While many mechanics of Beta Dueling are clunky and you need to play it "correctly" to not degenerate it into pointless set of Center spamming turns, at least it feels like we are playing the game and making impactful choices. 4th ed dueling can be described as game playing itself and informing you about the results without any meaningful things to do about that. You bring your character sheet, opponent brings their character sheet, and numbers randomly beat other numbers while players are essentially not needed for it to proceed.

7 hours ago, Ultimatecalibur said:

What? There is nothing in my suggestion about bidding (I'm not really a fan of it either) outside of it severely shortening the length of duels where no strife is bid for initiative or gained from rolls due to players being conservative with how much Strife they gain. My suggestion was fully focused around creation of a countdown clock that would prevent duels from stalling out.

With my suggestion Finishing Blows should be occurring after the following rounds of the duel if not sooner:

• Composure 4 to 6: Round 3
• Composure 7 to 10: Round 4
• Composure 11 to 15: Round 5
• Composure 16 to 21*: Round 6
• Composure 22 to 28: Round 7
• Composure 29 to 34: Round 8
• Composure 35 to 43**: Round 9

*A 5 Fire 5 Earth Rank 6 character would be compromised at this point.

**Even a 10 Fire 10 Earth Kami would be compromised if the duel went for 9 Rounds.

You ar3 starting at round 3 and gping up. FFG seems to be planning no more tyan 3

Just now, Daeglan said:

You ar3 starting at round 3 and gping up. FFG seems to be planning no more tyan 3

The E-mail said players want most duels on average to resolve in 3 to 4 choice points (rounds) with slightly fewer rolls than choice points. Normal duels have a max duration of roughly 6 rounds still allows for that. (The average of 1 and 6 is 3.5)

Just a heads up. For Legal reasons you don't want to post any game mechanic ideas on this forum.

If you post it you have rights to it under US copyright laws and they can't legal use it.

My suggestion to them was to use a mechanics from an IP they already own. So there are not legal issues.

1 hour ago, Ultimatecalibur said:

The E-mail said players want most duels on average to resolve in 3 to 4 choice points (rounds) with slightly fewer rolls than choice points. Normal duels have a max duration of roughly 6 rounds still allows for that. (The average of 1 and 6 is 3.5)

No that is not quite what the email said. And the possibility of 6 rounds is EXACTLY the opposite of their goal. MAX of die rolls is their goal. With a few more places to make choices. What you are proposing wont be used if for no other reason than copyright wont allow it. I do not like this whole auction mechanic you keep pushing. It is a TERRIBLE mechanic I would rather something more along the lings of choose a stance. depending on your opponents choices you get a bonus or penalty. maybe a die roll to read that choice.

Fix basic combat and damage mechanics so you can drop a foe in one or two hits and that would resolve the duel issues and lead to quicker leaner combat and conflict resolution in general.

The core of conflict resolution needs to be simple, quick, and effective. Techniques and descriptions of actions are what should spice things up.

6 hours ago, Daeglan said:

No that is not quite what the email said. And the possibility of 6 rounds is EXACTLY the opposite of their goal. MAX of die rolls is their goal.

Quote

We really appreciated the excellent feedback you gave us on the subject of duels! We’re looking forward to trying some adjustments to the current duel structure in future weeks, but we’d like to discuss the survey today. A few key points emerged, which we’d like to take the opportunity to share with you here:

• Players want a high degree of agency in their duels—in other words, they want their decisions to influence the outcome in addition to their character’s statistics and the dice rolls. GMs share this desire.
• Players want most duels to resolve with three to four choice points and two to three rolls (GMs favor fewer choice points and rolls)
• Players don’t want to be taken “out of the action” for longer than a few rounds by somebody else’s duel.

These trends present some challenges, but also some interesting opportunities. There is an innate conflict between a high degree of control and fast resolution—the fewer choices you get to make, the less control you have over the outcome, by definition. Had players and GMs not favored such a high degree of tactical control in their duels, it would be an obvious choice to simply make duels an opposed roll.However, something interesting arose from the difference between the number of rounds (in essence, choice points) people wanted and the number of dice rolls people wanted. Generally, players were more tolerant of additional rounds than additional rolls. Therefore, we think part of the key to balancing agency and efficiency might lie in removing dice rolls from some of the options, so that the average number of dice rolls in a duel is considerably lower. Randomness likely cannot be removed completely so that there are still uncertain risk/reward scenarios during duels, but we have some intriguing ideas to approach this challenge.

That is straight from the email. There is nothing in there about setting a MAX number of die rolls.

There is a point about players not wanting to be taken out of the action for to long by other players duels. Having a rough max duel duration can help fix the problems that cause this complaint. A 6 Round duel is a far easier monster to handle than an potentially infinitely long one.

6 hours ago, Ultimatecalibur said:

That is straight from the email. There is nothing in there about setting a MAX number of die rolls.

There is a point about players not wanting to be taken out of the action for to long by other players duels. Having a rough max duel duration can help fix the problems that cause this complaint. A 6 Round duel is a far easier monster to handle than an potentially infinitely long one.

Yeah but this here does talk about limiting to about 3 die rolls. when you look at both the Email and this post by Max.

Quote

Greetings L5R Open Beta Testers!

First off, we want to thank you for the great response on the survey last week. We got a lot of excellent feedback on duels, and we're in the midst of integrating that into an update to the conflict rules.

While there's a more detailed breakdown in this week's email, here are the salient points:

• Players put a high premium on agency, so choice points should be plentiful enough to be meaningful

• Players want fewer dice rolls in general

• Players are more amenable to additional choice points than additional dice rolls

• Duels pull the spotlight onto only one player, which is a challenge for many groups

In the coming weeks, we'll be rolling out an update to the duel rules to try to incorporate this feedback in a substantive way. This will likely involve actions that can be resolved very quickly, perhaps introducing a degree of randomness via means the than dice (blind choice, bidding, etc).

Additionally, we want to include extra guidance on how to integrate duels into other scenes, such as intrigues, and how to build activities for there other characters around duels.

For the discussion topic this week, feel free to weigh in on duels, but we'd also like to get feedback on techniques! Here are a couple of questions to get you started:

• How do you feel about the different types of techniques? Which are your favorite? Are there any types you don't like?

• How do you feel about the complexity of techniques? Are they overwhelming? Do they feel too limited?

• What technique-like abilities from past editions would you really want to see represented in the future?

Finally, we've got several minor corrections to the preview content, along with a new preview for the Tea Ceremony ritual, which can be found here .

It seems like you are being very narrow on what the Devs have said on the subject. Seeing as how Max does talk about limiting die rolls.