Lo5R will be a LCG now

[Shrapnel]

I mean, seriously, a show of hands: Who here in this thread honestly knew the Burakumin still faced discrimination in modern Japanese society before you googled the word Eta to find out what it meant?

*raises hand*
Cultural Anthropology class FTW.

*hand raises*

I knew because of this bastard.

[DSMatticus]

I knew Japan had had an "unclean caste." I was aware that they had active civil rights movements in the early-mid 20th century. I would not have been able to recognize either of those words out of context, though Burakumin is familiar in a way that suggests I had heard it before. I was not aware it was still an issue, but I'm pretty sure that's because I had never thought about it at all and the idea of discriminating on the basis of caste seems absurdly archaic to me (you know, as opposed to on the basis of skin color, which makes perfect sense ). But in hindsight, it seems rather obvious that if they were campaigning for civil rights within the past hundred years then there are still people alive who were active participants in the "fuck Burakumin" camp, so of course discrimination would still be an issue.

Absolutely none of this is relevant. The point is that L5R's "neutral authorial voice" uses a derogatory term for an extant and underprivileged group as a casual label. If you wrote a game set in or around the civil war and the neutral authorial voice preferred the n-word, that'd be offensive as shit. Not because mentioning that black people existed and were treated like shit is offensive, but because it is obviously not appropriate for your neutral authorial voice to use racist derogatives. This is not really complicated.

[Username17]

I been running around Eastern Europe with no internets for a few days, but I pretty much expected this discussion to be over. On account of the fact that I dropped all the mics and that was supposed to be the end of all of this.

Just because L5R includes Eta in the game doesn't mean that the game itself is racist. It just means that it's about a part of history that was racist.

No. You lose the internet. L5R is not about a part of history at all. It is a fucking fantasy setting. There are no Tibetans, there are Dragon Clan people. There are no Mongolians, there are Unicorn Clan people. Everyone has made up fantasy names, because it is a made up fantasy setting. The people are not Japanese or Chinese, they are Rokugani. Because it is a made up setting and everything in it is made up.

If, for whatever reason, the authors decided that they wanted to have a lowest caste of people who were treated as untouchable sub-humans by society, they could have given them a made up name. They could have used a Chinese or Japanese word that wasn't a racist epithet. But they didn't. They chose to use the Japanese word for "n*gger" for those people. That's amazingly offensive and also incredibly tone deaf.

And not to put too fine a point on it, but this is a problem in the third and fourth editions of this fucking game. It would be one thing if some dumb asshole wrote that word in to the setting back in the 90s in the beforetime when we couldn't google this shit and then they cleaned it up in a later printing once they realized that they had accidentally used a foreign word for n*gger as one of their in-game classifications of people - but after people brought it to their attention they just kept on doing it for over ten fucking years. I mean, they could have used the non-offensive term for those real-world people. Or they could use an entirely made up word for those people like they do for all the other people. Or they could have used a Japanese word that is not a specific racial pejorative like nodo. But instead they just keep doubling down, printing edition after edition saying "n*gger n*gger n*gger." It's way beyond the slack you get for being a dumbass foreigner who doesn't know any better. They do know better, and they kept doing it.

You wouldn't call an American Civil War themed wargame racist, would you?

That's a stupid aside, because of course Rokugan is not set in any Earth place or period. It's a fantasy game. But funny thing, it turns out that AEG also made a game that has the American Civil War in it, and they chose to use a bunch of neo-confederate historical revisionism. And guess what? That's really offensive! Also stupid!

Deadlands claims that in their alternate history, the American Civil War was a "tie" and the confederacy still exists, because AEG does not know what a fucking secession war is. And the Confederacy are all nice and decided to end slavery anyway for reasons. Almost like the millions of Americans who fought and died to end slavery and fight against the secessionist traitors who declared their treasonous war to protect slavery fought and died for nothing.

Now to be fair, back in the 90s putting the treason flag on things and writing revisionist pro-confederate rants was socially acceptable. Or at least, the media acted as if it was socially acceptable to do that and people didn't get in trouble for talking about the nice side of the battle flag that was popularized by the famous terrorist organization the Ku Klux Klan. It wasn't like today, where even fucking Walmart has figured out that possibly putting the flag of a bunch of anti-American racist traitors on things was something they should stop doing. But while the ridiculous attempts at Confedarcy Rehabilitation that Deadlands performs were things that you could get away with in the 90s, it was still in fact really bad. It's just that in the current zeitgeist we are allowed to say openly how bad it actually is and was without getting a lot of pushback from self-declared centrists saying that we have to be nice to our country's domestic terrorists.

I mean, seriously, a show of hands: Who here in this thread honestly knew the Burakumin still faced discrimination in modern Japanese society before you googled the word Eta to find out what it meant?

Obviously, I knew what an Eta was without having to google it, which is why I called attention to it in the first place. But seriously: don't fucking go there. There are three million Burakumin in the world, and deliberately insulting them with racist language is not OK. But it also wouldn't be OK if there were a hundred million or only fifty five. Using racist language targeted against oppressed minorities is a bad thing to do whether they are numerous and well known or not.

But the real bottom line remains and shall remain: there is no actual excuse for the word Eta to be there in the first place. L5R is a fantasy fucking world that is sufficiently unlike Japan that they have female non-human samurai. That means the entire social structure that Japan had which created space to systemically discriminate against the Burakumin people doesn't fucking exist. Just for starters, telling them that they "don't count as human" doesn't mean shit when you have actual non-humans who have status and rank in your society!

The people at AEG make lots of bad decisions, and some of their worst decisions involve handling references to the brutal oppression of minority peoples through our history in really shitty and flippant ways. I chose the example of the Burakumin because it is completely open and shut and bringing up the fact that the book calls them "Eta," which is equivalent to calling people "n*gger" is so bad and so pointless that simply mentioning it drops the mic on this conversation. If we get into the nitty gritty details, it gets worse, not better.

-Username17

[Grek]

Okay, you bring up a lot of good points there. Particularly regarding Deadlands; I hadn't realized they were the same company and the fact that they've done this in two different settings suggests that they don't deserve the benefit of the doubt here. I'm willing to concede that AEG probably did know better, and that their use of the word Eta is probably motivated more by stubborn historical revisionism than ignorance of the word's racist connotations.

[TheFlatline]

Because clearly you shouldn't have the ability to go "fuck that noise" and seek revenge on the people who you feel have screwed you out of honour. Or the ability to decide that actually you'd rather live long enough to kill the scum who took out your daimyo rather than die pointlessly.

I mean, these might not be "honourable" options, but this is a game, you can expect PCs to demand the ability to ignore social norms that are OOC wrong or even inconvenient. If the party archer has dishonoured himself and ought to commit sudoku? Fuck that noise, he's in the party and an essential asset on that basis. If Daimyo Steve bitches at us about this? Daimyo Steve dies and so does every mook he puts between him and the party. If that means we kill the Emperor, guess we're the new Emperor.

...None of the steps of that chain of logic are wholly reasonable, but it is also worth explicitly stating that PCs are very, very bad at fleeing from or de-escalating threats of any kind compared to real people or even book characters in the same situation.

So... by your own admission your argument is unreasonable?

I mean, if we throw basic setting stuff out the window then why can't I use that argument to state that gravity doesn't affect my character in a historical setting. Or that my character is immune to fire. Or that swords can't pierce my toon.

Because "fuck that noise".

[Lago PARANOIA]

TheFlatline, shut the fuck up. Omegonthesane gave good in-genre reasons as to why you shouldn't declare the game over just because the protagonists are in or embark on a course of action that gets them kicked out of polite society and gets them marked for death by The Man. You're not whining that Omegonthesane wants to play Space Rangers in Game of Thrones, you're whining that the DM is letting the game continue after Jaime slays the king or Jon Snow decides that he's going to desert the Night's Watch.

[ghost whistler]

. But funny thing, it turns out that AEG also made a game that has the American Civil War in it, and they chose to use a bunch of neo-confederate historical revisionism. And guess what? That's really offensive! Also stupid!

Deadlands claims that in their alternate history, the American Civil War was a "tie" and the confederacy still exists, because AEG does not know what a fucking secession war is.

Holy shitballs you're paranoid and stupid; assuming some nefarious intent on the part of game designers!

You might like to know that AEG do not publish and did not create Deadlands. They print Doom town, the card game based on the same setting.

Deadlands did not and had never asserted the civil war is a lie.

I have no idea how to deal with such weapons grade stupidity

[virgil]

Deadlands did not and had never asserted the civil war is a lie.

Where does he say it's a lie?

[sandmann]

Deadlands did not and had never asserted the civil war is a lie.

Where does he say it's a lie?

I think he misread "tie"...

[Omegonthesane]

Because clearly you shouldn't have the ability to go "fuck that noise" and seek revenge on the people who you feel have screwed you out of honour. Or the ability to decide that actually you'd rather live long enough to kill the scum who took out your daimyo rather than die pointlessly.

I mean, these might not be "honourable" options, but this is a game, you can expect PCs to demand the ability to ignore social norms that are OOC wrong or even inconvenient. If the party archer has dishonoured himself and ought to commit sudoku? Fuck that noise, he's in the party and an essential asset on that basis. If Daimyo Steve bitches at us about this? Daimyo Steve dies and so does every mook he puts between him and the party. If that means we kill the Emperor, guess we're the new Emperor.

...None of the steps of that chain of logic are wholly reasonable, but it is also worth explicitly stating that PCs are very, very bad at fleeing from or de-escalating threats of any kind compared to real people or even book characters in the same situation.

So... by your own admission your argument is unreasonable?

No, I just have a worse case of berserkitis than the rest of my usual group.

And yeah, I got ninja'd by Lago:

TheFlatline, shut the fuck up. Omegonthesane gave good in-genre reasons as to why you shouldn't declare the game over just because the protagonists are in or embark on a course of action that gets them kicked out of polite society and gets them marked for death by The Man. You're not whining that Omegonthesane wants to play Space Rangers in Game of Thrones, you're whining that the DM is letting the game continue after Jaime slays the king or Jon Snow decides that he's going to desert the Night's Watch.

I want to highlight the Jaime example because not only was the War of the Usurper campaign allowed to continue after he killed King Aerys, they didn't even have to change the scale of the game to accommodate his actions - he got his old rank back and they went on playing Scheming: the Game.

Whereas when Jon Snow deserts the Night's Watch or Sandor Clegane flees King's Landing you at least possibly could feel a bit sad that the game will now be a dungeon crawl until they get their standing back, Jaime didn't even meaningfully lose standing.

Although if we're talking Game of Thrones examples, and the scenario I gave were to take place in a game where you are meant to be the lords of a noble house, then you're not even complaining that the game can continue when Jaime stabs Aerys - you're complaining that the game is allowed to continue when Robb Stark calls his bannermen to march against the King.

[Lokey]

Was into the CCG for a few years starting around Jade edition, and have seen Frank rant about Wick and Soesbee before, but we can never get enough of that. Two of the big fans (on playtest team, went to gencon) were local (they told AEG/WotC stuff was crazy OP that was crazy OP), but we tended towards larger games than one on one and would shame people using the OP cards or strategies while usually doing silly theme stuff. Played Mantis before it was cool and SL while they were hopeless for preference, but of course made every deck out of every box possible

Stopped buying much except a few boosters per set after the big reset after Spirit (same cards, different name edition), stopped playing a few sets after (too much power creep to keep up without buying new cards). Read about every once in a while, I think after Mantis can do everything edition, it was keyword overload for a few sets then personality destruction overload for a few sets then a reset about 2014 to simplify and roll back a decade of power creep?

Probably not going to be attractive enough to make us toss aside Munchkin and Wiz-War for our card gaming of course.

RPG: we tried a few games around 3rd edition (best campaign was the Bloodspeaker one, evil does get nice things as long as nobody can iajitsu your face off). We were really big on party infighting in our games, if we ran the empire, Junzo's horde would have won way before Day of Thunder.

Had to wallpaper a lot of mechanical problems, found Intimidate to be pretty much an I-win as written (there's two negatives that greatly improve it so it was min-max heaven for a game then a rules rewrite) besides encountering some of the complaints in the OSSR.

Definitely not strong enough anecdotal stuff to settle the boring argument that's been going on for pages on the rpg side In short more of

less of

[Longes]

Speaking of Burakumin, in Vampire the Requiem Burakumin are an ostracised and persecuted bloodline of Nosferatu necromancers.

[Username17]

Speaking of Burakumin, in Vampire the Requiem Burakumin are an ostracised and persecuted bloodline of Nosferatu necromancers.

Yeah, you know you're kinda fucking everything up when you find that you're touching on the same subject as a White Wolf title, and their version is more respectful of painful history and foreign cultures.

-Username17

[shinimasu]

Re: Racial sensitivity aside from the above discourse the game gets sort of weird about "Gaijins" in general. It's like they want Rokugan to be awesome but they feel the need to keep going "But western countries are pretty cool to you guys!"

The two most egregious examples are "Gaijin Pepper" and the Gaijin Gear advantage.

Gaijin Pepper is all kinds of weird "shit we need to give the western fantasy amalgams something cool too" scrambling because if we're going from things Asian countries have actually done then China is the country credited for having invented and then refined gunpowder into its most usable forms. It was used a lot in mining. The Rokugan taboos about gunpowder make no sense, it would have made much much more sense to simply have a taboo about GUNS. Which are actually a western invention and which were actually banned in Japan (and are still heavily regulated).

Gaijin Gear is basically just "Pay points to give your character a quirky trinket" but one of the examples is a compass which was also something invented in China. The isn't as eyerollingly reaching as the gaijin pepper example above since it was probably just a minor research failure but it still makes it obvious that whoever wrote it just assumed that if it was "progressive" then it was made by a gaijin.

[Longes]

China had proto-guns, they've just never managed to make anything as good as european guns.

But really, Gaijin in the L5R world are also... special. 99% of them are evil traitorous scumbags who want to destroy all non-white creatures and steal your stuff. The first gaijin to visit Rokugan was treated like shit (despite being a shipwrecked child and spending the rest of his life in Rokugan) and became a Living Darkness' ninja after death.

The first actual ambassador from Gaijins looked like this:

And tried to assassinate the Not!Spanish representative while in Rokugan.

TL;DR: Rokugani's prejudice against gaijin is justified and is part of the divine order because gaijin are evil bastards who even grow mustaches to twirl.

[shinimasu]

So Gaijin are both evil and have access to cool technology.

I don't keep up with the narrative for these things I just go with what's in the core books because ain't nobody got time for that but this is the best kind of dumb I might need to start reading more of the fiction.

[Lokey]

In the old days gaijin just meant outsider and was an insult because xenophobia iirc. They've had at least a decade to screw that up

On the CCG, I perused some of the older threads. Depending on edition, there was probably an near optimal strategy or two that were effective but robotic to play and even worse to play against (i.e. Robo-crane from Jade days, standard attack Lion from the 30/30 days was probably similar). We just had a detente on some things and held onto something insane like phoenix bloodspeaker + lesser oni smash nonsense to beat people into line (as well as playing more multiplayer--oh, SL had tons of fun mp for us, the more SL players the better).

Besides what people played it was also important to drill into people's skulls to have things to do during all turn phases and to not just build for 10 turns then have a giant cluster eff of a battle, because that's also boring. Again we soft-banned some of the ridiculous things like Rear Guard + must target guys (one side can't take actions).

Now I'm not familiar with any of the games converted except seeing Star Wars played (something like 60 cards/player because milling was a win strategy). The 250 card core set looks troubling because the thing that seemed interesting about that game was the sheer variety of cards that could be used.

I guess it really depends on the current environment. Hmm http://rules.alderac.com/cr_for_20f ok, 20k words of rules plus another maybe 8k of game terms... Even if we went with 30/30 decks or shared card pool for say fate deck...I'd still be pretty flummoxed to come up with a 3-400 card pool they'd pack into one box for $40. Of course the better option is hope that big box of cards in someone's basement isn't too moldy if we really want to play some L5R cards.

[name_here]

Gaijin literally translates as "outside person", so it can be used to refer to anyone from somewhere else.

[Lokey]

Read somewhere significant changes to the CCG (or at least incompatibility). Just sharing

Hard to say what particular nostalgia goggles I have for the game are. Out of Vampire, Shadowfist and Illuminati (which we messed around with to greater and lesser degrees), it was probably because as big a mess as the various design teams made over the years, I think the game worked better RAW and with fewer don't-play-that-cheesy-shit than the above for various reasons. (and Vamp's a heartbreaker for me, interesting mechanics that should have been good, but needed some significant rules changes to make the game interesting and fast enough for us.) Surely wasn't the mess of a storyline.

[Username17]

Vampire was simply slow. And the predator/prey relationship was fundamentally flawed because it meant that everyone at the table had to be of rather similar deck power and player skill or the game would become extremely lopsided. The matchups of stealth bleed decks, weenie politics decks, and combat decks were all individually rather balanced in interesting ways at the top end. There were even some hybrid decks that were pretty competitive. But if one of the players brought a durdle deck or was trying to do something stupid with 5th generation vampires or some fucking thing, then the people across the table from them were pretty much fucked.

TL;DR: Vampire is a five player game where you can lose the game because of what's happening between the two players across the table from you, but you only inherently have any ability to do anything to the players to your immediate left and right.

Shadowfist has a much tighter multi-player structure because every player has equal incentive and ability to interfere with game winning attacks. The round of bluffing where people are encouraged to pretend that they can't stop attacks that they actually can is annoying though. Especially in competitive games.

-Username17

[Longes]

So I've read the L5R 5e, aka the FFG L5R RPG recently. It is not good. In fact it is amazingly bad, managing to combine the worst of all worlds. It's a roll-and-keep game with FFG patented Special Dice. The game still doesn't address the issues of gathering a party, and in fact makes them much, much worse.

You see, the chargen process in L5R 5e is a game of 20 questions. You pick your Clan, House and School, all of which come with different benefits. Then you pick one of five options saying how special you are among your school, which gives you a +1 to one stat. Then you say who was your significant mentor and get an NPC, a merit and a flaw. And so on.

Well one of those steps is picking your lord. You don't pick from the list, you just make an NPC who is your mission control feeding you tasks. So not only does everyone in the party belong to a different clan some of which hate each other and some of which may be at war. But you don't even have a unified fucking mission control.

The game has plenty of other issues, such as not specializing in a Ring being a trap choice, many of the schools being trap choices (the best duelist in the game isn't Kakita Dueling school - it's Crab Scouts), and the incredibly slow combat. The fact that two characters with the same high rings roleplay the same way also doesn't help.

[Orion]

Splitting up a group has always been a headache in RPGs; I don't know of a single group that doesn't try to avoid it like the plague.

Is there a way to support that, though? Like... when the face is doing his thing, most of the other players are sitting there with little to add to the discussion anyway. Would it be possible to make the mechanics of a game in such a way that eases these situations?

Radically messing with chronology could do the trick. There are a number of games where players are allowed to solve problems by doing a flashback to establish that the pcs already set up a solution. There is no particular reason the characters in the flashbacks need to be the same people as the characters in the "present." If you wanted to support a game where 4 pcs are warriors doing combat missions and one is a diplomat stationed in the palace, you could do a thing where whenever the warriors run out of supplies or bump into potentially-hostile forces, the diplomat gets to do a flashback where he rolls his skills to negotiate safe passage or requisition supplies.

[Rubick]

I play both the 5e RPG and LCG, AMA

I enjoy the LCG but it's very long and has many action/pause windows. IMO its biggest mistake was not having a "fast-play mode" be launched a few months after release in order to cut demo game length in half... Since regular games can go to ~60 min in tourney, and even longer in non-official play

I'm no stranger to long games as I love Dota 2. But, it's intimidating for new / most players.

You can play the game for free on jigoku.online. It's fan-made but FFG leaves it alone. It's kinda bewildering how they don't publicly support the project.

[Longes]

I play both the 5e RPG and LCG, AMA

How does the bushi/monk/shugenja/courtier balance shake out in play? It seems to me like everyone still dunks on courtiers, and Shugenja mostly still dunk on bushi.

[Rubick]

We don't have a courtier in our 5e game but I've looked into it some since I was considering trying to spend some exp

Personally I think skills past 2 are hard to justify except maybe primary skills.. Bushi have only 1 primary skill which does a lot of heavy lifting: Martial Arts (Melee). This one skill will let you win duels (so it's a social skill in that right), fight the inevitable bandit ambush magistrate games have, and so on. Courtiers are more screwed in having I'd say 2 primary skills that save the party's ass - Sincerity (which is used to talk to superiors) and Sentiment (Sense Motive, and initiative in social scenes).

Both have a ton of secondary skills. But Bushi's one primary skill does more than both of courtier's primary skills combined so in that sense Courtiers are hurt.

One thing about the game is that some of the school (aka class) powers as well as kata (fighty powers) and shuji (social powers) can be used in more situations than initially realized. So for example, the Doji Diplomat courtier power, mentions once per scene when making a check to persuade or influence someone, something happens. You can arguably use this in combat as there are some ways to use social skills in combat like challenging someone to a mini-duel in a skirmish.

It really depends on the wording and there's likely a heavy amount of "Mother, May I?" to the GM. At the moment, per RAW in-game I can take a social shuji that lets me buff initiative of *any* character. This means I can choose enemy characters. There's also another shuji (Fanning the Flames) that lets you daze (+2 to TNs unless they eat shit fora turn) a character per Opportunity spent.

Fanning the Flames is meant to be a "you're such a dick" or "you're so inspirational you throw people off their game" courtly power at first read. But per RAW in such a case some creative application lets you make these combo powers such in this one where you're anime-yelling at the combat and making people useless essentially. Unfortunately just like 3.X there's dumb fluff text which has nothing to do with RAW that will make GMs groan at you and disallow the combo so "Mother, May I?" may lead to you just saying screw it and min/maxing a ring instead.

Meanwhile, shugenja are playing Go and Shoji while you're playing Checkers, much like older editions. We have 2 in our party. One throws around AoE fireballs while us Bushi have to pray to one-shot a baddie if we wanna feel like we're pulling our weight. The other one has Invisibility and is Scorpion. Note that if you're sleeping (Unconscious condition) you suffer +10 severity to crit which puts most crits well into "instadeath" territory. Gotta say that I kinda disagree with Invisibility being a Rank 1 spell...

As far as class balance fun it's probably Bushi = Courtier if GM allows RAW usage of creative class/shuji power combos. Otherwise Bushi > Courtier. And def Shugenja >>> Bushi >= Courtier.

Altho it's L5R so we all knew what we were getting into as fans of the game. In a proper L5R game the courtier will be having a lot more fun than the bushi since there will be much more social intrigue than combat. Unfortunately as is often stated the standard campaign is magistrate campaign which innately leads to more combat than one would expect from a game that has a lot of talking. As you're more likely to run into criminals or say, bandits attacking the taxes you're collecting.