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Anyone have any thoughts on the last fiction just posted? I thought Denton did a pretty solid job wrapping things up, especially since the back and forth of internal coup vs external invasion were kind of jarring. I guess Mantis people should be pretty happy that Yoritomo survived. The "love" between Tsukune and Tadaka was a bit romantically written though I'm not sure if that was intentional or not since I didn't read the previous fiction between them and I wasn't sure how old Tadaka was supposed to be but there's a line about Tsukune being a "seventeen summers girl" that gave me pause, but I didn't really want to bring it up on the Facebook group because I didn't want to kick off some debate where people try to either defend pedophilia and I genuinely don't know if the love between them is supposed to be read in that way. Or maybe I'm reading the whole thing wrong. I also didn't keep up with the Crab fiction very much so I don't know if Yakamo being gay was previously known or hinted at or if it was just there to add more representation to the mix but it was a fun moment either way. Shoju had a pretty fitting end, and I really enjoyed the Kachiko/Hotaru story right before they marched on the capital, Hotaru willing to die in the duel was pretty emotional. Only real misstep I had with the end was that Yoshi was still alive. Ukiaki may have been manipulated by Shoju but there's no way in my opinion he didn't make sure he got to watch Yoshi get killed. I wouldn't have minded if Crane still had the regent but Yoshi was such a dick in the story that not seeing him get his was a mistake. Totally open on what happens to the heirs so that's interesting. Also hints at the Second day of Thunder which makes sense. Overall pretty good, though I am saddened that Katsuo didn't get splattered by the Oni because I really thought that was what he was there for.
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May 7, 2021 18:16
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PaybackJack posted:I thought Denton did a pretty solid job wrapping things up, especially since the back and forth of internal coup vs external invasion were kind of jarring. Thank you! I appreciate that. I worry that maybe I was having a little too much fun there with the finale fics. I'm glad I was able to turn some player choices into a sequential story. It felt a bit like the old times on Story Team for a bit, there. It feels kinda weird that this is the second time that I've written the finale fictions for an L5R card game. I'm not certain what I'm going to do next, I've been writing for L5R in some form since 2011. But whatever is next for me, I'm glad I got some time writing for one of my favorite fantasy settings. Spookyelectric fucked around with this message at 04:18 on May 8, 2021 |
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May 8, 2021 04:15
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Spookyelectric posted:Thank you! I appreciate that. I worry that maybe I was having a little too much fun there with the finale fics. I'm glad I was able to turn some player choices into a sequential story. It felt a bit like the old times on Story Team for a bit, there. I think you had a pretty unenviable task of making the hardcores that hadn't given up on the LCG happy. I didn't follow the old storyline particularly well but tried to keep up with this one from time to time. I felt like you always kept the world coherent and thematic without drowning the story in your knowledge of Japanese custom. Not to really name names, but the Scorpion clan book Whispers and Shadow by Mari Murdock was pretty excessive at points. Which brings me to writing Yojiro in as the new champion. Having read that book, Yojiro felt like something that was either long planned or fell into your lap so I'm a bit curious how far out that was planned. I'm very sad that with the game ending we won't see new versions of Yojiro, or that we never got a version of Altansarnai that matches up to how badass you wrote her. Congrats on the good work and I hope you can get some more work through the team that picked up the RPG stuff. PaybackJack fucked around with this message at 15:52 on May 8, 2021 |
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May 8, 2021 15:42
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There is now an official VTT module for L5R and while I haven't used it in an actual session yet, it seems pretty good. It seems to smartly handle the roll & keep steps, and lets the GM set the TN and even if the TN is secret. It includes in its compendium many (if not all) placeholders for weapons, items, armor, techniques, advantages/disadvantages, and school abilities. The weapons and armor are mostly there but the other things are mostly empty and will require referencing the source books (or just copy and paste into the placeholders). I plan on hopefully using it for some sessions if I can wrangle my players and I'll report back on that if/when that happens.
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May 10, 2021 16:51
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Ruzihm posted:There is now an official VTT module for L5R and while I haven't used it in an actual session yet, it seems pretty good. It seems to smartly handle the roll & keep steps, and lets the GM set the TN and even if the TN is secret. It includes in its compendium many (if not all) placeholders for weapons, items, armor, techniques, advantages/disadvantages, and school abilities. The weapons and armor are mostly there but the other things are mostly empty and will require referencing the source books (or just copy and paste into the placeholders). How is VTT in general? Is there much of a learning curve? I'd like to try getting in some L5R but the dice are definitely a barrier.
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May 10, 2021 19:46
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That Old Tree posted:How is VTT in general? Is there much of a learning curve? I'd like to try getting in some L5R but the dice are definitely a barrier. I've only been trying to figure it out for a little less than a week so don't take this as gospel or anything, but so far it seems pretty good. There are a lot of modules that can be plugged in of varying degrees of game-agnosticism. Most if not all are open source to some degree so if you are technically inclined especially apropos javascript you can adjust them to suit your needs. This includes the L5R module, which I did a pull request for a lil typo the other day  The L5R module makers currently recommend in their gitlab page (https://gitlab.com/teaml5r/l5r5e) a couple neat modules. One that make 3d dice appear when you roll (unfortunately not including explosions or rerolls iirc) which i think will be good fun, and one that allows players and GMS to search everything for terms which makes it easier to review things, or share things in the chat window if the players and/or gm make use of the compendium or journal features. There are so many other modules. I only wish there was a better searching tool for them, because the one i was using was just name-based. macroing functionality is pretty extensive. Just the other day in the L5r channel on the VTT discord (https://discord.gg/v9K2hKJ) someone linked a macro that will reset the void points for every player (half rounded up). So, that's pretty neat. I only did the most basic of stuff in roll 20 the couple times i used it as a gm when i first tried out 13th age, so my perspective as a gm user is limited. It seems to be no less friendly to players though. I'm self-hosting it on my home PC and having a fine time with that. player passwords are stored in plaintext on the vtt server and to my knowledge the admin has to set them up anyway so I would recommend the admin make new passwords of adequate complexity/length, and give them to the players individually, then set up SSL on the server so the connections are secure. vtt has instructions for that An alternative could be hosting on a web server in the cloud if you have one of those. vtt has partnerships with hosters which i'm sure are great, but I didn't really look into any. https://foundryvtt.com/article/hosting/ Ruzihm fucked around with this message at 20:40 on May 10, 2021 |
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May 10, 2021 20:38
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Hey, I'm currently gathering information on various dice systems, and I'm wondering if anyone here would be cool with talking about your opinions regarding L5R's R&K system (specifically 4e and earlier, I understand 5e kind of uses their own dice system) especially how you feel it compares fixed-dice systems like d20 and the more dice pool systems likes Shadowrun or WOD. The points I'm most interested in are: How long does it take to resolve actions? How consistent are those results with what you expect your character to be good or bad at? Do you feel like there's enough granularity for conditional effects such as specialized abilities or environment to matter?
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Jul 14, 2021 17:31
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SweetBro posted:Hey, I'm currently gathering information on various dice systems, and I'm wondering if anyone here would be cool with talking about your opinions regarding L5R's R&K system (specifically 4e and earlier, I understand 5e kind of uses their own dice system) especially how you feel it compares fixed-dice systems like d20 and the more dice pool systems likes Shadowrun or WOD. The points I'm most interested in are: How long does it take to resolve actions? How consistent are those results with what you expect your character to be good or bad at? Do you feel like there's enough granularity for conditional effects such as specialized abilities or environment to matter? Overall, I think R&K holds up poorly. It's a vaguely normal-curveish shape, but it's almost impossible to even estimate your odds of success on the fly due to its weird spikes and valleys (This site has handy graphs so you can see what I mean). It's a simple enough system to use, and resolves about as quickly as any other dice-pool system. And your character is about as good as you'd expect at their specialties. But the relative value of an extra rolled die vs an extra keep die changes based on how many of each you already have, so +1 ring or +1 skill has an inconsistent value. Ultimately, R&K works ok. It's easy enough to use, and gives a more or less acceptable outcome. But it is more complex than it needs to be and is difficult to estimate, both problems that classic die pool systems don't have. R&K doesn't have any advantages to make up for these flaws, there's just no reason to use R&K other than tradition. Edit: It's granular enough to allow for conditional effects, but the weird probability curve means it's hard to see how they impact your chances. A -0k1 penalty will harm different characters differently
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Jul 14, 2021 18:00
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Another thing about R&K is that it claims to offer the player more choice than typical dice pool systems ("Look, you can choose which dice to keep! You have some degree of control over your results!"). That should, in theory, offer more narrative possibilities. But that's not how it works out in practice, because 95% of the time, players are going to keep the highest dice. There are very few instances where players are incentivized to keep anything but the highest dice (and for voluntary failure, which is a thing, one might ask why we're rolling the dice at all). So while theoretically having the option of choosing whatever dice you want might suggest more narrative possibilities, in practice it's still just a binary pass-fail system, with little reason to treat it otherwise. Ironically, that's an issue that 5E, with it's custom dice, partially solved. Players have plenty of incentive to keep die results other than successes, or to voluntarily not accept a success to avoid strife. Void shugenja are even incentivized to keep blank results. Having said that? I still prefer R&K to Shadowrun's version of the dice pool. That's personal preference, of course. Spookyelectric fucked around with this message at 01:35 on Jul 15, 2021 |
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Jul 15, 2021 01:31
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Spookyelectric posted:Another thing about R&K is that it claims to offer the player more choice than typical dice pool systems ("Look, you can choose which dice to keep! You have some degree of control over your results!"). That should, in theory, offer more narrative possibilities. But that's not how it works out in practice, because 95% of the time, players are going to keep the highest dice. There are very few instances where players are incentivized to keep anything but the highest dice (and for voluntary failure, which is a thing, one might ask why we're rolling the dice at all). So while theoretically having the option of choosing whatever dice you want might suggest more narrative possibilities, in practice it's still just a binary pass-fail system, with little reason to treat it otherwise. If you want a kind of hybrid between the two, you can look at Double Cross, which is also a fantastic game.
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Jul 15, 2021 12:13
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NinjaDebugger posted:If you want a kind of hybrid between the two, you can look at Double Cross, which is also a fantastic game. Be warned it is almost the ugliest game I have ever looked at. Seems pretty interesting as long as you are hip deep in Anime bullshit, as many of my fellow l5r players tend to be, but good luck.
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Jul 15, 2021 12:50
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Thanks for everyone's input, I even looked into Double Cross as reference though the community zeitgeist seems to be less positive on that than L5R.
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Jul 16, 2021 05:36
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SweetBro posted:Thanks for everyone's input, I even looked into Double Cross as reference though the community zeitgeist seems to be less positive on that than L5R. Oh, then I'd like to register a counter voice. Double Cross is a fantastic game, and one of the few that has clearly done the math behind its systems. It is poorly presented, but once you get past that it's great. Its solid technical underpinnings also make it well suited to refluffing to other settings and themes (I ran a fun Persona reflavor of Double Cross for a time)
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Jul 16, 2021 05:40
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SweetBro posted:Thanks for everyone's input, I even looked into Double Cross as reference though the community zeitgeist seems to be less positive on that than L5R. Double Cross is sick. You get a bunch of cool powers, you can combine those powers endlessly as long as you're willing to throw your humanity away, and then if you've slammed your face on the super bar too much, you become a hideous beast unless you've made roleplaying connections with the NPCs. It's cheap, but it works: people who nap through talky scenes instead have gossipy arguments over seating arrangements. Then they use their <<Keystone Formation>>+<<Tranquility>>+<<Earth Fang>> an extra time when they're fighting their hot, evil anime boyfriend. Bribe the players to roleplay all day!
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Jul 16, 2021 06:09
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SweetBro posted:Thanks for everyone's input, I even looked into Double Cross as reference though the community zeitgeist seems to be less positive on that than L5R. It is? A lot of folks around here have talked that game up and they're right.
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Jul 16, 2021 12:45
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Lord_Hambrose posted:Be warned it is almost the ugliest game I have ever looked at. Seems pretty interesting as long as you are hip deep in Anime bullshit, as many of my fellow l5r players tend to be, but good luck. I gotta be honest, when described as "almost the ugliest game I have ever looked at," I assumed it would have hilariously amateurish anime strewn about all willy nilly. And while the DriveThruRPG preview shows some not-great-art manga panels, it does not look as bad as I expected. Not even damning with faint praise, because it just looks like a bog standard anime-themed RPG to me. Could do a lot worse  What makes the dice system so good, though?
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Jul 16, 2021 15:50
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Dick Burglar posted:I gotta be honest, when described as "almost the ugliest game I have ever looked at," I assumed it would have hilariously amateurish anime strewn about all willy nilly. And while the DriveThruRPG preview shows some not-great-art manga panels, it does not look as bad as I expected. Not even damning with faint praise, because it just looks like a bog standard anime-themed RPG to me. Could do a lot worse The dice system isn't anything special, just a typical roll+bonus vs difficulty. What it's good at is the technical writing. All of the powers and mechanics interact in a concrete, laid out way and do exactly what they say. There's a clear distinction between the fluff description of the power and the mechanics of it.
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Jul 16, 2021 16:08
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Dick Burglar posted:I gotta be honest, when described as "almost the ugliest game I have ever looked at," I assumed it would have hilariously amateurish anime strewn about all willy nilly. And while the DriveThruRPG preview shows some not-great-art manga panels, it does not look as bad as I expected. Not even damning with faint praise, because it just looks like a bog standard anime-themed RPG to me. Could do a lot worse The actual art is fine, it is really everything else that makes it so unpleasant.
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Jul 16, 2021 16:23
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Dick Burglar posted:I gotta be honest, when described as "almost the ugliest game I have ever looked at," I assumed it would have hilariously amateurish anime strewn about all willy nilly. And while the DriveThruRPG preview shows some not-great-art manga panels, it does not look as bad as I expected.  Pages and pages and pages of powers formatted exactly like this. It looks more like a technical document, and the designer optimized for clarity and accuracy of power reference and interaction at the table, not for reading spell descriptions while lounging in the bathtub imagining how fun it will be to play. It is honestly an ugly book.
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Jul 16, 2021 17:03
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Fair enough.
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Jul 16, 2021 17:46
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That's about how most Japanese TRPGs look honestly
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Jul 16, 2021 19:28
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Mystic Mongol posted:
Yeah, DX was the game that really made me understand the technical and user experience aspects of art in game books; it both breaks up the text to make it less visually unpleasant/exhausting, and as an aid in memory and reference (OK, I remember the flame powers section was right around that picture of the lady puking up a comet...). It is also a very crunchy game, way out of my rules-light storygame comfort zone. I think the game rules but GMing one of the adventures in the back nearly defeated me and I can barely imagine making a character from scratch. Obviously mileage will vary but if Exalted and Shadowrun levels of complexity are not your idea of a good time maybe this ain't the game for you. Then again people still joyfully play D&D 3.x and its variants/descendants so maybe this is more a me problem. Kaza42 posted:The dice system isn't anything special, just a typical roll+bonus vs difficulty. What it's good at is the technical writing. All of the powers and mechanics interact in a concrete, laid out way and do exactly what they say. There's a clear distinction between the fluff description of the power and the mechanics of it. Also true, but there is a fair bit of errata around, and I'm not sure how to tell the difference between errataed and un-errataed printings, nor how to find said errata separately now that the G+ group hosting them is long dead and I think the translator/publisher isn't in the biz any more. But again, maybe this is just me being old-fashioned and hopefully the drivethrurpg version has all that stuff integrated. Blockhouse posted:That's about how most Japanese TRPGs look honestly Perhaps I've just been spoiled by Ryuutama and Golden Sky Stories, but even, say, Shinobigami isn't a 400 page brick like good ol' DX.
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Jul 17, 2021 05:45
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Just had the last battle of my second completed campaign ever last night. 25 years of GMing and this is the second time I've brought a campaign to a full and complete end. At the start of the campaign, all the PCs knew was that the Iwane Dynasty was cursed to have only one child of each generation survive. Later, they discovered that it wasn't actually a curse, it was a vendetta, Ikoma Iwane having thoroughly pissed off Isawa Akei, who became Dark Oracle of Air, by thwarting her plans and forcing her to take up the mantle of Dark Oracle early, at which point she swore to hunt his line forever. The previous campaign's PCs should probably not have made him emperor after the second day of thunder. Many things happened along the way, including the Crab wiping out one of their own provinces, the PCs stealing all the free jinn from the burning sands and bringing them into Rokugan, the PCs successfully convincing the empire to preemptively invade the Caliphate since the Caliphate was definitely going to invade on account of stealing all the jinn, and other, less well known adventures. And then eventually, they discovered that one of the players, the one playing the magistrate to whom the rest of the PCs were yoriki, was actually the third legitimate child of Empress Iwane III. They found this out when the Mantis tried to bribe all of them into becoming part of the Mantis when they seceded. They proceeded to find a way out of this conundrum that I absolutely did not expect, used it to lure the Dark Oracle of Air into showing up unprepared at a time and place of their choosing, and ambushed her, eventually killing her by detonating an explosive that killed not just Isawa Akei, but also the concept of the Dark Oracle of Air, forever. It only cost the party two legs, a hand, some permanent nerve damage, and a PC and a horse coming within 1 round of death.
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Jul 28, 2021 13:47
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God bless high explosives. Also, that campaign sounds like a riot. Well done.
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Jul 28, 2021 16:11
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Looking for suggestions for a good Giri/Ninjo combo for a Hida Bushi. We're trying to get the player on board with actual roleplaying rather than just turning up to roll to hit things, and they actually suggested out of left field the Giri of "track down their Lord's son who has gone missing." But for the ninjo they went for "To find the best Tetsubo in all of Rokugan" and I feel that's the munchkin side of them trying to come out, like they think there's a Tetsubo +5 out there on a plinth somewhere. Any ideas for something that might conflict/compete with that giri? I'm trying to get everyone into the mindset of picking a ninjo/giri that competes/conflicts/creates drama in some way. Not necessarily just "be the best in all of Rokugan."
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Jul 31, 2021 12:15
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Yoshimo posted:Looking for suggestions for a good Giri/Ninjo combo for a Hida Bushi. We're trying to get the player on board with actual roleplaying rather than just turning up to roll to hit things, and they actually suggested out of left field the Giri of "track down their Lord's son who has gone missing." But for the ninjo they went for "To find the best Tetsubo in all of Rokugan" and I feel that's the munchkin side of them trying to come out, like they think there's a Tetsubo +5 out there on a plinth somewhere. Any ideas for something that might conflict/compete with that giri? I'm trying to get everyone into the mindset of picking a ninjo/giri that competes/conflicts/creates drama in some way. Not necessarily just "be the best in all of Rokugan." I mean... "Recover Hida's tetsubo, lost in the shadowlands when he went after his son." is a hell of a character goal,and would conflict unless the kid ran off into the shadowlands.
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Jul 31, 2021 12:48
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The first thing that comes to mind is "help the lord's son find a life he actually wants to live" which may or may not be why he disappeared, or why finding him might not be what the samurai actually wants to do.
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Jul 31, 2021 13:26
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Fields of Victory is now available in PDF.
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Aug 28, 2021 00:31
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Newly announced, a 5e D&D-based adaptation of L5R: https://gencon.asmodee.com/#g-adventures-in-rokugan
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Sep 15, 2021 08:34
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Are you loving kidding me.
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Sep 15, 2021 09:16
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It took about two hours for them to realize they had shot themselves in the dick and get someone on the l5r discord to say that no, they're not switching to 5e d&d, and that the actually good rules will continue to flow.
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Sep 15, 2021 12:29
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On one hand, D&D is a loving juggernaut and learning new RPG systems is an absolutely massive barrier to most new players, so it makes some amount of sense to try to port over the game to get some purchase (quite literally) from RPG fans who aren't ready to dive into a whole new rules system. On the other hand, 3.x of all stripes--including 5E--is hot loving garbage, so I can't imagine it'll actually be very fun. Likely gonna see shuggies turning the world upside down multiple times a day while courtiers and bushi struggle to make athletics checks to jump over a table. As long as the SRD poo poo doesn't reduce the quality of or delay the other books, I don't care. The problem is that it likely will reduce the quality and/or delay the other books, soooo Dick Burglar fucked around with this message at 13:40 on Sep 15, 2021 |
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Sep 15, 2021 13:35
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I'm not someone who loves to roll dice but I'm never going back to a straight roll a d20 to figure out the binary outcome of an action again. FFG gets a lot of flack for not adhering to the numbered dice system but that's just so archaic to me at this point. The FFG dice system, with dice for environmental effects, triggered abilities, banked lucked, and a much more meaningful yet simplified system of success/failure is something I'm not willing to part with anymore.
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Sep 15, 2021 13:47
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Lol we're doing this again, this is hilarious.
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Sep 15, 2021 16:07
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MonsieurChoc posted:Lol we're doing this again, this is hilarious. And it worked so well last time, what with it being considered the worst run of books in the history of the RPG and literally no one I've ever heard of having gotten drawn into L5R through them.
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Sep 15, 2021 17:53
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EverettLO posted:And it worked so well last time, what with it being considered the worst run of books in the history of the RPG and literally no one I've ever heard of having gotten drawn into L5R through them. You're gonna laugh, but I know of two.
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Sep 15, 2021 17:55
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Frankly my group bounced super hard off the exploding dice mechanic so a 5e port might be enough to get them to give it another try.
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Sep 15, 2021 20:19
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Epi Lepi posted:Frankly my group bounced super hard off the exploding dice mechanic so a 5e port might be enough to get them to give it another try. 
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Sep 15, 2021 20:28
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The guy who runs our usual campaigns said he might go back to L5R 4e instead of FFGe because he thinks the rules are badly written compared to 4e. I'm too sleep deprived to offer a rebuttal, but I am disappointed by default.
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Sep 16, 2021 05:01
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4e is badly written compared to a storygame system where a mute courtier isn't completely hosed over by that disadvantage and Momoku is also viable. You either play the optimised builds or fall behind because you aren't in 4e in my experience.
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Sep 16, 2021 07:10
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