So, I was in the bookstore the other day and I picked up a copy of L5R, 3rd edition. (not the cancer version) I haven't really had a chance to play with it yet, but I was just wondering if anyone who'd played it would care to share their thoughts/impressions/etc of the game.

The only thing I've done is cobbled together a quick character, put him up against one of the sample NPCs in the back, and had a little mock fight. From that, my only impression is, "Holy sh*t, this game is more deadly than Shadowrun!"

Thoughts?

I've played it. It's cool, albeit very VERY deadly. I liked 2nd Ed.
The threat of violence goes a LONG way. ACTUAL violence can make for a short game.

It's kind of odd. You play a samurai (or a kung-fu monk), and you get a sword, but then if you fight too much you die. Realistic, perhaps, but I wonder how well it plays.

Religiously. Of course, I also majored in Japanese Cultural Studies in college, so I think it's required. I would strongly recommend ignoring everything after the Scorpion Coup - or maybe a short bit after that. The line editor, Ree Soesbee, left the line at that point. And the believability of the game took a sharp nosedive.

That said, the game itself can be amazingly fun. It helps if your players know a lot about Japanese history and cultural mores. Or if they can fake it.

I've played a few sessions with friends. The things I found are:
>>Combat is deadlier than almost any system, though with a few lucky rolls, defense can be much more effective.
>>Even the most martially focussed character must spend points on social skills. (Skill diversity is very important overall.)
>>Balancing High and Low skills can be very tricky.
>>The only way to get a straight answer out of a Scorpion is to look at every answer in a mirror, while hanging upside down.

The lethality of the system can be balanced by having ranks in schools with defensive techniques (such as Hida or Shinjo - the latter of which is sadly not in the 3rd edition book), a high defense skill (the rank bonuses start to help out) and getting your lord to shell out for higher quality armor.

Yeah. Ree had to quit because she just couldn't rationalize any more of the insane shit that was required to become 'RPG plot'. She told me it made her feel dirty.

Note: If any of you didn't know, L5R's RPG metaplot is dictated by the card game tournaments. That means that if there's a numberical advantage to turning the crab clan to Fu Leng's side no matter how idiotic it is, if that deck wins, that's the metaplot. Which actually happened.

L5R can make for a conflicted game. more than many other games i've played, the GM and the players really need to sit down and discuss the game, and what kind of game they want to play, before anyone starts putting numbers on their char sheet.

the default game style, or the style favored by most of the real L5R enthusiasts i've met, is a very political game with strong emphasis on Japanese sensibilities--obliqueness, external politeness, maintaining and advancing one's place in a very structured society, and so on. if you go in expecting to swing your katana around a lot and chop off some fuckers' heads--like i wanted to do--then you're going to be seriously at odds with a lot of players and GMs that you may run into.

...I wish more games would encourage such elements. I've read through Lot5R, and really liked the level of intrigue it had. It's just sad that a lot of players I have known are in the school of hack/shoot/blast/punch, and become bored with a more subtle politically oriented/intrigue based game.

I want both!

meh. it's not the intrigue i dislike--that's fun. but i don't like restrictive social hierarchies in real life, and that carries over to gaming. same reason i'm not a fan of V:tM and the rest of the colon series.

Just like with practically every other RPG I always wanted to play it but will never get the chance. Even got myself a sourcebook years ago...

it's got some damn fine fiction, though. and inspired not a few DS poster names !!

See, the problem that I have with post-coup Rokugan, Toturi, is that there's so much insane shit that required so much crazy ass rationalization that it's almost impossible for me to put aside my 'WTF' factor and just deal with it. The only mode in which prior Rokugan was inflexible is in the same fashion that Shadowrun is inflexible because it doesn't adequately model a superhero or epic fantasy game. I also am forced to admit that, being friends with Ree, my judgement is already swayed.

-Lady Sun and Lord Moon becoming Lord Sun and Lady Moon. Cool on one level, but really annoys me on many others, not the least of which is 'people killing Kami'.
-The Kolat being rampant through all of the Shinjo, and subsequent squish of the Shinjo in favor of the Moto who SUDDENLY decided to rediscover their mongol roots. Just doesn't fly in most of my games.
-Kisada, as a fortune, walking around and drinking and having fun with signature NPCs rather than crushing the shit out of the shadowlands. Annoys me because if that's all Yakamo did while he was alive, that's DAMN sure gonna be all he does when he's dead.
-Daigotsu. Daigotsu is stupid. That's all I gotta say on that subject.
-Crab Clan defecting to the shadowlands. I mean, WTF. There's no way that would fly, logically. I don't care if he IS your lord. If your lord orders you to commit an act that is against all your life's work, you kill your lord and then yourself.

The problem with the more recent L5R background is that it plays out just like a shitty LARP. You give some fanboy creative control, and he's going to do stupid shit just to leave his mark -- so outrageous stuff starts happening, and everyone else is left trying to deal with it and stay IC. I can't tell you how many LARPs I've gone to where the game ends with an explosion because some knucklehead just can't help but try to blow up Elysium or something. That's the same vibe I got from the later L5R stuff -- when you let the lunatics (instead of professional writers) run the asylum, a bunch of really ridiculous crap starts popping up all over the place, and strains the credibility of the setting itself.

Critias basically just wrote my response for me. It's not that the rationale isn't there... it's that the rationale blows. I don't care who owned Lord Moon. It's still fucking Lord Moon. He tells YOU what to do, not vice versa. I don't care if it's an alliance of convenience or not - It's still an alliance. I don't care that Daigotsu and Kisada are no sillier than Togashi - Togashi was stupid too.

Unless you say the writers that AEG hired aren't professional and are fanboys, I don't see how that goes. But the very premise of the game from the very start was that players of the game had the ability to influence the course of the game. How the writers choose to write game result into the story is up to the story team. But the problem is that the basic cosmology of the world was never nailed down and was in some instances spun out of whole cloth and in others a patchwork of different Eastern myths sewn together - if you read the 1st Ed books, you'd know how disorganised the whole thing was. If you say that the later stories were crap, then I would say it is because the foundations of the entire storyline was crap in the first place. If they didn't want to want Hitomi + Obsidian + Togashi vs Onnatagu, then don't introduce Hitomi + Obsidian Hand in the first place. Remember the Emerald championship with Toshimoko? And never had Hitomi doing the "your soul is mine!" thing at the Day of Thunder.

Or never even bothered to allow the players control over the metagame via tourneys in the first place - which detracts from its immersive value and one reason why people still play L5R.

Hmmm, I haven't read the history of Rokugan section yet. Maybe I'll just skip it altogether.

So, I need to make characters with lots of good social skills, 'cause there's tons of intrigue, and I need to be pretty badass if I'm going to survive session 1, and I need to do this for 45 build point? Riiiiiight. Jeez, what do you do to make a character, not put any points into Traits? Get all yours skills at 1? (which the sidebar specifically says is a munchy tactic to boost your insight)

Go the munchie tactic route!

A viable option, certainly. But it seems like to only way to get all your bases covered, and you're going to suck at everything. Are starting characters supposed to have that "1st level suck" feeling? I guess I'm just getting too used to games like Shadowrun where you can actually create a character who is competent at something out of the box.

I've made my sentiments known, Toturi. I'm certain that you enjoy the tournament controlled metaplot. I have never liked the idea, even during 1st edition. I'm gonna leave it at that, because I'm certain I'll not change your mind, and I know you won't change mine. The fact of the matter is that there's definitely enough room in the game to change history or keep it verbatim.

Moon-Hawk, the 1st rank characters are reasonably competent. They're not gonna be too amazing at any one thing, but they won't suck, either. Let me give you an example. We'll say we have a Phoenix samurai known as Isawa Akikata. Now, despite being of the Isawa family, Akikata never had any skill at speaking to the spirits of Rokugan despite the prominence of his immediate family's shugenja. So he got his ass shipped off to the Shiba bushi school to learn about chopping folks up. Even so, his family expected that he comport himself like a proper Isawa and learn his ass about some spirits. His sheet, optimized for killing and being wise in the ways of spirits, is as follows:

EARTH: 2
Stamina: 3
Willpower: 2

WATER: 2
Strength: 2
Perception: 2

FIRE: 3
Agility: 3
Intelligence: 3

AIR: 2
Reflexes: 2
Awareness: 3

VOID: 2

Skills:
Defense 3 (Mastery 1)
Kyujutsu 1
Meditation (Void Recovery) 1
Spears 3
Theology 3
Calligraphy 1
Divination 2
Etiquette 2
Lore: Spirits: 2

Advantages:
Precise Memory (3)

Disadvantages:
Social Disadvantage (3 points - not a Shugenja)
Driven (Prove self to father, 3 points)

TN to be hit: 15 (18) (+5 from standard light armor, +3 from Defense)

Glory: 0
Honor: 2.5
Status: 1

With this sheet, we can see that Akikata will easily be able to hit the standard TN (15) with the skills he's good at (Theology, Stabbing Fools, Not Getting Stabbed By Fools). What's more, he stands a decent chance of doing well with his spirit lore, etiquette, and divination skills as well. His standard TN to be hit in combat is above average, owing to his Defense rating 3, which affords him a mastery bonus. He can also use his rank 1 technique to add his void ring rating to his TN to be hit, attack rolls, or damage rolls. Nobody's gonna count on Akikata to hold the line against the charging Matsu, but nobody should expect him to, either. They should expect him to fight and die like a good bushi, or fight and live and everyone gets a nice surprise because the cannon fodder made it out alive.

Another fact to keep in mind is that starting L5R characters are supposed to be fresh-faced from their gempukku, between the ages of 16 and 18. If you're running a game where people are supposed to have been around the block a bit, by all means, give them more XP. Starting characters are supposed to be new at this. If they're not new, they deserve more XP.

Thanks, that was really helpful. I was feeling like I'd done something wrong when I looked at the sample NPCs and saw that a frickin' bandit rolls 8k4 to attack, and I started feeling pretty bad about my measly 4k2 for my sneaky guy.
I guess I haven't done too miserably on my starting characters after all.