Bakeneko posted:

The specifics tended to vary depending on which writer was writing a given piece of fiction. Consistency in the lore was never AEG’s strong suit. However a lot of evidence seemed to point to the fact that some of the things samurai believed about the Celestial Order were wrong. After all, humans and other species existed and had developed their own cultures before the Kami fell and introduced it to the region they happened to land in, and several foreign civilizations were confirmed to exist alongside their own gods even into the present day.

I guess this might just be me getting into my own fanon, which was rather extensive at the time (I also theorized that the Nothing was actually a kind of demiurge, not the true creator of the universe, but that’s another story) but I think that the Order would have applied to the whole world and to nonhumans if it truly were the equivalent of a fundamental law of physics, rather than just a government that a group of celestial beings created to manage the humans they had decided to rule.

And yeah I'd love to see the rats and the others in the new RPG. Fingers crossed.

Lord_Hambrose posted:

While you are definitely correct, what campaign of L5R are you playing where anyone is a shugenja and not a bunch of cool bushi? I feel like you really need to play up social stuff to make L5R work, as opposed to running it as D&D with curvy longswords. Murder hobos without a lord to serve are just honorless dogs.

FFG is notorious for ignoring open playtesting,which is disappointing.

ProfessorCirno posted:

PaybackJack posted:

If you just want to test the game and see if it's for you then 1 core is exactly what you want. Not having a legal deck doesn't change the rules or the flow of the game, it simply streamlines the decks into more efficient versions of what they can do. The difference between 3 core and 1 core decks is pretty much the same as the difference between someone playing with a starter deck and a couple boosters and someone with a full playset of every card in the previous CCG. Magic figured out that was pretty terrible a long time ago and started putting out their preconstructed decks so that a player jumping in could have a more streamlined and efficient deck, but even those are still miles away from competitive decks.

The only games where you have all the options available from the get go are games with much smaller card pools and that are more interesting in being a complete game out of a single product; like Ashes or Codex. With any competitive card game that has an expanding card pool, the cost to buy-in with a full playset is going to be high.

PaybackJack posted:

The problem with this is that you're adding another product to the marketplace that a) confuses consumers, and b) pisses off retailers who have to gamble on how much to order.

quote:

They previously had greater quantities of certain cards in the core set, see Netrunner, and that really led to 'wasted' cards. They refined the distribution more with aGoT2e and I consider L5R to be the optimum in that everything for clans is x1 with the neutrals being x2. That means that as you buy x3 cores, you can build decks easier.

SuperKlaus posted:

I always thought Scorpion peasants were genuinely well-treated, because as the keepers of the Black Scrolls* the Scorpion are hyper-interested in keeping maho cults away, and they figured out that happy peasants don't turn to blood rituals so often. Or did I accidentally head-canon that? Maybe I made up the reason why but I swear I read somewhere that Scorpion peasants have it good, all considered.

*as always we'll disregard how fuckin' bad they were at this job in old canon

quote:

The issue, as always with the fighter / wizard thing, is that it goes way beyond combat. It's about ability to impact the narrative. Playing up courtly intrigue - which I am 100% behind - doesn't balance characters because the bushi is still unable to do much but hit thing with sword while the shugenja's skill set includes rendering secret missives invisible and reading friggin' minds. Plus, the new concept of shuji is available to every beta School but the Kuni, which means that everyone is on an equal footing accessing social-context "special moves." It's just that while the bushi demonstrates his skill at pretty talk, the shugenja talks pretty and then reads someone's friggin' mind.

I could be cracked though and seeing what amounts to PTSD flashbacks from umpteen D&D arguments on the topic. Pretty sure I'm not but I'll see what y'all think.

ProfessorCirno posted:

peasant stuff

KittyEmpress posted:

May have been outliers with rolls, always possible with low sample numbers, but Bushi definitely aren't mechanically gimped in a fighter vs. wizard way. They're still narratively gimped though, as discussed, in that they can't do narrative things [though Invocations have a 1/scene restriction, in non combat scenes]

ProfessorCirno posted:

Minor clans kinda can't be as distant and arrogant as the great clans are. Half the time, they have to work side by side with their own peasants. That's the thing with the Mantis - they aren't really samurai, they're sailors. Most great clans have big land armies, where they keep the peasant part of the army and the noble side of the army separated. That's not really so much an option on a boat! So of course, working side by side with them builds familiarity, which increases empathy. Of course, on top of that, most Minor Clans have their origins in peasants who did Real Good once, so it's a bit hard to put on airs when you know ol' great grandpa was out in the fields himself, and it's likewise hard to consider the peasants a group of ignorable half-human nobodies when you yourself are living proof they can drat well be more then that.

KittyEmpress posted:

[though Invocations have a 1/scene restriction, in non combat scenes]

quote:

Earth
Description: Earth kami repay disrespect with stony silence.
Effect: Characters cannot perform this technique again until the end of the scene.

PaybackJack posted:

It's fine for casual play. I think you guys are really overestimating that audience. We're talking about people that have a hard time following how to play Dominion. L5R is already pretty complicated for them, if you forced them into deckbuilding beyond "take cards X and Y and shuffle together" they'd check out because it's too complicated.

Macdeo Lurjtux posted:

It doesn't work mechanically but it makes a bit of lore sense. The kami are below humanity in the celestial order, it is only right and proper that they obey. The relationship between a Shugenja and the kami is the same as a Samurai to the Peasants, there are certain obligations both ways. It's the real reason why Maho is reviled, the taint and blood used to cast it is bad, but a human is becoming subservient to a spirit, thereby inverting the celestial order.

quote:

The Proper Time for the Proper Invocations

Invocations can be used outside of their proper circumstances, but kami are not obligated to answer the call of a shugenja, nor do they tend to react to frivolous entreaties. Outside of Conflicts and other life-and-death situations, a shugenja can only attempt a given invocation once per scene; if the shugenja succeeds, the kami have done as asked and it would be unseemly to request more. If the attempt ended in failure, the kami have made their answer clear.

Additionally, if a shugenja attempts to use an invocation in a way that falls far outside of its relevant context (for instance, attempting to summon vast quantities of jade to turn a profit, rather than to smite evil), the kami may not answer at all. The kami are not at the beck and call of the shugenja; if anything the relationship works the other way around, and the shugenja merely receive certain benefits as favors for their devotion.

PaybackJack posted:

See there you go using terms like 'break into'. These people don't do research on the game. It simply shows up on the BGG hotness list, or a popular product list, or they saw a lot of people posting about, etc. These are people that walked by the booth at Gencon, went 'Wow, Samurai game that looks cool. Take my money!'

Anyone who's even remotely interested to 'get into' the game will have done a bit of research online, joined the Facebook/Reddit chat, read about the game on BGG or FFG's own website, and immediately seen what you need to jump into the game proper is 3 core sets. If they were turned off by that and decided to not jump into the game, then fair enough it didn't hook them. The fact that every LCG does it's best sales in Core Sets, and actually expansions for board games in general, should tell you that a lot of people will just grab something because of the hype train, play it one time, and then let it sit on their shelf for the rest of their days.

PaybackJack posted:

I'm just going on numbers I heard retailers batting around online, which range from 70% to 85% of their sales of an LCG being in cores. So it's a fairly overwhelming amount. If you assume that everyone who buys 3 Cores will buy the first cycle and a deluxe then those sales should be a lot closer. The fact that they aren't suggests that either people are buying 3 cores of these games and then not buying into it any further or there's a large amount of people buying only a single core.

You are right, there's certainly a lot of speculation and room for variance outside that. FFG doesn't release it's figures so we won't ever know for certain unless someone hacks them and posts their sales records online.

alansmithee posted:

To get away from this discussion, I'm wondering how primary RPG dudes feel about what I assume is the fact that the LCG tournaments are going to determine storyline elements. Like I just was reading on the facebook group (one of them, at least) that the shogun of the empire will be decided by the winning clan at worlds. And already the bounties are going up (was something I largely forgot about from the old CCG days-basically dudes offering prizes to people who win with the clan they want and/or make story decisions they want)-when I checked this morning there was a $225 bounty for getting Crab to be shogun. I have no idea how they'd do it, but it does seem like it would be cool if they could get some RPG player input somehow, especially as they're typically gonna be more in-depth into the story elements.

PaybackJack posted:

Sounds like you had at least 5 other players to play with at the store, so that's not too bad. Good luck selling your friend on the game.

SuperKlaus posted:

That GM was an rear end in a top hat but the story does remind me of my distaste for designs like nearly every Unicorn bushi school in L5R RPG history. They're commonly too swingy, with the character displaying awesome power with his horse and tofu-block shapeless uselessness without. This new School Ability is funny but I'd prefer something a little less potent, preferably then paired with a non-horse-dependent power to compensate. At least it's just the one School Ability, whereas past editions might see 3 or 4 of 5 Techniques hinge on horses.

quote:

I Will Always Return (Rank 6 Mastery Ability)
Once per game session, you may call out for your steed. At the beginning of the following round, your horse arrives, regardless of any barriers that might normally have prevented it from reaching your location. If your steed has recently been slain, its spirit will possess the closest horse to you and come to your aid regardless, such is its loyalty to you.

Traveller posted:

Or you can be Isawa Asahina and set entire villages on fire just because you're that angry at the Crane. Shugenja are definitely wizards, for all of their supposed priestly trappings.

Bussamove posted:

I am still salty about how they just casually tossed Yakamo and Hitomi out of the heavens in a single short story with no pomp or circumstance years after that particular story arc resolved.

alansmithee posted:

Yeah I'm totally with you on this. Fu Leng basically had a timeshare property in Rokugan. And killing off Hitomi and Yakamo so quickly just seemed like a big waste. You could argue if it should've happened at all, but I thought it was a decent capstone to the stories of two fairly significant people. And then in a decade they're killed in basically a throwaway line as a minor part of some other story.

Also the most recent story hints at the presence of the naga which I'm glad to hear, although I'm not sure it doesn't open the door to a bunch of other stuff maybe best left not in the game.

ProfessorCirno posted:

I am fine with anime as hell wuxia flipping out, and I am fine with grounded and more sensical, but the game needs to choose which it is and set all archtypes around that. Bushi being grounded while everyone else is flying and flipping over trees is kinda bullshit.

KittyEmpress posted:

Courtiers do exactly what they need to do in this system. As I mentioned, Shuji are incredibly powerful in social contexts (And even outside of them, with initiative manipulation and bonuses in ckmbat). Unfortunately, I think literally every school in the book has access to Shuji. So a bushi, if willing to go outside their rank up tables, has as much ability to be a good courtier as a courtier. But they probably won't be ranking up from it, so they probably won't.

Yawgmoth posted:

That's honestly one of the things I hate most about previous editions since combat is typically over really fast. I can either cast my Xk1 damage spell or I can spend multiple turns doing nothing except saying "I keep casting my spell" and hope the bushi doesn't finish the fight before then. And even if they don't, enemy's probably got like a -30 TN penalty anyways by now do that big fun hadoken spell is total overkill.

I would honestly prefer making spells more modular but less huge in their effects, and give bushi a bigger scale, width vs. height style. But I don't know how well that would work in practice.

NinjaDebugger posted:

The major difference is that now courtiers have access to kata as well, which means the reverse is also true. The balance between courtiers and bushi is one of the things I'm most happy with in the beta.

SirFozzie posted:

And I'm very jealous of those of you running the beta for the RPG, as I said, my group is 4E or bust grognards (and we don't have a game running right now anyway), I was thinking about doing a PbP or Discord game just to fill the void.

SirFozzie posted:

they can have it, but if they CARRY it, they're expected to use it in self defense. So, they keep it packed away in most cases.

quote:

Greetings, Legend of the Five Rings Open Beta Testers!

We’ve just put the finishing touches on the first update to the beta! According to our most recent survey, almost half of you still haven’t had a chance to put the system through its paces in play, so we hope you can get the beta on the table soon and try out the first wave of updates! This update addresses several issues you’ve already spotted and tweaks some of the mechanics to reinforce the themes of the setting while making the game more fun. You can find a summary of the changes later in this email!

We’re also excited to preview character creation options for our very first minor clan: the Mantis! Yoritomo’s fleets from the Islands of Silk and Spice led with a majority showing, with the Fox coming in second at 33% and the impoverished Suzume family at a mere 15%. (It’s okay, Suzume-san, at least you still have your yams!) Thank you to everyone who voted, and we’ll have some more polls for you to participate in going forward.

The Game of Character Creation

This week, we want the focus of your playtest feedback to be the character creation process. I’m one of those players who enjoys making new characters almost as much as I enjoy actually playing the game. I’ve learned better than to inflict my GM with ten-page character backstories (and I don’t have as much free time as I used to), but I still love to flesh out my characters’ relationships, histories, hopes, fears, strengths, and weaknesses, with the hopes that the GM will eventually highlight them during a session. In the campaigns that I’ve run as a GM, I’ve often handed out supplemental questionnaires to get my players thinking about these narrative elements for their character—and to help me create a campaign that’s truly driven by the characters. The Legend of the Five Rings RPG stood out because it’s had a questionnaire since the very first edition: the Game of Twenty Questions.

When I had to opportunity to design the new edition of the L5R RPG with Max, I wanted to bake these story choices into character creation from the very start. I was reviewing the old Game of Twenty Questions when I realized many of the answers had mechanical implications, although those mechanics were actually recorded during the steps of an entirely separate character creation process. They didn’t have to be separate, I thought. The Game of Twenty Questions could serve as the main vehicle of character creation—the questions could become prompts for defining both the narrative and mechanical elements of a character at the same time, so that they would be considered together.

In the fourth edition of Legend of the Five Rings RPG, the bulk of that separate character creation process included spending forty experience points on whatever the player liked. In theory, this allowed players to tailor their character to reflect what they wanted narratively, but in my experience, players (myself included!) tried to wring every last mechanical edge they could out of those 40XP. It’s the Law of the Instrument rearing its head: because mechanics were the tools we had to build our characters, we were thinking mechanically first. Often, I wrote my character backstory second, basing the details on the build I was able to create.

When designing the new edition, I didn’t want to feel as much a slave to the mechanics. So we made the decision to remove XP expenditure from the base process.

The other reason we moved away from the free-spend XP model was to make the game more approachable for new players. In the old editions, there were a lot of different ways players could spend that XP, and some were much more powerful mechanically than others. For players who have never played the game before, that’s a lot of choices to process all at once! Moreover, it’s hard to know precisely how you want to play your character, and what you should invest in, until you’ve tried the game and walked around in your character’s shoes for a while.

Now, we’ve tried to narrow the focus so that players are considering one aspect at a time. You aren’t filling up an entire scrap piece of paper calculating what this mechanical combination costs compared to another in terms of XP. Now, in one question the player is defining an element of their character that is represented by an advantage, something that provides the player with a concrete narrative hook for their character while at the same time giving them a mechanical way to stand out during play. In another question, they can focus on choosing an additional skill or not. And so on.

We’re eager to hear from you whether character creation is achieving that goal and the goals of your group, and what we can improve to make character creation more intuitive and story-rich. In this update, we’ve also included guidelines for how and when to bring back experience points to the character creation process for advanced players or particular campaign concepts. The characters you can build with the Twenty Questions method are designed to represent samurai who have just come out of their coming-of-age ceremony, their gempuku. Importantly, these options still build on the existing Game of Twenty Questions meant to marry narrative with mechanics.

Week 4 Beta Update

This week marks our first major update! We’ve made a number of updates, some of them larger than others. While many are small corrections and revisions, there are a few topics for which we made notable changes!

Strife and Unmasking
“Unmasking” is the new term for “outbursts,” and it functions in a slightly different way. We want people who were enjoying the outburst system to be able to play it almost exactly the same way—but we also want people who feel their samurai should be able to remain stoic to have that flexibility. As such, when a character’s strife exceeds their composure, they become compromised. While compromised, a character cannot keep dice with strife symbols.

Now, their player has a choice. They can try to find ways for their character to shed strife during this time (essentially the equivalent of the old “Shut Down” option). Or, they can choose for their character to unmask, dropping their facade briefly (in what was an outburst before) to express their emotions outwardly. They clear all their strife, and must resolve the narrative and mechanical effects of unmasking (which are slightly modified from prior outbrusts, but fill largely the same functions). This means that unmasking is always a choice, and if a player really feels it would be inappropriate for their character to show emotion at a given time, they don’t have to.

We hope that this system will have greater flexibility, helping to underscore player agency while still offering all the roleplaying cues and interesting mechanical interactions around emotions that others like about the previous outburst system!

Wounds become Fatigue
Based on the poll and a lengthy internal discussion, wounds are being re-themed as fatigue—reflecting exertion as a character grows more vulnerable to a hit that causes a serious injury (still represented by critical strikes). Mechanically, this is very similar, but it does open up certain thematic avenues—for instance, it makes more sense for characters to intentionally suffer fatigue to get extra effects, and also for a character to recover small amounts of fatigue over a short period of time with certain abilities.

Duels
Duel objectives have been reframed and reworked to better fit into the lore of the setting! This includes closer guidance on what constitutes an iaijutsu duel, but also various other forms of duels, including no-holds-barred battles between warriors, sparring bouts, and Taryu-Jiai, the supernatural contests fought between shugenja.

Stances
Several stances have received a bit of a retuning. In light of the modifications to strife and unmasking, we wanted shedding strife to be a bit slower during conflicts. As such, two stances have been somewhat overhauled:
Water stance now provides additional action that can only be used to perform an action that does not require a check. This could include taking a minor narrative action, drawing or stowing an item, moving further, or even catching your breath to heal a bit of strife or fatigue.
Air stance now increases the TN to hit you by half your school rank (rounded up). This means that it scales as you (and your enemies) grow stronger—which all other stances do, directly or in effect. Previously, it provided only a small benefit for high-rank characters, but now it provides a fairly static benefit across your character’s lifespan.
Iaijutsu Technique
Instead of being represented with a single technqiue, Iaijutsu has been split into two techniques, with a few more to come in the future. These techniques have been rebalanced to provide more benefit—they also are somewhat better based on some of the action economy changes that have been implemented (see below).

Action Economy Revisions
This set of alterations is subtle, but important. The previous version allowed very free movement and drawing/sheathing of weapons, but it did make abilities that improve weapon drawing /mobility somewhat weaker. However, this wasn’t the only model we had experimented with in Alpha. Thus, before the Beta gets too far along, we’d like to try another way of handling this aspect of the game.

In short, during a conflict, movement (beyond one range band) and weapon manipulation are more restricted, often requiring an action. However, the Water stance now grants the ability to perform an action without a check. Further, certain abilities help to mitigate these restrictions (such as Iaijutsu Cuts).

This is a change that has a fairly substantial effect at the table despite seeming potentially insignificant on reading (as compared to some rather obvious changes, like the update from outbursts to unmasking or the rewriting of duel objectives as dueling terms), so we ask that people pay close attention to it to make sure that it’s working well. If it becomes too restrictive in encounters, please let us know!

Thanks again for participating, and we look forward to hearing from you soon!

Katrina and Max
L5R RPG Development Team

SuperKlaus posted:

But I will beat that drum again in another post. Right now I wanna ask everyone about duels. What have duels been like at your L5R 5e tables? I'm looking over the duel rules, having not experienced one in the natural course of play yet, and I don't see how they reflect the classic "scene at the end of Kurosawa's Sanjuro" L5R Iaijutsu duel. You know, where the guys stare and focus and then BAM violent death in one stroke. What's your incentive, having won the right to go first maybe through bidding strife, to Center instead of hacking the other dude with an Attack?

Yawgmoth posted:

If having fun and playing optimally are at consistent odds, your game sucks. End of discussion. And if "play a stereotype" is the only way to be optimal, your game is boring as hell. I shouldn't have to pick between what is fun and what is useful; down that road lies groggy bullshit that has no place in late 90s gaming, much less 2017. It's a ridiculous Wick-ism to put all these "play the way I think you should or else" rules in. Like, if you wanna play "the clan stereotype but with one slight difference" then cool, go for it. But some of us want to play something else because a bloodthirsty phoenix or compassionate lion breeds inherent conflict and that conflict is compelling. If you can't imagine why it would be enjoyable to play such a character, I'd suggest you need to expand your horizons.

Sephyr posted:

I've been a distant fan of L5R for ages, reading up on the lore but never really having a chance to play. Now I finally found a table and I have zero idea on how to make a workable character. I was thinking of making a vaguely monk-ish, sleepy kakita duelist and I need to have it ready by tomorrow.

Any quick hints on what to pick/avoid? Not looking for any broken combos (But if you wanna share... *cough*), just not really eager to suck at what I should be good at.

KittyEmpress posted:

Strife + (Opp or Success) are very common. And also are a big deal with explosions. As TNs go up, you will take more strife per check on average. So this will mean sometimes a shugenja has to choose between failing an invocation and blowing themselves but succeeding. It will come up semi regularly I'm sure, because I've gotten 3 strife on a a check to ensure successes... semi regularly while just being a bushi.

SuperKlaus posted:

Re: the RPG, I believe I have ironed out my Java program and it is probably correctly reporting success rates and strife generation for rolls. If anyone is curious.

quote:

Greetings Legend of the Five Rings Roleplaying Game Open Beta Testers,

We’ve received a lot of great feedback on conflicts from your surveys! Overall, the surveys have indicated that there are several aspects of conflict where most respondents would like us to simplify, while there are others where the level of granularity and tactical choice is appropriate. This week, we are implementing several changes based on this feedback!

Assessment

A significant proportion of players and Game Masters alike reported that Assessment was the most complex part of conflicts, and so we have moved Assessment toward a more familiar structure for roleplaying games.

Assessment now formally begins with the GM describing the scene to the players. The players then have the opportunity to ask the GM questions about their environment and opposition (which might require a check, at the GM’s discretion, just like any other proposed task in the story). Then, instead of declaring an intention during this phase and making a check based around this intention, each player simply makes an Initiative check. They can still spend opportunity results from this check to add details to the scene, but there are no default opportunity uses unique to this check.

This is is a subtle distinction, but a significant one: players simply choose the stance they wish to begin the conflict in and then use the associated ring for determining Initiative, rather than having to reflect upon (and narrate) a lengthy assessment. If players do wish to get information beyond the GM’s description of the scene, the GM can allow them to make checks as normal (and as common sense allows). This is also a more familiar structure for most players (making a check for initiative rather than making a check for assessment that determines initiative).

Randomized initiative was something we scrutinized fairly carefully, as removing it would even further reduce lag time at the start of conflicts. However, we determined that entirely non-randomized initiative made many encounters too predictable.

Optional Rules for Range Bands on a Grid

These rules adapt the existing, abstract range band system for use on a traditional grid, offering a translation rubric for all current and future content in the game system.

Fatigue and Injury

The “wound system” is also receiving a major overhaul. In addition to a simplification of Table 6–5: Results of Critical Strikes by Severity, this update offers a reconciliation between the theme of fatigue accrued from attacks avoided and the mechanics.

In essence, damage is still dealt in the same manner and is still reduced by resistance. However, instead of suffering fatigue as a result of being struck, a character suffers fatigue to defend, thus preventing a critical strike. Character still become Incapacitated when their fatigue exceeds their endurance (renamed from resilience due to the noted confusion with “resistance”), at which point they can no longer defend, and must simply suffer critical strikes.

In keeping with the genre, characters can even spend a Void point to voluntarily opt not to defend before becoming incapacitated, tactically suffering a critical strike to get the chance to deliver a counterstrike of their own.

Various conditions, most notably Injured Body Part, have been reworked for simplicity. Injured Body Part is now the Wounded (Ring)/Gravely Wounded (Ring) conditions, which impose standardized penalties. While more granular penalties for injuries were perhaps more mechanically interesting, they also contributed considerably to the complexity of critical injuries, which in turn could make combat move more slowly. The new Wounded condition should still drive hard tactical choices in combat, often forcing characters to abandon their favored ring, but with less to remember in specific effects.

Concealable Quality

Some respondents have pointed out that knives and other light weapons are currently struggling to have a clear role in conflicts. As such, the Concealable quality is receiving a rework (and being removed from several of the more potent weapons that previously had it), allowing a character to draw a Concealable weapon more quickly.

Unmasking

Many players have noted that Unmasking in its current state is too easy a tradeoff. This is partly a result of the iterative nature of the Open Beta; when one aspect of the game changes, others may need to catch up, and the rippling consequences can take time to address.

While there will be a larger reckoning after the Open Beta is complete to make sure the document is coherent, for now, Unmasking is being updated to have simpler, more clearly defined costs. Its benefits, by contrast, are largely narrative, but with further guidance for GMs on how this might translate into the narrative.

Lord_Hambrose posted:

Yeah, having your whole deal be Best Wizards really is hard to balance around. Having a strong trick in your schools element or at least an interesting ability that is unique to your school is really how it should be. I think this is why historically Asahina and Iuchi were interesting.

quote:

Honestly I really like the Kuni School getting combat and not social powers is a really interesting and favorable choice. They live in a world where shugenja pretty much never physically fight anyone except shadowlands monsters.