Lo5R will be a LCG now

[Orion]

So it sounds like they finally figured out that all three archetypes need to have a spell list they can learn a pile of different active abilities off of?

[Rubick]

Aye, although most schools have the same 3 techniques (spell lists) available: Kata (fight), Shuji (social), and Rituals (extremely minor prayers to kami/fortunes, tea ceremony, etc.)

Courtier and bushi are mostly just differentiated by their school technique. School techniques scale with rank. There's only a starting school technique and a Rank 6 (aka lvl 20) capstone technique. There's no mid-game* ones in say rank 3 or 4 so... You'd better hope you have a good one.

*mid-game unique abilities are reserved for 'titles' like yoriki (assistant magistrate) or gunso (sergeant?) however acquiring these abilities slows down your school technique scaling

[Longes]

How about monks?

[Rubick]

I have to look into monks more.

I think they can only have 1 active power on (which can be super charged if they get a 'critical success' or whatever). Tho the based damage of unarmed is initially low ( punch/kick/bite = range 0/1/0, dmg 1/2/0, deadliness 2/1/3 respectively) So the question I will ask myself when I have time to look into this is: "are monk powers (kiho) good enough to override their poor damage/deadliness?"

One thing to remember is that both unarmed and wakizashis have a ranged of 0-1 (punch and bite are both 0 while kick is 1) (wakizashis have a ranged of 0-1). Range 0 means you're right on top of them in l5r 5e. You have a default move action in 5e and can double move with water ring. However certain conditions, namely immobilized, will prevent you from moving. And it takes an action to draw a weapon.

So this means low water ring profiles using katana are pretty weak vs those who can get on top of them and immobilize or disarm (meaning they need to spend an action on drawing weapon) them. Note that I mention 'low water ring' profiles because water ring can use their 'water ring extra action' to draw a weapon so disarm can be good.

I will in spare time look into starting monks vs starting bushis and mid-tier monks vs mid-tier bushis.

On optimization: Mid-tier bushis' powerful kata seem to be the auto-critting Heartpiercing Strike (Rank 3, uses Fire), the disarming Crimson Leaves Strike (Rank 3, uses Earth). There's also Flowing Water Strike (Rank 3, uses Water) but that seems weaker (altho allows condition removal). Personally I believe Heartpiercing Strike aka Fire Ring is the best choice - it lets you ignore the auto-crit defense of Earth Ring stance in duels. Duels are important. If they counter it with Air Ring (making Heartpiercing Strike harder to hit) you can just go for a normal Strike actoin which can crit with 2 opportunities (1 opportunity has 33% chance per die) or just do massive damage in case of a regular hit.

Fire Ring in this game makes strife symbols (50% chance per ring die) count as 'extra successes' aka extra damage. I kinda think fire ring might be the go-to choice of go big or go home samurai as it results in both massive damage on regular hits and enables heartpiercing strike kata.

Any-tier optimization for bushi: I'd recommend Crescent Moon Style kata for any bushi regardless of ring. Lets you attack anyone who attacks anyone you guard - the guard action can make your guarded target harder to hit or in the case of good rolls phase-shift into completely unhittable TNs; Crescent Moon lets you attack the attacker WHILE doing such an action. Guard actions are very important from a meta perspective to protect your fellow PCs from missing arms and legs and shit so they don't quit the campaign... it's also important from a non-meta perspective to protect an important target like a daimyo.

If anyone has any thoughts please feel free to input!

[Username17]

At this point, I genuinely don't have an answer to the question of why I'd care about L5R branding specifically. The Rokugan setting is a mess that jumped the shark a long time ago. The various systems are confusing garbage.

Back in the day, the allure of playing in Rokugan specifically was "look at all this awesome evocative art it comes with!" Which was true and a pretty good selling point. But that stuff hasn't been "in print" in any "on the shelf of my local gaming store" kind of way for like fifteen years. College kids today don't even have any memories of when L5R was culturally relevant.

So why not just play D&D and layer some vaguely oriental stuff on a homebrew setting? The value added of using the L5R brand specifically over that seems to be broadly negative.

-Username17

[Longes]

5e restarted the setting, but I've never been much of an L5R scholar so I can't tell you what they changed and what they left behind.

The big issue is still that Rokugan is lacking the key elements that make the Sengoku Era so compelling. Sengoku Japan is split into a shitton of tiny clans bound by a tight web of war and politics. Sengoku Japan is a boiling pot ready to blow the moment a crafty daimyo gets a chance. It's also very self-contained, with no external enemy of note. Sengoku Japan is a dynamic, volatile society where peasant sandal bearer rose to be shogun regent, Oda Nobunaga's cunning is winning against the impossible odds, Christian peasants are being led by Jesus Christ's brother armed with a demon-slaying sword. Okay, the last one happened shortly after Sengoku. Point is - in Sengoku Japan anything can happen. Honor's for the dogs, peasants become kings, monks take up arms and slaughter the rival sects.

Rokugan is the polar oposite, and I'm going off the RPG depiction here. It has a giant threat in the shape of asian Sauron and his goblin hordes. It's an extremely stable country with the Emperor rulling over Rokugan with an iron hand, and clan warfare being in the state of cold war at its hottest. Peasants stay peasants, samurai stay samurai, the imperial family is inviolate. Everything is codified and bound in iron and there's nothing for a PC to do but go to the Wall and stab goblins in the face. Because clan politics are completely irrelevant to everything.

[Username17]

The irony of course is that as originally presented, L5R was on the brink of massive upheaval. The Emperor had no heirs and was dying, various random daimyos were in a position to attempt to become the next emperor through diplomacy or violence. Having armies of skeletons would make diplomatic victory more difficult and cultivating gardens did the opposite but diverted resources from the war effort. 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. Between promoted fanboys writing long screeds about how their favorite character could never ever lose because he was just the best at everything and a constant rain of "events" that reset the status quo, the setting congealed. Everything I ever liked about it is simply not true about it anymore. I don't see what benefit there is to even trying to tell stories set in that specific setting.

-Username17

[Longes]

Here's how bad it got:

https://community.fantasyflightgames.co ... ne-daimyo/

[Username17]

Here's how bad it got:

https://community.fantasyflightgames.co ... ne-daimyo/

The entire premise of that conversation makes me want to kill myself. Also, it cements my certainty that Rokugan as a setting just needs to be cleansed with fire and orientalist fantasy needs to start over from scratch. Like, at this point I'd actually rather start with Kara-Tur, Cathay, or Tian Xia. Although of course, those settings are also pretty crap and I'm pretty sure you could do better by just starting over altogether.

There are obviously advantages in having color coded clans that have different specialist knowledge and signature spells and sword moves and shit. But if you're even having a conversation about how to justify player characters from different clans getting missions from the same lord, you need to start over. Having characters from different clans working together in ensembles should be your absolute baseline assumption, and if your presentation of the setting makes questioning the creation of ensembles even possible you have failed as severely as it is possible to fail.

-Username17

[Longes]

There's a variety of oriental fantasy genres, and a lot of them are a good fit for roleplaying.

The most D&D you can get is classic chinese Xianxia. The genre experienced a resurgence recently with many popular web novels coming out, such as Warlock of the Magus World and I Shall Seal the Heavens. In Warlock the protagonist eventually goes to Faerun and fucks Lloth. No, seriously.

Xianxia are basically D&D stories where the world is littered with fighter and wizard schools and everyone who's not a level 0 peasant wants to become level 20 and kill God, and that's the central premise of the genre. The protagonist trains at a secret fighter/wizard school, assembles a party and/or a harem, and murderhobos his way to ultimate power.

Or you can go into a more low fantasy wuxia and scale the story down to just a conflict between martial arts schools, wandering martial artists, bandits and the government. The great example of this is the video game Tale of Wuxia

On a bigger, more political spectrum are classic Chinese and Japanese war epics - the Three Kingdoms and Sengoku. Here you can either be a band of murderhobos trying to steal the country for yourself, or be a band of murderhobos in employ of a warlord and try to steal the country for your warlord.

There's a lot you can do with oriental fantasy, from low level D&D, to high-ish level D&D, to Ars Magica style martial arts school management games, to Shogun: Birthright. The greatest failure of L5R is that it manages to engage with literally nothing that makes any of the oriental fantasy genres work. It's a lot like Wick's other project, 7th Sea, which was a game about Pirates the setting of which was entirely western Europe with Africa and Americas not even existing.

[Username17]

There are in fact multiple entire genres of Asian period dramas that have various amounts of sword and/or sorcery in them. We could do Jidaigeki or Korean Fantasy Epics (I don't know enough Korean cultural stuff to tell you what those are called). And if you're doing Orientalist fantasy genre mashups, you can and probably should borrow liberally from Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Thai sources. Because why not? D&D characters fight French Ogres then Greek Minotaurs then Germanic Trolls then British Stone Giants. Our orientalist fantasy adventurers can face a Korean Gye-Lyong and then a Japanese Shuten-Doji and then a Malaysian Penanggalan.

But it's not just monsters, spells, and weapons that can and should be mashed up. We can have Japanese samurai doing Chinese style court intrigue. We can take plot elements and mythic locations and genre conventions from cultures separated by thousands of miles and thousands of years. Actual mythology and folklore spreads from region to region and culture to culture and doesn't bother even trying to be "pure" and there's no reason for an RPG to do so either.

But just because you can and should acquire monsters, genre conventions, character archetypes, places, social structures, and who fucking knows what all else from many different regions and many different time periods doesn't mean that everything is going to work. An RPG is by necessity an ensemble serial story. Elements that envision a single protagonist chosen-one or a non-serial storytelling framework might not be bad for a novel or a movie, but they are definitely bad for a role playing game.

Settings, whether they are Star Wars or Rokugan are made from and extrapolated from the stories that are told about them. They aren't "real" in any particular sense, and there isn't any "primary source" you could cut things back to. If someone adds something to the story that undermines your ability to tell more stories - whether it by the Holdo Maneuver making ship battles and capital ships completely pointless or writing in strong clan allegiances that make mixed clan groups impossible to justify - you have to retcon that shit immediately or just walk away and tell stories in a different setting altogether.

The less has been said about a setting, the more blank space it has. And the more blank space it has, the more you could potentially put in some canon that was in any way compatible with an RPG. Once people have written more material into canon, that may or may not continue to be reasonable or even possible.

The Rokugan setting as minimally described in the original card game was actually a perfectly reasonable setting for an RPG. You can a breakdown of social order, wandering armies of monsters and ronin, and it was apparently totally reasonable or groups of samurai, ninjas, and shugenja from different clans or no clans at all to band together and start conquering up segments of the collapsing empire. That's all you actually need or want from a fantasy adventure setting. You introduce various kinds of characters, and then you have groups of different ones do adventures together in a scenario where they are expected to be able to make lasting changes and break new ground.


So how did it all fall apart? I would say there were several factors:

• Simple Setting Bloat. People wrote stuff into the setting, and a lot of that shit was written without any particular care or interest about how it might affect RPGs. Whole factions were retconned into unspeakable villainy or wiped out of the setting altogether, and if you happened to be playing one of those characters, that was just tough shit.
• Card Game Decadence. In the original card game there weren't enough cards to make a mono-Clan deck. Many clans only had a single Shugenja and most forms of utility characters only had one or two versions spread amongst all the Clans plus the unaligned. People used various Phoenix Clan Shugenja and Lion Clan Senseis because there weren't any options in their own clan. It was simply normal. As the card game got more expansions, the ability to play a deck where more or even all of your cards were the same color was a lot more available. And also, the card game designers got increasingly pissed off when people did well with decks that they hadn't foreseen - which included pretty much all the decks that made heavy use of off-clan personalities. 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."
• Favorite Character Syndrome. Every author likes some of their characters more than others. But L5R was justifiably famous for its Mary Sues and Marty Stues. As the role of these "super characters" got bigger, the space for actually roleplaying in the setting became smaller. By the time of the "Seven Thunders" fuckery, basically nothing you could imagine your character doing actually mattered because literally the entire world was going to be saved - repeatedly - by one of seven characters who wasn't you.
• Event Fatigue. The more storylines escalate, the less room there is for us to give a single shit about more mundane adventures. Further, the more the world gets devastated by giant events, the less space there is for people to do things that have any lasting impact. On top of that, the inevitable giant reset buttons after these major events wipe out all the relevant actions you might have taken in the meantime. Keeping up with constant "major events" is fucking exhausting and also invalidates pretty much every story you'd ever be able to tell in a roleplaying game.

So at the beginning you probably put together a team with a Crab Clan Samurai, a Phoenix Clan Shugenja, a Dragon Clan Monk, and a Scorpion Clan Ninja. And you had adventures. And subsequent additions to the setting informed you that:

• The mixed party you came up with is badwrong and could never happen.
• A couple of the characters are actually full of shadow jizz and are actually soulless villains, and if that was your character go fuck yourself.
• The village you saved from a rampaging ogre got destroyed by plague zombies so none of the people you rescued are alive anymore.
• The area you carved out as your personal fief has now been taken over by a mono-clan Daimyo, so all the characters except maybe one of them have to GTFO to make room for the plot.
• All the problems of the empire are solved by super heroes that aren't you.
• The main villain you were dealing with in your story doesn't matter because the overall storyline brings in two more bigger badder villains every fucking year.

-Username17

[Longes]

So how did it all fall apart?

-Username17

I'm going to posit that L5R did not fall apart, but was rotten the day it was written. And it was written by John Wick.

John Wick is famous for player disempowering and love of "tragedy" where "tragedy" means rocks fall and player loses. This is exemplified in one of the earliest L5R campaigns "Code of Bushido", which is a long railroad that ends with the quest giver Daimyo being an unpunishable scumbag and Wick smugly twisting his mustache and lamenting how honor is for suckers and is merely a tool to keep the strong in power.

While the "different clans can't sit together" problem is not directly attributable to Wick, a lot of bullshit that makes the RPG bad and un-fun is.

[Point]

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.

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.

[Lokey]

My L5R alarm went off: Clan Wars era (before Hidden Emperor) was heavily dependent on format: 30/30 v 40/40 and whether you used the "simulation" rules (only current block events, personalities and something I forget). Both of them curbed the more degenerate strategies, but also limited a lot of options (say Phoenix or Scorpion having say 4 in clan personalities between them in Jade, the set that followed Day of Thunder).

Some quick responses to various things above:
- Any 7 honor box flips turn 1 Evil Feeds and another province crushing event: game over. Didn't have to be LSD to do that, although ideal start for fast military.

- Off the top of my head, there was a huge problem on the Fate deck side: It was just too easy to have a fairly complete deck that was just better, it didn't matter what clan you played with (as long as your personalities were reasonable cost for performing the actions i.e. Strenth of Purity or Charge). Some of these cards were commons, some were hen's teeth. Then you look into which clans had a viable set of personalities to carry the strategy off.

- Strategy: 1v1 fast military or honor were the options. Other stuff was kinda viable, just had too many moving parts or unique pieces to get going (various denial strategies). Military or honor were win conditions, while there were plenty of ways to deny that, it usually didn't involve focusing on a clear win condition.

- Hidden Emperor had a bunch of king for a month strongholds: yes Phoenix was just nuts as printed and even after it lost the all shugenja are yours language. Toturi and Ninja (after some more card support) were nuts for a long time too. Ref Corrupt Toturi Blitz decks, which I think were worse than LSD ever were.[/i]

[Point]

Events were utterly, utterly broken. Inheritance, Imperial Gift, Evil Feeds, and Desperate Measures — my brain just summoned these cards out of my memory and I haven’t thought about them for years. Oh, and Return of Fu Leng a few expansions later. You could Just Win if you flipped these. Folks, we’re not exaggerating here: L5R had, effectively, instant-win mechanics.

The change from 30/30 to 40/40 was initially huge, but printing more and more broken cards and fast money ruthlessly obliterated that effect.

LSD was bad not just because it was fast military, but because, horribly enough, it had an honor win in its back-pocket. Lion didn’t have to be flexible, but it could be, and a skilled player in a military deadlock could painfully limp to an honor win, forcing the opponent to attack and open himself up to Counterattack. LSD stopped being a monster during Jade, but only because equal monsters rose up to match it.

Ah, I had forgotten how horrible Jade was. After that, Phoenix got massive overcompensation with ever good Personality in the world and Scorpion. . . didn’t. L5R didn’t really have a design philosophy, a bit like the DC cinematic universe or the latest Star Wars films: no overview, no real planning, just a general intent.

Toturi Military was possibly the Worse Thing. By that point, though, the only viable decks were utterly broken cheese. Toturi Military didn’t stand out too much because the field included dishonor decks that could kill you with literally zero interaction (The Wind’s Truth pre-errata), Ring decks that could win before you could kill them with literally zero interaction (Finding Enlightenment Through Air, or FETA, which only existed because — and this is objectively true — the person answering rules questions for L5R had less knowledge of the rules than the players and the design team didn’t mind), and turbo-honor decks literallyzeroyougettheidea. I was playing multiplayer rather than tournaments around then.

After that point — the end of the story arc — L5R reset itself with Gold edition and basically had a banned card list, doing what we (at the time) thought of as L5R’s MtG Type I and Type II setup. It was. . . problematic. Ironically, nearly everything that was good about that process was managed by WotC. See, by that point, WotC owned L5R and had managed the tournament scene and was setting up the new edition. I had a knee-jerk dislike of WotC, but they actually did some good work here. Then AEG reacquired the license and proceeded to make every bad decision possible, turning Gold Edition into a slog where nobody had an adequate card base for anything.

Still, the “Type II” format had the effect of outlawing the insane speed cheese of the previous sets. . . which slowly crept back into the game after that.

Gold wasn’t as rough as Jade was, and the design was straight-up better, but by that point the theme was banal. The civil war marketing was officially toast.

Military Fate decks were burdened by the fact that the best way to build military strength, followers, sucked in the first story arc. Later, followers stopped being deprecated by the design team, and a trickle of broken followers, usually-clan specific, would pop up here and there. By the second story arc, broken followers and cheap followers, combined with follower cost reduction (Toturi’s Army) made the Fate deck fairly varied. . . except for the fact that you HAD to play with counter-cards (Sun In Shadow) or be stomped by shugenja effects.

[Username17]

As far as the Lion Speed Deck, it was very hard to fight if you were trying to do something durdly as Crane, Dragon, or Phoenix, but Unicorn or Crab could put up a completely decent fight. Not only could they slap Lion down with breach, but they could also just put out enough Force quickly enough to simply not lose provinces and then win a slightly slower military game. Yes, sometimes Lion would get the Evil Feeds and cripple your gold growth, but if you have enough province defense that they try to turn 1 make a Copper Mine instead of turn 1 bring out a Matsu Gohei, the fact that they start with bullshit for money is a big problem for the longer game.

Also, the claim that you could make Lion Speed out of just Lion Personalities is false. Here is the entire list of Lion Clan personalities from Imperial Edition:

• Akodo Kage
  Ikoma Ujiaki
  Kitsu Toju
  Matsu Agetoki
  Matsu Gohei
  Matsu Imura
  Matsu Tsuko
  Matsu Yojo

So that's 8 Personalities. And you only need 30 cards, and some of them are going to be Events or Holdings. But you are not going to play Kitsu Toju in Lion Speed because you don't have any spells. You are not going to play Ikoma Ujiaki because good lord, why would you do that? You probably aren't playing Matsu Tsuko because she's too expensive, but even if you did she's unique and you're only allowed one.

The only Lion Clan Personalities that Lion Speed is genuinely happy to have in their deck from the first edition were Matsu Gohei and Matsu Yojo. Every other character is either so expensive that they require you to take a turn or more off buying holdings before the rush starts or just doesn't meaningfully impact the game plan at all because they aren't aggressive warriors. The typical Lion Speed Deck had more out-of-clan Personalities than it had Personalities that had a family name other than Matsu.

Anyway, after a few card sets, Lion Speed became much more homogenous because every card set gave you a new Lion Clan personality with a base gold cost of 5 or less, making the Turn 2 Aggro attack much more feasible and substantially reducing the amount of decks that ran Hisa.

But at the beginning, every Lion Speed Deck had three copies of a Samurai in fucking Scorpion Colors, because there wasn't a Lion Clan option for your third aggro character, and turn 1 Hisa + Toku, Turn 2 Oath of Fealty, Charge was often game over for a lot of decks. Not Unicorn or Crab decks obviously, but Phoenix, Dragon, or Crane were often unable to recover from that.

-Username17

[Lokey]

I never saw the card, but think Gohei was called something else pre-Imperial so you just played 6 of him until the Errata was actually enforced for tournaments. Of course there was Oni no Akuma 30 card dynasty deck doesn't need that deep of a bench.

Wonder if Dragon was ever broken before I stopped paying attention (uh, Diamond but probably well before that). They'd get decent cards, just none of them worked well together: samurai, decent shugenja, monks, tattooed whatever that were beyond awful, then the awful tattoo cards and the worst box to come out of Hidden Emperor...

Speaking of LSD, I wonder if anyone can track down the GCW rant Chris Bergstrom posted when the Spirit stronghold was spoiled?

[Username17]

There's a super secret version of Matsu Gohei who has the art of Matsu Yojo called Matsu Turi. He also has a base gold cost of 6, so you can't play him off your box on turn 1. There's a reason for that which has to do with printing plates and people not doing basic math. And because it was AEG there is an elaborate backstory for why this happened which has I think since been declared non-canon.

In any case, the bottom line is that Lion Speed was one of two viable high-end military decks, and it and Crab were substantially better than the other options until several sets came out. And those sets were created with the deliberate intent of overpowering various other factions. There was the time of turbo honor Poet Crane and it was stupid and virtually unbeatable. But that was shortly after I stopped playing the game altogether because I got in a fight with the rules gurus because they hadn't actually read their own fucking rulebook.

-Username17