I'm an experienced GM but running L5R for the first time. I'm still hacking my way through the rulebook (and the 4e book) and I'm having some difficulty with envisioning different lords and how that will actually all play out in a session. (Also for adventure creation, but that's another post)

How does one manage conflicting loyalties within in a group? Is it just players being pulled in many directions all the time? It just seems chaotic to me. Do you just ignore all but one players background during a session and focus on one players goals?

What does it typically look like at your tables?

(Sorry if this is a muddled post, early morning and bus ride do not a clear head make)

It kind of depends on the clans involved, their relationships at the time of the adventure, and the pretext under which the party was brought together. Sometimes it's easy, sometimes a little harder. There's one constant though: whatever the official task of the group is, it's important that they all appear to succeed - if not, it's dishonor for them and their lords. Conflicting loyalties aside, the common goal is an easy way of keeping things focused instead of everyone scattering about to look after their own interests. The only real difficulties I have are with things PCs do that have to stay secret from the others, and that doesn't have to come up often (or even at all).

Edit: the players control their PCs, but the GM controls their PCs' lords. You can literally order them to act a certain way. They can choose to disobey, but then they'd better have a very good reason - and a plausible excuse. I would avoid getting very heavy-handed with this, but it's perfectly fine to nudge PCs in a different direction if you think they're about to mess things up too much.

As for sessions about focusing on character backgrounds: how do you do it for your other groups? Do you only focus on one at a time?

What I'm doing right now for a group of 3, is I gave them 3 plot hooks, one for each, and let them decide the order to resolve them. Each one will get to be 'center stage' in their scene. And that's the session (including the meeting each other and then a short conclusion after).

5 minutes ago, Hida Jitenno said:

As for sessions about focusing on character backgrounds: how do you do it for your other groups? Do you only focus on one at a time?

I was inspired by watching Lost (at least the first 2 seasons). The show would have different things happening but would focus a little more on one person and would occasionally show flashbacks to fill in the characters history. I did the same thing in my games and made up flashbacks of the characters' youths as fillers in-between scenes. I would change it up so that everyone got a few turns in the spotlight this way but there was no particular order to it. Along the way I worked in the over-plot in smaller scenes until it built up to the climactic session. My players seemed to always like having scenes about their backstories that they never had time to flesh out themselves.

3 hours ago, Hida Jitenno said:

What I'm doing right now for a group of 3, is I gave them 3 plot hooks, one for each, and let them decide the order to resolve them.

This is basically my go-to plan: if the "A" plot, which is the shared overall reason for being together, takes the party to points 1, 2 and 3, then I would make a "B" plot for each PC, one at each of those points. So while the group is taking care of the "A" plot at point 1, the first can resolve his "B" plot, the second PC at point 2, etc. It may be a tad contrived, but I've never had anyone complain about it.