Hello, I have a question concerning school skills and the Rank 0 indicator.

How can a player strike an opponent or defend themselves if they, say, don't have the Me;ee Combat skill, or how can they roll for initiative without a Tactics roll, etc...

Are players who have a 0 in a Skill allowed to JUST roll their Ring Die and take whatever comes up, or do they need to be Rank 0 in their School Skills only?

EXAMPLE: Somebody making a Bushi does not pick Tactics as one of their School Skills, but it is still one of their school skills, they just don't have a +1 in it. They can make a Rank 0 roll with that however they cannot make a Rank 0 roll in, say, Government, since that was not part of their creation options?

I guess I just don't want to tell players at creation 'you may seem like you have an option here to not pick X skill, but because you'll need it for certain rolls, you HAVE to pick it.'

How do you handle this kind of things, and the Rank 0 skill, etc...

Yes you just roll Ring dice.

In this edition you never need ranks in something to be able to roll for it. School skill or not doesn't matter either. You just assemble a dice pool and roll, if you only have ring dice in the pool so be it.

When you assemble your dice pool, you add as many white dice as your skill rank.
If you have 0 rank, you add 0 white dice.

50 minutes ago, TheBlindSamurai said:

Are players who have a 0 in a Skill allowed to JUST roll their Ring Die and take whatever comes up,

Careful, here.
You keep UP TO your ring value (minimum 1)

Yes, that's important to remember. You have to keep a minimum of one die, but you don't have to keep all the dice you can - this can avoid situations where like, you get a lot of Strife symbols attached to stuff you're not planning on using.

At a GMs discretion/option you might not get to roll on some "things" unless you have ranks in a skill ... but this should be very rare.

I'm thinking about something like a roll to recall some obscure and/or censored bit of history. Usually something like that might be covered by culture or maybe theology (or commerce or even skullduggery). If you have zero skill ranks in ALL the skills that the judge thinks might form a basis for knowing that little bit of "disavowed trivia" then the GM might require you to justify how you could have that piece of knowledge before you make a roll with your Ring dice, or even say you can't attempt the roll. (Could be a hook for a future adventure to find that information from someone who knows something).

Again. A rare circumstance probably most appropriate for knowledge skills.

On 4/4/2019 at 10:23 PM, nameless ronin said:

In this edition you never need ranks in something to be able to roll for it. School skill or not doesn't matter either. You just assemble a dice pool and roll, if you only have ring dice in the pool so be it.

Indeed. And remember that the ring dice still has an explosive success on it. Theoretically, even an unskilled samurai using an approach for which they have a ring rank of '1' can still succeed at a task of any TN.

The odds are ridiculously infinitesimal and you'll probably be instantly compromised if you manage it, but the chance is there . That's a deliberate element since it occasionally lets a character pull off an unexpected moment of awesome, and it means no-one is ever completely unable to contribute in a given scene.

On 4/8/2019 at 12:36 AM, Magnus Grendel said:

Indeed. And remember that the ring dice still has an explosive success on it. Theoretically, even an unskilled samurai using an approach for which they have a ring rank of '1' can still succeed at a task of any TN.

The odds are ridiculously infinitesimal and you'll probably be instantly compromised if you manage it, but the chance is there . That's a deliberate element since it occasionally lets a character pull off an unexpected moment of awesome, and it means no-one is ever completely unable to contribute in a given scene.

The drawback is that awesome happens a good bit too often for some. The odds of open ending are the same on either die, but the strife penalty isn't...

I've seen unassisted 12+ success on r4s2

5 hours ago, AK_Aramis said:

I've seen unassisted 12+ success on r4s2

Sure,

But not all rolls benefit from bonus successes...

On a lot of rolls 12 successes is exactly as good as the two successes you needed to meet the TN,

But the 10 or so strife you likely accumulated make it a lot worse than just taking the bare minimum number of successes

11 hours ago, gareth_lazelle said:

Sure,

But not all rolls benefit from bonus successes...

On a lot of rolls 12 successes is exactly as good as the two successes you needed to meet the TN,

But the 10 or so strife you likely accumulated make it a lot worse than just taking the bare minimum number of successes

There are definitely things I dislike about the strife mechanics and even about some aspects of opportunities, but this is the main advantage they bring to the system. R&K is great, but the risk/reward aspect of previous editions doesn't always come across as very elegant: massive overrolls are just good luck gone to waste and while pushing your luck can be fun, repeated failure through unfortunate rolls even when you're conservative with raises can be offputting. Moving raises (pre-roll decisions) to opportunities (post-roll decisions) removes the gamble, but that's not too bad since it's still a roll of the dice which means there's an inherent risk (even if I'd have liked the system to scale a bit more with regards to success/failure) and it lets the player make the most of a great roll. The addition of strife makes sure the opportunities don't get out of hand.

On 4/9/2019 at 3:15 PM, gareth_lazelle said:

Sure,

But not all rolls benefit from bonus successes...

On a lot of rolls 12 successes is exactly as good as the two successes you needed to meet the TN,

But the 10 or so strife you likely accumulated make it a lot worse than just taking the bare minimum number of successes

True. But you're not forced to keep extra results from resolving  :

After rolling a die this way, the player chooses whether it will be kept (on top of their current results) or dropped.

If you've already got enough  and        to pass, bonus successes don't matter, and the new result has       on it, you can safely drop it (unless it also has    that you want, I guess)

For sure - my point was just that runaway successes often don't often occur because players don't have the incentive to keep rolling them up because of limited benefits and potential costs.

I know this is an old topic but I'm about to start GMing this game. One of the player asked "why spend XP on skills when rings will be a universal buff for all skill checks?". The only thing I came up with to answer was that skill increases contribute to school ranks. It did throw me off for a moment as I thought "good question..."

Skill Dice are better than ring dice. They have more symbols which are beneficial, like Exploding Success w/o strife, Success/Opp, etc. Somebody actually recently posted an analysis of dice and statistics topic - basically while your overall average number of success between 5 Ring and 5 Ring, 5 Skill doesn't improve (as you can still keep only five) the amount of opportunity you're likely to generate increases and the amount of strife you take decreases.

Skills are also cheaper and sometimes you're either forced to use a specific ring or have a lower TN with a specific ring.

1. Skill rank increases are cheaper to buy in XP - sometimes very cheap (Agasha Sumiko's Expert in the Dojo rule , for example makes buying rank 1 of a martial skill only 1XP)
2. Skill ranks contribute to any check in the field, regardless of approach - so whether you're repairing a damaged sword, trying to scrutinize a sword to identify the maker, trying to attune yourself to a sword with supernatural properties or whatever, the ring will change but it'll always be smithing as a skill
3. Skill increases (correct ones, anyway) contribute their full value to school ranks and titles, which rings never do.
4. Skill dice have generally more opportunities and less strife. The difference isn't too huge for 'normal' roles, but a compromised character is far, far more effective if they have a skill rank or two - the biggest deal being that a compromised character can still roll a result on a skill dice, but cannot on a ring die - meaning there is no way they can possibly succeed at a TN higher than their ring rank whilst still compromised.