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So! Fantasy Flight released the beta rules for their upcoming Legend of the Five Rings RPG setting. In a nice gesture, the beta rules are free. I don't know if they did this for their Star Wars system or not. The rules are available here, and I read through them a bit, enough to make a few snap judgments, which means that with my hour of reading, little history with the subject, and white maleness, I am uniquely qualified to comment on this, or at least vote to take away health care in Congress.
Write your Congressfolks, people.
As I covered here, I really like the L5R system, listing it as my favorite system in which I have yet to play. I love the roll-and-keep system, I think it makes intuitive sense, I think it meshes with the setting itself very well, it allows for better odds of success for a skilled samurai but also offers the chance for surprising success or inopportune failure, and it's incredibly easy to understand.
To recap!
Souji Okita wants to Cut That Guy. What is the Attribute best used for cutting? It's Dexterity. What is the Skill best used for cutting? It's Melee. So Okita rolls the number of dice he has in Dexterity (we'll call that four) and the number of dice he has in Melee (we'll call that 5). Nine dice! Roll 9d10, and keep 5, because of your Melee skill being 5 (NOTE: I do not recall if Keep is based on Skill or Attribute. I think it's Skill, because it rewards a physically-weak master of the blade versus a giant with a toothpick he's never seen). 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 6, 8, 8, 10. That's really good! Add up the best five, 6+6+8+8+10. 38! You got a roll of 38. Maybe Okita has ways to boost that further -- exploding dice that reroll on a 10, called shots that adjust the difficulty, etc. But that's simple! Roll 9k5. And the way you get those rolls makes perfect sense, I think.
The new system?
I honestly don't know where to begin.
Dice! Let's start with dice!
In L5R 4th Edition, the dice were d10s. Lovely, lovely ten-sided dice. They're happy! They go 1 through 0, and when you see a zero you'll be confused because you think the dice are 0-9, but hahahahaha, they're actually 1-10! That 0 is a ten. Don't worry! It's okay. Anyway, d10s are great and have been used for everything ever. If you play RPGs, you may have some around! World of Darkness games use them exclusively, unless stuff's really changed lately.
In L5R FFG, you have two types of dice, d6s and d12s. These are called Ring Dice and Skill Dice, respectively. They don't have numbers, though, since these are custom dice.
Let's diverge. I've griped about custom dice before, right? Only a little. Let's fix that.
Custom dice are INTELLECTUALLY BANKRUPT.
Custom dice are a naked cash grab in a hobby full of $100 board games, $60 RPG books, and buy-in LCG models and release waves of plastic spaceships designed to make you pay $15-60 PER MONTH to keep current with your friend who has the new TIE Fighter sf/0/x/14/xo9, the one that Darth Buttdawg walked in front of in the eighth issue of the crossover comic from 1989, but it has a new plasma torpedo card that will rescue the original Millennium Falcon ship you got when you got into X-Wing because it's the coolest ship in the world, only FFG has to keep the tournament scene healthy by releasing more and more powerful ships every time so people always spend that sweet cash, so if you want to play the Star Wars ship in the Star Wars tournament in the Star Wars league with your Star Wars friends, you need to buy the TIE Fighter sf/0/x/14/xo9, but if you REALLY want to make the Falcon better, there's that new $120 Epic ship, the SS This Was Never In A Movie, that has C-3P0's brother on it who synergizes really well with your Han crew card -- oh, you didn't think Han was going to FLY the Falcon? No one has Han fly the Falcon anymore.
AND I KIND OF LIKE X-WING
But here's the thing about custom dice. Custom dice are a gate. Custom dice stand in the way of people playing your games. It's like how soccer is the biggest thing in the world, and that's because anyone can play it. All you need is a ball. I played Ultimate Frisbee in high school, and all we needed was a Frisbee and a field. "Okay, that hill dropoff is one goal, and past the tree is the other." X-Wing and Armada both use custom dice, because FFG wants to include blank sides and results with multiple tags -- and we'll get to that -- but all it does is put another barrier to entry for you, especially -- especially! -- in a role-playing setup, where prior to now all you've needed is a book and whatever dice are under glass at the gaming store that are like $3. I have a bag FULL of multicolored dice, and I can trace most of them to specific places in my life. If I want to play an RPG, I just dig into that bag and get dice out. I already have dice. I don't need more dice. I've got the whole dice thing figured out. I have enough dice for everyone.
"But Matt!" you say, desperate to get me back on track. "You can just use existing dice and just have the numbers equal the custom sides! It's not that hard!"
Do you really want to check ANOTHER chart every time you make a roll? Because you'll be doing enough of that already.
Simple, right?
The beta rules include little cutouts for you to paste over your existing dice, or you can download the $5 L5R dice app from your app store of choice. Oh, and if you thought this was a preview for the upcoming FFG Genesys system, the dice used there are COMPLETELY different, but also custom, so no, you can't get dice and expect them to work for the FFG systems. You have to spend extra money to get dice to work with each system you want to play. I'm honestly surprised they haven't sold specific Star Wars dice for the individual Star Wars RPG settings, like Edge of Empire using different dice from The One What's Got The Jedi In.
So what do those symbols mean? What is in here that makes it better than normal dice? Is the tradeoff worth it?
@ = Success. YOU DID IT
& = Explosive Success. YOU DID IT AND THEN EXPLODED YOU'RE 'SPLOSION MAN. What this actually does is let you count this as a Success, and also reroll the die to try and get more symbols to add to your check. Functionally similar to the "dice explode on a 10" rule in 4th.
? = Opportunity. Let me quote. The Opportunity symbol represents secondary options available to the character thanks to the check. It does not contribute directly to success, but it lets the character do or notice something useful that is unrelated to their goal at the outset, or enhance their success with an additional effect or story detail.
# = Strife. This represents a rush of emotion in the character, which is a bad thing for samurai who are supposed to always keep their emotions in check. A nice touch is that this symbol never appears alone -- it's always accompanying something else. If you get too much Strife, you Emote, which in nerd circles is a bad thing unless someone said something mean about Rick & Morty.
So those are the custom dice! I hate them but okay. I'm going to try my best to not get off track here, because this is going to take some explaining.
Souji Okita! CUT THAT GUY
Step 1: Declare Intention.
"I, Souji Okita, do solemnly declare that I intend to cut that guy."
Step 2: Determine Skill, Ring, and Target Number of Successes.
Okay, so what Skill Group is this? We have five.
Okay, now we need the Skill. Inside the Martial Skill Group, we have
Now, we consider the Approach.
Okay, uh, let's go to page 81 to see some examples.
Martial Approaches (choose one)
Determine Target Number of Successes
christ
OKAY WE HAVE A CHART Is this an average difficulty, a TN 2, like jumping a ten-foot ditch or recognizing someone in disguise? Or is this a difficult task, a TN 3, such as scaling a cliff without a rope or finding a well-hidden object?
Honestly, I bet there are specific rules for this later in the book. But I'll pretend it's a TN 3, for the sake of moving this along.
Step 3: Assemble and Roll Dice Pool
So we take Skill dice equal to our Skill and Ring dice equal to the Ring for the Approach we picked, and we roll them. Then we apply any modifiers we may have, like from our Advantages and Disadvantages. I'm not going to do that last point because it's fine. Let's roll dice! DICE ARE BEING ROLLED LET'S GET HYPE
Step 4: Apply Advantages and Disadvantages (If Applicable)
IT'S OKAY WE'RE SKIPPING THIS STEP though if anyone had an advantage built around murder it'd be Okita.
Step 5: Choose Kept Dice
It was at this point, when I first read the rules, that I exclaimed aloud, "You have got to be kidding me."
So despite having custom dice, non-additive mechanics, and this new three-to-four stage action selection system, FFG's L5R has still grafted the roll-and-keep system onto their own machine, like a Frankenstein's monster with a sewing machine inexplicably stitched into its shoulder. You choose a number of kept dice from one to the ring value for the approach you used for this roll.
Step 6: Resolve Symbols of Kept Dice
So now you do your thing. For each Explosion, you roll another die and decide if you want to keep it or drop it (which makes this worse than the original system, since you may roll a blank and then not keep it. Maybe that's not any better than rolling a 1 or a 2, but increasing a 38 to a 40 still feels like progress, even if it wasn't enough to succeed). For each Strife, you get a Strife. For each Opportunity, you resolve an Opportunity effect, and you know, I wanted to keep this simple, but it's not going to let me, is it?
Opportunities
They have types, determined by your approach.
There's a bit in the text here that says "The whole group is excited to see how the characters will react, all thanks to one simple Opportunity die," which really feels like someone stamping their foot and justifying its inclusion, too.
There's also a threat of more tables with more options for opportunity dice expenditure, which seems cruel.
STRIFE
NO WE ARE DONE
If you get too much Strife you have an emotional outburst. I know it's based around what kind of ring you're using for your approach, I'm sure there are charts, I cannot handle this anymore.
OH GOD CLOSE THE SYSTEMS CHAPTER
Okay, look. I know I left stuff out of the core L5R section. I know the system is not that easy. But at its core, I really feel that it is. It's roll-and-keep. You have a number between 1-40ish to hit, and you roll dice, keep the high ones, add them up, and there you go. There are Raises, if you want to do something difficult, like shoot a sword out of someone's hand, so you Raise the difficulty up a number of steps, each step being an increase of 5. Some things give you Free Raises, and then I'm getting to the part where I'm getting a little frustrated and want to simplify it. But at its core, it's roll 5k2, and you can have some sort of idea of what that means.
All this stuff up here is covered in the very first chapter. This is the core of how the system works -- a multi-stage action selection, intent assignment from five options with different attributes, four separate symbols across two separate types of dice, and then this opportunity thing. It all feels like bloat.
Two stories.
One, I worked on a full system overhaul for Final Fantasy Omega, right up to the end. I was going to move the system to use L5R. As the characters were in the past, I had characters IN the past using the roll-and-keep system as I worked the kinks out of it, while our protagonists were still on the d20 system they were used to. I like weird mechanics showing up in gameplay like that. I detailed out attributes and attacks, wrote 5,000 words of skills and some 15,000 words of notes for myself, using in-game characters that my players knew as examples. I transferred one character to the new system completely. I poured a ton of work into this and I was really proud of it. I still am!
It was too complicated.
I defined too many things. I wrote out too many rules. Even stripping aspects of L5R out of the system, I introduced too many pauses to the system. I slowed it down. The system got in the way. The game's disintegration kept me from having to solve the bloat issue, and I never managed to solve the bloat issue, but it wouldn't have worked for our group. Not how we played.
Two, I play Star Wars Armada with my friend Nate from time to time. I'm really bad at it, but it's fun! It's an FFG joint, this miniature-based naval-style game of Star Wars battlecruisers drifting across the spacesea and shooting each other. And a core memory I have of it is how resolving attacks works.
I roll a handful of dice for Home One unloading a broadside into a Star Destroyer. 5 red dice and five black dice, let's say. Each color of die has its own distribution of different icons on its faces, and all of these are d8s. I take my results and group them into categories, finding my Hits, my Crits, and my Targets. For each Target I roll, I can block one of his Defensive Actions. But maybe I have a tiny little card assigned to my ship that represents an Ion Battery or a Targeting Turbolaser Array that will let me spend those Targets to use a card effect instead. And my Crits can be used for a standard Crit effect, but maybe I have an Armament card that lets me use a Proton Torpedo instead. And maybe I have a Crew card or something that limits what Nate can use on his Star Destroyer, or maybe Nate has a card on his Star Destroyer that cancels one of my dice, or, or or or or or or or or.
Every roll in Armada means we're poring over my cards, his cards, and our standard abilities, spending and applying and canceling and countering. And while this can be fun, it also brings the action to a complete stop. It's like if the Death Star fired its megalaser at Alderaan but Alderaan had to run three minutes of calculations to figure out how much damage it took. It's like Peter Fox mumbling "this game makes real fighting look attractive" while his brother Jason unfolds a flowchart showing how to kick, while they try to learn their Mortal Kombat analog. It's missing the forest for cataloging every tree.
And if that was the game, then great! But it's not! It's naval ships moving and fighters, it's positioning and action selection, it's jockeying and it's jousting. The Legend of the Five Rings LCG that just came out, which has this same thrust-parry-sidestep-reveal-betray-DOING, that's the whole game! You finish that step and you're into upkeep and then you put a new card down and you go into that whole exchange again. There isn't anything else, and that's great, because that's the whole point. But if it's not the whole point, or at least like half the point, then you're spending a lot of time in a spreadsheet.
YOU HAVE ROLLED MULTIPLE OPPORTUNITY DICE FOR NARRATION WOULD YOU LIKE TO SPEND THEM
I think I get what FFG is trying here, once we're inside the dollar defenses provided by the custom dice.
Games can be so much more than Dungeons & Dragons. By applying narrative payoff to rules and adding the opportunity symbols for failed rolls, FFG is trying to limit how often these combat-heavy games can be just a win-or-lose thing, and trying to promote games that aren't just combat-heavy. The old L5R setting spent a considerable amount of time and attention on the political maneuvering of the era, holding courtiers in the same light as bushi. But by codifying these systems so strictly, they restrain creativity rather than free it. Every roll brings with it a chart, every opportunity symbol just as much of an obstacle as an actual opportunity.
There's a term in video games, the "gameplay loop," that means what you spend most of your time doing. If the gameplay loop for a game doesn't center around the actual stated appeal and purpose of a game, there may be something wrong. In a game ostensibly about exploration, discovery, and freedom, much of the moment-to-moment gameplay in No Man's Sky when it shipped was managing inventory in menus. I can go hours between real-time battles in Total War games, building and upgrading buildings in a rarely-satisfying overworld instead of clashing Romans against Huns in thrilling open-field warfare, the loop going too far into administration instead of action. Compare the gameplay loop of Life is Strange, alternating between tense what-do-I-do-what-do-I-do anxiety and location exploration, never spending so much time in one that the game drags or pushes too hard.
All those custom dice, the symbols, the Opportunities, applying advantages and disadvantages, rolling and keeping and rolling more and keeping more, that's the system getting in the way. The gameplay loop in an RPG should be the series of interesting decisions, the actions and the consequences, the narrative and the payoff. All this stuff? All this stuff that's in the How To Play section, not in the additional rules and the edge cases and the weird stuff? That's administration.
I do enough of that already.
I get a copy of Blades in the Dark in three days. I can't wait to read it and report back.
Write your Congressfolks, people.
As I covered here, I really like the L5R system, listing it as my favorite system in which I have yet to play. I love the roll-and-keep system, I think it makes intuitive sense, I think it meshes with the setting itself very well, it allows for better odds of success for a skilled samurai but also offers the chance for surprising success or inopportune failure, and it's incredibly easy to understand.
To recap!
Souji Okita wants to Cut That Guy. What is the Attribute best used for cutting? It's Dexterity. What is the Skill best used for cutting? It's Melee. So Okita rolls the number of dice he has in Dexterity (we'll call that four) and the number of dice he has in Melee (we'll call that 5). Nine dice! Roll 9d10, and keep 5, because of your Melee skill being 5 (NOTE: I do not recall if Keep is based on Skill or Attribute. I think it's Skill, because it rewards a physically-weak master of the blade versus a giant with a toothpick he's never seen). 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 6, 8, 8, 10. That's really good! Add up the best five, 6+6+8+8+10. 38! You got a roll of 38. Maybe Okita has ways to boost that further -- exploding dice that reroll on a 10, called shots that adjust the difficulty, etc. But that's simple! Roll 9k5. And the way you get those rolls makes perfect sense, I think.
The new system?
I honestly don't know where to begin.
Dice! Let's start with dice!
In L5R 4th Edition, the dice were d10s. Lovely, lovely ten-sided dice. They're happy! They go 1 through 0, and when you see a zero you'll be confused because you think the dice are 0-9, but hahahahaha, they're actually 1-10! That 0 is a ten. Don't worry! It's okay. Anyway, d10s are great and have been used for everything ever. If you play RPGs, you may have some around! World of Darkness games use them exclusively, unless stuff's really changed lately.
In L5R FFG, you have two types of dice, d6s and d12s. These are called Ring Dice and Skill Dice, respectively. They don't have numbers, though, since these are custom dice.
Let's diverge. I've griped about custom dice before, right? Only a little. Let's fix that.
Custom dice are INTELLECTUALLY BANKRUPT.
Custom dice are a naked cash grab in a hobby full of $100 board games, $60 RPG books, and buy-in LCG models and release waves of plastic spaceships designed to make you pay $15-60 PER MONTH to keep current with your friend who has the new TIE Fighter sf/0/x/14/xo9, the one that Darth Buttdawg walked in front of in the eighth issue of the crossover comic from 1989, but it has a new plasma torpedo card that will rescue the original Millennium Falcon ship you got when you got into X-Wing because it's the coolest ship in the world, only FFG has to keep the tournament scene healthy by releasing more and more powerful ships every time so people always spend that sweet cash, so if you want to play the Star Wars ship in the Star Wars tournament in the Star Wars league with your Star Wars friends, you need to buy the TIE Fighter sf/0/x/14/xo9, but if you REALLY want to make the Falcon better, there's that new $120 Epic ship, the SS This Was Never In A Movie, that has C-3P0's brother on it who synergizes really well with your Han crew card -- oh, you didn't think Han was going to FLY the Falcon? No one has Han fly the Falcon anymore.
AND I KIND OF LIKE X-WING
But here's the thing about custom dice. Custom dice are a gate. Custom dice stand in the way of people playing your games. It's like how soccer is the biggest thing in the world, and that's because anyone can play it. All you need is a ball. I played Ultimate Frisbee in high school, and all we needed was a Frisbee and a field. "Okay, that hill dropoff is one goal, and past the tree is the other." X-Wing and Armada both use custom dice, because FFG wants to include blank sides and results with multiple tags -- and we'll get to that -- but all it does is put another barrier to entry for you, especially -- especially! -- in a role-playing setup, where prior to now all you've needed is a book and whatever dice are under glass at the gaming store that are like $3. I have a bag FULL of multicolored dice, and I can trace most of them to specific places in my life. If I want to play an RPG, I just dig into that bag and get dice out. I already have dice. I don't need more dice. I've got the whole dice thing figured out. I have enough dice for everyone.
"But Matt!" you say, desperate to get me back on track. "You can just use existing dice and just have the numbers equal the custom sides! It's not that hard!"
Do you really want to check ANOTHER chart every time you make a roll? Because you'll be doing enough of that already.
| Standard Face | Symbols |
| 1 | (blank) |
| 2 | @ |
| 3 | @# |
| 4 | &# |
| 5 | ? |
| 6 | ?# |
| Standard Face | Symbols |
| 1 | (blank) |
| 2 | (blank) |
| 3 | @ |
| 4 | @ |
| 5 | @? |
| 6 | @# |
| 7 | @# |
| 8 | & |
| 9 | &# |
| 10 | ? |
| 11 | ? |
| 12 | ? |
Simple, right?
The beta rules include little cutouts for you to paste over your existing dice, or you can download the $5 L5R dice app from your app store of choice. Oh, and if you thought this was a preview for the upcoming FFG Genesys system, the dice used there are COMPLETELY different, but also custom, so no, you can't get dice and expect them to work for the FFG systems. You have to spend extra money to get dice to work with each system you want to play. I'm honestly surprised they haven't sold specific Star Wars dice for the individual Star Wars RPG settings, like Edge of Empire using different dice from The One What's Got The Jedi In.
So what do those symbols mean? What is in here that makes it better than normal dice? Is the tradeoff worth it?
@ = Success. YOU DID IT
& = Explosive Success. YOU DID IT AND THEN EXPLODED YOU'RE 'SPLOSION MAN. What this actually does is let you count this as a Success, and also reroll the die to try and get more symbols to add to your check. Functionally similar to the "dice explode on a 10" rule in 4th.
? = Opportunity. Let me quote. The Opportunity symbol represents secondary options available to the character thanks to the check. It does not contribute directly to success, but it lets the character do or notice something useful that is unrelated to their goal at the outset, or enhance their success with an additional effect or story detail.
# = Strife. This represents a rush of emotion in the character, which is a bad thing for samurai who are supposed to always keep their emotions in check. A nice touch is that this symbol never appears alone -- it's always accompanying something else. If you get too much Strife, you Emote, which in nerd circles is a bad thing unless someone said something mean about Rick & Morty.
So those are the custom dice! I hate them but okay. I'm going to try my best to not get off track here, because this is going to take some explaining.
Souji Okita! CUT THAT GUY
Step 1: Declare Intention.
"I, Souji Okita, do solemnly declare that I intend to cut that guy."
Step 2: Determine Skill, Ring, and Target Number of Successes.
Okay, so what Skill Group is this? We have five.
- Artisan Skill Group
- Martial Skill Group
- Scholar Skill Group
- Social Skill Group
- Trade Skill Group
Okay, now we need the Skill. Inside the Martial Skill Group, we have
- Fitness
- Martial Arts [Melee]
- Martial Arts [Ranged]
- Martial Arts [Unarmed]
- Meditation
- Tactics
Now, we consider the Approach.
- Air: The Air Ring represents grace, perceptiveness, cunning, and precision.
- Earth: The Earth Ring represents resilience, memory, patience, and discipline.
- Fire: The Fire Ring represents passion, invention, candor, and ferocity.
- Water: The Water Ring represents adaptability, awareness, gregariousness, and power.
- Void: The Void Ring represents mysticism, wisdom, intuition, and instinct.
Okay, uh, let's go to page 81 to see some examples.
Martial Approaches (choose one)
- Withstand opposing force to wear it down (Earth)
- Shift opposing force to work against itself or for you (Water)
- Overwhelm opposing force with a quick burst of power (Fire)
- Feint to lure opposing force into a position of vulnerability (Air)
- Sacrifice to let opposing force score a victory so that you can achieve a greater end (Void)
Determine Target Number of Successes
christ
OKAY WE HAVE A CHART Is this an average difficulty, a TN 2, like jumping a ten-foot ditch or recognizing someone in disguise? Or is this a difficult task, a TN 3, such as scaling a cliff without a rope or finding a well-hidden object?
Honestly, I bet there are specific rules for this later in the book. But I'll pretend it's a TN 3, for the sake of moving this along.
Step 3: Assemble and Roll Dice Pool
So we take Skill dice equal to our Skill and Ring dice equal to the Ring for the Approach we picked, and we roll them. Then we apply any modifiers we may have, like from our Advantages and Disadvantages. I'm not going to do that last point because it's fine. Let's roll dice! DICE ARE BEING ROLLED LET'S GET HYPE
Step 4: Apply Advantages and Disadvantages (If Applicable)
IT'S OKAY WE'RE SKIPPING THIS STEP though if anyone had an advantage built around murder it'd be Okita.
Step 5: Choose Kept Dice
It was at this point, when I first read the rules, that I exclaimed aloud, "You have got to be kidding me."
So despite having custom dice, non-additive mechanics, and this new three-to-four stage action selection system, FFG's L5R has still grafted the roll-and-keep system onto their own machine, like a Frankenstein's monster with a sewing machine inexplicably stitched into its shoulder. You choose a number of kept dice from one to the ring value for the approach you used for this roll.
Step 6: Resolve Symbols of Kept Dice
So now you do your thing. For each Explosion, you roll another die and decide if you want to keep it or drop it (which makes this worse than the original system, since you may roll a blank and then not keep it. Maybe that's not any better than rolling a 1 or a 2, but increasing a 38 to a 40 still feels like progress, even if it wasn't enough to succeed). For each Strife, you get a Strife. For each Opportunity, you resolve an Opportunity effect, and you know, I wanted to keep this simple, but it's not going to let me, is it?
Opportunities
They have types, determined by your approach.
- Air = subtle, precise, cunning
- Earth = defensive, reassuring, thorough
- Fire = Flashy, creative, inspiring
- Water = Intuitive, flexible, gregarious
- Void = Mystical, wise, instinctive
| Element | Narrative Uses | Mechanical Uses |
| Water Opp. | Water Opp: You spot an interesting physical detail present in your environment not directly related to your check. At the GM’s discretion, you may use this to add a (previously unnoticed) piece of terrain or a mundane object to your environment. Water Success Opp: You perform the task very efficiently, completing the task more quickly or saving supplies in the process. Additional Water Opp. dice spent this way further reduces the time or materials required | Water Success Opp: Remove 2 of your strife per Water Opp. dice spent this way. Water Opp: Choose an Air or Earth opportunity from this or another table and resolve it. The cost of this opportunity is double its normal cost. |
There's a bit in the text here that says "The whole group is excited to see how the characters will react, all thanks to one simple Opportunity die," which really feels like someone stamping their foot and justifying its inclusion, too.
There's also a threat of more tables with more options for opportunity dice expenditure, which seems cruel.
STRIFE
NO WE ARE DONE
If you get too much Strife you have an emotional outburst. I know it's based around what kind of ring you're using for your approach, I'm sure there are charts, I cannot handle this anymore.
OH GOD CLOSE THE SYSTEMS CHAPTER
Okay, look. I know I left stuff out of the core L5R section. I know the system is not that easy. But at its core, I really feel that it is. It's roll-and-keep. You have a number between 1-40ish to hit, and you roll dice, keep the high ones, add them up, and there you go. There are Raises, if you want to do something difficult, like shoot a sword out of someone's hand, so you Raise the difficulty up a number of steps, each step being an increase of 5. Some things give you Free Raises, and then I'm getting to the part where I'm getting a little frustrated and want to simplify it. But at its core, it's roll 5k2, and you can have some sort of idea of what that means.
All this stuff up here is covered in the very first chapter. This is the core of how the system works -- a multi-stage action selection, intent assignment from five options with different attributes, four separate symbols across two separate types of dice, and then this opportunity thing. It all feels like bloat.
Two stories.
One, I worked on a full system overhaul for Final Fantasy Omega, right up to the end. I was going to move the system to use L5R. As the characters were in the past, I had characters IN the past using the roll-and-keep system as I worked the kinks out of it, while our protagonists were still on the d20 system they were used to. I like weird mechanics showing up in gameplay like that. I detailed out attributes and attacks, wrote 5,000 words of skills and some 15,000 words of notes for myself, using in-game characters that my players knew as examples. I transferred one character to the new system completely. I poured a ton of work into this and I was really proud of it. I still am!
It was too complicated.
I defined too many things. I wrote out too many rules. Even stripping aspects of L5R out of the system, I introduced too many pauses to the system. I slowed it down. The system got in the way. The game's disintegration kept me from having to solve the bloat issue, and I never managed to solve the bloat issue, but it wouldn't have worked for our group. Not how we played.
Two, I play Star Wars Armada with my friend Nate from time to time. I'm really bad at it, but it's fun! It's an FFG joint, this miniature-based naval-style game of Star Wars battlecruisers drifting across the spacesea and shooting each other. And a core memory I have of it is how resolving attacks works.
I roll a handful of dice for Home One unloading a broadside into a Star Destroyer. 5 red dice and five black dice, let's say. Each color of die has its own distribution of different icons on its faces, and all of these are d8s. I take my results and group them into categories, finding my Hits, my Crits, and my Targets. For each Target I roll, I can block one of his Defensive Actions. But maybe I have a tiny little card assigned to my ship that represents an Ion Battery or a Targeting Turbolaser Array that will let me spend those Targets to use a card effect instead. And my Crits can be used for a standard Crit effect, but maybe I have an Armament card that lets me use a Proton Torpedo instead. And maybe I have a Crew card or something that limits what Nate can use on his Star Destroyer, or maybe Nate has a card on his Star Destroyer that cancels one of my dice, or, or or or or or or or or.
Every roll in Armada means we're poring over my cards, his cards, and our standard abilities, spending and applying and canceling and countering. And while this can be fun, it also brings the action to a complete stop. It's like if the Death Star fired its megalaser at Alderaan but Alderaan had to run three minutes of calculations to figure out how much damage it took. It's like Peter Fox mumbling "this game makes real fighting look attractive" while his brother Jason unfolds a flowchart showing how to kick, while they try to learn their Mortal Kombat analog. It's missing the forest for cataloging every tree.
And if that was the game, then great! But it's not! It's naval ships moving and fighters, it's positioning and action selection, it's jockeying and it's jousting. The Legend of the Five Rings LCG that just came out, which has this same thrust-parry-sidestep-reveal-betray-DOING, that's the whole game! You finish that step and you're into upkeep and then you put a new card down and you go into that whole exchange again. There isn't anything else, and that's great, because that's the whole point. But if it's not the whole point, or at least like half the point, then you're spending a lot of time in a spreadsheet.
YOU HAVE ROLLED MULTIPLE OPPORTUNITY DICE FOR NARRATION WOULD YOU LIKE TO SPEND THEM
I think I get what FFG is trying here, once we're inside the dollar defenses provided by the custom dice.
Games can be so much more than Dungeons & Dragons. By applying narrative payoff to rules and adding the opportunity symbols for failed rolls, FFG is trying to limit how often these combat-heavy games can be just a win-or-lose thing, and trying to promote games that aren't just combat-heavy. The old L5R setting spent a considerable amount of time and attention on the political maneuvering of the era, holding courtiers in the same light as bushi. But by codifying these systems so strictly, they restrain creativity rather than free it. Every roll brings with it a chart, every opportunity symbol just as much of an obstacle as an actual opportunity.
There's a term in video games, the "gameplay loop," that means what you spend most of your time doing. If the gameplay loop for a game doesn't center around the actual stated appeal and purpose of a game, there may be something wrong. In a game ostensibly about exploration, discovery, and freedom, much of the moment-to-moment gameplay in No Man's Sky when it shipped was managing inventory in menus. I can go hours between real-time battles in Total War games, building and upgrading buildings in a rarely-satisfying overworld instead of clashing Romans against Huns in thrilling open-field warfare, the loop going too far into administration instead of action. Compare the gameplay loop of Life is Strange, alternating between tense what-do-I-do-what-do-I-do anxiety and location exploration, never spending so much time in one that the game drags or pushes too hard.
All those custom dice, the symbols, the Opportunities, applying advantages and disadvantages, rolling and keeping and rolling more and keeping more, that's the system getting in the way. The gameplay loop in an RPG should be the series of interesting decisions, the actions and the consequences, the narrative and the payoff. All this stuff? All this stuff that's in the How To Play section, not in the additional rules and the edge cases and the weird stuff? That's administration.
I do enough of that already.
I get a copy of Blades in the Dark in three days. I can't wait to read it and report back.
