OSSR: L5R 3rd Edition

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Ancient History
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Post by Ancient History »

Except...it's not! There's seriously a shitload of magic and pseudo-magic items made out of weird materials in the setting. They just don't want you to actually have any of that as a PC.
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Post by Longes »

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.
In 4e you are straight up forbidden to make "rare/precious or spiritually charged" materials. I'm seriously surprised to see a system that became better with more editions. SR5e, D&D 4e, etc. made me too cynical.
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Post by name_here »

Remember that those followed on from later editions largely considered to be the best of the lot.
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Post by Silent Wayfarer »

Longes wrote: In 4e you are straight up forbidden to make "rare/precious or spiritually charged" materials. I'm seriously surprised to see a system that became better with more editions. SR5e, D&D 4e, etc. made me too cynical.
To me, L5R 4e: L5R 3e as D&D 4E: D&D 3E.
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Post by Username17 »

The Book of Void

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The Scorpion Clan Seductress who was also the empress featured prominently in a lot of the early art for some reason.

It may seem like there's a lot that hasn't been touched on by this book, and there is. But this is the last chapter and it's the shortest – just 41 pages. So if you're expecting things to be wrapped up in a way that makes sense, expect disappointment. The opening italicized fiction is also the shortest in the book, taking less than a page to get across it's vague shonen-anime aphorisms. The characters are declaring that they are going to go rescue their lord, who has been imprisoned by one of the other clans and possibly there's some intrigue going on but their plan is to solve it with a frontal assault, so who cares? The story doesn't even get to the point of action actually happening, it's just people posturing for honor!

The first section of the chapter proper is a bit called “Gamemastering Tips.” That roughly breaks down into two subsections: the part where it tells you how hard it is to put together a party who can adventure together in this setting, and the part where it tells you how much Rokugan is totally different to and much more pretentious than Dungeons & Dragons. They call it “other fantasy settings” and other such euphemisms, but that's basically what they are talking about. No magic items for you! There's magic running through every leaf and spring because the setting is formally animist, but magic items would make it D&D, so fuck off. What's odd about all this is that in the card game, mixed parties really weren't a problem at all. You didn't play the Clan, you played a Daimyo. And there were solid advantages to having people in your fief who had the same clan as the daimyo, but there were also solid advantages to mixing and matching.

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Now you all have the same daimyo. The end.

But for reasons I don't fully understand, when it came to actually advancing the plot, all the clans became monolithic entities that really at most had two squabbling factions in them at a time. In the card game, each player was a lord from one of the clans and there weren't any real “clan priorities” because the guy on the other end of the table could just as easily be a lord from the same clan. You weren't “the Phoenix Clan” or even “The Isawa Family,” you were just some lord who happened to be named Isawa or Shiba and could muster other people named Isawa or Shiba more easily than an Iuchi or an Akodo. But there wasn't anything stopping you from filling your ranks with Kitsus and Kunis, and there could be totally valid reasons to do so.

So while the card game presented a totally playable and reasonable explanation for why and how people from different clans could be in the same army together (and indeed why such an event wasn't even the sort of thing that required explanations), the Imperial Herald fiction pieces presented a story which made that kind of thing way more implausible. And despite this being obviously extremely caustic for the game, the RPG decided to go with the herp derp version. So it demands that everyone make incredibly complicated backstories to explain why the player characters don't immediately murder each other for being on the wrong sides of inter-clan disputes. Why? That's so much more annoying and less effective than just declaring that no one is in charge entire clans and individual fiefs have people from multiple clans in them all the time and it's no big thing.

Having squandered their one chance to make a playable setting (one which oddly enough the d20 Oriental Adventures book didn't fail at), they then move on to the creatures and NPCs. This gets seven and a half pages, and is extremely telegraphic – fitting 6 sample NPCs on a page and not bothering to tell you what skills they have. So this is really the game's last desperate hope to tell you how good your characters are supposed to be, and it doesn't explain much. But what it does explain is pretty mortifying. As a starting character you get 45 points to divvy up between your stats, skills, advantages, special abilities, and status. The “typical bushi,” “typical ninja,” and even the fucking “typical bandit” all get to spend 60 character points on their stats alone. Their figured characteristics are calculated incorrectly (the Bandit is apparently wearing armor worth a 5 point penalty to his defense and is considerably easier to damage than if he was naked), and a lot of them are running around with weapon skills well above starting character maximums. So basically, as a character in this game you're a choad, well below the level of a “typical” spear catcher. Better min/max like crazy, because if you don't you're going to get your ass handed to you by unnamed forest rabble in one on one fights.

What follows is two and a half pages talking about how you could play in one of nine presented alternate (or counterfactual) periods of Rokugani history. That's almost four per page, so there isn't really enough meat here to run any of these. Just a call out that if you were really enamored with one of the time periods depicted in one of the card sets, you could probably go do that.

The Geography of Rokugan gets twenty one and a half pages, and is more than half this chapter. It's legit I suppose, but basically the kind of thing that was really sort of the entire point of the Book of Earth. A lot of it is taken up by giving you map citations of where all the villages that were mentioned by name in various Imperial Herald articles over the previous decade are. The system is not ideal, with each location getting a letter code and the map just having little letters on it. This is what I meant when I said this book looks like the work of the kinds of obsessive fanboys who run Memory Alpha for Star Trek or Wookiepedia for Star Wars. So if you want to know where the Battle of Drowned Merchant River took place five hundred years before the presumed start of the game, you are in luck because the location is on this map. That kind of attention to trivial detail is why this section takes more than twenty pages.
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The map of Rokugan is based more on China, while the culture of Rokugan is more like Japan.

Page 308 is basically an ad pimping various other sourcebooks.

Page 309 is a reading list and a set of movies the authors liked.

There is then a page and a half talking about how to convert characters from earlier editions (short version: sell off anything that your character has that either no longer exists or really sucks now for the amount of character points it cost in the old system and spend your influx of points on shit in the new book).

The last part of the chapter is two and a half pages of glossary, to tell you about all the various weird Japanese words they are mincing. Mysteriously includes some but not all of the main clan family names. So Shinjo, Iuchi, and Horiuchi are there for the Unicorn, but neither Utaku nor Otaku are. So... I dunno.

And that's the chapter. This chapter had one job: to tell a prospective GM how to actually play this fucking game. It did not deliver on that. There are no more chapters in this book, so this chapter failing to come through on that point pretty much means that the book as a whole fails on that count as well.
Last edited by Username17 on Fri Dec 26, 2014 1:29 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Lago PARANOIA »

FrankTrollman wrote:The characters are declaring that they are going to go rescue their lord, who has been imprisoned by one of the other clans and possibly there's some intrigue going on but their plan is to solve it with a frontal assault, so who cares? The story doesn't even get to the point of action actually happening, it's just people posturing for honor!
You know, I have no idea why gamebooks decide to do this. The whole 'let's do a badass action scene setup but don't go through with it' business. Why don't these stories show the cool parts? I don't know about WoD and L5R and other settings, but D&D (any edition) and Exalted and Shadowrun and d20 modern and Mutants and Masterminds pull that shit all the time.
Last edited by Lago PARANOIA on Fri Dec 26, 2014 2:09 am, edited 3 times in total.
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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 Ancient History »

Usually it's because the combat system breaks down at anything more than skirmish-level (or in D&D's case, they ask you to go use the mass combat system). The more complicated the combat, the more difficult and lengthy it is to even try and emulate it on the tabletop. That's why in Ghost Cartels for Shadowrun, when we had the big adventure in Kowloon City, we explicitly told the gamemaster to run it as cinematic - don't worry over every little mook; hell, don't try to stat out every little mook. Keep the players moving if possible, that kind of thing.

Which is harder than it looks like. Players, unlike actual characters in books or people in real life stressful situations, are not good at running away when outnumbered and outgunned, or even managing a tactical withdrawal. Players can be really pig-headedly stupid about trying to charge into 1,001 orcs or the line-of-fire of a fiery deathwyrm that just killed a castle. And most gamemasters don't just roll two big handfuls of dice and say "You're dead. The dragon pisses in your ashes." Because then the players are mad at them, like this was a fucking riddle or puzzletrap and Mister Cavern is being a dick because they tried to Julius Caesar the motherfucker.
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Post by Fucks »

How's L5R 4th edition core rulebook compared with this one?
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Post by Longes »

Fucks wrote:How's L5R 4th edition core rulebook compared with this one?
Based on what Frank wrote, it's better. Significantly. A lot of systems are streamlined, there are TNs in the book, there's a proper introduction. On the negative side, 4e just doesn't have a NPC list. There are monsters and animals (dog written as "Dog (Inu)". No other animals have japanese names), but no human NPCs.

The Book of Void suggests a number of hooks to organise PCs into a party, from "Imperial Magistrates", where all PCs are on his Imperial Majesty's secret service, to "Shadowlands Campaign", where you are basically Black Watch at the Wall, to "Otokodate (Band of Brothers)", where you are all just bros hanging out, looking for trouble.

It also has a three page discussion of "Asian vs. Western Storytelling", and a two page essay on making non-Shadowlands villains.
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Post by Username17 »

The 3rd edition book throws around some ideas like working for imperial magistrates and such as well. The big problem here is that these are not really examples of things to hang a campaign around, so much as a one-shot adventure. Yes, you might be put together as an A-Team (or really, a C-Team considering how much better than you typical fucking bandits are) to investigate a crime or hunt down a rampaging oni or something, but at the end of that adventure everyone has to go back to their family lands to go train in their house dojos for a few months. Bushi, Scouts, and Courtiers don't get to be freed from their apprenticeship's demand that they periodically return until they get to rank 5. Shugenja don't get out of that shit until rank 8.

The various flavors of team building suggested by the game are only good for one adventure, and you need a new excuse to have a second adventure, and a new excuse for a third. It's everything that's wrong with clan politics in Vampire: the Masquerade, but they don't even create a proper and lasting out for coteries to do table top campaigns with.

L5R needed to be rebooted in 2005 and it needs to be rebooted even more today. The D&D version was the best version, and from a mechanical standpoint they needed to adapt a lot of the things that made that work into whatever system they had going forward. The Roll And Keep system was exciting and full of promise in the 1990s because people didn't understand how it worked. Now we know how it works, and we know it's bad. Fiddling with the numbers is not going to solve that issue. But the storyline is also full of dumb. Nearly twenty years of writers trying to one-up each other and fighting it out over which characters are the bestest of all has left things as dumb and convoluted as Marvel Comics. Things need to be rebooted back to Clan War and done up with a lot less stupid shit. At no point should there be a "Ninja Emperor" in the form of the Emperor, who is also a Ninja. Because that's retarded. Someone obviously thought that was a way to make things "more awesome" but it was honestly just really really dumb.

The people writing 3rd edition L5R seemed to have thought that the problem with Rokugan was that it had been allowed to have too much D&D influence. The truth is exactly the opposite: that the RPG hadn't been allowed to become D&D-like enough.

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Post by fectin »

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Post by Longes »

FrankTrollman wrote:The 3rd edition book throws around some ideas like working for imperial magistrates and such as well. The big problem here is that these are not really examples of things to hang a campaign around, so much as a one-shot adventure. Yes, you might be put together as an A-Team (or really, a C-Team considering how much better than you typical fucking bandits are) to investigate a crime or hunt down a rampaging oni or something, but at the end of that adventure everyone has to go back to their family lands to go train in their house dojos for a few months. Bushi, Scouts, and Courtiers don't get to be freed from their apprenticeship's demand that they periodically return until they get to rank 5. Shugenja don't get out of that shit until rank 8.
While I generally agree that a reboot is needed, to scrub the setting and get rid of roll-and-keep, this particular problem has been solved in 4e. Your School Rank = Your Insight Rank, unless you changed schools or something. When you get to school rank 2, you get that technique instantly and automatically. No need to go back to your dojo, your apprenticeship is done at rank 1.
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Post by Username17 »

There is of course a great desire for non-western fantasy settings, and "Oriental Adventures" is probably number one on that list. A bizarre pastiche of Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Southeast Asian historical and fantasy tropes from a variety of eras - much like how the "standard" Western Fantasy borrows liberally from English, Irish, Swedish, French, German, Italian, and Polish historical and mythological elements from several eras. The key is to get the balance right so that you can actually play the fucking thing.

And at its onset, L5R came pretty close to delivering that. There was a space for small groups of heroes to have Inu Yasha/Journey to the West style adventures where they fought demons to save villages. And there was space for badass champions to do Dynasty Warriors style antics to decide the fate of provinces.

Sengoku Era Japan had over two hundred clans. L5R presented a simplification where the lords on that level were left unnamed and there was no game mechanical effect or demand that any character work or not work for any particular one. Instead, there was just a half dozen vague categories that carried with them cultural expectations, color coded outfits, names, and hard mechanics. So a character could be a member of a defined group that had fluff and mechanical impact, but have that not affect whose side they were on or whether they could team up with the other player characters.

Bizarrely, the L5R card storyline and to a much greater extent the L5R RPG, decided to throw all that away. The "clans" became the protagonist factions, which meant that there weren't nearly enough of them and that player characters were divided up based on mechanics and culture into allowable alliances (even with other PCs). And that's fucked.

But moving forward, you could really do way worse with Oriental Adventures than just rebooting L5R. Which is basically what 3rd edition D&D did, because Ryan Dancey is a genius.

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Post by Koumei »

So if you were rebooting L5R into Oriental Adventures D&D, what crap would you use as the go-to player options? Putting aside the bit where someone wants to be a not-Dutchman or a Warforged or a time travelling schoolgirl Warlock from the future Rokugan world, the "standard" list.

So for races, do you include Tengu/Kenku and Nezumi and things, or do you go "Nah, you have to be the popular club that people like, you're Human"? Do you make Clans do anything special at all? Just have them open their own prestige classes with requirements of "Level 5, _____ Clan"? Ignore them completely? For Classes, the Monk, Samurai and some flavour of Ninja seem obvious, but then something for the Shugenja and... if you're actually stating "this is D&D", I'm not sure there'd be "a class all about talking to people", maybe roll it into the Marshal or just scrap it and let people simply take social skills if they want to be the courtier? Would you do a separate thing for the Tattooed Monk with fire breath and crap? Do something specific for Horseback Archers (or archers in general), perhaps just make that the Knight?
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Having $TEXAS clans that aren't important enough to even list sorted into 5-6 categories with mechanical effects sounds sensible to me. Maybe have them be Races Of War style backgrounds and unlock a prestige class that does their main thing; it would be unfortunate if you couldn't have a single clan that fields reasonably effective examples of all the classes. I mean, that's great for explaining why you have mixed clan parties but makes problems for stocking dungeons.

I would say that a very good option for mixed parties is to just declare that Ronin are viable PCs. You can have your "it really sucks to be Ronin" cake and eat it too by letting Ronin adopt into other clans and have their Ronin penalties disappear while keeping their background traits. Then you can get literally anyone into any arbitrary party with any plot hook whatsoever.
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Post by Whipstitch »

I tend to favor leaving clans and lineage as largely a fluffy political thing and instead doubling down on the value of apprenticeships and schools for one's mechanics. Just as a genre thing anything that emphasizes you avenging your teacher is to be applauded, whether you're actually related to them or not.
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Koumei wrote:So if you were rebooting L5R into Oriental Adventures D&D, what crap would you use as the go-to player options? Putting aside the bit where someone wants to be a not-Dutchman or a Warforged or a time travelling schoolgirl Warlock from the future Rokugan world, the "standard" list.

So for races, do you include Tengu/Kenku and Nezumi and things, or do you go "Nah, you have to be the popular club that people like, you're Human"? Do you make Clans do anything special at all? Just have them open their own prestige classes with requirements of "Level 5, _____ Clan"? Ignore them completely? For Classes, the Monk, Samurai and some flavour of Ninja seem obvious, but then something for the Shugenja and... if you're actually stating "this is D&D", I'm not sure there'd be "a class all about talking to people", maybe roll it into the Marshal or just scrap it and let people simply take social skills if they want to be the courtier? Would you do a separate thing for the Tattooed Monk with fire breath and crap? Do something specific for Horseback Archers (or archers in general), perhaps just make that the Knight?
Here's what I'd do:

-Everyone is a human. Your clan is your race, and it gives small bonuses.

There are four classes:
-Samurai. Main fighter, profficient with melee weapons and a bow. Samurai has a skill for talking with nobility, and increasingly magical melee abilities, starting with stances and ending with reality slicing sword attacks. At high levels Samurai gets his own land with tiny men.
-Ninja. Rogue, master of stealth and sneak attacks. Ninja is profficient with ninja specific weapons, like ninja-to and shurikens. Ninja has a Streetwise skill and can talk with criminals. At high levels ninja gets ninja magic, like shapeshifting and invisibility, and gets his own ninja hideout with apprentices to send on missions.
-Shugenja. Cleric. Shugenja can talk to spirits, buff allies, perform rituals. Not sure what weapon should a Shugenja use. Shugenja has a Spirit Ettiquete, and can talk to spirits and non-human creatures. Shugenja never gets any attack spells, so Samurai and his tiny men stay relevant. At high levels Shugenja gets his own temple, with blackjack and cute miko, and can influence spirits for weather effects, or something like that.
-Monk. Bard. Monk fights with his fists (which get increasingly better with levels, or can be improved with magical handwraps/tattoos) or monk weapons, like a Bo. Monk has a skill for talking with common folk and can give enlightenment bonuses with ice-cream koans. At high levels Monk can use his skill to influence nobility, and becomes a guru with his own monastery and apprentices.

High levelSamurai can duke it out with other Samurais, and use his military force to do stuff. Ninja sends out agents and creates spy networks all around the world. Shugenja has power in the wilds, and is irreplaceable when you need to do diplomacy with the non-humans (or when you need to hunt them down and stab them). Monk has punchy mini-monks, and can convince peasants of other samurais to do his bidding, rebel, etc.
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Post by Username17 »

Koumei wrote:So if you were rebooting L5R into Oriental Adventures D&D, what crap would you use as the go-to player options? Putting aside the bit where someone wants to be a not-Dutchman or a Warforged or a time travelling schoolgirl Warlock from the future Rokugan world, the "standard" list.

So for races, do you include Tengu/Kenku and Nezumi and things, or do you go "Nah, you have to be the popular club that people like, you're Human"? Do you make Clans do anything special at all? Just have them open their own prestige classes with requirements of "Level 5, _____ Clan"? Ignore them completely? For Classes, the Monk, Samurai and some flavour of Ninja seem obvious, but then something for the Shugenja and... if you're actually stating "this is D&D", I'm not sure there'd be "a class all about talking to people", maybe roll it into the Marshal or just scrap it and let people simply take social skills if they want to be the courtier? Would you do a separate thing for the Tattooed Monk with fire breath and crap? Do something specific for Horseback Archers (or archers in general), perhaps just make that the Knight?
If you're doing an L5R reboot specifically, your starting non-human options should probably be: Nezumi, Bakemono, Naga, Mujina, and Oni. If you're just doing Oriental Adventures taking the original L5R as a template, then the L5R Naga is pretty specific and you wouldn't be at all out of place using a more powerful, less playable Naga and Oni, and you'd obviously want Kenku/Tengu. Also, you could very plausibly trade out Mujina for some other kind of Yokai, or even have a Yokai sub-menu. I don't think that in the post-TMNT world that people really want to do Oriental Adventures without Skaven in it, so Nezumi would be in there in one flavor or another regardless. You could also make a good argument for the Vanara.

So I think a good breakdown in order of importance might be:
L5R RebootNew OA
NezumiNezumi
NagaTengu
BakemonoBakemono
MujinaVanara
OniYokai
(Mujina, Kitsune, etc.)
Yokai
(Kitsune, Yuki Onna etc.)
Oni

The L5R family supergroups (the "clans") do an OK job. The strongest thematically are the Crane and the pseudo-foreigners (Dragon, Unicorn, and Mantis), the weakest are the Phoenix and the Lion. The Phoenix "we like all the magic" is probably the lamest because there isn't even a type of magic that Phoenix Shugenja do in particular. At least Lion Shugenja are necromancers and Crab Shugenja are demonologists. Phoenix Shugenja are just "higher level" which isn't even a thing.

If you were doing the clans from scratch, you'd definitely want a clan of horse nomads (based on Mongols, Ming, Huns, and/or Manchu). And you'd want a clan of mountain dwelling philosophers (based on Hollywood Tibet). And you'd want a clan of uncouth pirates (based on Koreans, Malaysians, Formosans, and/or Ryuku Islanders). And you'd want a clan of more-weeaboo honorable than thou guys who do tea ceremonies and shit. The Unicorn, Dragon, Mantis, and Crane do a good enough job of those in L5R, but the success there is trivial to replicate. You'd also do well to have a clan that is more identifiably Han, a clan that is all kinds of Vietnamese/Cambodian "jungle warfare" type tenacity, a Cantonese style merchants and triads clan, or a crazy Taoist steampunk clan. The L5R Crab and Scorpion ("Strength" and "subtlety" respectively) are OK, but you could almost certainly do better.

There's no especial need to use the L5R animal clan lists. You could do the clans from Jungle Village or the zodiac types, or whatever.

Image
One of the clans produces people who look like this, but it doesn't have to be named "Scorpion."

Anyway, higher level characters need to contribute to mass battles. And by mass battles, I mean mass battles. People were hemming and hawing about whether it was necessary for western fantasy to be able to support battles with a thousand or ten thousand soldiers in them (it is), but in Asian Fantasy you need to be able to have battles with 30,000 people on one side. Every higher level character needs to be contributing something to the mass battles minigame, because it's going to come up fairly frequently.

So you have Samurai Heroes and Shugenja Heroes and Monk Heroes and Ninja Heroes. Those are your four basic class types, and you need to support all of those. People may also want to be able to field non-noble warriors like Barbarian Khans and Bandit Chiefs. People may also want to be able to field Courtiers and Bureaucrats - certainly those are hero types that have solid genre support. But your basic four is still Samurai, Shugenja, Monk, and Ninja. You need to support those in all levels of play from starting heroes on fetch quests to legendary champions attempting to seize the empire for themselves and in every presented niche of the game from investigating Shuten Doji killings in remote villages to storming the forts of rebellious minor lords.

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Post by Longes »

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.
It's something Frank didn't mention, but L5R3ed doesn't actually have rules for horses. Again, fixed in L5R4ed
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Post by RadiantPhoenix »

Ah, here we go: (source = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu_mythological_wars)
  • Rathi: a warrior capable of attacking 5,000 warriors simultaneously
  • Atirathi: A warrior capable of contending with 10,000 warriors simultaneously.
  • Maharathi: A warrior capable of fighting 60,000 warriors simultaneously; circumspect in his mastery of all forms of weapons and combat skills.
  • Atimaharathi: A warrior capable of fighting 12 Maharathi warriors simultaneously (720,000 normal warriors)
  • Mahamaharathi: A warrior capable of fighting 24 Atimaharathi warriors simultaneously. No warrior has attained this status, not least because there have never been 24 Athimaharathi warriors at the same time. (17,280,000 normal warriors)
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Longes
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Post by Longes »

RadiantPhoenix wrote:
  • Mahamaharathi: A warrior capable of fighting 24 Atimaharathi warriors simultaneously. No warrior has attained this status, not least because there have never been 24 Athimaharathi warriors at the same time. (17,280,000 normal warriors)
I like how this implies that a warrior capable of fighting 720000 warriors simultaneously did exist.
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Post by Lago PARANOIA »

That's a pretty good list, Frank, but I have a couple of questions:

If you were doing a L5R reboot, do you think it would be acceptable to ditch the faux-Cambodia/Vietnamese/Korean aspects and replace them with a faux-Indian and/or faux-Timurid country? Or do you think that it'd just create too much mythology clog? I think it's kind of a damn shame that we won't get Persian bellydancer assassins and sadhu druglord necromancers mixing it up with ninjas, though.
Last edited by Lago PARANOIA on Sat Dec 27, 2014 10:52 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.

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

Atimaharathi warriors:
  • Narsimha
  • Vali
  • Kartavirya Arjuna
  • Parshurama
  • Ravana
  • Indrajit
  • Kumbhakarna
  • Narakasuran
  • Jambavan
  • Rama
  • Lakshman
  • Hanuman Bhisma
  • Drona
  • Ashwatthama
  • Karna
  • Arjuna
  • Krishna
  • Balram
  • Jarasandha and devas in heaven like...
  • Indra
  • Skanda
  • Ganesha
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Post by Longes »

Lago PARANOIA wrote:That's a pretty good list, Frank, but I have a couple of questions:

If you were doing a L5R reboot, do you think it would be acceptable to ditch the faux-Cambodia/Vietnamese/Korean aspects and replace them with a faux-Indian and/or faux-Timurid country? Or do you think that it'd just create too much mythology clog? I think it's kind of a damn shame that we won't get Persian bellydancer assassins and sadhu druglord necromancers mixing it up with ninjas, though.
I think adding a faux-India to the faux-Japanese setting is a bit overwhelming. Like, if you are making a game about irish clans duking it out, and your playable factions are Doyles, MacLeods and British Empire.
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Post by name_here »

I think when you're mixing China, Japan, and India in a game for people from none of those countries, you are moving into Kitchen Sink territory. Not that those aren't fun, but it is losing the "Far East as understood by confused Westerners" feel.
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