Legend of the Five Rings

So, I'm thinking of doing an L 5 R game.

The plot is currently unknown but I want them to be either ronin or samurai on a warrior's pilgrimage.

But I'm at a loss as to which one I should pick.

My group has taken an interest in this game. We heard about it briefly from one of our occasional members, but what pushed us over the edge was Spoony One's duelist story. We know the duel was illegal in several different ways, but it got us thinking on the subject and how fun it could be.

The downside is we know jack-all about the system. Other than Cranes being duelists, of course.

Well, the one guy has some knowledge but he's not around much.

edited 27th Jan '15 7:59:30 AM by Zeromaeus

Currently playing in an L 5 R Court game that's basically a hybrid of 3e and 4e with some House Rules for social conflict. We are playing with the metaplot, although the GM generally doesn't (since we were also all starting to pick up the card game, he figured it'd be a good introduction to it).

I seriously cannot overstate how much I love playing this game. Part of it is that the roll and keep math works really well—it has nice bell curve of probability. Part of it is the setting—not because it's a eastern fantasy setting, but because it's a setting with society. After playing in a lot of Dn D and even sometimes Exalted, where there isn't really a society to keep people from being...well, murder hobos, it's nice to play in a setting where there is an honest to goodness social contract in the world.

To be honest a lot of it is probably my GM. He has done a really good job giving the game Grey-and-Grey Morality, and making every character, even the villains, feel like people. Which is a good thing for me because I'm playing an All-Loving Hero Doji Courtier.

There are certainly some problems with the system. It's SUPER Lethal, which really isn't my cup of tea. My GM flat out banned Bushi second attacks—having everyone take an alternate path at the rank where they'd get their second attack, because it just makes the game TOO lethal—you shouldn't be able to kill the Mighty Glacier in one round. Since we're not really playing in a game where Anyone Can Die, despite the game's actual rules being made for that, it can be really hard to tune damage just right to not kill our Kakita Bushi (who up until last session had 2 Earth).

It is indeed one of the more lethal games out there. Everything can kill you from peasants with rocks and sticks to the mightiest of monsters.

A simple way to reduce lethality is boost life points artificially and/or remove the wounds system so it is a lot harder to make someone dead quickly.

We didn't want to increase hit points because we liked how quick the fights went. We thought of just increasing the "out" wound rank, but in the end the house rule we ended up using was that player characters who are "killed" can take a disadvantage representing some sort of semi-permanent injury instead of being Killed Off for Real. In general, this would only apply to skirmish combat, not lethal duels, as lethal duels, by definition have to end in death (and there's a lot of narrative time to help PC s avoid lethal duels). It hasn't come up yet (due to INCREDIBLY careful fight tuning), but it might be necessary later. We also don't have Mooks, like the random bandits the party Bushi fought to show them the combat system, explode dice on damage.

edited 16th Mar '15 8:37:42 PM by VerityCandle

I like that wounding mechanic actually. Reminds me of one of the rule variations in Weird Wars. Another potentially lethal setting.

In my one 4e game that I've played so far, ironically, a lethal duel did not end in death. We got a kharmic strike that left our PC Out and his opponent Down. As both survived, the issue was dropped and both the villain and our magistrates got off without dishonor.

(apparently I return only annually from my lurking to post things)

So I was reading the Deliberate Values Dissonance entry for L 5 R on the wiki, and thinking about how my group played with that...

The whole non-people thing with peasants and eta got commented on derisively by my friend's Sparrow Clan courtier a lot, and my Doji Courtier was super Nice to the Waiter (she did things like smuggle food from the samurai's dinner to her personal attendants, and would purposely pay merchants in koku for things that cost way less than a koku (but Doji courtiers start with 15, and can favor table for more, so...)). She also believed that peasants (and eta) were no less important than samurai, they simply had a different duty, and their service was vital to the continuation of Rokugan.

As for the values dissonance surrounding Shourido... we were playing in the time period post-destroyer war where the Spider were a Great Clan (we were actually playing close to concurrently with the card game storyline until the card game died). So there were openly Shourido practicing Spider in our court. And they were AWESOME. I mean they were still "dark," but they were very human, and principled (even if those principles were different).

One of the Spider in court was a Bad Ass Spider Monk named Dojan, who basically all the players agreed was the best character in court. He was a brutal fighter (who's damage rolls averaged around 60-80, leading to the term "Dojan Damage" being coined), but he was disciplined and wise, and was only that brutal to people who were bad (he did eviscerate a Yoritomo with his own Storm Kama, but that Yoritomo was a bandit who was bullying peasants, and attacked the party first). He had the Paragon of Shourido: Strength advantage (we were playing a hybrid of 3rd and 4th edition), but he believed that strength was not found in picking on the weak, but in mastering yourself.

Another of the Spider in court was...secretly a maho-tsukai with a pet Kansen (Dark Whisper Courtier). Which sounds really bad. But she was actually really self-sacrificing and tragic. She only used Maho to protect her Clan, and knew that her soul was damned to Jigoku, but believed that was the price she had to pay. She and my character ended up striking up an Odd Friendship, with her being the dark feminine to my character's light feminine.

The other Spider in court were also interesting. The Susumu Courtier was consistently hostile towards Bushido, but she basically just pointed out all of the Deliberate Values Dissonance, and respected people who could actually stand up to her and make a good point about its value. The top Spider in court was a Spider Duelist who could be very intimidating, but also helped out other characters and was very respectful and perceptive and really cared about protecting his people.

Even though I was playing a high honor character, I ended up friends with pretty much all of the Spider in court (it helps that my character was an All-Loving Hero, but...). Also note that my GM wasn't really trying to "sell" the Spider clan, just make them people instead of obviously evil villains who would basically just get killed.

edited 17th Jan '17 8:29:26 PM by VerityCandle

It sounds like most of your group were Spider Clan.

The problem I have with the Spider Clan is that it's frankly unbelievable that an Empire that has been at war for over 1000 years with the Shadowlands would suddenly accept them as a valid great clan, no matter what their silly Gary Stu clan head did. The Crab, at least, would fight to the last samurai to avoid accepting such a thing, and the Lion at least would probably stand with them.

I just don't buy it, so our games haven't included them. We've either set our games earlier or just plain ignored those parts of the background when playing a contemporary game.

In any case, I think you can do the same general things without them. You can have characters using maho to save their clans, knowing their souls are doomed to Jigoku, without them belonging to the Spider clan, and they then have the added tragedy that if anyone found out they were using maho their own clan would disown them as traitors just as readily as anyone else.

Actually, the Spider were all NP Cs (we were playing a court game with 60+ NP Cs, who were pretty much all as developed). The P Cs were two Cranes (my friend and myself), a Scorpion who was trained by the Crab, and a Kitsune Family Mantis.

I get that, especially to old school players, it does seem a little unbelievable that the Spider became a great clan, but we were just using the stuff that was canon in the CCG since we were trying to get some of our group into the CCG at the same time, so we figured going along with the storyline would make playing the CCG more fun and easier to explain.

My GM also thought that making them Obviously Evil and still accepted in court would be a little unbelievable, hence why he made them more grey.

Edit: Also: a lot of the other great clans in our game didn't really accept them. There was a whole plot about people (instigated mainly by the Crab, Scorpion, and Lion) trying to search their quarters to find any kind of contraband that could be used as an excuse to execute them.

Edit again: I, personally, don't find it too unbelievable, but I didn't start playing until Ivory Edition, so I think that might just be edition bias on my part. I figure if at least half the Lion are willing to accept Fu Leng as emperor and the Crab are sometimes just chill with their Champion summoning up a bunch of oni, if the Empress said "these people, who did just save you from an empire destroying war, are going to be a great clan. Oh, and because of that, the taint won't spread." the Crab might just go along with it just for the (what they would see as momentary) reprieve from the Taint (while being completely ready for when they were betrayed), and the Lion (who did have a mass protest seppuku in canon) might go along with it because it's what the Empress (who was divine) said. In story, according to some later Onyx Edition stories, the Empress decided to go along with it because of some prophecy/divine insight she had about it (and, I figure, because the taint not spreading to people who weren't willing was a pretty hard offer to pass up).

edited 20th Jan '17 8:10:03 AM by VerityCandle

The thing is, there was already an Obviously Evil clan at court - that was the Scorpion Clan's whole shtick. Who really believes that the Taint will henceforth be restricted "only to those who want it?" From a certain point of view, that was how it worked before too.

Yeah, I'm a grognard. I started playing L5R with the first edition RPG and the CCG just about when Scorpion Clan Coup was coming out. I stopped collecting the CCG near the end of Gold Edition, but I've stuck with the RPG. Given the number of times we've played it through the years, I would have to say it's one of my group's favorites. I've been a player in at least four long campaigns, and run at least three myself that lasted half a year or more.

The last one I ran a bunch of 1st edition modules, set in the 1st Edition pre-Scorpion Clan Coup timeperiod which ended with the players going through Tomb of Iuchiban, all with 4th edition rules. Player mortality in that campaign was about 300%, though the ex-Daidoji ronin managed to survive the whole campaign.

I don't think we've ever followed canon exactly. Some of the CCG metaplot just doesn't really work in the RPG, in our opinion, and it got sillier as time went by. The Second City set is just cool enough that we may use it in a future campaign, and that will require us to make a decision about whether or not to include the Spider, but no one has run it yet.

Edit: Half the Lion being willing to accept the possessed emperor as legitimate was an understandable Honor thing. The Lion were simply that driven by honor and tradition, and most of them didn't really understand that it was really Fu Leng. Oh, and the primary leader of the opposition was a disgraced Lion who Matsu Tsuko had hated since long before he had become a ronin.

The Crab really weren't okay with their daimyo making a deal with the Shadowlands - the whole plan was to pretend to work with the Shadowlands until emperor Hida Kisada-sama could then turn the combined might of the clans against the Shadowlands and destroy them forever.

edited 20th Jan '17 10:51:02 AM by Bense

I sort of figured the Scorpion's shtick was "obviously dishonorable but necessary" like Garak from Star Trek Deep Space Nine. Plus, none of the Scorpion in our court were all that evil, actually (well, maybe one, but he was so focused on protecting his lord he didn't actually have time do any harm). Sure, they probably would have liked to play the whole sneaky bastard thing up, but underneath it they were just people too. Actually, the Scorpion/Crab PC was probably one of the more benevolent player characters—he helped pretty much everyone (and for rather selfless reasons), though he did it by somewhat dishonorable, or at least impolite, means (generally intimidation, though some "training by ambush").

I figured most people who were in the know believed the taint not spreading except for voluntarily thing was temporary at best, but (especially for the Crab) an opportunity (to fight shadowlands even harder without worrying that their best people would get tainted just for being there—since before you could get the taint just for being in the shadowlands for too long—and to hoard jade for when it eventually went wrong). And in the game we did run, the Crab were pretty much looking for any reason they could get to kill whatever spider they could. (I didn't know the details of how okay/not okay most of the Crab were about Kisada summoning Oni, just that his army was supported by Crab forces who didn't act to overthrow him).

I think probably the metaplot looks less silly to me since I started when it was already canon and so didn't really contradict anything I had already been playing with. The setting changes, retcons, and contradictions could be something that would be bothersome if you've been playing since 1st edition, but the L 5 R game I played was my first.

Weirdly, my GM has been playing since 1st as well, both RPG and CCG (on and off as a Crane Honor player), and he didn't seem bothered by it (or if he did, just decided to roll with it anyway). He normally runs in a non-specific timeline (the last time he ran a full L 5 R campaign before this game, the Spider weren't really a thing for him to have to make a decision about whether to include or not), but since he was getting my play group into the CCG at the same time we all thought it would be kind of cool to play along with the storyline to get more invested in it (which worked, but lead to my endless concern and frustration when the story went on hiatus after FFG bought it).

Even though this campaign was my first L 5 R game, it really made me fall in love with the game and the setting. One of the things I really like is that a lot of the conflicts in the game are just between people with different viewpoints. I mean, yeah I suppose it has its share of arch-villains, but even a lot of them were once sympathetic characters who just made really bad decisions. While I like playing genuinely heroic characters, I still prefer my conflicts to have a little grey in them, since (as the person who plays The Face a lot of the time) it gives me alternate ways of solving the conflict instead of just violence all the time.

The game we played was basically a winter court game (it was actually a minor court in the summer, rather than a full winter court). Most of the game was just the different clans trying to get their own goals within the court while dealing with a Yoritomo blockade of the major river, and trying to either get the blockade off the river or keep it there depending on what fit their clan's needs. There was also a lot of focus on the PC's character goals and relationships. Aside from the bushi tournament that we had, there was maybe ten combats the whole game (and it went two and a half years).

Most of the combats involved the fact that surrounding the area where we had the court, there was a bloodspeaker cell trying to reroute the spirit portals in Kitsune Mori to lead to Jigoku instead of Chikushudo. And they weren't nice people. But, while most of the P Cs never really took time to find this out most of them had been recruited due to some personal moment of failure that made them kind of tragic. No less fallen, no less dangerous, but tragic. My character ended up seeing them as victims of the taint, and she basically went from knowing next to nothing about the taint to seeing it, and maho, as a trap, and believing that it should be avoided at all costs (while still having a lot of sympathy for those who fell to it).

Actually, L5r is the first time in an RPG I've ever seen the Black Magic trope done in a way that didn't seem silly or arbitrary to me. Normally I've seen certain types of magic just defined as "bad" without much explanation, but in L 5 R, the ways in which the taint can harm you are explained in detail and systemized with game rules (namely giving a sentient realm that's literally made of corruption root access to your soul so that it can slowly but surely isolate and change who you are as a person). I kind of see the taint as a souped-up addiction metaphor—people try a little because they think it will make their life better but soon need more and more and until it begins to harm their relationships and sense of self and make them consider actions they'd never do before. As someone who works in the mental health/substance abuse field (in the accounting department, but still), it actually seems like a realistic and applicable use of Black Magic, rather than the Fantastic Aesop that it usually is ("harming people with magic is bad, kids, but harming people with swords is A-OK").

edited 20th Jan '17 12:05:00 PM by VerityCandle

Those early L5R books are some of the best RPG supplements out there. My favorite is probably City of Lies, which is an amazing campaign both in presentation and substance, but Bearers of Jade and The Way of Shadow are two of the scariest supplements I've read for an RPG.

Bearers of Jade is really the best illustration, IMO of how to do the Shadowlands. The whole tone of the supplement is very bleak and dark, and the hints at the darker true history of Rokugan are excellent (like the fate of Hida Atarasu and the origin of the Daidoji family). The most interesting thing is probably that it says that Fu Leng is himself a victim of the taint of Jigoku, although Moto Tsume's character is interesting too. He's basically trying to prove that anyone could fall to the taint, because he did.

Once you read this book you look on the Crab with new respect.

The Way of Shadow is pretty unique in basically saying "no, there's no way the players can actually defeat this enemy. Once they've met it they can only really hope that it will lose interest in them and not bother to corrupt them further. For now." And it's a scary enemy - it will unravel you completely, taking all of your memories and everything you were if given the slightest chance.

My GM actually had a copy of a lot of the 1st edition books so I got to read some of them and I have to agree with you. They are amazingly well written. I like the 3rd Edition Revised rules better (because I like my games a bit crunchier than 1st edition was), but I LOVE the writing style of the first edition books. I read Way of the Crane almost from cover to cover (since I was playing a Doji Courtier). I really like how all of those books were written from an in-universe perspective. I've read through parts of Bearers of Jade and it was definitely total Nightmare Fuel, but what I read was really interesting (in a somewhat terrifying way), and definitely does give you an appreciation for what the Crab go through every day.

While I love my 1st Edition books and consider their writing superior to the other editions, mechanically I like 4th edition best.

1st edition was just a bit too lethal. If you got hit once in combat you were pretty much done, because you would lose enough dice for your rolls that you could no longer hit anyone. Everything else about it was great.

2nd edition fixed the lethality, but made the characters a bit under-powered with it's variation of roll-and-keep. It took a long time to be competent at things.

The d20 version was too D&D. I like D&D (probably the second-most popular game with my group, with the various versions of Star Wars being third), but alignments, levels, and hit points didn't seem to fit L5R very well. If I'm playing D&D I want to play D&D, while if I'm playing L5R I want to play L5R. This is the only rules set that I've never actually used.

3rd edition made everyone much too powerful, with characters quickly outstripping the difficulty numbers given in the rules, and was a little too crunchy, perhaps. I had a mid-rank Lion samurai who could literally one-shot kill the most powerful oni. Guaranteed. On the GM side it was hard to build high-level NPCs and get all of their numbers correct. Also it had a lot of typos.

4th edition is nicely backwards-compatible with 1st edition and is neither too lethal nor too powerful. I like the presentation and the writing, and the fact that it's not bound to a particular time period. About the only thing I don't like about it is that shugenja don't have a way to recharge their spells per day, which was problematic for my group. I might have to house rule that one.

edited 20th Jan '17 2:01:33 PM by Bense

My group kind of did a hybrid of 3rd Revised and 4th, we kept a lot of the crunchier bits from 3rd and most of the schools (though we sanded off the broken bits), but used any parts of 4th that were more mechanically defined or worked better (like intimidate and temptation being different skills, where they weren't in 3rd). We just kind of thought a lot of the schools in 4th were a bit bland and the some of skills didn't have enough of a mechanical definition (the ones that did we ported over from 4th).

I mean everything in 4th was definitely a lot more balanced, but the schools just weren't as fun (to us) as the schools in 3rd, and we've always been a group to like highly crunchy skill systems. The power level thing could be a bit of an issue, but we tried to solve some of those problems by removing the free raise from having 5 skill and having emphasis work the way they did in 4th (because characters were way too accurate), and mandating that all Bushi P Cs took a path at rank 3 instead of gaining the technique that gave them a second attack (since we really didn't know how to balance that against NPC math).

As for the typos and production quality, yeah, I noticed that. There were several sections of my GM's 3rd Edition Revised core book where he had to explain what was going on from an annotated PDF he had with all the errata and corrections.

Edit: So I guess I should say 3.75 is my favorite edition from a rules standpoint?

edited 20th Jan '17 2:38:31 PM by VerityCandle

The attraction for my group has always been the setting of L5R rather than the mechanics. 4th edition is just about perfect for us in its "crunchy" level.

That's with this particular game. We like more crunch in some other games, but 3rd's peculiarities and vast number of modifiers in combat seemed to get in the way of the storytelling to me.

"Two attacks for 3rd rank Bushi" has never been a problem for us, because balance isn't really the issue with our group. Mid-rank bushi are expected to be able to easily win in battles with shugenja or courtiers or some other school. If a courtier wants to take out a bushi he does it via other methods than pulling a sword and starting a fight.

In 1st edition no minor clan except the Mantis had techniques for 4th or 5th rank, and the Mantis didn't have a 5th rank. People in my group still enjoyed playing them, because balance in combat wasn't the issue.

I also like L 5 R more for the setting than anything else, but I guess we just have different crunch preferences. What's funny is it's not the fights being crunchy that my group really cares about (fights are pretty much always crunchy, anyway), it's more the skill crunch. It seems sort of backward, but my group tends to find that having a really well defined skill system makes it easier for us to role-play.

Interesting. We always take the approach of "tell me what you're trying to do, and then give me what skill you want to do it with." If the GM doesn't think the skill is a very good fit for what the character is doing then the roll gets more difficult.

We also modify difficulties by role-playing. If you can come up with a good reason why a task would be easier ("But I have the 'suspicious' disadvantage and always sit with my back to a wall, so it's always harder to surprise me"), or if you can role-play a negotiation well, then the accompanying roll becomes less difficult.

Different techniques for different groups, of course. The right one to use is always the one that your group is most entertained by.

edited 25th Jan '17 8:00:47 AM by Bense