28 minutes ago, Ultimatecalibur said:

And being at 0 hp has been the same way in D&D, though most forget that.

This isn't the same. 0 HP in DnD means the character is completely helpless and needs assistance. Incapacitated in this beta means the character is overwhelmed and can't choose actions that require tests.

Even in a one vs one skirmish, this means an incapacitated character has a slim chance of turning the fight around or managing to escape. When you consider the more likely scenario of multiple characters per side, that increases the chance that incapacitated characters will be able to be protected long enough to recover on their own without any additional assistance.

It doesn't make high damage any less effective. But it's worth remembering when you consider the relative strengths of the weapons.

28 minutes ago, Ultimatecalibur said:

Anxieties and other Strife inflicters will start inflicting equal amounts of fatigue to bleeding characters.

And critical strikes equal to total strife. Which means you can talk a bleeding person to death. Not sure how I feel about that, but it fits the general stress mechanism so... sure, why not?

Regardless, the point I was making is that bleeding won't kill a character on it's own. Either the bleeding character needs to push themselves too hard or someone else needs to push them over the edge.

Actually the Bleeding condition was updated: you only take damage for keeping Strife on your own dice results - so someone using skills, techniques or opportunities to inflict Strife on you does not kill you.

Thankyou, I could have sworn that's how it worked and I went and checked the wrong pdf.

6 hours ago, Franwax said:

Actually the Bleeding condition was updated: you only take damage for keeping Strife on your own dice results - so someone using skills, techniques or opportunities to inflict Strife on you does not kill you.

Indeed. Which means that the only way an incapacitated player suffers damage from bleeding is strife on Fitness checks to mitigate further criticals.

11 hours ago, Ultimatecalibur said:

You can survive being Incapacitated but that doesn't mean that you can continue to effectively participate in the current fight once Incapacitated without the use of a once per scene VP kata or outside assistance.

First Aid/Calming Breath allowing you to un-incapacitate yourself (if you'll pardon the double negative - 'capacitate yourself' sounds like you're charging up prior to impersonating Emperor Palpatine....) which means the situation might come up more often now.

Of course, that only works if someone else can protect you whilst you do so, even in air stance spending 2-3 rounds doing calming breath leaves you very vulnerable to taking more hits... (not that that's a bad thing; someone taking a condition called 'incapacitated' should be in trouble!)

16 hours ago, AK_Aramis said:

Keep in mind - the horses are trained for horse archery; they're directed almost entirely by the archer's feet, not the reins.

14 hours ago, nameless ronin said:

That works for mounted archers, who stay out of the fray itself. They don’t need to turn on a dime, never mind have the horse fight with them. It’s still ok for warriors who can keep charging through enemy infantry at speed. But if you’re fighting on horseback and can’t move relatively unhindered, when you’re turning all the time, when you’re guiding your mount to rear up or kick with its hind legs, having that hand free makes a big difference - not even just for the reins, but also for maintaining balance.

Oh, agreed. I was only giving horsemanship as an example of a situation which can be easier in some circumstances with a free hand, not one that requires one.

13 hours ago, GaGrin said:

While this is true, you can still gain the passive protection from stances so your opponent's being able to down you before you regain the few points you need to fight back is not guaranteed. You can also escape from a fight while incapacitated to buy yourself more time. I'm not saying it's easy, I'm just saying that incapactitation is not the same as the fight being over, unlike in many other games.

I need to re-read the bleeding condition, but my impression was that it was both trivial to stop and only actually bled you if you were taking actions (i.e. earning strife). If that is true, then unconscious characters are immune to bleeding.

Edit: I was mostly right, but I missed an important detail. Any strife gain at all causes the damage tick and crit for bleeding characters... which has interesting implications for strife-inducing effects.

Not all bleeding characters will be fatigue over resilience, and so it's not an automatic crit. After all, there are several ways to get a crit:

• technique
• fatigue ≥ resilience
• 2 opportunity on a strike

Bleeding can be caused with a severity 1-4 void-resisted crit.

1 hour ago, AK_Aramis said:

Not all bleeding characters will be fatigue over resilience, and so it's not an automatic crit. After all, there are several ways to get a crit:

• technique
• fatigue ≥ resilience
• 2 opportunity on a strike

Bleeding can be caused with a severity 1-4 void-resisted crit.

I know there's at least one way to inflict bleeding directly (Flowing water strike) with an attack - there may be other techniques I've overlooked.

All I really wanted to say about bleeding is that it was unlikely to ever actually kill a character, it's more like the physical equivilent of compusure/compromise (just more messy).

The point I wanted to make with the numbers was that some of the weapons with low damage can crit as hard as the high damage weapons before your opponent is even incapacitated, which makes the damage/crit power level stuff pretty involved. This is made more complex when you look at how temporary fatigue is compared to most of the critical effects.

I'm not trying to support or critique it at the moment, just lay all the implications of how it functions open. If you want them to change something (or houserule a tweak for your own group) then knowing this pretty important and I'm not sure some of the relationships or scaling is super obvious at first glance.

On 31/10/2017 at 1:07 PM, Sephyr79 said:

Rokugan swords are tested by hitting them on rocks and marking how deep they cut the rock on their handles. This should mean something.

What!? Where was this stated? This is absolutely ridiculous and breaks my suspension of disbelief more than freaking magic and dragons!

If this was stated in regard to Kaiu Blades then I would understand, because they are borderline magic weapons. But a normal katana? The only thing they would do to a rock is cover it with its broken pieces...

On 31/10/2017 at 3:47 PM, SideshowLucifer said:

Honestly, I feel weapons like a tetsubo, naginata and no-dachi are fine doing more damage than a katana. The weapons described as wargear are weapons of warfare.

I'm not ok with the flimsy armor samurai wear breaking katanas though. It's a rule I would likely ignore in its current state.

That being said, I find it perfectly reasonable for shadowlands creatures and other mythic beings to have hides tough enough to break katanas.

(...)

The samurai didn't pick the most effective weapon to carry, they picked the most elegant and the one requiring a great deal of skill and mastery.

Just wanted to say that I agree with everything here above the (...) sign. Absolutely.

But people should also remember that the samurai were **** pragmatic in their time. The "katana cult" came to prominence when they were already in decline (and brought back by massive weeaboos in the current era...), when there were no more massive wars to fight and rifles and cannons were the rulers of battlefield. A sword is a "civilized" weapon, to be used in the city, for self-defense and to wash one's honor. In the battlefield, a samurai would use a battlefield weapon.

On 31/10/2017 at 5:05 PM, Sephyr79 said:

I just did a google search for L5R artwork.

Wanna guess which weapon is shown being held and used prominently, both in war and in other less extreme settings, about 80% of the time? First two don't count.

Man, those legendary champions are all doing it wrong. Who knew.

History is great and fun for inspiration, but I'll take rule of cool every time when developing a system that has a strong identity.

Yes, they are.

More specifically, the people commissioning those artworks and writing those stories were. Massively wrong.

On 31/10/2017 at 8:42 PM, Sephyr79 said:

I just don't think "It's ok that the daisho is lame mechanically, because it's -rude- to actually bring real weapons" is a good reason to keep it as is. And if, say, one of the court's musicians turns out to be a horrible Shadowlands impersonator that once exposed by the party grows a hide of obsidian scales that gives it armor 4, having the PCs scurry around for a vulgar club to be able to hit it because their katanas (folded 200 times, slaked in the blood of enemies, honed to perfection) will be slightly more effective than pillows.

That seems perfectly congruous to me. Swords are slightly more effective than pillows against heavy armor. Unless you do Half-swording and Mordhau , which samurai wouldn't do.

9 minutes ago, Mirumoto Saito said:

What!? Where was this stated? This is absolutely ridiculous and breaks my suspension of disbelief more than freaking magic and dragons!

If this was stated in regard to Kaiu Blades then I would understand, because they are borderline magic weapons. But a normal katana? The only thing they would do to a rock is cover it with its broken pieces...

It is in the Kakita Blade and Omamori preview , but your point still stands as it still applies to a borderline magical weapon. The example blade is a 5 damage 8 deadliness monster of a weapon that likely can break boulders with Horizontal Blade (if the missing 1-handed grip is an error) just as well as a Tetsubo or Otsuchi.

14 minutes ago, Mirumoto Saito said:

What!? Where was this stated? This is absolutely ridiculous and breaks my suspension of disbelief more than freaking magic and dragons!

If this was stated in regard to Kaiu Blades then I would understand, because they are borderline magic weapons. But a normal katana? The only thing they would do to a rock is cover it with its broken pieces...

It's in the very first Way of the Crane book, which my DM told me to read in preparation for the game, and also seen in other sources. Apparently, they use Hida iron, climb the mountain with their latest creation and shave a piece of it with the blade, and inscribe the depth of the cut on the grip as a Seal of quality;

To be fair, I'm already happy enough with the latest update which at least makes 'Razor-sharp' have an upside (spending opportunity for crit lethality) instead of being 100% pure handicap. It's a way to make the weapon reward skill above adding successes to he strike like you can do with any beatstick.