There's the Asako Inquisitor school ability, which is pretty much the equivalent:

Traces of Passage (School Ability): Once per scene as a Support action, you may scry to detect any super- natural abilities used at range 0–3 in the last day (such as invocations, mahō, and kihō). Reduce the TN of your checks to investigate this phenomenon by your school rank.

But using something too close to that does rather leave an Asako Jade Magistrate (which isn't too unlikely in a setting where the Jade Magistrature exists) rather screwed over by giving them a title ability basically identical to their school ability.

24 minutes ago, Magnus Grendel said:

There's the Asako Inquisitor school ability, which is pretty much the equivalent:

Traces of Passage (School Ability): Once per scene as a Support action, you may scry to detect any super- natural abilities used at range 0–3 in the last day (such as invocations, mahō, and kihō). Reduce the TN of your checks to investigate this phenomenon by your school rank.

But using something too close to that does rather leave an Asako Jade Magistrate (which isn't too unlikely in a setting where the Jade Magistrature exists) rather screwed over by giving them a title ability basically identical to their school ability.

Did the Asako have something similar in 4e? if so how did it differ?

Not sure about 4e, but when they popped up in d20 oriental adventures their default feat - the Kami Revealed - let you do an at-will detect magic , (in D&D terms) so...Yeah, I guess so.

What might work, looking at the old Inquisitor tree - is what was the Inquisitor's highest feat: Stealing the Kami. 5e has no real equivalent of the 'counterspell' (except with ivory kingdoms divine artefacts, but they're rarely going to feature in a rokugani samurai campaign).

A jade magistrate has the legal and spiritual authority to say 'no, don't do that' to both a shujenga and the spirits they call on - being able to either react with a counter-invocation, or make invocations (and maybe Maho?) harder if the Inquisitor is close to either caster or target sounds like a character ability.

16 minutes ago, Magnus Grendel said:

Not sure about 4e, but when they popped up in d20 oriental adventures their default feat - the Kami Revealed - let you do an at-will detect magic , (in D&D terms) so...Yeah, I guess so.

What might work, looking at the old Inquisitor tree - is what was the Inquisitor's highest feat: Stealing the Kami. 5e has no real equivalent of the 'counterspell' (except with ivory kingdoms divine artefacts, but they're rarely going to feature in a rokugani samurai campaign).

A jade magistrate has the legal and spiritual authority to say 'no, don't do that' to both a shujenga and the spirits they call on - being able to either react with a counter-invocation, or make invocations (and maybe Maho?) harder if the Inquisitor is close to either caster or target sounds like a character ability.

that would be cool.

On 8/8/2020 at 3:26 PM, Magnus Grendel said:

Not sure about 4e, but when they popped up in d20 oriental adventures their default feat - the Kami Revealed - let you do an at-will detect magic , (in D&D terms) so...Yeah, I guess so.

What might work, looking at the old Inquisitor tree - is what was the Inquisitor's highest feat: Stealing the Kami. 5e has no real equivalent of the 'counterspell' (except with ivory kingdoms divine artefacts, but they're rarely going to feature in a rokugani samurai campaign).

A jade magistrate has the legal and spiritual authority to say 'no, don't do that' to both a shujenga and the spirits they call on - being able to either react with a counter-invocation, or make invocations (and maybe Maho?) harder if the Inquisitor is close to either caster or target sounds like a character ability.

So, once per round, during someone else's turn, you can make them reroll an amount of successes and explosive successes equal to your Honor rank whenever they roll for an evocation? Or if that is too broken, just 3 dice?

2 hours ago, Diogo Salazar said:

So, once per round, during someone else's turn, you can make them reroll an amount of successes and explosive successes equal to their Honor rank whenever they roll for an evocation? Or if that is too broken, just 3 dice?

I dont know the mechanics well enough to call whether that is a good or not...have to experiment

Yay for experimentation!

20 hours ago, Diogo Salazar said:

So, once per round, during someone else's turn, you can make them reroll an amount of successes and explosive successes equal to your Honor rank whenever they roll for an evocation? Or if that is too broken, just 3 dice?

Just because (you'd hope!) a Jade Magistrate is a pretty high-level samurai who's potentially going to have an honour rank in the 70s or more, I'd rather have it be a fixed number. Plus, making it dependent on honour rank means, say, a Yogo magistrate of the Kuroiban 'effectiveness over honour' philosophy will be, relatively speaking, useless.

Forcing someone to reroll 2 dice is an automatic, permanent disadvantage (but without the benefit of a void point). That feels not-too-powerful, but bear in mind Title abilities, rather than school abilities, aren't generally that potent. I might put in a proviso that the Jade Magistrate needs to be neither incapacitated, unconscious or compromised - basically, it's a free action but they need to be free to act to use it.

• Winter Court Champion lets you ignore two strife on checks to 'show off'.
• Emerald Magistrate is once per session, not once per turn. (Your idea feels like it would be fine if also once per session)
• Daimyo gives you bonuses on command checks on your vassals. Which matters in mass combat, but otherwise....how often do you need to pass a hard command check when you're a daimyo and you're giving orders to your vassals?
• Advisors have an awesome ability to provide their full skill rank as skilled assistance.....but they're doing so instead of just making the check themselves, so it's not actually that amazing.

Although I've got the impression that title abilities are, by and large, considered underwhelming for their XP cost, so making one that's a bit stronger might be a good idea.

And the advisor is amazing. It's much better than just making the check themselves. Let's say they're Ring 3 Skill 3, and the person they're assisting is also Ring 3, but only Skill 1.

If the advisor rolled with assistance from the other person, they'd roll 3 ring dice, 4 skill dice and keep 4.

If the advisor assists, that becomes 3 ring dice, 4 skill dice, keep 6.

Well, I guess the xp cost depends on how powerful the title ability is. Dreaded enforcer lets you ignore 2 strife whenever you murdering or planning to murder someone. But yes, the point about not being unconscious or incapacitated or compromised is important as well.

1 hour ago, Myrion said:

Although I've got the impression that title abilities are, by and large, considered underwhelming for their XP cost, so making one that's a bit stronger might be a good idea.

And the advisor is amazing. It's much better than just making the check themselves. Let's say they're Ring 3 Skill 3, and the person they're assisting is also Ring 3, but only Skill 1.

If the advisor rolled with assistance from the other person, they'd roll 3 ring dice, 4 skill dice and keep 4.

If the advisor assists, that becomes 3 ring dice, 4 skill dice, keep 6.

Agreed, but nine times out of ten, the advisor will be the one with the good scholar skill ranks (because that's why you've made them your advisor).

So whilst I'm not playing down the extra dice, it's a difference between the advisor assisting you and you assisting the advisor. Assuming you've got a lower skill rank, the title is 'buying you' the difference between one added die and that character's skill rank. Sorry; my bad - I meant your advisor doing it

Also note that I don't think the Advisor title increases the number of extra dice you can keep for assistance, only the number of extra dice you roll.

On rereading, I think you're right, and it only adds Xk1, basically.

That is cool, but not as good.

On 8/6/2020 at 10:01 PM, Diogo Salazar said:

Scholar skill group
Command
Fitness
Cleansing Spirit
Rouse the Soul
Jade Strike (with errata to make it affect Tainted instead of or in addition to otherworldly beings)

Honestly, I have no idea for the title ability.

Would Jade Magistrates be required to have the gift of the Kami? where as their Yoriki would not?

What do you mean by Gift of the Kami? The ability to use invocations? Just remember that there's no more universal spells like Sense, Commune and Summon, so mechanically, I guess, a Jade Magistrate was somehow taught how to entice Earth Kami nearby to Jade Strike someone and that's it.

1 hour ago, Diogo Salazar said:

What do you mean by Gift of the Kami? The ability to use invocations? Just remember that there's no more universal spells like Sense, Commune and Summon, so mechanically, I guess, a Jade Magistrate was somehow taught how to entice Earth Kami nearby to Jade Strike someone and that's it.

the ability to interact with the kami. to invoke them etc. The stuff shugenja do

1 hour ago, Diogo Salazar said:

What do you mean by Gift of the Kami? The ability to use invocations? Just remember that there's no more universal spells like Sense, Commune and Summon, so mechanically, I guess, a Jade Magistrate was somehow taught how to entice Earth Kami nearby to Jade Strike someone and that's it.

Except that, as per rules as written (which I personally disagree with) learning 1 invocation immediately gives you the ability to importune for any other invocation. Currently that's limited because you can only learn an invocation if they're on your school curriculum or a 1% chance from the heritage table.

Putting an invocation on a title is basically saying, anyone can theoretically use any invocation.

32 minutes ago, Daeglan said:

the ability to interact with the kami. to invoke them etc. The stuff shugenja do

Well, as I said, the stuff Shugenja did, which were to Commune, Sense and Summon kami, and other spells just being specific ways of doing all these 3 tasks in specific manner don't exist anymore, but as mentioned by @Tonbo Karasu below, now, if you know one invocation, you can importune kami for any others.

27 minutes ago, Tonbo Karasu said:

Except that, as per rules as written (which I personally disagree with) learning 1 invocation immediately gives you the ability to importune for any other invocation. Currently that's limited because you can only learn an invocation if they're on your school curriculum or a 1% chance from the heritage table.

Putting an invocation on a title is basically saying, anyone can theoretically use any invocation.

You are right, I did forget that. So, back to the drawing board? Assuming every Jade Magistrate is already by default a Shugenja (or trained by the Kaito) we should replace Jade Strike (but keep my suggestion to affect Tainted) with something else.

7 minutes ago, Diogo Salazar said:

Well, as I said, the stuff Shugenja did, which were to Commune, Sense and Summon kami, and other spells just being specific ways of doing all these 3 tasks in specific manner don't exist anymore, but as mentioned by @Tonbo Karasu below, now, if you know one invocation, you can importune kami for any others.

You are right, I did forget that. So, back to the drawing board? Assuming every Jade Magistrate is already by default a Shugenja (or trained by the Kaito) we should replace Jade Strike (but keep my suggestion to affect Tainted) with something else.

Or house-rule importuning to be something that requires the Shugenja tag, giving you the freedom to put Invocations into the Title and reducing the number of 8s rolled on heritage tables from 50% of rolls to about 30%. [eta I may be slightly cynical about this]

4 minutes ago, Diogo Salazar said:

Well, as I said, the stuff Shugenja did, which were to Commune, Sense and Summon kami, and other spells just being specific ways of doing all these 3 tasks in specific manner don't exist anymore, but as mentioned by @Tonbo Karasu below, now, if you know one invocation, you can importune kami for any others.

You are right, I did forget that. So, back to the drawing board? Assuming every Jade Magistrate is already by default a Shugenja (or trained by the Kaito) we should replace Jade Strike (but keep my suggestion to affect Tainted) with something else.

Unless being able to use invocations is a prerequisite? Which you could do i would think...

Historically the Jade Magistrates (when they existed) were always Shujenga.

Therefore I suspect adding the Shujenga school 'tag' as a prerequisite for the title, which ducks the whole question, as it's highly unlikely we'd ever see a Shujenga school without access to invocations.

15 hours ago, Tonbo Karasu said:

Except that, as per rules as written (which I personally disagree with) learning 1 invocation immediately gives you the ability to importune for any other invocation. Currently that's limited because you can only learn an invocation if they're on your school curriculum or a 1% chance from the heritage table.

Putting an invocation on a title is basically saying, anyone can theoretically use any invocation.

Agreed, but Importuning invocations aren't 'free' - for starters they're harder than normal (minimum TN+1) and, much more importantly, must make an offering.

"Whether or not something is sufficiently important is left to the GM’s discretion, but generally, the item should at least be rare, if not unique. The item is lost forever as the kami absconds with it."

If you feel Importuned invocations are too much of a flexible toolbox (and I can see the argument!) then my suggestion for what it's worth is to be stricter with what qualifies as an offering.

If, as an extreme example, a shujenga is having to permanently give up their ancestral family sword to get the kami to intercede, they're not going to use that outside a really dramatic and climactic scene.

I'm hesitant to restrict importune invocations to 'just' Shujenga as we have quite a few borderline cases (like the Kaito or Fortunist schools) that feel like they deserve the ability but are strictly classed as monks not shujenga.

18 minutes ago, Magnus Grendel said:

I'm hesitant to restrict importune invocations to 'just' Shujenga as we have quite a few borderline cases (like the Kaito or Fortunist schools) that feel like they deserve the ability but are strictly classed as monks not shujenga.

How about you're only able to Importune for an Invocation that they have not learned, but is on their curriculum?

5 hours ago, Tonbo Karasu said:

How about you're only able to Importune for an Invocation that they have not learned, but is on their curriculum?

Two reasons.

1. Because if it's 'further up' the curriculum, it's almost certain to be of a higher rank than your school rank. Which means at least TN+2, which means the odds of passing it are very low.
2. The Fortunist Monk's invocations are in a sidebar, rather than their curriculum.

Just now, Magnus Grendel said:

Two reasons.

1. Because if it's 'further up' the curriculum, it's almost certain to be of a higher rank than your school rank. Which means at least TN+2, which means the odds of passing it are very low.
2. The Fortunist Monk's invocations are in a sidebar, rather than their curriculum.

For 1, I know that I never learn every Invocation that I'm technically allowed to at each rank. To start with, there's normally more XP-worth to learn than is needed to finish a rank.

For 2, I'm actually okay with that - Fortunist's aren't invoking the kami to do things for them - they are blessed with specific abilities by specific Fortunes. A monk's close connection to Fukurokujin, for example, wouldn't let them throw boulders about, IMHO.