone who at somepoint got dragged intop combat bc the TN to be hit system did not scale very well with the attack rolls you had to expect on a given level.
Now thats something I don´t want to see again. For me a scaling of the TN is an important factor to provide different angles for different playsytles and avoid forcing people into the 1 way to build a fighter. So for me a way to increase you TN to a lvl where it is very hard to hit is a good thing to have in a game. Ofcourse it should come with drawbacks like for example having a worse resilence than the guy who opted for that to prevent that people go for both ways.
So what I think is the problem is that it is tied to the stance. It has no cost of opportunity and also is difficult to get one asigned to.
Instead of tying it to the air ring I would go for a technique.

Swift like the wind
Rank 1 Techniquce
Requirement: Air Ring 3, Resilence lower than 10
Required Stance: Air
Effect:
As a move action you can activate the technique you increase the TN of all actions
targeting you by your school rank until the next turn.

Passive Effect: Your resilence can´t increase beyond 10.

Something like that. Yes it makes the practioner hard to hit at all lvls but if you hit him he also is in a world of trouble as his resilence is pretty low.
In addtion you also could put that in no school training table so that people also get an xp disadvnatage from it if you don´t liek ahrd to hit.
Also since it is a tecnqiue NPCS should not get it as their technqiues are built differently and now you also don´t have the problem that you
can´t really hit the NPCS.

On 11/16/2017 at 4:59 PM, WHW said:

At Rank 5, you get access to stuff like Dazing opponents at will, so expect the difficulty of actually hurting someone scale up with their Katas - be it Striking as Earth, mean crits, immobilizing you and back stepping, or Dazing.

I think I may have missed seeing that. Here's the sources I noticed for Dazed:

There's the Kakita Duelist option at Rank 6, which is once per scene.

There are some opportunity spends, but these are resisted by a Fitness check, and those rarely fail even if they're TN5.

Shugenja do have Dazed available with Armor of Radiance, The Fires that Cleanse, Wall of Fire, and Wings of the Phoenix (the first two also impact your party, unfortunately). Tomb of Jade will apply Dazed to Shadowlands/Tainted creatures.

In a Social conflict, Fanning the Flames works.

Lord Akodo's Roar works, once per scene.

Your overall point is solid, even if there aren't at will abilities. Characters will be controlling the battlefield in other ways to avoid being hit. Outside of my silly white room with 2 Bushi, a party frequently has access to a Shugenja.

In Water stance, a monk can keep stepping to 1 for a punch with Open Hand Style to Immobilize, then step back to 2 (though Guard or Crescent Moon Style neutralize abuse).

Using Air stance against Water or Fire stance, low severity criticals (from opportunity) can also generate Dazed, but these are unlikely against Air stance (and not available vs. Earth stance).