Hello people,

we have recently started playing the L5R - RPG and we love it: the setting, the artwork, the adventures... FFG at its best since Dark Heresy.

However, it did not take us long to realize that this game does have some significant issues, mainly certain parts of the ruleset which are overly complex and can bog down the experience heavily. We identified mainly two areas. Here is our experience with these problems and how we solved them:

Opportunity

Problem: This is just a giant mental cluster-****. Trying to remember which ring opportunity does what requires constant flickering in the rules. Especially for narrative purposes, trying to find an appropriate use for every roll is time consuming and definitely puts a strain on the GM.

Solution: We heavily simplified it, so that opportunity has the same effect on all rings. Narrative opportunities always remove 2 strife. Combat opportunities do the same, as well as the possibility to inflict 2 strife to an enemy instead.

Combat Stances

Problem: This is another way too complex aspect of the rules. Choosing which ring stance according to what they do needs to be contemplated, as well as then remembering all the additional actions and effects they produce. This slows combat down to a crawl and makes it a rule crunch, instead of something fact-paced and exciting.
Solution: Players can simply choose what ring stance they like, effecting number of dice rolled and possible techniques only. The enemy will respond by attacking the PCs in the same stance in which they attacked the enemy, effecting the enemy's number of dice rolls. So you might attack an enemy in a certain ring stance to deny it a high amount of dice in the same stance, even if it means you also do not get your optimum ring stance. If the enemy attacks first, then the GM chooses the enemy's stance, usually the one with the highest dice rolls.

Both have changes have made our game way more smooth and allowed for a more fluent experience in narration as well as combat. What do you guys think about it?

While I agree the generic opportunities found on page 328-329 take a while to get used to I would say they work just fine. Remember, Minions are not supposed to spend Opportunities unless they specifically mentioned in their NPC sheet. You could do the same for Adversaries as well, if you don't want to spend too much time looking for them, so it just becomes a matter for the players and believe me, they will catch up soon enough.

And I would say that you created another problem by doubling the amount of rolls when before there was only one. I mean, there's a reason why later attempts of WoD simplified combat rolls from 4 dice rolls to 1.

And I mean, I don't how you guys are playing (if online through roll20/discord/TTS) or in person. But the character sheet has the stance bonus written on it, it doesn't take much to figure that out.

My initial reaction is that this removes a lot of the identity of the five rings from Legend of the Five Rings. Now I'm rolling Fire because I'm mechanically forced to by my opponent, not because it reflects my role-playing choice of being flashy, emotional, or aggressive. And with opportunity being spent the same way, each of the rings might start to feel sort of the same.

That said, I'm pro adapting the rules however you need to for your table. I agree that it takes a while to figure out how you can spend opportunity, so I understand the appeal of simplifying things. My sense is that L5R leads to more house ruling than most other RPGs.

14 minutes ago, MonCalamariAgainstDrunkDriving said:

My initial reaction is that this removes a lot of the identity of the five rings from Legend of the Five Rings. Now I'm rolling Fire because I'm mechanically forced to by my opponent, not because it reflects my role-playing choice of being flashy, emotional, or aggressive. And with opportunity being spent the same way, each of the rings might start to feel sort of the same.

That said, I'm pro adapting the rules however you need to for your table. I agree that it takes a while to figure out how you can spend opportunity, so I understand the appeal of simplifying things. My sense is that L5R leads to more house ruling than most other RPGs.

I mean, before you rolled specific attributes for specific skills, so you kind of knew that for being good in X I also need to increase Y but on this edition it's not necessarily this way, any Ring can be used for any skills and they have different uses (except martial skills that they all do the same thing, i.e hit enemy but the way the enemy is hit differs). I agree with MCADD, give it a time before doing all this because then, all the Rings lose what makes them unique and everyone will just roll whatever is their highest Ring all the time.

8 hours ago, Diogo Salazar said:

And I would say that you created another problem by doubling the amount of rolls when before there was only one. I mean, there's a reason why later attempts of WoD simplified combat rolls from 4 dice rolls to 1.

What do you mean by WoD? And how exactly did we double the amount of rolls?

I do agree that especially the combat solution is not the most elegant one. Here indeed we might add the ring stance effects over time, once we got down the rest of the combat system fluently. It does add some flavour to the ring styles, I can see that. Thanks for the advice.

Yet I just do not see the same in the opportunities, especially the narrative ones. The rings choice there is either already determinded by the test itself, or you choose the ring according to the highest amount of dice you will. Choosing the ring according to what opportunity you might get comes tertiary, if at all. Looking what the narrative opportunities do, and then having to find an appropriate detail which can be revealed, is too time consuming. Yet even here, we might at least adapt at least the mechanical uses of the rings, over time. But I do not see the flavour this gives to the rings here so much, the effects of the mechanical ring opportunities seem more generic, compared to the effects of the combat stances.

WoD = World of Darkness, the White Wolf storytelling system. Each attack in the original rules was "roll to attack", "Roll to dodge", "roll to damage", "roll to soak". When they redid it it became "roll to attack and damage". I'm not sure what was meant by doubling the rolls.

2 hours ago, Tonbo Karasu said:

WoD = World of Darkness, the White Wolf storytelling system. Each attack in the original rules was "roll to attack", "Roll to dodge", "roll to damage", "roll to soak". When they redid it it became "roll to attack and damage". I'm not sure what was meant by doubling the rolls.

I do like this aspect of both this game and Genesys (which L5R shares a lot of mechanical DNA with). Adding bonus successes to base damage rather than having a seperate damage roll is elegant and also prevents the 'perfect roll to hit' resulting in a damage roll of 'slight ineffectual tickle', which is just embarrasing.

12 hours ago, Diogo Salazar said:

I mean, before you rolled specific attributes for specific skills, so you kind of knew that for being good in X I also need to increase Y but on this edition it's not necessarily this way, any Ring can be used for any skills and they have different uses

Indeed. One thing I do like is that - barring a straight up dungeon crawl - it's a system which really doesn't support trying to min-max a character.

14 hours ago, Drakenhart84 said:

Problem: This is just a giant mental cluster-****. Trying to remember which ring opportunity does what requires constant flickering in the rules. Especially for narrative purposes, trying to find an appropriate use for every roll is time consuming and definitely puts a strain on the GM.

I've often pushed that onto the players. One of the biggest pieces of advice I can give in this system is to off-load a lot of the narrative innovating onto the players.

One reason disadvantages provide void points, for example, is to give players a reason to be actively asking the GM "can I trigger this thing which will make me worse?" instead of picking a disadvantage which will never matter in the story, like an allergy to a specific variety of yobanjin cheese or something.

Equally, let the players suggest ways - especially narratively - that an opportunity might be useful during the check. Let them say 'could I use opportunities to.....?' and do so before they're 'locked in' by choosing kept results, because then they know if they've got enough to matter. Equally, it's not unreasonable (occasionally) to say 'there's nothing much you could do with that opportunity, so there's no specific point keeping it.'.

Obviously in conflict scenes then opportunities will pretty much be the players' problems to manage as 90% of them will either be to trigger critical strikes or a specific PC's techniques.

14 hours ago, Drakenhart84 said:

Problem: This is another way too complex aspect of the rules. Choosing which ring stance according to what they do needs to be contemplated, as well as then remembering all the additional actions and effects they produce. This slows combat down to a crawl and makes it a rule crunch, instead of something fact-paced and exciting.

In a narrative scene, obviously it's drawn from the approach of a specific task, but in a conflict scene most PCs I've seen tend to pick and stick with their best ring, barring wounds or something really specific (like a need to ignore strife so void, or a need to un-incapacitate themselves so water). I'm surprised to see players swapping ring so much in a skirmish.

5 hours ago, Drakenhart84 said:

Choosing the ring according to what opportunity you might get comes tertiary, if at all. Looking what the narrative opportunities do, and then having to find an appropriate detail which can be revealed, is too time consuming.

Adding a detail is one I only tend to use if the detail is going to immediately come into play - convenient rope or adding a temporary disadvantage to an enemy or something. People don't need a massive list of advantages or disadvantages, in much the same way a character spending too much XP on too many techniques (and not enough ring and skill dice to trigger them in the first place) is kind of redundant.

But sometimes the generic opportunities are pretty much 'the point' - an obvious one is air, when - for example - gathering information; there is a generic opportunity spend to 'perform the task subtly' - meaning that you need successes or explosive successes to determine if you succeed , and opportunities to determine if someone knows you've succeeded; that's something, for example, which gets used in narrative scenes quite a lot in our games.

6 hours ago, Drakenhart84 said:

What do you mean by WoD? And how exactly did we double the amount of rolls?

My understanding was that to attack you roll, for instance Fire/Martial skill and then the target would roll the same thing to deny your success. Or I somehow interpreted this wrong?

22 hours ago, Diogo Salazar said:

My understanding was that to attack you roll, for instance Fire/Martial skill and then the target would roll the same thing to deny your success. Or I somehow interpreted this wrong?

I think he meant that if you attack in fire stance, it's resolved normally, but then the enemy is also forced to use fire stance for their attack back.

Or vice-versa, if they get the drop on you.

Oh, okay. That’s a horrible house rule then. It takes away players’ agency (when they lose initiative) and most players will try to get kata as generic as possible (by generic I mean kata that are not fixed to a particular Ring).

On 10/12/2020 at 5:39 PM, MonCalamariAgainstDrunkDriving said:

My sense is that L5R leads to more house ruling than most other RPGs.

words of wisdom.

On 10/14/2020 at 5:00 AM, Diogo Salazar said:

Oh, okay. That’s a horrible house rule then. It takes away players’ agency (when they lose initiative) and most players will try to get kata as generic as possible (by generic I mean kata that are not fixed to a particular Ring).

Also, even when PCs get to choose their own stance, most Kata are better against specific elements. Water is strong against Fire, which I think is strong against... Air?