Open Beta pour le nouveau système de RPG L5R

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

Last week covered a great deal of “housekeeping”—we addressed individual issues, alongside some adjustments we wanted to make to the overall system early on so we can see how they play out (in case we want to make future course corrections).

Thus, this week, our focus will once again be a survey, focused this time on Chapter 2: Creating a Character! You can find the survey here. Additionally, this week, you’ll have the chance to vote on a rare and potent item you’d like to see previewed in the Beta!

Advantages and Disadvantages

Advantages and disadvantages have had a more fluid role across the course of development than rings, skills, or even techniques. As with every element we brought forward from previous editions, we carefully considered what they added to the table and how they helped to further the story. Distinctions and adversities draw from previous editions, and passions and anxieties stemmed out of our interest in having an additional option to influence a character’s mental and emotional state throughout a game session.

Throughout the Alpha, we found that players wanted to represent their character’s desires and fears—not the big concerns like ninjō and giri, but the smaller wrinkles and idiosyncrasies that help make a character feel more fleshed out and alive. A dutiful Lion samurai who hungers for glory and a similar character who loves to practice origami in what little spare time they have might not seem that different. However, during play, that small detail often comes to be very important to the character’s arc, helping to humanize a character who otherwise seems like a stock example. Thus, we added passions and anxieties alongside distinctions and adversities. These new types of advantages and disadvantages also fit very well with the strife mechanic.

Regaining Void points as a result of disadvantages rather than by resting was a very intentional departure from previous editions. We want Void points to be a result of facing challenges and steeling one’s resolve in the face of near-defeat. The spirit of perseverance is very important in many works of samurai fiction. To reach their highest potential, characters must face the greatest challenges. Sometimes, this means you (the player) might even choose for your character to face setbacks and obstacles so that they can fight all the harder at the most vital moments. Players should take an active role in shaping the ups and downs of their characters’ stories!

One element of this mechanic has remained relatively consistent through development: advantages and disadvantages are somewhat fluid (an advantage can sometimes create problems and be treated as a disadvantage, and vice-versa). While the means by which this occurs has evolved, we liked the idea that few features of a character are always helpful or harmful. Being tall and sturdy is helpful if you want to reach something on a high shelf, but challenging when you want to hide in a crowd. A persistent cough makes it hard to run long distances, but also makes it much easier to convince people that you could not possibly have overcome several guards to assassinate a dignitary (whether or not you did).

The GM should keep this in mind, and remember that no advantage (or disadvantage) is completely static in how it should be applied. Players should also consider interesting and novel ways they can apply their advantages and disadvantages—though, of course, there is a fine line between being creative and arguing with the GM unnecessarily, and so we advise that players make their proposal, let the GM decide if it makes sense, and then accept that determination and move on.

We appreciate your continued enthusiasm and interest! Please take the time to fill out the survey on Creating a Character, and we look forward to going over the results and delivering a number of updates next week!

This week, we have a number of rules content updates, several exciting item previews, and a designer diary by Katrina Ostrander on the thought process behind intrigues, as well as some stories from the development process!

A Thousand Years of Conflict

The basic ingredients for a story are a goal and an obstacle. The narrative arises from how the characters struggle to overcome those obstacles and whether they succeed, fail, or change their goals entirely. And when characters have opposing or competing goals—when the obstacle is another character or party—conflicts emerge, the consequences of which might be felt for many generations in the game world or sessions in the real world.

Conflict takes on many forms in Rokugan: multiple courtiers vying for the favor of the same love interest, two duelists wishing to prove their school technique’s superiority in a friendly match, a group of samurai facing off against bandits harassing a town, or two armies clashing for control over a strategically placed castle.

In previous editions of the Legend of the Five Rings Roleplaying Game, duels, skirmishes, and mass battles existed to represent the latter three types of conflict, but we were missing a framework for resolving social disputes. To represent all of these different scenarios in the new edition, we retained duels for formal and civilized competitions between two individuals, skirmishes for chaotic and frenzied confrontations between multiple characters, and mass battles to represent entire armies joining the fray, but we created intrigues to adjudicate social debates and political plots.

Intrigues can represent a samurai making a petition to their lord in front of rival petitioners, courtiers feeling out their competition during their first day day at court, or even a Game of Letters being carried out by two or more courtiers over the course of an entire Winter Court (the premier social gathering in Rokugan, where clans discuss border disputes and trade imbalances, marital matches are made, and rivals are discredited or disgraced). The intricacies of these types of challenges merited more than a single check, and we realized we could apply the universal phases of assessment, turn-taking, and resolution to the scenario to make it a new type of structured scene (which would become termed “conflicts”).

As we explored and developed the idea of “social combat,” we returned to the idea of goals and obstacles. We wanted to ensure that the play group was entering into a structured encounter to achieve something meaningful and measurable, as opposed to the more freeform roleplaying that is also typical of social encounters. Of course, when making a check during an intrigue, roleplaying is still encouraged—and GMs should take the players’ dialogue into consideration when determining the TN of a check and reward clever players with decreased difficulty.

To model the idea of courtiers debating back and forth, exchanging several rounds of letters, or “running into” a character multiple times to gauge their nature, we instinctively turned to the character’s focus attribute to determine how many successes they would need to generate. These successes eventually turned into rhetorical points (page 156). In the very first intrigue we tested during our pre-alpha game, we tried doubling the target’s focus attribute as a starting point. Because the party was divided in persuading a character, it took them about three turns to determine who would carry the day, which felt sufficiently challenging and rewarding. This continues to be the baseline for an intrigue, although we encourage GMs to increase or decrease the number of rhetorical points needed, depending on the complexity of the characters’ machinations.

In this way, focus turned into a sort of static “social defense” trait, the same way that vigilance serves as a “perception defense” trait. We felt that the air aspect of a character’s focus represented their overall wiliness and ability to sense manipulation, while the fire aspect represented their own sense of drive and purpose. To successfully outwit someone an intrigue, player characters would need to be more subtle and more subversive in order to get their ideas across, find out what they need to know, or provoke another character into unmasking. Max formalized the common types of activities in social encounters into the different action types, and then all we had to do was tinker with initiative—and of course, test it exhaustively during the alpha—to finish creating intrigues.

When it came time to lay out the conflicts chapter, we wanted to present debates first in order to highlight how central court politics were to the Legend of the Five Rings RPG, and then we realized that we could present the remaining conflicts in the order of increasing severity and hostility. The idea of “escalation” flowed quite naturally, with intrigues leading to duels, which could devolve into skirmishes, and skirmishes could engulf multiple groups in a mass battle.

Week 6 Updates

In addition to various housekeeping items, such as addressing how NPCs interact with the new rules for becoming compromised, further fine-tuning of the Air stance, extra guidance on investigation, and numerous small clarifications, there are a few significant updates, based in no small part on last week’s survey results!

School Abilities

Several school abilities have been adjusted. The Akodo Commander School has been one of the most popular, but also consistently rated as the most powerful. Rather than make this powerful ability less useful in a direct sense, we decided to take advantage of our more flexible reflection of physical exertion after the last update and add a cost of 1 fatigue for each use of the ability. This leaves it as a very strong, character-defining ability, but a tiring one to use, especially over the course of a long battle.

Meanwhile, the Shiba Guardian School’s ability is being boosted a bit. While it is mathematically efficient, more than a few people have expressed concern about its lack of flair for a one per scene ability. As such, it now negates all strife on a single check and removes strife from the target equal to the Shiba Guardian’s school rank. Despite how splashy this new effect is, the once per scene limit remains, keeping it in the same realm as other school abilities.

Questions 5 & 6 of the 20 Questions

Ninjō and giri are staying largely the same for now, but we got a lot of good feedback on the surveys, and realized we were putting the cart before the horse a bit, especially on Question 5: a character needs to know who their lord is before they can understand their character’s service to them!

Question 5 now encompasses the invention or determination (or assignment, by the Game Master) of the character’s lord, along with more prompts to fill in details with this extremely important person in your samurai’s life.

Question 6 is less substantially changed, but we added some text to reinforce the idea that ninjō and giri need to be able to conflict, but not that they need to constantly be in direct opposition.

Spiritual Backlash

Spiritual backlash has been noted by some to be rather “gameable" to a shugenja’s advantage, and so we have made the wrath of the spirits a bit more severe. While dedicated players can likely still find certain uses for stirring the spirits to wrath at the exact right moment, they will have to work harder to do so now, and will suffer more tangible negative effects in all cases.

Finally, we have several item previews: the fabled Kakita blade wielded by Doji Kuwanan and omamori—protective charms carried by the devout in Rokugan.

Greetings Legend of the Five Rings Open Beta Testers,

To start off, the development team would like to thank you for your enthusiasm, energy, and excellent contributions over the course of the Open Beta! We’ve been really impressed by your response and the excellent conversations you’ve fostered.

This will be the final survey of the Open Beta. After we receive the information here, we will be stepping back, assessing all of the feedback we have received, and weaving together the final version of the manuscript with all of the changes fully integrated. We have been making positive iterative changes throughout the Open Beta, and much of our time will be spent applying these changes and making sure that they are implemented across the board, with all of their ramifications fully considered. Some parts of the final manuscript might differ quite a bit from the current implementation as we make updates and revisions based on the iterative changes, but the concepts we have settled on with your help over the course of the Open Beta will be preserved.

Two major points remain to update: character advancement and Ninjō/Giri. We’ll address here what we’re planning for these, and the survey will provide you an opportunity to weigh in on these.

Character Advancement

Playtesters have expressed a desire for more freeform character advancement, specifically with regards to the feeling that experience spent outside of curriculum is “wasted.” We do want players to be encouraged to invest in their curriculum, but consistent feedback is that receiving nothing for one’s other investments is frustrating. To address this, we will be making the following changes to character advancement:

Any purchase outside of your current school rank now contributes half of its experience value to your current school rank.
Rings are no longer included in school curriculums.
Experience to complete school ranks is going to be increased significantly.
Recommended experience rewards will be dropped to one per hour of play, with two per hour and/or discretionary bonuses for milestones offered as an option for GMs.

Ninjō/Giri

The development team sat down several weeks ago and asked: what do we want Ninjō and Giri to accomplish, and is it doing those things? Here’s what we came up with:

Encourage players to think about the character motives fundamental to samurai drama.
Give players a feeling of agency in the resolution of their characters’ inner turmoil.
Give the GM a way to engage the specific samurai drama stories the players want to tell.

We feel that objectives 1 and 3 are being met by the current system. Players are asked to specify how their character operates in a samurai drama, pulled between desires that might come into conflict. GMs are provided with information about the stories that interest their players. There are myriad interesting stories to tell in Legend of the Five Rings, but not every character operates on every axis; some characters are drawn between political necessities and grand romantic desires, while others have simpler wishes complicated by their circumstances or the expectations of society. By giving players a chance to define the conflict they want to play out at the start of a story, the GM is able to start thinking about these threads and weaving them into a larger plot.

However, we agree with player comments that objective 2 is not being satisfied: the current system offers guidance and light mechanical implications of pursuing/ignoring one’s duty or desires, but generally leaves it in the hands of the GM to dangle plot hooks before the players. This has a certain dissonance with the fundamental idea—that Ninjō and Giri are one of the places that players are able to collaborate with the GM to set up samurai drama everyone enjoys. Further, it runs a bit counter to many of the foundational works of the genre, where characters often choose to confront the conflict between their duty and their desires on their own terms (even if this might lead to tragedy).

As such, the following is our concept for Ninjō and Giri moving forward:

“Once per game session, a player may call for a Pivotal Scene involving their character to occur. The player gives a brief overview of a scene they want to roleplay related to their Ninjō, Giri, or the friction between the two. This should be a dynamic moment for the character, in which their faith in Bushidō is tested (usually ninjō) or their reputation is cast into question (usually giri). In their overview, the player should focus on the goals they wish to accomplish and how they relate to their duty or desires, as well as what is standing in the way of them accomplishing those goals. This scene could even occur out of sequence, and may be presented as a flashback (especially if one or more of the characters in question are deceased or otherwise unable to participate).

Next, the GM offers comments, suggested revisions, and guidance on situating this scene in the story—as well as the obstacle being described—along with the amount of honor, glory, or both that the player must stake on the outcome of the scene (see Staking Honor, Glory, and Status). If the player wishes to proceed with the scene, they stake the honor or glory and their character must spend one Void point.

The scene proceeds as a normal scene, with the GM improvising the action while drawing on previously established facts where possible to help build the scene. If the scene does not involve all of the PCs (or other NPCs who the uninvolved players can temporarily portray), the GM should consider keeping its duration to five minutes or less.

At the end of the scene, the player and GM must assess its consequences, as well as whether the character overcame or worked around the obstacles to their goal, or perhaps changed goals altogether. If the character’s faith in Bushidō is upheld, they do not lose any staked honor, and might even receive an honor award of the GM’s determination. If the character’s reputation is undamaged, they do not lose any staked glory, and might even receive a glory award if they did something worthy, at the GM’s determination. It should be very rare for a pivotal scene to occur without some change in a character’s honor, glory, or both—even a seemingly neutral outcome could gnaw at a character’s faith in the code by which they live their life or undermine their efficacy as a samurai in the eyes of others.

As with all matters, the GM is the final arbiter over whether the scene is appropriate or not—but the GM should offer an alternative that deals with the same Ninjō or Giri if they truly think a suggestion won’t work as proposed. In the same vein, the GM should not hesitate to ask the player to furnish additional details if they get stuck in framing or resolving the scene, or even turn to the other players table and ask for suggestions.”

Now that you’ve read over these options, head over to the survey here and give us your feedback on these ideas, as well as a number of other questions as we wrap up the Open Beta. Feel free to continue sending us your feedback for the next few weeks, and discussing this Beta on the forums.

We sincerely appreciate all of the passion you have displayed for Legend of the Five Rings roleplaying, and all the time you have put into testing, analyzing, and commenting on the Open Beta. Your feedback has been very important to the development of the game, and will continue to influence it as we develop the final manuscript!