Lo5R will be a LCG now

[Username17]

L5R isn't really a case of a game which we rag on because we are a bunch of negative nellies. It's a genuinely a bad game. It's bad on a lot of levels. It's bad on most levels it is possible for a game to be bad, up to and including containing offensively racist bits here and there.

L5R fails to present a structure by which groups of players can make characters and play the game. It is a monument of failed game design much more basic than having unclear rules interactions or unfair abilities. The game is unplayable even if you ignore all the rules.

The rules themselves are also really really bad. Unsalvageably bad. It isn't just that the numeric inputs are off or there are powers that invalidate whole genre tropes or whatever - it's that the core mechanic is simply terrible. I'm a dice loving nerd, I play To Court The King for fun, I really do understand the appeal of Roll And Keep. I've mathhammered it a bunch of ways and tried to make roll and keep functional - but you really can't make it work. While kind of attractive in a way, roll and keep is simply a bad idea. And it's the idea at the center of all the mechanics of this stupid fucking game.

So with all it is that's terrible about L5R, which is basically all of it, why is it that we still care? Why hasn't L5R been quietly forgotten about like all its shitty contemporaries like Trinity and Multiverser? Why is that despite having been burned repeatedly by this festering monument of rat jizz, that I am still going to do some good-faith investigation into the new version that FFG puts out when they get around to it? Because L5R lives in an echological niche that I want to play, and it is the game in that niche that has the best art. That makes it by default the game to fix if you want to play in that eco-niche, which I do.

Having good art is super important. People do not sign on to play a game because they randomly decided to finish reading a 300 page role playing game textbook. They play a game because they are grabbed by the one-paragraph description or an evocative piece of game art. This effect is so strong that people talk about playing Scion, despite the fact that that game doesn't even exist. Scion is a thousand pages long across three books and lacks an action resolution system. All the text and numbers is simply gibberish floating in a void because nowhere in any of those tomes was the slightest attention paid to the fact that a core mechanic might have to be written at some point. No table or sentence anywhere in the book is given over to telling you how rolling 3 is different from rolling 2 or 4. The "game" portion of the game simply never got written because there were 17 cooks working on the damn thing and apparently all of them thought it was someone else's job.

Nevertheless, people fucking play Scion. Because "demigods in vaguely modern times fighting monsters" is a popular niche and Scion unquestionably has the best art of any of the games that promise that you can play Percy Jackson or Wonder Girl. It's literally unplayable and people do it anyway, even if they have to write the game and the setting and the major characters from scratch.

L5R is the Asian fantasy game with the best art. It's an offensive heap of flaming garbage, but I still want to see it fixed. Because while I can write a better game system and I can write better characters and I can write a better setting... I can't make hundreds of gorgeous paintings of Asian fantasy characters.

-Username17

[Morat]

Seems to me you people manage to find something to break/is broken in every game. :/

You might say that there's a lot of negativity on the Den -even though I think you'll find that people play and enjoy many of the games they criticize, and just don't tend to write about it- but if you do, this isn't the thread to do it in. The L5R RPG was shit from top to bottom: unbalanced, poorly suited to serialised group play, full of massively stupid setting bits and the core mechanic is both utterly inscrutable and incredibly clunky. It's telling that John Wick jumped ship to make Seventh Sea of all things. To hear him tell it he made improvements all around, but Seventh Sea itself still has such enormous problems in all the same areas that I don't consider it playable.

7th Sea has...maybe one significant improvement. The setting is not written to fight too hard against mixed-nation groups the way that L5R shits all over mixed-clan groups. That's a noticeable upgrade.

But Jesus wept, it's a fucking swashbuckling pirate game without Africa or the New World, and Asia is behind an almost impenetrable wall of fire. They eventually stuck a few tiny islands out in the not-Atlantic like the Lesser Antilles was all anyone wanted out of the Caribbean. It's like, dude, Tortuga and Port Royal were pirate havens because they were far away from effective government but right next to absolutely stupendous wealth traveling by ship.

And as heinous as L5R's skill system is, where there are far too many and buying your stats is a way better deal, 7th Sea is a huge step back. Instead of nine stats, there are only five. And the skill list is several times longer, but the relative prices are identical. I know it says "knacks" and they come under "skills", but the "knacks" are what you spend XP individually raising. You just have to first buy a "skill" that has the knack you want. Granted, about 10% of those are from not-China (that you can't get to) or not-Ottomans (that you won't be living in), but fucking hell. Note that where, for example, it says "Attack" and then lists a bunch of weapons indented...all of those are bought separately.

It's mechanically so, so much worse. I guess there is a somewhat better caster-mundane balance because you have to pay 40 of your starting 100XP to suck at a fairly narrow area of magic instead of L5R where much more versatile magic is free. But it just ends up as an exaggeration of L5R. If you min-max, you can be effective, if you don't, you'll suck until the campaign ends because advancement is so slow.

[mlangsdorf]

My experience with 7th Sea was that because of the cost of knacks and the number of different knacks you needed to be a chandelier swinging, banister sliding, acrobatically dodging, sword swinging swashbuckler, it wasn't possibly to build D'Artagnan on the starting PC's budget. D'Artagnan, who is literally the epitome of a starting swashbuckler who will grow into greatness. And in this fucked up game, D'Artagnan is not a starting PC.

Various other experiments confirmed you couldn't be an effective pirate at the start (well, maybe you could play Jim Hawkins, but he's a fucking cabin boy, not a pirate). You could have an adequate amount of the pseudo-German country's nifty armor, but only if you set on fire your ability to walk, talk, or engage in combat as anything other than an armored target dummy. I never even figured out the magic system, but it seemed pretty obvious that whatever magic did, you couldn't do that and anything else: so swashbuckling sorceress or voodoo witch doctor pirate captain were completely off the page.

The fact that dice system was still screwed up (though somewhat less than L5R) was concealed somewhat by the fact that I couldn't generate characters I wanted to play, and therefore didn't actually have to interact with that part of the rules. Which isn't a ringing endorsement of the game by any means.

[ghost whistler]

L5R isn't really a case of a game which we rag on because we are a bunch of negative nellies. It's a genuinely a bad game. It's bad on a lot of levels.

asserted without evidence.

It's bad on most levels it is possible for a game to be bad, up to and including containing offensively racist bits here and there.

What racist bits? Chapter and verse please; I have 4e, please provide page references to these racist elements.

L5R fails to present a structure by which groups of players can make characters and play the game.It is a monument of failed game design much more basic than having unclear rules interactions or unfair abilities. The game is unplayable even if you ignore all the rules.

Then how have people managed to play it?

The rules themselves are also really really bad. Unsalvageably bad.

Citation needed.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Did you miss the link to the detailed review of the RPG earlier in the thread? The one that was a direct reply to one of your posts?

Because right now you're the guy demanding evidence while refusing to look at the pile of evidence that's been presented to them. Don't be that guy.

[ghost whistler]

Did you miss the link to the detailed review of the RPG earlier in the thread? The one that was a direct reply to one of your posts?

Because right now you're the guy demanding evidence while refusing to look at the pile of evidence that's been presented to them. Don't be that guy.

The link to the review of an out of date edition? Yes I saw that, but since it's out of date I didn't see the point. As I mentioned, I would like references from 4e which is the current edition and has been for some time. These sorts of criticisms wouldn't fly for DnD 5e if they referenced ADnD 2e for example.

[angelfromanotherpin]

I'm not aware of anything substantial that changed either system or setting wise between those two editions.

[Omegonthesane]

Did you miss the link to the detailed review of the RPG earlier in the thread? The one that was a direct reply to one of your posts?

Because right now you're the guy demanding evidence while refusing to look at the pile of evidence that's been presented to them. Don't be that guy.

The link to the review of an out of date edition? Yes I saw that, but since it's out of date I didn't see the point. As I mentioned, I would like references from 4e which is the current edition and has been for some time. These sorts of criticisms wouldn't fly for DnD 5e if they referenced ADnD 2e for example.

Your example is completely invalid. The three D&D edition changes that I was awake for, and the one that apparently happened before I was really aware of the franchise, were all paradigm shifts in the approach to game design (unified mechanic with unprecedented testing -> make everything a special case -> forget to actually write a game... I never said these were GOOD paradigm shifts). D&D is also not a single setting, but a framework designed to allow for various settings, intentionally including "the MC's homebrew".

A more valid comparison would be the two edition changes for Vampire: the Masquerade, where as I understand it all the fluff and setting remained the same while the mechanics got slight updates instead of a total overhaul; or Shadowrun 4e to 5e, where as I understand it various fiddly specifics of the system got worse without any real attempt to rewrite the game; or Warhammer 40,000 3e -> 4e -> 5e -> d6e -> 7e, to give a wargame example.

Even in those cases, there are specific and identifiable differences that can be pointed out in order to say "V:tM Revised is not V:tM 2e!" or the like.

The reason that you cannot take a point about D&D 3.5 and make it about D&D 4e is that these two are very different games - indeed, one is hardly recognisable as the other's relative if you look at the system and not the titles of things.

There exists a detailed review of L5R 3e. The onus is on you, and not on Frank, to point out the specific things that have changed that make it invalid when talking about L5R 4e.

L5R fails to present a structure by which groups of players can make characters and play the game.It is a monument of failed game design much more basic than having unclear rules interactions or unfair abilities. The game is unplayable even if you ignore all the rules.

Then how have people managed to play it?

By ignoring the setting as well, creating that structure themselves, and then pretending the game did so for them and giving it credit for a deed it never performed.

[koz]

ghost_whistler seems to be so engaged in his mindcaulk, he's not even aware that mindcaulk is a thing. It's both amazingly sad and amazingly hilarious to watch. Keep doin' what you do, ghost_whistler.

[Aryxbez]

I do think some of what ghost whistler is a valid concern, as in the review itself, some stuff that got complained about being missing or problematic was pointed out by me and Longes as being featured in the 4e printing. However, I wouldn't doubt the rest of the 4e abilities from 3e as being unchanged. It still works under highly faulty dice mechanics, hyper specialization being essentially required to matter, and the game failing on the basic principle of getting parties to go on adventures together for more than a one-shot.

So I think he should still read the reviews for the "evidence" he demands. As while some of the complains present might not be true, the overall product itself is still faulty (In fact the linked TN's might still be bad or inconsistent with the ruleset themselves).

[ghost whistler]

ghost_whistler seems to be so engaged in his mindcaulk, he's not even aware that mindcaulk is a thing. It's both amazingly sad and amazingly hilarious to watch. Keep doin' what you do, ghost_whistler.

You mean a phrase that noone else uses outside this site, a phrase who's meaning isn't self evident? good work dude.

[ghost whistler]

There exists a detailed review of L5R 3e. The onus is on you, and not on Frank, to point out the specific things that have changed that make it invalid when talking about L5R 4e.

No, the burden of proof is on the person that makes claims.

I have no interest in an older version of the game, whether it contained this or that is irrelevant; 4e is the current version. Either retract the claims, if they no longer apply, or back up those claims.

By ignoring the setting as well, creating that structure themselves, and then pretending the game did so for them and giving it credit for a deed it never performed.

You speak for all the people playing the game do you?

[Username17]

ghost's claim that he refuses to read the already posted six page hate fest on why L5R is not good on multiple levels but that the assertions that L5R is not good don't count because there isn't any evidence is like climate change deniers levels of bullshit. It's a temper tantrum where he demands things and also refuses to even check if his demands have been met (which they actually have of course). He literally just lost all credibility. I wouldn't piss on that man if he was on fire. He's perilously close to hitting the ignore list because honestly ain't no one have time for threadshitting like that.

But discussing why Roll And Keep is a dead end of game design is potentially interesting, so we should probably do that. In Roll And Keep, you have two ways to increase your average outputs: adding a rolled die and adding a kept die. L5R of course makes that less interesting by adding a rolled die or adding a rolled and a kept die, thus making there be no required analysis at all to determine which is better under any circumstances. But that's not a requirement, you could keep the two questions distinct and have something which is interesting. Not good as a system backbone for an RPG, but interesting.

Adding a rolled die adds to your output if the new die rolls higher than your lowest current kept die (nothing at all if it fails to meet that criteria), and adding a kept die adds to your output as long as there are any more rolled dice with a positive value. The simplest Roll And Keep system is Shadowrun 5. Every die outputs either zero or one (hit), and increasing the "limit" (which is your kept dice) makes a difference if you still have dice that have hits on them (and no difference if you don't), and increasing your "dice pool" (which is your rolled dice) makes a difference if you have less hits than your kept dice and also roll hits on the new dice. Shadowrun 5 is a dog with fleas of course, which doesn't mean the concept is necessarily unsalvageable (although in this case it is).

You probably hadn't even noticed that SR5 was a Roll and Keep system, and to be honest the ability to keep a bunch of dice that add zero is pretty much semantics. SR5's book speaks in terms of maximum numbers of dice that are hits that count, which in identical in output but thought of differently. Truth be told, you only really notice that you're doing Roll And Keep if a new rolled die frequently rolls higher than your lowest kept die, which in turn requires that you be rolling dice with a lot of variance. Roll And Keep with dice that go from 1 to 6 (as is the case with Silhouette and Necromunda) is hardly even noticeable. The end result just sort of clusters around the higher result and the dial doesn't move much. Roll And Keep only becomes a thing you notice you're doing when you roll big dice. Like, d10s at the minimum.

L5R does of course use d10s (exploding d10s even, which average a bit over 6 each). But that brings up the other end of the scale: when you're adding a kept die and the dice are really big, the game's increments are really large. If you keep one die more than your opponent, your outputs are different from theirs by about 5 points. That means that your game has a great difficulty modeling characters being somewhat close in skill - if you aren't first you're last. More generally, in a Roll And Keep system the average result of an additional rolled die is always going to be pretty close to the difference between the average roll of a die and its maximum - which means that outcomes aren't much in doubt unless the people on the lower end of the scale are already rolling and keeping a bunch of dice. As a rough minimum, if you're keeping less than 8 dice or so, it's very unlikely for you to be able to compete with someone keeping even one more die than you.

But now we're hitting the third constraint: to make this system work we need to roll a lot of d10s and not keep a bunch of them and still have a bunch more that we do keep and then add them all up. We're talking about rolling like 12 d10s and then doing math operations on them. Physically at the table this is extremely bullshit.

L5R doesn't come especially close to making a workable design. But the much more important and interesting problem is that the underlying concept of how the core mechanics should resolve is basically not something that could work with any inputs. We can vary the die size, vary the target numbers, vary the number of dice rolled, and vary the number of dice kept. There simply is no sweet spot. By the time you make the die size and die piles large enough to overcome stultifying determinism,you've landed yourself with a procedure which is an intractable pain in the ass to actually use at the table.

-Username17

[ghost whistler]

ghost's claim that he refuses to read the already posted six page hate fest on why L5R is not good on multiple levels but that the assertions that L5R is not good don't count because there isn't any evidence is like climate change deniers levels of bullshit

.
I made no such assertion.

I haven't made a claim. You have, several times. That's why I have asked you to provide evidence, but instead of doing so you seem to want to tediously drag this into a shit storm.

It's a temper tantrum where he demands things and also refuses to even check if his demands have been met (which they actually have of course).

There was nothing emotional in my post at all. To call it a temper tantrum is simply to reveal your own attitude, as is regarding my asking you to back up your claims as a 'demand'. I haven't 'demanded' anything; I hve simply asked you to back up what you assert with evidence. Surely this isn't difficult?

He literally just lost all credibility. I wouldn't piss on that man if he was on fire. He's perilously close to hitting the ignore list because honestly ain't no one have time for threadshitting like that.

Asking you to back up your repeated claims of a game being utterly unplayable and completely broken - and racist, even - is threadshitting?

Extraordinary.

If you want to have a shit fit, I'm not going to stop you. By all means chuck your toys right out the pram.

BTW, you're not an rpg.net moderator are you?

In Roll And Keep, you have two ways to increase your average outputs: adding a rolled die and adding a kept die. L5R of course makes that less interesting by adding a rolled die or adding a rolled and a kept die, thus making there be no required analysis at all to determine which is better under any circumstances. But that's not a requirement, you could keep the two questions distinct and have something which is interesting. Not good as a system backbone for an RPG, but interesting.

I don't know how this answers anything I've asked for

You probably hadn't even noticed that SR5 was a Roll and Keep system, and to be honest the ability to keep a bunch of dice that add zero is pretty much semantics.

Why would I?

L5R doesn't come especially close to making a workable design. But the much more important and interesting problem is that the underlying concept of how the core mechanics should resolve is basically not something that could work with any inputs. We can vary the die size, vary the target numbers, vary the number of dice rolled, and vary the number of dice kept. There simply is no sweet spot. By the time you make the die size and die piles large enough to overcome stultifying determinism,you've landed yourself with a procedure which is an intractable pain in the ass to actually use at the table.

So not actually unplayable, nor racist, just a bit swingy.

[Username17]

I don't know how this answers anything I've asked for

It doesn't. Also, I don't care, because I'm not talking to you. You're a threadshitting asshole who keeps moving goalposts and insists that he's never satisfied with anything and that any evidence for X doesn't count because it doesn't also simultaneously prove Y even when it is presented immediately adjacent to evidence for Y.

Go fuck yourself. Welcome to my ignore list.

If other, more reasonable people want to have a discussion about Asian Fantasy or the perils of Roll and Keep, I'm game. But I am done with this particular petulant twatshitter.

-Username17

[ghost whistler]

It doesn't. Also, I don't care, because I'm not talking to you.

You referenced me, I responded. Get over yourself.

You're a threadshitting asshole who keeps moving goalposts and insists that he's never satisfied with anything and that any evidence for X doesn't count because it doesn't also simultaneously prove Y even when it is presented immediately adjacent to evidence for Y.

So on top of accusing me of 'threadshitting', which really means "i can't handle the question so i'll resort to ad hom", you want to accuse me also of moving goalposts - all without evidence.

You're a child. You don't work as an rpg.net moderator as well, do you?

I guess we'll never know because you've decided to take your ball and go home.

If other, more reasonable people want to have a discussion about Asian Fantasy or the perils of Roll and Keep, I'm game. But I am done with this particular petulant twatshitter.

Are you fifteen or something? You sound like a child.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Wow, decrying ad hominem in one sentence, then hurling an insult in the next. Well done.

[souran]

Its saturday morning and I have nothing better to do, so I guess I will jump in here a bit.

Here are some reasons why L5R bad game ghost.

Frank already pointed out that the core mechanic is horrible. It extremely clunky at the table. My experience with the game has seen table play basically devolve into something like this:

A) Mister Cavern calls for a test
B) Players that are good at that area/optimized get results ranging from 30-50
C) Everybody else gets a result ranging from 1-10.
D) Regardless it takes like 3-5 minutes to determine the result of a single roll.
E) Mister Cavern realizes that calling for rolls is pointless because the system is basically binary. Players are either gods or failures.
F) Mister Cavern STOPS ASKING FOR ROLLS. Seriously, EVERY SINGLE GAME of L5R (except d20) has very quickly stopped using the die rolling procedure for anything except combat nearly instantly.

If people are avoiding your core mechanic you have a bad game.

The set-up of the setting is really good for a competitive game like a card game or minis game. However, when they translated this into the RPG they forgot that players will want to play characters from clans that don't like each other and that this needs to somehow work. A party with a lion clan samurai and a scorpion clan courtier/assassin needs to work like a party with a paladin and a true neutral rogue. Instead, the sourcebooks for the RPG act like you are somehow going to get all the players to be happy with monoclan games. FFG managed to figure out that a setting backdrop designed for wargamming (40K) needs to be modified to have a fewer mandatory Kill-On-Site situations than the wargame to make an interesting RPG. Hogshead publishing understood this 25 years ago when they put together the first warhammer rpg.

Now, again, a lot of people simply ignore this aspect of the fluff and play with mixed clan parties where people are from factions that are either actively at war with each other or have long standing vows to never cooperate with each other. However, this is the fluff equivalent of avoiding the dice mechanic. It also means that both players and DMs have to realize that when they read fluff in setting books, clan books, or novels that the characterizations might not be applicable when they play. This means that the fluff becomes counter productive to immersion, which is bad because thats the whole fucking point of fluff.

I will leave dealing with the racist parts to somebody else. The L5R RPG is a mess. It always has been a mess. The most playable version has been the d20 one and that version tended to play out as D&D with all the weapons renamed.

[ghost whistler]

Wow, decrying ad hominem in one sentence, then hurling an insult in the next. Well done.

What does this even mean? The guy's entire post demonstrates the most childish attitude possible, ignoring everything i've asked, quite calmly and quite politley, and dismissing what i've said as 'threadshitting'. Now you want to play the moral equivalence card? Let's keep it real ffs!

When claims as hyperbolic as have been made are produced, I want to see the evidence. When a game is dismissed as being racist, I want to see the evidence. Abuse is not evidence, insults hyperbole and ad hominem attacks are not evidence. Do you have any? If not, then why are you posting?

[ghost whistler]

Here are some reasons why L5R bad game ghost.

Specifically the claims were that it was broken unplayable and racist. Being bad is not the same. Not liking the game is not evidence that it is any of those things.

F) Mister Cavern STOPS ASKING FOR ROLLS. Seriously, EVERY SINGLE GAME of L5R (except d20) has very quickly stopped using the die rolling procedure for anything except combat nearly instantly.

So that is your perception, again that doesn't explain why plenty of people enjoy the game. So we are talking personal preference. That is fine, you are not obligated to like it.

If people are avoiding your core mechanic you have a bad game.

Are they? How many?

However, when they translated this into the RPG they forgot that players will want to play characters from clans that don't like each other and that this needs to somehow work.

I don't think that's a reasonable criticism. It's part of the setting. The DNA of Rokugan is based around clans that don't always get along or work together. It is not written that players must come from different clans, even though they might want to. There are other games that have this problem, such as Fading Suns. This is a feature of the setting, if you don't like ir or can't make it work, that's fine you find something that works for you. It is not evidence the game is broken.

I will leave dealing with the racist parts to somebody else. The L5R RPG is a mess. It always has been a mess.

Again, assertion.

[Omegonthesane]

There exists a detailed review of L5R 3e. The onus is on you, and not on Frank, to point out the specific things that have changed that make it invalid when talking about L5R 4e.

No, the burden of proof is on the person that makes claims.

I have no interest in an older version of the game, whether it contained this or that is irrelevant; 4e is the current version. Either retract the claims, if they no longer apply, or back up those claims.

RIGHT FUCKING HERE, YOU ARE MAKING THE CLAIM THAT ABSOLUTELY NOTHING FROM 3E HAS CARRIED FORWARD INTO 4E.

Absent chapter and verse citations of changes made in 4e, we have less than no reason to assume any fluff has meaningfully changed, and less than no reason to assume any mechanics have been even amended.

Therefore, Occam's Razor implies that anything that held true for 3e holds true for 4e. This is the default position, it is not a new claim demanding new evidence, it is the result of existing rules and existing proven statements.

You have claimed that, contrary to what observation of the L5R RPG property over the years would suggest, absolutely nothing that was wrong in 3e is wrong in 4e.

YOU ARE THE ONE WHO MUST BACK THAT SHIT UP.

[Mask_De_H]

Okay, ghost, you have gone completely batshit fanboy crazy here and need to dial it back. If you are looking to disprove a claim made about something when data has been provided, you must provide data to the contrary, not throw a shit fit and accuse your opponent of doing so. If you are the one stating 4e has fixed things, the onus is on you to provide evidence.

It you are unwilling or unable to provide said evidence, agree to disagree and drop it. Doing what you're currently doing just makes you look bad.

[Grek]

Frank, that's a very interesting take on roll and keep. Could you have a roll and keep system work where the number of dice kept is fixed? For example, xd6k3?

[Omegonthesane]

Frank, that's a very interesting take on roll and keep. Could you have a roll and keep system work where the number of dice kept is fixed? For example, xd6k3?

Well, that model means you can only have target numbers in the range 3 to 18, but at least you "only" need one probability table for each number of dice you could be rolling.

Some mucking about with Anydice tells me that once you hit 16d6k3 more than half your rolls are 18. That's a dice pool worthy of a squad of Khorne berserkers on the charge so you may want to stop before then anyway.

[Grek]

Right. Xd6k3 features a fixed range of possible outcomes (3 to 18), theoretically unlimited scalability of the RNG (adding an extra dice is always better, but will never take you off the RNG), but a practically limited scalability of about 10 or so before the benefits of an additional die are too small to reliably notice. Most results are skewed toward high, but the occasional black swan of all 1s can pop up. Downsides include the fact that its probabilities can't be calculated by hand and that the variance on the RNG shrinks as your dicepool grows.