/l5rg/ - Legend of the Five Rings (RpG) General

>Katana 4/5(7)
>Otsuchi 9/3
>Zanbato 5/6 (No Razor-edged)
>Naginata 6/6

If you want to avoid razor edged, you're pretty much down to zanbato vs Otsuchi.

In addition,
Polearms get Iron Forest Style, which takes advantage of their reach to keep opponents with shorter weapons away

Concealable and Mundane weapons are easy to carry in most places.

Weapons with snaring will presumably get techniques that take advantage of it for similar effect, but there aren't any in the beta.

>Polearms get Iron Forest Style, which takes advantage of their reach to keep opponents with shorter weapons away
Only sorta. First you have to activate the style which means you're not using those dice for damage or crits, second there's counter-play. You can use Iaijutsu to counter it entirely, since you can store a weapon at the start of your turn for free, and Iaijutsu gives you range 1-2. Admittedly this makes them use it as deadliness 5. Alternatively they can just throw a knife at you, since, you know, drawing is free.

At the end of the day there will be three archetypes of combat. A style that deals damage, a style that crits, and a style that debuffs. The katana is just the best weapon for the crit style at the moment, and crits are valuable in ways that damage and debuffs just can't be, the same way raw damage is valuable in ways that crit can't be.

No, Razor Edge serious kills certain weapons against armor.

A Naginata (6/6, range 2), Otsuchi (9/3, range 1), Tetsubo (8/3, range 1), Zanbato (5/6, range 1-2) are all good war weapons over the Katana (4/5(7), range 1) with most samurai likely in Lacquered Armor (resist 4) or Plated Armor (resist 5).

A Katana becoming a (2/3(5)) is not something you want.

The Katana is likely the best Civil weapon, but a bad battlefield one.

Throwing a Kife requires a technique.

>Throwing a Kife requires a technique.
So does iron forest style. What's your point?

>No, Razor Edge serious kills certain weapons against armor.

Only if you strike and don't deal damage. If you miss nothing bad happens. Further: striking as water exists if you're in a pinch. To top it off, damage doesn't matter for a crit build though. As long as you do 1, the crit is debilitating.

Point being is that you can't "just throw a knife." You either need a technique or a range 2 weapon.

You would need 3+ successes for Lacquered and Auto Crit Striking as Water/Fire can be kill by Earth Stance currently.

Striking as Water ain't that hot stuff because kept dice is a tight area and there isn't much room for keeping Opportunities.

>You would need 3+ successes for Lacquered and Auto Crit Striking as Water/Fire can be kill by Earth Stance currently.

Fire stance also just adds strife to successes. Akodo bushi just consumes strife to add successes. There are ways to make sure a bare minimum success gives you damage against armored targets.

Fire stance gives you a bonus success for each strife kept on a successful role it doesn't directly added successes to the role.

Akodo Commander is 1 school out of 14 and still requires the roll gets a minimum amount of successes before the bonus successes are added.

You still have a good chance of damaging a Katana in both cases.

>You still have a good chance of damaging a Katana in both cases.

If you miss you don't damage the katana at all because you never hit. You can choose to keep non-successes (such as opps or blanks) to avoid landing a pointless blow.

>with most samurai likely in Lacquered Armor (resist 4) or Plated Armor (resist 5)

>Not conning your opponents into unarmored duels
>Not stabbing your opponents in the back in situations where wearing armor wouldn't be socially appropriate
>Not having your geisha sister poison their tea
>Not using your Crane contacts to financially ruin your enemies, forcing them to commit seppuku out of shame

Such a simple minded user...

>Not having your geisha sister poison their tea

If your sister was a geisha, you wouldn't be a samurai.

I did say a Katana is likely the best Civil weapon. They are great when you are facing opponents in Concealed Armor/Traveling Clothes or worse, but you want wargear when fighting on an armored battlefield.

I don't really get why a club does more damage than a katana. I get that a katana is more deadly but there's no circumstance I'd ever rather be hit by a katana than a club.

Damage is mostly for armor piercing, and blunt force is pretty good at transferring through armor.

Ah, but user. The Scorpion would willingly dishonor their own women, to let them stoop so low, in order to kill a target.

Nah. They might stoop low enough to *pretend* to be a geisha, but they wouldn't actually make one a geisha. Dropping out of the celestial order is beyond the pale for even the most sneaky of sneaky bastard samurai.

1E Scorpions would certainly not be shy of sending one of their own to geishadom, especially if they failed to perform otherwise.

1E Scorpion were the height of Wick favoritism and would never have someone fail to perform because their supposed failure would already be factored into the plans and would result in success despite any attempts at being bad at their job.

Well, true. This was the age where samurai insisted over and over that ninja didn't exist and not in a wink wink nod nod way, and yet kept getting fooled by Scorpion rookies with literally the worst gear ever while the real Scorpion badasses killed daimyo. And somehow only the Kitsuki family ever came close to finding out the truth (and of course that was another gigantic fuck you, thanks Way of Shadow)

never played this before. 2 best ed to check out?

4E is where you should start.

In order from best to worst
4>1>3>the line of badness>2>>>>>d20
Wildcard is the new beta.

What does your clan need right now /l5rg/?

We're doing pretty well, all things considered, but I'd like a few more cards focused around dueling

tnx lads

>cannot tell if dragon or crane

The Beta looks pretty fucking awful. Though I will say the Unicorn's Horse Necromancy/Kool-Aid Horse is fucking hilarious.

>The Party is trapped in sealed off cave
>Shinjo Horse-Man says, "No problem, bros my recently killed horse will save us."
>Shinjo Horse-Man unleashes a loud high pitched annoying whistle.
>Suddenly the earth trembles as fearsome rumbling fills the air
>The Rockfall explodes into dust
>When the fine particles of stone finally settles the silhouette of a mighty steed can be seen in the sunlight streaming in.
>Kakita Girly-Man and Matsu Manly-Girl stare mouths agape in awe
>Shinjo Horse-Man strides to his ever faithful friend and leaps to the saddle and ride off into the sunset yelling "Oh Yeah!"

FFG Betas always look like ass. Final product will be fucking different it might be a different game just about.

>Rank 6 Mastery ability is weird

No fucking shit, that's like Epic level abilities which are fucking bullshit.

Honestly, that one isn't that weird when you consider that highly honorable beings get the fast track through the afterlife and there are many holes between the animal realm and the physical world. Your highly honorabru horse goes through his revolving door in Emma-O's office, steps out into the animal realm, and then steps out back in Ningen-do.

It's virtually the onikage steeds the Dark Moto used in Old5R. I get they wanted to nix the issue of losing your steed, but this is ridiculous.

Dude, it's Rank 6. I think you are allowed to be a little ridiculous at that level.

have you tried the star wars ffg? basically the same but without the convoluted bullshit.

i really dont like this edition but the art is amazing.

EXACTLY THAT
user, you are a person of culture.

I just played the module in the beta and it was the worst system I've ever played and I have played some bad systems.

Nothing about the game. Not the dice. Not the combat. Not the investigation. Not mass combat. Not the dueling. Not the intrigue system. Nothing about the game is fun. It's all a god damn chore.

designers that do not hate them.
seriously, designers hate the dragon. yay, we get an empress! WTF NO! dont do that, thats stupid AF!!!

i loled

You didn't actually play it at all, did you?

I did lie a little bit. I GM'd it. For four hours. It was terrible.

Rip user, may 4E be kinder.

So a few things to you anons. The Katana is a civil weapon not a battlefield one is an absolute meme. If you manage to not break that shit against heavy armor (Easily done on fucking fire stance) you can do 1 wound on the armored guy and still fuck him with crit, and believe me, if you have Ring 3 and skill 3 you will already crit realiable at every turn.
You can choose to keep non dice at all (So you are not forced to fuck your own katana, its called not being stupid)
and HOLYFUCK someone else here also triggered that they gave fucking WATER to Akodo's instead of FIRE? even their school rank has to do with STRIFE for fuckin sakes.

The Lion have been a Water clan the entire time.

Begone, Five Rings heretic.

I dunno if "Instead of doing anything this round, I miss." is really better than just using a weapon that can reliably go through armor.

Strength and Perception have always been their thing. Observing their opponents and then using that information to guide their military strength is their MO.

On fire stance (i know. the bad part is that this will lock your options.) 2 sucesses and 2 strife is enough to not break your weapon against plated armor. And is way harder to suceed without strife than otherwise.
in another related note, check artisan skills guys. you can pimp your katana (More severity) and your armor.

And on earth stance, anyone hitting you cannot get critical strikes. Period.
You do one or two damage or you miss on purpose. End sentence.

Severity means nothing to Earth Stance. If someone is wearing armor and you're using a katana against them, they have no reason to not be in Earth stance.

Well. Good luck passing through Guard + Crescent Moon Style if katana guy cant fuck you with Criticals. a shitty roll of 2strifes and 2 sucesses will put tn at 5 to attack him. Earth guy hope is that he wont take 1 damage every turn, because thats probably more than he will be dealing.

Actually 6. Tought it was TN 2 the guard action.

Earth guy can just Charge you and do the base damage of his weapon. It's not an actual attack, it's just automatic. If you turtle up, they step back and run forward until they get the Opportunity to do damage for free.

Clever. But unfortuantely, you dont turtle up in this edition. You can move normally even with a guard action.

And he can move normally and charge. If you do nothing but Guard, he Charges until you die from his base weapon damage. If you attack, he's in Earth and your damage is low or non-existent because you miss on purpose if you can't succeed by a lot. If you're both in Earth, the higher damage wins. If you Crescent Fire vs Earth, the higher damage still wins.

there's no reason to discuss this system. it's ass

I dunno, I'm having fun imagining a guy in armor with a tetsubo continuously stepping back and body slamming a kakita who won't put his katana down.

save it for sadpanda my dude

...what?

I think it's more of a booru thing.

Not sure if it makes sense using your 2 movements to getting away from your target and then using action to move right back to him due the description of charge. but have a (You).

You don't have to use your 2 movement. You use 1 movement to back up, and one to move forward and that's enough. Alternatively, your target backed up a bit, and you move forward an equal amount and that's enough. There's no minimum movement distance for Charge.

In theory its a sprint, you move x range bands. x being your successes -1. The action says it all, you move a "long distance". But sure as hell its a cheesy way to ignore defense in a Skirmish.

It's as a movement action and specifies that you move *extra* distance. The opportunity has no minimum distance.

Gonna have to fix that in the future. I think I remember a game where you were explicitly allowed to "move in place" to gain bonuses, though.

My reading, But, like you said yourself its a movement action. You are'nt moving if you are staying in the same range band. And there is no such thing as. i move 2 range bands back, i charge 2 rangebands forward and use 2 opportunities to ignore guard. I Could see people seeing problems with that kind of action, your idea is at the very least cheesy. at least to me. (i dont mean in a bad way, sometimes doing cheesy stuff is fun.)

But you aren't staying in the same range band. You're moving 1 back, and then 1 forward. If you got a bunch of successes, you could move further back and then forwards, but you don't actually need to do that.

Heart Piercing strike dont cost opportunity and is a auto crit. Earth stance wont stop it. Bonus success from fire stance will add up to the high severity of the katana.

It's TN is higher than normal, and unlike a normal attack, you can't just choose to miss if you can't reach it.
But yes, that does let you fight someone in armor.

If you want to keep using Fire Stance, someone could use flowing water strike on you and give you Bleeding, which makes you take damage for each strife you gain.
Incidentally, if you take damage that is beyond your Resilience (Water+Earth)X2, you automatically start taking critical hits. It's not likely, but if your bleeding ever crits you, its severity is equal to the amount of strife you have.

Agreed. The Kata should only be used by those who can beat TN 4 regularly. How much xp it costs to get there beats me.

>and HOLYFUCK someone else here also triggered that they gave fucking WATER to Akodo's instead of FIRE?
Literally been their thing forever. Akodo = Water, Matsu = Fire.

>Tactics: Shift opposing force to work against itself or for you (Water)

>Tactics: Overwhelm opposing force with a quick burst of power (Fire)

Lion are Water Clan user. It says so on their cards for their Shugenja.

Okay, Veeky Forums:
What disadvantages do I take for an inbred Crane Courtier, straight out of character gen? [4E]

Kakita with Heart Piercing Strike look bloody mean.

At the same level, the Kakita is going 'Nothing personal' on archers and the Scorpion is devouring 1 minion per turn without bothering to make attack rolls.

Neither of which are 'dead horse, return to me!'

Epilepsy and Contrary or Rumormonger.

Funny thing is that you can move 2 bands and then attack. a Kakita can go to range 6 (SIGHT RANGE) with one action.

...

I'm a little curious about the wording on the way of the lion class feature for the Akodo Commander, specifically because I'm unsure if strife is something that starts at zero and counts up or starts at your max and counts down. So does the skill reduce your strife and give you a bonus to attack (for a win win) or does it increase your strife in exchange for a bonus on attack (so paying a little for a bonus)?

>I'm unsure if strife is something that starts at zero and counts up or starts at your max and counts down.

You accumulate strife, and suffer an outburst when your strife exceeds your composure. The Akodo Commander lets you reduce your accumulated strife to hit people good. It's absolutely bonkers with a heavy weapon.

So I'm learning L5R a bit from a lore/RPG perspective and I'm curious about something.

Since duels are kind of the last answer in an argument, you can specialize in dueling, and its akin to forfeiting an argument to refuse one doesn't htat just mean the best duelest in a room can theoretically push their way around politically?

Like are there consequences to being Larry the duel happy jackass who wins every argument just because he's willing to take it to swords? Could you challenge someone to a duel who has literally no chance of winning against you? Is it dishonorable for that person to forfeit in that case or is it just accepted as being not stupid?

Or is this the kind of thing that would get you RAPIDLY stigmatized by everyone and ultimately cost you honor?

The consequences are that other, better duelists are going to start coming for you.
And if you challenge someone who can't duel, they can get a champion to duel for them. Do it too much, and their clan might just send one of its best just to thwart you.

And legally binding duels require the permission of both duelist's lords. Do it too frivolously and they're just going to start saying no.

Duels are only valid when someone's honor is being called into question. You can't just insist on dueling someone to solve problems. You basically can only call a duel if you're being called out directly, or if someone is giving you great offense (such as dissing your ancestors). There are a ton of court dilemmas in which a duelist just can't do anything.

A lot of people think a duelist can just make a claim and duel anyone who calls them a liar, but that doesn't really work. All that needs to happen is evidence to the contrary be presented to someone of higher status, and if that person calls you a liar, you can't really do shit about it. You're a liar now, and you won't be welcome in any court of any repute.

>doesn't that just mean the best duellist in a room can theoretically push their way around politically?
In theory, yes it's possible to angle everything into the threat of a duel.

In practice, Rokugan doesn't like courtly samurai who can't maintain the pretence of getting along with other courtly samurai, and have to resort to the ultimate resolution tool. It's boorish and unrefined.

If you're going to court as a bushi, there's a good chance you have tacit permission from your lord for duelling. That may be revoked if you use it unwisely. If the challenged samurai's lord refuses, they will have to accept the loss or petition their lord to reconsider.

>When a samurai is insulted or maligned, and even more so if his (or her) family, clan, or lord is the target of such insults and slanders, he will usually respond by issuing a challenge to a duel.
Technically, all you have to do is find yourself insulted over something in order to have cause to issue a duel. That doesn't mean the context is unimportant - only that you can do it.

Situations in which your honour would be dinged for staying silent and the challenged won't go back on their word just mean you're almost forced into a duel by your honour. Not that those are the only situations in which you can start a duel.

>you have tacit permission from your lord for duelling
Irrelevant. You need explicit permission to duel for the exact reason you want to duel, and so does the guy you are dueling. There is no blanket permission to duel.

>they will have to accept the loss or petition their lord to reconsider.
Nah. A duel that is not allowed to happen isn't even considered a draw, it's just unresolved. Lords who never allow dueling will start to have their own problems, but if they decide that an issue isn't worth dueling over, it needs to be resolved in a different way or remain open until permission can be found.

>You need explicit permission to duel for the exact reason you want to duel
Prove it.

>Nah.
Yeah.

If I challenge you to a duel, and your lord says 'no' while mine says 'yes', then you have to back out. To back out you have to let go whatever argument caused the challenge.