Legend of the Five Rings: Coming soon: L5R The Flamethrower!

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Traditional Games > Legend of the Five Rings: Coming soon: L5R The Flamethrower!

Epi Lepi: Oct 29, 2009; You can hear the voice
Telling you to Love
It's the voice of MK Ultra
And you're doing what it wants

NinjaDebugger posted:

I am home from gencon, and a friend happened to pass by the FFG booth while they still had beginner boxes, so if you have any questions, feel free to ask.

I have questions about how this game works in practice, but I'm not sure how to ask them. I guess what are your impressions reading through the adventure? How easy does is it to learn how to play based on the challenges in it?

# ¿ Aug 6, 2018 21:42

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# ¿ May 16, 2024 03:41

Epi Lepi: Oct 29, 2009; You can hear the voice
Telling you to Love
It's the voice of MK Ultra
And you're doing what it wants

Has anyone run the beginner game for the RPG? I want to run it this weekend and just finished reading through it. It seems like the GM has to do a lot of work narrating everything in a way the PCs can engage with. Does anyone have any tips or advice?

# ¿ Sep 8, 2018 03:35

Epi Lepi: Oct 29, 2009; You can hear the voice
Telling you to Love
It's the voice of MK Ultra
And you're doing what it wants

SuperKlaus posted:

Have you played a role-playing game before? No disrespect, just asking what your experience level with common concepts is. You're right that the GM often has to bear a hell of a lot of weight. A "co-GM" to help out is often a pretty good idea, especially once your group reaches six people. It's much more pleasant to be one of two show-runners working to engage four PCs than to be on your own against five.

I do not have the beginner game box but I've GMd my fair share of L5R, including the past iterations of the Tournament of the Topaz Champion. I will offer any advice I can once I get a feel for what you'd like to know most.

edit: actually I feel like the first and most important thing is what kind of tone you want. Are you going to take the setting very seriously in the hopes of epic samurai drama? Or are you going to accept PCs named after Pokemon who spend all their time running around to Benny Hill music and pulling their kimono collars because they "don't get no respect?" Anything is fine but it helps to know your goals and be on the same page with all of your PCs.

Speaking of the RPG I just saw FFG's new preview article and I'm astonished at the new stuff in the spell descriptions. Alternate names for spells from other styles of making magic? New keywords? Bunch of changed stuff in there, it seems. I don't oppose change, as someone who ranted endlessly at the devs about magic imbalance issues during the beta, but I'm kind of miffed that none of this poo poo was ever run by testers. Experience with RPGs suggests that we're in for some brand new, retooled totally unbalanced nonsense.

I've been playing RPGs for like 15 years, mostly D&D some FFG Star Wars. I've ran a Star Wars campaign that lasted a while and spent the last couple months running Curse of Strahd in 5e. I've never run LFR before and hoped the beginner game would be a good introduction to the mechanics and setting of the game.

I ran it on Sunday and to be honest we didn't particularly enjoy it. The Role and Keep with exploding dice felt really swingy, my girlfriend playing the Phoenix Shugenja ended up failing every contest that her character should have been good at and my friend playing the Unicorn ended up not only succeeding at most of the contests but beating the frontrunner. Another friend played the Scorpion which for some reason had 4 composure, causing him to need to unmask every other roll. Unmasking is still confusing by the way. I'm not clear when a player can unmask and if there are any mechanical negatives to it, otherwise, why does it matter? Can a player keep more dice with strife than their remaining composure or does it cap right then and there? Can they then immediately unmask and be good for the next turn?

The contests were eh, it was pretty much me reading the paragraph describing the event and then each of the PCs rolling in turn and that was it. The NPCs were all very barebones and while there were a few opportunities for the players to role play with them, I didn't have enough info about them or know enough info about the setting to really engage.

Pretty much I was hoping the beginner kit would be more like the Edge of the Empire beginner kit which was both a good introduction to the mechanics and a fun adventure that was easy to just jump right in with. This kit could be good with more effort put forth by the GM but if that's what I wanted to do I'd make my own campaign.

My players and I are still intrigued by the setting, though some more than others, but our jury is still out about this system mechanically. I'm considering trying one of the prior editions if we ever decide to give this game another go.

# ¿ Sep 11, 2018 20:07

Epi Lepi: Oct 29, 2009; You can hear the voice
Telling you to Love
It's the voice of MK Ultra
And you're doing what it wants

SuperKlaus posted:

Ah then I am very sorrowful I did not reply to you sooner. I find the 3e version of Topaz Champion a very handy thing, even if you don't want its timeline or mechanical underpinnings. This is because it has a large number of micro-hooks in its sidebars that are amazing for keeping PCs engaged and triggering role-play fun times. The 1e version has a few as well. I'd have recommended you use those as resources but I am too late. It really piqued my player's interest to have each of them assigned a personal scene based on one of the micro-hooks at the end of each tournament day, especially because you're kind of right that if players are reserved and unfamiliar with the setting they really need prompts or the actual tournament events are very uninspired roll-offs.

You may nonetheless wish to dig up the earlier Topaz Championships and some other modules from past editions for their sidebar micro-adventures. Examples: a gambler approaches the frontrunner duelist and asks him to throw a match. Another samurai has a food-eating contest with a PC at a peasant's hut and ends up vomiting disgracefully. A group of fellow Clan members approaches a PC and asks him to bait a guy who's been disrespectful into an alley for a beating. An uptight Lion leaves a family heirloom at an important man's house and shenanigans are the only way to get it back (also he was bawling like a baby in the woods about it). Many of the hooks are reasonably adaptable to settings outside of the Championship and could get your players interacting with NPCs and the setting. All four that I listed, for example, pose simple but fun questions of face, glory, and honor against personal relationships. Like the easy honorable answer to the gambler is to tell him to piss off, but besides the bundle of koku he's offering for a throw, he might pivot after a refusal and offer the PC a leg up through info on his opponent for no charge - is that too much for the PC's honor and pride (two concepts rarely unified in their needs)? And in the end he might make a friend or enemy of the gambler for future sessions.

I don't mean to tell you basic "how to GM" stuff by that as you have plenty of experience. I just mean to show how older modules could be a source of useful material for you. I hope you don't give up on the setting. It is possible (tragically, likely) the 5e Topaz Championship module is just poorly written. As for the mechanics, I think 1e, 3e, and 4e are all more or less fine but more complicated than the new one, and I'm not sure you're going to see any solution to the feeling of swingy-ness.

Again with the disclaimer I don't have the beginner box and am basing this on the beta test rules:

Unmasking's mechanical penalty is that you can't keep dice with strife if the strife would make you exceed composure. Therefore if you refuse to unmask and vent the strife, waiting instead for strife healing from other mechanics, you're going to suffer a success rate penalty. You can vent it out immediately, at your whim, and be immediately reset to zero, yes.

The idea is that when you vent it you immediately do something suboptimal. You don't have to go berserk in combat or scream obscenity at your debate opponent - they specifically ditched the old name "outburst" because beta players took that as a mandate - but you have to deviate in some way from what is the best, wisest course of action. So it can be chill like "this combat round I back away and defend instead of giving the shugenja the cover he needs to cast" or "I get too glib and drop a rude burn about the other guy's sickly daughter" as long as it gets the player to stop being a perfectly logical battle-and-honor robot. Outbursts are therefore supposed to spur role-play and deeper understanding of characters.

If your Scorpion feels he is unmasking too often be sure you are all aware of the non-unmask ways to shed strife. You get strife healing after every encounter and can heal strife with opportunity results in...ah...I think Water stance.

I feel like we may have had the order of operations wrong with unmasking. Also, I'm not sure if you can take more strife than your composure at once. The Scorpion character has 4 composure. He was rolling I think 5 dice for each of his attacks in battle so it wasn't uncommon for him to keep 4 strife on dice for a single attack. Can he keep dice with 5 strife total from one roll? Does he then immediately unmask and be able to make his next attack at TN1? Since there doesn't seem to be a mechanical penalty for unmasking(I'd expect a loss of honor but unless I missed it it doesn't seem like that's the case) it doesn't seem like there's a big penalty to unmasking so why not do it?

What kind of systems are the other editions? I assume they don't have custom dice, are they d20 system? d%?

# ¿ Sep 18, 2018 20:01

Epi Lepi: Oct 29, 2009; You can hear the voice
Telling you to Love
It's the voice of MK Ultra
And you're doing what it wants

Mystic Mongol posted:

So I've got the RPG, and it looks like a lot of fun. Is there a decent dice roller for online play? Rerolling certain dice after deciding what to keep certainly complicates things.

They have an official dice app you can download. Costs money but I don't know how much off the top of my head.

# ¿ Oct 12, 2018 17:49

Epi Lepi: Oct 29, 2009; You can hear the voice
Telling you to Love
It's the voice of MK Ultra
And you're doing what it wants

Are there any in depth videos out with either actual play or just really thorough explanations of how the RPG plays? I posted about trying the beginner game with my friends and being really unhappy with how it went. I�m still unsure if the adventure(or premade characters) were poorly written or if we just didn�t understand the rules well enough or if this game just isn�t for us. I�m reluctant to buy anything else until I have a better understanding of the game.

# ¿ Nov 10, 2018 18:19

Epi Lepi: Oct 29, 2009; You can hear the voice
Telling you to Love
It's the voice of MK Ultra
And you're doing what it wants

Is there a mechanical penalty for unmasking like losing glory or honor or something? A reason to not want to unmask if you/your GM can�t think of a way to narrate why it�s bad you did it? Or does the game just not work that way?

# ¿ Jun 1, 2019 06:02

Epi Lepi: Oct 29, 2009; You can hear the voice
Telling you to Love
It's the voice of MK Ultra
And you're doing what it wants

Traveller posted:

So I hear there's been big layoffs at FFG, their RPG department was gutted and Fantasy Flight Interactive is just gone.

Oh no, I knew about FFI getting shut down but I didn't know their RPG department was gutted. Where did you see that?

# ¿ Jan 9, 2020 16:58

Epi Lepi: Oct 29, 2009; You can hear the voice
Telling you to Love
It's the voice of MK Ultra
And you're doing what it wants

I didn't quite click with this system but I really wanted to. Now to decide whether to buy some of the books just in case I ever do click or not.

At least the books are pretty, probably worth half the price for the art and lore alone.

# ¿ Feb 18, 2020 20:30

Epi Lepi: Oct 29, 2009; You can hear the voice
Telling you to Love
It's the voice of MK Ultra
And you're doing what it wants

My parties biggest problem with the beginner box was the exploding dice make it so swingy that the PC that was supposed to be good at a specific thing was thoroughly outclassed by another PC at that thing despite it being the second PC's "weakness."

I don't know how much of that is the premade characters being weirdly made or if that's just a factor of the system.

I love samurai stuff so I wanted to like L5R, but the system didn't jive with my group and since half of them do not love samurai stuff as much as me I couldn't get much buy in to go past the beginner box without the system being more fun to play.

# ¿ Aug 22, 2020 22:39

Epi Lepi: Oct 29, 2009; You can hear the voice
Telling you to Love
It's the voice of MK Ultra
And you're doing what it wants

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.

# ¿ Sep 15, 2021 20:19

Epi Lepi: Oct 29, 2009; You can hear the voice
Telling you to Love
It's the voice of MK Ultra
And you're doing what it wants

HidaO-Win posted:

Dyed in the wool L5R first gen fanatic and original 5E D&D hater here. Have some to all of every other edition of L5R including Rokugan d20.

I will not get it.

Basically my decision doesn�t make a difference but the 5E D&Ding of every IP is a bad trend that is going to siphon money away from original RPG content in favour of 5E D&D tie ins.

If 95% of the market is 5E D&D, then every big publisher will pivot that way and other game lines will get increasingly attenuated support just because there is a better margin in a 5E product.

You�ll still get content, but there will be less art, less support, less tools available and the other games become harder to run with less releases. Then eventually glut and collapse again likely.

One product being an effective monopoly is always terrible for the consumer.

Yes but on the other hand, the current Lot5R system is garbage.

# ¿ Jul 24, 2022 16:10

Epi Lepi: Oct 29, 2009; You can hear the voice
Telling you to Love
It's the voice of MK Ultra
And you're doing what it wants

I don't have buy-in from my group for the setting unfortunately so I'm mostly just curious what stuff they do I can backport into our DND 5e games if/when we go back.

# ¿ Jul 24, 2022 16:33

Epi Lepi: Oct 29, 2009; You can hear the voice
Telling you to Love
It's the voice of MK Ultra
And you're doing what it wants

I don't like the exploding dice mechanic, when my group tried it out players who invested in a stat kept failing checks while those who didn't got lucky and exploded into success. We only did two sessions and it happened constantly, really turned us off.

# ¿ Jul 24, 2022 23:10

Epi Lepi: Oct 29, 2009; You can hear the voice
Telling you to Love
It's the voice of MK Ultra
And you're doing what it wants

Capfalcon posted:

I mean, hasn't every version had dice explosions?

I've never played any of the other versions. The setting seems really cool and I wanted to like this edition because I like other FFG games but our experience wasn't great and half of my group are not as into samurai poo poo as the other half so it didn't click.

# ¿ Jul 25, 2022 04:05

Epi Lepi: Oct 29, 2009; You can hear the voice
Telling you to Love
It's the voice of MK Ultra
And you're doing what it wants

NinjaDebugger posted:

If players invested in something are regularly failing checks you're setting difficulties too high, regardless of edition.

Played the beginner box so I didn�t set anything.

# ¿ Jul 25, 2022 15:18

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# ¿ May 16, 2024 03:41

Epi Lepi: Oct 29, 2009; You can hear the voice
Telling you to Love
It's the voice of MK Ultra
And you're doing what it wants

MMAgCh posted:

Is that the Topaz Championship one? It looks like virtually none of the TNs in that adventure are higher than 2, so if people with decent skill/ring values for the checks in question still failed them consistently, they either had very bad luck or were somehow getting their rolls wrong, I'd think.

You misunderstand. The issue was that because of exploding dice we had multiple instances where characters who did not specialize in "thing" performed better at that challenge in the Championship, than the characters that did. Maybe we had an outlier day but it happened enough that no one felt like their character build mattered in the slightest.

# ¿ Jul 25, 2022 19:24

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