Trying my hand here at some custom Techniques for 5E for the first time. I'm working on a whole set of techs based around interesting interactions between characters in different Stances. The idea here was to provide good tactical "counterplay" that is also richly thematic. For starters here I present my offense-based techs, with plans to follow up with some defensive ones in the same vein. Each one seeks to negate or counter the tactical advantages of a given Stance, or capitalize on its weaknesses.

I'm quite sure some of these are badly broken in some way I haven't noticed yet, so powergamers are invited to chip in with their exploits and combos. Feedback warmly welcomed!

Storm Drives the Waves

Rank 2 Air Kata

Close Combat Kata

Circling his opponent while lashing out with a whirlwind of fast, unpredictable strikes, the samurai keeps his foe on the back foot and herds him into an untenable position.

Activation: When making a Melee or Unarmed Attack Action in a skirmish against a character in Water stance, you may spend O in the following way:

Air O+: If the character spends O equal to his opponent’s vigilance, he gains one of the following benefits. Each additional O spent in this way grants one additional benefit.

-Until the beginning of your next turn, the target character cannot make any Movement actions.

-Until the beginning of your next turn, the target character cannot take the Calming Breath action.

-The target character must move one range band in a direction of your choosing.

Iron Smelting Strike

Rank 2 Fire Kata

Close Combat Kata

Against an overly cautious opponent, the warrior gathers his strength and unleashes an all-out assault to punch through his guard, his armor, and his bones.

Activation: When making a Melee or Unarmed Attack Action in a skirmish against a character in Earth stance, you may spend O in the following way:

Fire O+: If successful, you may spend O equal to the target’s Earth ring to inflict a critical strike of severity equal to the weapon’s deadliness, plus your bonus successes. This does not count as spending O to inflict a critical strike for the purpose of the Earth stance’s benefit.

Fire O+: You may spend O equal to the target’s vigilance to inflict the Dazed condition on them.

Flooding the Hearth Method

Rank 2 Water Kata

Close Combat Kata

Rather than meeting force with force, the samurai fluidly evades his foe’s killing zone, and flows into the spaces where his power cannot be applied effectively.

Activation: When making a Melee or Unarmed Attack Action in a skirmish against a character in Fire stance, you may spend O in the following way:

Water O+: If you spend O equal to the target’s vigilance, until the beginning of your next turn, the TN of any attack the target makes against you using a weapon for which you are not within range at the time this Technique is activated is increased by 1, +1 for each additional O spent in this way.

Sacred Mountain Pierces Heaven

Rank 2 Earth Kata

Close Combat Kata

Ignoring feints and misdirections, the warrior advances implacably until he overbears his enemy and they are at his feet, ready to receive the killing blow.

Activation: When making an Attack Action in a skirmish against a character in Air stance, you may spend O in the following way:

Earth O+: If successful, you may spend O equal to the target’s vigilance to inflict the Immobilized condition on them until the end of your next turn.

Earth O+: If the target of your action has the Immobilized condition, you gain one bonus success for every O spent in this manner.

• Storm Drives the Waves sounds weak, sure, certain Kata also use Movement actions and they get blocked out of it, but moving someone far or closer away is easily achieved with other Air Kata already and blocking someone from Calming Breath, I mean, I don't know how often your table uses this option, but it seems like a weak option to choose from, anyway.
• Iron Smelting Strike doesn't work. Sure, you put the exception for the critical strike on the first use, but not on the second. So the second option doesn't work. I would consider something else, like giving the opponent 3 or 4 points of strife and I would change the first option to say if you spend this amount of opportunities, the attack cannot be defended against, which is just a slightly different way of saying you inflicted a critical strike.
• Flooding the Hearth Method is an okay Kata I guess, but it somehow it feels weak to me. Even if somehow you kind copied the ability of the Air Stance.
• Sacred Mountain Heavens looks like great. Specially if you Immobilized the target with something else, like Silent Elimination.

Overall, I like the idea of what you did there, but only Flooding the Hearth Method and Sacred Mountain Heavens actually go against their "opposite" Ring.

Storm Drives the Waves is Air against Water, instead of Earth and Iron Smelting Strike is Fire against Earth, instead of Water.

If you don't want to make two pairs of opposite Kata (Air -> Earth, Earth -> Air), I would suggest going through the Rings in a clockwise or counter clockwise manner (disregarding Void and probably creating a Kata for Void against Void).

So, my take would be [Earth -> Air, Air -> Fire, Fire -> Water, Water -> Earth] or [Air -> Earth, Earth -> Water, Water -> Fire, Fire -> Air].

I love the idea and will see if I can come up with more in the same vein. I'll also allow my players to take them (provisionally, to playtest) although I supect that my not very warlike players might not be too interested.

By the way, how can we get to post the special characters for opportunities, strife, success and explosive success?

Hey guys, thanks very much for the feedback! I should note I guess that I have yet to actually use the system at all "in the wild"- I'm prepping for my first campaign of 5E now, so making custom stuff like this is part of me getting a feel for what works and doesn't; hence the glaring oversights. Some responses to your comments:

20 hours ago, Myrion said:

I love the idea and will see if I can come up with more in the same vein. I'll also allow my players to take them (provisionally, to playtest) although I supect that my not very warlike players might not be too interested.

Appreciate the encouragement- I'm working on some Shuji in the same conceptual framework, so stay tuned on that.

20 hours ago, Diogo Salazar said:

• Storm Drives the Waves sounds weak, sure, certain Kata also use Movement actions and they get blocked out of it, but moving someone far or closer away is easily achieved with other Air Kata already and blocking someone from Calming Breath, I mean, I don't know how often your table uses this option, but it seems like a weak option to choose from, anyway.

The idea here was to counter some of the Water stance's main advantages. While, again. I have no in-game experience to reference, the ability to use Calming Breath or Maneuver for free seem core to tbe utility of the Water stance. I wasn't aware of other Air kata letting you move enemies around, so that's very useful to know.

Maybe you can offer some alternative ideas that are in-theme. My deisgn goals are, A: Provide an effective counter to the Water stance's strengths, which are flexibility and recovery , and B), have a fitting game-world rationale for how that would stem from Air's strengths (subtlety and misdirection).

If l5R by default had a tactical spatial map, I'd be tempted to let it designate a space on the board that, if the opponent moved into it, you'd get a free attack or something like that, but that doesn't work well with the whole range band thing. Other thoughts?

20 hours ago, Diogo Salazar said:

• Iron Smelting Strike doesn't work. Sure, you put the exception for the critical strike on the first use, but not on the second. So the second option doesn't work. I would consider something else, like giving the opponent 3 or 4 points of strife and I would change the first option to say if you spend this amount of opportunities, the attack cannot be defended against, which is just a slightly different way of saying you inflicted a critical strike.

Thanks for catching that, I forgot that Earth stance also protects from conditions being applied- I'll fix that. The idea of adding strife is certainly thematic for Fire- I'm tempted to make it something like "inflict x strife, if target is compromised they cannot defend against this attack". Good looking out!

20 hours ago, Diogo Salazar said:

• Flooding the Hearth Method is an okay Kata I guess, but it somehow it feels weak to me. Even if somehow you kind copied the ability of the Air Stance.

You make an excellent point here, I really didn't think that one through thoroughly. I still like it a lot conceptually, in terms of flowing into the spaces where the opponent is weakest, but for the number of opportunities it takes, it's as you say a crappier version of the Air stance. I'm thinking of two possible versions- keep the requirement the same, but make it so that they simply can't Attack with an out-of-range weapon, or leaving it as is but dropping the Opportiunity cost to a base of 1, so you can potentially wind up with a much higher TN penalty than Air grants.

20 hours ago, Diogo Salazar said:

• Sacred Mountain Heavens looks like great. Specially if you Immobilized the target with something else, like Silent Elimination.

Thanks! I like it too.

20 hours ago, Diogo Salazar said:

Overall, I like the idea of what you did there, but only Flooding the Hearth Method and Sacred Mountain Heavens actually go against their "opposite" Ring.

This is very much intentional- the idea of "opposite" rings is very much an Occidentalism that I don't like in my Rokugan.

20 hours ago, Diogo Salazar said:

If you don't want to make two pairs of opposite Kata (Air -> Earth, Earth -> Air), I would suggest going through the Rings in a clockwise or counter clockwise manner (disregarding Void and probably creating a Kata for Void against Void).

That's actually kinda what I did- I used the traditional Chinese Wuxing cycle, removed Wood, and replaced Metal with Air. The defensive techs I'm working on reverse the cycle, so Air defends against Earth, Fire defends against Water, etc. This is a matter of taste, while I appreciate the feedback I'll probably leave this as-is. But as you suggested I'm also working on some Void techniques- my initial concept has to do with forcing opponents to use their weakest Ring, so it punishes "elementally imbalanced" warriors. More on that later.

Thanks again for the feedback, kindly appreciated! Hope to add some more content here soon.

46 minutes ago, robothedino said:

The idea here was to counter some of the Water stance's main advantages. While, again. I have no in-game experience to reference, the ability to use Calming Breath or Maneuver for free seem core to tbe utility of the Water stance. I wasn't aware of other Air kata letting you move enemies around, so that's very useful to know.

Maybe you can offer some alternative ideas that are in-theme. My deisgn goals are, A: Provide an effective counter to the Water stance's strengths, which are flexibility and recovery , and B), have a fitting game-world rationale for how that would stem from Air's strengths (subtlety and misdirection).

If l5R by default had a tactical spatial map, I'd be tempted to let it designate a space on the board that, if the opponent moved into it, you'd get a free attack or something like that, but that doesn't work well with the whole range band thing. Other thoughts?

Yeah, Thunderclap Strike already moves everybody close to you away from you rather easily, granted, it is a Rank 3 Kata.

I get what you are coming from and maybe take a look at already existing kata that might be doing something similar. The difference being, I guess, that your katas just work against that opposite ring, instead of any, so it may be ok to be a Rank 2 kata, instead of 3 or 4.

L5R doesn't have a tactical spatial map exactly, but take a look at Path of Waves. It has a kata there, called Chaotic Scattering, where you throw some object around the map. Everything within range band 1 of that object is considered Obscuring, Entagling OR Dangerous terrain.

46 minutes ago, robothedino said:

This is very much intentional- the idea of "opposite" rings is very much an Occidentalism that I don't like in my Rokugan.

That's actually kinda what I did- I used the traditional Chinese Wuxing cycle, removed Wood, and replaced Metal with Air. The defensive techs I'm working on reverse the cycle, so Air defends against Earth, Fire defends against Water, etc. This is a matter of taste, while I appreciate the feedback I'll probably leave this as-is. But as you suggested I'm also working on some Void techniques- my initial concept has to do with forcing opponents to use their weakest Ring, so it punishes "elementally imbalanced" warriors. More on that later.

Yeah, that's why I put the quotes, the opposition is pretty much an Occidental thing and I wasn't aware of something similar. Thanks for pointing out the Wuxing cycle. I'll take a look into that.

And again, that's how I felt because I couldn't see where you were coming from. Now that I know, I think it's fine.

Now, you might not have access to Path of Waves yet, but there's a new school (granted, a gaijin/ronin school) that by rank 3, you can easily have Vigilance 6 (and probably 9 by rank 5). I would suggest some of these kata shouldn't need to spend x amount of opportunities until you reach the target's vigilance.

Specially the one against Earth.

I would probably do something like this:

Iron Smelting Strike

Rank 2 Close Combat Kata

Against an overly cautious opponent, the warrior gathers his strength and unleashes an all-out assault to punch through his guard, his armor, and his bones.

Activation: As an Attack action using a readied weapon, you may make a TN 3 Melee or Unarmed Attack Action (Fire) check against a character in Earth stance within weapon's range.

Effects: If you succeed, your target suffers a critical strike with severity equal to your weapon deadliness plus your bonus successes. The TN of the Fitness check to resist the critical strike is 3 instead of the normal TN.

It's a total ripoff of the Heartpiercing Strike, just slightly easier to pull it off because of the fact both you and the target must be in specific Rings, so I don't know how frequent this kata would be useful, though.

I can see what you are trying to do with each kata but, unfortunately, I don't have any other feedback to how make Flooding the Hearth Method and Stomr Drives the Waves besides the fact that I felt them weak.

On 3/27/2020 at 7:44 PM, Diogo Salazar said:

By the way, how can we get to post the special characters for opportunities, strife, success and explosive success?

Just quote or copy from another use.

20 minutes ago, Magnus Grendel said:

Just quote or copy from another use.

Lol. Thanks, I’ll save it somewhere