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Prak
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Post by Prak »

So, here's a question- A kickstarter for asian themed dice has made me want to write a game about being shaolin monks/kung fu masters to use said dice in.

Is there enough to the Monk concept to hang a game on, or should it really be something more general like this?
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Post by name_here »

There's plenty to the Monk concept if you don't have to worry about protecting other roles.
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Post by Prak »

Yeah, I'm just reading the "how to reboot L5R" discussion and some of it is stuff that maybe holds true for "Ascetic Showdown" (ie, Monks with AS rules), like the stuff about the Spirit power source, and supporting Spirits as a splat.
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Post by NineInchNall »

Login wrote: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?"
I take it you don't frequently get into discussions with 5minds and the like, because those shitheads seriously don't want "paranatural power" (whatever the fuck that is supposed to mean besides shit-what's-not-really-plausible) to be in any way intrinsic to their "soldier/fighter/centurion/RealWorldProfession" characters' progressions. They don't want no paranatural power or magic -- where "magic" refers to doing that which is not actually possible, and unfortunately that includes doing any possible thing via ineffectual means (e.g., opening a lock by saying some words near it).
Current pet peeves:
Misuse of "per se". It means "[in] itself", not "precisely". Learn English.
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Post by Username17 »

Login wrote: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.
I think you've sold me on a Yokai class. If there are to be anti-Yokai magic countermeasures, there has to be a Yokai magic list. And a Yokai magic list presupposes a Yokai class to have access to said list.

Anyway, the number of magic classes to be had is debatable. Every time you add a magic class you make the amount of the magic available to one of the classes more manageable, but you also make the class list look more like a pile of magicians.
ClassLanguage Origin
ShugenjaJapanese Priest
OnmyodoJapanese Priest
MikoJapanese Priest
MahotsukaiJapanese Witch
YokaiJapanese Monster
WushenChinese Witch
MudangKorean Priest
ManyeoKorean Sorcerer
PhuthuyVietnamese Witch
ShidtenMongolian Sorcerer
SihirMalay Sorcerer

Now that's probably more than you need, but it means that you could have enough that each of the clans had 2 or so magic types that they were particularly known for. Throw in a few of the things like Alchemist and Beastmaster, and drop a few like Shidten that sound dirty when you say them fast, and you're good to go.
Login wrote: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.
Uh... sort of. To any level of power we are likely to want to get to, it is possible to write up more power for the Soldier than for the Librarian. We choose. He-Man is more powerful than Orco. Wonderwoman is more powerful than Oracle.

But the key is that they are getting power appropriate to their idioms. He-Man could become both tougher and stronger. He could fly around. He could become more like Captain Marvel in a bunch of ways - but that's as far as he's going to go. Orco's upper end of power and versatility basically don't exist. If we give the Soldier "Soldier Powers" those could be a bunch of things, and those could get very strong. But "Librarian Powers" have no limits at all. Thematically, a Librarian's powers is to get power from books, and a book can by definition contain any possible idea.

So Samurai and Ninja come with conceptual limits. We can imagine a very powerful Ninja or Samurai. But there are still limits inherent in the concept. But Shugenja has no limits. Reading books and having shit happen is a concept that is by definition unlimited. Whatever limits to the power and breadth magic of that sort has come from the rules of magic that come with being a high magic setting - not from the concept inherently.

So while for a Ninja we have to justify why any particular thing can be done with Ninja Magic, for the Shugenha we have to justify why any particular thing can't be. It's not that we can't do it, it's that it requires discipline to maintain game balance. It is simply easier to write power creep for Shugenja than it is for Samurai. It is easier to write stealth nerfs for Samurai than Shugenja. You can write Samurai and Shugenja as balanced. You can even write Samurai as more powerful than Shugenja, but the odds are against that happening by chance.

In any case, once there are several kinds of magic that don't overlap very much, the kind of breadth creep that mages often get is easier to control. It's still something you have to work on, because "Transmutation Bloat" is still a thing even if you've put all the necromancy into the Mudang list.

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Post by Longes »

FrankTrollman wrote:
ClassLanguage Origin
ShugenjaJapanese Priest
OnmyodoJapanese Priest
MikoJapanese Priest
MahotsukaiJapanese Witch
YokaiJapanese Monster
WushenChinese Witch
MudangKorean Priest
ManyeoKorean Sorcerer
PhuthuyVietnamese Witch
ShidtenMongolian Sorcerer
SihirMalay Sorcerer

Now that's probably more than you need, but it means that you could have enough that each of the clans had 2 or so magic types that they were particularly known for. Throw in a few of the things like Alchemist and Beastmaster, and drop a few like Shidten that sound dirty when you say them fast, and you're good to go.
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Can you make a similar lists of sufficiently different samurais and ninjas for different clans?
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Post by Username17 »

Longes wrote:Can you make a similar lists of sufficiently different samurais and ninjas for different clans?
You could, but you probably don't want to. And the reason is because of Fighters and Rogues. In D&D land, the Fighter is a deeply inadequate character, in no small part because role protection has demanded that many of the problem solving techniques of heroes of his idiom (sword wielding mundane warriors) be apportioned to the Rogue. Kull or Conan would never get anywhere in life if they couldn't sneak around a guarded castle or seduce an evil sorceress - and yet here we are with Fighter getting access to neither Stealth nor Bluff. Because those are "Rogue Skills."

While the design challenge in making the spellcasters is in dividing up magical effects such that individual player characters can't cherry pick off the list and be the MVP in every single challenge the party ever faces - for characters with less open ended idioms the challenge is the opposite. The challenge in making the Samurai and the Ninja are to make sure they have abilities broad enough that they always have something to do. Not to make them narrow enough that they don't run away with the game.

So we definitely want to make it so that a Shugenja can't wander around and pick up all the signature magics of all the clans. That would probably be bad. But there's no reason to believe that a Samurai wandering around learning the sword styles of all the other clans would be much of a big deal. You could make the Tiger Clan have Gisa instead of Samurai, while the Boar Clan had Qishi, and the Snake Clan had Hiepsi, and the Wolf Clan Baatar. But you probably don't want to. What you probably want to do is to make a single Samurai class and give out black armor to the Snake Clan and red armor to the Boar Clan and give each a minor package of cultural baggage and starting gear.

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Post by Omegonthesane »

Frank - once you've explicitly said it's Ninja Magic and not Ninja "Techniques" or Ninja "Jutsu" or any lesser thing, there are no longer conceptual issues. Because at that point the Ninja is a spellcaster, not some lesser thing.

Maybe that means you PrC out of "Boring* Ninja" and into "Fire Ninja" or something.

It's not like this can't be done at all. Seiken Densetsu 3 had two fighters, a monk, a rogue, a priest, and a wizard to choose from for your party; the former four became spellcasters after their first** class change. The sword fighter was still recognisably a fighter even as he passed around party heals or caused melee attacks to do magic damage, the monk was still recognisably a monk as he did likewise, the spear fighter was still a spear fighter even as she handed around buffs and debuffs and summoned gods to her aid, and the rogue was still recognisably a rogue even as he literally cast ninja spells.

And that was in a videogame for the SNES, where the conceptual requirements were lower - where "enough numbers" can in fact be a valid power source. A tabletop RPG has no excuse.

* this is admittedly rather like saying "dry water"
** technically there was an advancement path where the party monk could stay a Dumb Melee Fighter in return for stat buffs until his second class change, but three out of four still proves my point.

TL;DR "Does not use magic" is not a thing that has to be supported at any level in any playable idiom whatsoever.
Last edited by Omegonthesane on Mon Jan 05, 2015 8:11 pm, edited 5 times in total.
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Post by Username17 »

Omegonthesane wrote:Frank - once you've explicitly said it's Ninja Magic and not Ninja "Techniques" or Ninja "Jutsu" or any lesser thing, there are no longer conceptual issues. Because at that point the Ninja is a spellcaster, not some lesser thing.
Not really, no. The thing about Ninja Magic is that it's a subset of Magic. Ninja Magic might be balanced with Fire Magic or Conjuration Magic, but it's never going to be the equal of Magic Magic. Once you have Shugenjas, Onmyoji, Mudangs, and Wushen, you could potentially have Onmyodo be the equal of Ninjutsu. But if one character has a specified subset of magic and the other has magic unspecified, the latter is always going to cover more conceptual ground.

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Post by Koumei »

For clan-based Samurai, you could just give each a particular favoured weapon (in place of or in addition to the longbowkatana).

Or, however you nail down the "gaining techniques" progression, at one or two points have a blank "Special Clan-Based Tech". They can even be actually low-level effects, so all the high-end conceptual stuff is open to all of them, and just starting samurai worry about "A Crab can use his brute force to jam the blade into your shoulder and force you to your knees. A Badger can deliberately step into a blow, accepting the damage so as to turn that fury into a stronger counter attack." or whatever. And then everyone can later on cut ghosts in half, or slice a whole in the border so people can wander in and out of Shadow Shadow Bo Badow.
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Post by koz »

Slight correction there - Onmyodo is the magic type. The user is called an Onmyoji.
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Post by Omegonthesane »

FrankTrollman wrote:
Omegonthesane wrote:Frank - once you've explicitly said it's Ninja Magic and not Ninja "Techniques" or Ninja "Jutsu" or any lesser thing, there are no longer conceptual issues. Because at that point the Ninja is a spellcaster, not some lesser thing.
Not really, no. The thing about Ninja Magic is that it's a subset of Magic. Ninja Magic might be balanced with Fire Magic or Conjuration Magic, but it's never going to be the equal of Magic Magic. Once you have Shugenjas, Onmyoji, Mudangs, and Wushen, you could potentially have Onmyodo be the equal of Ninjutsu. But if one character has a specified subset of magic and the other has magic unspecified, the latter is always going to cover more conceptual ground.

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You are assuming out of hand that Ninja Magic is in any way different to Magic Magic, and I do not see even the slightest reason for this to be the case.

There's definitely a case for letting not a single class ever get access to anything so broad as Magic Magic, but there is nothing archetypal about Ninja Magic that means it cannot have all Magic effects available to it. Certainly not in a world where the audience has even heard of Naruto.
Last edited by Omegonthesane on Mon Jan 05, 2015 9:36 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by DrPraetor »

Omegonthesane wrote: there is nothing archetypal about Ninja Magic that means it cannot have all Magic effects available to it. Certainly not in a world where the audience has even heard of Naruto.
Or La Blue Girl.

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Post by Nath »

FrankTrollman wrote: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.
At some point, I started to wonder how much of a misnomer it would be to still refer to them as "clans," which means a shared ancestry (either real or mythical) and thus origin, while the setting is heavily likely to also have hereditary transmission of political power. So you need to explain how people of the horse nomad or Tibetan origin story ended all over the area, and integrated hereditary power structure, while still retaining that clan affiliation. At some point that'd become a mere synonym for ethnicity. I guess it sounds a lot less cool to have a game with "clan abilities" than it does with "ethnic abilities."

Maybe the setting back story could involve something like, a Great War where armies from all over the country united under the banner of the First Emperor to fight off the Evil of the land. While clan members remember and cultivate the ties to their original nation and people, they nonetheless had to stay in the province the Emperor ordered their ancestor to defend against the Evil. The provinces would also need backstories, who do not say anything about the characters personality traits or abilities, but about their duty ("On the fifteen year of the Great War, the First Emperor send warriors from Clan X, Y and Z under the command of general A to the province of B, to defeat the demon D. His head was cut-off and buried separate from his body, and to this day we watch over it to prevent his servants from bringing him back to life.").

( Now I have my mind set on writing mode, more ideas come. I remember about a Chinese law that made a most serious offense, punished by death, to reveal the birth date of the Emperor, as it would allow to find about his weaknesses using astrology. To further the divide between clans and allegiances, I thought about making a supreme offense of ever telling which clan the generals of the Great War originally belongs to, and thus the current day daimyo who descend from them, with in some cases the intended effect of keeping secret which color of magic the glorious ancestor used to seal away a nefarious demon. Too bad the daimyo character sheets would always end up giving away the secret... )
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).
Login wrote:This is incorrect. We have a soldier, an intelligence agent, a religious ascetic guardsman, and a librarian.
When discussing and labelling archetypes, the choice of words is rather important. It is the good old "rogue ninja versus rogue pirate" argument that you need to settle before starting to decide what you want each archetype to be able do and how the hell you will balance that.

"Soldier" means "paid fighter". If he doesn't get paid, he's not a soldier. In a setting that intend on emphasizing on honor and duty, it may be already semantically wrong to refer to a samurai as a soldier archetype. You may have used it considering it meant "professional fighter," whose definition is highly dependant on the meaning you put in "professional". Personally, my understanding incline me to consider "professional fighter" and "educated fighter" mean the same, and the actual word for that is "warrior". If you rather meant "occupying a socio-political fighting role" then the word is "military".

A character can be a soldier, a military and a warrior at the same time, but he doesn't have to. A knight would be a military and a warrior, but he is not a soldier. Your typical D&D party fighter is likely to be a warrior, but he is no military or soldier (may be an ex- though). The rookie in war stories may be a soldier and a military, he has yet to become a warrior.
And when discussing archetypes, the lines may shift away from the formal definition, because the very nature of archetype is to emphasize specific traits. If your story involves a general, it's completely different character if you describe him as "the military-type," "the soldier-type" or "the warrior-type": here, you just slided from George Marshall to George Patton.

If people can't easily agree on what your label means, chances are it is not an archetype. Which makes me say "intelligence agent" is not. "Spy" is an archetype (even if the popular archetype is widely different from what real life spies did or do).

And "religious ascetic guardsman" is so utterly specific that I know I'd just have to wait before the game needs to introduce yet another rule to deal with non-ascetic monks or monks with nothing to guard.
Last edited by Nath on Mon Jan 05, 2015 10:58 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by fectin »

@login, you are incorrect. Pedantry below.
Mamoru is really reaching back. I didn't even remember he had a non-experienced version. But okay: in the Hidden Emperor cycle, he's tailing Kage, trying to steal his secrets for the ninja. It's possible to read that as being some other shadowy group that is also obsessed with the kolat, abd that this group has no other writing about it, and also calls itself ninja, but the simple explanation is that he's a lying darkness ninja just like everyone else.
(Not entirely sarcastic; it really is possible that Mamoru was supposed to be a totally different and unexplained faction, but that seems less likely).

Sanado is literally the worst example for your position. He was first printed during scorpion clan coup as a "totally unaligned, honest!" ninja, but then got an experienced version during the Hidden Emperor cycle. He is depicted as a generic black pajamas ninja with no obvious alignment. However, he is also AKA Goju Sanado, and was both the leader of the Goju ninja abd explicitly the guy who kidnapped Toturi for the Nameless.

I had to look Hakumei up, because I didn't remember that card. Her deal is that she's from One Thousand Years of Darkness, which is an alternate history.
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Post by Username17 »

Nath wrote:At some point, I started to wonder how much of a misnomer it would be to still refer to them as "clans," which means a shared ancestry (either real or mythical) and thus origin, while the setting is heavily likely to also have hereditary transmission of political power. So you need to explain how people of the horse nomad or Tibetan origin story ended all over the area, and integrated hereditary power structure, while still retaining that clan affiliation. At some point that'd become a mere synonym for ethnicity. I guess it sounds a lot less cool to have a game with "clan abilities" than it does with "ethnic abilities."
It's really not that complicated.

Imagine for the moment that you have an Imperial Exams system like you were China. The Governor is a member of the Carp Clan, and he's governor because he did very well in his exams. The grain logistics magistrate is a member of the Wolf Clan, and he's a magistrate because he did almost as well in his exams - or maybe even just as well and magistrate was the highest available post that cycle. The governor brings in a bunch of Carp Clan people and appoints them to various offices where possible, and the Wolf Clan magistrate brings in a bunch of Wolf Clan people and appoints them to various positions. But when it comes to the governor needing adventurers, there are both Carp Clan and Wolf Clan people who are in his chain of command. The Wolf Clan Samurai is here because his father was brought in to oversee grain shipments, but he's still here and the governor he owes fealty to happens to be from the Carp Clan.

Alternately, imagine for the moment that each of the Clans has some industries that they monopolize by controlling relevant chartered guilds. So if you want tea, you have to go through the Rat Clan one way or another. Naturally, there are tea merchant outposts in every province. Even the provinces where tea is not grown, tea is still consumed. So the Rat Clan maintains houses in those provinces which oversee the transport and selling of tea. And if you're a Samurai of the Rat Clan, you may end up living anywhere there is a Rat Clan House (which is to say: anywhere in the Empire). But if the call for adventure is given out by the local Daimyo, you still have to answer it because you are living in their land and owe them fealty. The Daimyo may be a member of the Turtle Clan, who got rich off of rice wine futures, but he's still your Daimyo and if he commands you to go fight the Penanngalan, you'll have to do that.

And so on and so on. It would actually be really weird for every family to be the only set of nobles in a province.

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Post by DrPraetor »

Nath wrote:So you need to explain how people of the horse nomad or Tibetan origin story ended all over the area, ... they nonetheless had to stay in the province the Emperor ordered their ancestor to defend against the Evil
That would work, but opens the floodgates of grimderp.

I offer as an alternative: While the empire is busy being a source of progress and economic security, they are also engaging an active policy of moving the upper-classes from place to place, in order to tie the empire together politically. There are a number of mechanisms to handle this, but if you assume that the Empire has lead to an era of peace and prosperity, and thus population expansion into areas formerly ruled by monsters, you would have warrior-pioneers clearing new agricultural land and they would immigrate from various areas. They don't have to be ordered to say, they just get to be lordlings in whatever dominions they de-monster, while swearing fealty to the nearest major holding from which their new settlement was originally supplied. So the Northwest is mostly Bear Clan, was originally Bear Clan, but there are members of other clans scattered around (possibly with variously conflicting loyalties, another good source of stories and tension.)

A "new nobility" vs "old nobility" conflict also has some potential, as more recent settlements might be wealthier and chafe under feudal obligations to an objectively weaker liege lord.

Furthermore, you then assume that any particular member of the Fungus Clan in Bear-Clan dominated territory has a 50% chance to be the child of a mixed-clan marriage to a Bear Clan (you know, amidst all the sexism-erasing, in the original L5R, is there a consistent answer to whether interclan marriage is a thing and how surnames and clan membership is handled for the offspring?).
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Post by Longes »

And "religious ascetic guardsman" is so utterly specific that I know I'd just have to wait before the game needs to introduce yet another rule to deal with non-ascetic monks or monks with nothing to guard.
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Post by Login »

fectin wrote:@login, you are incorrect. Pedantry below.
Mamoru is really reaching back.
How is that reaching back? He's from the first expansion, sure, but that's the point: he's around before the Lying Darkness was introduced in the game. There was no retcon making him into a spawn of the same.
fectin wrote:It's possible to read that as being some other shadowy group that is also obsessed with the kolat, abd that this group has no other writing about it, and also calls itself ninja, but the simple explanation is that he's a lying darkness ninja just like everyone else.
That's. . . that's not an explanation. That's pointless conjecture to answer a question based on a false assumption. You're assuming he's a minion of the Lying Darkness so are therefore concluding that he must be. Without begging the question, no explanation is needed. Here's the thing: he's not a part of the Lying Darkness because he was never written to be. You're writing headcannon. There was no retcon of Mamoru, anymore than there was of Hiroru.

And btw, by definition, he's not part of any faction. He's Unaligned. Mercenary ninjas are a theme that L5R actually got somewhat right.
fectin wrote:Sanado is literally the worst example for your position.
No, he's really not.

The problem you have here is that while an experienced version is a specific dude, a generic, non-unique version is not a specific dude. That's why you can have Personality A have an experienced version, then Personality Z be the Soul of Personality A, then have a completely different Personality Z experienced. More importantly -- much more importantly -- you're assuming that Sanado was always a member of the Goju family. Which is most certainly not the case because the Lying Darkness is a contaminant. By your logic, Toturi was born a Lying Darkness minion because he was later printed as a ninja. What you're missing here is that a person can be a ninja and then be corrupted by the Lying Darkness. . . at which point they become a ninja. This is, in fact, a thing that is described as happening within the story.

Does this mean the authors couldn't retcon Sanado into being "always a Goju?" Of course they could. They do shittier things than that every day. But the point is that they haven't done so.
fectin wrote:I had to look Hakumei up, because I didn't remember that card. Her deal is that she's from One Thousand Years of Darkness, which is an alternate history.
I mentioned that under her image. She is still an example of a character created after the Lying Darkness existed who is not associated with the Lying Darkness and yet has the ninja trait.

Edit: note that the ninja spy is another example here, but I didn't post it because of stuff and junk. It's in Imperial and never received an experienced version. Ninja Shapeshifter technically works, but one version of Shosuro references it as a lesser-experienced version (another version of Shosuro does not, which is really conceptually confusing) so I decided that was a mess that didn't need poking.
Last edited by Login on Tue Jan 06, 2015 5:25 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Login »

DrPraetor wrote:(you know, amidst all the sexism-erasing, in the original L5R, is there a consistent answer to whether interclan marriage is a thing and how surnames and clan membership is handled for the offspring?).
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Post by Login »

FrankTrollman wrote:So Samurai and Ninja come with conceptual limits. We can imagine a very powerful Ninja or Samurai. But there are still limits inherent in the concept. But Shugenja has no limits. Reading books and having shit happen is a concept that is by definition unlimited.
I can partially buy that. Part of the issue here is that some of us think differently than others: once I say "magic exists," I'm not particularly finicky about the idiom that grants its existence. 3=2 bitches, all bets are off. Anecdotally, amongst rpers I have known, this was the most common mindset -- but most of them didn't play d&d.

But I acknowledge that many people -- and the bulk of them are from d&d land, which has market-share and cultural dominance -- are rather locked into weird notions on how these idioms work.

It's a perverse situation. Because reading a book does basically nothing dramatic irl, once reading=magic its magical scope is unbounded. But because swinging a sword is an inherently dramatic thing irl, any and all magic arising from it is limited by swordiness. For some.

Though not universal, that's a thing. And it has to be dealt with.

I think it's important to decouple magic from "mere" tools in your core book and make it very clear that the magic you're seeing from 99% of practitioners is the result of an unenlightened view of a much greater force. So the samurai's mystical kata and sword techniques may seem to be all about slashing, but the venerable master samurai understands that he needs no blade: he is the essence of sharpness and can cut with a word, destroy relationships with a gaze, and split a river in twain with a shout.

Swordguy at his best isn't a guy with a sword. He is the essence of destruction and creation manifesting as a guy with a sword.

And all that metaphysics has to be in core.

Nath wrote:"Soldier" means "paid fighter". If he doesn't get paid, he's not a soldier.
Whaaaaaa -- no, that's just wrong.

Plenty of soldiers don't get paid. Sometimes this pisses them off and they rebel. Soldiers are professional fighters and/or persons that are part of a military force. That's what makes them distinct, not salary. Slave-soldiers don't get paid shit by definition and they're still soldiers. Not even the dictionary definition of soldier references salary. N.B.: Professional doesn't mean "paid."
Nath wrote:If you rather meant "occupying a socio-political fighting role" then the word is "military"
A "military" isn't a person or a job. So this:
Nath wrote:A character can be a soldier, a military and a warrior at the same time. . .
. . .is nonsensical. A military is a type of organization or an adjective describing things associated with soldiers.
There is slang use of the term "military" to refer to a person's profession or outlook, but that is, again, slang, and not generally accepted. In fact, outside of cities that have military posts nearby, I've never heard the term used that way in the U.S. (So when you're in the North, you rarely hear it, but come down to the pork-barrel military-base-full South and you do). In any event: you are sorely wrong about how that word works.
And samurai are definitionally soldiers as they are formal participants in the military. So even if your definition of soldier were right (it isn't) or military were right (it really, really isn't), samurai would still be soldiers. A samurai who has no military rank would probably be ronin.
Nath wrote:If people can't easily agree on what your label means, chances are it is not an archetype. Which makes me say "intelligence agent" is not. "Spy" is an archetype (even if the popular archetype is widely different from what real life spies did or do).
I never used the term "archetype" and I don't see how applying that term mystically makes what you just said make any sense. I was referring to professions. So your disagreement concerning "labels" seems nonsensical. When I used the term "intelligence agent" I was describing a job and deliberately using a phrase that was more expansive than the term "spy" precisely because "spy" does not overlap completely with "ninja." I was describing the point of a ninja. "Spy" also refers to Charles Atlas superheroes who fuck lots of attractive people: that has fuck-all to do with the job/idiom of ninjas and the greater field of intelligence agent which includes ninja, so I don't know why you'd bring up spies.
Nath wrote:And "religious ascetic guardsman" is so utterly specific that I know I'd just have to wait before the game needs to introduce yet another rule to deal with non-ascetic monks or monks with nothing to guard.
I have no idea what this means.




NineInchNall wrote:I take it you don't frequently get into discussions with 5minds and the like, because those shitheads seriously don't want "paranatural power" (whatever the fuck that is supposed to mean besides shit-what's-not-really-plausible) to be in any way intrinsic to their "soldier/fighter/centurion/RealWorldProfession" characters' progressions. They don't want no paranatural power or magic -- where "magic" refers to doing that which is not actually possible, and unfortunately that includes doing any possible thing via ineffectual means (e.g., opening a lock by saying some words near it).
Long-winded and partially medicated response in spoiler; read at own risk.
Persons maintaining the Mundane Delusion fall into two rough categories, with some overlap.

The first group are stupid. They misunderstand what a d20 caster can do, they misunderstand what a noncaster can't, and they haven't the reading comprehension to address their failure -- but the internet doesn't punish them for their error. You meet few of these irl because if you do, it's trivially easy to display the error. Unlike on the internet, when you're shown to be wrong irl, you can't easily dismiss the event without consequence. When I've met these people irl -- after the 2000's (I didn't experience this in the 90's or earlier) and the table makes it clear that they're wrong -- such that their error makes it literally impossible to handle encounters PCs are expected to handle -- what happens, in my experience, is that the player immediately seeks a nearly no-magic game. As in: casters don't exist or are severely hampered. Now, the rubber meets the road here: most "low magic" players don't really want no-magic, so getting the game off the ground works poorly. But the Mundane Delusion is extinguished. That's my (biased, limited, subjective) real-life experience. On the internet, of course, they're never wrong.

The second group are lying. They're twats. They know they're full of it. They expect the GM to simply give them a special, personal benefit to make up for their mechanical limitations. Note that this is consistent with grognard priorities: if you're playing in a game where it's socially acceptable to be a selfish, immature dick, then side-deals and under-the-table negotiations are good form, and in their mind, you're the jerk for not "compromising." Further, the full caster who doesn't play along is verbally attacked, but even though these liars lie and say it's because such players are powergamers, what's really happening is that those casters are demanding too much honesty.

I don't meet these people in real life. . . anymore. They're bad people to game with, so I don't do that. They have more net presence than rl presence: irl, you'll probably be pissed with them over something else and quit playing with them long before you get to the Mundane Delusion crapping on your game.

Dealing with both groups, from a design perspective, is simple: don't engage. Don't tell them shit -- at least about this. This is not a rhetorical or logical issue, this is a marketing issue.

Assume you're making a game.

If your game is good enough for the non-deluded, the deluded will also play. If you stop engaging them respectfully, they lose power. It's not your job to enlighten the masses, it's your job to push a game.

Mundane Delusionists don't know what the term "mundane" means. They attribute super-powers to mundane abilities then pretend they haven't done so. So you emphasize the Charles Atlas Superpowers of your noncasters and don't worry their pretty heads with the details. If your game is advertised as having no linear fight(etc.) problem, do it in a way that engages people who care about that and doesn't engage the people that insist that the problem doesn't exist. They'll end up playing what their friends play. And grognards who never play anything new. . . won't play anything new.

Note that I think it's possible to make a good rpg (unlike 5e d&d) then market it to grognards (like 5e d&d). Here's the thing, though. If you're making a good rpg in this hypothetical, you will have sought out and grabbed new players, disillusioned/burned players, combined it with online services and a line of single-player games with a multiplayer game in the wings, given it smart phone support, created an srd and an ogl, and basically roxxd all available soxxz. Given the hypothetical market you have in this hypothetical product, how are the Mundane Delusionists even significant?
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Post by name_here »

I'm going to have to side with Frank on this one. Book magic is conceptually unlimited in a way that nothing else is. Fundamentally, no matter what your other source of magic does, you obviously can read about it in a book. Sword guy can use his sword magic to break any number of things, and transitive property of fightiness can extend to all kinds of other stuff, but when he uses it to grow trees people are going to start asking questions.

I think twelve distinct forms is probably too many, but 6 choose 2 forms of magic both allows for two classes per clan and still makes a reasonable go at splitting up the conceptual space of "literally everything that could conceivably be written about".
DSMatticus wrote:It's not just that everything you say is stupid, but that they are Gordian knots of stupid that leave me completely bewildered as to where to even begin. After hearing you speak Alexander the Great would stab you and triumphantly declare the puzzle solved.
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Post by TheFlatline »

Login wrote: I can partially buy that. Part of the issue here is that some of us think differently than others: once I say "magic exists," I'm not particularly finicky about the idiom that grants its existence. 3=2 bitches, all bets are off. Anecdotally, amongst rpers I have known, this was the most common mindset -- but most of them didn't play d&d.

But I acknowledge that many people -- and the bulk of them are from d&d land, which has market-share and cultural dominance -- are rather locked into weird notions on how these idioms work.

It's a perverse situation. Because reading a book does basically nothing dramatic irl, once reading=magic its magical scope is unbounded. But because swinging a sword is an inherently dramatic thing irl, any and all magic arising from it is limited by swordiness. For some.
Sort of... It's not a D&D thing, it's a Western Culture thing. For the longest time literacy was associated with the highest levels of learning and the holiest of holy. Until Martin Luther came along you couldn't even read the bible to see if you were following the instructions your God had set out for you- you needed a priest to interpret latin into your own, "vulgar" language.

And that was an idea that set off 100 years of war.

Literacy is considered the basic stepping stone to anything else. I can see why "book magic" would trope out to be the uber form of magic, specifically because in our culture it's the fundamental first step in achieving more, whatever more that is. It also is the ultimate abstraction- while sword magic can help you slice through mountains or whatever, you have a hard time abstracting a sword paradigm out to growing trees as was mentioned. But a book, or simply written language, can abstract everything.
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Post by Omegonthesane »

I'm not sure to what extent this is clarifying and to what extent this is me walking back my position, but the last few posts just tell me that magic gets chunked along career lines and the "librarian" becomes a Sorcery Steve in the spirit of (proposals for 2nd Edition) After Sundown Witches.

If the Samurai wants to grow trees with Sword Magic, well, presumably at a sufficiently high level he can go "I have a somewhat deeper understanding of magic than 12 levels ago and can thus also use a bit of Plant Magic on the down low" to grow trees. I can't comprehend how "reads books in their spare time, and some of those books teach them magic" in any way invalidates any idiom worthy of even lip service, so it doesn't seem unreasonable as a kludge to make high level work.
Last edited by Omegonthesane on Tue Jan 06, 2015 8:33 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Emerald »

name_here wrote:I'm going to have to side with Frank on this one. Book magic is conceptually unlimited in a way that nothing else is.
I disagree that nothing else can be conceptually unlimited to the same degree. From what I understand of L5R elemental magic (from this thread, I've never played), each ring lets you manipulate an element physically (throw fire, move earth) or metaphorically (inflame passions, make people stubborn) to do lots of stuff and Void covers every random effect the elements don't because it apparently does that in this game, and that already reaches the same conceptually-unlimited point because dividing every concept into one of five categories means you can fit every concept into one of five categories. Even if the specific spells L5R has here are fairly narrow, the concept scales up just fine.

Frank's review of the Book of Air also mentioned that this setting is animistic, where everything has a spirit and you barter with them to get what you want, so even without the elemental trappings you still have a similarly conceptually unlimited flavor justification for magic because there's a spirit that relates to or knows about everything you could ever want to do.

And they can each out-abstract (and be out-abstracted by) book magic and each other, because you can read about spirit and elemental magic, books and scholars and other sources of knowledge as well as elemental things have spirits too, and knowledge/insight and spirits fit into the elemental pentad somehow like everything else.
Omegonthesane wrote:I can't comprehend how "reads books in their spare time, and some of those books teach them magic" in any way invalidates any idiom worthy of even lip service, so it doesn't seem unreasonable as a kludge to make high level work.
Agreed. Really, any flavor of magic can be made sufficiently conceptually unlimited to break game balance (witness D&D's "Conjuration and Transmutation do everything" problem, which has nothing to do with the fact that D&D uses book magic and everything to do with the fact that "magic that summons any creature in existence to do stuff for you" and "magic that changes things" are ridiculously conceptually broad), so it's not a question of whether your flavor justification for magic scales too far conceptually, it's how you can conceptually limit a very broad flavor justification based on the setting.

If shugenja don't use generic D&D-style book magic but rather study a set of holy texts describing the laws of the Celestial Bureaucracy and how to find loopholes in them, then that can limit a shugenja's conceptual power both broadly ("Each of the Ten Scrolls of Heavenly Wisdom that a shugenja studies has a certain topic like manipulating the mind or changing form, and if a topic isn't covered in one of those scrolls, it can't be done") and more narrowly ("Causing a volcano to erupt or summoning a dragon are too blatant, there are no loopholes big enough to let a shugenja do those specific things").

That justification allows for not only giving other classes their own magic but even giving other classes their own book magic with different sources or methods, like samurai who study the treatises and biographies of ancient generals and learn to duplicate the legendary deeds they read about, and I'm sure there are a bunch of other justifications that can do the same.
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