FrankTrollman wrote:If you wanted to make the game have the longest possible shelf life, I would think you'd want to do both things - the Samurai could start his level 1 career as a lone Bushi, a third son who isn't entitled to dick diddly, but as he goes up in level he becomes automatically entitled to an army of his own. The key here is that you have to make sure that this advancement is sufficiently automatic that it actually happens. If the Samurai needs his house forces to be a level appropriate force at Name Level and the Shugenja just happens to know more powerful spells - then you're in a position where if the MC puts his foot down on the Samurai getting his retainers you're back to Fighters not having nice things.
I almost wrote that starting as a crap-covered farmer should be
permissable, but I couldn't articulate it in the time I had to write the last message. I generally agree, but I seriously would insist on the caveat that the GM should consider starting weak a "specialty" campaign, like "everyone is a merfolk!" or "the game starts in Hell!" I want the game to actually, blatantly make the "starting as a somebody" notion to feel like the default. Otherwise, players will have to tussle with our cultural inertia when they sit down to play. Worse, I forsee GMs starting you as a "minor lord" but treating you like a teenage bushi, not out of malice, but out of habit. I may be biased on this, but I've seen too much of myth weavers to trust the worst of what the hobby has to offer.
Also, let's be clear here: starting out with non-scrub characters is just plain easier to build and run. It's easier to balance, it's easier to create plot hooks, it's easier for PCs to write personal histories and to create inter-PC relationships.
That said, I'm okay with zero-to-hero existing. Just leery of it. Really leery.
FrankTrollman wrote:I could go either way on that. If someone wants to play a Karasu Tengu I could see that being done with giving them a "magic being" class. But I could also see just telling them to take levels of Samurai and concentrate on the mystical abilities.
Spirit dude should have a splat of its own for the following reasons:
- a) "If we are to face shen in its own element, we will need proof against its charms." Each splat's powerset should have (mild) counters employable with proper preparation. Counter systems are a pain in the ass to design, but it's very rewarding in genre. If spirit is a power-type, getting counters against its powers is on the table, just as grabbing anti-shinobi powers for a samurai or anti-kata powers for a monk would make sense.
- b) "Only the ways of the spirit realm can create a space bigger inside than out." Having an additional powerset for spirits makes them more distinctive. Some nonhumans will not have anything to do with monks or ninjas or samurai. Nature spirits, for example, really don't have any conceptual overlap with any of these dudes -- the closest one comes to is monk -- and nature spirits are obviously going in. The Yuki-onna's weather powers aren't terribly monkish and we most certainly should have the former in.
- c) "While in the womb, he was touched by the spirits of the forest. He sees what we do not." People will want to run half-blooded beings. As mentioned previously, multi-splatting is perfectly fine. The easiest way to make a half-human, half-Huli jing/kitsune is to make a menu of spirit creature traits/abilities and let the hybrid just pick enough to qualify as a hybrid. Thematic distinctiveness is maintained, and it's mechanically straightforward.
This also enables fairly cherished plot tropes. Instead of the GM having to bullshit a sword that only a heavenly being can wield, or a gate that may only be entered by a child of man, you can have your system point to traits that only mortals or spirits and/or hybrids have. You'll have to make sure that the hybrid isn't over-strong by having a foot in both camps, but it's worth it.
Note that this is two separate, intertwined arguments: that spirit-being is a creature type and that spirit powers are a powerset. You could achieve some of what I'm seeking here by making only one of those two things true.
Longes wrote:This raises a question: how important Shugenja archetype is? What makes Shugenja - Shugenja? Shugenja as a spiritual person can easily be folded into the Monk, because that's what IRL shugenja are/were. Shugenja as a magic user is problematic, for reasons you outlined - wizard's conceptual space is much bigger than every other conceptual field, unless you severely restrict him. At high levels things inevitably get silly - ability to move one mountain or turn one river per day is just better than having tiny men. And while a wizard can potentially get himself an army, a samurai can never move mountains.
Shugenjas, like d20 wizards, are librarians with super-powers. Their idiom is the use of book-learning and writing to achieve paranatural effects. D&D fanboyism has entrenched this notion as the "default" for magic, such that some geeks have difficulty conceiving of magic as anything other than what mega-librarians do.
Note that this notion contaminates what it touches. Shugenja are basically priests irl. L5R converts them into a more cerebral, literary class and diminishes their religious capacity. It
tells you that shugenja are priests, but then it offers
zero opportunity to square shugenja abilities and behaviors with the religion of the world. And most players never notice. This is how the contaminant works. Once you're a wizard, the previous idiom is now a veneer over the wizard. If the contaminant hit a practitioner of voudoun, for instance, the character would have a stylistic conceit of mentioning Erzulie and Chango in his incantations, but he would still gain powers from book-reading and research.
Once you realize this, shugenja/wizards are easy. If you want to have word magic, have word magic. If you don't want word magic, don't have that shit. And if you don't have word magic, then the only magic available will be sub-divided thematic magical specializations. The scales fall from your eyes, to be excessively dramatic. After all, word-magic was just a specialization that you had, inadvertently, amped up to eleventy-zillion.
When you say "wizards can move mountains," what you are really saying is "magic users who use word/book magic can move mountains because I have, through conformity with my particular subculture, imparted Real Ultimate Power upon word/book magic and simultaneously taken a shit on every other idiom imaginable." And I'm not trying to pick on you: this nasty little bug has swept through geekdom like the clap at a modern old folk's home. If you enforce the conscious notion of word/book as an idiom, it no longer makes sense to say "samurai can't move mountains but librarians can" because librarians obviously fucking can't. You stuck the adjetive "magical" in front of librarians (subconsciously) and refused to do the same for samurai: you then wondered how you got different results. Again, what you're doing is being done by millions of people and everyone on this board has probably done it. Paizo literally makes its money by doing this.
L5R is a persistently good example here. Think about it: why do shugenja get to spend ring points for effects? If you read "shugenja spend an extra, special pool of points for effects" and "samurai don't get this pool,"
why weren't you bothered? Why didn't you put the book down, immediately, and say, "what the fuck?" If you didn't react, I submit that it's likely because you've been trained by our (sub)culture to accept that Wizard(tm) gets a separate and unequal resource system for no reason. And having had that indsidious notion creep into your thinkmeats, you then, rightly, note that courtier 1/ninja 1 is inferior to shugenja 1, but can't clearly note why.
Now, I'm not claiming that ring points are a good thing thematically, merely that they are a strong thing. Once you open those up, you can then ask yourself: how come shugenja get lots of techniques -- spells -- and other classes don't? The answer there is simple: spells are justified by the "limitation" granted by ring points. The entire thing is just conceptual legerdemain. d20 wizards get the same bullshit dance: wizards are "weak" because they have only so many spell slots, but because they have limited slots, spells must be uber, and because they have only so many slots, spells must be varied. The entirety of the wizard's justification for being better than you has the rhetorical weight of the Lightning Warrior's satirical "doesnt' have a familiar" dodge.
If you excise the bigotry built into the "wizard assumption," there is no reason not to hand out L5R shugenja resources to all and sundry. Now, this will just go on to highlight how unthematic and uninteresting L5R shugenja casting really is, but that's okay because L5R is beyond saving and you shouldn't actually try to fix it: just end the thought experiment there.
You know what? Here is a helpful tip for anyone who is still laboring under wizard bigotry:
All splats must have their REAL class abilities listed under their central character description. Splats MUST NOT put such abilities in other chapters.
Application: Look at the wizard in d20. Take the entire wizard spell list and put it on the wizard's class description. Show this wizard writeup to a new d20 player. Show them the fighter. What shall they conclude? That the wizard is objectively better. Hiding class abilities in extra chapters is a deliberate attempt to smuggle power to a class. Doing this might stop some of the bullshit Pathfinder revels in.
Do this in L5R and you get the same result. (L5R, like much of WW, is written by d&d players who, having played few other games, see all gaming through the lens of the worst sort of immaturity you'd get from 2e AD&D.)
Magic specialization isn't just a strategy to fix the wizard.
Magic specialization is the natural result of removing D&D wizard bigotry from the game. When you put the wizards true splat all in one page, people new to the game, but not new to game design, will happily slash that sonofabitch up until the "wizard" becomes "fire mage" or "mind magician" or some shit. The problem will be obvious and the solution
instinctive. It will not occur to any concenred to "throw out magic."