If you have a low Air/Water ring, then the Doji and Bayushi talking in the corner really are just politely commenting on each other's fashion sense with no layered meaning.

I don't think any system fully communicates what that means for the player beyond a failed die roll, and I often want them to be actively concerned for what that lack of understanding means for their prospects within the empire. I thought it was worth mentioning as a more intangible lever available to GMs who are worried about how they approach a player entertaining the "one ring to rule them all" play style.

Aside from that, come on, any system with derived stats like Focus and Vigilance is just begging a GM to make evil secret rolls.

If you have a low Air/Water Ring then you are Spock. Especially if you have high Earth and/or Void to boot.

6 minutes ago, AtoMaki said:

If you have a low Air/Water Ring then you are Spock. Especially if you have high Earth and/or Void to boot.

Kitsuki Spock, most likely.

16 minutes ago, ExplodingJoe said:

Kitsuki Spock, most likely.

Logical.

....That's actually a good idea to help people who don't know the system get their head around approaches.

Pick a fictional character and try and 'pigeon-hole' either their personality or combat style to two rings (or one high, one low).

• Personality
  • Spock - High Earth, Low Water*
• Combat Style
  • The Hulk - High Fire, Low Void
  • Hawkeye - High Air, Low Fire

etc, etc.

* Air drives close scrutiny, so I'm not convinced that can be that low - and even if Vulcans do not lie, Spock occasionally bluffs or misdirects by omission.

When I ran the beginner box adventure in my FLGS, I was concerned about stances (as they are a pretty foreign concept to the predominantly D&D Adventure League players in my pool of players) and thus crafted a solution. I simply went to the L5R wiki and downloaded the element icons, and then printed a brief summary of the ring value as described in the player folios. resized them to fit on a Magic card, and hit print. The 2 printouts were then glue stick'ed to a Magic card x5 ( Air, Earth, Water, Fire, & Void ) x1 per folio.

Then during the tournament I'd have the judge announce their little hint blurb, and watch as the players shuffled through their cards to determine the 'proper' stance to select. It was quite fun, interactive and the players really got into it. Not to mention it was a great aid in keeping track of what stance was chosen for the final conflict.

Feedback from the players was positive, and they enjoyed having a tactile interactive.