And also World of Dew, cause the previous thread died before I could answer questions about it
Have you ever had an L5R session that focused on a siege or something else happening at a castle?
>>98406191I started a campaign off with a siege once. The Scorpion were sieging a Lion castle in the Vale of the Father and Daughter, where the Monkey eventually settle in the metaplot, and the PCs were participants on both sides. There were some efforts on both sides to break the siege, and the Scorpions managed to get some infiltrators in to open the gates before the Voice of the Emperor showed up to deliver a proclamation that the fighting had reached an unlawful level of mobilization and was henceforth proscribed. During his oversight of the stand-down and withdrawal, the PCs on both sides ended up in a position to save him from an assassination attempt by a Shadowspawn. Some weeks later, they were all summoned to the capital where the Emperor took advantage of their good deed saving one of his Chosen to name them the founders of a new minor clan based out of the besieged castle, putting a permanent end to the Lion-Scorpion warring in that region. The rest of the campaign was these former enemies having to get along and run their new minor clan and deal with further problems caused by the Lying Darkness acting against them.
>>98406191Way back in 1e we did the Scorpion Coup. My PC was a Scorpion Emerald Magistrate who was dancing on the edge of becoming Junshin (the rest of the party was all high honor types and the company he kept was influencing him). I had rolled the Yogo Curse on the heritage chart so me taking sides with with the Emerald Champion worked as a good resolution to the curse. During the siege his biggest contribution was stopping an assassin from killing Doji Satsume. When he faced the assassin she revealed herself to be his sister. He refused to back down and killed her in the ensuing fight. As she died he felt the Yogo Curse resolve, the poor bastard never he was cursed until that moment. Despite his best efforts he survived the coup and became Ronin though he retained his position as an Emerald Magistrate.He also participated in the Clan War in Toturi's Army. He desperately wanted forgiveness from his clansmen and Kachiko used it to string him along. He was her spy in Toturi's camp. She even set him up as a patsy during the Test of the Emerald Champion to effectively give her real preferred candidates an effective bye. He walked away from that with a moon shaped facial scar delivered by Mirumoto Hitomi.
>>98406871>The rest of the campaign was these former enemies having to get along and run their new minor clanAmazing, I wish I had players who could play opposed factions without being gay about it>>98408251>As she died he felt the Yogo Curse resolve, the poor bastard never he was cursed until that moment.What's it supposed to feel like?
>>98406191My party and I once assaulted a castle. Somehow one of the shugenja managed to hyuk that one magic fire spell into the top floor window and annihilated the entire floor.
>>98406187I'll ask a question. What questions were those and when are you going to answer them?
Someone sell me L5R. Also what edition? I imagine the one for D&D sucks. What about others?
>>98412027The main competition is between L5R 4e and L5R 5e.L5R 4e is timeline agnostic and keeps the traditional roll-and-keep system of previous editions, further refining it. It's the most complete edition designed to allow players to play at any point in the setting's history, using rules that had been refined over the course of two decades.L5R 5e is focused on a rebooted version of the setting and has a new system with novelty dice and a subsystem called Strife, which is focused on the build-up of internal strife in a samurai which may cause them to act irrationally when it reaches a boiling point. It's very much of a narrative system unlike anything that came before in L5R, with mechanics that encourage or force players to roleplay in a certain way, depending on your perspective.As for L5R itself, think of it as a Song of Ice and Fire with Japanese paint. The empire of Rokugan is divided into seven major clans or eight or nine depending on the era you're playing in who are supposed to loyally serve their emperor, each of which is associated with a specific animal and performs a specific function within the empire. Players play as samurai of these clans and their subfamilies, who must try to balance their duty to their immediate superior, their duty to their clan, their duty to their emperor and their personal aspirations and desires. These samurai are trained in specialised schools that allow them to be bushi (warriors), courtiers (socialites), shugenja (wizard-priests) or other more specialised roles (artisans, monks, ninjas, etc). The traditional L5R campaign is about playing Emerald Magistrates, samurai police who answer directly to the emperor and are supposed to be above clan politics, but they're almost inevitably pulled into courtly intrigue, petty duels, violent skirmishes and supernatural shenanigans that disrupt their investigations.
>>98410834Part of the Yogo Curse is that it lets you know that you have betrayed the thing you care for most. In my character's case it was the final betrayal of Clan and Family when he killed his sister. My GM described it as tension that was finally released, a tension my character had been living with for so long he thought it was normal. The release was relief combined with despair.
>>98412027>What edition4thPros>Fairly lethal>Characters and builds are very customisable and fun to theorycraft>Exploding dice D10 system means you always have a 0.1% chance to knock a roll out of the park even if you have shit stats for that roll. >Advantages/Disadvantages are fun. >Fun roleplay>Almost classless. There's basically Bushi (typical samurai), shugenja (mages) and courtiers (fancy talky dudes in court) and you can multiclass between them fairly well. >You can unlock bonus classes late game by speccing into specific shit and meeting steep requirements. >Has rules for duels, mass battles for the Warhammer/TotalWar enjoyers and court scenes. >Lore and worldbuilding is solid>Social heirarchy and status plays an important part so it heavily punishes "le heckin D&D murder hobos xD">Class balance between combat and casters is fairly goodCons>If you do a long campaign (like 1 year plus) it turns into repetitive "court scene, combat encounter, duel, court scene, investigating, court scene, duel" gameplay loop. >Some builds are fairly broken if you know how to abuse the game mechanics or if your DM is shitty. >Game is really unbalanced in the late game. Makes it very hard for a DM to throw a challenging combat/social encounter at the party short of making the enemy immune to basically everything>Lethal system can be pretty un-fun for some groups as one multi-exploding dice roll can 1-shot a character even late-game. >DM needs to be a fucking wordsmith lawyer rapbattle tier of competent in conversations otherwise social encounters and court scenes will be really shitty>"You cant do XYZ because your Daimyo/Honor/clan says you cant" can feel like an ass-pull sometimes or some players might call it railroading. Honestly 8/10. Very good system and me and my friends' general preferred system, but it falls apart at high lvl, in large groups or during very long campaigns. Run it with 2 maybe 3 friends in a 6-12 month campaign.
>>98412027To add, if you and your group like politics, intrigue, social encounters that feel like 2 characters trying to outmaneuver each other in chess and haiku rap battles you'll probably fucking love L5R.
CRAB CLAN HERE, FUCK THE CRANE, THEY ARE WORTHLESS AS SAMURAI
>>98420277Crab clanners are the obnoxious dwarf lovers of L5R.
>>98406191Yes. I ran the adventure with the siege of the Hare's clan castle for 1E (aka Best Edition). Gave the players extra characters. Turned out to be a good idea, because lots of characters died gloriously during the siege.
>>984120271E is the best. Someone said 1E is the most L5R edition of all five editions, and I agree. 2E is 1E with training wheels.3E and 4E have nothing in common, except they're both lame in their own way.5E has beautiful art, but it requires speciality dies and the system is much more complex than 1E.
