10 hours ago, AtoMaki said:

Okay guys, time for an update! Yesterday, my gaming group took your advice and gave an honest try to Outburst and Strife. The results: 13 Outbursts, and two breaks because of unceasing laughter at the gaming table .

The mechanics look fine, but they are rather... I dunno how to put it... difficult. I guess you are fixing this one now, but there is a hilarious misalignment between the emphasized theme of the game and what the Strife/Outburst mechanic does. Instead of promoting serious roleplay, we found that it tends to break up the seriousness and cause legitimately funny situations. The closest parallel would be the constant quipping in Marvel movies. This isn't necessarily bad, of course, but I dunno if this is what you guys are aiming for.

How often are you asking for rolls? How often are your players choosing high strife instead of other options? Are people seeking ways to lower strife through opportunities or passions? It seems like your experiance is an outlier from what I’ve heard, so I’m just trying to diagnose if there is a reason for that.

5 hours ago, DarkIxion said:

How often are you asking for rolls? How often are your players choosing high strife instead of other options? Are people seeking ways to lower strife through opportunities or passions?

We usually don't have a lot of rolls, but the exact number is highly situational. We were cautious with keeping Strife results before this game, but as things got worked out, we started keeping Strife like no tomorrow. And again, before this game, everyone was crazy with keeping Strife low, but not anymore.

• How much strife are characters accruing in a given session?
Depends on the character. One accumulates it quite frequently (but it ends up not mattering because of her high water and earth rings).

• How common are outbursts?
Not as common as we initially feared. We've had two so far in roughly 12 hours of testing.

• How often are characters succeeding or failing on their checks?
More often than not we are succeeding at our checks, but it seems random if that makes any sense?

• How frequently characters are spending and acquiring Void points?
Spending Void is fairly common, though acquiring it isn't. They end up spending it about twice as fast as they earn it, which causes them to spend it as soon as they get it later in the day.

• How often are the GM and players struggling to find the right approach (skill and ring) for checks?
This isn't really a problem for us as my players are good at finding alternative approaches to situations.

My 2 hour session last night (via skype, no less) only had a few rolls. (Was actually 3.5, but the first 1.5 was pulling the party together.

But of the 5, two are starting next session at or above half full...

One got dinged for having a very on point anxiety... and had 3 on the one roll he made. He had 8 composure... We only got through 1 scene.

The one failure of note was that same kitsuki willingly failing to avoid an outburst. He had the needed successes to succede.. but would have taken 2 strife. So, instead, he took the opportunity.

None of them had played L5R before.

both my l5R groups are experienced roleplay gamers...

Yes, the group last night was talky -

• table chatter
• long dialogue with NPCs
• discussing amongst themselves the state of the fiction and who knows what.
• Wordy descriptions of their actions.

The joy of that group - I can throw them a minor curve and let them do the in-character interactions on an improvisational theater level. Two are trained stage actors. And not a one is over 30 years of age... great group; I miss face-to-face play with them.

So, my group and I haven't had too much play experience, but from the few hours we did have we came to a few conclusions.

1. It's difficult to choose the right approach and skill sometimes, but it's... almost not important to get it just right. By that I mean that sometimes a player would describe their attempts to glean information, and I would think out loud: Analyze or Survey? And we'd go through the lists of what each meant and we could see everything from several different angles. So, in the end, we just picked what felt right, and that was nice. It didn't have to be "This ring because the books says so" or "This ring because it's easier/harder" it was about what seemed right to roll, and that was good to us. It's something we expect to go more smoothly the more we play, but as it is we like it.

2. Opportunities are amazing. I'll admit that I'm a bit biased when I say this because it's a system I've introduced (in different forms) to systems that don't have such mechanics, but the players seemed to really like it too. Being able to narratively influence a scene based on something mechanical (so it doesn't feel like you're taking too much control) was awesome to them. They could pick the sorts of things they wanted to see or find, and I could give them that. Flavoring/limiting them by Ring was also interesting, and (again) I think we'll get even more out of it as we go along. For now though, we like Opportunities.

3. Strife and Outbursts haven't come up much. One player has accumulated some, but not nearly enough, and the other has simply rolled well, so he hasn't come up against much strife yet. Either way, I'm excited to see how it all plays out when we get there (because I fully expect to before the end of the module).

And... that's it on actual play for now. I've got more feedback, but it's mostly character generation stuff right now. Next time.

Ran a one-shot on 10/22, here's what I found.

• How much strife are characters accruing in a given session?

People tended to run up strife fast early, but managed it afterwards.

• How common are outbursts?

Didn't have any during my session, but it was all of a short investigation+a combat for people unfamiliar with the rules.

• How often are characters succeeding or failing on their checks?

We had a character miss four straight rounds of attacks rolling 3k2 against non-Air ring targets. The shugenja had no problems due to rolling 5k3 for their primary spell. Might need to take a look at shugenja vs non-shugenja starting attack skills, since it seems way easier to get ranks in Theology than it is to get in Martial Arts.

• How frequently characters are spending and acquiring Void points?

Only one character remembered that void points exist.

• How often are the GM and players struggling to find the right approach (skill and ring) for checks?

We did fine on this one, though a quick reference would have been helpful for this and opportunities.

On 10/19/2017 at 7:33 PM, jmoschner said:

That is one direction to take it. Would really like to see the main source of strife things like having to choose between saving the puppy or the kitten.

If cant change the dice would look at having the symbols work more like narrative opportunity for the gm and then turn the strife concept into something that functions like honor or glory where you have a rating that represents how composed the character is and has advantages and disadvantages similar to honor and glory.

I think it would be mechanically simpler to just have composure, and allow insults, and other bits attack someone's composure using the same mechanics as normal combat damage. As well, "strife" if it exists, the player should have the choice of taking Physical wounds or lose composure to keep that die. Or even simpler, you just have wounds and they can come from any distressful source, and expand the table to include loss of face or running away as an applicable option when you go over wounds.

3 sessions down (total 8 hours) no one has had an outburst. Several have come close. Abuut 50 total rolls, abot 10 failures, only two failures not due to strife avoidance. Several, "I succeeded, but not to the level I wanted" - while the extra successes could have been had, but the player avoided to to strife aversion.

The effects o an outburst on conflict scenes other than duels not clear; the effect on the individual more clear,but needs revision.

Every session, at least one PC has hit within 2 of an outburst (and that even in the 2 hour, 5 total rolls session. Giri conflict)

neither of my groups has willingly spent voidMOst are earning a point or two from hidden TN's, but it hasn't been an isseu.

So far, the approaches used by my player have a very low correlation to the approaches listed for the skill group in use. Aside from that, however, by ignoring the synch to skill group, the approaches are making things work passably well. In part, this has a lot to do with the beta adventure and it being an investigation.

Some examples: One player chose to analyze the fight by use of tactics skill - "My knowledge of tactics should allow me to work out what happened." I agreed - the character simply did not roll enough to meet the difficulty. Another used his knowledge of Martial Arts [Melee] to theorize about the fight... None used the specific scholar skills, but all used scholar approaches.

We've had our first session Tuesday night, I gmed A Rōnin’s Path and there were three players (Kakita duellist, Togashi Monk, Kitsuki Investigator).

On 18/10/2017 at 3:12 PM, FFG Max Brooke said:

Some questions to consider based on your time at the table:

• How much strife are characters accruing in a given session?

Quite a bit but they also shed it fast. The Kakita was the exception as he had Water 1, but due to compsure 10 and choosing the Become Enraged Outburst he could manage it as well.

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• How common are outbursts?

With the exception of the Kakita that made it part of his tactics we had none.

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• How often are characters succeeding or failing on their checks?

With the exception of one single check all the few checks that were failled were due to Strife management.

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• How frequently characters are spending and acquiring Void points?

My group seemed to be playing as if Void didn't exist.

• How often are the GM and players struggling to find the right approach (skill and ring) for checks?

That's been fairly easy. My players focused a lot more in finding the best approach than worrying about skills though.