Just wondering if anybody has run this scene in Palace of the Emerald Champion...and if there was anything that worked particularly well. I'm a novice GM, with L5R being my first shot at it, and I'm still kind of finding my way. I had expected this adventure to be scripted out in much more detail, it's way more open ended than I expected. I had thought most role playing adventures included a lot more detail for the GM to be guided by, but perhaps not. Any clever ideas for a Rampaging Boar scene would be wildly appreciated!

Hypothetically...let's say the PCs lose all their rations to scavenging boars and are then forced to hunt in the evening for food for the night, and fail. What should be the appropriate consequences for that?

1 hour ago, Schmiegel said:

Hypothetically...let's say the PCs lose all their rations to scavenging boars and are then forced to hunt in the evening for food for the night, and fail. What should be the appropriate consequences for that?

a variation on the Exhausted condition maybe ? same penalty, but need to eat to remove the effect instead of sleeping ?

Good idea, thanks Avatar111. That seems perfect. One of my players suggested that very thing, in fact, but we surmised that it should kick in after missing meals for two days. (It didn't come up, they killed the Rampaging Boars and ate them..).

On 2/21/2019 at 11:18 PM, Schmiegel said:

I had expected this adventure to be scripted out in much more detail, it's way more open ended than I expected. I had thought most role playing adventures included a lot more detail for the GM to be guided by, but perhaps not.

It's a difficult balance to strike: a written module can never prepare for everything that can happen (and including a lot of the things that can happen will make it bloated with info you in practice often never need); the writers can to a certain extent remedy this by framing the adventure to restrict player options, but that quickly leads to railroading - which turns players off and kind of defeats the purpose of the whole game. When I GM a session based on a module I created myself usually more than half of what I prepared never comes up and over half the session is spent on things I didn't prepare for. The thing is though that that is often a good sign: it means the players are running away with the game, instead of only reacting to what you offer them. As a GM, just try and do the same: roll with it and have fun. I think you'll find you will be able to react positively and effecitvely quite soon, without needing a ton of experience, if you treat these situations as an opportunity for the game to be better and not as a hurdle or a test for you to pass.

On 2/21/2019 at 2:18 PM, Schmiegel said:

Just wondering if anybody has run this scene in Palace of the Emerald Champion...and if there was anything that worked particularly well. I'm a novice GM, with L5R being my first shot at it, and I'm still kind of finding my way. I had expected this adventure to be scripted out in much more detail, it's way more open ended than I expected. I had thought most role playing adventures included a lot more detail for the GM to be guided by, but perhaps not. Any clever ideas for a Rampaging Boar scene would be wildly appreciated!

The only issue I had with it was getting them away from their belongings. only half did... but that still was enough to cause a wonderfully slapstick fight.

Still, quite a nasty encounter. If running it with the full core, remember the crit effects and stacking. Corebook boars are worse!

On 3/3/2019 at 9:39 PM, AK_Aramis said:

Corebook boars are worse!

Definitely. The players got to go Boar Hunting in one game I played. They have since learned why hunting wild boar fell into the same category in the middle ages as hunting big cats and bears.

I ran this scene and i think it went down well with some comedy moments in there.

My PCs has set up camp, for some reason they had set watches at night, early in the morning they heard some rummaging in the bushes and a little way in to a thicket and some trees.

The Kuni went to investigate, he passed his initial stealth check and managed to upon a boar foraging for truffles with her young ones in tow.

The boar spotted the PC, which resulted in the PC running out of the thicket by hiking up his kimono above his knees and being chased by the boar, all that was missing was the Benny Hill theme tune (Google/YouTube if you dont know what it is)

On 2/21/2019 at 4:18 PM, Schmiegel said:

Just wondering if anybody has run this scene in Palace of the Emerald Champion...and if there was anything that worked particularly well. I'm a novice GM, with L5R being my first shot at it, and I'm still kind of finding my way. I had expected this adventure to be scripted out in much more detail, it's way more open ended than I expected. I had thought most role playing adventures included a lot more detail for the GM to be guided by, but perhaps not. Any clever ideas for a Rampaging Boar scene would be wildly appreciated!

L5R is kind of tricky to spell everything out in. You are dealing with a setting where there are a myriad ways to solve most issues. You can get into a duel, use Politics, o, if a Lion or Crab, just beat someone up. all approaches are relatively equally valid. That the modules do not spell everything out is more because they really can't. So, they spell out the expected ways, and trust the GM can figure things out. Also, I will say, open ended is god because players can, and will, derail your plans. One of the best examples was the Age of Rebellion Starter box module..I will not say what my players did, but they ended up, with a couple of actions early on, rendering the second half not only unnecessary, but pretty near impossible to happen.

we didnt run into this one, im kinda curious now. Strange that there's not a "starving" condition.

Also, seeing the thread title, I was fully expecting this to be a 30-50 feral hogs joke.