FrankTrollman wrote:Card Game Decadence. In the original card game there weren't enough cards to make a mono-Clan deck. {. . .} So the card game became much friendlier to players who made mono-clan decks, but also the game designers got increasingly belligerent about players playing multi-clan decks - going so far as to call perfectly reasonable deck building choices "basically cheating."
I can’t comment on the “basically cheating” bit — I never heard that and would like to know where you heard it. I’m not doubting or challenging it — I seek elaboration. But as for the rest — that isn’t true. The situation was worse than that.
Lion was the favorite. Straight up. From the fucking beginning. Lion was the designer’s favorite.
You could make mono-Lion deck. You could make a Lion deck without non-Lions in it. It was the best deck in the game. You could make it in Imperial Edition, the first edition. It was the LSD, the Lion Speed Deck.
The only counter to Lion — and when I mean only, I mean only — was Breach of Ettiquette, which was totally unfair and hosed many other factions. (Or it did nothing, depending on when it was played, or it screwed you over when played so you couldn’t play it and it was dead in hand: it was a horrifically designed card, utter feast or famine.) They made a counter-card by the second expansion. I remember it was parodied at the time. IIRC, someone made up fake ancestral items for each faction. The item for Lion? The Ancestral Hankie of the Lion. Bow when a card prevents you from winning the game; a counter-card will be made in the next expansion. Flavor text: “Bu-buh—buh I wanted to win nooooooooowwwwwwww.”
Crane was broken, too, but Crane had such a dedicated win strategy that you could fill your deck with hate-cards and beat it. Which people did. Every tournament. Which is why Lion won the first story-“end” tournament, Time of the Void (y’know the tournament that was supposed to be the end of the story). Lion won. As expected. As predicted.
My friends and I built decks to beat Lion. It would take weeks of testing. That sentence is not a joke. My friend would put together a Lion deck in five minutes and I would carefully design decks, in-between school and work, over weeks and play against that abomination over and over. Were there other factions that were broken? Yes. But they didn’t have the
consistency that the LSD had. I knew I had lost on turn 2, usually on turn 1. The initial card flip sealed it.
The only faction that could in-clan all of its shugs without much pain was Phoenix, and most of its shugenja were overcosted. . . so their next box gave them a massive gold bonus for buying shugenja. The only reason they weren’t the most powerful faction was because a) broken shugenja shit was mid- to late-gameish and the game was over by turn 4 in many tournaments (LSD) and b) cheap shugenja were few in number so you didn’t have consistency.
During the third-ish story arc (really the heavier part of the second), Pheonix was flooded with cheap shugenja and (and a box that made ALL shugenja their clan) and good kiho (zero-cost magic tricks playable earlier in the game than conventional spells) were introduced. They became the dominant faction, bar none, for literally years, and the designers not only pretended that this wasn’t a problem, they actively supported rulings that made this worse.
N.B.: There were factions that only worked well, originally, if they had guys affiliated with themselves (e.g., Naga, Shadowlands, Scorpion).
They all sucked. Sucked diseased ass. For years.
Multi-clan alliances were supposed to be the point of the story. They were, in fact, hatefully bad within the CCG. The most shat-on “clan” in the game, the Naga, had a box that was literally a hybrid between themselves and the Crab. Everyone else gets to play themselves; they get a handout from another faction. Think about the slap in the face that represents.
FrankTrollman wrote:The implication from the original game was that it was entirely reasonable to expect some Unicorn clan Daimyo with a bunch of Lion clan allies or some fucking thing to be the next emperor and that you wouldn't recognize the place in five years no matter what.
And... they walked all of that back. Like, literally all of it.
I ran around getting people to play the game because Magical Japanese Civil War sounded like the coolest shit ever. Then — this would literally happen — they’d get the latest expansion and ask why the clans are all working together against skeleton people or pajama people and I’d have to admit the civil war was basically over about a month after it started.
Did you know that the only times that the story depicted actual interclan murder and warfare were either a) resolved to be the result of supernatural evil or b) horrible writing failures that the customers* hated?
There was no depiction of Clan vs. self violence for political reasons in the story of L5R, ever. The only depiction of that was in
marketing. Let’s test my memory here.
*I hesitate to say fans becuase the biggest fanboys were the designers.
• Crane daimyo leads a bunch of Shadowlands Madmen (a garbage card weaker than non-evil counterparts — way to support the theme there) to sack Crane lands. He’s a doppleganger controlled by the Scorpion. Also, he turns Shadowlands and eeeeevil. There is no political gain for a Crane faction for this. No one points out in the world that this makes no sense. It would be like the governor of Georgia just burining down Georgian homes. Not the homes of black people, mind you, well-off white people.
• Lion fights Lion for about 5 minutes because the Emperor is made out of Evil and some say “gotta serve” and some say “nah.” Then the Designer Favorite Lion Who Becomes Emperor Because Fuck Your Outcome-Determining Story Tournaments shows up and ends that. Again: one faction is made out of magic evil.
• Dragon civil war. The best character, say most customers, from the original story becomes a crazy murder chick. Because Ninja. She doesn’t explain shit, just goes crazy. Dragons start leaving. All the new Dragon cards have no or negligible honor scores, taking a deck archetype that never got adequate support (honorable dragon samurai) and simply destroying it. Fans HATE this. Crazy chick later becomes the Moon, replacing the previous god, who was a dick for no raison. A few months later, the designers kill her and replace her with another god because people aren’t supposed to become gods. N.B.: The Emperor can make humans into gods. Seriously. It’s been in the story since the first-ed. rpg.
There isn’t one short story, not one in-house fanfic, that describes Clan A fighting Clan A over food, territory, wealth, or pride without supernatural influence. Not one.
L5R made me a fucking liar, and I won’t forgive AEG for that.
L5R doesn’t have the cachet of even Vampire tM. “Tremere” and “Malkavian” are concepts filled with stupid, but there’s enough evocative stuff in there to grant them staying power. For example, some of that stuff still resonates with me, even though I will happily trash most of WW’s oeuvre. L5R’s selling point was that it was the only one in its niche. Really. It was the only fantasy Kurosawa really out there. Its characters were an initial draw, but only in the early parts of the first story,
before people began to write their dialogue, when they were mostly art pieces.
I know a crap-ton of WW trivia and I could, with a bunch of willing friends, cobble together a WoD game worth playing, though 95% of the original stuff would be stripped out, just on the strength of the few concepts that work — a few proper nouns and a premise. You could walk up to a stranger and describe my hypothetical game and that stranger could, despite massive houserules that defy original designer intent, recognize that game as WoD. Should you do it? Is it worth it? Eh and meh, respectively. But it’s not an inherently silly proposition.
I know a crap-ton of L5R trivia and there is no point in running a L5R rpg. Everything it does can be done by grabbing, say, GURPS Japan and starting from scratch. There isn’t a single proper noun that’s worth keeping. The only memorable characters Wick writes are gags — go look up Bayushi Tangen. And even then, they’re out-of-genre meta-gags. And most of the writers manage to be worse than Wick.
Crane and Lion are replaceable. Even their animal sigils are replaceable. Japanese: poet, Japanese: professional prideful murderer. Scorpion are the sneaky ones. Dragons are badass but aren’t the best for some reason. Phoenix = libraries. Unicorn have horsies. But everyone has horsies. Ignore that fact.
See, stop right there. Look at the Unicorn: their shtick was so bad that the CCG desperately prevented factions from using cavalry meaningfully during its whole existence, even though that makes no sense whatsover. L5R couldn’t find something for the Unicorn to do, so it took a horse-based society and removed horses from them so one faction could look good. I mean, how do you even — how is that even a thing? Horse archery is literally a samurai shtick. In story, Unicorn were teh best because they had European-style horses as opposed to smaller ponies — but the Mongols upon which they’re half-based ran the largest continuous land empire in human history precisely because they had hardy, flexible mountain ponies and not giant European warhorses. Think about the levels of fucktardedness in that process. It’s literally less psychologically demanding to remove Unicorn than it is to fix that!
The Followers of Set were mostly bad (last clanbook trying to fix them notwithstanding) so you could toss them, but the idea that vampires, a worldwide pheonomenon, don’t have ancient representation coming out of Egypt is absurd, so you’d have to throw
something into Egypt. In contrast, you should just erase the Unicorn.
The best thing to do with L5R is to find a japanese person who speaks fluent japanese and who is an avid geek and have them provide all the proper nouns for your homebrewed Asian Civil War game. Steal any tropes from L5R and use them wholesale; they will not be recognized. None of them are unique.
Edited: spelling error.
30 card dynasty deck doesn't need that deep of a bench.