|
Lord_Hambrose posted:Looks, sometimes having to have 14 different outcomes for every choice means that the Unicorn get to do everything (secretly assisted by the actual 1st place Nezumi but even the story team could only do so much). When dominant decks would win 8 out of every 10 tournaments, stupid things will happen. What was annoying was the winning faction was usually just the deck du jour so the person winning would pick the faction they actually liked so the story team had to scramble. If Unicorn players actually won all those tournaments and not just Unicorn decks Rokugan would have looked very different.
|
#
?
Aug 5, 2023 20:49
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 24, 2024 15:50 |
|
|
Unicorn were dominant thru the four winds period? I could've sworn they were pony farts in the wind until Khol Wall. Thought four winds era was dominated by KB Tishi Scorpion dueling, THE Kakita crane dueling and lion had battle dominance with push/pull. But it has been a loooong time.
|
|
#
?
Aug 5, 2023 20:51
|
|
|
It was more Reign of Blood if I recall correctly for that. Unicorn had lots of big win streaks because Calvary was super good and impossible to defend against lots of the time. Four Winds was cool because every deck also got to pick one of the people vying for the throne that had various storyline consequences. Akodo Kaneka always had a big focus in the stories (and as a person the dragons froze in time so he wouldn't be too old or something) so it always felt like him or super honorable and generic Tsudao were the favorites. Unfortunately the fan based loved the more interesting Hantei Naseru a kid who was raised by an evil Ghost Emperor who returned from beyond the grave to take Rokugan as part of the peace deal. It was a cool era, with Lion players adding one Shadowlands card to every deck so it counted as corrupted in protest of something or other but ended with them getting an in clan Oni personality. An actual internal conflict was a great way to call back to the excitement of Clan War while still keeping all the clans doing things that make sense. My Scorpion friend is still make they get exiled twice but the Crab ally with the Shadowlands and invade other Clans and that's fine during the original Clan War. Oh, and at the end of the Four Winds Naseru becomes Emperor, Tsudao gets a cool death being a big drat hero, Sezaru joins the Phoenix because he is a master of magic and needs their help being supreme magic cop, and Kaneka becomes Shogun (cool) and also... Uhh... Joins the Phoenix? (Look the deck was really good that month).
|
|
#
?
Aug 6, 2023 12:25
|
|
|
Lord_Hambrose posted:(Look the deck was really good that month). Or: "What's With These Story Results?" It is funny that as good as the Khol Wall was, few Unicorn players actually won with that deck which is why so few story results were Unicorn-centric.
|
|
#
?
Aug 6, 2023 13:30
|
|
|
Prior to the second half of Diamond, Unicorn won mostly in Europe and usually got smashed in NA tournaments. Unfortunately, most of the info about the game was on forums, which are all gone now. From my memories: Gold was all over the place, with the best decks of the end of Gold (so the initial emperor vote) being Phoenix (mostly Phoenix with rats), Crab (Walls and Corrupt), Crane (which wasn't great on its own, but had some good players), SLH control, and Scorpion control/dishonor. Diamond pre-Khol Wall, especially Kotei 2004 thru Gencon 2004, was all over the place. Lion was initially the best but fell off quickly (due in no small part to their best player that a bunch of people emulated being a deck-stacking cheater whose decks took advantage of his cheating, so they sucked when you didn't cheat), with Crab and Dragon as the best military decks and SLH and Scorpion as the best control decks, and Phoenix honor could beat top decks but lost to everything else and was easy to meta against. Unicorn was ok in base set Diamond but dire afterwards, they got slapped by all the best decks and the movement-focused combat meta, and with their weird economy, got a lot less from A Favor Returned than the other go second clans. Unicorn had one of the biggest drop-offs in power in Diamond, which might be why Khol Wall was pushed so hard. In my write up leading into Gencon 2004, I put Unicorn at the bottom of clans that might win Gencon. I playtested during that time and playtesting was chaos, I quit playing for a few years after they buffed One Tribe despite our protestations in playtest about the box already being insane. Europe always had a reputation of having metas soft to Unicorn decks (and really weird fate decks with a bunch of random one-ofs), but also had a bunch of the best Unicorn players there.
|
|
#
?
Aug 7, 2023 01:02
|
|
|
Sega 32X posted:Diamond pre-Khol Wall, especially Kotei 2004 thru Gencon 2004, was all over the place. Lion was initially the best but fell off quickly (due in no small part to their best player that a bunch of people emulated being a deck-stacking cheater whose decks took advantage of his cheating, so they sucked when you didn't cheat) Is there more to this? I never heard about it.
|
|
#
?
Aug 7, 2023 01:53
|
|
|
I still think about the playmates made out of random foil L5R cards.
|
|
#
?
Aug 7, 2023 02:38
|
|
|
Dawgstar posted:Is there more to this? I never heard about it.
|
|
#
?
Aug 7, 2023 05:23
|
|
|
Lord_Hambrose posted:
you sure you have the timing right? Okuro no Oni and the Kitsu corruption were Hidden Empire era and kind of swept under the rug for a while with the Volturnam reset.
|
|
#
?
Aug 7, 2023 06:04
|
|
|
Dawgstar posted:Is there more to this? I never heard about it. Without going into 20 year-old drama, one of the top Lion players in the US was a dude out of Seattle and he was an exceptional player, won multiple Koteis, including de-facto nationals. He also, later in his L5R career, somehow always flipped 5s for Gambling Houses, be it luck or something else. This is the deep lore, as he quit before it became common knowledge, but I had a good time thrashing what was supposedly the top deck in early Diamond because it didn't actually work that well. He left to run design at another game company, and there were some shady things that went down that led to him vanishing from the games industry for a while. The blind cheater was a different dude. Sad story, honestly. I did knock him out of Nationals at Origins that year, judges watching us as it was top 8. One took me aside and expressed his concerns after game one but I had been drinking all day and was super cocky (was going through my own type of sad story at the time), and just shrugged and swept him 2-0. Lion had no answers for Corrupt Crab outside of Peasant Revolt hitting on certain midgame turns, even with ideal t1-3 draws. His method of cheating was mostly just stacking the top 4-10 cards (and not really anything with his custom braille sleeves, though I heard that might have got him in trouble in another game later on). It was super impressive to watch him play, regardless, as he kept the board state in his head just by asking. Sega 32X fucked around with this message at 09:17 on Aug 7, 2023 |
|
#
?
Aug 7, 2023 09:12
|
|
|
Macdeo Lurjtux posted:you sure you have the timing right? Okuro no Oni and the Kitsu corruption were Hidden Empire era and kind of swept under the rug for a while with the Volturnam reset. Oh, yep you are right. That was a period where I wasn't playing much (and it was so long ago, disappointingly).
|
|
#
?
Aug 7, 2023 11:34
|
|
|
Would replacing "honor" with "ethics" make the rpg less problematic? I'm thinking confusion style rigid ethics, roles, and rigidity, which would require a few system tweaks.
|
|
#
?
Aug 29, 2023 09:25
|
|
|
Lost_Heretic posted:Would replacing "honor" with "ethics" make the rpg less problematic? I'm thinking confusion style rigid ethics, roles, and rigidity, which would require a few system tweaks. It really depends on how interested you are in playing the "samurai genre". Anything where you are playing something heavily based in a different culture is obviously a potentially problematic thing, but at the same time if you sand away everything that really makes it stand out from any generic fantasy setting you might as well play anything. Exploring a different society is one of my favorite parts of roleplaying but you just have to keep in mind that Rokugan truly isn't historical Japan. Just knowing that something is problematic and being respectful while playing goes a long way. Just don't be one of the guys who played the CCG in a bathrobe back in the day.
|
|
#
?
Aug 29, 2023 12:49
|
|
|
"Honor" and "honorable conduct" are not foreign to English-speaking cultures. Neither are concepts like "face," as in "saving face." That's why we have words and phrases for them. When you comport yourself with social expectations and values you are honorable. Easy. The trick when dealing with "honor" and so on in L5R, like Lord Hambrose says, is to not go overboard like it's this ~inscrutable Oriental~ make-believe that has to be mentioned in every sentence you speak. It's just that the social expectations and values are different, and that's what makes samurai drama what it is rather than D&D with mostly curved swords. Omitting "honor" from L5R is silly and oversensitive.
|
|
#
?
Aug 29, 2023 16:07
|
|
|
Just reskin L5R as a Jane Austin period piece set mixed with Arthurian fantasy and *boom* now you're not engaging in cultural appropriation you're celebrating your own history. An important point in the discussion of "honor" is that's it's used as often as a weapon as it is a defense. You can find any number of reasons to claim someone lacks honor and throw them under the bus, Bushido is a code that Samurai follow, honor is a social construct that is used to subjugate as often as it is used to uplift. As Superklaus mentioned, the difference between D&D and L5R is that you're essentially agreeing to a predefined world in which a nebulous idea of honor is what separates the classes, and everyone is going to roleplay as if they lived in this world where they are members of the higher class by virtue of having been born into, or by skill having made themselves some way useful to, a clan. And as mentioned, don't lean into weeb poo poo by spouting off every Japanese word you know and acting like every dishonorable act is going to result in seppuku.
|
|
#
?
Aug 29, 2023 16:24
|
|
|
I recently read the first Daidoji Shin book, and it really does a better job of showing what life in Rokugan actually is like more than anything else I have seen. Having lots of lower class characters and not exclusively high ranking samurai nobles is pretty nice.
|
|
#
?
Aug 29, 2023 17:24
|
|
|
PaybackJack posted:Just reskin L5R as a Jane Austin period piece set mixed with Arthurian fantasy and *boom* now you're not engaging in cultural appropriation you're celebrating your own history. An important point in the discussion of "honor" is that's it's used as often as a weapon as it is a defense. You can find any number of reasons to claim someone lacks honor and throw them under the bus, Bushido is a code that Samurai follow, honor is a social construct that is used to subjugate as often as it is used to uplift. As Superklaus mentioned, the difference between D&D and L5R is that you're essentially agreeing to a predefined world in which a nebulous idea of honor is what separates the classes, and everyone is going to roleplay as if they lived in this world where they are members of the higher class by virtue of having been born into, or by skill having made themselves some way useful to, a clan. Now I really want a Regency/Early Victorian Arthurian Knights RPG.
|
|
#
?
Aug 29, 2023 18:33
|
|
|
Just posting to say, I wrote another Halloween L5R Story this year, and THIS year it's an official one! From Aconyte Books and featuring the Scorpion and Moth clans, "The Banquet of Starving Ghosts" by yours truly. You can find it here. I hope y'all enjoy. Thank you!
|
|
#
?
Nov 1, 2023 15:55
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 24, 2024 15:50 |
|
|
Spookyelectric posted:Just posting to say, I wrote another Halloween L5R Story this year, and THIS year it's an official one! A nice spooky story is always a pleasant surprise at Halloween. Thank you!
|
|
#
?
Nov 2, 2023 05:07
|
|
