Wtf

Disappointed by those "designers" yet again. They clearly just throw stuff on paper and call it a day.

No pun intended.

1 hour ago, Avatar111 said:

Wtf

Disappointed by those "designers" yet again. They clearly just throw stuff on paper and call it a day.

No pun intended.

What’s the issue? I haven’t seen the book yet but I’m curious...

12 minutes ago, Franwax said:

What’s the issue? I haven’t seen the book yet but I’m curious...

Overall busted. Like, it reeks of potential abuse.

But, I just drop the towel... This game is just like that, it isn't meant to be something remotely balanced or logical or mechanically well designed.

It is just stuff thrown on paper, written stylishly but completely devoid of gameplay finesse.

At this point, I need to make peace with the fact that I hate the design of the game. No matter how much I like the setting... the gameplay is utter garbage in my opinion.

Over and out.

Dude, just make peace with the fact that pen+paper RPGs have to accommodate a much wider range of situations (near infinite) than any other game, and cannot be mechanically complex to the point of there not being any misunderstandings. I ve played RPGs for 25 years now, and the current L5R is in the upper third in terms of rules quality and loophole scarcity. At some point, you simply need the GM to cover some of these interactions.

Yes the system has its flaws and omissions, but I am not sure what your background is in terms of rules quality. I played all the big systems and plenty of smaller ones, and the only ones I vouch for as being mechanically better made are the new Modiphius systems - and a huge criticism of these is exactly that: People feel they are lifeless mechanics akin to a boardgame, lacking in flavor and style.

L5R 5th is without doubt the best-working L5R ruleset so far, easiest to remedy and adjucate, and allows for the widest range of mechanically supported tactics and playstyles. Just have your GM (or yourself, if you are stuck with the task) put a limit to obvious cheese.

And be glad we are not talking about immortal kobold sorcerors, bugbears with whips and bags full of rats, unkillable jedi cyborgs with 4 meter lightsaber blades, infinite-loop attack bushi, wild west card mages who instant kill anything in the entire game just by touching it or cybernetically enhanced thugs who can shoot an entire clip, reload, and empty it again before anyone even got to take an action.

If there would be less mechanics it would be better. As almost every time they writ e down a mechanic, it is broken and badly designed.

I'm just very disappointed.

like, who wants to make a bushi in this game? Just put an armor on a shugenja and he is like 20 times more powerful than any bushi can ever hope to be. Most katas are garbage, and now they "design" (shouldnt even call it that, more like "puke") some Shikigami super caster enhancer that basically breaks the whole game in multiple ways by being way too versatile and flat out broken if used with water stance in conflicts.

like, the whole shite is amateur level of quality. At least the packaging is neat I suppose (oh and the writing is greeeat!).

but the rules? That you seem to think this is... industry standard quality? Oofff. The bar must be really low, because this "game" is trash design.

But I'm done venting, and done with the product. Not for me, obviously.

1 hour ago, Kaiju said:

Just have your GM (or yourself, if you are stuck with the task) put a limit to obvious cheese.

As someone routinely picking up the GM position: cheese, and certainly obvious cheese, is rarely a significant problem. There are normally plenty of ways to deal with that from just not allowing it to cheesing right back until it stops and everything in between. It's also in many cases not a sign of bad design or poor mechanics: stretch anything far enough and you'll probably find some way of breaking it. Strong design starts with the basics and builds from there.

Your mileage apparently varies, but I don't see strong core design in this edition of the game. Setting TNs is barely explained and some of the official ones don't seem to follow any logic. Advantages and disadvantages are all over the place and need serious GM involvement to achieve anything approaching parity - previous editions had issues with the values, but in this edition the whole point is to keep making them come up to drive the strife and void point mechanics so this lack of parity otherwise propagates through the whole system. Handling strife is so open-ended there's little point in calling perceived abuses loopholes: there's no skirting rules or restrictions, just do what the system says you should do to manage strife and you can probably expect not to become compromised unless you want to. Opportunities commonly don't follow their basic requirement of not having anything to do with success or failure and tend to make or break techs.

These are core concepts that are key to the gameplay, and they're just not polished enough. Previous editions have their issues, certainly, but their core ideas are by and large solid. For me that's much more important than having to put my foot down to squash some powergamer ruleslawyering a bit less often.

Also, as a personal pet peeve: the index sucks and the overal layout can make it hard to find all the relevant rules for complex interactions. 😛