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Lago PARANOIA
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Post by Lago PARANOIA »

Also, the whole taking a shit on ninjas smacks of blatant hypocrisy. If you're doing an actual historical fiction game of faux-Asia where things are supposed to be realistic and shit on all levels, then sure, feel free to make fun of that kind of ninja archetype. It's not even a bad way to build street cred; people have been doing the whole 'Hollywood are full of sensationalized and sanitized lying liars; here's how it REALLY went down' stuff for ages with pirates and cowboys and shit.

However, if you already have fucking shugenjas in your game then you've already gone well past the event horizon. At that point you're just being a fanboy. Nothing wrong with being a fanboy, but let's get serious here: ninjas are the most-loved part about fantasy Japan. Samurai come in at a distant second place. This is true even in the country that created both archetypes. Dissing ninjas at that point is like trying to make a fantasy Western game that doesn't have cowboys in it, instead focusing on the conflict between shamanistic American Indians and the technomagic U.S. Army.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.

In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
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Post by Login »

The good parts of L5R are written by the players, as they play. I wish that were marketing bullshit, but it's true. It happened to my friends and I, both for the CCG and the rpg. Thing is, every day, a L5R author wakes up and shits on another bit of canon. Eventually, they shit on something that you and your friends invented. Do you touch that bit again? Obviously not.

Now imagine that process happening on everything you once liked about an IP and you can see how old-school L5R players feel.

You can see that with ninjas.

Wick's ninjas didn't disturb anyone for a very important and perverse reason: there was no good ninja support in the CCG when L5R rpg 1e came out. As such, we, the then-fanbase, had no reason to believe that there weren't tons of "real ninjas" with super-powers running about, as opposed to the pajamas guys, so we could still get our "ninjas." After all, the Shosuro Assassin school still got (non-level-relevant) super-powers, right?

Maybe all the card-game pajama ninjas are the ninja and their troupe of distractions. Yeah, that could work. A stretch? Hell yes, but we'll mind caulk it until the authors get around to --

Image

Oh.

What the shit?!


So we forgot about the Wick plot hole. We forgot about it because the crazy train rolled through and plowed our previous concerns. Sure, L5R NEEDS black-pajama ninjas, but finding a super-powered excuse to get both those and "real" espionage spy-ninjas is a trivial exercise for a fantasist. So a clever writer could still slap the pajama ninjas around while giving players pajama and plainclothes ninjas to play with. Could. But we never got to address that problem in the first place because something far worse happened to the story that totally obliviated the issue.

Note that this means that there are actually FOUR* types of ninjas in L5R:
*4.5; see below.

• 1) Black pajama fake ninjas. Good one, Wick. Card support received: less than zero. This is because a) no one at AEG gave a shit about what Wick was writing and b) because of the second ninja type.

This is where the image of the ninja supporting this concept in the CCG would be if it existed. Instead, enjoy a spoiler of explicit refutations of this concept:
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Distracts people, is Scorpion, but is not a ninja. (Is a people, btw: it's a Retainer, a person so uninteresting that he works like holding, a piece of property.)

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This is a combat unit; it has nothing to do with espionage or distraction.

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Okay, this is close, but this guy has more military prowess than some infantry groups and is built for surprise attacks, not drawing fire. No dice.

Note that we have here several examples of "ninja-in-training" and each example rejects the Wickian notion. These cards are also fairly new, btw: there are no ninja-in-training concept cards from Back Inna Day.

• 2) Black pajama real ninjas. Matsu Hiroru, come on down! (Note: the most prominent, thematic, useful, and named ninja for the early history of L5R was not a Scorpion.) These ninjas made Wick's version a retcon. No attempt at reconciliation was ever made, which means that the CCG basically "overwrote" Wick's retcon. This gets you into the aforementioned fuck you territory:

•• New L5R rpg player: "I played lots of ninjas in the CCG! I want to do the same in the rpg!"
•• L5R rpg: "You fucking munchkin. I'm giving all your toys to shugenja. Take a trivial bonus to stealth and go cry in a corner."

There is actually no conceptual space for black pajama real ninjas in L5R. Really. They exist, but, by written canon, they can't. If you're going to sneak-kill someone in Rokugan, you wear pajamas Because Japan, but there's no in-game reason why you do it. You aren't a Shosuro trainee, you aren't shadow-eaten (and therefore have literal black-as-pitch skin). It's a subtle example of dissociated theme (as opposed to disassociated mechanics).
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No, you cannot play this and be effective in the rpg you fucking munchkin. Also, this card is terrible, but I'm raging off-topic.

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This card is mostly poor in 1v1 but good in multiplayer, and the latter is exactly the reason why it saw play -- is what you would say if you don't know what mammaries are. I must stop with the ccg mechanical conclusions. Again: you won't be playing her in the rpg.

• 3) Lying Darkness ninjas. Again, there's no reason in story to call these guys ninjas at all, but we call them ninjas because Soesbee.
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No one has ever, to my knowledge, ever Rule 34'd faceless ninjas. You know what you must do.
Also, this card is terrible. Please help me stop help me help me

• 3.5) Lying Darkness ninjas, subcategory: other.
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This. . . takes explaining. . . the thing is. . . fuck it, moving on.

• 4) Students of the Shosuro Acting School and Shosuro Assassin School. This is in 1e, was part of Wick's canon, and has been carried forward. By this logic, Lion spies and Crane Harriers (dickish guerilla fighters for the pansy clan) are all ninjas -- Harriers are featured in the Way of the Ninja splat for 3e (or 2e, whatever). This is mostly unsupported by the CCG: harriers never have the ninja keyword, Matsu Hiroru does. Note that the CCG also has people in non-pajamas -- usually spikey-armor deals -- that have the ninja keyword. They are mostly Scorpions.
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Do not ask for an explanation of the Ninjutsu trait.

Behold the conceptual ninja clusterfuck described here. Savor it. Roll it around your thinking jelly. AEG made a game about Japan and could not figure ninjas out. But this wasn't due to mere incompetence or stupidity: it's because every author is a Mary Sue loving fanwanker who couldn't care less about the consequences of any other author's work.

As for the rpg, the game handled ninja incompetence the way most games with "I hate you munchkins!" design fuckups do: all ninjas are high-level. NPCs with sweet ninja skills are Better Than You to the max. This has a bizarre consequence of making ninja NPCs TPKs when they should, thematically, run away from troupes of PCs.

The L5R rpg isn't worth saving, but I tried for awhile. My solution to The Ninja Problem should sound eerily familiar to you: everyone is a shugenja. Just give all non-shuggies the ability to use kihos or other powers by spending ring points just like shugenja then give them a power menu like spells and be on your merry. This was a clumsy, ad-hoc solution that demanded huge amounts of creative support (hence: not worth saving).
Last edited by Login on Fri Jan 02, 2015 12:43 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by fectin »

Except that every non-Lying Darkness ninja learned from Shosuro though, who was the original coruptee.
Vebyast wrote:Here's a fun target for Major Creation: hydrazine. One casting every six seconds at CL9 gives you a bit more than 40 liters per second, which is comparable to the flow rates of some small, but serious, rocket engines. Six items running at full blast through a well-engineered engine will put you, and something like 50 tons of cargo, into space. Alternatively, if you thrust sideways, you will briefly be a fireball screaming across the sky at mach 14 before you melt from atmospheric friction.
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Post by Login »

fectin wrote:Except that every non-Lying Darkness ninja learned from Shosuro though, who was the original coruptee.
No.

a) The Lying Darkness' first direct human contact was with Goju. (Maybe.) Depending on which story you're using (there are two directly contradictory tales), this happened either at the fall of the clan-founder kami (pre-Shosuro's Scorpion status) or during the ninja purge (note that the latter would make the ninja status of Goju's followers a coincidence of profession: if he had been a shugenja, it would be just as logical to label all Lying Darkness minions "shugenja").

b) Shosuro was retconned to be not even human, but instead a piece of the Lying Darkness given independent sentience. Whether or not that makes her truly the Shadow or a conduit for it is ambiguous. And tedious.

c) Not all ninjas are Scorpions or Scorpion-trained, and therefore would not have derived their nature from Shosuro.

d) Other points of contact with the Lying Darkness can and have existed, and since these points of contact can be arbitrarily invented, there can be an infinite set of Lying Darkness ninja sources. For example, the Nothing* was present in the Obsidian Hand, which has the potential to grant the holder the ninja trait. Apparently. And Hitomi could spread this trait. The Lying Darkness can make direct contact with a mortal, without recourse to Goju, Shosuro, Hitomi, or prosthetic limbs.

N.B.: If you did not understand something in this post, rest assured, it is not worth understanding.

*For something which has no name, this motherfucker sure has a lot of fucking names.**

**The Nothing was named Akodo, but I cannot recall a time where a former-ninja or the Nothing itself is ever called Akodo. Not once. The ccg search engine shows zero cards with "akodo" and "ninja" on them. (Including Emp. Toturi, who doesn't count for obvious reasons, anyway.) There are precisely zero examples of Goju who become Akodo in the ccg. I have never seen this done in the rpg, even though there are throwaway references to the Goju/Akodo transformation that are utterly nonsensical. ("Yup, we took these previously super-powered mentally-ill amnesiatic low-caste demihumans and made them all into loyal samurai with a bloodline stretching to a divine progenitor, and we did it in a few weeks. Happens all the time.) The L5R story seems to be fractally inconsistent: every inconsistency has within it another inconsistency that undermines the bullshit you just read, on and on.
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Post by Username17 »

Bottom line: you need to get the players on board with playing characters in the game. And on the most basic level that means that you need to provide genre and mechanical support for mixed parties of ninja, samurai, shugenja, and monks from different clans. But no less importantly, it means that you need to have "The Empire" be a thing that produces positive social change. And no, I don't mean that this means you need to make the enemies of the Empire be a bunch of cannibal rapists or something, I mean that the Empire itself has to actually be doing good things.

Here's the deal: your audience is a bunch of white people. Even your audience members who have slanty eyes and yellow skin have names like "David" and "John" and are basically just white people who happen to have extended family on the other side of the Pacific. Very importantly, they do not feel or care about xiào. The choice between doing the good thing and doing the thing their great grandparents intended for them to do is not an ethical dilemma that your audience members feel is particularly hard. Oyakoukou is not enough to compel players to do much of anything.

What that means is that in order to set up the sort of classic Asian tragedy "duty vs. desire" dilemma, the game has to present the Empire as something whose existence in its current state is self justified on utilitarian grounds. Undermining the social order of the empire has to be something that appears to carry genuine risk. Which means that the Empire has to be regularly using its labor levies to save people from flooding, to be using its draconian taxes to build libraries that extend literacy, and to be using its armies of conquest to spread food security and higher living standards to the Bakemono tribes.

When you just fall back on the "Yeah? But the bad guys are really bad!" that doesn't cut it. Not remotely. What happens then is that the players passively cheer for team Empire whenever it fights armies of cannibal mimes, but the rest of the time they basically just ignore whatever it is that the Empire wants them to do while they go off and save villagers from cannibal mimes in their own adventures. I ran a Rokugan campaign and it pretty much shook out exactly like that - when the Empire wanted them to save peasants from monsters they saved peasants from monsters, and when the Empire wanted them to do something else... they saved peasants from monsters. The Empire needs to have actual moral authority, not just traditional authority. Because the players aren't from the in-game culture and tradition does not motivate them.

This interestingly means that one of the last "fun" big reveals - that Fu Leng had taken over the Emperor - was actually terrible for the game and they never should have gone there. It made the entire decision to refuse Imperial Edicts and run off to be a heroic adventurer way too simple and easy. The Empire has to be good, even a morally neutral Empire is too easy of a voice to ignore. An actually corrupt, let alone villainous Empire isn't even a choice - the players simply declare themselves to be rebels as soon as a coup excuse appears and never look back. It's like Star Wars levels of moral quandaries about whether to support the Empire or not. Also, it played merry hell with the Card Game, I mean what the fuck did the Imperial Favor even mean at that point?

So if you were rebooting L5R, or launching a new Oriental Adventures setting that learned from L5R's mistakes, the Empire would not just be "good," it would do good things. The basic structures of the Empire would explicitly and demonstrably improve the lives of the people living in it and also allow for and support things we would recognize as progress. And then questions like "Save an innocent man by undermining the laws and institutions of the Empire [Y/N]?" might be ones that the people playing Samurai would have to think about and discuss, rather than having a race for who could buzz in with a 'yes' fastest.

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Post by fectin »

@login
L5R wiki agrees with you, and I'm not looking deeper: Goju was earlier.

Even so, that still says that everyone with the "ninja" tag is either a minion of the Nothing, or traces their training directly to someone who was.

Matsu Hiroru is (maybe) an exception, but he has an especially convoluted background, and is a bad example of anything other than "love interest for Soesbee's Mary Sue."
Vebyast wrote:Here's a fun target for Major Creation: hydrazine. One casting every six seconds at CL9 gives you a bit more than 40 liters per second, which is comparable to the flow rates of some small, but serious, rocket engines. Six items running at full blast through a well-engineered engine will put you, and something like 50 tons of cargo, into space. Alternatively, if you thrust sideways, you will briefly be a fireball screaming across the sky at mach 14 before you melt from atmospheric friction.
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Post by Login »

fectin wrote:@login
L5R wiki agrees with you, and I'm not looking deeper: Goju was earlier.

Even so, that still says that everyone with the "ninja" tag is either a minion of the Nothing, or traces their training directly to someone who was.
Nope.
Image

Image

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Note: Is Harrier trained, but is not a Harrier, as per the previously noted practice. The ccg is consistent with its inconsistency. Also: is from another dimension. But it's close enough to count.
As for Hiroru:
Matsu Hiroru is an example of the Inevitably Increasing Shittiness phenomenon described above. When first printed, the card was a cool concept, the ninja assassin one would hope for (though crippled with terrible stats and costs). He incited mild curiosity: Lion is the last clan one would associate with ninjas, and he has a Lion name. An L5R author got around to using him: what result? A shitty, uninteresting fanfic. Hiroru wasn't useful -- he's a slow-burning high-cost low-utility card in a game about speed and efficiency -- so the impact of that terribleness was minimal. We all just put that in the bin of Potentially Cool Things That Are Now Shit and moved on.
The L5R rpg is meant to be consumed, not played. You're supposed to read it, revel in the fanwank, and do all of the heavy lifting of creating the world yourself. The central tension of L5R is that there is no tension.

There is no right or wrong in Rokugan. I don't mean that it's a nihilistic abyss. I mean there's really no appreciable tension due to moral decisions, if only because there are no real moral decisions. L5R is a game ostensibly about honor where honor doesn't really exist.

Being honorable is mandated by the gods and enforced nearly by the laws of physics themselves. Being honorable is easier than anything else you could ever do. Everybody does it. Literally, everybody. Dogmatic, ultra-disciplined obsessive compulsive behavior that would be shocking and rare in real life is observed in nearly every primate in Rokugan, to the point where you hesitate to call them human.

I ran L5R rpg games. Each game re-wrote the canon, not because we players wanted to, but because there was no game without such a re-write. (The game practically tells you to do this when it hands you socially strictly hierarchical feuding clans then says PCs from them work together all the time -- which deserves a rant in and of itself.) One expects feudal japanese drama to be built around the tension between authoritarianism and conscience, and/or between one social obligation or another. In L5R, one side is always completely correct so there is no such tension. Cleaving to authority always gets bennies and awards; failing to do so isn't just bad, it's soul-rapingly evil. After the first story arc, being the bad guy in L5R didn't mean you were just a terrorist or a criminal: it meant you were a tool of literal sentient evil.

This wasn't always exactly the case. . . exactly. Authors would backpedal this, but eventually the MarySuists won the day completely.

I and my players liked the idea of the Kolat. This was a criminal conspiracy that hated the kami, the gods and founders/owners of the Empire. They hated them because the kami are dicks. The kami were murderous thugs who took Rokugan by force and then created traditions of horrendous, continuous violence and despair. While the Kolat were originally created to be just the Rokugani Mafia, an author or two transformed them into a highly-philosophical anti-theist resistance movement.

Then they became eeevil monsters.

There can never be a central tension in L5R and the Empire can never stand for anything, or do anything useful, because if it did then it would mean that the leaders of the Empire lack Mary Sue perfection. This is why L5R has no human peasants. The lower classes exist to support the pointless war-making of the samurai, and are glad for it, and if they are ever not glad for it, they are evil. Like, physically evil -- they will usually end up with the Shadowlands trait. If that sounds like aristocratic bullshit, well, it is. And it's literally true in L5R.

Example:
Here is a pirate. She was fan-appreciated because she became the leader of the pirate faction (Mantis, which has other themes, but mostly pirate) and that faction hadn't had a pirate leader.
Image

Her leadership was challenged by the child of the previous (aristocratic) leader. The result? She becomes purely villainous, inferior to the opponent in every way, and is corrupted by Eeevil. No, really:
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Worse, since any behavior by a major character -- that includes your PCs, if you like -- can have its behavior justified by whatever theory of honor you like so long as it favors the leader, all moral justifications fall to meaningless pro-authority cant.

At this point, L5R is not a world background containing people.
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Post by Longes »

That's a lot of black pijama ninjas.
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Post by Username17 »

Having the opposition to the status quo be revealed as secret baby eating deviants with small penises is the kind of thing that can get people to support the status quo in a movie. It's completely ineffective in a cooperative storytelling medium. Participants can always just say "Sure, but I'm going to go make my own protest movement. With blackjack and hookers."

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This photo really improves the governor's position in a two way race against Big Fat Bug Face Baby Eating O'Brien, but does little to move the dial in a race against a generic Democrat.

L5R tried over and over again to get people to fap to the Empire kicking ass by having traitors to the empire be syphilitic rapists who weren't really human, and it doesn't work. Doubling and tripling down on it with ever more absurdly wicked villains is bad writing, but it's also a failure to learn from mistakes. If the Crab Clan having oni in their rank and file didn't make everyone boo and hiss at the Crab from the beginning, what made them think they could get everyone to think turning on the empire was a bad idea by having Hida Sukune flayed alive and run up a flag pole? And when that didn't work, what made them think that the Lying Darkness plotline would change anything?

The fact is that the Empire is portrayed as having certain people treated as subhumans that it is not even against the law to murder - and that's super fucked up. So while it's trivially easy to create a villain who is even worse, that still just makes people want to fight that villain - not to support the Empire.

The L5R people never figured out that Good isn't just the absence of Evil. To make Heroes, they need to do good things, not just fight people who do bad things. This means that you have to admit that there are social and economic problems, of course, because without the implacable yet entirely banal specters of food security, exposure, and disease it's not easy to find ways to do good works without somebody being a villain somewhere. But that's not a bad thing! Characters are supposed to be "great bureaucrats" and shit, and what the fuck can that even mean if there aren't shortages and disasters to combat?

Superman can't just have punchups with the second strongest man in the world every month. He also needs to save people from burning buildings and help test new super magnets and stuff.

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Post by Silent Wayfarer »

Isn't that part of the whole Kurosawan influence on L5R with Rokugan being some super gritty blood and honor thing where life is cheap and so on while at the same time having wizards and monsters and shit (which kind of turns the whole thing on its ear).

I don't know how I didn't realise it until now, but L5R basically cannot reconcile its mechanics with its setting (or even its current setting with its history) because essentially, the NPCs which make things happen basically do not play by the same rules as you. It's not even in the same rule system, they operate in a completely different universe that just looks similar.
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Post by Lago PARANOIA »

So, about how good/beneficial should the Empire be? Akbar the Great good? 2015 Finland good? Federation good? Are there any downsides to making the Empire being too good? I mean, even in Star Trek the various captains still had conflicts with their sponsoring power where you could still sympathize with said Federation.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.

In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
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Post by Longes »

Silent Wayfarer wrote:Isn't that part of the whole Kurosawan influence on L5R with Rokugan being some super gritty blood and honor thing where life is cheap and so on while at the same time having wizards and monsters and shit (which kind of turns the whole thing on its ear).

I don't know how I didn't realise it until now, but L5R basically cannot reconcile its mechanics with its setting (or even its current setting with its history) because essentially, the NPCs which make things happen basically do not play by the same rules as you. It's not even in the same rule system, they operate in a completely different universe that just looks similar.
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Post by Longes »

Lago PARANOIA wrote:So, about how good/beneficial should the Empire be? Akbar the Great good? 2015 Finland good? Federation good? Are there any downsides to making the Empire being too good? I mean, even in Star Trek the various captains still had conflicts with their sponsoring power where you could still sympathize with said Federation.
How about this?

At the center of the Empire, under the emperor's throne the Lying Darkness is sealed. It is literaly Hitler, Tzeentch and [Tzimisce] combined. The seal of the kami isn't perfect, so the Lying Darkness is slowly sipping through, tainting whatever it touches. There is a way to combat its influence - Honor. By being pure and following the code of the kami people of the Empire can stall their transformation into horrible mutated monsters.

This way breaking Honor becomes an actual dilema - do you use Low Skill (Lockpicking) to open the treasury and feed the starving peasants, knowing that it makes you one step closer to becoming a raving madman? Do you betray your greedy daimyo, knowing that loyalty and rules are the only things that keep Empire from turning into Mordor?
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Post by Schleiermacher »

If loyalty to corrupted people is itself virtuous, that scenario quickly becomes extremely fucked up. If not, where's the dilemma?

Also in general, Wheel of Time-style "evil is a monolithic and semisentient force" is and remains really dissatisfying in my opinion. It tends to lead to boredom and/or awkwardness if examined in any detail.

Also also, don't say "literal" when you mean the opposite of that. If you actually did mean that the main antagonist of the setting is an insane paranoid genius flesh-warping chaos god vampire turned German racist dictator then I apologise for jumping to conclusions, but in that case your idea is super dumb. :biggrin:
Last edited by Schleiermacher on Sat Jan 03, 2015 5:11 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by Omegonthesane »

Schleiermacher wrote:If loyalty to corrupted people is itself virtuous, that scenario quickly becomes extremely fucked up. If not, where's the dilemma?

Also in general, Wheel of Time-style "evil is a monolithic and semisentient force" is and remains really dissatisfying in my opinion. It tends to lead to boredom and/or awkwardness if examined in any detail.
The end of Wheel of Time included a reveal that if the Dark One was destroyed no one would have any ambition to make things better. If anything that makes the monolithic evil problem worse to me.
Schleiermacher wrote:Also also, don't say "literal" when you mean the opposite of that. If you actually did mean that the main antagonist of the setting is an insane paranoid genius flesh-warping chaos god vampire turned German racist dictator then I apologise for jumping to conclusions, but in that case your idea is super dumb. :biggrin:
That would make for an awesome campaign however.
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Post by Username17 »

Longes wrote:How about this?
It sucks. Basically you're just proposing Warhammer 40k grimderp bullshit where failing to go along with an incredibly shitty plan is playing into the hands of skin eating flayer demons. It's not heroic or interesting, it's just depressing and shitty. Grimderp doesn't inspire loyalty. Grimderp doesn't inspire at all.
Silent Wayfarer wrote:I don't know how I didn't realise it until now, but L5R basically cannot reconcile its mechanics with its setting (or even its current setting with its history) because essentially, the NPCs which make things happen basically do not play by the same rules as you. It's not even in the same rule system, they operate in a completely different universe that just looks similar.
That's the first problem, but you're actually missing a step. Having actually made a two tier system in which the NPCs get one set of rules and you get another, the authors insist on displaying their "creativity" by breaking both sets of rules when writing the backstory. So not only does Hitomi play by totally different rules as an NPC than when you are allowed to play her in the CCG (or as a much weaker, yet otherwise similar Mirumoto Samurai in the RPG), but when the wheels of the story move forward the authors keep coming up with new crap to let her Mary Sue it up even more. For fuck's sake, she literally becomes the Moon - something that before that point in the story wasn't a thing that was even a thing for NPCs.

So basically John Wick John Wicks you by playing by a different ruleset than you. But then the other authors John Wick him, by tossing even those rules out. Leading to a three tier system where even the "fuck you" narrative John Wick establishes isn't adhered to and things become dumber than you can imagine.
Lago wrote:So, about how good/beneficial should the Empire be? Akbar the Great good? 2015 Finland good? Federation good? Are there any downsides to making the Empire being too good? I mean, even in Star Trek the various captains still had conflicts with their sponsoring power where you could still sympathize with said Federation.
You're quite right that even Star Trek's Utopian Space Communists have no difficulty finding things for groups of good and intelligent people to have disagreements about. However, in a broader sense the more Utopian things are the less there is for heroes to do. There is a reason that Star Trek spends more time time traveling into Earth's past than it does messing about on the Federation's Earth.

The Empire needs to be taking active actions to improve quality of life, increase security, promote racial harmony, fight disease, and so on. But it also needs to be in a transitional state on all of those issues so there is room for heroes to make noticeable positive impacts. And the Empire as a whole needs to be resource limited such that political disagreements can be more complicated than "Racist politician wants to block food aid for Nezumi because he's a dick." When you levy ashigaru to go on bandit patrols, that reduces the manpower available for flood controls. Both tasks need doing, but it's a genuine question which needs more manpower assigned to it each year.

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Post by Longes »

FrankTrollman wrote:
Longes wrote:How about this?
It sucks. Basically you're just proposing Warhammer 40k grimderp bullshit where failing to go along with an incredibly shitty plan is playing into the hands of skin eating flayer demons. It's not heroic or interesting, it's just depressing and shitty. Grimderp doesn't inspire loyalty. Grimderp doesn't inspire at all.
Lago wrote:So, about how good/beneficial should the Empire be? Akbar the Great good? 2015 Finland good? Federation good? Are there any downsides to making the Empire being too good? I mean, even in Star Trek the various captains still had conflicts with their sponsoring power where you could still sympathize with said Federation.
You're quite right that even Star Trek's Utopian Space Communists have no difficulty finding things for groups of good and intelligent people to have disagreements about. However, in a broader sense the more Utopian things are the less there is for heroes to do. There is a reason that Star Trek spends more time time traveling into Earth's past than it does messing about on the Federation's Earth.

The Empire needs to be taking active actions to improve quality of life, increase security, promote racial harmony, fight disease, and so on. But it also needs to be in a transitional state on all of those issues so there is room for heroes to make noticeable positive impacts. And the Empire as a whole needs to be resource limited such that political disagreements can be more complicated than "Racist politician wants to block food aid for Nezumi because he's a dick." When you levy ashigaru to go on bandit patrols, that reduces the manpower available for flood controls. Both tasks need doing, but it's a genuine question which needs more manpower assigned to it each year.

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How does that promote "duty vs. moral" dilema? If the Empire is objectively good, and things that you do in service of the empire are objectively good, then where does the internal conflict come from. I generally don't mind, but in L5R "duty vs. moral" conflict is one of the design goals.
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Post by Dean »

FrankTrollman wrote: And the Empire as a whole needs to be resource limited such that political disagreements can be more complicated than "Racist politician wants to block food aid for Nezumi because he's a dick."

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Well there still needs to be a lot of that because it's a game. In real life the way you find out which areas of public need get which amount of support is with studies and investigative committees. That's effective but it's also super boring and not something you need 5 magical ninjas to do. The way you find out that the Nezumi aren't getting enough aid in a game is to find out that the politician in charge of that is racist.

The Empire as a whole can be good for the people but it can and should be frequently corrupt in small pockets, because rooting out corruption is something PC's can be good at while sponsoring committees to compare the benefits of dam creation VS Nezumi aid isn't.
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Post by Lago PARANOIA »

Longes wrote:How does that promote "duty vs. moral" dilema? If the Empire is objectively good, and things that you do in service of the empire are objectively good, then where does the internal conflict come from. I generally don't mind, but in L5R "duty vs. moral" conflict is one of the design goals.
Differing priorities. For example, if you think that Shadowlands cultists are a bigger problem in the city than the pirates but your governor is assigning you to an anti-pirate task force anyway, you have a reason to rebel and a reason to follow orders without making you look like an idiot or going OOC for doing either. Someone who agrees to head the task force can justify their decision by trying to find links between pirates and the cultists, getting the trust and alliance of the merchant's guild, getting enough money for a sting, etc. On the other hand, someone can try to actually do both duties satisfactorily and may be compelled to call in favors or do a rush job on one or both responsibilities or even stonewall.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.

In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
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Longes wrote:How does that promote "duty vs. moral" dilema? If the Empire is objectively good, and things that you do in service of the empire are objectively good, then where does the internal conflict come from. I generally don't mind, but in L5R "duty vs. moral" conflict is one of the design goals.
The idea is that when the Empire is doing good they are doing it in a "greatest good for greatest number" sort of way. So there are still people being dicked over all the time. And it's just broadly good, rather than universally good.

The easiest example would probably be the Bakemono. Bakemono in the empire are treated like second class citizens, because that is what they are. Bakemono are not allowed to become Magistrates and many lords will not allow them to become Samurai. The Empire pledges less rebuilding investment when a Bakemono village is devastated by a fire or a swarm of beetles than it does when a Human village is. This is wrong and unfair. However, there are still Bakemono outside the Empire, and their life is shit. They live close to starvation more years than not, and big Oni come over and take their shit whenever they want to. And while the insurance provided by the Empire is less than what it provides to its human subjects, it's infinity times better than the no insurance and also laughing at your misfortune that the Onis provide. And the status of Bakemono in the Empire is improving over time. The arc of history is moving towards justice for Bakemono in the Empire - and towards big stupid monsters shaking you down at will outside of it.

Clearly, what is best for Bakemono is to be in the Empire and play by the rules. To petition for greater status and stronger ties to the current social order. A social order which explicitly treats them as lessers to other people, but which also treats them better than the Hobbesian battle of all against all that exists in Yomi does.

You could make things similar (though perhaps less stark) for the human peasantry. The basic idea is that the Empire provides more than lawless chaos can, and that things within the Empire are also presenting measurable progress. It doesn't have to be Utopian to make the total package of the Empire be one that is easy to swallow.

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Dean wrote:Well there still needs to be a lot of that because it's a game. In real life the way you find out which areas of public need get which amount of support is with studies and investigative committees. That's effective but it's also super boring and not something you need 5 magical ninjas to do. The way you find out that the Nezumi aren't getting enough aid in a game is to find out that the politician in charge of that is racist.
You don't need ninjas to determine the needs of the Nezumi.

You do need ninjas to stop the "bandits" that are employed by the magistrate to persecute the Nezumi.

Here's the thing: L5R has corrupt officials. They fall into three basic categories:

1) Scorpions. Scorpions are allowed to be corrupt, so fuck you.*
*N.B.:
Scorpion corruption never has any adverse consequences. They are designated-acceptable villains. Also note that this is a retcon of an earlier, almost-as-bad situation: in 1e, Scorpions were often the default villains, and their villainy did have consequences: roving bands of PCs would gank them. Still AFB, but Scorpions were often cited as a possible bad guy in throwaway plot seeds. This is a problem because it brings us back to the No Mixed Parties problem. (I recall that GURPS Japan directly addressed this, saying that mixed parties were not a traditional part of Japanese adventures and that steps had to be taken to fix that. L5R just ignored the problem, even as it continuously aggravated it.)

While the No Mixed Parties problem persisted, the No Scorpions problem was addressed in the Scorpion splat -- the Wick one that was good -- with the invention of Scorpion Loyalty (tm). Once a Scorpion is your friend, that's it: he's your hook-up for life.** Loyalty was assigned a stat to parallel honor. This made it just as fucked as honor: honor was supposed to be a two-edged sword, where being high-honor gave you super-powers and a good rep but made you do dickish, shitty things. . . but since honor is Always Good, the downside never kicks in. Loyalty was a substitute for honor's mechanics, and since honor is fucked, loyalty becomes gosub honor --> divide by zero. So you just MTP all that shit until you've had enough and switch systems.

**Until you cross him, obviously. He works for the Jaffa/Klingon Revenge Obssessed Super-Mafia, so you knew that already.

Also, Scorpion loyalty never practically matters to non-Scorpions b/c Scorpions can't be your friend, so fuck you. See, here's the thing: Scorpions MUST betray you if the clan needs it. They go on and on about that: the Way of the Scorpion has a "good guy" Scorpion who the clan headfucks precisely because he's not being mean to nice people. So how does a "loyal" Scorpion balance these furies? Fuck you, the books never address the first real moral/social tension you have encountered.

And if they did address it, it would probably all turn to shit.
2) Shadowlands. If you steal money, but not in a heroic Mary Sue way, chances are something will rape your soul and you'll turn into a monster. Just a matter of time.

3) Throwaway choads. These are people who haven't hit category (2) yet. If they last long enough, they will be retconned into (2). Otherwise, they will be murdered by Mary Sues. No joke: most non-monster villains do not last longer than the story in which they are written. Non-monster villains with cards simply receive no story support at all as a general rule.

Image
Never appeared in story. Interesting card, though. Not good for 1v1 -- too slow -- but fun.

4) Mary Sue. These follow the Scorpion rule. These are rare: usually Crab and Mantis.


This means that it's up to the GM to create real, substantive foes and plots. Which boils down to writing your own game. You didn't need the rpg at all.
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Post by Lago PARANOIA »

Speaking of Bakemono:

This is what a Bakemono looks like in Oriental Adventures:
Image
Image

But here's what they mean in actual Japanese mythology:
Wikipedia wrote:Obake (お化け) and bakemono (化け物) are a class of yōkai, preternatural creatures in Japanese folklore. Literally, the terms mean a thing that changes, referring to a state of transformation or shapeshifting.

These words are often translated as ghost, but primarily they refer to living things or supernatural beings who have taken on a temporary transformation, and these bakemono are distinct from the spirits of the dead. However, as a secondary usage, the term obake can be a synonym for yūrei, the ghost of a deceased human being.

A bakemono's true form may be an animal such as a fox (kitsune), a raccoon dog (tanuki), a badger (mujina), a transforming cat (bakeneko), the spirit of a plant—such as a kodama, or an inanimate object which may possess a soul in Shinto and other animistic traditions. Obake derived from household objects are often called tsukumogami.
In fact, you might have heard the term Bakemono if you keep up with popular anime:
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I don't really think it matters that much whether or not the game has a civilization of common Youkai like tanukis and kappas and shit, but if you are going to have a bunch of hunchbacked goblin things can we please freaking call them something else?

What's more... I'm not super-familiar with Rokugan outside of Oriental Adventures, but I'd be willing to bet that there's a ton of stuff like that. AH and Frank mentioned as much in their review.
Last edited by Lago PARANOIA on Sat Jan 03, 2015 7:09 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.

In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
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Post by Silent Wayfarer »

One psycho lesbian athlete please.
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Post by Username17 »

Bakemono has its origins from a word meaning "shapeshifter," practically speaking it just means "monster" and has for hundreds of years. The Bakemono Zukushi Scroll is basically just a monster manual.

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Bakemono from Bakemono Zukushi.

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Bakemono from Bakemono Yotsugi no hachinoki.

Bakemonogatari is actually doing kind of a pun, because it's part of the "Monogatari" world (which means "Ghost Story") and Bake on its own means "changing."

But basically it all boils down to the fact that traditional societies did not make clear distinctions between goblins, ghosts, demons, and beasts. There was a lot of overlap in the terminology, and it's mostly Gygaxitis that makes us want to nail these terms down. The reality is that you do want some kind of Goblin, and "Bakemono" is as good a word for that as any. You could also call them "Yokai" (as Hiruko the Goblin does), and you wouldn't be wrong, but you wouldn't be wrong to call them Bakemono either.

But where I split ways with L5R and Dominions is that Bakemono Goblins should be red, not green.

Image

Tengu (or Kenku) vary from being basically Goblins to being basically bird people. I think that they are cooler when they are more bird-like, but I am willing to accept sexy ladies with crow feathers like Princess Kurama.

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Post by Login »

Bakemono are almost always rendered as Goblins in L5R, due to CCG keywording.

Goblins are always Shadowlands. Always. (E.g., Always Chaotic Evil.)

Shadowlands are leperoutcastunclean. This means that nothing bad that ever happens to them will ever matter, ever. That makes them a poor example here.

Shadowlands critters can get Fu Leng talking in their heads, telling them to be naughty. This is never described happening to ogres and goblins (though it probably could): only to corrupted persons. Goblins and ogres are described as created by Fu Leng as replacements for humanity; their malice towards humanity is therefore built in. The rpg addresses the free will issue by it obviously does not gofuckyourself and you didn't expect it to do so by page 5 of this thread, right?

Nezumi are incorruptable. They and the Naga can't gain Taint. This should make them superior to humans, at least in the eyes of some, but that issue is never discussed, ever. (Back inna day, Naga players discussed it, but Naga had shit cards, so Naga never got to influence storyline. The designers didn't have their thumb on the scale: they smashed the scale with hammers.) That said, some ratlings do live in the Empire, usually working with the Crab. They are a much better example of a nonhuman underclass.

Note that you do not need a nonhuman example. Eta exist. Eta are treated like shit. This is an empire with a rigid caste system. Empires exploit people.

All badguys are external to the Empire. All the time. There are three exceptions. These exceptions are chronological.

1) During the Clan War, where the game was extremely underwritten, badguyism was governed by the philosophy described in Zero Cool: there are no bad guys or good guys, there's just a bunch of guys. (Note: that movie had a clear bad guy, so, kinda shit in that context.) Note that this was NOT a direct result of the writer's intent, but the implications of what was written.

2) During the Scorpion Clan Coup (SCC), Scorpions were the badguy. Except if you were Scorpion. Later on, they were (mostly) rehabilitated. This is the only canon redemption that does not suck diseased pigeon cloaca.

3) In 1e, as mentioned, other members of the clans could be badguy -- mostly Scorpion. Others were implied, but Scorpion is usually named. Problem: how do you keep a confrontation with a badguy from a different clan from calling in his buddies and escalating the conflict into a civil war? Answer: write your own rpg motherfucker.

Item (3) has been effectively retconned out of existence, whereas item (1) was written out as the story gaps were filled.

Btw: in L5R, Tengu are depicted in a variety of ways, depending upon the artist.

1) Straight-up animal raven.
2) Bipedal, human-sized raven with arms with prehensile digits.
3) Dude with a big nose. Seriously. Just a dude rockn' the pinnochio.

Oriental Adventures sticks with (2), iirc -- afb still.

Note that the "external to the Empire" thing can lead to some odd situations. The closest L5R has ever come to not throwing a badguy into mutagenic ooze is with Hantei #16.

Hold on: this is about to get a bit stupid.

Hantei #16 and a bunch of dead people show up, in the flesh, at the end of the HE storyline in order to fight Nothing. Any explanation given for this would be more fucking awful than not explaining it, so we leave it at that. These dead people are called spirits: they glow gold. Does this offer confusion with typical L5R spirits? Yes. Is this definitional confusion ever resolved? Guess, motherfucker.

Hantei #16 was an Emperor, until he died, but now he's not dead, so he's Emperor. . . except there already is a shiny new Emperor.

Hantei #16 is a dick. And he's a Rokugani-unacceptable dick! Holy hell, a badguy who doesn't drip ichor! He executed people at random, killed family members, and was a general twat while alive, until he went complete batshit and the court couldn't take it anymore. He was betrayed and offed. Now that he's back, he wants the throne back -- a non-royal sits on the throne (the winner of the Clan War was a Lion, because Lion won Gencon, because they had the best deck handed to them by the designers -- but hey, players drive the story, right?).

He loses -- he's badguy, he has to lose -- but he's strong enough that they end the conflict with a deal instead of a suicidal battle. Most of this happened off-screen: this conflict happened between sets (HE and Gold Edition) so players really didn't have a chance to get into it. There were no cards depicting this conflict, for the most part. But this was the closest we got to "everyone is just guys" like in Clan War. And it was off-camera. I don't think the story will ever get that close again.
Last edited by Login on Sun Jan 04, 2015 1:03 am, edited 2 times in total.
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