Saying what I said in the other thread-- in a setting that involves 7 to 10 different factions, it feels a bit odd to have a game where people are told to play through it from the perspective of a single clan against another clan until they get their best possible result and then report those as their result.

Although it is enlightening here to find out that there is in fact a way to do a perfect play-through, it just involved having different priorities than I did.

Still-- I think the end result of this is kind of predictable-- the Lion will definitely retake the village, the commander will probably be rescued, the message will probably be intercepted and well.... I think whether or not to read it is the most questionable result.

Because this has been presented as 4 goals with a pass/fail state to players and those players are encouraged to play through it until they pass as many of the goals as they can, I really do believe that most players will report having passed as many goals as they can find the result for. Who wants to report that they took up the challenge and failed completely?

Granted-- the fact that the old L5R story team always offered up the most unlikely, ridiculous potential choices and the playerbase always decided to go for that rather than what would seem like the more likely, sensible direction for the story to go in-- as if the playerbase simply wanted to troll the Storyteam and see if they could write up something within 24 hours that entirely went against everything the story up to that point had totally been aiming towards and take a last minute swerve to present whatever ludicrous choice that someone winning some tournament had made... yeah, that was crazy. And it drove L5R down a bad road...

But this sort of "illusion of choice", particularly in a case where it feels it hardly even matters at all in the grand scope of things... it feels utterly deflating.

I mean-- really-- its going to come down to "The Lion win everything!!" or the majority of players self-reporting "I am stupid and couldn't figure out how to get the best result"?

Honestly-- this sort of predictable result does make me yearn for the days of "if you can win the tournament as Nezumi, then we'll have a Nezumi Emerald Champion" days.

The playerbase trolling the story team to drive the whole setting off a cliff at least left me in a position for rooting for some result over another. A story choice where it is so **** predictable where everyone is going to land because their personal pride is at stake leaves me in no position to root for anything at all.

Granted-- the card game tournament results are of no consequence. Ever since the game launched, the Scorpion have been so insanely imbalanced to every other card that has been printed that they kind of automatically win everything. And that occasionally happened in the old game, but while some factions might have sucked for long periods of time, it was rare for any single faction to be so utterly dominant and broken for more than 8 months. And this game is releasing packs faster than the old one was.

So I think this sort of game was a good idea, but I totally wish it had been in such a state where the results did not blatantly favor just a single clan and choices were ambiguous enough that there was far less of an outright "win" or "lose" condition, and instead the choices might have, at most, been suggested to favor or disfavor one of the 7 to 10 factions in the game.

I might have mentioned before that I gave up even buying a single deck of the card game when I found out the average time of a match is 90 minutes. I mean, seriously? If it's two wing big or go home decks fighting against each other, it's possible for 2 Magic players finish 6 matches in that time period. So, the problem began there. Then, there is the fact that winning by military victory can take forever with a deck that can hold you off and then you just need to hold on long enough to dishonor your opponent. Not that the Scorpion didn't do back then, but the game felt more dynamic back then.

Anyway, I don't care the story team taking a collective decision to affect just a small part of the story. I prefer that to Evil Hoturi being a thing just because 80% of the player base couldn't agree on anything except that they hated the Crane.

55 minutes ago, Diogo Salazar said:

I might have mentioned before that I gave up even buying a single deck of the card game when I found out the average time of a match is 90 minutes. I mean, seriously? If it's two wing big or go home decks fighting against each other, it's possible for 2 Magic players finish 6 matches in that time period. So, the problem began there. Then, there is the fact that winning by military victory can take forever with a deck that can hold you off and then you just need to hold on long enough to dishonor your opponent. Not that the Scorpion didn't do back then, but the game felt more dynamic back then.

Anyway, I don't care the story team taking a collective decision to affect just a small part of the story. I prefer that to Evil Hoturi being a thing just because 80% of the player base couldn't agree on anything except that they hated the Crane.

A lot of games I saw in the first couple years of the game were able to end on turn 2 or 3 because there really was absolutely no point in spending resources defending because all your characters go away at the end of the turn. What you have during any given turn is what you could buy during any given turn, unless you threw away extra resources to keep one high cost character around for 2 turns.

The game doesn't allow for any real building or coordinating-- and yet you spend so much time fiddling around with tokens-- and every last decision being so unbearably critical that it takes forever.

And between the card costs and the low amount of resources you get at any turn-- there really is no such thing as buying up everything you reveal in your provinces on any given turn. The vast majority of cards in any given deck are a waste-- you just buy in a single personality and use it to break provinces.

And it seems they functionally stopped printing any neutral cards about 2 years ago, a great dismay to the fans of the primary 3 minor factions. Can't really expect them to put out an Imperial or Mantis Clan or Shadowlands card worth playing when they can't even make a Lion or Crab card worth including in a deck.

The whole thing is an utter mess-- which is a major disappointment given that it seems FFG can print numerous other card games that people have fun with. But this whole L5R LCG forum is all but dead compared to 2 years ago-- all except this fiction area.

Still keen interest in the story. But fixing the actual underlying game is another matter entirely.

I see various people suggesting a second edition of the game, but who knows how many things they have already lined up to print.... and how many people will feel sour over what they have bought so far in the name of loyalty to the IP-- regardless of everything being broken pretty much from the starter set.

1 hour ago, TheHobgoblyn said:

Still-- I think the end result of this is kind of predictable-- the Lion will definitely retake the village, the commander will probably be rescued, the message will probably be intercepted and well.... I think whether or not to read it is the most questionable result.

#s 2 & 3 are incompatible. If more people saved the commander, then he’s alive and the scroll got out to the Unicorn. Lion-Dragon connection is a solid plus, keeps one of Ujiaki’s conspirators around; it’s a good choice for anyone not wanting to be pro-Lion.

If more people recovered the scroll, then it comes down to if more people read it than not. Finding Kyosuke alive but leaving him to die while recovering the scroll and not reading it is the arguably the most Lion-positive result.

I do suspect that the Lion will retake the village, unless there’s a solid pro-Unicorn voting faction that makes sure to throw the battle against the Lion.

Overall, I thought this little ronin, choose your own ending, adventure story was a lot of fun.

I played it as an undercover Scorpion Shosuro, in the role of a ronin, with a mission to keep tabs on the Lion-Unicorn conflict.

His goal was the acquisition of information and to keep the Unicorn-Lion conflict going.

That way the Lion and Unicorn remain focused on each other instead of the Scorpion or the regent Shoju.

I ended up getting the scroll, opening it up for the information (obviously), and then helping the Lion enough so that they could win the battle.

Thus ensuring that the overall conflict remains a relative stalemate between the Unicorn and Lion.

It also had the added bonus of the commander dying.

I figured that was good as it prevents the Lion from having another competent leader to help them quickly end the conflict.

Overall, I reasoned that the information in the scroll was the worse option for the Lion and that it was better for myself

In contrast, I figured that the Lion getting back a competent commander would be better for them and thus worse for this undercover Scorpian and his goals.

Needless to say, I'm pretty happy with the ending I got.

It will be interesting to see which ending is the most popular and then become the offical ending to this story.

Reminder: Your story decisions in An Impossible Task are due by Tomorrow!

https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/news/2020/11/2/an-impossible-task-4/