I've had the opportunity to experiment with the role-playing game through sessions of an online game and I've felt a noticeable issue (which may or may not be an issue): Composure seems to be too strong of an attribute. Strife is far too easy to accrue and for a character with a low Composure score, they risk being forced to Unmask to remain effective in multiple scenarios, they are easily Compromised, and Strife feels more important than Fatigue and makes dueling incredibly difficult. The balance seems off since Earth/Water feels much more valuable in most situations.

What are other people's insights and opinions, and how does one get around it?

only an issue when you have 6 composure or less and a low water ring and not a good grasp of the game (using opportunities, advantages etc).

5 hours ago, Avatar111 said:

only an issue when you have 6 composure or less and a low water ring and not a good grasp of the game (using opportunities, advantages etc).

And only an issue when you have a GM that doesn't challenge PCs in creative and compelling ways. Yes, there are many ways to reduce Strife, but it should be a tug-of-war, mind games and all.

7 hours ago, kpsmith said:

I've had the opportunity to experiment with the role-playing game through sessions of an online game and I've felt a noticeable issue (which may or may not be an issue): Composure seems to be too strong of an attribute. Strife is far too easy to accrue and for a character with a low Composure score, they risk being forced to Unmask to remain effective in multiple scenarios, they are easily Compromised, and Strife feels more important than Fatigue and makes dueling incredibly difficult. The balance seems off since Earth/Water feels much more valuable in most situations.

What are other people's insights and opinions, and how does one get around it?

A lot depends upon scene lengths - the reset to half is much more generous when the scenes are shorter.

Composure of 6 SHOULD be twitchy. They should also be spending opp to reduce strife taken. It's 1:1 on strife on the same roll.

Or, they should be predictable - using one good stat - often void - so they can avoid taking strife.

2 hours ago, T_Kageyasu said:

And only an issue when you have a GM that doesn't challenge PCs in creative and compelling ways. Yes, there are many ways to reduce Strife, but it should be a tug-of-war, mind games and all.

theres thing a GM can do, theres thing a GM shouldn't do.

when you have an Air-Fire-Earth Kakita, and a Earth-Water-Void Iuchi, you cannot simply "throw 5 times more random strife at the Iuchi player than the Kakita player just because he can handle it".

you need to be relatively fair, and you also cannot strife out the Kakita all the time by throwing ton of random strife here and there. The Iuchi can honestly soak 5 times more strife than the Kakita and self sustain himself, just with the rings!

a character with 12+ composure, that uses water or void a lot, will NOT get strifed out in MOST games. Fact. Can you challenge him/her with other ways? sure. but unmasking is not something this player will do unless he wants to, because he doesn't have to.

Nothing else to say.

8 hours ago, kpsmith said:

I've had the opportunity to experiment with the role-playing game through sessions of an online game and I've felt a noticeable issue (which may or may not be an issue): Composure seems to be too strong of an attribute. Strife is far too easy to accrue and for a character with a low Composure score, they risk being forced to Unmask to remain effective in multiple scenarios, they are easily Compromised, and Strife feels more important than Fatigue and makes dueling incredibly difficult. The balance seems off since Earth/Water feels much more valuable in most situations.

What are other people's insights and opinions, and how does one get around it?

once you hit composure 8 and water 2, it isn't that bad anymore, but still harsh. eventually though, everybody will have somewhat balanced rings, and dumping water is not something I'd recommend as its versatility, mobility and self-preserve capabilities makes it a tool that I would find difficult to go without. doesn't need to be your highest ring, but don't leave it at 1.

4 hours ago, Avatar111 said:

once you hit composure 8 and water 2, it isn't that bad anymore, but still harsh. eventually though, everybody will have somewhat balanced rings, and dumping water is not something I'd recommend as its versatility, mobility and self-preserve capabilities makes it a tool that I would find difficult to go without. doesn't need to be your highest ring, but don't leave it at 1.

Especially since it's also the ring driving "awareness" checks in narrative scenes. I find there are few things which terrify a player more than saying "you see....." [rolls] "....nothing out of the ordinary."

There are a lot of options to manage strife, on top of "dont always keep the highest possible successes". Part of this is on the GM in not spamming you with rolls with high TNs that are necessary to advance - but keep in mind, voluntarily failing a roll also nets your a VP!

In our group, strife started to become less of an issue once people didnt try to go for maximum successes on any roll (esp. in combat). Sometimes its worth losing out on 1 or 2 damage in order to avoid being compromised.

Also look around at various techniques, shuji, school abilities and whatnot. There is some strife managment going around.

In my experience Composure is only a thing for starting characters below 20-30xp. Then Skill Dice and common sense kick in and you will feel bad for accumulating 5+ Strife in one scene let alone enough to cap your Composure. Except in Mass Battles where it is raining Strife all day every day but those type of scenes should be rare I guess.

27 minutes ago, AtoMaki said:

In my experience Composure is only a thing for starting characters below 20-30xp. Then Skill Dice and common sense kick in and you will feel bad for accumulating 5+ Strife in one scene let alone enough to cap your Composure. Except in Mass Battles where it is raining Strife all day every day but those type of scenes should be rare I guess.

exact, but some people never played the game so cannot fully understand.

though, reset composure to half, then gain 5+ strife for next scene, you still have to manage your strife, unless you are a water/void main user, then it is like, whatever and you will not compromise unless put in a very dire situation which is very rare.

From my first playthrough and this ongoing game, I'll never again make a duelist that starts with Fire 3, Air 3 - sure, the Initiative and Endurance is nice, but Composure 6 kind of blows and is the end all be all number in the game since it affects EVERYTHING.

12 minutes ago, kpsmith said:

From my first playthrough and this ongoing game, I'll never again make a duelist that starts with Fire 3, Air 3

With Void 2 you get the Kobra Kai Build (Strike First Strike Hard) that is pretty dangerous for everyone at the table, especially the GM's mental state.

1 minute ago, AtoMaki said:

With Void 2 you get the Kobra Kai Build (Strike First Strike Hard) that is pretty dangerous for everyone at the table, especially the GM's mental state.

Please elaborate?

18 minutes ago, kpsmith said:

From my first playthrough and this ongoing game, I'll never again make a duelist that starts with Fire 3, Air 3 - sure, the Initiative and Endurance is nice, but Composure 6 kind of blows and is the end all be all number in the game since it affects EVERYTHING.

its fine... yeah its bad for the first 1-2 session, but rely on air to dodge. and invest right away in water 2.
my kakita player had the same "issue", yes you start very, extremely trashy.
but you have decent endurance probably, the air stance is good in defense early on vs mobs.
once you get water 2, I think you will start to feel much better.

edit: its basically like starting D&D with 6hp... takes a bit of sessions get out of the problem zone.

I picked up Water 2 as my first ring purchase. We also discovered Meditation (Void) can be used to recover Strife (it was omitted from a book; a player has an e-mail from dev regarding it) so I'm taking advantage of Meditation as a Downtime activity to maintain my Strife levels.

Just now, kpsmith said:

I picked up Water 2 as my first ring purchase. We also discovered Meditation (Void) can be used to recover Strife (it was omitted from a book; a player has an e-mail from dev regarding it) so I'm taking advantage of Meditation as a Downtime activity to maintain my Strife levels.

yeah, water 2... can't really go without it. dumping water is straight up insanity most of the time.
that is a bit of the Kakita problem, there is no ring he can "dump".
so you end up spending a LOT of XP on rings, and not have many techniques/skills. But it is good at what it does later on.

2 minutes ago, kpsmith said:

Please elaborate?

You Initiative with Void, don't care about your roll because Focus 6 is almost instant first place, get the -1 TN Void OPP for Fire, start in Fire Stance, attack with -1 TN + Fire Stance + Seize the Moment, vaporize your opponent, Unmask and shank another fellow in the following turn, then spam Guard in Air Stance until the skirmish is over since you are now useless for anything else (Compromised, no Void Points). Your GM will bite a knife after the third skirmish, I can guarantee that!

1 minute ago, AtoMaki said:

You Initiative with Void, don't care about your roll because Focus 6 is almost instant first place, get the -1 TN Void OPP for Fire, start in Fire Stance, attack with -1 TN + Fire Stance + Seize the Moment, vaporize your opponent, Unmask and shank another fellow in the following turn, then spam Guard in Air Stance until the skirmish is over since you are now useless for anything else (Compromised, no Void Points). Your GM will bite a knife after the third skirmish, I can guarantee that!

I'll be sure to try it once.

22 hours ago, Avatar111 said:

theres thing a GM can do, theres thing a GM shouldn't do.

when you have an Air-Fire-Earth Kakita, and a Earth-Water-Void Iuchi, you cannot simply "throw 5 times more random strife at the Iuchi player than the Kakita player just because he can handle it".

you need to be relatively fair, and you also cannot strife out the Kakita all the time by throwing ton of random strife here and there. The Iuchi can honestly soak 5 times more strife than the Kakita and self sustain himself, just with the rings!

a character with 12+ composure, that uses water or void a lot, will NOT get strifed out in MOST games. Fact. Can you challenge him/her with other ways? sure. but unmasking is not something this player will do unless he wants to, because he doesn't have to.

Nothing else to say.

Ok I'll bite, difficulty in conflicts are character specific therefore there's no such thing as fairness: what is a challenge for one is not necessarily a challenge for another, and this scales by rank. How would you composure challenge said PC Iuchi the Impervious?

46 minutes ago, T_Kageyasu said:

Ok I'll bite, difficulty in conflicts are character specific therefore there's no such thing as fairness: what is a challenge for one is not necessarily a challenge for another, and this scales by rank. How would you composure challenge said PC Iuchi the Impervious?

If the player build their character to be hard to strife out, nothing you can really do.

Same as if a player made an Earth crab with a big full plate. You can't challenge that character with regular physical damage mobs (unless you make the difficulty of the opponent so strong that the other players would basically be one shot and just always attack the crab player).

You have to find an other way of challenging the player, on one of their weakness.

The challenges need to be set for the average of the party. But some challenges can be harder for one character to deal with than for another. Example, using supernatural dmg would make the crab player be vulnerable. But you cannot always do that.

The way the game works is like that, it is a "hard counter" game. No point most of the time to just try to overwhelm one player strong side at the detriment of the other players.

Basically, as much as the big crab earth in armor is "almost" immune to physical damage, the water-void character is "almost" immune to be strifed out, but that character can be dealth with in other ways, just that he won't have issues with strife at all, and not much you can do there.

This is an interesting side of the system, the way that a lot of thing is very binary.

It does create a bit of issues to have characters that are on different ends of the spectrum as extremes are quite extreme in this game. Your big crab can probably handle 5 times as many "mobs" striking at him than your courtier who would struggle against one.

It is challenging for the GM, and not the ideal design, but I am sure you can find ways to challenge each players on their weaknesses. Its just that some things will be sometimes trivial for one of you player and absurdly difficult for another. Try to make it so that every player gets their "turn" at being the weak one in a scene.

7 hours ago, Avatar111 said:

This is an interesting side of the system, the way that a lot of thing is very binary.

It does create a bit of issues to have characters that are on different ends of the spectrum as extremes are quite extreme in this game. Your big crab can probably handle 5 times as many "mobs" striking at him than your courtier who would struggle against one.

It is challenging for the GM, and not the ideal design, but I am sure you can find ways to challenge each players on their weaknesses. Its just that some things will be sometimes trivial for one of you player and absurdly difficult for another. Try to make it so that every player gets their "turn" at being the weak one in a scene.

It's ironic because imho I see these moments as characters standing out and excelling. They should be the best at what they were trained to do center stage. I agree that it shouldn't mean the other characters are humiliated, but said courtier shouldn't be standing toe to toe against the Maw. Conversely, it's imperative for the GM to create scenes for the diplomat and duelist to have their own moments to shine. This being said, I appreciate that Hidas make great duelists too. This isn't combat simulator (D&D) so it's not expected to be balanced for every scene and every challenge, that's why I think the designers made their ninjo / giri wheel.

4 minutes ago, T_Kageyasu said:

It's ironic because imho I see these moments as characters standing out and excelling. They should be the best at what they were trained to do center stage. I agree that it shouldn't mean the other characters are humiliated, but said courtier shouldn't be standing toe to toe against the Maw. Conversely, it's imperative for the GM to create scenes for the diplomat and duelist to have their own moments to shine. This being said, I appreciate that Hidas make great duelists too. This isn't combat simulator (D&D) so it's not expected to be balanced for every scene and every challenge, that's why I think the designers made their ninjo / giri wheel.

Yup, but you won't make that water-void-earth character lose composure, unless you basically throw a "you take 10 strife!" at him/her but say to the other players; "but you guys take only 3".

so in the end, to go back on the original subject, it is not really that possible for the GM to make such character lose composure, unless it comes out as an obvious "unfair stab" at the player, which are not cool things to do usually.

Shame there are so little tricks to increase other characters' Strife in the game, I would have expected to have multiple Shuji and Kata for that purpose. Only things I found so far are Ikoma school ability, Fire opportunity to give 2 Strife and Pelting Hail Kata (though it's nice to shoot 7 Strife to opponent with Daikyu). Surprising you can't simply annoy other people in Intrigues as Attack action.

Edit: Also, Rallying Cry Shuji has opportunity to give Strife to opponents in Skirmish.

1 hour ago, Mirac said:

Shame there are so little tricks to increase other characters' Strife in the game, I would have expected to have multiple Shuji and Kata for that purpose. Only things I found so far are Ikoma school ability, Fire opportunity to give 2 Strife and Pelting Hail Kata (though it's nice to shoot 7 Strife to opponent with Daikyu). Surprising you can't simply annoy other people in Intrigues as Attack action.

Edit: Also, Rallying Cry Shuji has opportunity to give Strife to opponents in Skirmish.

I agree.

It is a problem for duels and intrigues, mostly.

For intrigues, there is specifically a rule to "discredit" others and the text specify it can be done with opportunities on p.328 or techniques. And I'm like... But, there are basically no technique that put strife on someone!

Again, some kind of problem that happened in the rush, dark period of development, that seem to have been between beta and full release.

For the intrigues, I actually use the success on the social check to inflict 1 strife +1 more strife per two bonus successes (basically, you inflict strife instead of momentum, if you specifically do the "discredit" intent which doesn't give momentum points anyway). It is a bit better, as it makes it possible to discredit someone using any ring and not just fire (though fire is still better at it because of the opportunity usage).

Edit; there ARE a few techniques, but overall, it surely feels lacking.

For duels too, there should be a way to inflict strife without striking. And no, predict action is not good enough for it.