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 .