After playing a few games, our gaming group has noticed that picking on the "weakest" player seems to be a problem.

Once a player falls behind, or gets into a bad situation, its really easy to "farm" rings on them instead of players with better board position (path of least resistance).

We think that having to break province should be required to get rings in your claimed pool, or some other form of change. Farming a ring off of someone just seems to easy.

Any thoughts?

How have your multiplayer games gone? Do you see this happening too?

Also, it feels like you should be able to negotiate fate, honor, imperial favor during treaties. Thoughts?

While it’s true we have had similar problems (farming rings from a player without defenders 1st turn), I think it’s not really that big of a problem.

1) We played with normal decks. I suspect this can be prevented with decks tailored for multiplayer. More low cost characters are waaay better than 1 or two big costers, at least to prevent unopposed conflicts. When we played, we bought the “normal”amount of chars, and that lead to that, after everybody has declared their first conflict, there was one player that had all his chars bowed. Perfect for farming.

2) You can only farm 1 ring per conflict, unless that player has claimed some rings and you break that province. The moment somebody has too many rings and is threatening a victory, the others players focus on him and forget about the weakest player. That gives said player some time to come back to the game. This has happened in our two games, and in one that player came back to claim the victory. (We were 4 people playing)

4 hours ago, Tabris2k said:

While it’s true we have had similar problems (farming rings from a player without defenders 1st turn), I think it’s not really that big of a problem.

1) We played with normal decks. I suspect this can be prevented with decks tailored for multiplayer. More low cost characters are waaay better than 1 or two big costers, at least to prevent unopposed conflicts. When we played, we bought the “normal”amount of chars, and that lead to that, after everybody has declared their first conflict, there was one player that had all his chars bowed. Perfect for farming.

2) You can only farm 1 ring per conflict, unless that player has claimed some rings and you break that province. The moment somebody has too many rings and is threatening a victory, the others players focus on him and forget about the weakest player. That gives said player some time to come back to the game. This has happened in our two games, and in one that player came back to claim the victory. (We were 4 people playing)

This does and doesn't work though. What tends to happen is that in a 3 player game the weak player (who we will call player 1) has very little to offset the disadvantage as they are having to expend more resources (cards mainly but characters as well) to try and keep afloat versus pressure from Players 2 and 3. This normally results in that when the time comes to shift gears and target the player (who we will call player 3) who is ahead they end up being able to contribute very little where as if they are smart player 3 will have ideally have been able to farm rings from Player 1 and likely been acting after the player 2 who was forced to expend cards as well to take rings from player 1 and thus was bleeding their own card resources in the process,. This will normally leave player 3 able to farm rings for minimal resource expenditure thus have more resources to defend his own provinces when the inevitable counter attacks start to happen.

It usually breaks down that the dominant position will be the 2nd or 3rd player who was not attacked by player 1 since they can react to where player 1 attacked for the double punch to farm an easy rings on turn 1, and will usually have the opportunity to try and farm a spare ring from Player 1, assuming they won their opening conflict.

On 6/17/2018 at 9:19 AM, Buddhist_Possum said:

After playing a few games, our gaming group has noticed that picking on the "weakest" player seems to be a problem.

Once a player falls behind, or gets into a bad situation, its really easy to "farm" rings on them instead of players with better board position (path of least resistance).

We think that having to break province should be required to get rings in your claimed pool, or some other form of change. Farming a ring off of someone just seems to easy.

Any thoughts?

How have your multiplayer games gone? Do you see this happening too?

Also, it feels like you should be able to negotiate fate, honor, imperial favor during treaties. Thoughts?

Enlightenment victory is so easy to farm for that there's no reason NOT to gang up like a pack of hyenas. The weak player burns most of his resources while the strong players maintain board state and card advantage because they don't have to burn as many (or at all) in order to grab rings.

Some trend my play group has noticed include,

Passing conflicts > A lot of the time most players are passing conflicts although they invested fate. It makes sense as there are more enemies on the table than there are friends. What we all agreed on after noticing this was that players should be allowed to make deals with each other while defending. And allowing players to defend for other players. We think this will be a nice dynamic. We cant have the defending rule be the same as that in magic cause unlike magic defenders in L5R get bowed.
We also agreed defending other players in rings that match keeper roles is an advantage. I would have loved as Unicorn moving a bowed unit to a conflict my opponent defended successfully against Isawa Kaede just to benefit of the ring bonus.

Creative deals > In our game I had a deal where in exchange for assisting in a conflict I asked for having one of my characters honored. I quite enjoyed this. I also loved how I gave my opponent an ornate fan to help defend and got it back with my giver of gifts.

We hate that we can't declare multiple conflicts of a certain type.
Here is a nice idea lets create a shrine to the <insert element> kami token. Lets use this to attain enlightenment instead of rings. Let the rings return to the pool. Lets also give buffs to the kami tokens when contesting a ring of a certain type. It fits with lore, you create a shrine to appease a kami when you win. When a province is lost to an opponent they can stake claim on your shrine.

Putting fate on rings needs a little revamp. Lets make the rule you place a fate on a ring of a player who has the least amount of fate on rings they control.

Need more incentive to attack. Make kami tokens give buffs.

Bonus tag team rules.
10 rings. 5 military elemental rings and 5 political elemental rings all shared by players. Single player rules for the most part. No additional fate at the start. Attacking and defending can be assisted.

13 hours ago, moto_rudhra said:

Some trend my play group has noticed include,

Passing conflicts > A lot of the time most players are passing conflicts although they invested fate. It makes sense as there are more enemies on the table than there are friends. What we all agreed on after noticing this was that players should be allowed to make deals with each other while defending. And allowing players to defend for other players. We think this will be a nice dynamic. We cant have the defending rule be the same as that in magic cause unlike magic defenders in L5R get bowed.
We also agreed defending other players in rings that match keeper roles is an advantage. I would have loved as Unicorn moving a bowed unit to a conflict my opponent defended successfully against Isawa Kaede just to benefit of the ring bonus.

Creative deals > In our game I had a deal where in exchange for assisting in a conflict I asked for having one of my characters honored. I quite enjoyed this. I also loved how I gave my opponent an ornate fan to help defend and got it back with my giver of gifts.

We hate that we can't declare multiple conflicts of a certain type.
Here is a nice idea lets create a shrine to the <insert element> kami token. Lets use this to attain enlightenment instead of rings. Let the rings return to the pool. Lets also give buffs to the kami tokens when contesting a ring of a certain type. It fits with lore, you create a shrine to appease a kami when you win. When a province is lost to an opponent they can stake claim on your shrine.

Putting fate on rings needs a little revamp. Lets make the rule you place a fate on a ring of a player who has the least amount of fate on rings they control.

Need more incentive to attack. Make kami tokens give buffs.

Bonus tag team rules.
10 rings. 5 military elemental rings and 5 political elemental rings all shared by players. Single player rules for the most part. No additional fate at the start. Attacking and defending can be assisted.

Passing Conflicts - Yup, we've noticed the same thing with my group. Our first game ever, the three of us All passed 3 rounds in a row just to buy lots of guys and build up a board state. Since attacking weakens your defense without potentially weakening all your enemies, the first to attack generally gets pounced on. I agree that defending for each other might be a way to solve this; though there are other potential solutions.

Deals: Treaties need to have much more crunch to them; I'm only ever going to bid 5 honor on a treaty, since, if I bid anything else, it's obvious I intend to break said treaty, so why would anyone agree to it?

Fate on Rings: Definitly needs a revamp, since you're less likely to gain fate from rings in this format than others, either this needs to be modified to account for it or there needs to be some other way to gain fate during the game.

I agree there needs to be more reason to attack, but I think that can be solved by making it less punishing to be attacked by multiple players.

Your Kami Shrines idea is pretty interesting, I'd like to see it developed a bit more while making sure it stays simple enough. (It does hurt to not be able to declare more conflict elements; it hurts clans that rely on specific ring types while rewarding ring manipulation clans like the Phoenix)

3 hours ago, RavenwolfXIII said:

Fate on Rings: Definitly needs a revamp, since you're less likely to gain fate from rings in this format than others, either this needs to be modified to account for it or there needs to be some other way to gain fate during the game.

I agree there needs to be more reason to attack, but I think that can be solved by making it less punishing to be attacked by multiple players.

Your Kami Shrines idea is pretty interesting, I'd like to see it developed a bit more while making sure it stays simple enough. (It does hurt to not be able to declare more conflict elements; it hurts clans that rely on specific ring types while rewarding ring manipulation clans like the Phoenix)

I haven't managed to play at all yet.

Was just thinking, if you feel there needs to be a Fate revamp, and you need it to be less punishing to be attacked a lot... Perhaps receive a fate whenever an attack is declared against you INSTEAD of fate on rings?

The Shrines idea makes sense to me, easier to keep track of than rings on provinces. Just put a shrine card aside to show you've completed that shrine. Maybe I'm wrong though. As I say, I haven't played this format yet unfortunately.

On 6/20/2018 at 9:52 PM, Brekekekiwi said:

The Shrines idea makes sense to me, easier to keep track of than rings on provinces. Just put a shrine card aside to show you've completed that shrine. Maybe I'm wrong though. As I say, I haven't played this format yet unfortunately.

It's fairly easy to keep track of (just leave the ring on the province) and it does incentivise attacking other players since you can steal their rings.

Generally, I do feel you have less fate to work with in this format, since it's currently possible to never have fate placed on your rings. In regular l5r, generally there will be 1-3 fate put out on rings every turn, that both players potentially have access to. In this, it's only one per player, and that fate may not even be accessible to certain players . In a 3 player game, why not make a treaty with another player to always place our fate on each other's rings? That way, the third player will never have access to any of this extra fate since he cannot place on his own rings; even if he could, that would still only ever be a max of 1. Thus, this third player will quickly be starved out, weakened, and ganged up on and used to farm rings off of.

That's funny. Our playgroup adapted decklist a lot to be able to participate in as much conflict as possible for the same reason. A regular list here includes a lot of cheap conflict characters (I play Crane /Drag with 3 steward, 3 harrier, 2 Wanderer) and dynasty character too (I play no 4+ characters and play 3 copies of both Seppun Guardsman and Otomo Courtier + 3 Artisan and ofc Whisperer). Because the first player to invest fates on a dude just get ganked by all the other, exchanging void rings. So first turn is a festival of 1 drops attacking and defending alone, second turn is too and by the end of the third turn someone usually wins.

I quite enjoy to read the meta is so different somewhere else !

Hmm... I wonder if Keeper Initiate is useful. If you claim someone else's X ring, keeping your own in your pool, then you could latter attack with that ring to get however many back on the board for 2 rounds.

52 minutes ago, Duciris said:

Hmm... I wonder if Keeper Initiate is useful. If you claim someone else's X ring, keeping your own in your pool, then you could latter attack with that ring to get however many back on the board for 2 rounds.

The issue is not losing your ring to an early attack and having it locked on a province.