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Prak
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Post by Prak »

Longes wrote:
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?
It seems good on the surface, but it's the same problem as the classic "I want to fuck with the paladin" dilemma (kill an innocent or a super-demon gets released), in that the best/highest/most good answer is "I help the people and then I go face stab the baby-eating monster, because I'm a fucking adventurer and face-stabbing monsters is what I do"
Frank wrote:For fuck's sake, she literally becomes the Moon
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Cuz apparently I gotta break this down for you dense motherfuckers- I'm trans feminine nonbinary. My pronouns are they/them.
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FrankTrollman wrote:In Soviet Russia, cosmic horror is the default state.

You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.
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Post by Login »

You don't need to work hard for moral dilemmas in fantasy asia. You really, really don't.

Feudal Japan is one big moral sinkhole. The world is run by women hating murdershits and everyone respects them. What do you do? Become ninja and join an anti-daimyo resistance? Great, the daimyo use their peasants as human shields: how many innocents die before the Glorious Revolution can take place? And if you beat the local warlord, how do you pay all the thugs who got you that far? Is your duty to your men or to the peasants?

If you're not in revolution-mode, how many compromises to the jerk in charge do you make? If your lord is demonstrably insane, do you stand by him? Do you quietly replace him? This is a concept that not only real life can provide material for, this is something that was done better in Stargate SG-1 than in L5R.

I could go on, but further examples belabor the point. None of these conflicts can ever exist in L5R because as soon as they do, you can't Mary Sue your leader. The authors care more about their pet characters than they do about their own world background, and they sure as shit, spinach, and Spinoza don't care about your investment in the world background.

Take Hitomi. She becomes the Moon. Do you know what she was before? She was the best story L5R had to offer. And it wasn't bad. Until it was.

The spoiler below contains the basic narrative of one of the original stories in L5R. Imagine you're getting into the game back inna day. Now imagine that your standards are really fucking low: as such, all you want, the only thing you want, is a halfway decent end to the story. That's it. That's all. How does that turn out?
Hitomi hates Yakamo. Yakamo killed Hitomi's brother in a duel. Hitomi says he cheated. Yakamo don't care.

Hitomi charges Yakamo in battle. Hitomi cuts off his hand. The combatants are separated, each enraged.

Yakamo gets magic evil crab hand from a shugenja. Yes, that's kinda dumb, but well within silly fantasy parameters and we roll with it. He's a crab with a crab claw: okay.

• Right here is where players in the first arc usually catch up with the story. This is fairly engaging, and the art is compelling. (Can't add images easily right now.) Onward:

Yakamo fights Hitomi and cuts off her hand and breaks the Dragon Ancestral Sword. There was even a card for that. Sweet.

Hitomi gets a new magic hand. Ok, this is hitting the stupid. How many magic hands are there? The magic hand is never adequately explained (until much later, and you will regret hearing the explanation, so never mind it). Fans didn't really criticize this, though: it was silly, but the revenge story was still sweet. On with the show.

Final Battle of Clan War: Yakamo fights an Oni with his name (long story), loses, Hitomi kills it, doesn't kill Yakamo because of practical reasons -- both are needed to fulfill the prophecy to kill BBEG. They go and do that. The end.

Wait. What?

Yep. They still hate each other, but they don't really interact after that.

Is that a weak ending? Are you satisfied? You should be. Listen to me: swallow that shit down and smile with every pus-filled bite motherfucker. Stop right here, take that no-closure ending, smile a bacteria-ridden grin and thank me for the wonderful story. Because if you push motherfucker, if you say, "wait, what happens next?" if you whisper it under your breath, if you cock your fucking head to the fucking side with a hint of quizzical apprehension then we will continue to the real conclusion.

You blinked. That will be interpreted as interest. Consider what happens next your own fault.

Let's skip over a lot (lots) of stuff to get to apotheosis. Long story short: the Moon is BBEG. He gets ganked. Hitomi replaces Moon. Sun is depressed and suicides. Yakamo replaces Sun. The reasons are stupid: just pretend you heard them already and dismissed them.

Does this end the story? Nope: we have the opposite of closure here. Then again, it's not complete shit. It's just not very good. Hell, we were better off with the "I could kill you but instead I'll just flaunt my superiority" crap from the Final Battle. The problem here is that this isn't an ending at all; this is a coda. Just before you walk away from storytime -- like, one expansion later -- the authors tap you on the shoulder and say, by the way:

The authors/gods/dragons decide that mortals shouldn't be gods so they kill Yakamo and Hitomi.

Off-camera.

No big war, no serious cards to reflect the conflict. They just die when no one is looking.

And no one cares.

Seriously. No one in the Empire seems to care. L5R is 90% metaphysical/magical events, and nearly none of them have any social effect whatsoever. The most important gods in the Rokugani cosmology have changed personhood twice and everyone is cool with it.

Further, that shit doesn't even make sense within the bullshit cosmology the authors created. The thesis was this: the celestial wheel was turning and a new age was dawning: instead of the age of gods (or whatever the fuck) that we have presently, we were entering the Age of Man. As such, gods are getting killed and mortals are ascending. The original gods said fuck that and unilaterally ended the age of man by killing and replacing the sun and moon. That's a doughy pantload because:

• Mortals become gods all the fucking time. Emperors can make dead mortals into gods by imperial fucking decree. So did the other mortal-->god deities get executed? Nope. So why did you just waste our fucking time with the sun/moon slaughter?

• If the Age of Man is dictated by the Celestial Harmony, who the fuck are you, dragons (e.g., authors) to think you can thwart it? Several major story arcs are about the Balance being disturbed by the dragons, resulting in swift punishment. (The Oracle of the Void, servant of the Void Dragon, and the Jade Dragon both shit all over "Balance" and thereby cause problems.) Answer: go fuck yourself with a novelty dragon dildo. The rules don't apply. The authors just Mary Sued Celestial Dragons.

• Oh -- and this is cute. There's a faction within the Phoenix, associated with the Asako family, that believes that mankind should run itself and get off the reincarnation wheel and become All That. If that sounds a lot like the Kolat, it is a little, but the organizations are independent (and Asako get super-powers, Kolat don't). The Asako are heretical, but not terrorists, and they're never called out for their heresy because their writer failed to understand the implications of what he was typing. But none of that matters because fuck them, fuck the Kolat, and fuck you for being interested in them because guess what fuckweasel: the Celestial Heavens just told you that you were totes right the whole time then it pulled the football away a second later trollolololool!!!1!! seriously fuck yourself you paid money for this game lol.

There were no reactions by the humanist factions to this bewildering turn of events. NONE. The Kolat had WON. They fucking won. And then they didn't. And they didn't care. No one cared.

And weren't we talking about a simple revenge story a second ago? Yes, that one story that drew you into the game in the first place turns out to be one drawn out rickroll ending long after the meme died. The authors are telling you, to your face, spittle flying madly: we shat on your story, and we shat on the Kolat-lover's story, and the Phoenix-lover's story, and the dragon-lover's story, and tied it all together in one putrescent bow and didn't even have the decency, the goddamn decency, to have a single character lampshade a single thing we just did.

But wait, you say: my emotional and financial investment in the game has been violated, but I still don't feel like the authors have wiped their asses on basic creative writing itself. Fear not, for the authors will take the time out of their busy schedule of laughing in your face in order to piss on your head.

So, remember back at the beginning when Hitomi got mad at Yakamo because her brother was wasted by the latter? Yeah, see, here's the thing: her daimyo, the Dragon Clan Champion, told her brother to get into that duel in order to set her up as the chosen one to beat the BBEG.

In a retcon.

Which means the entire story was nothing but a fucking sham.

And Rokugani samurai are slavishly loyal, so if she had just been told by the Champ to sack up and become the Chosen One, she would just do that. But headfuckery is more fun.

So the entire story was nonsensical and meaningless. If you were an L5R fan, you could have spent your time with the game instead deliberately cultivating STDs instead of playing L5R and you'd probably would have been better off.

This is the Inevitably Increasing Shittiness at its near maximum. Note that at every step of the way, the story gets worse. And when it becomes chronologically impossible to make the story worse, the authors retcon the story until it is worse. The previous sentence is not hyperbolic no matter how hard I try: it is a plain statement of fact.

Also, the Dragon Clan Champion is a body-hopping, soul-devouring parasite, but he's goodguy so that's okay fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu

Are you beginning to understand why most players who want to play an intelligent game of L5R rarely get to the free will/moral tension issues discussed herein? They're so busy sorting out the fucktardedness of the story that they can't get to articulating basic problems. L5R is a game centered around a story, and the best way to enjoy it is to dump the story.
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Post by Username17 »

Login wrote:Shadowlands are leperoutcastunclean. This means that nothing bad that ever happens to them will ever matter, ever. That makes them a poor example here.
Nah, it's a pretty good example. Because at this point we're not even really talking about what should be done with the L5R storyline as it is right now, because as you've mentioned and I agree with the answer to that is merely "kill it with fire." At this point we're discussing genre elements to include to make an Oriental Adventures fantasy setting that wasn't a greased chute into an ass shaped pit full of the leavings of the self insert fanwank of a bunch of lazy and indulgent hacks.

So obviously the whole thing where in L5R "Shadowlands" ended up meaning "always aligned with ultimate evil, do not pass Go" and also turned into a weird corrupting thing like it was Warhammer fucking Chaos even though in the first set there were totally Shadowlands cards that didn't cost you honor to play or use and even most Shadowlands followers cost prestige to the family (not the personality leading them into battle, whose ability to win tests of honor is unchanged), is and was dumb. If you're writing a new setting and game, you would not want to do that.

In fact, you're going to want to have "tempter demons" of some sort, the sort of Buddhist gluttony monsters if nothing else. And the only way deceit demons really work is if the players are willing to sit down and talk to them - which in turn will only happen if there are in fact creatures of shadow (or whatever you choose to delineate such creatures) that are OK to talk to and work with. Which coincidentally, is much closer to actual Asian legends than this Warhammer Grimderp nonsense.

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A Vanara Ninja, a Human Monk, and two Demons should absolutely be a supported party. You've basically failed at Oriental fantasy worldbuilding if they are not.

The whole incorruptibility thing is therefore a thing that simply doesn't have to happen. Obviously if you're dealing with Warhammer Chaos style corruption for everyone who pokes an obsidian mirror with a stick and there are one or more races who are fucking immune to that, your entire society is run by idiots if your ruling class is made up of any other type of race. But Warhammer Chaos is a bad story element and makes for bad stories. The solutions to it are always the same: kill it with fire. If dark magic is instead something that people can generally be exposed to and even use without degenerating into dog rapers, that would be better. If the price of dark power was something that you could potentially pay and move on with your life, but might end up being something terrible that made everyone sad - that would be something interesting instead of more grimderp stupid.

In short, the Nezumi shouldn't be "corruption immune" because they shouldn't need immunity to corruption, because living in the lands overrun by demons shouldn't be a thing that corrupts people. And then the fact that the Empire doesn't put Nezumi in charge of all major decision making wouldn't be a plot hole.

Frankly, the more I think about the amount of whining you'd have to put up with from people who wanted to bring in elements from Path of the Destroyer or whatever the fuck you'd get with a reboot, the more convinced I am that L5R per se is simply toxic and needs to be rebooted hard enough that the actual clans and maps and personalities and shit of L5R aren't used. Not rebooted back to Imperial, rebooted back to the "We should really make a fantasy setting inspired by Japanese and Chinese stuff." Doing that you'd fix a bunch of minor problems - like you wouldn't have a "dragon clan" to make it be confusing whether a character was a Dragon, a member of Clan Dragon, or a Dragon who was also Clan Dragon. Because shit like that was needlessly complicated. You'd make sure all your Clan Titles were different from creature types that characters who were important in the story could actually have. So a "Rat" clan would be OK because there is no real confusion with Rats and Nezumi (and same for Tengu and Crows), but Dragon and Ki-Rin clans are not acceptable.

So, mandatory clans:
  • Horse Nomad Clan. Somebody has got to be the various Mongols, Huns, Ming, and such that have plagued, joined, and ruled China over the years.
  • Tibetan Clan. Somebody has to do the heavy lifting of bringing in Hollywood Tibetism into the joint. So all your weird Shangri-la and Nando-Parbat stuff goes here.
  • Pirate Clan. Pirates are awesome and totally sweet. Some combination of Koreans, Fomosans, Malaysians, and Ryukyu Islanders. They got boats. And pirates.
  • Conservative Clan. Somebody has to do the heavy lifting of "high culture" Japanese stuff. Tea ceremonies, calligraphy, flower arrangement, fans. They could be legit or corrupt or both, but there's a whole bunch of Hollywood cliches about Japanese capital-C Culture and one of the clans needs to do that stuff.
The arguments for those four really make themselves. They have enough of an established cultural identity that you can establish them as having a Hollywood bastardized culture with just a few pictures as establishing shots. A few pictures of mountains, yaks, prayer flags, and dudes in robes with shaved heads and people will fucking know you are talking about Tibet. But that's also not enough clans, so you'd need at least two more, which could be:
  • Merchants and Triads Clan. Because of the effects of Hong Kong Cinema, a lot of people don't really realize that the Cantonese are actually a small minority in China and that most of China is not really like that. But the fact is that the whole thing about criminal syndicates and shipping companies that we love to watch movies about is only really a thing for some Yue and Wu speakers around the coast. But it's still an Asian culture that is reasonably familiar and merchant gangsters are fun. You could pull in stuff from Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Thailand, because why not?
  • Han Chinese Clan. There are a ridiculous number of Mandarin speakers in the world, and a shit tonne of Han Chinese source material to draw upon. They could go into battle looking like dudes from Qin's army and shit. Most feudal China stuff is from this culture, so it's easy enough to work cultural cliches in.
  • Jungle Clan. Cambodia and Vietnam are not physically or demographically large parts of East Asia, and arguably aren't even in East Asia (depending on where you think South East Asia goes). But the US fought and lost a war on the soil of Vietnam and Cambodia in the relatively recent past, and they are culturally important places to white people. So you can have black-clad tenacious jungle fighters and they will automatically gain respect from the intended audience. And also giant Angkor-Watt style snake temples in the jungle are awesome.
  • Steam Punk Clan. I don't think you're doing Asian Fantasy right if you don't have some kind of crazy gunpowder stuff going on. Arquebusiers and fire arrows and stuff. One of the clans could specialize in the various weird fantasy alchemy and steam punk shit. They could really do whatever other than that - they could be like a Japanese Zaibatsu or a bunch of Taoist tinkerers. Basically, clockwork fu dogs is strong enough imagery that people will accept whatever other cultural traits you say they have.
  • Not-Muslim Clan. With the amount Uighurs are getting in the news lately, putting in a clan of dour monotheists who have beards wouldn't be too unreasonable. You can throw in as much Malaysian Islam for your Not-Muslims as you wanted as well. This is more dangerous ground than making clans of Not-Korean pirates or Not-Mongolian horse nomads, because East Asian Muslims still exist while the Mongolian Hordes stopped being a thing a few hundred years back.
The key though, is still that when you put this all together, individual Daimyos have people from multiple clans working for them. And provinces aren't generally mono-clan. So it's not considered weird or even a thing you have to explain at all for there to be dudes from multiple clans working in the same adventuring party together.

And you'd make sure all the clans had signature magic things for their Shugenja to do. But you'd also make sure that they had signature things for their Samurai, Ninja, and Monks to do. Because you're supporting all the basic character types and not being a twatshitter who insists that anyone who wants to be a Shugenja and doesn't write "Phoenix" on their character sheet is doing it wrong. And you sure as fuck aren't going to reproduce any of that fuckery where Phoenix Shugenja specialize in "being better" and therefore have no identifiable specialization at all. You're going to do shit like how the Lion Clan Shugenja specialized in Necromancy, and had signature necromantic spells. But like, for all the clans. So maybe the Pirate mages have by default access to the strongest scrying or something.

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Post by Orion »

How do non-humans fit? There are non-humans in every clan? The non-humans have special nonhuman clans with no humans in them? Some human clans have non-human members and some don't? If so, are the non-humans important enough to one of their A schticks or are they merely a B schtick?

I'm leaning toward option 3, myself.

EDIT: How do you sell "merchant gangsters" and "pirates" as distinct groups? Make them hate each other, first off. Give them clothes from different cultures in opposite colors. Base the guys with triad ethos out of silk road wagons instead of trade ships? Is that enough?
Last edited by Orion on Sun Jan 04, 2015 3:34 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Login »

FrankTrollman wrote:Not rebooted back to Imperial, rebooted back to the "We should really make a fantasy setting inspired by Japanese and Chinese stuff."
That is what happened at our table, which is why we stopped: we didn't have the time to make a new game.

L5R is best when it's a varnish, an idea. I recruited people into the game based on a pitch, but the pitch was all that was there. So we still agree.

There are some motifs I think would be essential in a broad-based, asian kitchen sink game:
  • Loose Hierarchies. None of this "Clan Leader is Demigod" bullshit. You're in a feudal society where, if the banners are called, maybe the high-and-mighty local lord gets half of his liegemen. Betrayals are common, skullduggery is inevitable, and allies are fleeting. This means that brother-against-brother civil war is on the table. This also means that Strange Bedfellows adventuring parties can and will happen.

    This undermines japanese-ness slightly. That's good. Weeaboo fetishism isn't worth giving up the drama granted by a varied playgroup.
  • The Default PC Is a Minor Lord. Your basic, starting generic samurai PC has servants, a big-ass house, and land with a few peasant families. The default ninja has a spy network, a few samurai in his pocket, and solid, if not extensive, experience. The default sorceror/shugenja has a temple to call home. The default monk either is a mid-range figure in his temple or a highly-reputable traveling badass.

    Starting PCs at "first level" is a rough choice when you're trying to involve everyone in politics. Most just-starting-out concepts have no skin in the political game, and with no investments, "burn it all down" becomes the default option.

    Further, as has been oft discussed, the shugenja idiom/powerset is too damn broad, so when if you're handing out super-powers, it's easier to hand the ninja shinobi techniques and the samurai mystical kata if the shugenja are already at "mildly competent." You're past the point where you would hand out "parries kinda okay" so handing out mystical powers will be uncontroversial.

    Finally, this should be the default since, if it's just an "option," GMs will often dismiss it out of habit.
  • All Mystic Abilities Have a Common Underlying Theorem. Whether it's Rings or Elements or what have you. The ninja's shinobi arts teaches him the principles of Air just as the samurai relies on an Air kata to defend his lord. The monk's understanding of Metal lets him hold off an angry Oni that wields the same element. The mechanics of each idiom can be different -- and should be different -- but the practitioners can talk to each other about their take on Chi and Wood and so on. That in mind, besides the must-have four splats, you need at least a fifth splat: spirit being. This generically covers mystical nonhumans and they get a magic type of their own, just like the other four.

    If there's heavy chinese influence -- and there should be -- you really want to have a Doctor archetype as well. It's not as important as Monk, though.

    The easiest way to handle the different-but-same nature of mystical powers: use the same, base resource scheme for all of them but employ different mechanics for implementation.

    Also: there is no chief element. Leave that "Void is everything" shit at the door.
  • The Heavens Are Not That Into You. There's destiny and fate and duty and honor and they do have actual, metaphysical and physical effects, but there is no true way that the Heavens will always endorse. This means that if your daimyo tells you to go on a rape spree, the Powers That Be will not universally endorse that shit. You can get mystical support from a Don't Be a Shit part of Heaven, just as your daimyo's supporters rely on the Fascist Fuckstain parts of Heaven. Heaven is a bureaucracy: it's interested, ultimately, in stability. That said, if you want instability, there are other Realms that may float your boat.
Orion wrote:How do non-humans fit? There are non-humans in every clan?
Nonhumans vary and factions vary: there is no default relationship.

Oni in japanese mythology are very intelligent; it's not impossible to have a community in good stead with one. It's also not impossible for them to be at war.

Nonhumans are part of the political mess, just like humans are: they simply have extradimensional priorities that make some of them wild cards, or unreliable.

Now, once you hammer out which nonhumans are in and which are out, this question will have more weight.

Orion wrote:How do you sell "merchant gangsters" and "pirates" as distinct groups?
I don't think you need to limit each faction to one motif and one motif alone. A faction can concentrate, but monomania gets you shit like "only Scorpion can be truly sneaky" and "only Crane can be truly pretty" and "only the Dragon can be basically worthless at everything." I am very, very sour on stat bonuses due to faction, race, or other splat characteristic as a general proposition: here, it seems particularly out-of-place. What you should offer is a wealth of powers and character assets centered around a faction. So there can be considerable overlap between "merchant gangsters" and pirates in the form of super-powers they can both purchase from their respective lists. If each faction gets one, and only one, thing represents their shtick, your attempts at making them distinct grind down into madness. And such a scheme makes it nigh-impossible to play a black-sheep type that plays against type.

Instead, each faction, sub-faction, club, what-have-you, offers a suite of powers. Even if a player doesn't fit his own faction's cliche, the cliche can be enforced by NPCs.

In addition, each time a character dips significantly in another faction's suite, he has to support that with a connection background. Taking a page from Legends of the Wulin, these backgrounds come from a separate pool of character points than the normal pool, so they put on pressure on combat minigame asset purchases. Thus, if you want to have two samurai splats because you were a hostage to a different faction's family, dedicate some background points to that and be on your merry. If you want to be a thief of knowledge, running about the land stealing secrets, dedicate some background to information brokers and dire enemies and buy powers from a crap-ton of splats. So long as your abilities are power level appropriate and the abilities make sense in the world background, the particulars of your character's powerset can be pretty varied.
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Post by Whipstitch »

Orion wrote: EDIT: How do you sell "merchant gangsters" and "pirates" as distinct groups? Make them hate each other, first off. Give them clothes from different cultures in opposite colors.
Gonna give you a big ol' Lana Kane "NOPE" here given that we've been talking about these clans largely in terms of player options and that means people shouldn't just be fighting over the box canyon because that's just what people do when one side is wearing red armor and the other is wearing blue. Overlap is a concern, but there's lots of other dials you can tweak here to make them distinct aside from the landlubbers vs. salty sea dogs knob.
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Post by Orion »

Oh, when I say hate each other, I'm think "I'm a Mac; I'm a PC" as much as anything.
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Post by Prak »

Honestly, if the MantisPirate Clan rules the seas and the Triad rules the roads, there's actually relatively little reason for the two to be in conflict. They may conflict when the Triad wants to ship something, in which case, of course the Pirates are going to be expected to steal that shit, but you could just as easily say that the two clans have an arrangement where the Triad seriously hires Pirate ships as an escort when they need to send stuff over the seas, and the two clans represent most organized crime in the region, while still being distinct in that the Triad actually has a hierarchy, while the Pirates use the term "organized crime" a good bit more loosely.
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FrankTrollman wrote:In Soviet Russia, cosmic horror is the default state.

You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.
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Post by TheFlatline »

FrankTrollman wrote: In fact, you're going to want to have "tempter demons" of some sort, the sort of Buddhist gluttony monsters if nothing else. And the only way deceit demons really work is if the players are willing to sit down and talk to them - which in turn will only happen if there are in fact creatures of shadow (or whatever you choose to delineate such creatures) that are OK to talk to and work with. Which coincidentally, is much closer to actual Asian legends than this Warhammer Grimderp nonsense.
So I've been playing off and on Dragon Age Inquisition and this just clicked with something that was talked about by one of the party members in the game.

In DA the party member says that what most people refer to as "demons" (they generally stick to the 7 deadly sins, which is generic as fuck but whatever) are just spirits, and they can and do have benign natures if the person or people they're interacting with maintains the right mindset, since within the Fade where they live emotion and thought manifest.

At the time it kind of struck me as an "oh okay" thing but in this light it actually seems kind of cool, especially from a buddhist sense. Oni are malicious when they're a dark reflection of whoever they're dealing with. After all, they aren't of this world and they're latching on to paradigms that we can understand. So they're potential paths to some real funky power but at the same time if you really don't have your shit together you can be responsible for the rampaging demon that is killing everyone in a very real sense. Not only are you in that event responsible for all these dead people, you're responsible for destroying a spirit that probably has no fucking clue it's doing something wrong. It's just going off of what it picked up from you.

So self-control when dealing with spirits and the supernatural world is important. Like, really important.

Edit: Also, I'd probably run with the idea that as a spirit engages more and more with our world it learns and develops it's own personality. So that eventually it's not slaughtering townsfolk because that's how it thinks you say "hello" in Samurai, but because it wants to.
Last edited by TheFlatline on Sun Jan 04, 2015 5:31 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Prak »

TheFlatline wrote: slaughtering townsfolk because that's how it thinks you say "hello" in Samurai
I don't know why, but Grundy-Oni amuses me.
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FrankTrollman wrote:In Soviet Russia, cosmic horror is the default state.

You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.
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Post by Dean »

That would create a cool reason for intense repression in the individuals that would be expected to interact or fight with the Shadowlands. It could be the basis for the entire aristocracy to be really into repressing your emotions and keeping calm, and since this is asian royalty that works well.

If every Shugenja who might meet a demon knows that becoming too emotional could create a murder or lust demon then you've got a pretty strong piece of worldbuilding as to why the upper class acts like Samurais do in asian cinema.
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Post by TheFlatline »

Dean wrote:That would create a cool reason for intense repression in the individuals that would be expected to interact or fight with the Shadowlands. It could be the basis for the entire aristocracy to be really into repressing your emotions and keeping calm, and since this is asian royalty that works well.

If every Shugenja who might meet a demon knows that becoming too emotional could create a murder or lust demon then you've got a pretty strong piece of worldbuilding as to why the upper class acts like Samurais do in asian cinema.
If you really wanted to run with the idea you could say that the two worlds drift towards and apart from each other, and that really good astrologists can track the proximity of the heavens. When the supernatural world is far away or the celestial bureaucracy is particularly... er... preoccupied, you can get away with shit that normally would have very real repercussions. Which is how you get brothers backstabbing brothers and civil wars and stuff. They think there are windows of opportunity where they can go against their culture and training without repercussion.

Of course, consistently good astrologists are difficult to find, and a good grifter and a good astrologist are mainly separated by hindsight of varying lengths.
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Post by Username17 »

The Flatline wrote:So self-control when dealing with spirits and the supernatural world is important. Like, really important.
That would be very cool. Bonus points if there's a bit about how spirits can be set off on the wrong path by being exposed to any of the 108 defilements. You could throw out a few big ones as examples and leave open to tables what a spirit set off by dogmatism or obstinacy would do.
Login wrote:None of this "Clan Leader is Demigod" bullshit.
Definitely. I don't think Clans should have leaders. Some medium sized fraction of the provincial governors should be from each of the clans, but they should have whatever claim to the loyalty of the people in their province regardless of clan - not to people from the same clan who live in different provinces. Family and clan ties can be important for creating plot twists and giving people excuses to go places during festivals, but loyalty should be regional and not by character type.

I don't have hugely strong opinions as to how loyal people are expected to be towards their Daimyo, but even though the expectation is that you have a Wolf Clan Samurai, a Rat Clan Ninja, a Carp Clan Shugenja, and an Ox Clan Monk, all four characters should be pledged to the same Daimyo by default.
Login wrote:Your basic, starting generic samurai PC has servants, a big-ass house, and land with a few peasant families. The default ninja has a spy network, a few samurai in his pocket, and solid, if not extensive, experience. The default sorceror/shugenja has a temple to call home. The default monk either is a mid-range figure in his temple or a highly-reputable traveling badass.
I'm of two minds about this. Basically the Shugenja character concept scales a lot farther than Samurai or Ninja do. You could be a bumbling peasant sorcerer with some slight of hand and some fireworks and call yourself a Shugenja - or you could summon a storm that wipes out an invading army all by yourself and still call yourself a Shugenja. Your personal value in troops could be 1 or 100,000 and your basic concept hasn't changed. Having game balance even remotely be a thing is fought on two fronts: starting Shugenja off as low as possible, and creating pathways for advancement to allow the Monks, Samurai, and Ninja to scale up as high as possible. The goal is to have the character archetypes be around the same power level at the start of the game and have the game end before we hit the point where the Samurai can't have nice things and the Shugenja can.

So there's basically the Willow system: where the sorcerer starts the game as a guy who can do some disappearing pig tricks and some modestly effective wards against demon magic. This allows the Shugenja to contribute on the level of Madmartigan - who's just a handsome dude who happens to be pretty good with a sword. That gives both characters a ceiling which is farther away from where they start. And then there's the LotR system: where all the fighter types are entitled armies of tiny men. This gives them a clear path to gain additional power and maintain relevance long after their personal ability to kill things with a sword or a bow has ceased being more than a curiosity. That puts the game's ceiling objectively higher.

If you wanted to make the game have the longest possible shelf life, I would think you'd want to do both things - the Samurai could start his level 1 career as a lone Bushi, a third son who isn't entitled to dick diddly, but as he goes up in level he becomes automatically entitled to an army of his own. The key here is that you have to make sure that this advancement is sufficiently automatic that it actually happens. If the Samurai needs his house forces to be a level appropriate force at Name Level and the Shugenja just happens to know more powerful spells - then you're in a position where if the MC puts his foot down on the Samurai getting his retainers you're back to Fighters not having nice things.
Login wrote:That in mind, besides the must-have four splats, you need at least a fifth splat: spirit being.
I could go either way on that. If someone wants to play a Karasu Tengu I could see that being done with giving them a "magic being" class. But I could also see just telling them to take levels of Samurai and concentrate on the mystical abilities.
Login wrote:If there's heavy chinese influence -- and there should be -- you really want to have a Doctor archetype as well. It's not as important as Monk, though.
Once you get away from the big four, you are no longer obligated to have it "make sense" to play any particular clan/class combination. If you decide to have a Pirate class, you don't have to make it easy on players who want to have their characters take it and be from the pseudo-Tibetan clan. All the clans need to be on the level of "MC gives you zero shit about making a backstory" for each of the four big classes. So if you want to be a Monk from the Horse Nomad Clan, the MC gives you zero shit because that's well established as a thing. If you want to be a Ninja from the More Honorable Than You Clan, the MC gives you zero shit because that's a well established character thing to be. Doctor or Barbarian Warrior don't have to be equally well supported in every Clan. The MC is allowed to give you shit if you want to take the Barbarian Warrior class and be from the More Honorable Than You Clan. But yes, "Doctor" is a big character type for a secondary archetype, and a character who knows about alchemy and the body is totally a thing that players should probably be allowed to be.

Classes you might want to give some support to:
  • Barbarian Warrior
  • Beastmaster
  • Bureaucrat
  • Courtier
  • Doctor
  • Investigator
  • Pirate
  • Scout
  • Shapeshifter
  • Any Number of Divisions in the Magic System
That last one can be a good way to cut down on the overly diverse nature of the power of Shugenja - which is always going to be a problem that the game flirts with. So if you split the casters into Shugenja and Onmyōji, you can limit the versatility of Shugenja by havign some portion of what is possible with magic to be possible for Onmyōji and not for Shugenja (and vice versa to limit the Onmyōji). If you put in a Miko class that absconds with some of magic's potential, the Shugenja would be further limited. If you put in a Wushen, same deal.

However much power and versatility magic has as a whole, you can fine tune the amount of power and versatility available to a specific character by dividing the spell lists between different caster classes. The more caster classes, the less versatility the spell list of any specific character needs to have. If you have enough magic divisions, the Casters can individually have a breadth of power quite comparable to the Ninja or Monk - which is probably about where you want things to be.
Login wrote:Also: there is no chief element. Leave that "Void is everything" shit at the door.
Yes. The divisions of magic are arbitrary, and probably some of them are going to end up being a bit better than others. But there's no reason to go out of your way to make things ungamebalanced. Simple human error and unforeseen combos will do that for you.
Orion wrote:How do non-humans fit? There are non-humans in every clan?
Non-human characters, like Beastmasters and Bureaucrats, are secondary character concepts. That means that it's OK if they are character concepts that the MC makes you write a backstory to justify or which just aren't supported by the game. There are a lot of Yokai and Yaoguai. Like, really a lot. And you're not going to make all of them playable and the ones that you do make playable aren't necessarily going to be available in every class and clan flavor.

So just for starters, of Tanuki, Kitsune, Kappa, and Mujina, I would expect no more than two of those to have real character generation rules, at least in the basic game. And their position in each clan can and should be different. It wouldn't seem weird to me if the hyper-honorable clan straight up didn't let Mujina join at all, while it would be very weird to me if one of the clans was called the Badger Clan and didn't let Mujina in.
Orion wrote:How do you sell "merchant gangsters" and "pirates" as distinct groups?
Well, at the most basic level, each Clan has a color coded outfit and a heraldic beast. So the pirates faction is Tiger Clan and the merchant gangster clan is the Boar Clan, and they have different colored armor for their Samurai. But beyond that, when you're grabbing cultural traits for the two clans you're grabbing Korean and Malaysian traits for the Tiger Clan and Southeast Chinese and Yakuza traits for the Boar Clan.

Image
Tiger Clan

Image
Tiger Clan

Image
Boar Clan

Image
Boar Clan

In terms of secondary archetypes generically allowed, there might be a fair amount of overlap. But the main contribution of the clans is to provide a different "look and feel" and it's easy enough to get that from those two.

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Post by Longes »

I'm of two minds about this. Basically the Shugenja character concept scales a lot farther than Samurai or Ninja do. You could be a bumbling peasant sorcerer with some slight of hand and some fireworks and call yourself a Shugenja - or you could summon a storm that wipes out an invading army all by yourself and still call yourself a Shugenja. Your personal value in troops could be 1 or 100,000 and your basic concept hasn't changed. Having game balance even remotely be a thing is fought on two fronts: starting Shugenja off as low as possible, and creating pathways for advancement to allow the Monks, Samurai, and Ninja to scale up as high as possible. The goal is to have the character archetypes be around the same power level at the start of the game and have the game end before we hit the point where the Samurai can't have nice things and the Shugenja can.
This raises a question: how important Shugenja archetype is? What makes Shugenja - Shugenja? Shugenja as a spiritual person can easily be folded into the Monk, because that's what IRL shugenja are/were. Shugenja as a magic user is problematic, for reasons you outlined - wizard's conceptual space is much bigger than every other conceptual field, unless you severely restrict him. At high levels things inevitably get silly - ability to move one mountain or turn one river per day is just better than having tiny men. And while a wizard can potentially get himself an army, a samurai can never move mountains.

I think it's a better idea to not have a magic archetype in the game. Alchemist can be a good mystic archetype. Not the kind that turns lead to gold, the kind that drinks mixture of quicksilver and goat shit to slip under the door. You'll have to strictly define what alchemy can and can't do, but I think that's more manageable than L5R style Shugenja.

Alternatively you can just not have mystical class. Ninja has magical stealth abilities, Samurai has magical kenjutsu abilities, Monk has magical martial arts, and no one has just "magic" as their focus.
That last one can be a good way to cut down on the overly diverse nature of the power of Shugenja - which is always going to be a problem that the game flirts with. So if you split the casters into Shugenja and Onmyōji, you can limit the versatility of Shugenja by havign some portion of what is possible with magic to be possible for Onmyōji and not for Shugenja (and vice versa to limit the Onmyōji). If you put in a Miko class that absconds with some of magic's potential, the Shugenja would be further limited. If you put in a Wushen, same deal.

However much power and versatility magic has as a whole, you can fine tune the amount of power and versatility available to a specific character by dividing the spell lists between different caster classes. The more caster classes, the less versatility the spell list of any specific character needs to have. If you have enough magic divisions, the Casters can individually have a breadth of power quite comparable to the Ninja or Monk - which is probably about where you want things to be.
I don't think that's a good solution. Current problem with L5R is that 4 Shugenja is the optimal party. You have Air and Void Shugenja to replace Courtier, Earth and Fire Shugenja to replace Bushi, Air and Water Shugenja to replace Ninja. With what you suggest the problem will remain, only instead of taking four shugenja, people will be taking social shugenja, physical shugenja, stealth shugenja, etc.
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Post by Lago PARANOIA »

If we're doing faux-Asian fantasy, you have to have a mystical guy in robes who can A.) do magic without also being a martial arts master and B.) be a fully-supporting member of the band for a wide range of power levels. I don't see anything wrong with giving the more martially-oriented archetypes equivalent or even superior special effects -- there is precedent for that. But you still need a squishy wizard archetype. Even Dragonball has 'em.
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 Username17 »

I don't think you can really dump the Shugenja. Some of the thematic magical abilities people are going to want are very much "spells" and whatever archetype has them is going to be a "wizard." If you insist on calling the characters who do those things "Monks" or "Ninja," then you've just made it so that the Wizards in your game come with martial arts and/or stealth powers in addition to their spells.

People are going to want conjuration and weather control, and it's thematic and people deserve to have it. And when you summon demons and shoot lightning bolts out of your hands, you're a wizard. There's plenty of wizards in source material, and you can't really cut that out and still be doing fantasy Asia in a way people are going to want.
Longes wrote:I don't think that's a good solution. Current problem with L5R is that 4 Shugenja is the optimal party. You have Air and Void Shugenja to replace Courtier, Earth and Fire Shugenja to replace Bushi, Air and Water Shugenja to replace Ninja. With what you suggest the problem will remain, only instead of taking four shugenja, people will be taking social shugenja, physical shugenja, stealth shugenja, etc.
I don't think you're getting it. The reason why Shugenja are better than you in L5R is that they cast from regular stats that do regular things and just get a lot more and better spells than other people get other abilities. When the Courtier gets 1 skill trick, the Shugenja gets 15 spells per day. Other than that, the Shugenja has the same stats and skills as the Courier and go fuck yourself. But there's no reason to do things that way. At first level, the Courier could easily have as many or more abilities as the Shugenja and could be meaningfully superior in their fields of endeavor even with similar stat arrays. L5R follows the D&D model where gaining a level of warrior gets you one ability that might be kinda OK in some circumstances and gaining a level of caster advances "spellcasting" which is an asterisk linking to 30 pages of powers. But that's a choice. You don't have to do that. And you shouldn't.

But even if you give out comparable numbers of abilities to the Scout and the Sorcerer, you still frequently run into severe balance disparities. And that can be caused by scaling, and by breadth. The scaling issue is that the top end imaginable for the "magic guy" is simply higher than the top end imaginable for the "Barbarian Warrior." It just fucking is. If you keep adding levels forever, you will eventually get to the point where the magic guy can still conceptually gain power and the Samurai really can't. And as you move towards that point, there's always the temptation to flatten out the rate of power gain for the warrior whilst not doing that for the mage. Resisting that requires great design discipline and also a perceived end to the power progression. It is at least theoretically possible to hand out powers to start and at a rate of progression such that the magic guy is balanced with the ninja and samurai at the beginning of the game and continuously until reaching the end of the campaign.

The versatility issue is another big one though. In most fantasy games and settings, the breadth available to sorcery is very large compared to the breadth that other characters throw around. And if you let the magic guy cherry pick from all of it, he's going to be useful in a lot of circumstances. That in turn is going to give him a greater than fair share of the screen time even if the "power" of whatever they do while onscreen isn't out of line with what the other characters do. To use a D&D example, a 10th level Wizard has four 5th level spells. If he chooses to learn spells that are useful in different aspects of the game (ex.: Teleport, Cloudkill, Wall of Force, and Fabricate), he'll be able to be the star of the show much more often than a character who is "just" a Diplomancer or a Tripstar or something. Even if we accepted that none of those spells were out of line for what a character of that level should be doing, the fact that the Wizard can branch out into all four areas makes other players feel small in the pants.

Magic versatility can only be addressed by either limiting magic as a whole, or by forcing a degree of specialization onto each magician. I don't trust the first option in a world with expansion sets, so I think the second option is more likely to work and more satisfying in play. In our Wizard example, you'd have the character be limited to "magic of making" or something, forcing them to take Wall of Stone instead of Teleport. Still a good spell, but more redundant with what they already have and thus reducing the amount of time they spend being the center of attention. Teleport can still exist, but in this model would go to Illusionists or something instead.

As to how this would tie in to Oriental Fantasy, you'd have Shugenja and Onmyoji. And then you'd split the spell list between the Shugenja and the Onmyoji. And the Onmyoji would get the summoning spells and the Shugenja would get the elemental blast spells. And then you couldn't have both Fireball and Masterball, because those would be off of different lists.

Now you're still committing yourself to make the Monk list and the Samurai list the equal of the Shugenja list. But I submit that it is definitionally easier to do that if the Shugenja list is "everything magic can do in the setting that isn't on the Onmyoji list, the Mikodo list, or the Wushen list instead" than it is if the Shugenja list is "everything magic can do in the setting, full fucking stop."

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Post by Whipstitch »

FrankTrollman wrote: But the main contribution of the clans is to provide a different "look and feel" and it's easy enough to get that from those two.

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Once you've got costumes out of the way you can establish a lot of the other stereotypes just by asking one super important question: What kind of ancestor do these assholes brag about the most over drinks? By having a few dead celebrities and folk heroes around you can flavor the clans a fair bit just by giving the sea clans dread pirates, great admirals and naval victories to brag about while the merchant clans favor trickster figures and revenge dramas.
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Post by Login »

FrankTrollman wrote:If you wanted to make the game have the longest possible shelf life, I would think you'd want to do both things - the Samurai could start his level 1 career as a lone Bushi, a third son who isn't entitled to dick diddly, but as he goes up in level he becomes automatically entitled to an army of his own. The key here is that you have to make sure that this advancement is sufficiently automatic that it actually happens. If the Samurai needs his house forces to be a level appropriate force at Name Level and the Shugenja just happens to know more powerful spells - then you're in a position where if the MC puts his foot down on the Samurai getting his retainers you're back to Fighters not having nice things.
I almost wrote that starting as a crap-covered farmer should be permissable, but I couldn't articulate it in the time I had to write the last message. I generally agree, but I seriously would insist on the caveat that the GM should consider starting weak a "specialty" campaign, like "everyone is a merfolk!" or "the game starts in Hell!" I want the game to actually, blatantly make the "starting as a somebody" notion to feel like the default. Otherwise, players will have to tussle with our cultural inertia when they sit down to play. Worse, I forsee GMs starting you as a "minor lord" but treating you like a teenage bushi, not out of malice, but out of habit. I may be biased on this, but I've seen too much of myth weavers to trust the worst of what the hobby has to offer.

Also, let's be clear here: starting out with non-scrub characters is just plain easier to build and run. It's easier to balance, it's easier to create plot hooks, it's easier for PCs to write personal histories and to create inter-PC relationships.

That said, I'm okay with zero-to-hero existing. Just leery of it. Really leery.


FrankTrollman wrote:I could go either way on that. If someone wants to play a Karasu Tengu I could see that being done with giving them a "magic being" class. But I could also see just telling them to take levels of Samurai and concentrate on the mystical abilities.
Spirit dude should have a splat of its own for the following reasons:
  • a) "If we are to face shen in its own element, we will need proof against its charms." Each splat's powerset should have (mild) counters employable with proper preparation. Counter systems are a pain in the ass to design, but it's very rewarding in genre. If spirit is a power-type, getting counters against its powers is on the table, just as grabbing anti-shinobi powers for a samurai or anti-kata powers for a monk would make sense.
  • b) "Only the ways of the spirit realm can create a space bigger inside than out." Having an additional powerset for spirits makes them more distinctive. Some nonhumans will not have anything to do with monks or ninjas or samurai. Nature spirits, for example, really don't have any conceptual overlap with any of these dudes -- the closest one comes to is monk -- and nature spirits are obviously going in. The Yuki-onna's weather powers aren't terribly monkish and we most certainly should have the former in.
  • c) "While in the womb, he was touched by the spirits of the forest. He sees what we do not." People will want to run half-blooded beings. As mentioned previously, multi-splatting is perfectly fine. The easiest way to make a half-human, half-Huli jing/kitsune is to make a menu of spirit creature traits/abilities and let the hybrid just pick enough to qualify as a hybrid. Thematic distinctiveness is maintained, and it's mechanically straightforward.
This also enables fairly cherished plot tropes. Instead of the GM having to bullshit a sword that only a heavenly being can wield, or a gate that may only be entered by a child of man, you can have your system point to traits that only mortals or spirits and/or hybrids have. You'll have to make sure that the hybrid isn't over-strong by having a foot in both camps, but it's worth it.

Note that this is two separate, intertwined arguments: that spirit-being is a creature type and that spirit powers are a powerset. You could achieve some of what I'm seeking here by making only one of those two things true.



Longes wrote:This raises a question: how important Shugenja archetype is? What makes Shugenja - Shugenja? Shugenja as a spiritual person can easily be folded into the Monk, because that's what IRL shugenja are/were. Shugenja as a magic user is problematic, for reasons you outlined - wizard's conceptual space is much bigger than every other conceptual field, unless you severely restrict him. At high levels things inevitably get silly - ability to move one mountain or turn one river per day is just better than having tiny men. And while a wizard can potentially get himself an army, a samurai can never move mountains.

Shugenjas, like d20 wizards, are librarians with super-powers. Their idiom is the use of book-learning and writing to achieve paranatural effects. D&D fanboyism has entrenched this notion as the "default" for magic, such that some geeks have difficulty conceiving of magic as anything other than what mega-librarians do.

Note that this notion contaminates what it touches. Shugenja are basically priests irl. L5R converts them into a more cerebral, literary class and diminishes their religious capacity. It tells you that shugenja are priests, but then it offers zero opportunity to square shugenja abilities and behaviors with the religion of the world. And most players never notice. This is how the contaminant works. Once you're a wizard, the previous idiom is now a veneer over the wizard. If the contaminant hit a practitioner of voudoun, for instance, the character would have a stylistic conceit of mentioning Erzulie and Chango in his incantations, but he would still gain powers from book-reading and research.

Once you realize this, shugenja/wizards are easy. If you want to have word magic, have word magic. If you don't want word magic, don't have that shit. And if you don't have word magic, then the only magic available will be sub-divided thematic magical specializations. The scales fall from your eyes, to be excessively dramatic. After all, word-magic was just a specialization that you had, inadvertently, amped up to eleventy-zillion.

When you say "wizards can move mountains," what you are really saying is "magic users who use word/book magic can move mountains because I have, through conformity with my particular subculture, imparted Real Ultimate Power upon word/book magic and simultaneously taken a shit on every other idiom imaginable." And I'm not trying to pick on you: this nasty little bug has swept through geekdom like the clap at a modern old folk's home. If you enforce the conscious notion of word/book as an idiom, it no longer makes sense to say "samurai can't move mountains but librarians can" because librarians obviously fucking can't. You stuck the adjetive "magical" in front of librarians (subconsciously) and refused to do the same for samurai: you then wondered how you got different results. Again, what you're doing is being done by millions of people and everyone on this board has probably done it. Paizo literally makes its money by doing this.

L5R is a persistently good example here. Think about it: why do shugenja get to spend ring points for effects? If you read "shugenja spend an extra, special pool of points for effects" and "samurai don't get this pool," why weren't you bothered? Why didn't you put the book down, immediately, and say, "what the fuck?" If you didn't react, I submit that it's likely because you've been trained by our (sub)culture to accept that Wizard(tm) gets a separate and unequal resource system for no reason. And having had that indsidious notion creep into your thinkmeats, you then, rightly, note that courtier 1/ninja 1 is inferior to shugenja 1, but can't clearly note why.

Now, I'm not claiming that ring points are a good thing thematically, merely that they are a strong thing. Once you open those up, you can then ask yourself: how come shugenja get lots of techniques -- spells -- and other classes don't? The answer there is simple: spells are justified by the "limitation" granted by ring points. The entire thing is just conceptual legerdemain. d20 wizards get the same bullshit dance: wizards are "weak" because they have only so many spell slots, but because they have limited slots, spells must be uber, and because they have only so many slots, spells must be varied. The entirety of the wizard's justification for being better than you has the rhetorical weight of the Lightning Warrior's satirical "doesnt' have a familiar" dodge.

If you excise the bigotry built into the "wizard assumption," there is no reason not to hand out L5R shugenja resources to all and sundry. Now, this will just go on to highlight how unthematic and uninteresting L5R shugenja casting really is, but that's okay because L5R is beyond saving and you shouldn't actually try to fix it: just end the thought experiment there.

You know what? Here is a helpful tip for anyone who is still laboring under wizard bigotry:

All splats must have their REAL class abilities listed under their central character description. Splats MUST NOT put such abilities in other chapters.

Application: Look at the wizard in d20. Take the entire wizard spell list and put it on the wizard's class description. Show this wizard writeup to a new d20 player. Show them the fighter. What shall they conclude? That the wizard is objectively better. Hiding class abilities in extra chapters is a deliberate attempt to smuggle power to a class. Doing this might stop some of the bullshit Pathfinder revels in.

Do this in L5R and you get the same result. (L5R, like much of WW, is written by d&d players who, having played few other games, see all gaming through the lens of the worst sort of immaturity you'd get from 2e AD&D.)

Magic specialization isn't just a strategy to fix the wizard. Magic specialization is the natural result of removing D&D wizard bigotry from the game. When you put the wizards true splat all in one page, people new to the game, but not new to game design, will happily slash that sonofabitch up until the "wizard" becomes "fire mage" or "mind magician" or some shit. The problem will be obvious and the solution instinctive. It will not occur to any concenred to "throw out magic."
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Post by Longes »

When you say "wizards can move mountains," what you are really saying is "magic users who use word/book magic can move mountains because I have, through conformity with my particular subculture, imparted Real Ultimate Power upon word/book magic and simultaneously taken a shit on every other idiom imaginable." And I'm not trying to pick on you: this nasty little bug has swept through geekdom like the clap at a modern old folk's home. If you enforce the conscious notion of word/book as an idiom, it no longer makes sense to say "samurai can't move mountains but librarians can" because librarians obviously fucking can't. You stuck the adjetive "magical" in front of librarians (subconsciously) and refused to do the same for samurai: you then wondered how you got different results. Again, what you're doing is being done by millions of people and everyone on this board has probably done it. Paizo literally makes its money by doing this.
I disagree. Here's the problem as I see it:
We have four archetypes. A fighting specialist (Samurai), a sneaking specialist (Ninja), an unarmed fighting specialist + something extra (Monk) and magic specialist (Shugenja). However, "magic" covers everything above and more, whether it is done by studying scrolls, or by performing a special airbending dance. "Magic" shouldn't be a separate specialty - it should be top level of other, more strictly defined specialties. So, for example, a high level samurai can set his sword on fire and leap tall dojo in a single bound. It's immediately obvious why high level samurai doesn't raise dead or create demiplanes - he is a fighting specialist. But when your specialty is magic, you can concievably add any ability to your list and it would be totaly okay, because magic doesn't have limits on its own.
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Post by Lago PARANOIA »

Longes wrote: So, for example, a high level samurai can set his sword on fire and leap tall dojo in a single bound. It's immediately obvious why high level samurai doesn't raise dead or create demiplanes - he is a fighting specialist.
Bleach, Ninja Gaiden, Mortal Kombat, Fate/Stay Night, Journey to the West, Jade Empire, and especially Naruto.

As Login noted, the problem is that 'pure' spellcasters in these sorts of TTRPGs are being limited by the tropes and mentalities of D&D. In source material, even in fantasy faux-Asia media that's being produced today, there's enough thematic headroom for samurai and monks and ninjas to be equal to or even superior to pure spellcasters. Even when the spellcasters can do crazy shit like summon kaiju and create massive rivers that can be seem from outer space. That shit is barely good enough to give your character a name in Naruto.
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 OgreBattle »

L5R is a moldy california roll of a setting and no amount of additional cream cheese poured on it will make it better/'authentic'. If you want an RPG setting for East Asia that isn't terrible yellowface adventures for honorless hakujin pigs then you have to start from something new... so we really don't need to mention it other than as an example of what to laugh at/avoid.

As Lago mentions, in most East Asian storytelling there really isn't that strict of a distinction between "feeble robed guy that shoots elemental power" and "I am good at swinging a sword". Naruto is a good setting to work off of as it covers being Rock Lee "I am so good at punching and jumping I fly/teleport and shoot fireballs", summoners, pet users, summoning tidal waves and entire forests, and some magic sword guys too.

In wuxia fiction being good at unarmed combat and using a sword isn't something you divide into different classes, only though more recent games/manga/settings influenced by D&D might make that distinction more for game mechanics reasons than anything else.

You can also take a look at how East Asian folks today do fantasy settings.
Asura Online is based off the Journey to the West setting, my buddy who's a journalist in China writes about it here:
http://kotaku.com/becoming-a-demigod-te ... 1457978181

Vanillaware's Muramasa presents a neat 17th century Japan setting with neko-girls, demons, ninja, peasants, Chinese sorcerers, and vengeful ghosts as major characters:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uq1ILW54EqI

And thinking about it for a bit... Tekken's got actually a pretty good fictionaly/exaggerated summary of a samurai clan with the Mishima zaibatsu's world conquering hijinks.
Last edited by OgreBattle on Sun Jan 04, 2015 11:03 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Longes »

Naruto
All characters in Naruto are technically ninjas. Do they all belong to the same character class all abilities of which can be written in the sane ammount of pages without diagrams showing ability dependencies?
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Post by OgreBattle »

Longes wrote:
Naruto
All characters in Naruto are technically ninjas. Do they all belong to the same character class all abilities of which can be written in the sane ammount of pages without diagrams showing ability dependencies?
If you took the Swordsage and Warblade classes, called their techniques 'jutsu', then wrote a bunch more jutsu for them to use you'd have a good approximation of Naruto's chakra ninjas that have to spend a moment to gather chakra every once in a while.

The way magic causes exhaustion in Shadowrun approximates how chakra is molded stamina and you can get bed ridden from over-use of powerful jutsu also works nicely.


As for how to get a nice feeling of "honor" in without feeling too hokey/being incredibly hokey, American sports dramas strike me as a good approximation of student/master relationships and bringing honor to your clan/school/state by winning the big game/war as well as earning personal glory/MVP through valor on the field. It's because winning is so important that you can introduce corrupt figures to tempt the PC's, or have ethical dilemmas when your feudal lord tells you to stick this syringe in your butt for the good of the clan or stealing the rival clan's lucky mascot to ensure their defeat.

Air Bud can easily be re-written into "But the clan scrolls DON'T say a dog can't be a samurai!" (aka the Hakkenden: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hakkenden)
Last edited by OgreBattle on Sun Jan 04, 2015 11:38 pm, edited 3 times in total.
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Post by Login »

OgreBattle wrote:As Lago mentions, in most East Asian storytelling there really isn't that strict of a distinction between "feeble robed guy that shoots elemental power" and "I am good at swinging a sword."
That isn't even a distinction in all of Western storytelling. Gandalf sworded dudes aplenty, thankyouverymuch. This obsession is nearly purely D&D's effect on the subculture.
Longes wrote:We have four archetypes. A fighting specialist (Samurai), a sneaking specialist (Ninja), an unarmed fighting specialist + something extra (Monk) and magic specialist (Shugenja).
This is incorrect. We have a soldier, an intelligence agent, a religious ascetic guardsman, and a librarian.

We then say, "hey, what if the legends and myths and stories about people in these lifestyles and professions were true? And what if each of these, now mystical, professions gave a person roughly equal opportunity to gain paranatural power?"

Having established that premise, we then assign each of those otherwise mundane occupations powers that defy the laws of physics, according to our own aesthetic. And those powers can be anything we want. We choose.

So when we hand the soldier fire magic, that's us doing it; we aren't locked in by some definitional problem with the soldier. However, let's say that one of us says, "hey, military conflict defines all of human existence, since logistical considerations span all aspects of human life. Therefore, there's really no end to the soldier powerset." That person then hands the soldier power over producing food and plagues -- issues that are far more important to traditional military than screaming really loud and charging an enemy. They get power over sex in order to swell ranks with new soldiers, and they get mental powers because militants, to this day, pervert the thinking of billions. Criticizing criminal military acts by the U.S., for example, has led to the critics being imprisoned while actual thieves, rapists, and murderers being criticized have received promotions. And that happened, like, just now. That's a pretty hardcore case for mind control.

Is that person correct about the range of the notion of "soldiering?" Of course he is. Now, that being said, do we think that his definition of the soldier powerset is good? Well, that depends on what we want from the game and what we want everyone else to do. If we don't want intelligence agent to have the kind of reach and breadth that soldier has, then no, the powerset isn't good, and we scale it back.

We don't have to make the soldier's shtick "mystically enhanced military." As above, we could make it fire, or water, or teddy bears. Or magic. But we're still choosing it.

So when we come to the librarian, we could say that their shtick is whatever we choose. When you say that their shtick is "magic," that's you saying it. It's not a thematic necessity. And even then you're using the definition wrongly.

You know what the first thing I read when you said that the bookworm's power was magic was? I read that as "oh, metamagic: he's good at undermining other peoples' magical stuff, or enhancing it. Maybe this dude just finished reading the Darksword trilogy or some shit." Now, I know that's not what was in your head, but a part of me thought that. I submit that it's because I didn't cut my teeth on D&D. The notion that there should be a splat whose power is "everything motherfucker" never occurred to me in my gaming until d20 gained popularity. You defined magic as "doing everything," but that's your head trip. It isn't even definitionally correct. You made the mental leaps from "librarians" to "magic" to "anything that magic can do" to "since magic is technically anything possible, magic that does magic is everything." Are you seeing that bullshit there? That shit is not healthy. That doesn't happen in subcultures not reeling from D&D tropes. That shit actually has some serious circular argument bullshit going on by the middle of it. The definition of magic changed from "a paranatural system of physics that one can personally interact with in this fictional world" to the conventional definition of "impossibly extraordinary claims and effects" and back again. Further, there isn't even a justification at step one: "librarian" to "magic" is just hangin' out like ancient genitalia, daring you to look at it.
This is where a link to a picture of particularly decrepit genitalia would be if such were not beyond the pale even for this board. Ask yourself honestly: are you disappointed that there was no image here?
If I make a game and I have paranaturally-enhanced librarians, said individuals will do whatever I damn well say they do, and I won't be able to resort to thematic restraints when that range of abilities is criticized.

And then again: since when do East Asian tropes harp on librarians? Shugenja became librarians because L5R had D&D tropes baggage. Shugenja shouldn't be librarians; they should be priests. And we probably shouldn't call them shugenja.
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Post by RadiantPhoenix »

Paranaturally-enhanced librarians are obligated to have powers of:
  • Knowing things, especially the details of Mister Cavern's newest Steve monster.
  • Papyrokinesis.
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