Safety Factor posted:

I traded away my Lion

frakeaing HAMSTER DANCE posted:

In fairness, they gave us a choice.

frakeaing HAMSTER DANCE posted:

Was that a thing that actually happened though? Most of the stuff I remember were things like "choose one of these outcomes for the story"

ProfessorCirno posted:

Hey for what it's worth I read all this and like it, as I've also always had issues with Actual Satan being at the gates for literal centuries while everyone else somehow just doesn't ever worry about this. It also adds rather interesting conflict to the Yasuki, who are very much not supposed to be dealing with the gaijin who they are charged with literally keeping out, but gosh that would be worth a lot of money, wouldn't it? And then the Tortoise step in. In fact, maybe that's how it plays out - the Yasuki are of course openly mercantile, and probably use this to try and eliminate any kind of public gaijin goods market, and go back and forth between waging bizarre economic shadow wars with the Tortoise (who's main thing is trading with gaijin), and allying with the Tortoise when those foreigners start to get unfriendly and now it's go time.

SuperKlaus posted:

Chill la Chill posted:

I hope FFG makes a new L5R RPG with designs taken and refined from the star wars RPG. I'd really like to see L5R with a more modern set of rules. I played the old one and it had all the usual crap from the 3.5 rules system

Chill la Chill posted:

Oriental adventures was my first RPG book and it was all because I was tricked by lovely RPG grognards that it was a "good system." loving grognards, man, tricking kids into playing their lovely games. (that's how I also got into 40k )

I didn't find out about the actual L5R ruleset until later and by then it was too late. I was in the glory days of 4e and finding out good games like dogs in the vineyard or burning wheel by then.

SuperKlaus posted:

Zarick beat me to it on the rules here but did you notice anything else about the Shinjo Outrider? Specifically, that it totally rules? "Reduce ANY check TN by your Rank (wow!), so long as you tell me how your horse 'should' help here." This is gonna be goooooood.

"I want to convince Kisada to give me the ancestral Crab blades." "Uh alright but that's TN 8, a 'legendary' task." *horse makes big, soft eyes at Kisada* "Nice work, Ed-san, looks like I just cleared that easy TN 3 and got me some sick swords."

"I want to jump over the palace." "What? TN like 9, past a legendary feat!" *mounts up, rides to palace, horse jumps, at top of jump rider jumps off (see: Mario and Yoshi)* "Looks like I just jumped over the palace on a totally do-able TN 4"

Aramoro posted:

Yup, they're busy refusing the gifts and shes busy asking them to accept them. That's why you need a chump to go with you to refuse/accept the gifts on his behalf.

Chill la Chill posted:

Is this seriously an argument for exponential wizards and linear fighters? Those sword guys are so good with their swords they also warp the fabric of reality with their animu powers

SuperKlaus posted:

I appreciate your joining the discussion. I mean that sincerely, though I would dispute all of your points.

1) A game should not have Player A command the fabric of creation while Player B does sword good. This is fundamentally unfair to player B, and very boring. Further, Player A only commands creation because we arbitrarily say so in this fictional work of entertainment; Player B can just as easily perform incredible things with his sword, as Chill la Chill has said. If it helps, I would suggest that kata users draw power from their ancestors to do amazing things just as kiho draw on ki and invocations draw on kami. See? We can easily explain away "realism" concerns.

2) Simply disallowing shugenja is no solution. When you have to ignore part of the rules to make a game work, it is a bad game. Why should we ever play a bad game?

3) I do not believe that is quite accurate to the setting, but I don't really mean to argue that point. What I would say is that a dedicated pacifist shugenja nonetheless is overpowered and unbalanced because flying, reading minds, and even shooting fire all have stupendous applications to non-combat situations. L5R role-playing, even more so than other role-playing, is not exclusively about combat performance.

Chill la Chill posted:

You should try out Gloomhaven because it's now the ultimate D&D dungeon crawling experience. 4e didn't go far enough, and 5e is

Yawgmoth posted:

Conversely, this is exactly what I want out of L5R. I want my shugenja to be goddamned wizards who are also ordained ministers, I want my bushi to be yelling about their secret blade style that can only be performed with My Grandfather's Blade, and I want my monks to be pulling off Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Techniques while expressing extreme dismay that you forced them to use it. Mostly because it's pretty simple to scale a game down but really loving hard to scale a game up.

Yawgmoth posted:

why did you have to remind me of this

Unless I'm forgetting something even more egregiously cack-handed, that was the dumbest of all the major plot lines.

sexpig by night posted:

Yea, I'm pretty eager to see the new update! I'd be super happy if FFG could turn my opinion around here. Unmasking seems like a good compromise between Outbursts and 'yea but I'd rather not my stoic Lion be forced to act like an rear end in a top hat just because someone got a good barb in', and super eager to see a refined and expanded duel system!

alansmithee posted:

The big issue with the scorpion decision for me isn't just that the dude obviously chose something subpar for the clan. That kinda sucks, and it's making me rethink if it's really a good idea to have such impactful decisions for the game made based on a dude placing in one tourney. I don't think any of the other clans had people picking junk for them for the betterment of the game (remember, it wasn't even scorpion who won the tourney).

Roland Jones posted:

The thing about the Isawa is, how do other shugenja compete with them? They have the best general-use ability for magic, and while it makes sense, it's somewhat hard to bring others up to that level when everyone else specializes more instead of just being good at magic.

SuperKlaus posted:

This exactly. It's been a problem in game design for an eternity. Designers keep making these "werewolf hunter" classes, if you will. Are there werewolves? The hunter makes everything trivial. Are there not werewolves? The hunter plays with his phone while everyone else games. Not cool.

Quidthulhu posted:

2! It's #2!

Dick Burglar posted:

I never implied that shugenja should roll up into town draped in full armor and carrying a big gently caress-off weapon. Of course that is not okay. I was asking if, in combat with non-supernatural enemies, there was a reason a Kuni couldn't wear armor and use a weapon to fill in as a bushi. Considering they get access to kata, is there anything that makes them mechanically worse bushi besides their school techniques not giving them bonuses to weapon-based combat?

Yes, I understand the story aspect of how they will likely get executed like bushi rather than captured like shugenja, but aside from that.

unseenlibrarian posted:

Yeah, no second day of Thunder means no Agasha defection in the first place, IIRC?

Timeline resets!

unseenlibrarian posted:

I'm not gonna be over timeline resets eliminating the Monkey clan until they give me an equivalent 'no we were totally not founded by a secret peasant who found a sword and happened to be in the right place/right time' minor clan so I feel you.

Dick Burglar posted:

What is the Dragon Clan's actual purpose? As someone who's only ever read the 4E rulebook and FFG open beta rulebook, they just come off as the ~oh so esoteric and inscrutable~ clan, in a really annoying way. Like, what do they actually do for the empire? What do they do, period? There's basically no real information in the rulebooks, just a lot of "they do things and nobody knows why."

Kaza42 posted:

Fittingly enough, the dumbest fiction in the new L5R set