Gamer Question

[benlehman]

People who like L5R: Why?

Why do you like a top-heavy, orientalist, highly westernized fantasy of Japan that is simultaneously less gameable and less interesting than the "real thing" (either a historical period or something based on Japanese myth.) Real Samurai had complicated lives of politics, betrayal, war, and power. Y'know, human issues. L5R Samurai seem to worry mostly about "taint" and "honor" and kill themselves all the damned time.

Not to mention that China and Korea are reduced to "the shadowlands" that are EVIL and full of "taint."

And please don't say it is the system. 'cause that is a whole nother rant.

(Clarification: I have no trouble believing that a lot of people like L5R. Just that twice today I have seen folks who I think of as rational, sane people, very hip to racial, cultural, and historical issues, praise the game. I'm really curious -- why? Am I missing something?)

Comments

[benlehman.livejournal.com]

Example:

The mechanics of raises seem silly to me. The fact that you have to take a raise before you roll means that there are breakpoints in difficulty -- for an XkY die pool, you will always want to take Z raises and no more.

Usually, Z = 0.

This sucks.

A cooler thing is to allow raises after the roll.

yrs--
--Ben

[yeloson.livejournal.com]

I agree. TNs AND Raises together are a cruddy way of dealing with difficulty issues. For one, how much "better" a raise is, is completely undefined. My drift basically steals the rollover success from Sorcerer- each raise = an extra rolled die to some other action.

[(Anonymous)]

That isn't entirely accurate. Raises "raise" the risk you take of failure for a more difficult action. For something like blind perception rolls, the gm has the ability to add raises onto your roll themselves when you make the roll, or change what info you get as though you had called raises. In combat though it makes it so when you specifically are trying to do harder things, you have a greater chance of failure. If all raises were called after you rolled it would be pointless. You would never fail to take the right choice in combat as you would know you did not roll enough to be able to knock the man's sword from his hand, or feint, or whatever.

As to usually not making them? Also false. The dice pools on the current system make taking raises fairly easy, on top of a ton of static bonuses written into the system. My combat char can roll 9k4 on the attack, without spending void. This means on average I can easily take 2-4 raises on the attack, with reasonable chance of success.

[benlehman.livejournal.com]

Dude, chill. You are not your game system. You also don't need to go rooting around in the livejournal archives to defend it.

The fact of the matter is that, for a XkY die pool against difficult Z, there will be an ideal number of raises N. Always. The same. Number. This is mathematics -- the same thing is true of Power Attack and Expertise in d20, or any mechanic where you reduce your chances of success before the roll in order to improve the results after.

I think that's dull. I don't like it when a game penalizes me for trying something cool, or different, or out of the ordinary.

[(Anonymous)]

Wow, I recieved incredibly late notification on that. Oops.