Hi everyone,

In a few weeks, I ll be starting a 5th edition campaign. I am a seasoned GM playing with seasoned players, 2 of whom I would rate as moderate munchkins (as in, within their character concept, they will optimize what they can, but wont step out of character for same weird tech), and we ve had the preliminary debates about clan choices, themes and such.

Now as it is quite possible on my players will see this, I am not going to go into too much detail, but I have planned for a campaign dealing with the supernatural, the horror elements and the fantastic elements of L5R, after having had two much more mundane/pseudo-historical campaigns in the past.

As such, I have contemplated whether to include subskills. The idea is that especially the martial subskills basically turn anyone with a melee skill of 3 into an excellent allrounder in duels, battlefield situation, or with any weapon. There is a distinct lack of differentiation between a samurai living his life to perfect the spear, and one who has trained with the sword - mechanically, they can switch weapons most of the time, with just the katas to consider.

Similarly, I find the Aesthetics skills to be too broad and considered sub-skills for them, if my players intend on picking up some of these. As we will see plenty of social situations, I expect them to. I love setting up, for example, a bonsai competition or a painting session, and thus a little bit of differentiation might be helpful here.

Now, this leads to the problem of XP. If I split up martial melee into 5+ subskills, players will need to spend a lot more XP to, for example, play a duelist who needs AT LEAST 2 subskills, or any kind of multi-weapon user, which is basically any battlefield-trained samurai (bow, sword, spear I d assume). How do you think this should go? Give additional skillpoints at character creation? Give out more XP at the risk of people just dumping it into other things? Give discounts to multiple skills of the same group?

I d love to hear your opinions on this.

Reminds me of 4th edition, where you had a bunch of skills for different melee weapons, including separate skills for general swordsmanship and Iaijutsu duels. I think you will need to carefully balance this, since the characters will not have many skill points in the start and the skills are limited to rank 3 on character creation so it is unlikely a character will be a master in one skill at the start. But I have seen a player who just dumped all his XP to Martial (Melee) until it was at 5, so I understand why you would like to make it less effective path.

Honestly, I would say that you can divide melee weapons into three distinct categories. Balanced, unbalanced, long... Balanced being swords and things that work around being made with balance and finesse in mind. This would include things like katana, wakizashi, and most shorter bladed weapons. Unbalanced is stuff like axes and hammers with the zanbato maybe. Long is anything that isn't really unbalanced but do to length would require a distinctly different style and grip when wielded. Things like the naginata, bo, and yari.

Ranged weapons can be broken into two categories but don't really need it that bad. Fired and thrown. It feels a little pointless to me though but maybe if you want ninjas to be different from the average samurai I could see it.

Unarmed is narrow enough generally speaking.

As xp goes you could start them out with ten xp that can only be used on skills. I honestly have almost no experience with artisan skills so no comment on how those should be broken up.

Hope this helped and best of luck!

26 minutes ago, Kaiju said:

Now, this leads to the problem of XP. If I split up martial melee into 5+ subskills, players will need to spend a lot more XP to, for example, play a duelist who needs AT LEAST 2 subskills, or any kind of multi-weapon user, which is basically any battlefield-trained samurai (bow, sword, spear I d assume). How do you think this should go? Give additional skillpoints at character creation? Give out more XP at the risk of people just dumping it into other things? Give discounts to multiple skills of the same group?

I suggest giving a little bit more XP; not a whole lot more, 10 to 20% at most, since the cost of skill advancements goes up with rank (it's cheaper to be decent at two skills than to excel at a single one). PCs have their ring dice anyway, so they can make "unskilled" rolls if it comes to that.

I would restrict the use of this XP to buying advancements for a set of core skills for the character only, for instance the starting skills the player chooses.

Given that these subsets will lead to an increase in skills to choose from for those starting skills, I'd also increase the number of starting skills the player gets to choose: 1/3, rounded up, of the extra skills to choose from (so if Martial Arts [melee] becomes 5 subskills and that's the only thing that changes about the selection, the player gets to choose (4/3) rounded up = 2 extra starting skills), to be picked from the subskills only.

I'd be wary of splitting skills up too much as well though - definitely no more than 5 melee subskills, for instance.

I don't think I would divide anything, let your player take the very useful/good skills and maybe they will be tempted in also getting a somewhat less useful sideskill with the rest of the xp.
if you start dividing too much, you might end up with some characters with a crazy amount of skill points just in martial for example, which is a bit boring.

How about for each rank of Melee, your player can pick one weapon she has mastered, where the full skill is used, and all other weapons are used at one skill rank lower? So at Rank 3 melee, three melee weapons are mastered but anything else is used with two skill dice?

I'm leaving Melee as it is in my game, but I am adding a 'Dark Theology' (Unless I can think of a better name, I hope I can think of a better name) skill which covers things like shadowlands lore, maho knowledge, diagnosing Shadowlands Taint, kansen, forbidden lore, oni and so on. I think that would distinguish the sort of lore you might go to the Isawas for and the sort you want to consult a Witch Hunter for, and it would help to make things like maho effects seem even more outside the natural order and alarming. ("You got three successes on Theology? Ok, you are absolutely certain that what you've just seen is not possible to accomplish by calling on the kami, they just don't work like that--this is, this is something else...")

5 minutes ago, Miwt said:

How about for each rank of Melee, your player can pick one weapon she has mastered, where the full skill is used, and all other weapons are used at one skill rank lower? So at Rank 3 melee, three melee weapons are mastered but anything else is used with two skill dice?

I'm leaving Melee as it is in my game, but I am adding a 'Dark Theology' (Unless I can think of a better name, I hope I can think of a better name) skill which covers things like shadowlands lore, maho knowledge, diagnosing Shadowlands Taint, kansen, forbidden lore, oni and so on. I think that would distinguish the sort of lore you might go to the Isawas for and the sort you want to consult a Witch Hunter for, and it would help to make things like maho effects seem even more outside the natural order and alarming. ("You got three successes on Theology? Ok, you are absolutely certain that what you've just seen is not possible to accomplish by calling on the kami, they just don't work like that--this is, this is something else...")

This is actually an interesting idea. I consider expanding on that idea as follows: For 1 XP you can learn a mastery, up to a maximum of masteries equal to your skill rank. A mastery is a subskill, not having one and using the skill means its now at +1 TN (or minus 1 skill die, have to do the math on this). I d give out a few for character creation.

This means you only have to raise one skill, but you cannot use that one skill for just anything you get your hands on. Obviously works better with some skill groups than others, but weapons and aesthetics both make sense. Basically, every samurai gets basic training with all kinds of weapons, but you just spent a little more time and effort one a few specific ones.

This means the Martial Arts Melee 4 Hida can still have 3 Iaijutsu, which should probably be enough of a hindrance to make it worth trying for a different approach.

In general, I guess my main issue is just everyone being a great duelist and all-around weapon master, making any plot of trying to goad the guy into a bad situation (like influencing weapon choice of the duel, or duel vs. skirmish, or stealing/sabotaging his weapon) pretty much a wash because the guy is just as fine with whatever else he has on hand.

4 hours ago, P'an Ku said:

Unarmed is narrow enough generally speaking.

Honestly though, I've been a little bothered by the lack of differentiation between sumai, Jiu-jitsu, mizu-do, and bariqu in this edition. really, there should at least be a difference between striking and grappling as, in the real world, proficiency in one doesn't translate to the other (though most fighters these days study both.)

I would point out that certain techniques require certain weapons, and this is probably what was intended to make the difference between a weapon "specialist" and a generalist.. but at this point there aren't really enough techniques to make that big a difference.

My gaming group is also talking a lot nowadays about splitting up some of the Skills to various Sub-Skill. It looks like a fairly good idea for diversity and blasting apart some of the "be-all-end-all" Skills that do too much for our liking (Fitness and Survival being the prime targets here). We don't think that XP should be a big deal because the whole point is having characters with different sub-specializations so giving them more XP to "re-assemble" the greater Skill kinda defeats the purpose of introducing Sub-Skills. You gotta revise the starting Skills tho for who gets what starting Sub-Skill from the original starting Skill.

Sub skills can work with minimal adaptation, but only if you have VERY few of them. If you split one skill into more than 2 or 3, and/do it for more than one or two skills, I find that you run into issues with the advancement tables of school curriculums. For example if you have 5 weapon skills, a bushi could get to rank 2 by mostly buying those and will hardly have any opportunity to get the Kata they want or need before they are propelled to the next rank. They can still get other things later, but it throws the whole thing off balance.

If you need more, using speciazations as mentioned above can work.. be careful about the penalties for our-of-specialization usage: +1 TN is really a big deal, especially at lower ranks...

Here is alsoa tangent discussion I had started in the houserule forum a while back

If the weapon categories were a bit more balanced then splitting up the weapon skill by these might be a good idea. Means that even if a player only has one Melee skill, he can have the 'best of both worlds' where he has a range of different weapons he has access to but he can't just pick up any bizarre thing and be able to use it like a pro.

I think in many situations this won't affect very much in play though, so I don't know it could accomplish what you are looking for, Kaiju. If your duelist player chooses swords, then he just uses his sword skill every day for duels and skirmishes and I guess he could look sadly at the rochin and timbe that were dropped by the Mantis that he just beat up, but generally it wouldn't change much for him.

If you split Melee into Iaijutsu and Skirmishing, then that might do what you are looking for. (If you feel like Kakitas are a bit weak, then let them use their Iaijutsu in skirmishes like they could in previous editions, and if you want to make Mirumotos more OP then let them use their Skirmishing skill in duels). This would mean that not every bushi who can swing a tetsubo is great at dueling, and not every duelist is great in a brawl.

11 hours ago, Miwt said:

I'm leaving Melee as it is in my game, but I am adding a 'Dark Theology' (Unless I can think of a better name, I hope I can think of a better name) skill which covers things like shadowlands lore, maho knowledge, diagnosing Shadowlands Taint, kansen, forbidden lore, oni and so on.

I've considered this too, but my trouble as a GM was revealing too much about the surprise subplots the characters might encounter. For a limited session campaign being upfront works best because characters need guidance so they feel competent enough to deal with situational challenges. If the intention is slowly building tension and revealing a thin veil between a normal and dark reality, maybe you can set the tone that those general skills only apply to routine, non esoteric lore.

:: Looks sideways at P'an Ku::

On 3/15/2019 at 4:43 PM, P'an Ku said:

Honestly, I would say that you can divide melee weapons into three distinct categories. Balanced, unbalanced, long... Balanced being swords and things that work around being made with balance and finesse in mind. This would include things like katana, wakizashi, and most shorter bladed weapons. Unbalanced is stuff like axes and hammers with the zanbato maybe. Long is anything that isn't really unbalanced but do to length would require a distinctly different style and grip when wielded. Things like the naginata, bo, and yari.

That's exactly how the rules for the RPG Arcanis handles its weapon skills. In that system it works great. But there are a lot more skill points tossed around there (and ranks top out around 18+) I love the Arcanis rules system. But I don't think it translates directly to 5E Rokugan. I think splitting MA Melee into three or more skills in Rokugan 5E is more trouble than it's worth.

I would be wary of splitting up different melee weapons into their own categories. It's true that under this system a well trained samurai can fight equally well with a sword, a spear and a giant hammer. In general skirmish, or in a duel. That might not be totally realistic. But I happen to teach kids martial arts in real life, and my own training includes some weapon forms. I absolutely believe that there is some overlap between training unarmed and training with weapons. And from different types of weapons. I believe potentially having a bunch of ranks in one area (say swords) but nothing anywhere else (fists, spears, etc) is also unrealistic.

I think what I hear behind your concern is that "the samurai will all look and fight the same way"... and so far I don't think that's an issue in 5E Rokugan. But i do think you are opening up a can of worms and making a lot of work for yourself. I suspect that the conversion will be more difficult to balance than just adding an extra XP point at the end of each adventure. Still its your game.

At least Martial Arts (Melee) is one of the most useful (if not THE most useful) skill to have in 5E Rokugan. Aesthetics? Not so much. I don't think you are going to be overburdened by players with many ranks in Aesthetics abusing their artistic creation and appreciation abilities. Especially if two of them have some munkin-y leanings. It's possible none of your players will have any ranks in aesthetics at start. While I think splitting up Melee will generate headaches for you, I think splitting up Aesthetics is pointless.

My opinions. Good luck with your game!

One split that would probably work well is to divide Courtesy into two... in a more “social” scenario, this skill is really getting a lot of use: trying to be polite or to insult subtly; to make your case or just to introduce yourself properly; offering a gift and basically pretty much anything that involves speaking without pulling your rank or intimidating your way around... Having, for example, Etiquette spliced out can make sense.

I'm tempted to split Courtesy into Politeness and Sincerity... but I don't like the nerfing and the rejiggering that the schools would need.

I'd rather have a 3rd category of thing — call it a specialization — that is as narrow as the subskills, but does something different...

I'm thinking two possibilities:

• Convert level black dice to white dice
• pre-rolled black die showing opportunity.