I decided that I wanted (and others might too) to look at what a character would look like at a high level so I spent 150 xp on one of my characters, this is the result (just the xp related stuff, you'd of course have changed glory etc values by this point):

Some notes:

I spent 60 Xp on Ring increases, 20 on techniques (15 kata, 5 shuji) and 70 on Skill increases.

I don't feel like doing this for another character but if someone else wants to I'd be keen to see the differences.

Kaiu Yuki (Rank 6 Hida Defender):

Rings:

Air: 2

Earth: 5

Fire: 4

Water: 2

Void: 3

Skills:

Artisan:

Aesthetics: 0

Composition: 0

Design: 0

Smithing: 3

Martial:

Fitness: 4

Melee: 4

Ranged: 1

Unarmed: 0

Meditation: 3

Tactics: 0

Scholar:

Culture: 0

Government: 0

Medicine: 1

Sentiment: 0

Theology: 0

Social:

Command: 2

Courtesy: 0

Games: 0

Performance: 0

Trade:

Commerce: 0

Labor: 1

Seafaring: 0

Skulduggery: 0

Survival: 3

Techniques:

Kata:

Striking as Earth, Lord Hida's Grip, Striking as Fire, Rushing Avalanche Strike, Iron Forest Style, Iron in the Mountains Style, Striking as Void

Shuji:

Honest Assessment, Touchstone of Courage

Rituals:

None

Derived Stats:

Resilience: 14

Focus: 6

Composure: 18

Vigilance: 2

Worth a look - high level characters to throw at one another in a 'sorry about the mess' equivalent would be a good way to poke the duelling system.

He's a very crab samurai, isn't he?

Okay....an obvious as-far-as-possible-away counterpart; a rank 6 Duellist:

Kakita Nobushi (A.K.A. 'Bob')

• A Kakita Duellist assigned as a bodyguard to a foreign dignitary, the diminutive nickname applied by the foreigners has somehow stuck, even amongst the courtiers of the Winter Court, much to his distaste and dishonour.
• Crane Clan, Kakita Family, Kakita Duellist, Patience, Ruthless Victor
• Air 5, Fire 5, Earth 3, Water 3, Void 4
• Status 35, Honour 55, Glory 49
• Quick Reflexes, Daredevil, Whispers Of Doom, Cynicism, Gaijin Name
• Culture, Aesthetics 2
• Meditation 3, Martial Arts (Melee) 4, Fitness 3
• Courtesy 2, Sentiment 2, Command 1
• Way Of The Crane, Strike With No Thought
• Iaijutsu, Striking As Air, Striking As Fire, Striking As Earth, Striking As Void, Crescent Moon Style, Crashing Wave Style, Battle In The Mind
• Weight Of Duty, All Arts Are One, Lady Doji's Decree
• Resilience 12
• Composure 16
• Focus 10
• Vigilance 8

....Yeah. Rank 6 Characters are scary:

• Nobushi using Centre with Martial Arts (Melee) [Air] is going to need an average to hit of about TN10.
  • Anyone attacking him lets him perform a strike action.
  • A Way Of The Crane Strike With No Thought finishing blow on a TN2 target will on average inflict Instant Death twice, simultaneously.
• Yuki - assuming he only has his lacquered armour - still takes a disconcerting amount of fire to bring down.
  • With Striking As Earth, his armour is about 4.5 on average.
  • Assuming 'normal' ashigaru with Yumi in a sufficiently large squad to get 3 successes on each roll (the suggested maximum squad size is 6), the incoming clouds of arrows do 6 damage at a time
  • That's 1.5 wounds through his armour.
  • With Earth 5, Fitness 4, he'll be reducing any critical he takes by an average of 5, so essentially ignoring a deadliness 3 attack until he's incapacitated, which will take 10 volleys plus 3 more volleys due to his ignoring it from The Mountain Does Not Fall.
  • Once he finally runs out of void points, he'll be unconscious from accumulated wounds, so no longer making fitness checks - but he still has 'way of the crab' in his pocket for the last attack before he passes out, which will ignore the 14th volley, before the 15th will finally do something meaningful to him.
  • That's somewhere in the region of 90 arrows this guy will have sticking out of him before he finally keels over....

One thing to keep in mind with 'high' level building is time. You probly won't have as much xp as you think. Unless I missed something you have to spend xp to use your talents so a year long game of l5r will have a lot less xp spent on your character that at first glance. I'd consider the time you usually game, the time frame you think you'd end up 'high' level. Use the suggested 2xp an hour and drop at least 2 xp from every session in your time frame.

Gave it a try, turning Togashi Katatenabe into a more militant Ise Zumi. I must say the advancement sheet for the Ise Zumi is really bad, for the fact that it forces you to follow an elemental pattern to buy your kiho and still account for advancement. and rituals shows up only at Rk 5 (odd for a monk=

Blood of the Dragon (Rank 6 Mastery Ability)
Activation: As a Support action, you may choose one of your tattoos and empower it. Each tattoo can be empowered only once per game session.
Effects: When performing checks to which the empowered tattoo applies, add two rolled Ring dice showing any faces instead of one rolled Ring die
showing a face with 1 oppotunity. This effect persists until the end of the scene.

Rings : Air 3, Earth 4, Fire 3, Water 4, Void 4

Skills: Fitness 2, Martial arts [unarmed] 5, Meditation 2 , Theology 2 , Survival 2, Labor 2, command 2

Tattoos: Soup Spoon (labor), Tiger (unarmed), Mountains (fitness), Lotus (meditation), volcano(command)

Kihos: grasp the earth dragon, the great silence, touch the void dragon, death touch, still the elements, way of the edgeless blade

empowering the Tiger tattoo seems quite strong, particularly with death touch and edgeless blade though.

1 hour ago, Darksyde said:

One thing to keep in mind with 'high' level building is time. You probly won't have as much xp as you think. Unless I missed something you have to spend xp to use your talents so a year long game of l5r will have a lot less xp spent on your character that at first glance. I'd consider the time you usually game, the time frame you think you'd end up 'high' level. Use the suggested 2xp an hour and drop at least 2 xp from every session in your time frame.

I'm almost certain that this is not a thing.

Quote

Over the course of play, characters gain experience points (XP), which
their players can spend between sessions to make the characters more
potent. XP can be spent on the following character advancements:
• Increasing ring values
• Increasing skill ranks
• Purchasing techniques
• At the GM’s discretion, acquiring advantages or “buying off ” disadvantages
in accordance with narrative events

It would surely explicitly say here if you had to spend xp to use techniques.

That is entirely possible. It's just how it read to me on my first time through. It seemed odd that xp costs were written in several different places which implied to me you spent xp to use talents. I must have just gotten a little mixed up. I will claim that it was late at the time.

It also seems that at the suggested xp rate you will advance rather quickly.

150 xp for rk 6, 2xp/hour so 75 hours...

so 15 5hours sessions. If you game twice a month, half a year.

Hmm, fair enough. I must just be missing things. I need to diver deeper in to the school stuff. On the face of it you can max out a skill with 30 xp which felt kinda fast for my group but there might be some more restrictions tossed in I have missed.

13 hours ago, Darksyde said:

Hmm, fair enough. I must just be missing things. I need to diver deeper in to the school stuff. On the face of it you can max out a skill with 30 xp which felt kinda fast for my group but there might be some more restrictions tossed in I have missed.

I believe progression is too fast too. Assuming you only spend XP according to your curriculum then to complete your curriculum costs 140xp.

We play 4-5 hour sessions (lets assume 4 hours however). That's 8xp per session.

140/8=17.5 weeks, or a hair over 4 months.

In my opinion that is too quick to go from zero to legend.

Obviously you won't remain slavishly devoted to your curriculum, but even then, I believe this rate of increase it too high. I think personally, I'd stick to 2xp an hour for the first circle and then maybe drop it to 1xp an hour after that perhaps, as once people get some customisation under their belt their characters will be at a point where they're more fun to play and more tailored in the direction they wish to take them.

XP awards are VERY flexible (unlike a lot of mechanics) lets remember, so you can always award less should you wish to prolong the certain period of play you and your group find most enjoyable.

10 minutes ago, Bazakahuna said:

I believe progression is too fast too. Assuming you only spend XP according to your curriculum then to complete your curriculum costs 140xp.

We play 4-5 hour sessions (lets assume 4 hours however). That's 8xp per session.

140/8=17.5 weeks, or a hair over 4 months.

In my opinion that is too quick to go from zero to legend.

Obviously you won't remain slavishly devoted to your curriculum, but even then, I believe this rate of increase it too high. I think personally, I'd stick to 2xp an hour for the first circle and then maybe drop it to 1xp an hour after that perhaps, as once people get some customisation under their belt their characters will be at a point where they're more fun to play and more tailored in the direction they wish to take them.

XP awards are VERY flexible (unlike a lot of mechanics) lets remember, so you can always award less should you wish to prolong the certain period of play you and your group find most enjoyable.

Indeed. Historically I've rarely stuck to the 'recommended' starting XP or XP progression in a system - our group tends to start at medium-level and then largely stick there for a campaign.

I love the 2xp per hour rate, but that's because I like to dish out large amounts of XP, and I like to see characters grow.

I've been frustrated by far too many games where DMs enforced a "realistic" growth with tiny XP rewards, and the game died out before any of us could get to become proper awesome at what we wanted to do and... Well, that's frustrating to me.

Which is why when I DMed L5R 4th ed, I was very generous in XP and was fine with my PCs all ending Rank 4 after a 23 sessions campaign (4 hours per session).

I think I'll keep the 2px per hour rate, it fits my style. I also think it allows for a lot of extracurricular fun, or suboptimal growth ("I only need 2 more spent XP on my curriculum to Rank up, but I'll raise a Ring instead of sticking to one rank in a previously untrained skill"). But I can understand how it doesn't work for you.

Fast growth allows for campaigns that deal with every power level without needing to invest years of play in them. And that's a good thing in my book. I pretty much never want to spend years playing any single game, no matter how good it is.

To be honest, giving XP by the hour is one of the genius ideas that striked me when reading the rules. I had never seen that anywhere else, except in vague terms of "short sessions should award about this much and longer scenarios should net that many points" or so. This way of putting it is excellent in my perspective.

In my experience games are at their best in the middling levels. They are skilled enough and important enough that they can do interesting things competently, but not so powerful that everything they do need to be epic to avoid being anticlimactic. We tend to progress quickly through early stages and slow dramatically at this mid point, delaying the high stages... but again this is a play style thing, some people prefer low level, others high, some groups don't have staying power for long term due to liking variety etc. Ultimately XP is a flexible factor and only becomes a mechanical issue when running premade adventures with strict progression.

On 10/16/2017 at 10:44 AM, Magnus Grendel said:

• Yuki - assuming he only has his lacquered armour - still takes a disconcerting amount of fire to bring down.
  • With Striking As Earth, his armour is about 4.5 on average.
  • With Earth 5, Fitness 4, he'll be reducing any critical he takes by an average of 5, so essentially ignoring a deadliness 3 attack until he's incapacitated, which will take 10 volleys plus 3 more volleys due to his ignoring it from The Mountain Does Not Fall.

It's worth noting that you only ever start a session with 1 void point, assuming he's at cap already may be overly generous.
Giving him Plated Armor and always getting an opportunity on striking as earth we can give him 6 armor. A rank 6 Akodo with wargear will still one shot him (3 successes, 2 opportunity for striking as water) assuming he's got strife to spend about 85% of the time. A rank 3 with a katana will take him out in two hits (both with 80% accuracy). Relying on defense in this ruleset seems problematic.

22 hours ago, Nitenman said:

150 xp for rk 6, 2xp/hour so 75 hours...

so 15 5hours sessions. If you game twice a month, half a year.

What's the standard for 4th edition?
I always played on 1st edition (with some rules added from 2nd) and our GM was giving us an average of 1 XP every 3 session. Yeah i know, it's kinda sucked.
(and he was very "forcedly realistic" in the xp expenditure... something like "i whant increase kenjutsu from 2 to 3" "you will need to found a trainer and exercise with him for 1-2 hours at day, every day..." "for how long?" "until he found you good enough...")

So i really have no idea how many XP is "good" for 4th edition
(and that's will be important even because we are arranging a "long adventure/mini campaign" on 4th edition before trying 5th one to make a good comparison between them)

8 hours ago, shizumaru said:

To be honest, giving XP by the hour is one of the genius ideas that striked me when reading the rules. I had never seen that anywhere else, except in vague terms of "short sessions should award about this much and longer scenarios should net that many points" or so. This way of putting it is excellent in my perspective.

Giving XP per hour is a genius idea for me too.
When we started playing Star Wars, my PC complained about "not enough xp". When i stopped thinking they where just whining, and started paying real attention on what they where saying, i found they had some sort of reason: we're no more teenager playing 2-3 times a week every week; we barely arrange to play 2 times at month, and thats more time spent we spent on almost everything else. It's not important "it's just 6 session from last time i leveled up" or worse "it has passed only 3 days since you entered Hutt's station" but it's the "it's already three months since last time i had enough XP to spend on something useful", and that's kinda sucks...
I'm still not a good fan of fast-leveling, and that's specially true for a rigid more realistic setting (like L5R) and i of course will dislike having bushi single-handedly fight an oni and feel like it's too easy, but players should feel rewarded for dedication to the game.

Maybe 2 XP at hour could be proven to be too much (but even if Nitenman calculated it would need "only" six month of playing to get rank 6, i agree that if you let the xp flows, the player are good to use xp on something less useful and more "adherent to caracther's concept")

Also, i calculated most of time we play 6-8 hours, and many RPG will give you XP based on "game session"... how long is your game session? why short game session should be rewarded like long ones?
L5R 5th edition give you the answer: you should be awarded for hours of gameplay, not abstract time called "game session"

Last but not least: i agree all player should be rewarded by same amount of XP. Because everyone is important. Everyone make sacrifices. The one falling asleep on the couch, maybe had a very tiring work day and he really really whant to stay on the table and play with the others, but just can't do it. Giving less XP to someone because he felt asleep, are missing 'cause today is sick, or he came late for "family reasons", it's like punishing him, and that's not cool.
We're no more teenager, so i assume everyone is playing is doing it because he what to, not because has nothing else to do or whanna bang the chick on the table (also because all girs we play with are either married or mothers )

1 hour ago, rcuhljr said:

It's worth noting that you only ever start a session with 1 void point, assuming he's at cap already may be overly generous.
Giving him Plated Armor and always getting an opportunity on striking as earth we can give him 6 armor. A rank 6 Akodo with wargear will still one shot him (3 successes, 2 opportunity for striking as water) assuming he's got strife to spend about 85% of the time. A rank 3 with a katana will take him out in two hits (both with 80% accuracy). Relying on defense in this ruleset seems problematic.

I'm not sure where you're getting these numbers from. An Otshuci with 3 (bonus) successes and 2 striking as water procs is 12 damage into 2 resistence which still leaves Yuki able to take 4 more damage before going over his resilience of 14. A Katana user with 3 (bonus) successes and 2 opportunity does 5 damage on the first hit and 7 on the second which still won't down him (and it seems wildly optimistic to give someone at rank 3 3 bonus successes and 2 opportunity consistently). Also comparing how tanky an armour user is against someone with striking as water and anyone else will be night and day.

Also remember that The Mountain Does Not Fall boosts your resilience whilst active.

No, surviving on 'tanking' otsuchi hits is a poor choice but he's better at it than most. The most critical ability for a 'tough' hero is probably one yuki is missing, Warriors resolve - its one of the only ways I can see to un-incapacitate yourself mid fight.

28 minutes ago, Norgrath said:

I'm not sure where you're getting these numbers from. An Otshuci with 3 (bonus) successes and 2 striking as water procs is 12 damage into 2 resistence which still leaves Yuki able to take 4 more damage before going over his resilience of 14. A Katana user with 3 (bonus) successes and 2 opportunity does 5 damage on the first hit and 7 on the second which still won't down him (and it seems wildly optimistic to give someone at rank 3 3 bonus successes and 2 opportunity consistently). Also comparing how tanky an armour user is against someone with striking as water and anyone else will be night and day.

A rank 6 akodo turns 6 strife into 6 successes on attack, or at rank 3 turns into 3 successes. I'm also not sure why someone would attack a resistance tank with something other than striking as water, but you could the katana becomes not worth even bringing to a fight (gogo samurai drama) while the Otsuchi still does the job in two hits instead of one.

3 minutes ago, Magnus Grendel said:

Also remember that The Mountain Does Not Fall boosts your resilience whilst active.

No, surviving on 'tanking' otsuchi hits is a poor choice but he's better at it than most. The most critical ability for a 'tough' hero is probably one yuki is missing, Warriors resolve - its one of the only ways I can see to un-incapacitate yourself mid fight.

It didn't seem prudent to be activating TMDNF preemptively, The extra wounds seem to just get you out of incapacitated after you've already been knocked down though, but you ignore the effect anyways for the duration so maybe overkill? Warriors resolve is awesome, especially for those honor rockets. I guess I just wanted a Hida at that point to feel more unstoppable, if this poor guy shows up having already spent his void it's a really sad display.

43 minutes ago, Norgrath said:

(and it seems wildly optimistic to give someone at rank 3 3 bonus successes and 2 opportunity consistently).

The rank 3 was getting 2/2 not 3/2, which with 4 ring 5 skill is hanging out at 80% chance as indicated. 2/2 does 7 damage past armor with akodo technique, two hits for 14 resilience.

Assuming he has strife to burn - admittedly it shouldn't be too much of a problem: someone wielding an otsuchi picks up strife fast.

Yeah Akodo technique is in a weird place. They really want strife making your reading of wargear super useful for them. Hopefully you pick up 3-4 strife in your initiative roll and then you have to live off of your per turn earning. Apparently the Akodo legion should hire crappy ronin to get into clashes and lose over and over to keep up the legions fighting spirit. Luckily since the ability triggers after a successful roll you can use the strife you generate on an attack to boost that attack.

9 hours ago, rcuhljr said:

I'm also not sure why someone would attack a resistance tank with something other than striking as water, but you could the katana becomes not worth even bringing to a fight (gogo samurai drama) while the Otsuchi still does the job in two hits instead of one.

I don't think many characters will stay up through two Otsuchi hits. With regards to the rest unless your gm is an adversarial one then the worst case scenario (which is what you're describing, or very close to it) will very rarely come up. Thank you for explaining the school ability though, I'd only skimmed over it.

12 hours ago, kelpie said:

What's the standard for 4th edition?
I always played on 1st edition (with some rules added from 2nd) and our GM was giving us an average of 1 XP every 3 session. Yeah i know, it's kinda sucked.
(and he was very "forcedly realistic" in the xp expenditure... something like "i whant increase kenjutsu from 2 to 3" "you will need to found a trainer and exercise with him for 1-2 hours at day, every day..." "for how long?" "until he found you good enough...")

So i really have no idea how many XP is "good" for 4th edition
(and that's will be important even because we are arranging a "long adventure/mini campaign" on 4th edition before trying 5th one to make a good comparison between them)

If I recall correctly, the game tells you to give about 3-4 xp per scenario. Up to 7, for a meaty piece of story.

I was notoriously generous in XP and gave about 7 per session, and almost every session was a full story, very few scenarios spanned two sessions and when they did I gave 14 or 15xp for the two sessions.

I hate forced realism in character evolution. Especially the kind that forces you to spend time during the game session looking for a mentor or making pointless rolls just to prove you've been training. In my opinion things happen offscreen, and you can become a goddamn Shougi master if you put the XP in it without games ever being part of the campaign, and that can even be a very nice surprise to everyone when they do pop up and everyone finds out what you've been doing in your downtime.

I'm a "large amounts of xp freely spent" kind of guy. Anything that isn't horribly cheesing your character into overpowered builds is fine by me.

11 hours ago, rcuhljr said:

I'm also not sure why someone would attack a resistance tank with something other than striking as water, but you could the katana becomes not worth even bringing to a fight (gogo samurai drama) while the Otsuchi still does the job in two hits instead of one.

Because you can use the various 'armour-penetrating' techniques. Heartpiercing Strike, for example, or a fire opportunity spent during a mass battle, doesn't give a pair of fetid dingo's kidneys what your armour is; you could be in master-crafted plate behind a siege mantlet, and you still take the hit to full effect because it delivers an automatic critical strike, not damage - and for that you want a high deadliness weapon, like a Wakizashi

Heartpiercing Strike to the arm disables most of the heavy hitting weapons, as arm injuries specifically mention that you can't use the damaged arm for holding weapons. No two hands, no otsuchi.

After that, you are really only left with one handed weapons...of which katana+iaijutsu is best.

Without heartpiercing strike, it's often worth to sacrifice Durable quality of your katana (you really should put it on during maintenance!) to do a no-damage crit to the arm of your opponent to disable their weapons, too.

2 hours ago, WHW said:

it's often worth to sacrifice Durable quality of your katana (you really should put it on during maintenance!)

That's for your GM to decide if you can, though. And just 'randomly making your katana durable because I want to' is not something I would expect to see happening a lot.

The Restore approach only really applies to smithing if you're fixing a sword you've already damaged or destroyed.

'Maintenance' for sharpening is Refine (air), which can potentially up the damage or deadliness by one but can't add qualities, and more importantly, 'basic day-to-day maintenance' isn't the sort of thing that the GM should be making you make a check for. Preparing your weapon for a climactic formal duel, maybe, or if it's a particularly narratively significant sword.

That said, I agree. even the damaged quality on one of two swords is better than a disabling condition on the other guy's arm.