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L5R open beta info and download.
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Having skimmed through the first few pages I noticed that there doesn't appear to be the Spider Clan listed in the major clans.

They are also going to use the same dice system that they use in their Star Wars rpg.

 ProtoClone wrote:
Having skimmed through the first few pages I noticed that there doesn't appear to be the Spider Clan listed in the major clans.

You also won't find Mantis. It's not yet a Great Clan. The Spider Clan doesn't exist yet. Hantei XXXVIII is on the throne. Akodo Toturi has just become the Lion Clan Champion.

 Manchu wrote:

 ProtoClone wrote:
Having skimmed through the first few pages I noticed that there doesn't appear to be the Spider Clan listed in the major clans.

You also won't find Mantis. It's not yet a Great Clan. The Spider Clan doesn't exist yet. Hantei XXXVIII is on the throne. Akodo Toturi has just become the Lion Clan Champion.

Had to go to the wiki to get a grasp of how far back they turned the clock since I am only know try to get caught up on the lore...really far back it seems.

If you want to brush up on the new setting, here is an index of all the current fiction:

https://community.fantasyflightgames.com/topic/258529-fiction-library/

So far, I can't see myself switching to this system. It might appeal to some people, but the early beta rules are not impressing me. The roll and keep system is basically just lip service to the original mechanics, and the new game is very "cinematic" rather than roleplaying. The Strife mechanic creating "force roleplaying" isn't my favorite thing ever, and forced disadvantages, especially the Anxieties, cause every character to be unreasonably neurotic about something. There are, apparently, no rational characters in Rokugan. Everyone has some crippling mental disorder based around a single bizarre neuroses. I don't really like games where the players are shoehorned into "roleplaying" their characters the way the game (or in this case, the dice) wants them to.

I had been curious to see the Giri and Ninjo mechanics. There aren't any. It's actually one of the least-well-defined parts of the game. Your characters want something, and have to do something else. Okay, that sounds like going to my job every day instead of surfing. It's basically another "Neurosis Mechanic" in the game, lol.

Character creation has some iffy bits. The families offering two fixed skill points is pretty bad in terms of pigeon-holing families into one kind of role. When a starting character might only have 7 total skill points, those 2 being "Must be this" can hamstring that family in certain subclasses. The example I saw on the forums was Ikoma, who get Performance and Composition. Which might be useful for a Courtier, but if you wanted to be an Ikoma Bushi or Shugenja, suddenly 29% of your starting skill points are being used for skills not immediately relevant to your class. Character creation seems to want to make you play Donji Courtiers and Matsu Bushi, etc and don't try to play anything remotely against type. The disadvantages and advantages are very poorly weighted for a one-for-one situation. There are clearly some choices that are worse than others, especially on the Disadvantages. And since Void points are primarily retained by overcoming disadvantages, it's not a roleplaying aid, so much as a process of attempting to optimize your disadvantages.

It's not all bad. I kinda like that the game included mechanics to make sure the combat wasn't "All Katana All the Time" but without running it pretty heavily, it's hard to tell if the "Razor Edge" rules will ever really apply outside of fighting someone in heavy armor or some armored Shadowlands beast. But, the flip side is that the combat mechanics in the beta are pretty lackluster. Everybody just seems like they're going to hit and be hit on pretty basic target numbers, and since the dice just have fixed odds with essentially "hits" and "misses" rather than numbers, which seems like will scale very poorly as characters advance in rank and rings.

Dunno. Not impressed, but I'll keep reading what other people think about it. See if maybe I'm overlooking something.

 ProtoClone wrote:

They are also going to use the same dice system that they use in their Star Wars rpg.

This is not accurate. It uses different symbols and I believe only d6 and d12. I think it is really crappy of them to go a separate route especially when they have Genesys coming out so soon. Why not just use that systems generic custom dice? Oh wait I know why, so you have to buy more of their special custom dice that will only work with this game. I also find it kind of insulting that they release a dice app that you have to pay for in order to try the beta rules. So you either shell out $5 to get the app or you print out a bunch of stickers to place on some of the dice you already have. This seems like a money grab instead of an actual attempt at staying true to the old system or revamping it to work with their existing role playing rules system. Such a shame. It would have made a nice setting/sourcebook for Genesys.

So, this is a new L5R by a different company, with new rules and apparently in a different time ?

spect_spidey wrote:

 ProtoClone wrote:

They are also going to use the same dice system that they use in their Star Wars rpg.

This is not accurate. It uses different symbols and I believe only d6 and d12. I think it is really crappy of them to go a separate route especially when they have Genesys coming out so soon. Why not just use that systems generic custom dice? Oh wait I know why, so you have to buy more of their special custom dice that will only work with this game. I also find it kind of insulting that they release a dice app that you have to pay for in order to try the beta rules. So you either shell out $5 to get the app or you print out a bunch of stickers to place on some of the dice you already have. This seems like a money grab instead of an actual attempt at staying true to the old system or revamping it to work with their existing role playing rules system. Such a shame. It would have made a nice setting/sourcebook for Genesys.

Meh, still is unappealing not matter how accurate I may have not been.

 godardc wrote:
So, this is a new L5R by a different company, with new rules and apparently in a different time ?

Based on what's mentioned above, it appears that they set it in the 1st Edition time period, which was set back before the Scorpion Coup attempt. A "Mantis Clan" exists, as do the other minor clans that would become part of it when it achieved great clan status. But iirc, Yoritomo's Alliance (the precursor to the amalgamation) doesn't begin until the Great Clan War starts.

The 1st Edition RPG allowed Naga player characters. I wonder if the FFG game will allow that as well.

The Strife mechanic creating "force roleplaying" isn't my favorite thing ever, and forced disadvantages, especially the Anxieties, cause every character to be unreasonably neurotic about something. There are, apparently, no rational characters in Rokugan. Everyone has some crippling mental disorder based around a single bizarre neuroses. I don't really like games where the players are shoehorned into "roleplaying" their characters the way the game (or in this case, the dice) wants them to

That seems to be a defining trait of FFG RPGs over the last few years. All three of the Star Wars RPGs utilized an arbitrary negative mechanic to try and influence the characters. For instance, the first of the three has a debt attribute that you can never completely get rid of. You can reduce it. But if you ever completely pay off your debts, then they'll just get replaced with new ones.

Frankly, it makes it seem to me like FFG doesn't trust GMs to actually come up with stuff that will properly motivate their players.

 Veteran Sergeant wrote:
So far, I can't see myself switching to this system. It might appeal to some people, but the early beta rules are not impressing me. The roll and keep system is basically just lip service to the original mechanics, and the new game is very "cinematic" rather than roleplaying. The Strife mechanic creating "force roleplaying" isn't my favorite thing ever, and forced disadvantages, especially the Anxieties, cause every character to be unreasonably neurotic about something. There are, apparently, no rational characters in Rokugan. Everyone has some crippling mental disorder based around a single bizarre neuroses. I don't really like games where the players are shoehorned into "roleplaying" their characters the way the game (or in this case, the dice) wants them to.

I had been curious to see the Giri and Ninjo mechanics. There aren't any. It's actually one of the least-well-defined parts of the game. Your characters want something, and have to do something else. Okay, that sounds like going to my job every day instead of surfing. It's basically another "Neurosis Mechanic" in the game, lol.

Character creation has some iffy bits. The families offering two fixed skill points is pretty bad in terms of pigeon-holing families into one kind of role. When a starting character might only have 7 total skill points, those 2 being "Must be this" can hamstring that family in certain subclasses. The example I saw on the forums was Ikoma, who get Performance and Composition. Which might be useful for a Courtier, but if you wanted to be an Ikoma Bushi or Shugenja, suddenly 29% of your starting skill points are being used for skills not immediately relevant to your class. Character creation seems to want to make you play Donji Courtiers and Matsu Bushi, etc and don't try to play anything remotely against type. The disadvantages and advantages are very poorly weighted for a one-for-one situation. There are clearly some choices that are worse than others, especially on the Disadvantages. And since Void points are primarily retained by overcoming disadvantages, it's not a roleplaying aid, so much as a process of attempting to optimize your disadvantages.

It's not all bad. I kinda like that the game included mechanics to make sure the combat wasn't "All Katana All the Time" but without running it pretty heavily, it's hard to tell if the "Razor Edge" rules will ever really apply outside of fighting someone in heavy armor or some armored Shadowlands beast. But, the flip side is that the combat mechanics in the beta are pretty lackluster. Everybody just seems like they're going to hit and be hit on pretty basic target numbers, and since the dice just have fixed odds with essentially "hits" and "misses" rather than numbers, which seems like will scale very poorly as characters advance in rank and rings.

Dunno. Not impressed, but I'll keep reading what other people think about it. See if maybe I'm overlooking something.

I certainly don't think you are. roll and keep + speciality dice + success thresholds (which they call target numbers for reasons) + weird things on the dice lead to a muddled mess. Keeping opportunities or strife dice is a way to fail actions, since they in no way count as successes, and as starting characters you'll be generally keeping a max of three, assuming you can force the static clan+family+school values to stack at least a Ring or two to a usable value (ie, the starting max of 3).

The exception is Void check Opportunity Results, which can be used to lower the TN for another Ring, so you'll want to be making nonsense Void checks all the time (and failing them, so you can keep more opportunity results) so your next action with a Ring you care about has a lower TN.

---
It's rather telling to me that starting characters are on the same level as bandit and soldier minions (with 4 Ring points above the base of 1), so apparently the expected play for the first couple sessions is a comedy where the party bumbles around constantly failing at basic tasks.

Character creation is pretty bad - you'll get a choice on a handful of skills and 1 or 2 techniques, but largely characters are going to be stamped out of a press of <Clan><Family><School> and are going to be functionally identical just so they have functional dice pools (since odds of rolling success are 3/6 or 7/12 depending on Ring or Skill dice). Average tasks are two successes, so if you have less than 3 in the Ring you're using, success is quite hard, especially since I can't find a way to have more than 1 skill rank in much of anything starting out.

Amusingly, stereotypical characters like a Crab-Hida family-Hida school bushi are more versatile than other characters since all three give bonuses to the Earth ring, but starting Ring values can't be above 3, so you can assign that point to any other Ring (including Void)
Actually diversifying to the point that you have 2/2/2/2/1 is really bad, because it drops you to rolling 3 (or even 2 dice, if you don't have the skill) dice and keeping only two. That's a recipe for constant failure.

----
I also really dislike the advantages and disadvantages. Partly for the reasons you mention, but also because the advantages are weirdly restrictive for existing at all. For example, with the Ikebana advantage, you can always identify a plant by any of its parts, and you know its properties and language of flowers meaning. If you don't have this specific advantage... apparently you can't do that at all? The psychological ones are even worse- daredevil strongly implies that only people with this trait can risk their lives without hesitation. I guess everyone else has to hem and haw for a round before they can fight? Some of these are way too vague, but written as game rules. Non-generous people apparently have a risk of offending or slighting people by giving them gifts, because the point of the Generosity advantage is that never happens if you have it.

The point to disadvantages seems to be to find something that you'll roll a lot, but doesn't actually matter so you can fail and regain spent void points (probably the most reliable way to succeed at checks, outside of having the party assist you on any action, which lets you roll and keep an extra die for each person). And failing disadvantage checks is really trivially easy, since you not only choose which dice to keep, you can also choose to keep fewer dice than your Ring score (minimum 1).

This also applies to strife results- as long as not all the dice are strife, you can just... not take them. Whatever this 'emotional outburst' system is supposed to do, you can just ignore it entirely. Presumably, it's there to provide a negative impact to honor, glory and status and create drama or whatever, but there isn't any reason to. Opting to fail might well be preferable to taking that final point and having an episode in front of your lord or the court.


Also, Large people apparently can reach high shelves and hit their heads a lot (I'm not kidding), and get to reroll up to 2 dice for holding things up. Yes. That is an 'advantage.'

Its a crazy mess, and most characters are likely to die due to fluke die rolls and the mess that is the deadliness weapon property and critical severity.

I was excited for this (I only played the D20 version), and I'll still check it out, but this is sounding like it will be a hard sell for my gaming group :(

Note that the starter adventure in the beta gives you 24xp to spend on your character, so a rank 4 ring or multiple rank 2 skills are quite doable.

Outburst are manageable - you are rarely ever forced to take one (because as noted you can choose to not keep strife results) and you get to choose what form they take - sometimes they can even be positive: enraged is a risky but effective choice for an air-and-fire heavy duellist.

Note that you can't just 'choose to make a check' - if it's not important or dangerous you don't get to make the check, and if you're deliberately making important or dangerous checks on a weak ring..... you deserve what you get.

And no, anyone can try anything - there are no advanced skills like 40krpg. You don't need the ikebana advantage to know about flowers, but someone with the advantage is better in tgat field than someone without, even if the latter has an extra rank or so of aesthetics (or whatever).

locarno24 wrote:
Note that the starter adventure in the beta gives you 24xp to spend on your character, so a rank 4 ring or multiple rank 2 skills are quite doable.

Outburst are manageable - you are rarely ever forced to take one (because as noted you can choose to not keep strife results) and you get to choose what form they take - sometimes they can even be positive: enraged is a risky but effective choice for an air-and-fire heavy duellist.

Note that you can't just 'choose to make a check' - if it's not important or dangerous you don't get to make the check, and if you're deliberately making important or dangerous checks on a weak ring..... you deserve what you get.

And no, anyone can try anything - there are no advanced skills like 40krpg. You don't need the ikebana advantage to know about flowers, but someone with the advantage is better in tgat field than someone without, even if the latter has an extra rank or so of aesthetics (or whatever).

That's great for the starter adventure, though terrible for the impression of the game- the normal assumption is you'll start with zero XP, so if anything, that presents a false impression for playtesting.

I'm not sure why you think you can't just choose to make a check. If you're doing an investigation of the court, for example, rolling Void + Politics [or whatever the actual skill is, it's used as an example in a couple places] to see what you know about the court situation is completely appropriate. That you can intentionally fail the test to get Opportunity results to make your next check easier sounds metagamey*, but entirely doable with the rule-set presented. If you can't freely choose to keep Opportunities rather than successes, there is no point in the system presented.
*but the entire system of weaseling your way to use your best ring for every task is pretty metagamey as written, so that doesn't come across as particular negative for this system.

On the other hand, I didn't see anything that presented 'anyone can try anything,' beyond BSing their way to using a good ring, and the way the advantage/disadvantage rules are presented is VERY proscriptive. For example: Keen Hearing 'You can hear noises that others do not detect and can assess your environment by sound alone.' That isn't written in a way that suggests other people can even try, and that kind of language isn't even vaguely rare in the advantage or disadvantage write-ups. Many, are 'you can do X and others can not,' sometimes implicitly, but other times, like Keen Hearing, are entirely explicit- people without the advantage simply can't. Ever.

My group didn't even finish the sample adventure before deciding it just wasn't worth the time.

The system is really bad, and I don't even think it is salvageable because some of the wort parts are intrinsic to the custom dice mechanics.

Basically, Strife is either repeatedly punishing characters, or completely meaningless. This leads to character creation being very "gamey". A character like a Matsu Commander, Shinjo Outrider, Hida Defender, Akodo Bard, etc that has a High Earth and a High Water is all but immune to Strife, and incredibly tough in combat. A character like a Bayushi Manipulator is a total spaz (low Composure, low Water trait to remove Strife) and made of paper (low Resilience). Strife also won't affect higher Rank characters much at all either because their Composure scores will be high enough and the dice odds are fixed, putting a feasible limit on just how much Strife characters will incur from rolling their own dice or having it inflicted on them by opponents. As I've joked, Matsu Marvin can actually beat Bayushi Bob in a Strife Duel, and will be effectively impossible to beat if he just wants to push it to a draw. You could probably roll dice for hours and Bayushi Bob will never be able to cause Matsu Marvin to have an outburst unless Bayushi Bob significantly outranks Matsu Marvin, simply because Marvin, by default, has Water 3 and will strip off an average of 4 Strife every time he rolls, and Bob can only inflict an average of 2.3 per turn. Matsu Bushi. Paragons of control and poise. If you know anything about L5R, this is pretty hilarious.

Worse, you can't just ignore the Strife Mechanic, because it is baked into every fundamental aspect of the game by being on the dice and being part of the Stances in combat and Intrigues. If you don't use Outbursts, Fire Stance becomes amazing and Water/Void Stances are basically useless. if you ignore Strife results altogether, then Fire Stance is pointless too, leaving just Air and Earth as having any mechanical effect.

The whole thing reeks of not having a cohesive design plan. For example: The core mechanics for dice rolling and keeping completely negates the mechanics for weapons breaking because you can intentionally fail the test if you know you're going to damage the weapon. Which means the only people breaking Razor Edged weapons will be NPCs the GM deliberately chooses to be stupid.

The mechanics scale really poorly, too. Die faces are a majority of 1/0 (success/not success), and TNs increase.decrease at +/- 1. This means your maximum number of predictable successes at any given roll are fairly clear, with the odds of Explosive Success (being able to get 2+ Success results on a single die) fixed around 12%. But the degree of difficulty increases much sharper than the chance of success, and with such a narrow overlap, it means the probability graphs are hilariously wonky. In simple layman's terms, TNs 4 and above are really hard to achieve keeping anything less than 4 dice unless you use Fire Stance, but TN 2 is essentially routine and easy to pass for even beginner characters. Rolling 7k4 results in a little better 4.1 Successes on average, meaning you're just skating a TN4 check. Rolling 3k2 is 1.7 Successes on average, meaning even your Scrubly character still has a decent shot of hitting the default difficulty. For your 4k3 (3 trait, 1 skill), you're up to 2.2 and 4k3 will be a pretty routine roll for a Rank 1 character.

What's that all mean? TN2 is routine, TN3 is pretty hard, TN4 is something only higher ranking characters can make. But with a +/- 1 margin of difficulty, that's literally the extent of the scaling.

Character generation sucks too. There's almost no choice in stats, and the handful of choices you get are kinda silly since there are clear Best Picks (how many Bushi aren't going to take Martial Arts Melee, for example, or how many Courtiers pass up Courtesy?) Not to mention that the game heavily incentivizes ranking up as many skills to Rank 2 as you can given the differential in XP costs to buy them later. Characters in this Beta are just idiosyncratic clones whose only functional differences will be in what Disadvantages they choose. Want to have a Hida Bushi who knows history? Tough cookies. Want a Matsu Bard who played shougi with his grandfather? Tough cookies. The only way to get "offbrand" skills for your character is to take a 3rd Disadvantage and get +1 Rank in a skill, but you'd be a fool to trade an extra Disadvantage for 2XP worth of a Rank 1 skill when it could be 4XP for a Rank 2 skill or 6XP for a Rank 3 skill. So, basically, if you want to add some flavor and variety to your character, the CharGen process punishes you. Want to have a Lion Clan Bushi that knows how to ride a horse? That'll cost you 10 Honor because you hate Bushido, or it'll cost you an extra Disadvantage and foregoing a chance at Martial Arts: Melee at Rank 2.

Like I said, I think this system is dead in the water unless they are willing to forego or radically alter the custom dice.