3 minutes ago, AtoMaki said:

The Strife dumping part works on everyone, you only get the narrative advantage against someone of lower or equal status.

Yeah, I mentioned that. It's just that otherwise you're probably trading a Strife dump for a H/G hit PLUS increasing the animosity of someone of higher status, which is... not good.

Also, in a decent amount of cases, it costs you an extra check to figure out relative status. Sure, the peasants are (hopefully) safe, and the daimyo is DEFINITELY not safe, but every time you want to target another samurai...

4 minutes ago, Avatar111 said:

I try to make the scenes about 5 active rolls per player (not including resists, if there are). In average.

Yeah that's more than I have per scene at my table. 2 to 3 rolls per head is kind of a max in a narrative scene (conflicts are something else), and not everybody has to roll on everything.

2 minutes ago, AtoMaki said:

My point is that at the very worst, the player must give a description of the character's action, they can't get away with only stating the action.

The Strife dumping part works on everyone, you only get the narrative advantage against someone of lower or equal status. You also get to remove Strife each time you make a check, not just any random time you fire off a quip or something and the check must be made to quip it can't really serve any other purpose.

fanning the flame with playfulness spam.

anyway, not saying it is broken or anything, i'm merely noting the HUGE difference between some advantages and others.

at once per scene like Bento said... I think It makes more sense. Basically, using the Creative approach, but making it once per scene.
But yet again, we fall into houserule material.

3 minutes ago, Franwax said:

Yeah that's more than I have per scene at my table. 2 to 3 rolls per head is kind of a max in a narrative scene (conflicts are something else), and not everybody has to roll on everything.

I run narrative scene like conflicts as I said. Each player take a "turn".
A bit like smaller downtime scenes. I find it works better than to let them spam checks and interrupt everytime, this game works best when every action is a decision.

edit: at 2-3 rolls, your players (water especially) totally do not care about strife probably.

You can't, by definition, Playfulness Fanning the Flames. If you're making innocuous remarks, then you're not... fanning flames. Doubly so if you're doing it to someone who's of equal or lower status and is therefore, as the Passion itself tells you, not having their flames fanned.

Just now, JBento said:

You can't, by definition, Playfulness Fanning the Flames. If you're making innocuous remarks, then you're not... fanning flames. Doubly so if you're doing it to someone who's of equal or lower status and is therefore not having their flames fanned, as the Passion itself tells you.

interpretation again.... the only good answer when it comes to this product...

I can totally fan the flame while joking about you. Playfulness is basically "fire ring" ! That is how I interpret it and I don't see how I'm wrong.

1 minute ago, Avatar111 said:

interpretation again.... the only good answer when it comes to this product...

I can totally fan the flame while joking about you. Playfulness is basically "fire ring" ! That is how I interpret it and I don't see how I'm wrong.

You CAN fan the flame whole joking about someone, but then you're using, by definition, something they would take offense at, because that's the point of Fanning the Flames.

3 minutes ago, JBento said:

You CAN fan the flame whole joking about someone, but then you're using, by definition, something they would take offense at, because that's the point of Fanning the Flames.

sure, you still remove 3 strife though.

though you see the whole point of the exercise basically proves my point; no two person have the same interpretation. we are 4-5 people discussing this and we find it hard to come to a definitive answer.
the whole system is like that

10 minutes ago, JBento said:

Yeah, I mentioned that. It's just that otherwise you're probably trading a Strife dump for a H/G hit PLUS increasing the animosity of someone of higher status, which is... not good.

1

Well, I give you that, it is not as straightforward as Daredevil when you dump Strife each time you act like a PC .

By the way, Fanning the Flames goes with Provocation, not Playfulness.

4 minutes ago, AtoMaki said:

By the way, Fanning the Flames goes with Provocation, not Playfulness.

ok then, Provocation.
point is, some people get spammable passions while other get "downtime activity" type of passions, if even.

the whole thing is badly thought of. it could probably have been much simpler than putting like 25 useless tags and exemples on all of the advantages/disadvantages and make a good, clear generic rule.

oh. well.

1 hour ago, Avatar111 said:

Point 2 - using the Playfulness plassion, my player is basically doing jokes to everybody while doing Fire Shuji. Not hard to pull off if you are a witty player.
edit; compared to my player with a Tea passion that he almost can never use.
So in the end, we have to nerf Playfulness and buff Tea. basically coming down again to "interpret and adjust the rules" cause they are so bad.

56 minutes ago, JBento said:

Playfulness only works on folks of lower status, which may or may not be an issue (I mean, you still dump Strife on folks of higher status, but you're dumping H/G as well). And you don't dump 3 Strife EVERY TIME you make a joke - you dump 3 Strife for spending a considerable part of the scene in joking banter. One joke? No Strife dump. Most of your participation in the scene involved some sort of funny comment? Dump 3 Strife... for the entire scene.

54 minutes ago, Avatar111 said:

that is a nice interpretation, basically nerfing it to "once per scene". but this is not as the rule mentions.

I always refer back to the observation in the core book

that you're generally only supposed to be triggering an advantage or disadvantage once a scene (admittedly when talking about 'discrete application' but which I tend to use as a rule of thumb for most situations unless there's a really really good reason for applying something repeatedly):

"As a general guideline, no advantage or disadvantage should apply more than once per scene in this model except at the GM’s discretion."

Now, as a rule, I agree Playfulness is likely to be easier to create an opportunity to use than Tea (although Tea does complement the fact that the Tea Ceremony ritual already exists explcitely to remove strife, basically doubling the effect if you pass and giving you personally the benefit even if you fail), because whilst you need time, space and resources to brew up for Tea, all you need for Playfulness is a character of equal or lower status whom you know well enough to mock creatively.

Since, one assumes, the other PCs fall into this category, meeting this prerequisite is the default state of play provided the other players are not going to get out of joint about being the subject of your jokes.

However:

• You still need to be making your check to mock or chide them, and it still requires the thing you're doing to be 'untoward', not out-and-out offensive. Banter to recover strife in most downtime scenes is fair enough, but then any downtime scene long enough for a meal could also include a tea ceremony.
• You most definitely cannot combine Playfulness with Fanning the Flames - firstly (narratively) because the former is all about mocking someone in a way which doesn't shock anger them and the latter is about exactly the reverse, and secondly (mechanically) because Playfulness requires the check to be an Air ring check whilst Fanning the Flames is locked to a Fire approach.

1 hour ago, Avatar111 said:

bottom line is, if the player wants to roll a water check, he can do it with barely any effort (sure he is restricted in the type of action he can take) but that's about it, as long as he does something in line with water ring adjectives 

• This is probably something I disagree on more strenuously than most people on these forums; spontaneously demanding a check on a specific ring to trigger a passion or adversity or to harvest opportunities is not universally available on demand. Perhaps most importantly;
  • To trigger your passion, you need to be making a check.
  • To make a check, you need to be performing a task which the GM has agreed is TN1 or greater
  • To have TN1 or greater, it cannot be a 'TN0' task - as in, it needs to have " consequences of success and failure [which are] interesting and meaningfully different ". Simply saying "I pause in preparing our battle plan to insult [Player on my left]'s extremely bad hairdo for a couple of minutes..." could give you a chance for a check, but doesn't give you a chance for a check unless you, the GM, and - (under the circumstances) the 'victim' PC's player -can agree a meaningful consequence to you messing up the check, which I would suggest should as a minimum be an honour loss for discourtesy.

agree on all the above, doesn't fix the core issues though. replace playfulness with provocation if you want then.

the discussion isn't about the specifics, its about the general flawed rule that have a lots of holes. which could have been avoided by making a stricter, more defined, general rule, instead of being extremely convoluted with thousands of tags and examples and what not.

we will never come up to an agreement though, like with most other discussions concerning this flawed system, we merely can come up with "well, that is how I do it".

Provocation/Fanning The Flames would definitely work.

Of course, that's a much more dangerous option to be using merely to remove strife because of the possible consequences of the check, but fire Passions like Provocation or Daredevil are generally more powerful in part precisely because a fire approach is going to want to keep a lot of strife in a conflict scene because that's what makes fire tick, whilst - as you note yourself - a character intending to focus on a water or void approach to conflicts doesn't need much help managing their strife.

8 minutes ago, Avatar111 said:

we merely can come up with "well, that is how I do it".

Agreed and different people's ways of playing - both their level of strictness with the rules and the focus of the adventures they run - will make different bits feel more or less flawed.

I would only observe that it feels no more flawed than most RPGs I've played that have ever tried to be more than just a dungeon crawler.

Note that you don't HAVE to use the described Ring for a passion - the book says that's the ring the passion most commonly applies to, but I can see Playfulness using say, Water (not that you need help managing Strife if you've got a strong Water ring, but I digress). It's certainly out of character for Earth and Void, and the fact that you can't be actually offensive seems to disqualify Fire, but I wouldn't put that last one out of the race.

In the same vein, that blessing that lets you endure stuff is marked as Void, but Earth seems to be a good fit as well (well, not the spiritual part, but the "I haven't eaten in a while" part seems to apply).

While the Tea one seems to be harder to use, it stacks with both Tea Ceremony AND the fact that you're going to Void that thing (meaning you're taking less Strife anyway) and, narratively, can apply just as Playfulness - you just while away the hours discussing the different flavours of tea and what crop was the best. Like wine, only more Rokugany.

2 hours ago, Avatar111 said:

edit: at 2-3 rolls, your players (water especially) totally do not care about strife probably.

In narrative scenes strife should not be much of a concern for anybody, IMO anyway. Strife is mainly supposed to make conflict resolution challenging.