39 minutes ago, Avatar111 said:

which is "fun" to me, Finishing Blows is a great mechanic, very cinematic, and thematic to what iaijutsu duels should be.

the current "predict" option doesn't capitalize enough on making mindgames important. If mindgames are directly related to strife (which staredown bidding is, and is good as is) then you make the duels much more tense.

Which is fair. The dueling system isn't perfect, and, with good reason, I don't really see a dominant strat that always wins. I assume people will be going into duels with strife accumulated, and a good duelist also has to avoid being ambushed by courtiers looking to stress them out before a match.

Battle in the Mind adds a level to the predict/stance game at rank 3. I only gave my example, because its one of the only clear strategies where you would focus on Rising Cut over Crossing Cut. There's just no point to Rising Cut unless you can compromise an opponent pre-duel, or your composure can hold out longer.

16 minutes ago, ExplodingJoe said:

Which is fair. The dueling system isn't perfect, and, with good reason, I don't really see a dominant strat that always wins. I assume people will be going into duels with strife accumulated, and a good duelist also has to avoid being ambushed by courtiers looking to stress them out before a match.

Battle in the Mind adds a level to the predict/stance game at rank 3. I only gave my example, because its one of the only clear strategies where you would focus on Rising Cut over Crossing Cut. There's just no point to Rising Cut unless you can compromise an opponent pre-duel, or your composure can hold out longer.

rising cut is terrible indeed. crossing cut is simply better. for duels anyway.

rising cut can be good in day to day situations outside of duel if somebody compromised and you want to crit them. but those are edge cases imo. for sure you can powergame that, and say that in a skirmish, you use your katana but keep your wakisashi sheated, and then if somebody suddenly become compromised, bang, you rising cut him with your offhand wakisashi that was sheated. that works too. if a bit cheesy. But hey, otherwise you need to resheat your katana before using the attack.. iffy design.

but yeah... rising cut is also poorly designed for duels, especially considering finishing blows already crit. making that extra effect on rising cut (the crit effect on compromised opponent) a bit... useless.

oh well. I love this game, but it definitely needs a reprint with ton of changes imo. I'm having fun just redoing parts i don't like. rising cut might need a rework !

Rising cut is more of a battlefield tech. With people already at 1/2 strife, its pretty easy to compromise them, especially in wargear.

2 minutes ago, WHW said:

Rising cut is more of a battlefield tech. With people already at 1/2 strife, its pretty easy to compromise them, especially in wargear.

you still need to resheat your weapon to use it. which is pretty weird imo. hence why the offhand wakisashi is the best way to use it. which is also pretty weird.

needs a rework there is no getting around it. it doesnt work as intented thematically i think.

Or you can use it after the melee is joined and you drop the cumbersome reach weapon. Just because you cant imagine a scenario where it works doesnt mean there is none.

The katana is very much a sidearm in a conflict, much like european swords. In a real fight you probably start with a bow or polearm, maybe a blunt weapon but when they get in close or you want a sweet duel with the enemy commander, then you draw steel.

legit answers. we are stretching it a bit now, and i'm not sure it was designed as such, but these are all valid ways to use it for sure.

still bad for ritualized duels.

but i like where this conversation is going, it presents a lot of different cases and will make it easier to fix the duel rules eventually.

10 minutes ago, Avatar111 said:

legit answers. we are stretching it a bit now, and i'm not sure it was designed as such, but these are all valid ways to use it for sure.

still bad for ritualized duels.

No, it isn't. If they are compromised, it's the automatic end to a first strike duel. You're again assuming that it's a race to fatigue out - ignoring that Iaijutsu is a "one swing each" social construct. Rising cut is vaguely better than crossing cut on the battlefield, but on the iaijutsu duel, it's the best technique.

3 hours ago, AK_Aramis said:

No, it isn't. If they are compromised, it's the automatic end to a first strike duel. You're again assuming that it's a race to fatigue out - ignoring that Iaijutsu is a "one swing each" social construct. Rising cut is vaguely better than crossing cut on the battlefield, but on the iaijutsu duel, it's the best technique.

if they are compromised you get a free crit x2 your weapon's deadliness right away called a finishing blow. so IF your weapon is still sheated the only way to use that finishing blow is to use a IAI kata, i'd take crossing cut because the TN is lower.

but ok, i see you know what you are talking about... ?

(edit: and you get people liking your comment... i'll be damned...read the book people!)

1 hour ago, AK_Aramis said:

No, it isn't. If they are compromised, it's the automatic end to a first strike duel. You're again assuming that it's a race to fatigue out - ignoring that Iaijutsu is a "one swing each" social construct. Rising cut is vaguely better than crossing cut on the battlefield, but on the iaijutsu duel, it's the best technique.

• i thought even in 4e iai duels would escalate if uncocluded? 5e definitely doesnt present that piece of dueling lore.

6 hours ago, WHW said:

• i thought even in 4e iai duels would escalate if uncocluded? 5e definitely doesnt present that piece of dueling lore.

I don't know 4E; I only have the core, and unused by me, at that. In 3E, it could, but wasn't automatic, continue into skirmish, but it didn't continue as a duel mechanically .

On 10/22/2018 at 11:22 AM, ExplodingJoe said:

I don't really see a dominant strat that always wins.

Build a Kaiu Engineer, and rank them up to Rank 2. Enter duel. Using your massive Composure, take as much strife as necessary to guarantee initiative. Use the Masterful Builder school ability to add two attribute dice set to Opportunities. In Water stance, draw your homemade katana and roll a TN2 attack, using your 2 bonus dice (Opportunities) to activate a critical. Voila... first strike every time.

5 hours ago, Shinjo Koetsu said:

Build a Kaiu Engineer, and rank them up to Rank 2. Enter duel. Using your massive Composure, take as much strife as necessary to guarantee initiative. Use the Masterful Builder school ability to add two attribute dice set to Opportunities. In Water stance, draw your homemade katana and roll a TN2 attack, using your 2 bonus dice (Opportunities) to activate a critical. Voila... first strike every time.

Neither Martial Arts (Melee) nor Meditation is a starting skill or on the Rank 1 curriculum for Kaiu Engineers and Water is not really one of their strong rings. The opponent starting in Air Stance can seriously mess that strat up.

Edit: Earth Stance also hard stops that strat because it negates the spending on opportunities from crit strikes.

4 hours ago, Ultimatecalibur said:

Neither Martial Arts (Melee) nor Meditation is a starting skill or on the Rank 1 curriculum for Kaiu Engineers and Water is not really one of their strong rings. The opponent starting in Air Stance can seriously mess that strat up.

Edit: Earth Stance also hard stops that strat because it negates the spending on opportunities from crit strikes.

I've got to be honest, I'm not seeing how either of these is a hard counter to this strategy. Maybe I'm misunderstanding something...

First, regarding the build. The Kaiu Engineer can easily start with Earth 3, Water 2, and Martial Arts [Melee] 1 if built correctly at Rank 1. This gives them a Composure of 10, which is much higher than a Kakita's Composure of 6. They can upgrade their skills freely, they just only get half the School credit.

At Rank 2, the Kaiu Engineer gets the Martial Skills group (Martial Arts [Melee] and Meditation) as school schools, and can buy Rank 2 Kata's, including Iaijutsu katas. So they could go Earth ring themselves, or stay with Water if they haven't purchased the kata yet.

So let's say that the Kaiu Engineer is using this technique to put aside two Advantage dice...
- If the Kakita opponent is in Earth stance, then it becomes a race to see who runs out of Composure first. Switch to Earth stance and wait it out. The advantage is to the Kaiu.
- If the Kakita opponent is in Air stance, then the Kakita needs to hit TN 3 to strike the Kakita from Water Stance... which isn't unreasonable (most characters are using non-Water stances with Rising Cut to hit TN3 anyway). Or switch to Earth stance and wait out the Composure race.
- Keep in mind that I'm envisioning a "single swing, first hit" sort of duel... not chopping at the air trying to hit the other person first.

I guess I spoke too strongly when I said that this works every time, but being able to add two attribute dice, once per scene, both set to Opportunities, is a huge advantage over the other schools.

I think that "single swing duels" are not working with this game, its not what the designers intended. Nowhere in the duel rule it talks about one swing duels, for a reason.

All duels are about striking. Striking is the only duel specific action that lets you roll a check too, meaning "opportunities".

Centering and Predict (also the kata battle in the mind feels week imo) are not well designed. With some kind of rework to these actions, it is possible to have the type of duels people around here seem to expect.

As is, its basically a mini skirmish in which you try to strike down your opponent first while managing your composure.

Sure, in a duel to first blood they had to include the predict action as a design crutch because otherwise earth is simply too good for these duels. It gives a chance of winning to a non earth character, but still with less chance than the high earth one.

16 minutes ago, Shinjo Koetsu said:

a Kakita

Please don't bully the Kakira Duelist, poor guy has enough problems. If you want a good duelist match then go Hida Defender aka 'Nice Critical Too Bad I Reduce It To Nothing' or Mitumoto Swordsman aka 'Forget Your Explosions: The School' or the Ikoma Bard aka 'Strife And Daze Wins The Day'. Now those are worthy opponents in a duel!

9 hours ago, Shinjo Koetsu said:

Build a Kaiu Engineer, and rank them up to Rank 2. Enter duel. Using your massive Composure, take as much strife as necessary to guarantee initiative. Use the Masterful Builder school ability to add two attribute dice set to Opportunities. In Water stance, draw your homemade katana and roll a TN2 attack, using your 2 bonus dice (Opportunities) to activate a critical. Voila... first strike every time. 

You can only use Opp to activate a critical strike while in the Fire Stance so this strategy doesn't work RAW. At Rank 2 they can use Iaido techniques to do it. But at Rank 2 most other Bushi will have new tricks on their sleeves as well. My money on the "unexpected strong duelist" of this edition is still on the Ikoma with their strife dump banter.

47 minutes ago, Avatar111 said:

I think that "single swing duels" are not working with this game, its not what the designers intended. Nowhere in the duel rule it talks about one swing duels, for a reason.

All duels are about striking. Striking is the only duel specific action that lets you roll a check too, meaning "opportunities".

Centering and Predict (also the kata battle in the mind feels week imo) are not well designed. With some kind of rework to these actions, it is possible to have the type of duels people around here seem to expect.

As is, its basically a mini skirmish in which you try to strike down your opponent first while managing your composure.

I fully agree. The dueling system needs some serious tweaking, though it starts in a much better place than 4E. However, I really like the fact that the Kakita are actually pretty bad at a "no holds barred" martial duel and I would tweak the scoring system and actual rules of Iaijutsu duels specifically to make them "good" at it in detriment of other Bushi. That approach seems more flavorful to me, since the Kakita train a lot to be good at a very specific and ritualized manner of duel that mostly only the Crane really care about. Unfortunately for the rest of the Empire, anything the Crane care about becomes norm the closer you get to the center of power.

But mechanically representing the fact that a Hida is actually a beast at dueling (since dueling other samurai is like a vacation to Crab bushi), but probably pretty bad at winning a ritualized duel full of obscure rules that a Crab Bushi can't have the luxury to waste their time preparing for seems really, really fitting.

54 minutes ago, Shinjo Koetsu said:

First, regarding the build. The Kaiu Engineer can easily start with Earth 3, Water 2, and Martial Arts [Melee] 1 if built correctly at Rank 1. This gives them a Composure of 10, which is much higher than a Kakita's Composure of 6 . They can upgrade their skills freely, they just only get half the School credit.

Wait, what? I didn't even TRY with my Daidoji Iron Soldier, and the dude has TWELVE composure right off the bat.

22 minutes ago, JBento said:

Wait, what? I didn't even TRY with my Daidoji Iron Soldier, and the dude has TWELVE composure right off the bat.

The (Kakita) Kakita Duelist has no Ring bonuses for either Composure Rings, so the best it can get is an Earth+Water of 3 for a Composure of 6.

Just now, AtoMaki said:

The (Kakita) Kakita Duelist has no Ring bonuses for either Composure Rings, so the best it can get is an Earth+Water of 3 for a Composure of 6.

That's just... weird.

predict and center need to be reworked to have checks, and probably deal somehow with either Focus or Vigilance. the best duelist should have all rings. Like Musashi said. Balance!

3 minutes ago, AtoMaki said:

The (Kakita) Kakita Duelist has no Ring bonuses for either Composure Rings, so the best it can get is an Earth+Water of 3 for a Composure of 6.

Kakita doesnt have Earth ? I think he does.

Just now, Avatar111 said:

Kakita doesnt have Earth ? I think he does.

Nope, it is Air + Air or Fire + Air and Fire + Free Ring.

57 minutes ago, omnicrone said:

You can only use Opp to activate a critical strike while in the Fire Stance so this strategy doesn't work RAW.

fire stance doesn't have anything to do with spending Opp to do critical strike.

and the Iaido techniques in this game are basically a way to strike when sword is not out without using water stance. that's all. and i'm talking about Crossing Cut here, because Rising Cut is just pure trash.

3 minutes ago, AtoMaki said:

Nope, it is Air + Air or Fire + Air and Fire + Free Ring.

either the Kakita Family, or the Kakita Duelist school (don't remember which one) had earth as an option unless I really, really have a brain fart.