OSSR: L5R 3rd Edition

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Post by Orion »

The bushi schools do have a tiny bit of structure, don't they? From what I recall, every single bushi school from a major clan got an identical "make 2 attacks per round" ability at rank 3. Minor clan schools got some kind of nerfy multiattack that was anywhere from nearly as good to absolute shit. Shugenja schools don't actually get level-based class features at all, do they?
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Post by Longes »

Not all bushi get "attack as a simple action" on rank 3, but in general you are correct. Shugenja get new spells at insight levels, and never else.
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Post by TheFlatline »

So browsing through ebay, it looks like D&D Oriental Adventures is pretty cheap (8 bucks plus shipping). Is it worth investing in any of it?
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Post by Lago PARANOIA »

Which edition? If we're talking about 3.0E's Oriental Adventures, it's not awful for 8 dollars worth. Martials and monks especially get some more options, there are some really cool monsters in the book (so cool that 4th edition blatantly recycles a lot of the artwork), the equipment list is fun, and the Shaman is an interesting alternative to the cleric. Unfortunately, the actual setting material is really, really weak. What got me into Rokugan and its clans was not this book but a few random articles on 1d4chan, an OSSR, and some reeeeeeally old Nifty Message Board posts.
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Post by Silent Wayfarer »

Orion wrote:The bushi schools do have a tiny bit of structure, don't they? From what I recall, every single bushi school from a major clan got an identical "make 2 attacks per round" ability at rank 3. Minor clan schools got some kind of nerfy multiattack that was anywhere from nearly as good to absolute shit. Shugenja schools don't actually get level-based class features at all, do they?
Shuggie schools are frontloaded: you get one thing at level 1 and then nothing new for the rest of your career except a bigger number for School rank. Most shuggie things scale off your elemental ring and your insight rank (character level) anyway.

You can get more class features by Multiple Schooling to another shuggie school, but IIRC only the first Basic snd the first Advanced school count toward your School Rank.
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Post by fectin »

Iirc, the 3e oriental adventures introduced the iajutsu skill.
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Post by Ancient History »

I vaguely recall that even late into 3rd edition there was a conversion document floating around to tell you how to use some of the prestige classes in OA as schools in 3e - which was kind of good, because you'll notice that outside of shugenja and samurai, there's a noticeable dearth of options for other classes. I ran a brief 3e game where everybody was Hare Clan (Hare 4 Life!), and the face character was stuck with Minor Clan Diplomat and the Ujina family dude as a scout.

Oh, and then there's Paths - which are sort of like alternate class levels - those are another option for fleshing out your character.
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The Book of Fire

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Every element had their own magic items, oracles, dragons, demons, spells, and so on. They also developed “dark” versions of most of that because setting creep got out of hand pretty fast.

At 67 pages, the Book of Fire is the middle of the chapters in terms of length and also it's placement in the book. This is the chapter where the commit to telling you how the game works. The opening story is about some people on a dungeon crawl in an abandoned city with monsters in it in the shadowlands. The POV character finds a cursed dagger and becomes corrupted by it. It's really more Wheel of Time fanfic than L5R fanfic. The thing is that there's pretty much no connection between this story and anything that goes on in Rokugan, and no real reason for the player characters to go on this adventure. It's just sort of a mess.
Book of Fire wrote:The Legend of the Five Rings game system is designed to be flexible, simple, ad efficient. Resolving disputes is meant to be dynamic and exciting, whether the dispute is a social encounter with one's lord or a fierce combat encounter. Situations are intended to reflect the dynamic, heroic style of samurai epics such as Lone Wolf and Cun or Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai. Because of this, there is a great deal of emphasis on intrigue and combats tend to be swift and deadly.
That's the game intro paragraph to the Book of Fire. It's the kind of thing that should have been in the introduction to the book, which obviously this book does not actually have. Rather than at the beginning to chapter 3. It's also of course a total lie. L5R has one of the most cumbersome systems ever devised, where basic die rolling takes longer than any system I can think of except Framewerk. It is not simple by any possible stretch of the imagination. And as for efficiency – this chapter continues the previous chapter's model of not actually listing basic target numbers for actions. Basically, this game is like Scion in that it provides the calculations to perform opposed tests and fight people in combat, but the basic target numbers to “do stuff” don't exist. Such as L5R 3rd edition is a game at all, it is that the MC stares at sample NPCs and tries to figure out what kinds of tasks they'd be able to do, and then ad hocs something based on how difficult a task the PC wants to perform seems to be compared to the sorts of results the MC thinks an NPC who could pull that off would be able to roll. And good luck with that, since of course the actual designers of this game have no idea what the probability curves of the L5R die rolling system looks like.

In L5R you double plus super we mean it don't get to roll or keep more than 10 dice. The chapter several times talks about various equations to convert extra rolled dice past 10 to kept dice and extra kept dice past 10 to “free raises” (which are suspiciously similar to getting +5 bonuses to your final total). And while you can imagine circumstances that this shit could come up, it really doesn't matter for the most part because people tend to have stats (and thus kept dice) that range from 2 to 6 at chargen and don't generally exceed that range in either direction in the expected lifetime of most campaigns. The book is in short extremely concerned about how to calculate edge case mega-character actions whose average action result is about 61, but they don't bother to tell you what an action result of 61 would mean, or even what the difference between a TN 10, 15, or 20 action that a mortal character might attempt would be.

Target number modifiers get some ink. So the rules tell you how much more difficult it would be to climb a wall if you were injured, sleep deprived, or poisoned. But there still aren't guidelines as to how difficult it would be to climb various kinds of walls in the first place. Much is made of “raises” which are little bullshit where you gamble with the target number in order to get benefits if you succeed. Essentially it's just a really cumbersome way of attempting to do harder things and going up against a higher target number to compensate. The game also hands out “free raises” like they were candy. These allow you to get a result that is like you went against a higher TN without changing the TN. This is a whole lot like a circumstance bonus that makes the task easier except that it can't lower the base TN – so it makes harder tasks easier but medium tasks just get completed more stylishly if they succeed. There's pretty much nothing nice to say about the raises mechanic, it's just a needless complication.

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I said that the combat numbers were sufficiently nailed down that it was physically possible to play a combat according to the rules. I think that's about as far as I would go with that. The numbers are more than a little bit insane. Peoples' armor class (that is, the TN to hit them with weapon attacks) is their Reflexes times five, and actual armor or lack thereof increases that by zero to ten. So the lowest Reflexes a starting character is going to have is 2, giving the minimum AC at 10. The maximum Reflexes of a starting character is 6 (for a Kakita Kakita or a Shinjo Utaku, for example), which can put your armor class at 40 or beyond (the Utaku Battle Maiden School gives you +1 Reflexes and also adds your Water Ring to your armor class, for example). Assuming that someone soft maxed their weapon skill and has an Agility of 3 and thus has five dice keep three on attack, they hit an AC of 10 99% of the time and miss against an AC of 40 95% of the time. It's not quite as busted as Scion, but a starting Shinjo Battle Maiden on a horse wearing Riding Armor no-shit has the target number to hit her be 47 without fucking with advantages or kata, and even characters with the regular soft max attack pools (6k4) only hit 7% of the time. People who just spent a couple of points on a weapon skill and took the base agility they started with hit approximately 0.0% of the time. And remember that if you max out your defense stat, you also get to use it as your attack stat if you are specifically using a bow. So... it's pretty close to being as bad as Scion.

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Did someone just say “kata”? Because I think someone said “kata.”

11 pages of this chapter are taken up with katas. These are extra abilities that you can learn for a few points and a GM-determined amount of time by studying with some senseis that the GM has determined know them. There is a lot of GM-fiat in here, but they also have prerequisites which you probably don't meet the prerequisites for at chargen. Some of the prereqs are literally that you have to be such and such a level in some bushi school or another, making them be easter egg abilities of those schools that are not in the list of abilities the school grants but instead in the combat chapter because fuck you. The abilities granted by kata are pretty much completely arbitrary, with some of them having drawbacks that make them disadvantageous to even use and some of them being extremely powerful. Each kata has an amount of time it lasts and takes an amount of time to activate. So you have to do your special exercises before battle, and the battle generally has to come in the next hour or two. Because apparently the L5R people were sad that they hadn't yet figured out a way to get warriors on a five minute workday schedule.

Thirteen and a half pages in the chapter are taken up with equipment descriptions. This is a surprising place to find these things for me. But it's also a surprising place to find these things for the authors, because the item descriptions will sometimes have rules references to combat rules, which they helpfully inform you are to be found in “the Book of Fire,” which you are of course currently reading when you read that. This is probably a bit more insane and offensive than running into a page XX error. The gear itself is mostly armor and weapons. Armor makes you harder to hit, and weapons set your damage, kind of like D&D except all the numbers are bullshit and the chapter lacks an equipment chart to compare these things easily. Melee calculates your chance to-hit with agility, your defense with reflexes, your damage with strength, and your hit points with the lower of your stamina and willpower. Strength doesn't add much to your damage, as damage rolls operate differently from normal rolls and your stat only adds to the rolled dice while the kept dice are set by the weapon you are using. And your attack stat can be converted into damage by taking raises for extra damage at a slightly better rate than that – this means that practically speaking your attack stat is in all ways better than Strength, and remember that if you're an archer your attack stat is also your defense stat because game balance is for suckers.

This is not a joke. If you're a basic samurai with your starting stats and kenjutsu rank, swinging your katana around you roll 3k2 on to-hit rolls (average 15.3) and 5k2 on damage rolls (average 19). If you raise your agility to 3, you roll 4k3 on to-hit rolls (average 21.9). So if you accept a 5 point higher TN for raising damage equal to the amount you'd gain for having one more strength, you're still looking at an average to-hit roll that is 1.6 higher relative to the target number you're looking for. And you of course have the option of not using your extra damage raise and simply accepting a considerably higher chance to-hit if your opponent has a lot of reflexes. The game really wants you to be a horse archer, and at times references one of the game's most hilarious misprints: where Utaku Kamoko was printed “Otaku Kamoko.” Ask 4chan why that's funny. Bizarrely, rather than just fucking fix that shit, I think the game metastasized an elaborate explanation for why that was actually her name, so in this chapter you are allowed to learn special Otaku powers. Seriously, look it up.

There's a whole thing about Iajutsu Duels, and there are seriously like eight steps for each participant and I can't be fucked to math hammer it.

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Iajutsu Duels were important in the game and in the setting, but this subsystem is unnecessarily cumbersome. Odd, because the card game handled it rather elegantly with just two choices and two numbers.

For reasons that defy ready analysis, this chapter contains a bunch of miscellaneous rules for advancement and social standing. Status and Glory go from -10 to +10, but I have no idea why. There are a lot more levels than that, especially at the top, and it ends up with some ranks have status values of shit like “9.3” and I do not understand how that is different from just calling them a 10 and calling the dude with a 9.4 an 11 and so on. The game does not seem to gain anything from these fractional values. Most of the character advancement rules are in the previous chapter, but the explanation that the MC gives you as many XPs as he feels like and whatever is in this chapter.

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Achilles attempts to become as honored as the Turtle Clan.

The game has a mass battle minigame. And while it has little to do with the rest of the game, it's extremely not the worst mass battle game you'll see. Basically there are specific things that give your side bonuses, and bringing more people is one of them. So you collect bonuses in a pile, roll your dice, add your bonuses, and the higher roll does better than the lower one. It's more complicated than that, and you have a chance to do a dramatic action between each round, and that's why it takes up six and a half pages. But really, I think the mass battle system here is considerably better than the normal combat system, which is odd for something trying to be an RPG.

Next up: the Book of Air, where they actually tell us how Shugenja and Monks are supposed to work.
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Post by Silent Wayfarer »

FrankTrollman wrote:The game really wants you to be a horse archer, and at times references one of the game's most hilarious misprints: where Utaku Kamoko was printed “Otaku Kamoko.” Ask 4chan why that's funny. Bizarrely, rather than just fucking fix that shit, I think the game metastasized an elaborate explanation for why that was actually her name, so in this chapter you are allowed to learn special Otaku powers. Seriously, look it up.
The Utaku were called Otaku from 1E onwards, I think, and it's only when they realized that Otaku basically meant socially retarded neckbeard in Japan that they contrived a way to change the name.

The original Otaku was basically Sakaki from Azumanga with a katana.
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Post by Koumei »

Yeah, my introduction to L5R was a friend telling me with some excitement that Unicorn had Otaku Battle Maidens. Indeed my "Samurai with no Iaijutsu" who ended up becoming an Emissary (Jade? Emerald? Something green) in the Living Campaign was an Otaku Battle Maiden.

I'm not actually sure which edition that was, but they hadn't yet gone "Crap, everyone knows what Otaku means, change it!" Apparently there's no chance of an offshoot family called Fucking Weeaboo.
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Post by Silent Wayfarer »

They changed it in the middle of 1e, during the crazy bullshit after the 2nd Day of Thunder, I think. Otaku Kamoko (the Unicorn Thunder) was the last person to bear that surname.

And I had lots of fun with the Gaijin Name disadvantage, besides the usual Moto Rola and Moto Saikel and Moto Kar, there was also Shinjo Uiabu and Iuchi Bai (it's a Cantonese thing).
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Post by Aryxbez »

FrankTrollman wrote:
Book of Fire wrote: Situations are intended to reflect the dynamic, heroic style of samurai epics such as Lone Wolf and Cun or Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai. Because of this, there is a great deal of emphasis on intrigue and combats tend to be swift and deadly.
I actually looked up Lone Wolf And Cub, awesome as it is, and could see this in Game of Thrones, I wonder if my peers often at ends with the source material applying to the PC's. Sort of like that Warhammer 40K BS, where the people on the cover NOT YOUR CHARACTER, some peasant that doesn't matter. Though I suppose things can be fast and deadly? Gotta jack up the AC, or likely die quick and such.
but the basic target numbers to “do stuff” don't exist.
That's really odd, I recall someone referencing that getting like a TN 40? was enough to blow up a mountain. Maybe we were referencing the 4th edition book??
The opening story is about some people on a dungeon crawl in an abandoned city with monsters in it in the shadowlands. The POV character finds a cursed dagger and becomes corrupted by it. It's really more Wheel of Time fanfic than L5R fanfic.
Did originally getting magical items not corrupt you in Rokugan? Otherwise this actually makes sense, as lot of games that I heard were played usually revolved around going into the Shadowlands, cue horrible one-shot style deaths.
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Post by Longes »

Next up: the Book of Air, where they actually tell us how Shugenja and Monks are supposed to work.
In 4e Dragon clan has Togashi Tattooed Men, who are monks, but they are not Monks (who are detailed in the book of air). They are socially both samurai and monks, and they tear off their shirts before battle. But they are technically not Monks, and don't have access to Kiho by RAW. Kiho being miny spells monks have, which range from awesome (perfect awareness of everything alive and everything deliberately hidden in a small radius) to terrible (your punches get range of a few meters, but the damage goes down).

Was this shit insane in 3e as well?
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Post by Silent Wayfarer »

Pretty much, except that Tattooed Men in 3e could also learn kiho (their tattoos were their version of class features) as monks.

Even shuggies could learn kiho too. But not bushi. Fuck you, bushi. Well, unless you're Dragon bushi, they got a special skill which let you learn kiho at every level.
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Post by fectin »

If I recall right, the change to "Utaku" wasn't until about when WotC sold it back. It might have been been in spirit wars, but not much earlier.

And yes, the explanation was SUPER contrived.
Last edited by fectin on Thu Dec 25, 2014 4:11 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Longes »

Silent Wayfarer wrote:Pretty much, except that Tattooed Men in 3e could also learn kiho (their tattoos were their version of class features) as monks.

Even shuggies could learn kiho too. But not bushi. Fuck you, bushi. Well, unless you're Dragon bushi, they got a special skill which let you learn kiho at every level.
In 4e it's only brotherhood monks who can learn Kiho by default. Tattoed Men require a 5 point advantage, because fuck you. A sidebar suggests allowing shugenja learning Kiho as well. Bushi are useless and weep in their corner.
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Post by Username17 »

Aryxbez wrote: I actually looked up Lone Wolf And Cub, awesome as it is, and could see this in Game of Thrones, I wonder if my peers often at ends with the source material applying to the PC's. Sort of like that Warhammer 40K BS, where the people on the cover NOT YOUR CHARACTER, some peasant that doesn't matter. Though I suppose things can be fast and deadly? Gotta jack up the AC, or likely die quick and such.
One of the neat things about the card game was that even the basic bullshit samurai were presented with names. So rather than putting out a generic Lion Clan samurai #1, you put out "Matsu Gohei." He wasn't unique or anything, he was just supposed to be an example samurai. But of course after years of repeated fanwank and setting power creep, Matsu Gohei in particular became a glorious general and even dies and becomes an honored ancestral ghost. So you don't get to be Matsu Gohei in the RPG, so there's nothing you get to be at all.
That's really odd, I recall someone referencing that getting like a TN 40? was enough to blow up a mountain. Maybe we were referencing the 4th edition book??
There's no target number lists in this book, meaning that pretty much every MC is going to have their own interpretation as to what a particular roll means. The combat examples are not encouraging, in that there is really intense "raise inflation." One of the few examples is literally that a player character wants to cut a dude's mustache with his sword, so the MC decides that's worth four raises - thereby bumping the target number from 20 (strike an ordinary dude wearing armor) to 40 (go fuck yourself). A regular sort of dude with a stat raise and a skill gets 5 dice and keeps 3 and only nails that task 5% of the time.

Of course, at the other end, if you're a Shinjo Battle Maiden you probably start play with a skill in riding of 4 and a reflexes of 6, and on riding tests you no shit roll 10 dice and keep the best 6 and your average result is 49.9. Player capabilities are so all over the place and the swinginess introduced by every point of stat or skill is so huge that I don't think a sensible target number list could be made. And 3rd edition just fucking left the chart out altogether.
The opening story is about some people on a dungeon crawl in an abandoned city with monsters in it in the shadowlands. The POV character finds a cursed dagger and becomes corrupted by it. It's really more Wheel of Time fanfic than L5R fanfic.
Did originally getting magical items not corrupt you in Rokugan? Otherwise this actually makes sense, as lot of games that I heard were played usually revolved around going into the Shadowlands, cue horrible one-shot style deaths.
Magic items that corrupt you certainly exist in the setting. But most of the magic items in the card game don't really do stuff like that. Magic items are totally just a thing in the card game, but for whatever reason the RPG doesn't want to give you any of them. Almost every deck contains at least one magic item, a clan sword if nothing else. But while the use of magic weapons in the card game is ubiquitous, the RPG writers and players seem to have mostly decided that they should be reserved for people who aren't your characters.

In the case of the story though, the opening fiction for the Book of Fire is really pretty explicitly a crossover fanfic with the Wheel of Time, where Shadar Logoth appears in the Shadowlands for no reason and a samurai finds Mat's dagger, also for no reason. It makes as much sense as any alternate universe crossover fanfic.

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Post by Longes »

Each kata has an amount of time it lasts and takes an amount of time to activate. So you have to do your special exercises before battle, and the battle generally has to come in the next hour or two. Because apparently the L5R people were sad that they hadn't yet figured out a way to get warriors on a five minute workday schedule.
I'm surprised to see that the game actually improves between editions. In 4e executing a kata is a Simple Action, and most of them last indefinitely.
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Post by Longes »

Aryxbez wrote:
but the basic target numbers to “do stuff” don't exist.
That's really odd, I recall someone referencing that getting like a TN 40? was enough to blow up a mountain. Maybe we were referencing the 4th edition book??
Yes, 4e has a section on TNs, going from 0 to 60.

5: striking an immobile target/recognizing an old friend.
60: shattering stone with your bare hands/Outwitting a Fortune
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Post by Count Arioch the 28th »

Silent Wayfarer wrote:
FrankTrollman wrote:The game really wants you to be a horse archer, and at times references one of the game's most hilarious misprints: where Utaku Kamoko was printed “Otaku Kamoko.” Ask 4chan why that's funny. Bizarrely, rather than just fucking fix that shit, I think the game metastasized an elaborate explanation for why that was actually her name, so in this chapter you are allowed to learn special Otaku powers. Seriously, look it up.
The Utaku were called Otaku from 1E onwards, I think, and it's only when they realized that Otaku basically meant socially retarded neckbeard in Japan that they contrived a way to change the name.

The original Otaku was basically Sakaki from Azumanga with a katana.
I can see how they would make that mistake though if they read some books on ancient Japan though, at one point Otaku just meant "House". Kind of like some foreign person who only read about feudal England and thinks that a cool name for an American cowboy is "Cock Cogburn". Technically correct but it means something else now...
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Post by Silent Wayfarer »

Magic items in L5R are closer to Thread/Pattern Items in Earthdawn, in that they almost always have a history and/or were made by some larger than life historical figure whose rules you don't have access to (fuck you, PCs). They also have a stupid name: nemuranai (which is probably supposed to be "undreaming" in Nipponese, translates to "awakened" in Rokuganese, but sounds stupid to anyone who knows the language).

For example, Kaiu the Builder forged the Crab Clan Ancestral Katana over the course of a night while camped out in the Shadowlands waiting for the Number Two Oni of the shadowlands, while Kuni the Wise Guy enchanted it and Hiruma the Hunter stabbed the Number Two Oni in the face when it showed up. Or how Doji Yasurugi (Crane Thunder) forged five super badass katanas, all of which were pretty much a pretty version of Stormbringer and nobody else could ever do it again.

They are generally not evil by default, but evil wizards (maho tsukai and the like) have forged cursed magic items and given them to people to fuck them up.
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Post by Ancient History »

Magic items in L5R are closer to Thread/Pattern Items in Earthdawn, in that they almost always have a history and/or were made by some larger than life historical figure whose rules you don't have access to (fuck you, PCs). They also have a stupid name: nemuranai (which is probably supposed to be "undreaming" in Nipponese, translates to "awakened" in Rokuganese, but sounds stupid to anyone who knows the language).
Well, no. They want to be Earthdawn, but they refuse to give you even guidelines for that. What they do have is several classes devoted specifically to making magic swords and shit, and then refusing to give you actual rules for magic shit they can make. The high point for magic item creation in L5R was the d20 days when they could piggyback D&D's system.
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Post by Username17 »

The Book of Air

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The elements originally interacted with different parts of the game. Air with spells, Earth with defense, Fire with dueling, Water with terrain and province assignments, and Void with card drawing.

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With enough expansions, those connections eventually broke down entirely.

It's Christmas time, and I have 47 hours off, so it's time to sit down with a glass of Northern Irish cream and read and rant about the fourth chapter of L5R 3rd edition: The Book of Air. The Book of Air is 60 pages, and we're running towards the end of the book. The opening story is longer than the other and is an old man giving a demonstration of magic to a promising shugenja student along with some Yodaisms and fortune cookie wisdom. There is no plot and it conveys no real information about what magic is capable of in the setting or what people can do with it. The only real setting information is that apparently temples in Rokugan have statues of Benten in them.

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Yes. That Benten. Really.

The chapter proper begins with a one page rant about how there are largely indifferent spirits all over the place, and magic is performed by entreating, bargaining with, or dominating those spirits into doing stuff. It's kind of neat fluff, save for the kind of stupid bits about the alternate spirits of evil that bad guys get to have evil interactions with instead. In the RPG the only real effect is that it gives license to the MC to troll you by announcing that your character has offended the kami and now they can't use magic anymore or whatever. But since the system lacks basic interaction mechanics and is held together almost exclusively with mind caulk, the MC could probably do that to you anyway, so really not much of a change.

Next, we get into a 7 page rant about cosmology, which is about gods, spirits, and alternate dimensions. So, really high level shit that probably doesn't make any difference in your game because most of the characters have no ability to interact with any of this at any point in the game. There are various evil things, various quasi-Buddhist dimensions you won't ever get to see, and dragons who are better than you. And the people of Rokugan worship the 7 Lucky Gods.

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All Rokugani religion is essentially from the scrolls of Rumiko Takahashi

Then there is a two and a half page section on “Nemuranai.” These are a perfect excuse for characters to have magic items. Shinto is essentially animism, and there are spirits in everything. If you have a helmet or a pair of sandals, there are kami in them. And if you awaken the kami in an item, the item turns into a magic item that does some stuff. So you could plausibly just hand out magic trinkets as characters leveled up like you were playing a fantasy adventure game. But the book specifically tells you not to and rants about how nemuranai are super duper rare and non-transferable because kami forbid that player characters ever got nice things. By the way, the word “nemuranai” appears to be Japanese for “never sleeping” and if you image search it, weird creepy shit comes up.

Almost half the chapter, 24.5 pages worth, is the “spells and magic” section. This is the part where they tell you what the Shugenja School Rank actually does (just two chapters after telling you what the bushi and scout school rankings did). Your school rank is both your skill in casting spells and your maximum spell level. You can multi-school, but that is a sucker's game and you should pretty much always just power through a school – they go up to eight. Spells are divided up into five rings, and you get one spell of each ring type per day for each point in the ring you have. Also your “attribute” for casting each type of spell is the ring value. The TN to cast a spell is 10 + 5 times the spell level. Since rings (except Void), are the lower of two stats that are generally speaking unrelated, even very powerful shugenja are going to have 2s in some of their rings and be practically speaking limited to just casting two first level spells each day from those elements. Even such “paltry” shugenja can therefore cast “summon earth” twice per day, which despite rants about how you aren't allowed to make magical jade with it, is apparently capable of making gold at the rate of 1,200 pounds per casting. Seriously, that's a spell that every Shugenja automatically knows, and the lowest level of casting completely skullfucks the entire economy and turns the setting into a bizarre post-scarcity farce.

The bottom line of course is that while shugenja are more encouraged than most to split their stats around to pick up ring values so they can keep more dice on spellcasting checks and gain insight levels that they can plow into their school rank and get more rolled dice on spellcasting, they don't really miss out much on swording or talking. There's not a lot of reason to believe that a member of a prestigious courtier school is going to be much better at jibber jabber than a Shugenja who cares about their air magic. Indeed, even 1st level spells let you make magic weapons out of elemental funk, and the benefits of that over wielding a regular steel weapon are about what you'd get from a bushi school. Basically, Shugenja >> You.

Void Magic is special in a lot of dumb ways. The most obvious way is that the ring costs half as much (or less) than any other ring to buy because Void is a stat instead of being the lower of two stats. The other way is that void magic runs off your current void points instead of your void rating for calculating dice pools. That's normally a disadvantage, but void magic includes a bunch of ways to increase your void points beyond your normal maximum. It's pretty trivial for a level 4 Void Shugenja to be rolling and keeping 10 dice on any Void spell she really wants cast. The big problem here is that aside for some weird metagame bullshit of moving dice around, none of the spells in the basic book actually do anything you much care about. There are expansion books with more spells, and presumably somewhere there's a void spell out there where it actually matters that you can consistently cast it with an action value over 60, but in the core book it's just some spells to build up and then spend your daily void points to either have one really big roll or have a more modest bonus to all your similar tests for an hour. You learn and cast one or the other depending on how your MC has decided to handle skill tests. This makes most of the spells useless in most games, but it's a damn bit better than fucking Courtiers, who often get fixed powers that only do anything if the MC has decided to run skill checks in very specific and kind of obscure ways (for example: the Yasuki and Bayushi courier schools have abilities that trigger iff your MC has decided that the way to handle social tests should be to have two characters both make tests against a low static TN and award victory to whoever made the most raises and still succeeded – which is a possible but unlikely way to handle such tests).

Shugenja schools, as mentioned earlier, go up to 8. But the spells they let you learn only go up to 6 in this book. There are higher level spells elsewhere, and if you go into the spell research rules in other books it's not a whole lot of downtime to create one from scratch if you're powerful enough for a 7th or 8th level spell to be something you'd be able to cast. The real issue of course is that while going up in level entitles you to cast higher level spells (and gives you more dice to roll on casting checks), it doesn't actually give you any higher level spells to cast. You need to get access to a spell scroll, and with the rules in this book they are 100% gated by the MC deciding whether or not to give you one. So aside from the starter spells (including the completely economy destroying Summon Earth discussed earlier), you have no control over what (if any) spells you get, and there's no particular reason to believe you'll get spells that have anything to do with the ring you invested in.

Anyway... Monks. In Japanese and Chinese history, monks often played a very large and important role. The various monasteries didn't have a pope and often were not even nominally in fealty to the local nobility, so they were able to wield more political and military power even than the European bishops. So it's no surprise that monks were kind of a big deal in L5R even in the beginning. Of course, when it started, the “monk” role was given to the Dragon Clan. The Dragon Clan were more “Tibetan” than the other clans (just as the Unicorn Clan were more Mongolian), and their strongholds were mountain monasteries. They had monks who were like Shaolin monks, and they looked like this:

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A fire breather of the Dragon Clan. Would also be accepted in the Wu Tang Clan.

Anyway, later on they decided that monks dedicated to a more “five ring” flavored enlightenment should be a thing and then there was a giant piece of confusion between characters who were “monks” and characters who were aligned with the monk faction. And so, eleven and a half pages are spent describing the various flavors of Monk in Rokugan, and most of that goes into describing their quasi-spells called “kiho.” The rules for learning kiho are unparseable, in that the “main” restriction is that you're supposed to have a ring value equal to the mastery level of the kiho, but it also has this hanging sentence that “Such a character” is limited by his rank in a school with the monk descriptor. But that's not attached to a clause that refers to any particular character in particular or type and all the rules for learning kiho seem to be under the heading “Non-Monks and Kiho” and I have no idea which sentences in this word salad are supposed to apply to Dragon Clan Monks and which are supposed to apply to Shinsei Monks and which are supposed to apply to Shugenja and which are supposed to apply to other people. It's all argle bargle.

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Kihos are supposed to be like when monks go all Dragon Ball, which probably sounds cooler than it is.

The Kiho themselves are mostly tradeoffs, and in most cases quite terrible. You spend a bunch of XP to learn them, and then you have the option to spend a void point to make a questionable trade. There are some winners in there but they seem to be accidental. For example, Air Fist makes you trade damage away to gain accuracy, which of course you would then use to pay for raises to grapple, throw, disarm, or otherwise disable an opponent and not give a shit about the damage. Mostly, you don't care about kiho, and the fact that you can't figure out how it's supposed to work or what it's supposed to cost is therefore not a big deal.

The book spends six and a half pages talking about Shadowlands Taint. The Shadowlands are a thing which have changed a lot over the course of the game, become much more black-n-white and a lot less interesting as it was fleshed out. Rokugan has a big wall in the south like the Great Wall of China (but in the South), and on the far side are the Shadowlands, an area filled with blight and monsters. In the original presentation, there were creatures from the Shadowlands that were basically assimilated into Rokugan culture, and they were something that people dealt with on the level of mercenary human bushi – not a source of honor but not a source of shame either. And there were things in the Shadowlands that were just mischevious and uncouth, and dealing with those things was dishonorable because it was embarrassing for the most part. And there were things in the Shadowlands that were just rampaging monsters or dangerous animals. And finally there were things in the Shadowlands that ate people and demanded human sacrifices and stuff – and they were just plain evil.

As the game and story went on and Marty Stue characters needed ever more powerful and wicked enemies to triumph over, the Shadowlands became a more and more monolithic villainous land. Essentially, it stopped being like the original WFRP Chaos Lands, and became more like the later incarnations of Chaos: a skullfuck babyeater emporium that corrupted everyone that touched it and made them mutate and grow vaginal dentata. Apparently the writers never got the memo that your enemies being more evil doesn't make you more good, it just makes the choices you make to fight them easier and less interesting. The Shadowlands came up with a new plan every couple of months and never ever won, so Fu Leng ended up being like Skeletor or Dr. Claw.

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Much of the Taint section is filled up with arbitary Warhammer style chaos mutations and I don't care.

The Maho Tsukai are like evil blood-powered wizards. There's three and a half pages dedicated to their off-brand of sorcery. It's really weird. But basically, being a blood speaker is actually pretty rad. You have to stab people for hit point damage to cast spells, but you use an actual skill instead of a school ranking as your casting skill and you don't need to fuck around with spell slots. Periodically, you need to drain some blood out of someone to lower your shadowlands taint or you'll turn into an NPC monster, but despite using loaded descriptions like “sacrifice an intelligent being” it's actually a pretty small amount of damage and not a super big deal. Plus, you're allowed to become a blood speaker without signing up for any of this classist school nonsense. You don't have to be a natural shugenja or part of a special family, you can just fucking do it. Blood sorcery is way more egalitarian than Rokugani society as a whole, and fits closer to modern ideals than the so-called “good” kami based magic. Indeed, while the Shadlowlands Taint section has a big rant about how anyone who gets Shadowlands taint on them are totally fucking doomed, the Blood Speakers can keep tainted people going indefinitely with no doomage by just spilling 4 hit points worth of blood from time to time (characters have 14 hit points per point of Earth ring, so that isn't a lot).

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The first blood magic cards didn't even cause you to lose honor, and regularly made their appearance in “good guy” dueling decks.

Maho attack spells are pretty much terrible, but some of the buffs and conjurations are pretty awesome. The big selling point of course is that you can grab the high end shit like Summon Oni as a starting character. It's TN 30 to cast, and requires 8 hit points of blood, but it's fucking summon oni. If you throw down some of the expansion material, that shit can get nuts. Basically every character should get into Maho in a big way. It doesn't even matter what your stats or other skills are, you'll have some ring that's good, and be able to throw down some decent magic even if you're a bushi.

And that's the end of the chapter. The summons can't really be parsed without reference to the next chapter, and we'll get there next.
fectin
Prince
Posts: 3760
Joined: Mon Feb 01, 2010 1:54 am

Post by fectin »

But they did eventually turn bad:
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(that's the scorpion clan sword, by the way)
Vebyast wrote:Here's a fun target for Major Creation: hydrazine. One casting every six seconds at CL9 gives you a bit more than 40 liters per second, which is comparable to the flow rates of some small, but serious, rocket engines. Six items running at full blast through a well-engineered engine will put you, and something like 50 tons of cargo, into space. Alternatively, if you thrust sideways, you will briefly be a fireball screaming across the sky at mach 14 before you melt from atmospheric friction.
Silent Wayfarer
Knight-Baron
Posts: 898
Joined: Sun Jun 21, 2009 11:35 am

Post by Silent Wayfarer »

Ancient History wrote:Well, no. They want to be Earthdawn, but they refuse to give you even guidelines for that. What they do have is several classes devoted specifically to making magic swords and shit, and then refusing to give you actual rules for magic shit they can make. The high point for magic item creation in L5R was the d20 days when they could piggyback D&D's system.
The best PC-made stuff isn't even magic, they're just masterworks. Those are supposed to be the high point of what PCs can expect to actually wield in game, since actual magic weapons are Clan heirlooms and are functionally minor artifacts.
Last edited by Silent Wayfarer on Thu Dec 25, 2014 7:35 pm, edited 1 time in total.
If your religion is worth killing for, please start with yourself.
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