The back story here is that I'm a fan of the L5R lcg and the L5R universe in general, and thought it would be great to check out the L5R role playing game. I've never GM'd before in my life, but neither of the members of our role playing group that do wanted to GM for L5R, so I volunteered. I'm beginning to think that was a mistake..
I bought the beginner game and ran the first half of the adventure a couple of weeks ago. It went well enough. I learned from the experience. In the meantime I've been reading some of the fiction, through the adventure again, and the rules. We're about to do the second half tomorrow night, starting with Scene 6: The Competition, Day Two.
I was trying to find some GM-related commentary to help guide me with running the adventure and came upon this thread regarding the dueling competition that concludes the tournament:
After reading that, I'm wondering if I have misunderstood the approach the GM is supposed to be taking with running the Topaz Championship. Don't get me wrong, Wyrmdog's ideas look brilliant. But I had no clue that it could be this complex of a process. How exactly do people usually run the final (dueling) component of the championship? The adventure book reads "find out which PC scored the most tournament points and that PC faces either Kakita Riku or Bayushi Mei Lin in a duel, making a single competitive TN 1 Martial Arts (Melee) check." So that's just one dice roll... "The character with the most bonus successes takes the lead in the tournament....Then, any other PC who has not fought can challenge the character in the lead to the same contest. We assume that the other duels occur without incident and do not affect the outcome. The last character to hold the lead after all PC's have fought (or passed) is crowned as the new Topaz Champion."
We will have three PC's competing tomorrow night (one of them missed our first role playing session - so I was thinking of just "auto-awarding" him four xp to put him on even ground with the other two).
So first you have a dice roll pitting the point leader among the PC's against either Riku or Mei Lin, then another PC takes on the winner and then the third PC takes on the winner of that..? Is that it?
After reading Wyrmdog's post, I got the feeling I was missing something as his process is WAY more elaborate than that. How do people generally run that segment? I hope I haven't handled this entire tournament incorrectly to this point.
Thanks for any suggestions!