Legend of the Five Rings: if the system doesn't behave the way I want, I'll chop it up until it does
Curiously, that's also how samurai dealt with peasants. Anyhow, I need a place to store the rules for the game I'm running, so they might as well go here.
CHARACTER CREATION
Character creation rules are available under "Book of Earth" on LastHaiku. Spells and kiho (Martial Arts Moves) are in "Book of Void."
I'm messing with the skills, like so:
I'm dropping "Mastery" abilities, except for Bugei skills.
All "Lore" specialties are separate skills.
"Temptation" is now a High skill. The nobility spend a lot of time tempting each other.
There are also three new skills, The first is a High Skill: Bun-bu-ichi, otherwise known as "Obtuse." Much of this courtly stuff won't affect you if you don't care about it. This is the skill of ignoring it, or dismissing it as a waste of time. (BTW, bun-bu-ichi was real thing. It's literal meaning is "The pen and sword are one." Irony is not a modern invention.)
The second is also a High skill: Games. The nobility have a lot of ways to pass time, don't they. Specialities include Go, Shogi (Japanese chess,) Kite Flying, and Kemari (an ancient Japanese game indistinguishable from hackysack.)
The third is a Bugei skill, Tactics. If one person is being attacked by many, the attackers may all also add their Tactics skill to their weapon skills.
Something about skills that's not changing is that Courtier is the "make some guy do something" social skill. Etiquette, according to the L5R rulebook, is the defensive social skill, the ability to say "Thank you, I'd rather not" and make it stick.
GAME MECHANICS
Roll Stat + Skill on any-sided dice. Evens are successes, odds are not. You want to roll successes equal to a "target number" (TN). Each success above that s a "raise" under the standard L5R rules.
(Most of the time, I'm not going to roll the dice, and instead assuming that NPCs get 0.5 successes per die.)
If you want, you can turn those extra successes into kept dice. Kept dice may be spent by adding them to a later roll, if you can justify it, i.e. "My haiku made him think about the impermanence of life, so his mind is not fully on this combat." You have to decide to add them before you roll the dice, though.
You can only keep the dice from a single roll. If you get raises later, you can't add them to your pool of kept dice. You can, however, replace your kept dice with the raises from another roll.
Many times, raises can be spent on Glory points (see "Glory" below.)
CONVERTING FROM THE RULES IN THE BOOKS
Rolling an extra die is still rolling an extra die. Keeping an extra die means rolling two extra dice. Rolling and keeping an extra die thus means you roll three more dice.
An TN of 5 equals one success. An TN 10 is two successes. You get the idea.
There are a bunch of School abilities that say something like "add your Agility to your roll." In these cases, roll extra dice equal to half your ability, dropping fractions.
VOID: After you see the results of a roll, you can choose to spend a Void. This has one of two effects:
- Reroll all your dice that do not show successes.
- Roll another dice. If that dice is a success, roll it again. Keep on rolling until you fail. Add all successes to your total.
If you have special abilities that let you roll 2K2 when you spend void, you may do either of these twice, or one of each.
COMBAT: Fights start with rolling for initiative, namely Reflexes + Iaijutsu. Raises from this roll are usually kept, but they can be spent on Glory instead.
Combat is usually Agility + Weapon Skill vs. either Reflexes + Weapon Skill or Reflexes + Defense. Each raise is usually added to your damage dice, but you can also keep dice, or use them for a variety of special abilities.
SPELLCASTING: roll Ring + Insight Rank. If you're casting an Air spell, roll Air plus whatever your Insight rank is. For a Fire spell, roll Fire + Rank. To successfully cast a spell, you need successes equal to the spell's level. Each additional success is a raise, as usual.
If you have a scroll of a spell you don't know, you can cast it by reading the scroll, but you have to take it out of whatever you're carrying it in, and then unroll it. This is going to take at least a round. Also, you're looking at the scroll, not the target. If the spell has to be aimed, you'll need an extra success, or it will go off somewhere in front of you.
Once you have a scroll, it takes 2 XP and a week to learn it.
HONOR, GLORY, and STATUS
The rulebooks says these are very important, but they don't have much of an effect in game. Let's fix that.
These three attributes have a decimal place. They appear on the character sheet like "4.3" or "5.5". The number to the left of the decimal is your Rank, i.e. if you Honor is 5.8, your Honor Rank is 5. If you have to roll one of these, you roll dice equal to your Rank. If you have abilities that work if your Honor or Glory is higher than someone else's, that refers to your Rank in that attribute..
Honor, Glory, and Status are gained and lost in tenths of a Rank, usually referred to as points. If you gain 3 honor points, your Honor goes up by 0.3.
WHAT ARE THEY GOOD FOR?
STATUS measures your position in Rogukani society. Its prime game-mechanical effect is, if someone with a higher status tell you to do something and you refuse, you lose the difference between your Status in honor points!
HONOR is basically your social hit points. If it drops to zero, you kill youself, or at least decide the life of a wandering samurai is terrible and become a monk or a farmer or something. In any case, the character is out of the game.
GLORY is your public face, your social reputation. In the gift-based economy of Rokugani nobility, it's also the money equivalent. You do glorious deeds, and then subtly hint what you might like to have. Some noble gives it to you, and everyone thinks "Oh, samurai-sama did that on the orders of that daimyo." Your Glory drops, his goes up. But you have a new, shinier sword!
Spell scrolls cost 1.0 Glory Ranks per level.
PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER
A Badger, a Crab, a Crane, and a Dragon enter a lord's castle. The decorator had an Awareness of 2, and Artist 4. (2+4)/2 = 3, so that's the TN the PCs need to be unimpressed.
The Badger doesn't have any applicable skills, so he rolls his Willpower, and gets 1 success. 2 dice will be kept against him.
The Crab rolls Willpower + Bun-bu-ichi. 3 successes. Feh, money that could have been spent on spears has been spent on flowers and paint.
The Crane rolls Intelligence + Artist, and gets no successes. He spends a Void. His first roll is a success, so he rolls again. That one is also a success, so he rolls a second time, which is also a success, so he rolls a third time. That one is a failure, leaving him with a total of two successes. One die will be kept against him.
The Dragon rolls Willpower + Meditation, gets 4 successes. He's paying attention to the nothingness beyond self, and ignores the art on the walls. His inner calm allows him to keep a die.
They're ushered in to the Lord's presence. He informs them that his court is sharing their poetry, and "invites" them to participate.
The Crab responds that his poetry is written with a sword, not a pen. Uh-oh. That's the sort of statement that could make things go very wrong. Also, the lord is Status 5, and the PCs are all Status 1, so a simple refusal would cost him 4 honor points. The Crab rolls a second Willpower + Bun-bu-ichi roll, and gets 3 successes. Ordinarily, this would mean he'd lose a point of honor. Instead, the lord accepts his offer to use his sword skill for the lord, in place of his skill at poetry.
The Badger actually has Poetry 1, and rolls Awareness + Poetry. ("Awareness" is the system's Charisma equivalent) and get a success.
But then, one of the Lord's courtiers tells a better poem, with 2 successes. The dice that were being kept against the Badger are rolled. They add another success, for a total of 3 successes. That two more than the poor Badger had, so he loses two glory points!
The Crane has no interest in losing either Honor or Glory, he he trots out the all-purpose defensive social skill, Etiquette, and suggests that his poetry is not grand enough for his lordship's ears, but his companion, the Dragon, is a poet of some renown in his homeland. His Etiquette + Awareness roll gives him 4 successes, but the die that was kept against him is rolled, and is also a success. This puts him a success down, but his throwing the Dragon under the bus means that instead of his losing an honor point, another die will be kept against the Dragon.
The Dragon gestures for silence, and sits in quiet meditation. He's not refusing the Lord's request, but he's not fulfilling it right away, either. He loses half the honor points a refusal would have cost him. His Honor drops from 4.0 to 3.8.
Meanwhile, the Dragon's player rolls Willpower + Meditation, and gets 3 successes. He keeps them all, losing the kept die from his previous roll. He rises to speak, The character has no Poetry skill, but rolls his Awareness plus the three kept dice he's spending, and gets three successes. That's one more than the previous high roll, so he takes a Glory point.
CHARACTER CREATION
Character creation rules are available under "Book of Earth" on LastHaiku. Spells and kiho (Martial Arts Moves) are in "Book of Void."
I'm messing with the skills, like so:
I'm dropping "Mastery" abilities, except for Bugei skills.
All "Lore" specialties are separate skills.
"Temptation" is now a High skill. The nobility spend a lot of time tempting each other.
There are also three new skills, The first is a High Skill: Bun-bu-ichi, otherwise known as "Obtuse." Much of this courtly stuff won't affect you if you don't care about it. This is the skill of ignoring it, or dismissing it as a waste of time. (BTW, bun-bu-ichi was real thing. It's literal meaning is "The pen and sword are one." Irony is not a modern invention.)
The second is also a High skill: Games. The nobility have a lot of ways to pass time, don't they. Specialities include Go, Shogi (Japanese chess,) Kite Flying, and Kemari (an ancient Japanese game indistinguishable from hackysack.)
The third is a Bugei skill, Tactics. If one person is being attacked by many, the attackers may all also add their Tactics skill to their weapon skills.
Something about skills that's not changing is that Courtier is the "make some guy do something" social skill. Etiquette, according to the L5R rulebook, is the defensive social skill, the ability to say "Thank you, I'd rather not" and make it stick.
GAME MECHANICS
Roll Stat + Skill on any-sided dice. Evens are successes, odds are not. You want to roll successes equal to a "target number" (TN). Each success above that s a "raise" under the standard L5R rules.
(Most of the time, I'm not going to roll the dice, and instead assuming that NPCs get 0.5 successes per die.)
If you want, you can turn those extra successes into kept dice. Kept dice may be spent by adding them to a later roll, if you can justify it, i.e. "My haiku made him think about the impermanence of life, so his mind is not fully on this combat." You have to decide to add them before you roll the dice, though.
You can only keep the dice from a single roll. If you get raises later, you can't add them to your pool of kept dice. You can, however, replace your kept dice with the raises from another roll.
Many times, raises can be spent on Glory points (see "Glory" below.)
CONVERTING FROM THE RULES IN THE BOOKS
Rolling an extra die is still rolling an extra die. Keeping an extra die means rolling two extra dice. Rolling and keeping an extra die thus means you roll three more dice.
An TN of 5 equals one success. An TN 10 is two successes. You get the idea.
There are a bunch of School abilities that say something like "add your Agility to your roll." In these cases, roll extra dice equal to half your ability, dropping fractions.
VOID: After you see the results of a roll, you can choose to spend a Void. This has one of two effects:
- Reroll all your dice that do not show successes.
- Roll another dice. If that dice is a success, roll it again. Keep on rolling until you fail. Add all successes to your total.
If you have special abilities that let you roll 2K2 when you spend void, you may do either of these twice, or one of each.
COMBAT: Fights start with rolling for initiative, namely Reflexes + Iaijutsu. Raises from this roll are usually kept, but they can be spent on Glory instead.
Combat is usually Agility + Weapon Skill vs. either Reflexes + Weapon Skill or Reflexes + Defense. Each raise is usually added to your damage dice, but you can also keep dice, or use them for a variety of special abilities.
SPELLCASTING: roll Ring + Insight Rank. If you're casting an Air spell, roll Air plus whatever your Insight rank is. For a Fire spell, roll Fire + Rank. To successfully cast a spell, you need successes equal to the spell's level. Each additional success is a raise, as usual.
If you have a scroll of a spell you don't know, you can cast it by reading the scroll, but you have to take it out of whatever you're carrying it in, and then unroll it. This is going to take at least a round. Also, you're looking at the scroll, not the target. If the spell has to be aimed, you'll need an extra success, or it will go off somewhere in front of you.
Once you have a scroll, it takes 2 XP and a week to learn it.
HONOR, GLORY, and STATUS
The rulebooks says these are very important, but they don't have much of an effect in game. Let's fix that.
These three attributes have a decimal place. They appear on the character sheet like "4.3" or "5.5". The number to the left of the decimal is your Rank, i.e. if you Honor is 5.8, your Honor Rank is 5. If you have to roll one of these, you roll dice equal to your Rank. If you have abilities that work if your Honor or Glory is higher than someone else's, that refers to your Rank in that attribute..
Honor, Glory, and Status are gained and lost in tenths of a Rank, usually referred to as points. If you gain 3 honor points, your Honor goes up by 0.3.
WHAT ARE THEY GOOD FOR?
STATUS measures your position in Rogukani society. Its prime game-mechanical effect is, if someone with a higher status tell you to do something and you refuse, you lose the difference between your Status in honor points!
HONOR is basically your social hit points. If it drops to zero, you kill youself, or at least decide the life of a wandering samurai is terrible and become a monk or a farmer or something. In any case, the character is out of the game.
GLORY is your public face, your social reputation. In the gift-based economy of Rokugani nobility, it's also the money equivalent. You do glorious deeds, and then subtly hint what you might like to have. Some noble gives it to you, and everyone thinks "Oh, samurai-sama did that on the orders of that daimyo." Your Glory drops, his goes up. But you have a new, shinier sword!
Spell scrolls cost 1.0 Glory Ranks per level.
PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER
A Badger, a Crab, a Crane, and a Dragon enter a lord's castle. The decorator had an Awareness of 2, and Artist 4. (2+4)/2 = 3, so that's the TN the PCs need to be unimpressed.
The Badger doesn't have any applicable skills, so he rolls his Willpower, and gets 1 success. 2 dice will be kept against him.
The Crab rolls Willpower + Bun-bu-ichi. 3 successes. Feh, money that could have been spent on spears has been spent on flowers and paint.
The Crane rolls Intelligence + Artist, and gets no successes. He spends a Void. His first roll is a success, so he rolls again. That one is also a success, so he rolls a second time, which is also a success, so he rolls a third time. That one is a failure, leaving him with a total of two successes. One die will be kept against him.
The Dragon rolls Willpower + Meditation, gets 4 successes. He's paying attention to the nothingness beyond self, and ignores the art on the walls. His inner calm allows him to keep a die.
They're ushered in to the Lord's presence. He informs them that his court is sharing their poetry, and "invites" them to participate.
The Crab responds that his poetry is written with a sword, not a pen. Uh-oh. That's the sort of statement that could make things go very wrong. Also, the lord is Status 5, and the PCs are all Status 1, so a simple refusal would cost him 4 honor points. The Crab rolls a second Willpower + Bun-bu-ichi roll, and gets 3 successes. Ordinarily, this would mean he'd lose a point of honor. Instead, the lord accepts his offer to use his sword skill for the lord, in place of his skill at poetry.
The Badger actually has Poetry 1, and rolls Awareness + Poetry. ("Awareness" is the system's Charisma equivalent) and get a success.
But then, one of the Lord's courtiers tells a better poem, with 2 successes. The dice that were being kept against the Badger are rolled. They add another success, for a total of 3 successes. That two more than the poor Badger had, so he loses two glory points!
The Crane has no interest in losing either Honor or Glory, he he trots out the all-purpose defensive social skill, Etiquette, and suggests that his poetry is not grand enough for his lordship's ears, but his companion, the Dragon, is a poet of some renown in his homeland. His Etiquette + Awareness roll gives him 4 successes, but the die that was kept against him is rolled, and is also a success. This puts him a success down, but his throwing the Dragon under the bus means that instead of his losing an honor point, another die will be kept against the Dragon.
The Dragon gestures for silence, and sits in quiet meditation. He's not refusing the Lord's request, but he's not fulfilling it right away, either. He loses half the honor points a refusal would have cost him. His Honor drops from 4.0 to 3.8.
Meanwhile, the Dragon's player rolls Willpower + Meditation, and gets 3 successes. He keeps them all, losing the kept die from his previous roll. He rises to speak, The character has no Poetry skill, but rolls his Awareness plus the three kept dice he's spending, and gets three successes. That's one more than the previous high roll, so he takes a Glory point.