6 hours ago, Daeglan said:

Why does it need to be explained? We dont need Ave Ceasar explained either.

Because unlike "Ave Ceasar", the exact nature of "Hai" will come up, especially in a court-heavy game where an argument over a "misused" 'Hai' can have grave consequences.

3 minutes ago, AtoMaki said:

Because unlike "Ave Ceasar", the exact nature of "Hai" will come up, especially in a court-heavy game where an argument over a "misused" 'Hai' can have grave consequences.

Don't know about your table, but at mine we try to make sure everybody's intentions are clear. I'm not siccing a kill-happy duelist on a PC because a player meant something else than what I understood he said.

2 minutes ago, AtoMaki said:

Because unlike "Ave Ceasar", the exact nature of "Hai" will come up, especially in a court-heavy game where an argument over a "misused" 'Hai' can have grave consequences.

This is where a slight variation on the translation convention occurs.

The characters, unlike the players, (mostly) have levels in the skills of Rokugani Social Interaction. We, as GMs, assume that the character is saying the right thing in the right language, unless there is a fluffed roll, or a deliberate decision made by the player. I wouldn't penalise a player for a misuse of a term they use for verisimilitude if their character has an appropriate skill. Heck, I probably wouldn't notice it.

31 minutes ago, nameless ronin said:

Don't know about your table, but at mine we try to make sure everybody's intentions are clear. I'm not siccing a kill-happy duelist on a PC because a player meant something else than what I understood he said.

This is exactly why the writers need to clean up artifacts. So that the game doesn't have to stop for an explanation each time a player fires off a "Hai" that might mean one thing or another. Like, jeez, I'm not talking about a chapter-long analysis with a complex linguistic history, just maybe a short paragraph. Or just stop using it.

30 minutes ago, Tonbo Karasu said:

The characters, unlike the players, (mostly) have levels in the skills of Rokugani Social Interaction. We, as GMs, assume that the character is saying the right thing in the right language, unless there is a fluffed roll, or a deliberate decision made by the player. I wouldn't penalise a player for a misuse of a term they use for verisimilitude if their character has an appropriate skill. Heck, I probably wouldn't notice it.

Personally, I would rather have the term in question cleared up in the setting book. We do a lot of in-character voice narration where falling back to this kind of assumption is - obviously - not really an option.

13 hours ago, AtoMaki said:

I wouldn't have a problem if this was explained in the game like this.

If all the "it would be nice if" cultural elements were delineated, it would fill a book as big as the Emerald Empire book.

An explanation of the most important terms, like "hai," "ie," "dozo," "-dō," and "-jitsu," however, sounds like an excellent DLC...

5 hours ago, AtoMaki said:

This is exactly why the writers need to clean up artifacts. So that the game doesn't have to stop for an explanation each time a player fires off a "Hai" that might mean one thing or another. Like, jeez, I'm not talking about a chapter-long analysis with a complex linguistic history, just maybe a short paragraph. Or just stop using it.

Personally, I would rather have the term in question cleared up in the setting book. We do a lot of in-character voice narration where falling back to this kind of assumption is - obviously - not really an option.

Why does FFG have to put out a text on it when i can gonto wikipedia if it is that important to me?

12 hours ago, AtoMaki said:

This is exactly why the writers need to clean up artifacts. So that the game doesn't have to stop for an explanation each time a player fires off a "Hai" that might mean one thing or another. Like, jeez, I'm not talking about a chapter-long analysis with a complex linguistic history, just maybe a short paragraph. Or just stop using it.

Why would the game have to stop each time a player uses a Japanese word? They'll only do that if they intend for it to matter, and if they get something wrong and it gets explained they won't get it wrong again. Honestly, this is a non-issue. And again, where does this "hai" stuff show up in the rules? Is it not just a fiction thing?

7 hours ago, Daeglan said:

Why does FFG have to put out a text on it when i can gonto wikipedia if it is that important to me?

Oh my god don't do this! This is the best way to have a player use 'Hai' to say 'hi' or refer to their eldest bother/sister .

10 hours ago, AK_Aramis said:

If all the "it would be nice if" cultural elements were delineated, it would fill a book as big as the Emerald Empire book.

Not like that would be a bad thing .

40 minutes ago, nameless ronin said:

And again, where does this "hai" stuff show up in the rules? Is it not just a fiction thing?

This is the core of the problem: it does not show up "in the rules" just randomly dropped in the fictions, so it is free to generate chaos. For more savvy groups it also opens up the can of "Do Rokugani characters speak Japanese or English now?" because 'Hai' does not have a particularly unique meaning so what's the point of using it?

The debate on "where is the line between 'flavorful' usage of Japanese and 'gratuitous'" among L5R fans is an old one for sure. I remember people arguing about this from the first edition under AEG. The only thing I can really say about it is if you find it silly don't do it at your table, if you like doing it then don't let strangers on the internet get you down, but you're never going to reach a consensus here. The L5R community hasn't in 22 years and we're not going to today either. I'm not saying not to discuss it but just don't expect to change anyone's minds.

This discussion also reminded me about how the old Sengoku RPG by Gold Rush Games used to go balls-to-the-wall when it came to name suffixes and titles. They used to have a PDF of the Names and Titles section of the core rulebook on their site for free, and I was an indispensable tool for me for years as an L5R GM.

Their website disappeared a long time ago, but I actually managed to find the PDF thanks to the Wayback Machine:

https://web.archive.org/web/20040212054503/http://www.sengoku.com:80/files/nametitl.pdf

1 hour ago, AtoMaki said:

This is the core of the problem: it does not show up "in the rules" just randomly dropped in the fictions, so it is free to generate chaos. For more savvy groups it also opens up the can of "Do Rokugani characters speak Japanese or English now?" because 'Hai' does not have a particularly unique meaning so what's the point of using it?

I mean, so what? Every group does what they want. Most players I've played with ever since 1st ed have no knowledge of Japanese whatsoever. Throwing in the occasional arigato or whatever is something they tend to like, but that's all it is. Nobody's going to start a linguistic debate over arigato gozaimasu vs gozaimashita, they just enjoy hearing something Japanese in there and approximately knowing what it means - and approximately is fine . Why would I start throwing around dire consequences over a linguistic faux pas that far and away most players will never recognize as such? Especially since I'm often checking players intentions ("did you mean to subtly insult that courtier or was that an accident?") anyway, because not everybody conveys their meaning exactly right all the time even in their native language (and as an aside, English is a second or in my case third language for most people I've played with but a lot of our in-game conversations are partly in English anyway since that's what the rules and the published modules are in. If we nitpick everybody's word choices while mixing three languages, things get unplayable really quickly). There is no chaos unless you want there to be.

1 hour ago, nameless ronin said:

I mean, so what? Every group does what they want. Most players I've played with ever since 1st ed have no knowledge of Japanese whatsoever. Throwing in the occasional arigato or whatever is something they tend to like, but that's all it is. Nobody's going to start a linguistic debate over arigato gozaimasu vs gozaimashita, they just enjoy hearing something Japanese in there and approximately knowing what it means - and approximately is fine . Why would I start throwing around dire consequences over a linguistic faux pas that far and away most players will never recognize as such? Especially since I'm often checking players intentions ("did you mean to subtly insult that courtier or was that an accident?") anyway, because not everybody conveys their meaning exactly right all the time even in their native language (and as an aside, English is a second or in my case third language for most people I've played with but a lot of our in-game conversations are partly in English anyway since that's what the rules and the published modules are in. If we nitpick everybody's word choices while mixing three languages, things get unplayable really quickly). There is no chaos unless you want there to be.

Exactly. This is supposed to be fun. What.you are expecting is not going to be fun for most people. It amounts to a dipping of a toe into another real world culture. And that is a good thing. If you harp on the players over nitpicky crap like this you are going to quickly turn them away from learning more. That is counter productive. Most people in real life are very forgiving of genuine faux pas.

Please stop pushing fun killing stuff. People who want to know will find it when they are ready.

7 hours ago, nameless ronin said:

Why would I start throwing around dire consequences over a linguistic faux pas that far and away most players will never recognize as such?

I don't know. Not long ago, I had an argument with a guy who would have some random kami curse a PC for unmasking in a forest. Some people take Rokugan really seriously... just look at what happened with poor 'Banzai'.

6 hours ago, Daeglan said:

What you are expecting is not going to be fun for most people.

Yes. That's my point. Having just one argument over 'Hai' is an utter waste of game time and will be most likely as far from being fun as it can get. God forbid if it comes up more than once or if the group fails to let it go. It is an anti-fun landmine and there is no real reason to have it around, one way or another.

12 minutes ago, AtoMaki said:

I don't know. Not long ago, I had an argument with a guy who would have some random kami curse a PC for unmasking in a forest. Some people take Rokugan really seriously... just look at what happened with poor 'Banzai'.

I've seen that argument. Not sure how some extreme ruleslawyering has any bearing on something that isn't even part of the rules though. Again, work with intent. When it comes to fluffy player input that isn't exactly hard to do. You don't need to go second-guessing some unknown developer's thought process: your players are right there. They're playing the game with you. Communication can be a tricky thing, I know, but if a bunch of people sitting around a table trying to have fun can't communicate - while playing a co-operative roleplaying game, no less - they have bigger issues than someone going "hai" at an inopportune moment while in character.

1 hour ago, AtoMaki said:

I don't know. Not long ago, I had an argument with a guy who would have some random kami curse a PC for unmasking in a forest. Some people take Rokugan really seriously... just look at what happened with poor 'Banzai'.

Yes. That's my point. Having just one argument over 'Hai' is an utter waste of game time and will be most likely as far from being fun as it can get. God forbid if it comes up more than once or if the group fails to let it go. It is an anti-fun landmine and there is no real reason to have it around, one way or another.

I havea solution. Dont game with A holes. Problem solve. My fun time is limited i am not going to waste it on jerks who get pedantic about Hai.

11 hours ago, Daeglan said:

I havea solution. Dont game with A holes. Problem solve. My fun time is limited i am not going to waste it on jerks who get pedantic about Hai.

I have a better solution: if a writer randomly includes an alien word in the setting then have them explain why it is there and what does it mean.

7 minutes ago, AtoMaki said:

I have a better solution: if a writer randomly includes an alien word in the setting then have them explain why it is there and what does it mean.

You want them to add a foot note to a fiction if somebody says "hai" in it?

I don't know if you've read The Sword and the Spirits , but the first paragraph mentions bokken, dojo, the -chan suffix, tenugui, and obi belt. Of all of these, it only explains tenugui. And that's great. Bokken and dojo are probably known (should be, for players of the RPG), obi belt is sufficiently self-explanatory, the meaning of -chan can more or less be deduced from context and can be looked up if the reader really wants to. Tenugui is the only one that needs to be explained (though from context you know it must be a piece of fabric anyway). Now, if you can show me a piece of fiction that might lead someone to believe "hai" means "hello" or something like that we can have a conversation about how that makes for bad writing, but I'm reasonably confident just about any instance you can find will use it in a context that will strongly imply it's an expression of consent or agreement. Which is good enough. If I recall correctly, The Sword and the Spirits does not have a single hai in it, btw.

1 minute ago, nameless ronin said:

I don't know if you've read The Sword and the Spirits , but the first paragraph mentions bokken, dojo, the -chan suffix, tenugui, and obi belt. Of all of these, it only explains tenugui.

Tenugui is the only word there that is not explained in background material, so they explain it right there. IIRC they have a whole online article about what -chan and the other suffixes mean. So if you come from L5R, you will know what bokken, dojo, and -chan mean, but not tenugui, so the writer explains it, even if its meaning is fairly obvious due to context. This is how it's done.

11 minutes ago, AtoMaki said:

Tenugui is the only word there that is not explained in background material, so they explain it right there. IIRC they have a whole online article about what -chan and the other suffixes mean. So if you come from L5R, you will know what bokken, dojo, and -chan mean, but not tenugui, so the writer explains it, even if its meaning is fairly obvious due to context. This is how it's done.

So how about kataginu and nakodo, later on in the chapter? For that matter, how about cicada? It's not Japanese, but it's a word not everyone will understand either (or even realize is not Japanese).

'Kataginu' made me chuckle. Geeeez ...

Just wondering, do you also punish players when speaking English to describe what they do or say in character as well? For example, if they use regional expressions, words in a bad/unclear meaning/context (literally!), contemporary words that couldn't exist in such a setting, terms borrowed from other games, etc?

"You said you're "casting a spell", so the kami are angered and you won't be able to use invocations for an in-game week, and will need to make major offerings to regain their favor."

"As for you, you said your bushi character is "literally dying of boredom while listening to the courtiers arguing", so your character suddenly collapses. You should start creating a new character."

"And you, you answered the lord's question by saying "I'm a new-ish courtier", so the entire court is looking at you weirdly, trying to understand which country, region or city is a newish person from. You have to react quickly before you get branded as gaijin and punished accordingly!"

We have guidelines for the various Japanese terms that might appear in the game, so this particular problem doesn't plague us .

49 minutes ago, AtoMaki said:

We have guidelines for the various Japanese terms that might appear in the game, so this particular problem doesn't plague us .

Why? Google is a thing. I have yet to see a word i cant look up using google and learn what it means. Why does FFG have to have a dictionary for every japanese term they might use?

I would rather they spend that page count on Rokugan stuff.

40 minutes ago, Daeglan said:

Why? Google is a thing. I have yet to see a word i cant look up using google and learn what it means. Why does FFG have to have a dictionary for every japanese term they might use?

We generally dislike "doing homework" when there is a staff of paid writers whose job is doing it instead of us. Also note that FFG does explain what most of those Japanese words mean - as I mentioned above, "Hai" is a strange exception/anomaly here that is a part of a very distinct group of problems aka The-Things-That-Just-ARE (a piece of the setting that has no explanation for its existence, it just kinda exists for reasons ).

40 minutes ago, Daeglan said:

I would rather they spend that page count on Rokugan stuff.

I'm fairly sure that words used in Rokugan do count as "Rokugan stuff".

9 hours ago, nameless ronin said:

So how about kataginu and nakodo, later on in the chapter? For that matter, how about cicada? It's not Japanese, but it's a word not everyone will understand either (or even realize is not Japanese).

Anyone with a passing familiarity with Japanese will immediately know that cicada isn't Japanese... none of the standard tramsliteration schemes have lone c 's, only ch 's.

The Japanese for it is higurashi ....

4 hours ago, AtoMaki said:

We generally dislike "doing homework" when there is a staff of paid writers whose job is doing it instead of us. Also note that FFG does explain what most of those Japanese words mean - as I mentioned above, "Hai" is a strange exception/anomaly here that is a part of a very distinct group of problems aka The-Things-That-Just-ARE (a piece of the setting that has no explanation for its existence, it just kinda exists for reasons ).

I'm fairly sure that words used in Rokugan do count as "Rokugan stuff".

Most people i find would prefer to pay for stuff that can only really get from the game company. I dont want to pay for something i can just do a google search for.