11 minutes ago, Buhallin said:

Marines are also rather notorious for blowing off steam in pretty crazy and inappropriate ways.

That wasn't the question being posed. The point of contention was "Do disciplined people spaz out for no reason?" They don't. I mean, your wife chased a small animal with a vacuum cleaner. She probably wouldn't make a very good samurai either, lol. If we play a military RPG, are you going to play as Barracks Restriction Barry, the kid who keeps freaking out at his Corporal and eventually gets Admin Sepped for Failure to Adjust to Military Life? Of course not. You're going to play the 95% of Marines who can stand at attention for a while, does all their daily tasks, deploys and does what he's supposed to in combat, and gets out four years later with his Good Cookie and an Honorable Discharge and then go on Reddit and make fun of how much being in the Marines sucked. And he only got 13 weeks of conditioning and training and then 4 years of on the job training. I mean, the game has a Battle Trauma Anxiety if you want to play that guy with PTSD, and that might even be fun and rewarding. But otherwise, samurai aren't going to be spazzes the same reason that Marines typically get in trouble off duty. The peer pressure and systemic pressure to act right keeps them in line when they are working. Your wife has no social repercussions for acting silly at home. If she knew you would dishonor her and cast her into the street for doing it, she'd wait until you weren't around and scream in a pillow if that was bothering her. And that is the difference with a samurai. He's better trained and conditioned than your wife, and the expectations placed upon him are as much a reinforcement for his behavior as they are the cause of his internal struggle.

The fact is, if Strife was a system of slow-building pressure-cooking like Insanity is in Call of Cthulhu, maybe it would seem like a good mechanic. If it was like that, I'd be much more receptive. It's hard being a Samurai sometimes. And I spend my whole live abstaining from the things that make me happy, getting stuck in ideological binds, and occasionally taking orders from idiots. But that stress is slow-burning. My starting character is a scrub. If I want him to be a spaz (like Strife makes characters with low Water and Void), make it a Disadvantage I can opt into. If I want my character to be an idealistic young samurai who slowly but surely realizes that being a samurai isn't all Glory and Honor and it eats away at him unless I work to manage his psychological state (perhaps in a similar way to how CoC mitigates Insanity), that would be epic.

I'm not against Strife as a concept. I'm against it as it is implemented. It's not representative of real-world behavior by disciplined people. It swings far too much, with some characters running hot and cold constantly, or others not feeling the effects at all.

3 minutes ago, TheVeteranSergeant said:

The fact is, if Strife was a system of slow-building pressure-cooking like Insanity is in Call of Cthulhu, maybe it would seem like a good mechanic. If it was like that, I'd be much more receptive. It's hard being a Samurai sometimes. And I spend my whole live abstaining from the things that make me happy, getting stuck in ideological binds, and occasionally taking orders from idiots. But that stress is slow-burning.

3 minutes ago, TheVeteranSergeant said:

I'm not against Strife as a concept. I'm against it as it is implemented. It's not representative of real-world behavior by disciplined people. It swings far too much, with some characters running hot and cold constantly, or others not feeling the effects at all.

This is exactly what I'm trying to get at. Right now the system encourages either constant swings of emotion (because you aren't managing your Strife well), or no actual effects other than to make you pour lots of time and energy into managing your Strife well. What it doesn't do is the slow and inexorable burn, the buildup over time that leads to a moment which will be truly dramatic, a turning point in the story. I would trade a hundred little "you laughed at an inappropriate moment" and "you shut down in this conversation rather than continue to engage" moments for a single one of the points in my campaign where a PC broke down crying in public, or picked up an enemy's severed head and threw it at their attackers, or whooped with joy and hugged someone when they discovered that person was alive. The latter are memorable; the former aren't.

But that doesn't mean the former don't have a place. If the Strife system were changed to a slow burn, with accumulations coming less frequently and reductions being more difficult, then you could choose to burn off a tiny bit of Strife any time you wanted with a small display of inappropriate behavior. Those out-of-place laughs or refusals to engage become little vents, in the player's control. Don't want to take the little hits of Honor and Glory that will come with 'em? Then your character is a Proper Stoic Samurai . . . who either has to manage his life (not his rolls; his life ) very carefully to keep himself in balance, or inevitably lose his cool in a spectacular and story-making fashion.

Would increasing the threshold help? So for composure make it x3 or x4, possible make it a static number, say 20? etc.

7 minutes ago, TheVeteranSergeant said:

That wasn't the question being posed. The point of contention was "Do disciplined people spaz out for no reason?" They don't.

No, disciplined people don't spaz out for no reason - because they aren't disciplined 100% of the time. That's my point. How people blow off steam and cope with stress is very relevant to this. Most of us, in our daily lives, have a pretty constant stream of coping mechanisms. We're talking about a society where those are largely absent. There's no point where you can just get drunk and party. No point where you spend a day lounging because you called in sick for a sanity day. Without outlets, people get weird in how they react.

That's the thing though. There wasn't "no opportunity." That's Movie Samurai mythology. Samurai didn't work all day every day. They had hobbies, and spiritual mentors and there was theater and festivals, etc. They were also serial philanderers and pedophilia wasn't uncommon either (though I will understand if you leave this out of Your Rokugan, lol). This idea of the Always On Samurai is false. They just had very elaborate rules for playing pretend in public. Unsurprisingly, there was a little hypocrisy built into the system since everyone knew it wasn't sustainable.

2 minutes ago, TheVeteranSergeant said:

That's the thing though. There wasn't "no opportunity." That's Movie Samurai mythology. Samurai didn't work all day every day. They had hobbies, and spiritual mentors and there was theater and festivals, etc. They were also serial philanderers and pedophilia wasn't uncommon either (though I will understand if you leave this out of Your Rokugan, lol). This idea of the Always On Samurai is false. They just had very elaborate rules for playing pretend in public. Unsurprisingly, there was a little hypocrisy built into the system since everyone knew it wasn't sustainable.

Which is fine. But what are we creating here? It seems to me that the game is intended as Movie Samurai mythology, not a Japanese middle-ages cultural simulator. Just like D&D is Movie Fantasy mythology, not a European middle-ages simulator.

4 minutes ago, Buhallin said:

Which is fine. But what are we creating here? It seems to me that the game is intended as Movie Samurai mythology, not a Japanese middle-ages cultural simulator. Just like D&D is Movie Fantasy mythology, not a European middle-ages simulator.

And this is a campaign choice not a rules choice. I think, and I could be wrong that the main issues here is that the game is telling you how to play. The L5R story is there to give you the background and maybe some optional mechanics to emulate some of those conventions. Not to be a straitjacket to this is how you have to play.

Example. In D&D the common background is that Elves and Dwarfs dislike each other. Now do the rule force me to hate the Dwarf in my party. No. But there are optional rule emulate this.

Especially after years of "L5R your way" some of these rules just seem to want to take way choice.

2 minutes ago, tenchi2a said:

And this is a campaign choice not a rules choice. I think, and I could be wrong that the main issues here is that the game is telling you how to play. The L5R story is there to give you the background and maybe some optional mechanics to emulate some of those conventions. Not to be a straitjacket to this is how you have to play.

Example. In D&D the common background is that Elves and Dwarfs dislike each other. Now do the rule force me to hate the Dwarf in my party. No. But there are optional rule emulate this.

But dwarves are always short and tough, and elves are tall and slim and good wizards and stupidly good archers. How is that any less a straitjacket? Every rule will provide some limitation - if I want to play a really, really high magic world where even starting wizards can cast more than a few spells, the rules don't let me do that. Straitjacket. So while you can certainly pick some examples of cases where the rules don't bind how you want to play, I can offer just as many where they do, for any system you care to name.

6 minutes ago, tenchi2a said:

Especially after years of "L5R your way" some of these rules just seem to want to take way choice.

And this is the real problem. Rules that reinforce a setting are perfectly fine, but FFG has introduced some conceptual changes to the setting which you just plain don't like. Which is fine, although I think most of the people raging about it lie somewhere between "Never gave it a chance" and "Went hunting for things to dislike."

But if you're expecting them to fundamentally change the direction of the setting they're making, I suspect you're going to be pretty disappointed.

37 minutes ago, Buhallin said:

Which is fine. But what are we creating here? It seems to me that the game is intended as Movie Samurai mythology, not a Japanese middle-ages cultural simulator. Just like D&D is Movie Fantasy mythology, not a European middle-ages simulator.

Exactly where I was going with this. So why does this movie have to suck then? If Strife is something only Real People ™ would have to deal with, and not sweet-*** Movie Samurai, then Strife should go. If we're playing a game where Real People ™ wander around in Fantasy Samurai Land, then Strife needs to work like it affects actual real life people, and we have to assume they do all the things regular people do.

Right now, we have Spazzy Samurai in our Samurai Movie game, and it makes a crappy movie. You don't get to be heroic or realistic. You just get to play the Impulse Control Minigame.

Interesting points, @Kinzen ! I like that there is a mechanic that measures stress of the conflicts in a samurai's life, and I hope one makes it to the final version, but I'm not particularly attached to this one.

7 hours ago, Kinzen said:

I would love the Strife mechanic if its rises and falls were much less frequent and tied, not to the dice, but to the concepts of the setting and what's happening in the plot.

If there is a strife mechanic, I want those conflicts to play a major role in it for sure. But for me, there's two reasons that strife-on-dice is appealing:

• It a sort of success-at-cost mechanic. How badly do you want success? (I know you disagree on this, which I'll get to)
• More strife on ring dice than skill dice helps make skill dice better. (Helps avoid the trait-dice problem of 4e). To be fair, there's other ways to solve this problem:
  • Fewer stress signs on both dice, but make it harder to shed. Less spiky.
  • Blank sides. Boring but fast.
  • More successes on skill dice. Might throw off the balance too much? Dunno.

6 hours ago, Kinzen said:

But it would sell me much more persuasively on the concept of "what price are you willing to pay for victory" than the current "booby-trapped success" model.

Huh. When I read it, it feels to me like "what price are you willing to pay for victory". Let's say I've got a work project (TN 2).

I'm making some progress. (1 success), buuuuut I hit a stumbling block. I can work extra hard, stressing myself out (1 success, 1 strife), or I can just fail and accept the consequences. The consequences might be stressful--I might suffer some strife if I have a Anxiety related to my job (or an inverted Passion). But the task itself stops being stressful when I give up. (Like so many abandoned internet debates )

IME, failure itself isn't inherently stressful--only if I'm emotionally invested. If I--personally--sit down at a canvas and fail horribly at trying to make a beautiful painting... well I don't really care because I don't care about painting well.

7 hours ago, TheVeteranSergeant said:

The things I described are counter-balancing. If I'm stressed out (things that are making me angry, frustrated, sad, etc), I will do something to relieve stress (things that make me happy, excited, etc). The only way the stress carries with me is if I'm actually not getting over that stress because the other activity isn't actually helping me be happy, excited, etc. But the Strife mechanic is clearly delineating that I'm getting agitated by whatever it is I was doing. If it is something good, then the logical extrapolation is that I've added Strife that was "happy" in nature, and it is functionally identical to the Strife that I got because that High-Fire Scorpion said mean things to me in the last scene.

Yeah that's why it appeals to me. I'm an introvert. Carousing at happy hour makes me happy-- and it can go really well--but it's somewhat exhausting. I think assuming a counterbalance of "positive cancels negative" might be too simplistic.

What I don't like is that shedding strife is a bland use of water stance. But that's a different issue.

1 hour ago, TheVeteranSergeant said:

Unsurprisingly, there was a little hypocrisy built into the system since everyone knew it wasn't sustainable.

Thats is hinted at even in the reduced background in the beta (Im not sure if it's historically accurate but it wouldnt surprise me) by the note that Geisha are technically bunrakumin because if they don't, legally speaking, exist , samurai can let their reserve slip around them without loss of face.

I dunno. I get the desire to have outbursts be rarer but more dramatic, but at the same time I like the 'self-control hit points' mechanic for a provoke intrigue: it strikes me that 'forcing your diplomatic rival to crack' should be something doable in what is essentially social combat, and that shouldn't be within a player's control to say 'no I don't' any more than they get to politely decline to fall over incapacitated when hit with a ballista round.

The only outbursts we've had have always been as part of conflict scenes (which makes sense - a 'conflict' of whatever kind is when you should see emotions run high - outside conflicts, checks are rarer and there's the passive per-scene stress burn regardless of the approach you use).

I guess the question is, should people be having to worry about strife and outbursts outside a conflict scene?

39 minutes ago, Magnus Grendel said:

Thats is hinted at even in the reduced background in the beta (Im not sure if it's historically accurate but it wouldnt surprise me) by the note that Geisha are technically bunrakumin because if they don't, legally speaking, exist , samurai can let their reserve slip around them without loss of face.

I was just about to bring up the purpose of a geisha.

A battle-weary samurai who's just gotten through fulfilling his orders - and slaughtering an entire village full of families - can go to see a professional sympathyst capable of more than simply serving drinks and playing shamisen, but also (amongst other things) he can put his head in her lap and cry it out for a minute while she assures him that he's still a man.

Or he can just go in to water stance or whatever.

I think this current system is steering in to being a REALLY good board game.
I also think the designers might be underestimating the scale and content of the stories and storytelling potential that players have been using L5R for (as opposed to say DnD or whatever other hack/slash rpg you want to reference.)

Legit though this page of this thread perfectly illustrates the aspects of L5R that this edition (in my opinion) is not getting right.

3 hours ago, Kinzen said:

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.

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.

I actually do like that it is random and hard to predict. That's life and life as a samurai is far more stressful than even my life deployed was. It wasn't easy at all to keep things in check in front of my soldiers. I'd lose my composure over some of the most odd things. Thankfully, I had people I could vent to. Samurai do not.

On that note, I do find it odd that failure it's it's own reward. Perhaps the task was so stressful you failed at it and that was the result of the stress rather then being able to endure it to finish the task before you let the stress overcome you.

In our game there is a courtier npc who loves to take jabs at a Matsu bushi. That's where most stress comes from outside of social conflicts and military conflicts.

The Matsu has to hold her tongue as long as possible or leave to keep from falling into the courtier's trap.

I have no idea about the history of the Legend of the Five Rings (I guessed by the Musashi reference that it was an East Asian and/or Japanese based game).

I certainly never heard of it before FFG promoted it.

I really liked the idea of an RPG in a different setting drawing on one of my favourite settings. The biggest challenge for this type of game is the whole Giri vs Ninjo struggle.

Any old Fantasy RPG can set a number of Characters up against a bunch of marauders, and apart from weapons and armour, what's the difference between 4 Knights in European setting and 4 Samurai?

As an outside observer, I see the conflict between die hard L5R people, History fans (with an almost academic level of knowledge of the period), and RPG types who want a cool game to play.

I find the setting interesting, and the history of the world also interesting. I can, however, separate 'real' historical fact from fantasy gaming.

I think FFG jumped into the game thinking one thing, but never really investigated the best way to package it (assuming the designers have an image of a finished product in mind).

My best suggestion would be to recall the product, and have another go at it.

1 hour ago, Buhallin said:

But dwarves are always short and tough, and elves are tall and slim and good wizards and stupidly good archers. How is that any less a straitjacket? Every rule will provide some limitation - if I want to play a really, really high magic world where even starting wizards can cast more than a few spells, the rules don't let me do that. Straitjacket. So while you can certainly pick some examples of cases where the rules don't bind how you want to play, I can offer just as many where they do, for any system you care to name.

The difference here is physical/races differences versus social differences. I have no issues with Your races is short so you get negatives on reach, but positives on hide (halflings). that is a mechanical issues caused by a physical constraint. Just like if you take missing hand as a disadvantage. The straitjacket is when a non-directional mechanic tells me how I will behave in the current encounter based on a random dice mechanic that I have no truly roleplaying way to counter. I will be the first to say that stress, joy, excitement,etc. can build, but its not as linked as people seem to think.

I would have no problem with the idea if it was divorced from the rolls and assigned as a penalty by the GM with a honor or glory roll chance to avoid it. That effected everyone evenly. And not just character that are not build specifically to avoid it. FFG may think IMHO that they are adding a mechanic to support roleplaying, but all they have done is add power to build designed to counter it. Which does nothing to improve roleplaying, it just forces people to build their characters this way or suffer.

I can name a few also. Just because more then one company does it doesn't make it a good idea. If everyone else jumped off the bridge would you.

1 hour ago, Buhallin said:

And this is the real problem. Rules that reinforce a setting are perfectly fine, but FFG has introduced some conceptual changes to the setting which you just plain don't like. Which is fine, although I think most of the people raging about it lie somewhere between "Never gave it a chance" and "Went hunting for things to dislike."

But if you're expecting them to fundamentally change the direction of the setting they're making, I suspect you're going to be pretty disappointed.

FFG can setup setting in anyway they see fit. That was never the issues here. The issues is the play it our way mechanics that the current game has. I have played in and GM in many L5R games over the years. All of them different based on who was running them. That was the great thing about "L5R your way". I have also played in many Straitjacket games and the truth is they normal last a few months to a maybe at most a year or two. then they are dropped and never picked up again. Believe me I have a whole room filled with bookshelf on one-off RPG core rules.

A lot of this may be repetitive of what others have said, it is just hard to find sometimes. I also think it is important for as many people as possible to give feedback so FFG gets the best possible picture. We all want the new edition of L5R to be the best ever, so we all need to participate.

I was VERY excited when I first read the Beta rules about Strife and Outburts. It seemed like a way to integrate the internal conflict drama into the mechanics of the system. The more I play with it though, the less enamored I am with it. While the system presents itself as a way to drive interesting narrative, much of the system is driven by dice rolls not the narrative. I have no real complaints about ninjo and giri so my feedback is directed more at the strife dice symbol.

When it comes to generating strife from dice rolls, you are just as likely to generate strife from striking down your beloved spouse on the unjust orders of your lord as you are for climbing over a fence. So to me, it just totally fails as a mechanism for promoting narrative at that point. Instead of promoting interesting narrative, the dice mechanic merely creates a subsytem begging for gamification, with immense potential to ruin immersion or to take the players out of the story.

The problem of dice generating strife then leads to the next issue, a need for a mechanism to shed strife regularly, otherwise, players will gain strife too quickly and too randomly. While a character's ninjo or giri may came into play once or twice a session, the player could roll dice many many times a session, and mere randomness of the dice could generate high levels of discordant strife, which then need to be removed or the weight and impact of the ninjo and giri decisions become meaningless in comparison to the randomness of the dice. Consider instead something like insanity from any Cthulhu-esque game (CoC, Trail of Cthulhu, etc.) or corruption from Warhammer games or other similar mechanics. These usually are the slow accumulation style, which are much harder to shed. So while the geisha discussion highlights narrative ways to relieve strife, the dice-based strife mechanics necessitate a mechanical relief (i.e. water stance) that once again does not support the narrative.

I think back to my most recent L5R 4e campaign, which involved one of the most fantastic moments of samurai drama I've experienced at the table, and the dice mechanics around Strife would not have supported that moment at all. The ninjo and giri systems would have for sure, but not the dice symbols.

Another issue with the dice mechanic, and I'm still trying to figure out if this might be a feature or a flaw, is that as characters gain experience and advance their rings and skills, the dice mechanics of strife matter less and less. Higher skills and rings allow the player to roll more dice, thus increasing the chances of rolling more successes without strife. On the one hand, this generates stories where begining characters are more likely to have outburts, which may or may not be in keeping with the genre and the goals of the design team, but on the other hand, but after awhile the chances of a roll adding strife to the character, who by the way also likely has higher composure now, are reduced. This combination creates a weird dynamic of characters growing, but facing less strife, which seems like a flaw.

Proposed solutions:

• Make strife something that is not easily shed and not gained randomly.
• Increase the ways in which the narrative generates strife for characters.
• Provide good advice for GMs on how to generate internal and external drama (advice on PC-NPC-PC triangles - your sensei taught you to do X, but your gunso says Y).
• Provide advice for GMs on how to read character sheets with an eye toward fueling internal drama. Character sheets are the way players tell the PC what is important to them, by providing GMs advice on how to read these character sheets to find things that are important but opposed, will guide the player to identify internal drama herself. A character sheet for a Phoenix with high Martial Arts [Melee] skill or one with the Bitter Betrothal disadvantage and the Paragon of Chugi advantage.
• Provide good setting materials and prepublished adventures which emphasize this aspect of the genre.

From the L5R 4th Edition Core Book.

Quote

What is a Geisha

The nature of geisha can be somewhat confusing. Contrary to what outsiders may think, geisha are not prostitutes. They are entertainers, trained to offer solace to lonely and stressed-out samurai by means of pleasant conversation, jokes, music, dance, and relaxation. A samurai who pays for an evening with a geisha is paying for the chance to rest, unwind, and “take off his face,” becoming merely a man for an evening, sharing the company of a beautiful and charming woman without the burdens of samurai duty and honor. Romance with a geisha is certainly possible, but entails an extended period of courtship, in which the samurai shows his dedication by means of repeated visits and gifts (traditionally presented to the mistress of the geisha house rather than to the geisha herself). Only a samurai who proves himself truly dedicated can earn a geisha’s favors.

I think the Fluff of the Geisha kinda just crushed the Crunch of Strike and Outburst. lol Unless the developers gives a character a big benefit when visiting a Geisha. I mean, its not dishonorable to see one so...

5 minutes ago, BlindSamurai13 said:

From the L5R 4th Edition Core Book.

I think the Fluff of the Geisha kinda just crushed the Crunch of Strike and Outburst. lol Unless the developers gives a character a big benefit when visiting a Geisha. I mean, its not dishonorable to see one so...

I don't think its about dishonor here. It has more to do with western misconceptions of what a Geisha is and offending people. Its not FFG's fault but these day it doesn't take much to set people off.

13 minutes ago, tenchi2a said:

I don't think its about dishonor here. It has more to do with western misconceptions of what a Geisha is and offending people. Its not their fault but these day it doesn't take much to set people off.

Indeed. I can't imagine FFG would just ignore the fluff of the Geisha and how they help a samurai relax when their stressed out.

2 hours ago, TheVeteranSergeant said:

Exactly where I was going with this. So why does this movie have to suck then? If Strife is something only Real People ™ would have to deal with, and not sweet-*** Movie Samurai, then Strife should go. If we're playing a game where Real People ™ wander around in Fantasy Samurai Land, then Strife needs to work like it affects actual real life people, and we have to assume they do all the things regular people do.

Right now, we have Spazzy Samurai in our Samurai Movie game, and it makes a crappy movie. You don't get to be heroic or realistic. You just get to play the Impulse Control Minigame.

Strife isn't something "only real people" have to deal with, it's also a key component in pretty much ANY story telling. Watch a movie and tell me none of the characters get riled up lol. Watch ANY movie!

49 minutes ago, TheEldarGuy said:

I have no idea about the history of the Legend of the Five Rings (I guessed by the Musashi reference that it was an East Asian and/or Japanese based game).

I certainly never heard of it before FFG promoted it.

I really liked the idea of an RPG in a different setting drawing on one of my favourite settings. The biggest challenge for this type of game is the whole Giri vs Ninjo struggle.

Any old Fantasy RPG can set a number of Characters up against a bunch of marauders, and apart from weapons and armour, what's the difference between 4 Knights in European setting and 4 Samurai?

As an outside observer, I see the conflict between die hard L5R people, History fans (with an almost academic level of knowledge of the period), and RPG types who want a cool game to play.

I find the setting interesting, and the history of the world also interesting. I can, however, separate 'real' historical fact from fantasy gaming.

I think FFG jumped into the game thinking one thing, but never really investigated the best way to package it (assuming the designers have an image of a finished product in mind).

My best suggestion would be to recall the product, and have another go at it.

This is a BETA - so its not packaged yet. I think we'll see several changes to the packaging during the Beta as FFG is fully intent on profiting from / promoting every aspect of L5R.

48 minutes ago, tenchi2a said:

The difference here is physical/races differences versus social differences. I have no issues with Your races is short so you get negatives on reach, but positives on hide (halflings). that is a mechanical issues caused by a physical constraint. Just like if you take missing hand as a disadvantage. The straitjacket is when a non-directional mechanic tells me how I will behave in the current encounter based on a random dice mechanic that I have no truly roleplaying way to counter. I will be the first to say that stress, joy, excitement,etc. can build, but its not as linked as people seem to think.

I would have no problem with the idea if it was divorced from the rolls and assigned as a penalty by the GM with a honor or glory roll chance to avoid it. That effected everyone evenly. And not just character that are not build specifically to avoid it. FFG may think IMHO that they are adding a mechanic to support roleplaying, but all they have done is add power to build designed to counter it. Which does nothing to improve roleplaying, it just forces people to build their characters this way or suffer.

I can name a few also. Just because more then one company does it doesn't make it a good idea. If everyone else jumped off the bridge would you.

FFG can setup setting in anyway they see fit. That was never the issues here. The issues is the play it our way mechanics that the current game has. I have played in and GM in many L5R games over the years. All of them different based on who was running them. That was the great thing about "L5R your way". I have also played in many Straitjacket games and the truth is they normal last a few months to a maybe at most a year or two. then they are dropped and never picked up again. Believe me I have a whole room filled with bookshelf on one-off RPG core rules.

If a game is about combat (most D&D games) then it only needs rules for combat. If a game is going to be about "honor and steel" it best have rules for both... You need some stat to show what your character feels, because it is different than you feel as a player. This is one of the biggest errors in L5R 1st ed. John Wick loved letting players RP their courtier part, and as such the development for the courtier game was horrible and mostly RP based... What happens when someone wants to play a character who is a genius but the player isn't? Or a character who is a smooth talker but the player isn't? The same thing you do when you play a 10' tall half orc barbarian who can break trees down with his bare hands and eats a whole horse for breakfast when you are in fact a 14 year old pot head who plays video games and RPG all day. You create a system that regulates it.

16 minutes ago, BlindSamurai13 said:

Indeed. I can't imagine FFG would just ignore the fluff of the Geisha and how they help a samurai relax when their stressed out.

I don't think they will ignore it fluff wise. But that's different then promoting a core mechanic that has what most not informed Americans would call prostitution.

Quote

Strife isn't something "only real people" have to deal with, it's also a key component in pretty much ANY story telling. Watch a movie and tell me none of the characters get riled up lol. Watch ANY movie!

I think you missed the point I was making there if that was the first response you came up with. Movie Samurai was a term I referred to as an unrealistic depiction of samurai that people seem to have gleaned from bad movies/anime/stories/etc. If the movies are showing people having real human reactions, then they are Real People ™ and not Movie Samurai.

The problem with the game is that its Strife mechanic isn't depicting Real People ™ and its version of Movie Samurai aren't fun either.

Diplomacy is failing here