Just now, Darksyde said:

I don't quite follow on this. It feels like you are defaulting to only 'bad' reactions to things where outbursts are socially bad but not inherently from bad feelings or reactions.

So in your example after making the cooking roll and taking the strife you have caused yourself an outburst. Well you were obviously on the brink of an outburst or scored a massive amount of successes + strife to trigger one. In the former you may be so elated that something finally went right today that you let out a little woop of excitement. In the latter your outburst might be a celebratory 'in your face wok!'. either of which gains you some odd looks by your household/guests/team members.

Strife isn't just stress the way I see things. It is more of a build of emotion, good and bad. When you finally can't keep it all bottled up you let a little of that emotion slip, in good ways and bad.

But . . . now I have a choice between whooping with joy at my success in cooking dinner, or burning it. That still doesn't make sense to me. In any other system this would be two separate things: the cooking roll, and a roll to maintain my composure, with their results not dependent on each other.

1 minute ago, Kinzen said:

Exactly. You're introducing something that is completely unrelated to the check I'm making, in order to explain why the check had the result it did. I don't want to have to do that once, much less constantly.

I believe that a flowing scene is a good thing for a story, as long as it isn't something that derails it completely.

Just now, SideshowLucifer said:

One way to look at things is that the entire culture is based on perfectionism.

That's the Crane. I think the Phoenix also cares out of honest reasons. The Scorpion cares, but not for honest reasons. The rest are various levels of "Zero F*s given". Displaying emotion will most likely never matter when facing a Crab or a Unicorn. It might draw out a frown from a Lion. The Dragon are Dragon, emotions or not. Dunno about the Minor Clans, the embarrassment might go either way there.

In the cooking dinner example, I don't think it matters. You won't get enough stress to matter. As to the failing part, that may not be that stressful in itself. You just start over, which in turn can cause the stress your looking for.

1 minute ago, Buhallin said:

True story: We've got a small dog that likes to attack our vacuum cleaner. Typically, it's cute but a little annoying. One time, my wife just lost it and started chasing the dog around the house with the vacuum. I still mess with her over it to this day.

Why did she lose it right then? What made that one moment biting the front of the vacuum the one that put her over the edge? The answer is that it doesn't matter . At no point in my many retellings of that hilarious moment of losing it has anyone stopped and asked me "But why did that put her over the edge? Why didn't she lose it at work?"

If you're trying to invent reasons why it happened right then, IMHO you're trying to over-control it. People lose it at random times for all sorts of reasons that have nothing to do with what they're doing at any specific given moment.

Does that happen multiple times a day, though? And does it make for a satisfying story? For me, the answer is no.

Especially when the other half is missing: okay, the system represents you losing your cool randomly, for no reason you can really point to. But what it doesn't represent is you losing your cool in moments of profound stress. Those are no more or less likely to upset you than vacuuming the house is. The latter is much more vital to the genre of samurai drama than the randomized bits are.

Just now, SideshowLucifer said:

One way to look at things is that the entire culture is based on perfectionism. If something goes wrong, it causes stress. Composure is very important. A samurai is not supposed to show any cracks in public. It would be frowned upon to even show sorrow or anger if your son fell in battle.

You can't look at this from a modern western mentality.

That part's clear, and I think very few of us are disputing it. The question is whether the mechanics are an effective way of modeling the type of story and culture they're supposed to be representing. Right now, things going right causes stress, while failure does not. Failure is, in fact, a way of avoiding stress. To which I say: whaaaaaa????

Just now, AtoMaki said:

That's the Crane. I think the Phoenix also cares out of honest reasons. The Scorpion cares, but not for honest reasons. The rest are various levels of "Zero F*s given". Displaying emotion will most likely never matter when facing a Crab or a Unicorn. It might draw out a frown from a Lion. The Dragon are Dragon, emotions or not. Dunno about the Minor Clans, the embarrassment might go either way there.

Not true at all. The culture is big on keeping face and approaches everything done with a precession and perfection unheard of by most cultures.

1 minute ago, SideshowLucifer said:

Not true at all. The culture is big on keeping face and approaches everything done with a precession and perfection unheard of by most cultures.

Yeah, but the culture is the Crane Clan, and things kinda become murky past that.

@Kinzen I think the goal of the Strife system is mostly to give some stress that goes with success. When you are only so/so with doing something (rolling 3k2) you can get your successes but you might not be so great at it. You must take the rocky path when your skill isn't so great (maybe your soup was to peppery, but you balanced it with other spices and it come out well). A reasonably skilled person (rolling 6k3) would have enough rolled and kept dice to avoid that rocky path. They both might still only succeed on a TN of 2, but the more skilled person does it more effortlessly (doesn't have to choose dice with strife to gain the required successes).

I get some of your point - there are penalties for success, and none for failure. If you aren't going to fail you keep no dice and thus gain no stress lol. That does seem a bit odd... Maybe that is something the Strife system should incorporate. The Strife can also gain very fast, and I don't see someone coming unhinged over a single mistake.

If every failure gained 1 Strife, and maybe every successful roll should MAX gain 1 or 2 strife no matter how many Strife dice you keep. Would that be more satisfactory? Do you think it is not clearly defined that success + strife means you are making it work, but there is some complication? Or do you just not like that concept?

23 minutes ago, Kinzen said:

But . . . now I have a choice between whooping with joy at my success in cooking dinner, or burning it. That still doesn't make sense to me. In any other system this would be two separate things: the cooking roll, and a roll to maintain my composure, with their results not dependent on each other.

Fair Enough. I see where you are coming from. To me it feels open ended enough to not be that much of an issue. As I posted some where else it feels more to me like a tool to help me role play in the world of stoic Rokugani Samurai. Giving me an actual tangible scale to judge when I let my facade slip just a bit. Even in the example given as is, you are correct, they seem unrelated but since so much hinges on situation as well if that happens in front of your clan mates at a campfire, so what? You let off some steam, lower your strife rating and move on. In front of your Clan Lord it becomes a bit more important and maybe keeping face is more important than a good meal no matter how badly you wanted things to work out. I like the give and take. It may need some tweaking to better balance the rate at which it is gained but it works for me. This constant struggle of vulcan like perfection with the reality of being a very emotional human.

I guess the main thing I would like to have out there is when ever I see these discussions the outburst is always a rant, scream, fight, toss over a table etc. When it could just as easily be shedding a tear, laughing at a joke, blushing at handsome courtier, smiling at a family reunited etc.

It obviously isn't going to work for everyone as it is possible the most talked about aspect of the new system but it is also one that we are stuck with. Perhaps it would also be worth starting a thread to go over what happens if you just ignore outburst all together. In Exalted 1st and 2nd edition they had something similar though far less open ended that I never liked as a gm so I just simply never used it. Luckily you didn't really have anything that used your 'limit points' to do anything like strife is used for so you would have to decide if dropping outburst changed that dynamic.

1 minute ago, Kinzen said:

But . . . now I have a choice between whooping with joy at my success in cooking dinner, or burning it. That still doesn't make sense to me. In any other system this would be two separate things: the cooking roll, and a roll to maintain my composure, with their results not dependent on each other.

And they are two separate things. Your cooking caused you stress and it just so happened that this stress pushed you over the edge.

1 minute ago, Kinzen said:

Does that happen multiple times a day, though? And does it make for a satisfying story? For me, the answer is no.

Especially when the other half is missing: okay, the system represents you losing your cool randomly, for no reason you can really point to. But what it doesn't represent is you losing your cool in moments of profound stress. Those are no more or less likely to upset you than vacuuming the house is. The latter is much more vital to the genre of samurai drama than the randomized bits are.

So you are saying that that the beta is missing things that inflict lots of Strife at once? That there need to be ways to give characters new Anxieties? That critical strikes likely should inflict strife in addition to their effects? That roll failure needs to inflict strife in more cases?

38 minutes ago, Ultimatecalibur said:

Wrong. People stress out all the time like that. Heck, I've been the guy who stressed out so much they started laughing.

Am I wrong, or would you just not make a very good samurai? I mean, I spent ten years in the Marines, and I wouldn't react like that, and never did. A samurai at gempukku has spent at least that much time training and being conditioned.

This is more faults with School design than rather than Strife/Outbursts as a system. Way of the Lion's ability to bank and spend Strife as bonus successes

Way of the Lion is just icing on the cake for that character. Hida Harold is going to be similarly untouchable because his starting statline will be identical (Hida chargen progression is Earth Earth Earth(Water) Water). Then he takes Fire 2 at Step 4 and boom, Composure 10, Striking as Earth, Combat Rage. Doji Doreen's problem isn't that she doesn't get Way of the Lion, it's that her chargen process disadvantages her from the start. And it's not just Doji Doreen. It's going to be any character that similarly gets pushed away from prioritizing the Strife-management stats. Those characters have Outbusts. The ones that don't have that handicap probably don't.

1 minute ago, Darksyde said:

Perhaps it would also be worth starting a thread to go over what happens if you just ignore outburst all together.

1

I have just watched a 5-hours long session without Strife and Outburst. Literally nothing special happened. There were a lot more narrative Opportunities flying around and Fire Stance became really good. That was all.

20 minutes ago, Kinzen said:

But . . . now I have a choice between whooping with joy at my success in cooking dinner, or burning it. That still doesn't make sense to me. In any other system this would be two separate things: the cooking roll, and a roll to maintain my composure, with their results not dependent on each other.

Either is dishonorable...

... bushidō calls for praising others, but never one's self. Humility is required, even as glory is sought...

Bushidō (and the judeo-christian ten commandments, for that matter) sets goals at odds with each other. To succeed at them all is hard.

Whooping in delight is an honor hit, but a trivial one, and if the neighbors notice, a glory hit, too.
ruining dinner is an honor hit as well, but is only a glory hit if others will be eating it.

20 minutes ago, Kinzen said:

But . . . now I have a choice between whooping with joy at my success in cooking dinner, or burning it. That still doesn't make sense to me. In any other system this would be two separate things: the cooking roll, and a roll to maintain my composure, with their results not dependent on each other.

Either is dishonorable...

... bushidō calls for praising others, but never one's self. Humility is required, even as glory is sought...

Bushidō (and the judeo-christian ten commandments, for that matter) sets goals at odds with each other. To succeed at them all is hard.

Whooping in delight is an honor hit, but a trivial one, and if the neighbors notice, a glory hit, too.
ruining dinner is an honor hit as well, but is only a glory hit if others will be eating it.

Just now, Darksyde said:

I like the give and take. It may need some tweaking to better balance the rate at which it is gained but it works for me. This constant struggle of vulcan like perfection with the reality of being a very emotional human.

I guess the main thing I would like to have out there is when ever I see these discussions the outburst is always a rant, scream, fight, toss over a table etc. When it could just as easily be shedding a tear, laughing at a joke, blushing at handsome courtier, smiling at a family reunited etc.

I don't mind what form the outburst takes. As I said: I dislike the fact that it is unpredictable and randomized, and requires constant bookkeeping and remembrance of multiple different rules. I dislike the disconnect from the grand story issues and the principles of the setting.

What I'm trying to figure out is . . . are those aspects of it features for other people? Do you (all the yous who like the Strife mechanics, not just Darksyde-you) actively prefer "the constant struggle of vulcan like perfect with the reality of being a very emotional human" being randomized, so that sometimes the struggle is easy and sometimes it's hard and you never know which one it's going to be? Do you enjoy learning all the different rules you can use to manage and leverage your Strife? Is that in fact preferable to a system that intervenes less often, but under more significant circumstances?

I am genuinely curious to know the answer to that.

Just now, Ultimatecalibur said:

And they are two separate things. Your cooking caused you stress and it just so happened that this stress pushed you over the edge.

So you are saying that that the beta is missing things that inflict lots of Strife at once? That there need to be ways to give characters new Anxieties? That critical strikes likely should inflict strife in addition to their effects? That roll failure needs to inflict strife in more cases?

I am saying what I said in my original post. I would vastly prefer a Strife system that is less of a randomized mechanical metagame, intervening in some fashion on nearly every roll, and more intimately linked with the key issues of duty and desire, the conflicts of Bushido, and the things that in real life cause people emotional distress.

34 minutes ago, Kinzen said:

Especially when the other half is missing: okay, the system represents you losing your cool randomly, for no reason you can really point to. But what it doesn't represent is you losing your cool in moments of profound stress. Those are no more or less likely to upset you than vacuuming the house is. The latter is much more vital to the genre of samurai drama than the randomized bits are.

I think this is also partly to do with how a game is run as well. You should only be making rolls for things that would build up your emotions and not on completely random things. I feel it is intended to be a tool for those times of most importance.

7 minutes ago, AtoMaki said:

I have just watched a 5-hours long session without Strife and Outburst. Literally nothing special happened. There were a lot more narrative Opportunities flying around and Fire Stance became really good. That was all.

Fire Stance has to be heavily altered if you remove Strife, obviously. That's not an endorsement of the Strife mechanic, it's that group failing to recognize the side effect of removing the downside of a Tradeoff mechanic, lol. Of course Fire becomes Super Awesome if there's no calculated risk involved. It was designed with a calculated risk.

Ninjo and giri can be completely ignored because its mechanic doesn't tie into any other mechanic in the game. Removing Strife (or even just fundamentally altering it) will require a complete rework of the rules. That doesn't mean we don't discuss how that complete rework looks, it just means we acknowledge that the game, as written, takes the Strife mechanic into account. I mean, if you take Strife out of the game, Water becomes pretty Meh, even though with Strife in the game, it is possibly the best in the game.

The reality is this: L5R worked as a game for four editions without a Strife Mechanic. So if "nothing special happened" for 5 hours, it's because they didn't rebalance the game mechanics to account for removing Strife. The probabilities on the Custom Dice only really work if you have Strife as a mechanic. Otherwise, you have one blank face on the D6, and everything else is a choice of "Hmm, how good is this compared to what I need to do?" It would be like RnK on D10s, except the D10 just had faces with 0, 1, 6, 7, 8, 9, 7, 8, 9, 10.

I kinda question having Earth being tied to both HP and Composure... It means Hida are constantly stoic... which seems thematic... except they are the ones who don't mind someone letting off steam...

Meanwhile my Shosuro Infiltrator / Actress can't contain her emotions through 2 bad rolls...

I wonder if Composure shouldn't be Fire + Air (or at least Earth + Air) after all Fire is the active - flamboyant and dazzling and an emotional component while Air is the controlled, baiting, and trapping approach...

I mean - I don't mind my actress being a foul mouthed diva, cursing a broken nail every scene... but where is the ability to act? Where is the "show must go on" resilience?

11 minutes ago, Kinzen said:

What I'm trying to figure out is . . . are those aspects of it features for other people? Do you (all the yous who like the Strife mechanics, not just Darksyde-you) actively prefer "the constant struggle of vulcan like perfect with the reality of being a very emotional human" being randomized, so that sometimes the struggle is easy and sometimes it's hard and you never know which one it's going to be? Do you enjoy learning all the different rules you can use to manage and leverage your Strife? Is that in fact preferable to a system that intervenes less often, but under more significant circumstances?

I am genuinely curious to know the answer to that.

I do currently see it as a feature. For my part, and hopefully others will chime in for you as well, I don't feel like it is all that random. With the tools given to manage strife it feels like a choice to me which is why I get more of a tool take away myself. I don't mind the extra fules so much I guess because I've already dealt with similar in the Star Wars game via strain. You spent it for this and that but too much if it caused big problems. Since it is left in my hands I feel more in control than say if there was no way to get rid of it and it just depended on the roll of the dice which I would agree would aggravate me terribly for being as random as it feels to you now.

Wording also seems to be more important that I had thought. Reading over this discussion I totally get where you are coming from when it is in terms of stress and being stressed out and if this action is stressful but I feel like the strife mechanic represents more than just the typical feelings of stress as we have them today so verbiage may help in later iterations?

50 minutes ago, Kinzen said:

Does that happen multiple times a day, though? And does it make for a satisfying story? For me, the answer is no.

Especially when the other half is missing: okay, the system represents you losing your cool randomly, for no reason you can really point to. But what it doesn't represent is you losing your cool in moments of profound stress. Those are no more or less likely to upset you than vacuuming the house is. The latter is much more vital to the genre of samurai drama than the randomized bits are.

Does it happen multiple times in any given scene with this system? I'll admit we're still setting up our group so I haven't seen it in action, but it doesn't seem that it does.

For the triggered bits of losing your cool, I don't think it's meant to. That's left up to roleplaying. It's very easy as a player to represent moments of intense, immediate stress for your character. Representing that subtle buildup of emotions and stresses that you as a player never really experience is much harder.

33 minutes ago, TheVeteranSergeant said:

Am I wrong, or would you just not make a very good samurai? I mean, I spent ten years in the Marines, and I wouldn't react like that, and never did. A samurai at gempukku has spent at least that much time training and being conditioned.

Marines are also rather notorious for blowing off steam in pretty crazy and inappropriate ways. Samurai culture is not "Do your job with precision and go nuts all the rest". It's literally 24/7 stoic attention to culture and presentation.

It's worth noting that this survives in Japan even to this day. The reported levels of stress within their corporate culture is pretty crazy.

13 minutes ago, shosuko said:

I kinda question having Earth being tied to both HP and Composure... It means Hida are constantly stoic... which seems thematic... except they are the ones who don't mind someone letting off steam...

I actually thought that the Crab were known for being emotional and combustable. They put on plays and stuff in their free time and get mad at stuff and have no time for politics and politeness and stuff.
Like, every game we play we -always- portray Crab as more emotional than others. Not weepy or anything, but quicker to anger.

I never thought that they'd be completely emotionally unmovable in this system.

3 minutes ago, GhostSanta said:

I actually thought that the Crab were known for being emotional and combustable. They put on plays and stuff in their free time and get mad at stuff and have no time for politics and politeness and stuff.
Like, every game we play we -always- portray Crab as more emotional than others. Not weepy or anything, but quicker to anger.

I never thought that they'd be completely emotionally unmovable in this system.

It's funny. I always saw it the other way. They keep they're emotions more in check and maintain as much control as they can because if they don't the shadowlands and/or the taint may exlpoit that moment of weakness. Which as a result made the intricate Kaiu gifts and craftsman ship all the more surprising or the fine hand writing of a Hida general unexpected. It was what always drew me to that clan for the RPG. In courtly matters they didn't sound more likely to anger to me but more that they only observed the absolute minimum requirements of 'polite' society and were too strait forward and blunt for 'intrigue' but not rudely so as to lose face. (though that is kinda what we have the Yasuki are fore )

37 minutes ago, Kinzen said:

What I'm trying to figure out is . . . are those aspects of it features for other people? Do you (all the yous who like the Strife mechanics, not just Darksyde-you) actively prefer "the constant struggle of vulcan like perfect with the reality of being a very emotional human" being randomized, so that sometimes the struggle is easy and sometimes it's hard and you never know which one it's going to be? Do you enjoy learning all the different rules you can use to manage and leverage your Strife? Is that in fact preferable to a system that intervenes less often, but under more significant circumstances?

For me, this is based on my previous response. There are elements of roleplaying where it is hard to truly get a sense of your character - a smart player running the dumb fighter, or a less-social player trying to play a character with a high charisma. Trying to manage their internal responses is hard. It's not too bad to deal with the big, crazy, obvious things, but even then a lot of systems have things like Fear mechanics. But that ongoing stress, the day-to-day buildup of life that real people deal with every single day... that's almost impossible for a player to internalize and represent for their character.

This system does that for me. Yes, it's a little hand-wavy, and I have to look at it from a pretty high level, but I can do that. And the reality is that people are random. Stress is random. The times when you lose it are random. The idea that you're only ever going to break down due to stress during that big fight, or immediately after, is simply wrong. Things like PTSD will manifest long after the event, at unpredictable times and in unpredictable ways. A lot of people seem to dislike the randomness because they can't control it. To me, that's the point.

4 minutes ago, Buhallin said:

And the reality is that people are random. Stress is random. The times when you lose it are random. The idea that you're only ever going to break down due to stress during that big fight, or immediately after, is simply wrong.

Uh, no. Not really.

I have absolutely had emotional breakdowns, either of a good or a bad sort, right in the middle of or immediately after big events. I have chewed my fingernails while waiting for the results of a test, burst into cheers when I got a question right in a competition, shouted profanity when something I was working on just wouldn't cooperate, and had full-body shakes after a car accident. Only ever in those situations, no -- but mostly in those situations? Yes.

It is true that long-term problems like PTSD come afterward. Those are the kinds of things you represent with a Disadvantage, because they're lasting complications. But brief emotional reactions? Those are, more often than not, pretty closely paired with the events that provoke them. And they're not unpredictable, either: I knew I would be happy if we won that competition, pissed if my computer wouldn't cooperate, etc. It doesn't take me by surprise that my husband is in a bad mood after talking to his sister, who is a constant source of family conflict. But under these rules, it's either up to the dice whether he has any emotional turmoil he needs to work out afterward with some soothing baking or whatever.