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Zero Suit Ridley posted:It's a great fit for pbp. Don't run seven games concurrently though. Did you try to run seven games concurrently? Also, is running things in Anime Mode so that I don't have to worry so much about accidentally killing characters a bad way to approach things? Covok fucked around with this message at 04:13 on Sep 28, 2015 |
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Sep 28, 2015 04:06
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Most of my best (live) games have been with a focused faction; like one Winter Court or a group of samurai from a single clan or allied clans. I would say mostly just have a firm idea of what you want to do and what ties the characters together, since the game can be pretty factional. In addition, just being clear about what kind of setting / adventures you plan on can be pretty important, just so people don't create an artistic courtier for your game of tragic war (or at least have some idea of what they're getting into). As a player, much the same holds true, but in the sense of asking questions about what will fit the game in question. Edit: anime mode is probably fine, I'd probably have to take another look at it, but 4th is definitely 90s-era lethality, even if it isn't the rocket tag that 3rd was. Easing up on that is probably wise if you plan on combat being a regular event. Some of those old 1st edition adventures were basically non-functional because the amount of combat and the ability of characters to withstand combat weren't even remotely in sync. Alien Rope Burn fucked around with this message at 04:44 on Sep 28, 2015 |
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Sep 28, 2015 04:20
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Covok posted:Did you try to run seven games concurrently? Yeah, there was a point where I had somewhere between seven and nine L5R games going at once.
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Sep 28, 2015 16:08
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Covok posted:Did you try to run seven games concurrently? I ban great destiny and dark fate as advantages and just give everybody great destiny (Die an awesome death) for free. It saves a lot of trouble, lets you call it in whenever it seems awesome, and generally just makes the game better. Alternately, you could go 100% full anime and do the Tenra Bansho Zero thing. Make the death flag a literal mechanic. If you don't tick it, you can't die, period, and you can tick it to nosell any one incoming attack, no matter how absurd.
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Sep 28, 2015 17:41
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So on a vaguely related note, in addition to L5R getting sold off to FFG, they did divest themselves of 7th Sea, too...by reverting the rights back to Wick. http://www.alderac.com/blog/2015/11/03/a-return-to-7th-sea/
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Nov 3, 2015 20:20
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unseenlibrarian posted:So on a vaguely related note, in addition to L5R getting sold off to FFG, they did divest themselves of 7th Sea, too...by reverting the rights back to Wick. It might not suck? Ninja Edit: Left off two questions: Will the bonkers-as-hell metaplot be wiped away? Will Eisen still be The Best? 
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Nov 3, 2015 20:48
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Mile'ionaha posted:It might not suck? Have you met my friend John Wick? The man who wrote a book about being a dickhole GM because of how proud he is of it? Or the man who, when promoting his new RPG at gencon, demanded that a man buy five copies of his book instead of sharing it with his buddies, and refused to sell him the book when he said no?
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Nov 4, 2015 22:27
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To be fair, since Wick quit AEG, he wrote a book where... there was this RPG that was pretty... I actually did like... ... huh. Nevermind.
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Nov 4, 2015 22:53
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Is 7th sea (as is) any good if I want to play a fun pirate game? The FATAL and Friends writeup is very, uh, thorough and even if I had time to read it the database is down.
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Nov 4, 2015 23:54
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^^^^ It's okay, but it was made in the 90s and isn't especially good at pirates specifically. ------- He's said vaguely sane things about what he wants to do with a new 7th Sea setting. Of course, it's in the "scribbled notes on the back of a napkin" stage of development. Also, unprompted, he's said "I promise: no d20s!" But this maybe goes in the chat thread or something? Not that this one's drowning in posts. That Old Tree fucked around with this message at 00:01 on Nov 5, 2015 |
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Nov 4, 2015 23:59
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Plague of Hats posted:
Does he wake up sweating in horror at night, the voice of Ryan Dancey ringing in his ears?
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Nov 5, 2015 00:29
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Clipperton posted:Is 7th sea (as is) any good if I want to play a fun pirate game? The FATAL and Friends writeup is very, uh, thorough and even if I had time to read it the database is down. Other problems with the game: the system gives character a pool of special dice they can spend to do crazy swashbuckling stunts and any unused dice become your XP at the end of the session (therefore strongly incentivizing players not to pull any cool and crazy swashbuckling stunts unless they absolutely have to), and the game's presentation is very 1990s with a giant detailed metaplot and unkillable signature characters doing all the important things all spread across several dozen splatbook supplements. There was also an early D20 conversion of the game that was dumb and broken even by the standards of early D20 game conversions. There's a lot of cool fluff in the setting and I think there might be a really good game/setting buried in there somewhere, but I'm also pretty sure John Wick isn't the person to be trying to bring that off.
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Nov 5, 2015 00:35
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Clipperton posted:Is 7th sea (as is) any good if I want to play a fun pirate game? The FATAL and Friends writeup is very, uh, thorough and even if I had time to read it the database is down. It depends what you want to get out of it. I will say that the mechanics of 7th Sea are really crunchy and fun to work out. Sword and sorcery styles have a ton of flair and style that leads the game to being a dramatic narrative experience. The rules need tweaking though. One of the most common complaints I've seen on TG about it is the Drama Dice -> XP discouraging spending drama dice. Is there any reason you can't just houserule that away? I have. I'm running a long-term 7th Sea game that's been on for about 4 months. The system is definitely tending towards anime piracy, but the setting doesn't support that - instead trying to impose some odd and stiffling courtly system. My advice is just axe the setting or don't pay much attention to it, make your own poo poo up and have fun with whats a pretty clean system with lots of flavor.
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Nov 20, 2015 22:44
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So, what is the current state of the metaplot under the Dragon empress? By the way, 4th edition is very good on the whole, but this makes no sense: quote:GAIJIN GEAR [MATERIAL] (5 POINTS) You're either paying 5 points for a mundane item with no rules to support it, or for a weapon that only has drawbacks and no benefits whatsoever. Why would you do this?
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Dec 18, 2015 21:17
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Halloween Jack posted:So, what is the current state of the metaplot under the Dragon empress? Jigoku got tired of Fu Leng always failing so they took an NPC from Burning Sands that was originally in Clan Unicorn and turned her into Kali-Ma, who became the new champion. She went off and nuked the Ivory Kingdoms then stomped over to Rokugan. There was a big war that Rokugan was losing, and Dragon Empress Iweko ended up making a deal with Daigotsu that allowed Spider to be an actual legit Great Clan so long as he stopped Jigoku's taint from spreading. He agreed and descended into Jigoku as it's new champion. Meanwhile, Shahai does some ritual to supercharge Fu Leng and steal his power back from Kali Ma, and he pops out of Jigoku in Scorpion lands (creating a new Festering Pit) in dragon form to go all Mortal Kombat with Kali Ma and wins. Shahai dies in the process and Daigotsu gets to work deciding he ain't no bitch and tells Jigoku that he wears the pants in this relationship, then proclaiming Shahai (and a few others) as Dark Fortunes, has his son Kanpeki become the new Spider Champion, and stops the taint from spreading (unless you willingly give it to yourself). The Shadow Dragon also joins in. With the Ivory Kingdoms freshly nuked, Iweko decides to go all Imperialism (because that's always worked out for Japan) and announces that they are now called the Ruined Kingdoms, and she's totally claiming that poo poo. The vast majority of Spider are sent to be her conquerers with the Dragon to serve as their leash holders, and a bunch of other clans head over because there is a ton of money to be made, and the Rokugan Colonies happen. The Spider are generally sinister sneaky suspicious little shits, and the Lion get real fed up with this. Some dragon named P'an Ku starts to show up in the Colonies and everyone goes insane for a bit but then it's fixed and it doesn't really seem to have any big or further effect on metaplot that I can tell. Iweko has two kids - one is raised by mostly Clan Lion (where her hubby is from) but is technically also raised by the other non-Lion clans, and the other entirely by Clan Spider. Seiken, the older son, is a real big shithead, and like half the Great Clans dislike him. Seiken heads to the Colonies and gets all bossy and lovely over it. Iweko I retires and Seiken becomes Iweko II; he immediately removes the Imperial Bureaucracy and publically insults Spider for no real reason, then removes Kanpeki as Clan Champion and stuffs his brother in there instead (who naturally had no say in this). The Spider somewhat understandably yell what the gently caress, Seiken gets real smug and tells them to deal with it, so they go "FINE FUCKER LET'S SEE WHAT HAPPENS" and a) declares war, and b) brings back Jigoku's taint. Nice going, Seiken. He holds a big championship and a Daidoji wins, who asks "yo can we just like publicly do all our shady gaijin pepper poo poo" and he goes "Sure w/e" so not only are the Daidoji Harriers back, they now have official Imperial standing. P'an Ku warns Seiken that some mystic whatever seals are gonna break and it's totally gonna be the biggest, sickest war EVER. Also P'an Ku apparently takes the guise of a mischievous and anime-rear end little girl. I'm not actually sure if Seiken is actually supposed to be the shithead he's been somewhat consistently portrayed as.
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Dec 18, 2015 22:48
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ProfessorCirno posted:brings back Jigoku's taint. Also the bit about the gaijin pepper reminds me that Iron Empire is still one of the most interesting mini-settings in L5R. My current group has again taken to playing the game as Emerald Magistrates, and while no one has cared to use a firearm yet I suspect it's only a matter of time before someone decides to find a use for sniping. Or until the Tsi Smith decides to craft a gun and have the Doji Courtier gift it for mutual Glory and an Ally. (Three of the five PCs can throw Xk4 for damage, so ranged combat isn't a big deal for them as of yet.) As of yet our only issue comes with an error in the Secrets of the Empire crafting rules, which would otherwise seem reasonable. You're supposed to triple the price for all purposes, even for determining the base crafting TN before throwing Raises at it which is the whole point of the advanced crafting rules. Thus attempting to make a katana with your stamp on it (and nothing else special) requires a TN 80 check with two Raises.  (We changed things with a house rule so the aforementioned crafting PC can make cool stuff without excessive minmaxing, since having to call several Raises on top of the default TN is still no slouch.)
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Dec 18, 2015 23:35
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ProfessorCirno posted:I'm not actually sure if Seiken is actually supposed to be the shithead he's been somewhat consistently portrayed as.
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Dec 19, 2015 00:28
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NGDBSS posted:Wait, what? What's the loving point of making a big change to the setting about taint if you're going to change it right back so quickly? (I wonder how much of the metaplot FFG will keep considering this weirdness.) I remember what AEG did with the WotC's story, which was "Oh yeah, this war? Suddenly over. The new faction that just lost? They're forced to jump off a cliff." It was deeply "we're not saying this isn't canon but we are saying we don't give a gently caress".
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Dec 19, 2015 02:29
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Alien Rope Burn posted:I remember what AEG did with the WotC's story, which was "Oh yeah, this war? Suddenly over. The new faction that just lost? They're forced to jump off a cliff." Wait, what? Are you talking about the Spirit Wars? Because the Gold Edition base set was the only story developed in-house at WotC (and handed off to Rich and Shawn after the sale/first set), and Spirit Wars (and the Spirit faction) were always intended to be a weird time jump stopgap. Which is kind of a shame, since that setting is way more interesting than spooky cosmic horror ninja battle.
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Dec 19, 2015 02:40
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Huh. You're totally right now that I double-check. Granted, I don't know if it's more or less weird that they introduced a faction that only lasted for one set.
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Dec 19, 2015 03:56
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Halloween Jack posted:I haven't read any of this, but as a Lion fan, "Spider Clan? gently caress that! Also gently caress bureaucracy just because" sounds like a pretty Lion thing to do. I skipped over some of the minor stuff, but he's done stuff like "enter the Emerald Championship, which more or less threw off the legitimacy of the whole event, because he felt like it" or "rolled into the Second City unannounced, told everyone else to gently caress off, and claimed rulership for no given reason." Like everything has indeed cast him exactly as a Lion - brash, stupid, shortsighted, and overly eager for war. Which is why his only real two allies are the Crab and the Lion. The Phoenix sorta back him. Scorpion pretended to, but in reality joined the Crane, Mantis, Unicorn, most of the Dragon (though they don't show it), and formerly Spider, in going "no what back the gently caress down jesus." Meanwhile the Lion have begun braying that the the colonies are by default corrupt and only good proper pure Rokugan who've never left the country should be considered true samurai, and Iweko II declared that the entire Second City had to be destroyed and rebuilt to ensure no unclean gaijin influences like architecture could brainwash anyone. He also talks big game about how Rokugan has grown corrupt and improper over time and harkens back to a glorious golden age of the past. He despises how weak city living samurai are, and how TRUE ROKUGAN is found in rural areas. Sorry bro. Iweko II is Rokugan Donald Trump. ProfessorCirno fucked around with this message at 07:43 on Dec 19, 2015 |
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Dec 19, 2015 07:26
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Oh, and the Phoenix kinda bizarrely made this giant screed about blood purity and how mixing races was sinful and all this poo poo, aimed directly at the Unicorn, and the Unicorn told them to put the gently caress up or shut the gently caress up, and I'm not sure where that went. So those are Iweko II's allies. The Crab, who are mostly just real itchy that they haven't had a good war in awhile. The Lion, who support just flat out kicking out half the other Great Clans and are pushing for him to do just that. And the Phoenix, who have bizarrely become 18th/early 19th century racists.
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Dec 19, 2015 07:38
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You're not inspiring hope here; those clan positions from the Crab and Phoenix seem at least a bit out-of-character. But I suppose a significant part of the problem is the mandate that every time an empire-spanning conflict in the metaplot ends, another must start within living memory of the participants. Wasn't the Scorpion Coup the very first piece of metaplot, after all? And thus far we've had one crazy thing after another within the span of an in-game century, which is pretty short in the context of Rokugan's size/social and technological structure. gently caress, even though Europe (as an example) regularly had conflicts every few decades over three or more millennia, very few such conflicts had quite the scope or stakes as the poo poo that regularly seems to plague the Emerald Empire. Of course the real reason for keeping everything so close together is in all likelihood to avoid massive feature creep in the CCG as a result of introducing entirely new waves of characters every two years while simultaneously invalidating all the old ones, which is perfectly understandable. Or story creep when all the characters from the last arc are now just ancestors and some nobodies are in control. I just wish they didn't have to shackle that to a constantly evolving metaplot that could definitely stand to be slowed down or otherwise zoomed in at a smaller scale. (For all of the ways in which 40K is far loving crazier, at least it understands that social and political movements take a fair bit of time to form and play out.)
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Dec 19, 2015 08:03
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Well, Phoenixes have always been arrogant assholes and hypocrites, so it's not too far-fetched there...
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Dec 19, 2015 08:08
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NGDBSS posted:You're not inspiring hope here; those clan positions from the Crab and Phoenix seem at least a bit out-of-character. But I suppose a significant part of the problem is the mandate that every time an empire-spanning conflict in the metaplot ends, another must start within living memory of the participants. Wasn't the Scorpion Coup the very first piece of metaplot, after all? And thus far we've had one crazy thing after another within the span of an in-game century, which is pretty short in the context of Rokugan's size/social and technological structure. gently caress, even though Europe (as an example) regularly had conflicts every few decades over three or more millennia, very few such conflicts had quite the scope or stakes as the poo poo that regularly seems to plague the Emerald Empire. No, the game started with the coup about 5-6 years in the past. It's also not like the current meta really matters, it's not like the story is going to go anywhere now. I'm hard pressed to see a situation whee FFG doesn't either start new or jump the story 1-200 years so they can start fresh and not involve players in this Byzantine legacy.
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Dec 19, 2015 08:18
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ProfessorCirno posted:Oh, and the Phoenix kinda bizarrely made this giant screed about blood purity and how mixing races was sinful and all this poo poo, aimed directly at the Unicorn, and the Unicorn told them to put the gently caress up or shut the gently caress up, and I'm not sure where that went. It was that the Moto are still cursed and they're passing that curse through blood lineage without telling anyone. As for where it went... I'll hopefully finish writing that fiction by the end of this week. ProfessorCirno posted:I skipped over some of the minor stuff, but he's done stuff like "enter the Emerald Championship, which more or less threw off the legitimacy of the whole event, because he felt like it" or "rolled into the Second City unannounced, told everyone else to gently caress off, and claimed rulership for no given reason." No, that was his brother Shibatsu. And he had a reason, restoring order to the city. How flimsy or strong that reason may have been could be up for debate, however. Point being, that wasn't the guy you're talking about. Edit: If I ever do an L5R Story Team AMA (why the hell would anyone be interested in that, though?), I would have a lot to say about the Unicorn-Phoenix conflict and the circumstances surrounding that little story arc. Sometimes everything goes right and sometimes everything goes terribly, horribly wrong... Spookyelectric fucked around with this message at 09:17 on Dec 19, 2015 |
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Dec 19, 2015 09:07
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Spookyelectric posted:
If you ever do one, I can back you up with story team evidence from earlier eras!
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Dec 19, 2015 10:05
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Well, it feels like there's a big push towards there being some big titanic war between good and evil and all that jazz that will CHANGE ROKUGAN FOREVER or something...timed perfectly to the switch to FFG  .I mean I'm not saying that was the original intent given how sudden the FFG purchase was, just that it's comfortably heading in that direction hahaha. Spookyelectric posted:No, that was his brother Shibatsu. And he had a reason, restoring order to the city. How flimsy or strong that reason may have been could be up for debate, however. Point being, that wasn't the guy you're talking about I thought Seiken was the one who rolled in and told the Crab to demolish the entire city and rebuild it from scratch as a Proper Rokugan City apropos of nothing?
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Dec 19, 2015 10:08
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NGDBSS posted:But I suppose a significant part of the problem is the mandate that every time an empire-spanning conflict in the metaplot ends, another must start within living memory of the participants. Wasn't the Scorpion Coup the very first piece of metaplot, after all? And thus far we've had one crazy thing after another within the span of an in-game century, which is pretty short in the context of Rokugan's size/social and technological structure. gently caress, even though Europe (as an example) regularly had conflicts every few decades over three or more millennia, very few such conflicts had quite the scope or stakes as the poo poo that regularly seems to plague the Emerald Empire. If I recall this is literally poked fun of in one of the side story bits - a Toritaka mentions that Rokugan is increasingly filled to the brim with ghosts because people keep dying in nonstop wars.
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Dec 19, 2015 10:17
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ProfessorCirno posted:I thought Seiken was the one who rolled in and told the Crab to demolish the entire city and rebuild it from scratch as a Proper Rokugan City apropos of nothing? Ah, I thought you were referring to an earlier event. No, Seiken didn't even go to the Second City until after the event you're talking about. As I recall, what happened was that Seiken attempted to garner colonial support by rebuilding parts of the Second City that were destroyed by the whole P'an Ku/Fudo mess, asked the Crab to handle it and help him "shape the city into something more worthy", and they took it as an excuse to demolish a bunch of Spider-controlled holdings and buildings that were of gaijin origin to "make room." Basically as a middle finger to anyone the Crab doesn't like. That's not what the wiki says, but don't trust the wiki. The wiki is often wrong. If I can go on a little rant here: This was a story point that needed more than just a slew of clan letters to portray, but there was no other place to put it. I don't think it was very clearly communicated as consequence. But then, that specific batch of Clan Letters were a lot of trouble for us anyway. As I recall, about half of them weren't even written by Story Team due to how slammed we were. They were contracted out to other writers and I believe they got published without anyone from Story Team even having the chance to look at them and see if they actually said what we wanted them to say (they were turned directly in to brand). I honestly think that less fictions with more personal focus would have served us better than one fiction per week. The guys above us looked at the fictions as "Free Content" and a product we gave away to add value to the brand. Which is true, to a point. But at the same time, all of these stories and so-called "required reading" to make sense of the metaplot also created a barrier to entry. To get what's going on, players would have to read a ton of fiction, and ain't nobody got time for that. Add to that the rapid accumulation of story prizes (every Kotei gets a unique story prize, and there are like sixty Koteis or something insane), and the mandate that every expansion get its own story and three fictions devoted to that story, plus a "focus story" for each clan, and we quickly find our metaplot diluted. Instead of all the fictions adding up to one evolving storyline with concurrently-evolving characters, we end up with a bunch of "flash-in-the-pan" events that pick up and resolve very quickly, storylines being dropped abruptly, and everything completely divorced from whatever is supposed to push the story. So when the story needs to be pushed, it's basically forced. I never thought I'd say this when I joined the team... but we made too many fictions. Less fictions, where each fiction had greater impact on the main story but a smaller focus, would have served us better. I think. I'm not complaining, and I don't "blame" anyone, per se. Their priorities are different from ours and they're trying to protect and market the brand. The success of a story for them is through the lens of how well it could be marketed, and it's easier to market the kinds of conflicts they were asking us to write. But I do find it a little ironic that mere months after Story Team finally got the autonomy we've been wanting for years, they up and sell the brand. Oh well. FFG will do a good job. I have no worries about that. But if they decide to continue the focus on story during their tenure, my advice to them would be less fictions with more actual content, and focus the story on a limited cast of bigger-than-life characters whose actions are affected by players, rather than a bunch of stories with a massive cast of interchangeable spuds via story choices that are practically unlimited. If that makes sense. Spookyelectric fucked around with this message at 17:48 on Dec 19, 2015 |
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Dec 19, 2015 17:18
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Sega 32X posted:If you ever do one, I can back you up with story team evidence from earlier eras! L5R Story Team Bros! High Five! We should start a
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Dec 19, 2015 17:24
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ProfessorCirno posted:I skipped over some of the minor stuff, but he's done stuff like "enter the Emerald Championship, which more or less threw off the legitimacy of the whole event, because he felt like it" or "rolled into the Second City unannounced, told everyone else to gently caress off, and claimed rulership for no given reason." The Lion in general really shouldn't be portrayed as foolhardy as they consistently are by people like Wick. Their huge territory needs to be administered and their huge army needs to eat, and if they made a play to beat up the rest of the Empire all the time, they'd have been done long before that one crazy emperor disbanded the Akodo family. NGDBSS posted:You're not inspiring hope here; those clan positions from the Crab and Phoenix seem at least a bit out-of-character. But I suppose a significant part of the problem is the mandate that every time an empire-spanning conflict in the metaplot ends, another must start within living memory of the participants. Wasn't the Scorpion Coup the very first piece of metaplot, after all? And thus far we've had one crazy thing after another within the span of an in-game century, which is pretty short in the context of Rokugan's size/social and technological structure. gently caress, even though Europe (as an example) regularly had conflicts every few decades over three or more millennia, very few such conflicts had quite the scope or stakes as the poo poo that regularly seems to plague the Emerald Empire. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 18:25 on Dec 19, 2015 |
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Dec 19, 2015 17:59
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The Lion need some serious TLC. Every clan has flanderized to a certain degree, but I think the Lion have suffered the most, with the Phoenix at a close second. In First Edition and at the start of the game, they were one of the most interesting clans, if only for the dynamic between the families. The Ikoma were extremely colorful and one of the only families that could show open emotion in court without being shamed. Matsu brashness was only one aspect of their warrior bragging culture, and they were almost like a matriarchal re-imagining of the mythical Spartans. The Kitsu were priests who could commune with and channel the dead before anyone else could (and they didn't even cast spells in the 1st Edition RPG) and lived their lives in atonement for the ancient race that Akodo killed. Arguably, they were the most Shinto-inspired priests (everyone else is more like a mix between Shugendo and D&D Tropes). And the Akodo were an extremely prestigious and honorable tactician family that were nonetheless completely disgraced. Furthermore, while all of the clans adopted specific aspects of Bushido, only the Lion embraced the entire code. It was their thing. This was a clan designed with interesting stories in mind. Now, the current Lion portrayal is extremely vanilla. And in my opinion, in a setting as fantastic as Rokugan, no clan should be the vanilla samurai clan. I don't fault any one party with this, there are a lot of forces at work in a game like this over a long period of time. But they need some TLC. If I could choose three clans to "refresh" and redesign their identities, it would be the Lion, Phoenix, and Dragon, all for different but related reasons. Of course, there were some obstacles to just outright doing this (most of them not being AEG-related), but maybe FFG will have the ability to refresh all of the clans who need some new life. Spookyelectric fucked around with this message at 19:07 on Dec 19, 2015 |
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Dec 19, 2015 18:50
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Halloween Jack posted:I think this is why the eve of the Scorpion Coup is so popular, besides being the default--there's always a clan war somewhere, and it can consume the lives of your PCs but not the entire Empire. And then you can jump into the events of the Coup if you want, or do a divergent history-altering event, or whatever. That's honestly a bit sad, if only because you can get pure gold by taking basically any arc starting point in the whole of L5R and planting explosives liberally under the tracks. Heroes of Rokugan 1 beerslammed Hidden Emperor and Second Day of Thunder, and while it had its problems, it was a golden train wreck of a plot. Heroes of Rokugan 3 started a few years after Oblivion's Gate, just as the Spirit Wars were about to start, and blew the tracks to smithereens in the first mod, and was the best campaign yet. My last campaign started out as a run of Heroes of Rokugan 1, and then midway through, I decided the players had deviated enough and blew the tracks to hell, and found pure gold beneath them. And then the sequel that I just started, a hundred years later... well, best not to talk about that, I have players reading this thread. Suffice to say, there are a set of tracks laid down, and the players managed to blow them to hell in their first case, the story of which is here.
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Dec 19, 2015 18:52
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Spookyelectric posted:In First Edition and at the start of the game, they were one of the most interesting clans, if only for the dynamic between the families. It's easy to forget, though, what an uphill battle the Lion had early on. The first storyline has Matsu Tsuko as their first champion - who can't make a correct decision to save her life, literally. Every time it comes for her to make a choice, it's almost always a horrendously wrong one. And honestly, the Matsu would go on to dominate their portrayal for a good while because of that. Way of the Lion was certainly not the worst of the clanbooks, but it was probably the dullest, mostly just offering up obvious extrapolations. About the only thing that stood out was Wick's portrayal of Ikoma, but that had approximately zero relevance to their actual portrayal of the family at the time, and their school was easily the worst in the game. What's more, when it came to detailing historical battles in 1e supplements, they're portrayed as losers over and over, whether it's the Unicorn riding over them, the Scorpion tricking them, or the Phoenix roasting them. Even Way of the Lion focused on battles they lost, under the presumption those are they ones they study to figure out what they did wrong. Which makes sense from a practical perspective, but it just fed into that narrative of them being boisterous losers. I think the Lion has always struggled, mainly because things like being "clan of honor and war" makes it harder to distinguish them, because all the clans are about honor and war, save maybe the Scorpion. The Lion are chiefly "like the others, but more" in their elevator pitch, and though they have some interesting cultural angles, that overall notion tends to wash out those differences when you don't have a strong vision for their portrayal. Alien Rope Burn fucked around with this message at 19:51 on Dec 19, 2015 |
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Dec 19, 2015 19:47
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Halloween Jack posted:You're either paying 5 points for a mundane item with no rules to support it, or for a weapon that only has drawbacks and no benefits whatsoever. Why would you do this?  You have to work for your fun!Or at least that's the response you'd get from half the L5R community, including some of the writers. It's honestly one of my biggest issues with the L5R mechanics (and the people who made them); there's so many loving trap options and it feels like it got an even worse playtesting run than 3e D&D. Why does X advantage cost Y? Because it's rare! Does it give you anything besides the ability to say "I have a thing that is not usually on a character sheet"? Nope! Also you might get killed for having it. Why does A disadvantage cost B? Because that's the number that first came into my head. Never you mind that by taking this you'll basically be nonfunctional half the time; if you're a real roleplayer it won't bother you! I really hope that FFG either goes through the system with several combs or just makes a new one from scratch, since there's so much of that "balance is impossible so we won't even try, you can just houserule it if you don't like it" mentality woven into the books currently.
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Dec 19, 2015 19:55
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Alien Rope Burn posted:I think the Lion has always struggled, mainly because things like being "clan of honor and war" makes it harder to distinguish them, because all the clans are about honor and war, save maybe the Scorpion. The Lion are chiefly "like the others, but more" in their elevator pitch, and though they have some interesting cultural angles, that overall notion tends to wash out those differences when you don't have a strong vision for their portrayal. This is a problem that got even worse as time went on. Compare the original Ikoma to the current super-plain version portrayed now. Spending the entire Clan War as a punching bag didn't help matters either, I agree with you there. I'm extrapolating a bit here, but I think the original idea was for the Lion's military failures to be seen as heroic tragedies rather than incompetence or being "losers." Their strengths are also supposed to be their weaknesses, and the Coup was the falling of their star. This is not how it was consistently portrayed, however. Toturi's fall was tragic specifically, but the other losses were seen through the eyes of the other clans, and because (most of) the clan books are purposefully written from an in-clan bias, that angle is completely lost. That's just the impression I got, though. I can't really speak with authority as to the intentions of the setting's architects. John Wick was but one of L5R's creators and his motivations were not always in synergy with the rest. So it may just be that the Lion were pulled in a dozen directions at once from the get go.
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Dec 19, 2015 20:06
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Apropos of nothing, I've been reading the book cover-to-cover and I see that the Scorpions are still the special snowflake clan, after a fashion. In the section on Samurai Virtues, every single virtue has a blurb on how the Scorpion practice it (if at all). Even when no other clans are specifically mentioned at all.Yawgmoth posted:Because roleplaying, you filthy powergamer. quote:Or at least that's the response you'd get from half the L5R community, including some of the writers. It's honestly one of my biggest issues with the L5R mechanics (and the people who made them); there's so many loving trap options and it feels like it got an even worse playtesting run than 3e D&D. Why does X advantage cost Y? Because it's rare! Does it give you anything besides the ability to say "I have a thing that is not usually on a character sheet"? Nope! Also you might get killed for having it. Why does A disadvantage cost B? Because that's the number that first came into my head. Never you mind that by taking this you'll basically be nonfunctional half the time; if you're a real roleplayer it won't bother you!
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Dec 19, 2015 20:26
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Spookyelectric posted:That's just the impression I got, though. I can't really speak with authority as to the intentions of the setting's architects. John Wick was but one of L5R's creators and his motivations were not always in synergy with the rest. So it may just be that the Lion were pulled in a dozen directions at once from the get go. If John Wick didn't hate the Lion, he sure had a funny way of showing appreciation. A lot of the early portrayals of the Lion were also, I think, influenced by the CCG meta at the time and the Lion Speed Deck (aka "LSD"), which relied on berserker tactics to annihilate your enemy's provinces in an early alpha strike and just feed their downward spiral after that. If they were tacticians, it didn't show in their gameplay, which was mostly just pumping up their numbers to beat enemies through overwhelming numbers and force. It wasn't until Scorpion Clan Coup that they got a stronghold that actually encouraged some degree of tactical thinking. Of course, that tactic was often just getting overwhelming force and then playing Deadly Ground to shut out your opponent from responding, but it was at least a modicum more thoughtful. It says something that they got the Kolat traitor through player vote at the time; the kind of degenerate decks the Lion created definitely resulted in a backlash against them in the fandom. They didn't just have an effective deck, but had a deck that ended the game so fast you practically didn't get a chance to play it.
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Dec 19, 2015 20:44
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In many ways, the CCG is a stronger influence on players' understanding of a clan's identity than the story or RPG can ever be. It's a fact that has caused me many a moment of futility. Especially when it comes to the portrayal of shugenja, which sort of became my pet issue as time went on...
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Dec 19, 2015 20:48
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