L5R 4th Edition - Well... WotC did it first!

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Traditional Games > L5R 4th Edition - Well... WotC did it first!

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

I just finished reading the 4e core book and now I really want to play this. Anyone running/looking to run a game on IRC?

# ¿ Jan 12, 2013 00:29

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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 23:24

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

So this came up in the game I'm in: What would be the appropriate Honor act for going around Toshi Ranbo using Cloak of Night to make people's clothes disappear? And assuming you don't sufficiently use Stealth (spell casting) to hide that it's you, how much Glory (or Infamy) would that be worth?

# ¿ Feb 12, 2013 06:04

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

ScottyBomb posted:

I'm not certain Cloak of Night works that way - certainly, I'm fairly sure that's against the spirit of the spell...

But air kami are tricksters! :haw:

quote:

No matter.

There's not much written about matter of a risque nature when it comes to Rokugan as AEG tries to avoid such topics when possible. Suffice to say, if someone found themselves naked it public, they'd quickly and quietly get OUT of public - but no one would act shocked, because the polite thing to do would be to ignore the nudity. And the Rokugani are a polite people.

If Soshi Hentai happens to be caught using the spell, however, that's a different matter. First off, if he's caught sneaking, he's already been caught doing something dishonorable. Honourable samurai don't "sneak" (though they may "prowl" from time to time.)

Second, he's been essentially attempting to publicly force other samurai to lose face, and that's a fairly serious offense. If the shugenja didn't AT LEAST receive several challenges from offended parties or their champions I'd be surprised. I'd have him take a huge, HUGE hit to his honor, and likely a chunk of Glory as well. This is the kind of scandal people remember for years, and destroyed a reputation for life.

I was planning on only doing it to heimin/hinin, not anyone who would be legally allowed to do anything to me. Of course making samurai lose face like that would be terrible, but making the peasants fear the sudden onset of the vanishing-clothes-curse might be seen as something other than social pariah-ville.

# ¿ Feb 12, 2013 07:18

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

The honor I can understand, but why glory? I through glory was how recognized you were. I would expect this to be the sort of thing people talk about, thus building glory (or infamy, more likely).

# ¿ Feb 12, 2013 07:31

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

ScottyBomb posted:

Infamy, absolutely. Glory, less so. Glory comes with respect, after all.

Yeah that was meant for Shardix. Reply != Quote. I would expect an honor loss and a (likely substantial) infamy gain.

# ¿ Feb 12, 2013 07:39

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

Alien Rope Burn posted:

If I use the Spider Clan it'd probably be as more of a subtle secret society; I like some of the ideas behind it, but having festering samurai in a spiky fort eating human flesh with bone chopsticks while red lightning strikes the earth

I had to pretty much beat my ST over the head with angry words to get him to let me assume this as the default for the Spider Clan instead of making them the painfully stupid and absurd version where they all try to get 4 ranks of taint ASAP and walk down the street wearing a spider mon covered in dead babies. Personally, I don't even know how that kind of group is supposed to exist in any form for longer than a day; if you hate everything the current culture holds dear and are working to destroy it from within, you kinda have to keep that poo poo covert or else you're going to be finding yourself in Jigoku sooner rather than later.

# ¿ Mar 29, 2013 21:10

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

Help me L5R thread, you're my only hope! I'm playing a shugenja and I want to buy Chosen by the Oracles (air). My ST is half-willing to let me buy it, but he wants me to do/have something as a prerequisite. What that something is, he doesn't know. And I am not versed enough in L5R lore to have any clue either.

So, any ideas of what an IR2 shugenja could do to gain the favor of the oracle of air? I am not averse to courting the dark oracle of air

# ¿ Apr 25, 2013 18:03

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

The advantage says "For reasons beyond your understanding, you have caught the notice of one of the Oracles..." so I guess it could be a thing you have done or will do or have a talent for doing.

# ¿ Apr 26, 2013 03:35

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

Question for you all: How do you introduce an ancestor to an established character? My GM and I have statted out an ancestor for my character but he's really unsure how to bring him into being around. Should/can he just appear one day and start advising? Should my character do some sort of ritual to get his attention? There's precious little printed on the topic.

# ¿ Jun 12, 2013 19:27

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

Mors Rattus posted:

I would go with the character accidentally awakening the ancestor with some symbolically relevant act, like accidentally recreating a scene from their life.

Pretty much exactly what we did (except not so accidental). Thanks!

# ¿ Jun 19, 2013 05:52

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

Do we finally get some actual rules for taryu-jiai? Also, what does the Fire Kami's Blessing spell do, out of curiosity?

# ¿ Jul 27, 2013 16:07

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

Quick rules question: if you cast Mists of Fear (instantaneous duration, causes a Fear 5 effect) on someone, do they take the -5k0 for the rest of the encounter? Or do they just get real scared for a couple seconds and maybe flee if they fail catastrophically with no other effect?

# ¿ Nov 12, 2013 05:16

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

NGDBSS posted:

It's for the rest of the encounter or until the source of the effect (ie, the maho-tsukai who's casting the spell) is removed.

Yeah, that's what I thought. my (now ex)-GM said the spell was the source, and thus it doesn't produce any penalty, just maybe making the guy flee if he fails by enough and has the ability to flee and is the type to flee. :geno:

# ¿ Nov 13, 2013 17:27

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

NGDBSS posted:

Hmm, looking further at things that duration of Instantaneous seems to be a misprint or deliberate. There's another spell (Your Heart's Enemy, Air 3, Core) which also inflicts Fear on a single target, but in this case it has a duration of five rounds and inflicts Fear 4. Mists of Fear inflicts Fear 5, but with raises the Fear strength can increase; Your Heart's Enemy (not a maho spell) has no such provision.

It would have to be either a misprint, or intended to work as previously stated with the source of fear being the maho-tsukai. Otherwise the spell would have no effect at all beyond making you jump slightly for a half second, which is a pretty piss-poor use of 6 wounds, 0.2 taint, an air slot, and at least one complex action.

# ¿ Nov 13, 2013 20:02

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

L5R.avi

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

# ¿ Jan 22, 2014 23:04

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

I hope this is okay to post here: I have a couple of friends on IRC (GameSurge server) who are interested in playing and I have hastily taught them the basics as much as I can with my admittedly threadbare knowledge and understanding of the mechanics & setting. But we have no GM because everyone I know only wants to play D&D. Anyone up for running a game for some newbies? We have character concepts kind of figured out. Alternatively, anyone know of any good channels I could be in to find someone who would fit the bill?

# ¿ May 16, 2014 19:58

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

Winson_Paine posted:

Dude the person who needs to run the game is found in your mirror. We all did it, everybody gotta learn sometime. Grab them bootstraps and run a game.

I don't have the capacity to run an L5R game (or any game for that matter) for a number of reasons. Trust me, if I thought I could pull it off even half-assedly, I would.

# ¿ May 17, 2014 03:25

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

Zero Suit Ridley posted:

I waited around pestering people to run l5r for two editions before I finally decided if I ever wanted to play it I'd be running it myself. I started Scorpion Emperor and have since been not just running but playing in over half a dozen different l5r games.

If you don't think you can come up with your own adventure content, there's several sources of pre-written adventures that all you really need to do is step into the GM spot and follow what's on the page. Incidentally this is like, the single best way to get a sense for running any system, and for running games in general. Pull out the Second City box, run that. Pull out the sample adventure from the core book, or the free RPG day one, or there was I think one that came with the GM screen, or I'm pretty sure there's some that go with the setting-in-a-box for the elements books.

I've seen you posting intermittently trying to recruit a GM for that group (or others just like it) since I started running the game. One of us is playing plenty of l5r, the other isn't, and I can't help but think there's a correlation here...

That's some good advice there. I just finished running a 2-year long D&D game and I am really burnt out from that, which is the big reason I Don't want to run anything. I also just started a new job and so I just don't have the cognitive energy needed to run a game; I can focus on a single character and that's it.

# ¿ May 17, 2014 17:43

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

KittyEmpress posted:

I'd be interested in joining a game, since the RL one I was GMing ended three weeks back, and I'd love to play as a player. At the same time, I don't feel like I have to join, especially if Yawg's group is already tight knit.

We are not especially tight knit. I said "hey anyone interested in L5R?" and I got a couple people interested in me teaching them the basics as I understand them. And it looks like one of them has to drop because of a new job, which is why we need a replacement.

# ¿ May 17, 2014 17:54

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

KittyEmpress posted:

I'll drop by the IRC then and see if I like the people I guess, before I commit to joining, if that's okay. Is it gamesurge at synirc? or?

Just been doing #L5R on GameSurge.

# ¿ May 17, 2014 18:54

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

So after a bit of hunting around, I can't seem to find anything at all that will tell me how big Rokugan is. None of the maps I can find have a scale and most of the forum postings I find are just guesswork and making excuses for AEG. Anyone got any real answer or am I stuck with "however big your GM wants it to be"?

# ¿ May 31, 2014 16:25

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

I have noticed this. Based on searching google, what few maps are around with a drat scale attached, and what others have posted for speculation, rokugan is somewhere between 300 and 1600 miles long & 200-800 miles wide. Major cites are somewhere between a 1 and 30 day hike between them, there's about 1-6 major rivers (some of which may just start and stop in the middle of a field), and the mountain ranges may or may not have some manner of connecting pass through them depending on what map you're looking at.

I guess this is why "imperial cartographers" is an actual suggested campaign mode. :psyduck:

# ¿ May 31, 2014 17:57

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

Zero Suit Ridley posted:

Just try not to think about it. Aeg didn't.

Basically the tagline for L5R in general.

# ¿ May 31, 2014 20:22

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

I didn't know that if you put several magnets on a CRT monitor the color warping would be saved into the image, but there it is.

# ¿ Jun 1, 2014 04:36

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

nucleicmaxid posted:

So are there any online TT or irc games in this setting that regularly run? I don't want to do some dorky pbp fanfic stuff, but I am somewhat interested in playing in the setting.

Well if you want to run a game that has apparently lost its GM, I've got a few players for ya. Otherwise, I remember there being an L5R irc channel but I forget what it is.

# ¿ Sep 22, 2014 03:22

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

nucleicmaxid posted:

I don't know the setting THAT well, and I haven't GM'd in ages or that might actually be fun.

All we know of the setting is what in the core, the City of Lies player's guide (since we were ostensibly running through that module), and clicking random page on the L5R wiki. We could likely tell you all we know about everything, including our characters, in an hour.

# ¿ Sep 22, 2014 18:54

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

Is there a pdf of Book of Void out yet?

# ¿ Oct 10, 2014 15:53

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

wargames posted:

Are we ever going to do a roll20 game with Teamspeak or Mumble?

Why roll20 when there's bots that do actual L5R rolling?

# ¿ Oct 17, 2014 20:05

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

wargames posted:

Why not anything with voice comms and not PBP?

Because PBP is awful garbage, much like roll20's embarrassment of a dicebot and their terrible implementation of mapping/tokens/chat/etc. My question, which is a valid one, is still "if you're playing by voice comms why in god's name would you use a site so ill-suited to the game as roll20 when you could use something tailor-made to L5R that currently exists in various forms?"

# ¿ Oct 17, 2014 21:30

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

Ardulac posted:

I'm just a little confused by the incredible amount of vitriol you have for roll20.

I can post the :words:

version if you're genuinely interested, but the tl;dr version is that every experience I've had with that clunky piece of poo poo has made me dislike it somewhere between a little and a lot more.

That said, I have a couple players from an apparently dead campaign that NutritiousSnack was running that would like to continue playing, if anyone is interested in picking up where he left off. We were doing the City of Lies thing with some houserules/homebrew/alt history stuff.

# ¿ Oct 18, 2014 20:40

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

nucleicmaxid posted:

I'd be interested in playing too. But I'm completely not interested in running some half finished game with custom houserules and homebrew randomness.

That's fair. Figured I'd throw the idea out there because I liked the characters involved with that game so much. I'd of course be down for starting anew as well.

# ¿ Oct 18, 2014 21:02

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

Ardulac posted:

I love a good horror story as much as the next guy, so I'd say I'm interested . So far my only real issue was with the sound not working randomly on the browser version, but the Hangout version hasn't had any of those issues.

Most of my problems were preferences like not being able to move the chat, not being notified textually when someone said something, and the sheer amount of fuckery a GM has to go through to let the players actually play the loving game. Seemed like every time we wanted to do anything, the GM had to go digging through menus to give us permission. Tokens had a wonderful habit of not saving their information or changes to it, the map in general was a war on many fronts (sizing, images not saving, not being able to reveal parts, distances defaulting to 4e D&D mid-session, etc.), but the worst offender and the one that made me give it up entirely was the dicebot.

The info I gathered was about 6-8 months ago during a "campaign" of 3.5 D&D which was basically .hack//sign with the serial numbers filed off and given a standard D&D setting. Basically we just wanted to do dungeon crawls with an amusing backdrop to tie them loosely together. Unfortunately our first run took about five times longer than expected because we kept getting poo poo rolls. Whatever, happens. But then it happened again. And again. So I started recording all of our d6, d8, and d20 rolls and what I found was that we were in fact rolling consistently far worse than any normal distribution would have us rolling; our average d20 roll was just barely above a 6 and our d6/d8 rolls were frequently at or very near minimum. Made every combat go incredibly long because we'd sometimes go multiple rounds before anyone actually hit with anything.

After about a month of playing (a couple sessions a week), I felt like I had accumulated enough data to bitch to the dev team. Their response was a total brush-off "nuh uh, this bot was tested 80 hojillion times and is the fairest dicebot in the universe times infinity no backsies! Obviously you and your group were just unlucky, this data can't be right." At that point we basically stopped using roll20 for anything but the mapping, which we eventually got sorted out by just showing up a half hour earlier and dicking around with making sure everyone had permission to move their pieces, permission to edit its info, permission to see all the things on the map, ad infinitum every session. A total chore, but one we had already gotten fairly quick at.

quote:

I'd be up for something like that.

Cool! We hang out in #l5r on GameSurge but we aren't married to the server or anything.

# ¿ Oct 19, 2014 19:23

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

Zero Suit Ridley posted:

So I guess one of the upcoming products is going to be an atlas of Rokugan. Finally, usable maps!

What are the odds they still forget to put a loving scale on the drat things?

# ¿ Jan 8, 2015 20:51

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

Sorus posted:

Little leery about that. Mostly related to WC4 but I'm starting to not particularly care for L5R players.

What is WC4 and why does it make you leery about this?

# ¿ Feb 21, 2015 04:53

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

Plague of Hats posted:

Are you prepared to question this guy's honor?

I have 5 ranks of iaijutsu. Bring it on. :smuggo:

# ¿ Feb 21, 2015 15:15

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

L5R 4e Official Errata is out. A lot of little corrections and "legacy errors" getting fixed, and Intimidate is a willpower skill.

# ¿ Apr 5, 2015 17:49

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

AmiYumi posted:

I'm curious, what do people think of Imperial Archives? I dig it, other than the weirdly-racist-even-for-L5R Yobanjin section. Of course, I've been waiting for more on Shourido, and really dig seeing the Firefly Clan and the rest back in print, and also dead. Kiiind of get the impression the book is a collection of bits that should've been put up online for free/cheap when an appropriate book to each section was released, though.

That's how I feel about it too. Especially for stuff like oni lords, which were expressly promised in EotE and then cut for reasons. All in all it's an okay book but really it just shows how bad AEG is at writing books when so much of it is "this is all stuff we could have put in other books with some competent editing".

Also, I'm pretty sure my GM is gonna have our group fight one (or more) oni lords and I really get the feeling that if you're built to last in a fight at all, you can handle one of them by yourself at R6. I have nothing to really back this beyond my own intuition at the moment though.

# ¿ May 8, 2015 23:41

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

Oh. Yeah. Kinda forgot about maho being absolutely bonkers when you have >300 wounds and even the most powerful sword strike in the world is gonna do like 60. But question, since you guys (very obviously) have a more complete grasp on this poo poo than I do: Drown the Spirit in book of void. Doesn't that basically cripple all of them for 3 turns since their air+water rings are near-universally more than their strength?

# ¿ May 10, 2015 17:55

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

NinjaDebugger posted:

Can't say, I don't have that book, and I'm not likely to grab it anytime soon.

It's an ML4 air+water+void spell that gives the target a penalty to strength equal to their air+water rings for 3 rounds +1 round per raise. If that drops them to 0 or less str, they are helpless for the duration.

# ¿ May 10, 2015 20:14

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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 23:24

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

NinjaDebugger posted:

It says a lot that that isn't the dumbest spell I've seen in L5R.

What's the dumbest spell, then? Is it Pain? My vote goes to Pain.

# ¿ May 11, 2015 14:21

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