Alt-L5R Clans

[Wiseman]

Yeah, people taking on armies singlehandedly is a thing in eastern legends. So you could totally have a thing where you wade through hordes of nameless mooks until you get to the one guy on the other side with a name.

[maglag]

Even lone wolf and cub, where the main character is supposed to be a normal dude with no magic super powers in an age where guns are starting to become common, straight out wipes out multiple national organizations down to the last dude. Even when they gather in their thousands to try to stop him, Lone wolf doesn't give a shit and charges head on, leaving no survivors, to the point the bad dudes are reduced to go call old geezers out of retirement.

[OgreBattle]

So as a legit concern of war wagons and boats, how does one even make them relevant in the context of personal badasses?

RIFTS has super cyborgs and wizards as lvl1 characters but they often journey through the wasteland in a personalized mobile home or military APC. APC's are a military vehicle, but in an RPG context it's a nifty personal vehicle. In a fantasy setting you can have your adventuring party of 6 PC's + Hirelings have a horse/ox drawn wagon they travel the wilderness in. I've played hexgrid games where you store all that dungeon loot and arbalests in the wagon while going from point of light to point of light.


Ming commander Qi Jiguang suggests at least 1 tank, 1 controller, 2 strikers per wagon party


In a war then your Heavenly Strategist player character is able to use awesome formations (that a lesser man could not coordinate) of power that break the enemy's charge:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4qbQCJ9QKs

He is the pokemaster of tiny men compared to the Lu Bu who personally fights.

[ArmorClassZero]

Question: Are (what if) the wars / battles between the Clans were largely ceremonial? Not strictly 'kill them down to the last man' but more concerned with non-lethally capturing prisoners in order to ransom, get political leverage, and dishonor the opposing clan?

The late Renaissance in Europe worked this way to a degree, with nobles basically hiring mercenary armies, and the peasants / merchants viewing wars as disputes between nobles. Admittedly I'm not that familiar with feudal Asia.

[Username17]

Yeah, people taking on armies singlehandedly is a thing in eastern legends. So you could totally have a thing where you wade through hordes of nameless mooks until you get to the one guy on the other side with a name.

"Eastern" isn't really a genre. I mean, genres can be subdivided eternally, as Mech Anime breaks down into Real Robot and Super Robot, and those further break down by target age group and whether there's romance to go with all the fighting and so on and so forth. But even without going on a deep dive into subgenres it's just trivially obvious that Evangelion isn't the same thing as Legend of Hua Mulan.

The entire reason this is being discussed at all is in the context of something where intrigue matters. Obviously this is wholly incompatible with other kinds of stories in which Goku flies down and rips the roof off the Imperial Palace. Such stories might be Eastern, but they aren't relevant.

Within the context of the kinds of stories being discussed, armies matter and logistics and command of armies matter. That's really the beginning and end of that part of the discussion. Any and all stories in which individual characters are so powerful that they shout "Kamehameha!" and blow up entire opposing armies are completely irrelevant for this discussion.

Question: Are (what if) the wars / battles between the Clans were largely ceremonial? Not strictly 'kill them down to the last man' but more concerned with non-lethally capturing prisoners in order to ransom, get political leverage, and dishonor the opposing clan?

They aren't completely ceremonial, but the goal of war is to take over the other province, not to wipe out all the people who live in the other province. So no, people would not normally be expected to slaughter all the peasants in villages their armies marched through. Although of course, looting areas and possibly hauling some people off as slaves would be the kind of thing people would do.

-Username17

[angelfromanotherpin]

The R3K stories where one dude beats like 1000 other dudes in battle are based on having a strong dueling culture, which L5R traditionally has. Two regiments meet, each puts forth a champion to fight, all the loser's friends retreat, and the winner puts 'defeated X00 men' on his achievements list and is credited with turning the whole battle.

That's how individual badasses count for a lot in battles with huge numbers of people. But of course, they still need a pile of their own soldiers to have the standing to make challenges in the first place.

[OgreBattle]

As late as the 1910's there's accounts of troops stopping to watch officers duel:

“One sub-lieutenant two or three in used his drawn sword on his men when they hung back, cutting down in quick succession ; and then, realizing the hopelessness of such action, he gallantly advanced alone to meet the Japanese. He ran towards them till a bullet, one of the last remaining, struck him in the stomach; as he fell he stabbed himself with his sword sooner than fall into his enemy’s hands. Another Russian followed in shouting in defiance to the Japanese, and as he came on, a Japanese officer hurried to meet him. The two closed in an Homeric hand-to-hand in sight of the two armies and as they whirled their swords at each side rent the air with cheers. Now It seemed that the Russian was winning and the Russians thundered applause. Now again the Japanese had the upper hand, and hoarse ” Banzais ! ” rose from the Hiroshima infantry. Then the Russian went down before the skillful swordplay of his opponent, and a moment later he lay a corpse upon the hill. The Japanese officer ran calmly back to his line and took his place at the head of his men amidst a tumult of cheers, and almost at the same moment the long-looked-for ammunition arrived.

The star of Japan was now in the ascendant. The Japanese troops poured a terrible fire into their opponents, and instantly charged with the utmost resolution. For a moment the Russians stood ; bayonets were crossed ; a Japanese bayoneted a Russian and was immediately impaled on the bayonets of the Russian victim’s comrades. The officers fought with swords and revolvers, the Japanese officers making dreadful play with their sharp Samurai blades, and hewing off the limbs of their less skilful antagonists. But the combat was too unequal when one side could not use the rifle ; the Japanese speedily obtained the upper hand, forced the Russians from their trenches, and sent them reeling back in terrible confusion, while they poured into the retreating mass of infantry a decimating fire.”

Japan’s Fight for Freedom: Herbert Wrigley Wilson, 1905
Battle of Telisse, June 14th 1904
posted in Culture clash in martial history: Africa, Russia, Japan..: Schola Forum

----

Sometimes the officers find each other and duel in the middle of combat

[Chamomile]

Even assuming Guan Yu literally wades into the enemy lines to kill a thousand people in a single battle, he's doing it in a context where showing up to the war with ten thousand people is indicative of being a minor warlord in the early shakeout period when it's pretty much every province for themselves, and the real Three Kingdoms action revolves around armies measured in the hundreds of thousands. If a guy who kills a thousand men in evenly matched battle shows up alone to a fight against ten thousand enemies, he probably isn't even going to get his standard thousand down before he gets Zerg-rushed to death. There's even a line in Romance of the Three Kingdoms about how great people can be killed by a lucky crit from an archer.

But alt-L5R won't be, even if finished, a video game. It's going to be a tabletop RPG. For those purposes, you want to be able to play out a skirmish battle without having a pack of bandit assassins immediately reduced to total irrelevance by the presence of one samurai. Since the only important part of a samurai defeating a thousand men one way or the other is the part where he challenges an enemy samurai in a one-on-one duel, all that giving him the power to literally defeat a thousand soldiers by himself does is make it impossible to ever have a skirmish combat with him.

[Wiseman]

Yeah, people taking on armies singlehandedly is a thing in eastern legends. So you could totally have a thing where you wade through hordes of nameless mooks until you get to the one guy on the other side with a name.

"Eastern" isn't really a genre. I mean, genres can be subdivided eternally, as Mech Anime breaks down into Real Robot and Super Robot, and those further break down by target age group and whether there's romance to go with all the fighting and so on and so forth. But even without going on a deep dive into subgenres it's just trivially obvious that Evangelion isn't the same thing as Legend of Hua Mulan.

The entire reason this is being discussed at all is in the context of something where intrigue matters. Obviously this is wholly incompatible with other kinds of stories in which Goku flies down and rips the roof off the Imperial Palace. Such stories might be Eastern, but they aren't relevant.

Within the context of the kinds of stories being discussed, armies matter and logistics and command of armies matter. That's really the beginning and end of that part of the discussion. Any and all stories in which individual characters are so powerful that they shout "Kamehameha!" and blow up entire opposing armies are completely irrelevant for this discussion.

-Username17

Well aware of that. Should have added a "some" in front of eastern legends.

Also, what is the acceptable peak of individual power for this?

[Almaz]

To me, it seems that the story of Seven Samurai, while you wouldn't tell exactly that story in an era where the Clans are strong and societal order is maintained, would be a low level story in such a game, where bandits (who are mostly hardened killers and mostly have military training) are fended off by a bunch of named characters, with Kambei (who has the Strategist class) marshaling the untrained and unready farmers into a reasonable fighting force and the samurai taking the losses on their face because they're heroic characters, and the exploits of Guan Yu Literally Kills One Thousand People In A Fair Fight would be at or around the peak (I mean, he literally got deified! seems fair).

As Chamomile mentioned, the reason Guan Yu, God Of the Glaive, doesn't break the game, is because being worth a thousand soldiers just means you count as a regiment at a stage where players command multiple, but that's also probably the last stage at which such a character still is obliged to play in the actual strategic game. One more x10 from that, and you start actually fighting off entire armies and winning, and so warlords stop mattering. Even if you got every canonical top-level warrior in the game setting on your side, you would still be vulnerable to being outmaneuvered by a competent strategist at the head of an army of soldiers. It does mean that if Guan Yu has breached your walls, however, that you should probably run rather than hoping your honor guard can defeat him.

Settling on this would be saying those top level characters can't be taken out by ordinary assassins, but honestly that doesn't seem unreasonable. People like Cao Cao and Oda Nobunaga evaded assassination attempts all the time... and in a fantasy setting, your Oda Nobunaga probably does more than just stand up after getting shot (twice, in the chest), but rather actually regenerates if the weapon isn't blessed. It just means that ninja are actually cool dudes with secret death magic rather than random peasants, and that you have to remember to try not to write dozens of top level warriors into the setting.