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Posted: Sun Jan 11, 2015 8:47 pm
by Nath
FrankTrollman wrote:Nath, even as formulated that isn't a problem. Imagine for the moment we were talking about Shadowrun. Every character has their own contacts, and any particular character has a modest preference for taking jobs from their own contacts (in that doing so improves the loyalty of one of their contacts in addition to whatever money is paid). Are you prepared to say that this is a problem? Because I'm pretty sure it is a feature.

It is simply genuinely a good thing that player characters have different contacts that they can turn to for information and quests. It lets players be proactive and self starting and other buzzwords when it comes to getting and completing quests.

You keep pointing at the fact that players might have motivation to do one thing over another thing and saying that's bad. How could that possibly be bad?
This works for the employer/quest giver NPC, which by design is intended to be on the same side as the PC (even double cross require the PC to side with the employer at least initially). This is not a case where working with the NPC and working with the rest of the team is going to be mutually exclusive.

The problem is going to appear if using (loyal) members of the PC faction as antagonists. I'm talking about player characters having different contacts that may passively or actively try to make them betray the rest of the party, which I don't think is a genuinely good thing.

Shadowrun has ten major megacorporations, dozens of smaller ones, major criminal syndicates, gangs, secret organizations... So the gamemaster has some to room to avoid the issue. But it's because it exists that you have to avoid it.
I never encountered a party where more than one or two PC who'd have actual ties to megacorporations - connection to crime syndicates or national law enforcement or security agencies being slightly more common. It was just common sense to simply not play or write an adventure which featured their chosen faction as an antagonist. Still, that means there are plots I simply couldn't use (and, after a few years and a number of changes inside a group, both players and characters, a tangled web of relationships that was getting increasingly difficult to navigate through to find an employer and an antagonist everyone could accept). It even happened to me once to have a player asking to play a character from Aztlan, which basically made it impossible to pursue the ongoing campaign; I had to force him into rewriting what otherwise was, setting-wise, a perfectly valid character concept.

And that's Shadowrun, where you literally have an entire, modern world to play with, and where most authors and gamemasters nonetheless rely on a number of designated evil factions (Aztechnology, Humanis...).

Here, we're talking about an oriental empire where it is mandatory for every PC and almost all major NPC to belong to one in only a dozen or so of clans (and my understanding is that introducing a designated evil clan would be a mockery of the original intent).

The occasional intra-team betrayal can be fun to play. When every game has one waiting to happen, I expect a lot of GM will switch to a designated evil for the rest of the campaign out of boredom.

To have the rules and the setting strictly enforce that a standing order of the daimyo must be followed may be solving this issue. But having a solution to a problem is different from the problem not existing at all. In this case, it put a requirement on adventure starting with an order from the daimyo.

Posted: Sun Jan 11, 2015 9:17 pm
by Omegonthesane
Nath - you are missing a crucial difference between Shadowrun megacorps and Not-L5R clans. The proposal is that clans are not monolithic, and in fact have regular internal conflict as well as regular external conflict. Yiff Yiffington's faction isn't "the entire Wolf Clan", it's "the bit of the Wolf Clan that likes Yiff Yiffington and isn't doing any sufficiently bad shit". Villains can then be drawn from the rest of the Wolf Clan without nearly so much hand wringing or need to insert ever more setting things.

Posted: Sun Jan 11, 2015 10:54 pm
by Fucks
SR megacorps do have internal conflict as well as external ones, so where's the difference?

Posted: Sun Jan 11, 2015 11:20 pm
by Username17
Fucks wrote:SR megacorps do have internal conflict as well as external ones, so where's the difference?
Megacorps have CEOs, clans do not. A clan doesn't have a top of the pyramid. If you ultrasrab Lord Kumaishi, there will be bear clan people who are upset. But you won't have to deal with the wrath of the bear clan as a whole because there is no whole. The fox clan isn't Renraku, it's Japanese. There isn't any problem or question with having fox clan people on both sides of a conflict.

-Username17

Posted: Sun Jan 11, 2015 11:31 pm
by Whipstitch
This is much ado over what amounts to having common family names. Seriously, we're talking about whether your cousin would rather wear a kasa, a gat or one of those fuzzy hats with the ear flaps. There is not a party platform because they are not political parties. You can avoid 90% of the problems you're fretting about by keeping the descriptions loose and then having the MC do his prep work with the understanding that the clans chosen by the players probably won't be getting put to the sword by the heroes any time soon. This is an easy thing to do because unlike Shadowrun you're not going to have any one of these factions specialize in exclusive powers based on pulling hearts out of people's chests in order to perform sorcery.

Ya know, I reviewed the thread just in case I was off base on the relevance of clan affiliations and I forgot/inappropriately mind caulked the bits where Frank said stuff about clan powers or whatever, so while I still agree with him in general on this I acknowledge that the above description of clan significance was too flippant. Mea culpa.

Posted: Mon Jan 12, 2015 2:16 pm
by Username17
Clan powers and clan operated industries are no different from racial traits in traditional D&D. Well, they are different in one major respect in that there are like a dozen or less Clans and several hundred D&D races. So it's like if you were doing D&D but you only included playable races in your list of NPC races.

So the Brewer's Guild is run by Gnomes. It's not run by the Gnomes, it's run by some Gnomes. As a Gnome PC, you could plausibly have an "in" for social encounters involving the Brewer's Guild, but there's no impediment to the Brewer's Guild being the bad guys in a story and having one of the party members be a Gnome. He's a Gnome, the Master Brewer is a Gnome, but neither is the boss of the other and they do not share a Gnome boss. The local king is a Dwarf.

Giving clan industry affiliations and such encourages diverse parties. It means that you can take turns being the party face as you interview folks in different walks of life. It means that there is an incentive for one character to make a bear clan samurai and another to make a serpent clan onmyoji.

-Username17

Posted: Mon Jan 12, 2015 2:34 pm
by Orion
Is there any reason to go with NO central Clan authority? I'd think you'd get most of the beneficial autonomy, and a few more plot lines, out of a distant, limited and controversial clan primarch. The idea is that your clan has a boss, but if you're low level he doesn't know who you are. He's probably heard of your BOSS, who is a persona of some authority in your clan's local affairs. Your boss may or may not share the clan boss' agenda. (Probably doesn't) Not only do you have the option to do things your clan boss doesn't like, you may well be ordered to, and then you have a choice to go along or to try to appeal to the higher-ups.

Once you're high enough level that the clan chief has heard of you, you discover that there are entrenched party loyalist and "loyal opposition" factions. Not everyone important in the clan supported installing the current guy, but while their objections are known & noted, he took power without anyone getting stabbed in the face. The opposition party has its own club and on their own lands they mostly do things their own way, and the chief executive mostly chooses to overlook it.

At some point there will be a struggle for the succession story. This might happen because the clan boss steps down or dies. It might just be potential heirs duking it out with each other before the big cheese shows any sign of departure. You will also get stories about plots to assassinate the chief or to actually secede from the clan. The assassins and secessionists will almost always be played as villains, but they will have had help from sympathetic opposition leaders who supported the villains before they found out how extreme these villains were going to get. The PCs could be party loyalists, or opposition loyalists covering up their dirty laundry.

Stories about inter-clan relations also benefit from simpler objectives. "Get the Wolf Clan Daimyo to sign this accord with the Fox Clan" is an easily understood objective, even if it's equal parts symbolic and practical.

Posted: Mon Jan 12, 2015 3:44 pm
by Username17
Orion wrote:Is there any reason to go with NO central Clan authority?
Yes. There is an advantage to having more than 12 daimyos. If you put a clan head above that, then the daimyos will recede into the background and you'll end up with just the clan heads as the main leaders.

It's just pointlessly reductionist to have a big boss of all Wolf Clan lords. Putting in a clan head reduces the number of high lords that people care about rather than increasing it.

Also, it's divisive of the party, because a Wolf Clan Head is the big boss of one of the players and not the big boss of any of the others. That creates automatic intraparty betrayal triggers that have no real advantages.

-Username17

Posted: Tue Jan 13, 2015 1:31 am
by Orion
You've convinced me, on the grounds of minimizing intra-party strife.

However, I'm extremely skeptical of your claim that it's desirable to have more than 12 daimyos. Frankly, I'm not sure it's desirable to have more than 6 daimyos.

Posted: Tue Jan 13, 2015 1:39 am
by Ancient History
The setting already has multiple levels of daimyos. Each family in a clan has a daimyo; each clan has a daimyo; and certain domains that administer lands for the emperor have daimyos - a daimyo is just anybody who has other samurai sworn under them. So there groundwork is already there for intraclan and interclan and inter-Imperial and local intrigue.

But, it squanders that potential. The Clan Daimyos are made pretty much the only daimyos of any consequence on the political stage. You don't get the jockeying about as different family daimyos struggle to see who gets to be daimyo-no-daimyo of the clan, or the subtle distinctions of rank that comes from being daimyo of a small town unbeholden to anybody but the Emperor herself vs. a daimyo that's the vassal of another, greater daimyo. You don't get the multiplicity of titles and obligations and authorities which, quite frankly, make medieval politics East or West so interesting.

It all reduces down to a double-handful of NPCs that hold the fate of the entire Empire in their hands, because nobody takes a piss without making sure they say it's the right time and direction to do so.

Posted: Tue Jan 13, 2015 10:42 am
by Username17
The number of daimyos needs to be large enough that the official list of them is incomplete. That way MCs can make their own villains without having to shit on canon.

The number of daimyos should also be large enough that the player characters can all become daimyos without having to conquer the whole empire first.

So the Sengoku Jidai thing where there are over a hundred daimyos is ideal, and the post hidden emperor thing where there are like 10 daimyos is bullshit.

-Username17

Posted: Fri Jan 16, 2015 1:34 am
by Orion
Right. I agree. I think the numbers of daimyos players should care about in a given instance of play is about 6.

Posted: Fri Jan 16, 2015 3:27 am
by Whipstitch
That seems like an utter ass pull to me. Lords can vary wildly in power and there seems very little point in fretting about the nominal ranks of various honchos before anyone's even settled on how big armies should be getting. Remember that lords and factions are a lot like monster manual entries and that your job is to throw enough high quality shit at the walls until some of it finally manages to stick. It's sort of like with Vampire: the Masquerade--many people only remember the half dozen or so clans that appealed to them personally, but creating 13 of them was still worthwhile given that different people often have different combinations of clans they're interested in.

Posted: Fri Jan 16, 2015 4:01 am
by Orion
Longes wrote:At the center of the Empire, under the emperor's throne the Lying Darkness is sealed. It is literaly Hitler, Tzeentch and [Tzimisce] combined.
If you want people to care about traditional Asian moralities, I do think you need them supernaturally enforced, but this is the backwards way to do it. You don't threaten to corrupt the good guys, you threaten to punish them.

In the actual source materials it's very clear why duty, tradition, and piety are important. If you handle and associate with unclean people and things, you invite sickness and misfortune. Not sickness as in moral degeneration, just sickness and in you get pneumonia and maybe die. If you anger the nature gods, you invite famine and misfortune. If you forsake your duty for love, your karma will be bad and your lover will die tragically. Also, misfortune. If you forsake your duty for revenge, you will suffer misfortune and karmic death. If you break your dharma, you will invite misfortune. If you fight destiny or act against the omens, you invite misfortune.

So if you actually wanted people to care about old-timey taboos and duties, you'd need to do a few things. Put in some spirits who are NPCs who are dicks, of course. Most of them would end up being punched in the face, of course. When the villages has bad harvests because they angered the river gods or the forest gods, the players will go kill those gods and that is fine. It still establishes that the traditions are important. If you really want to fuck with them make the active cooperation of the nature gods important, such they you either negotiate with them or bring in new gods from elsewhere once you kill the local gods, or a local priestess has to turn into the moon or something.

At the same time, you have more abstract consequences of impiety. All your PCs have a Luck stat, which is permanently reduced if you "multiclass" to learn abilities outside your birth class, clan school, or whatever, or if you bind demons or train with corrupt or foreign objects. It also goes down temporarily when you do individually impious actions like talk to untouchables or stab your relatives. Locations and population groups also have luck meters. You can rock up to a village and start modernizing their laws and infrastructure, but if you go too far too fast they will have an earthquake or a crop failure or something. The party monk or party shugenja needs to be able to read the luck auras and determine what your party can and cannot get away with. In some cases they will be able to forcibly integrate the ratlings and goblins if they wish, but in other cases they really will have to resettle them or keep them in a ghetto because gods or simply the principles of dharma demand it.

As players gain levels, they get increasing power to disregard the old ways. They can survive bigger luck penalties personally, and also get some kind of abilities to resolve the imbalances they create in the world so they can go back and pass a new wave of civil rights laws without setting off a volcano. One high-level end game involves ascending your PC to the celestial sphere, and thus gaining the ability to completely revise or abolish one of the divine laws or imperial traditions.

Posted: Tue Jan 27, 2015 11:49 am
by Longes

Posted: Tue Jan 27, 2015 2:54 pm
by TheFlatline
Anyone that *proudly* displays the D&D movie poster probably needs to be dumped in an unnamed grave.

Posted: Tue Jan 27, 2015 6:39 pm
by Lago PARANOIA
Spoony is an Angry Reviewer (in fact is part of the OG) like the Angry Video Game Nerd and Nostalgia Critic, so it's almost certain that he's doing it ironically.

Posted: Fri Feb 13, 2015 5:10 pm
by cigfrain
Level 2) Her story demands that your story go fuck itself with rusty bottlecaps. You either leave the table or suffer.
I know Ree in the real world and she is horribly manipulative under that cheerful smile. She has ruined reputations of fellow larpers on a whim. Her latest kick seems to be Distopia Rising where she is chasing after a pretty 20 year old.

As for her writing? Ya, its not the best... But thats what you get for writing trash novels for so long. There is so much out there on how amazing she is, but its mostly just smoke and mirrors over substance.

Posted: Sun May 10, 2015 11:17 pm
by Lago PARANOIA
Are any of the d20 L5R splatbooks any good? And if they're not good, which ones are the least bad?

Like, if you were running a campaign of d20 L5R for some ludicrously rich dowager and her friends and had to use at least three books from the line (while being allowed to patch in the rest of the holes with homebrew or other d20 crap) which three would you pick and why?

Posted: Wed Jan 25, 2017 9:32 am
by Wiseman
If you're designing an oriental setting, you could be helped by drawing from Touhou.

I was thinking that one way of making a less of a distinction between casters and non casters was to make things like samurai, monk, ninja etc just base classes that all have spellcasting added on top.

Like Youmu is a samurai and is fully capable of using spirit magic.

Sakuya is a ninja and has space-time magic abilities.

Aya is a ninja/courtier/informant and has wind magic.

Byakuren and Reimu have martial arts abilities and also have divine magic on top of them.

Suika and Yuugi are oni warrior like characters and have the same magic avaliable to them.

Yorihime is a noble/courtier character and has bullshit hax Lunarian CoDzilla powers.

Reisen is a soldier and has illusion/madness powers.

Patchouli is a scholar and has elemental magic.

Keine is a scholar type and can manipulate history.

Basically like that. Everyone has magic in addition to their basic skills. Heck Hong Meiling is specific called out as weak because she only focuses on martial abilities.

I'm not sure if what kind of magic you have should be limited by what base class or not.

Also, youkai have explicit communities in this setting. The tengu and kappa have their own communities on Youkai Mountain, Oni live in the Ancient City underground, Rabbit youkai live in the Bamboo forest and it's implied that there are many other communities. However it's not at all weird to find some of these elsewhere in the setting or teaming up to form adventuring parties (that's what the entirety of Imperishible Night was about).

Of course this will need to be adapted somewhat if you want to have an empire of sorts considering that Gensokyo is a setting run by youkai. (seriously, it's rather ambiguous as to whether the main human settlement even has a leader).

There's also touhou d20 for ideas though it uses Anime d20 as a base so take it with a grain of salt.

EDIT: New thought. Perhaps Gensokyo could serve as the basis for a sort of Shadowlands like area.

Posted: Wed Jan 25, 2017 4:43 pm
by LeadPal
Wiseman wrote:If you're designing an oriental setting, you could be helped by drawing from Touhou.
Gensokyo is an extremely small scale kitchen sink setting, not really anything like L5R. Also, fuck Touhou d20.

Posted: Thu Jan 26, 2017 11:17 pm
by Wiseman
As a recall, the consensus was that abandoning all but the very basics of L5R was the way to go.

And yes, Gensokyo is more of a fantasy kitchen sink, though it's become more and more focused on eastern mythology as it's moved forwards. (13.5 is about a 3-way "holy war" between buddhism, taoism, and shinto).

Posted: Fri Jan 27, 2017 2:32 am
by Lokey
The fail is on a basic level though. Game mechanics, fail. Setting, fails in the central irredeemable all-powerful evil is less important than who your grandfather was, what color gi you wear, who said what about whom at court, who's Daimyo passed gas at Tea, etc...

It's a total tear-down. Some of the LARP may be salvageable, no idea about those rules.

Posted: Fri Jan 27, 2017 7:06 am
by Voss
Eh. That doesn't sound like a setting fail to me, except for bothering to _have_ a central irredeemable all powerful evil, which is just fucking flavorless and dumb. Having a setting that reacts to your background and politics is pretty refreshing, actually.

Posted: Fri Jan 27, 2017 7:19 am
by Wiseman
Having clans, families, and factions that matter in game is a good thing. Having them be kill on sight to each other outside of specific areas is a bad thing.