Legend of the Five Rings 3rd edition review

Cafe Society
1

I’ve recently picked up a copy of Legend of the Five Rings (3rd edition). never in my life have I seen a more attractive book. It’s filled with beautiful color artwork, with a nice background per page which doesn’t affect reading, good formatting, and a handsome cover. It gets points strictly on looks alone.

inside the cover, you’ll find it has a nice concept and good central idea but some problems with editing. It’s also clear they didnt’ give enough thought to some poewrs and abilities. I haven’t read earlier editions, so I’m not sure how much was carried over. Judging by some information I do have concerning 1st edition, I think they added some bits without thinking about the consequences.

Overall, the system is solid and fairly quick to use. It uses a “bidding” system for characters to try and roll higher than a base target number. Not bad in and of itself, but your rolls are pretty reliable, without much chance of getting higher or lower. You can fairly accurately guess how many “raises” you can bid for, so I 'm not sure this will work out.

The combat system needs some fine-tuning; it’s dangerously easy to take so much damage from a single shot that your penalties (from taking wounds) renders you useless. Armor might help, but doesn’t actually add a whole lot of protection and doesn’t decrease the actual damage you take.

The neatest things in the system are the uber-cool schools. Whether you’re a warrior, a wizard, or a monk, a spy, a courtier, or whatever, there are several schools to pick from. The schools are a little too focused, and it looks like characters will have trouble doing anything outside their speciality. Nonetheless, I think everyone will be eagerly awaiting the chance to increase their school, and eventually trying to learn other schools. However, they forgot to list some very important information for some schools, like what spells you get, etc.

The magic system works pretty well, but I do wish they had more non-combat spells. Overall, it’s fairly smooth and easy. One flaw is that it’s not clear which spells you get if you start play as a wizard (Shugenja in the game). There’s a blatant conflict with the information in the Magic chapter and the individual Shugenja school listings. I honestly have no idea which is correct. In addition, a simple spell enables you to create* any* natural substance in vast quantities. I know Samurai don’t normally worry about money, but having vast fortunes at your beck and call is still a huge disadvantage.

One potential problem point are the Monks. They aren’t particularly bad on their own, but some of their abilities are extremely troublesome if comboed. One ability, for example, is available to every single starting Monk and lets you succeed at any task automatically except combat rolls with 30 seconds of concentration. It also seems to cut out any time requirement. Your starting Monk, with no skill in crafting, can make any Legendary item in 30 seconds. Craft skills don’t see all that great thereafter. Another monk ability can combo with Shugenja to let you toss off infinite numbers of spells.

All in all, the game is pretty cool, and I’d reccomend it. But the Game master definitely needs to take a look at the above problems and decide how he or she wants to handle them. I’d recommend creating minor schools characters can study without taking up their main School’s abilities (thus making them more flexible) and using the optional rules for skills.

2

The editing on 3rd edition, while better than 2nd, does indeed fall short. In particular, their leaving out the chart for Target Number examples, and the complete absence of any sort of statistics for horses. Somewhat important for, say, any Unicorn clan character. (both of these are available on the AEG website. somewhere.)

Also, your comment on how easy it is to die from a single shot isn’t a bug; it’s been a feature since 1st edition. It was part of the design goals in 1st edition (“death is a feather, duty a mountain” and all that pop samurai stuff).

I, personally, believe that many of the rules and interactions in 3rd edition were not well thought out, and not well playtested. Far superior to wretched 2nd edition, of course, but not on a par with 1st edition. 1st edition was much simpler and streamlined (at the cost of fewer options for players). 3rd edition has so many bonuses, modifiers, techniques, kata, kiho, spells, etc., etc. that it would be impossible to keep them all sorted out. Frankly, I suspect that while the writers attempted to do so, they have just been overwhelmed by the increasing amount of expansion material, and so power-creep has become entrenched.

My play group, after commenting on how pretty the book looked, read through some of it and resoundingly forbade me to switch our campaign over from 1st edition (I agreed). But, if you’re going to run the game, go search over on AEG’s fora – not just for those horse statistics, but for the free pdf they put together upgrading the rest of the schools from earlier editions that haven’t been published for 3rd edition yet.

3

While it’s good to know they didn’t do it by accident, I think I’d have to change it for any serious game. LotFR will be lethal enough without everyone dropping dead (or worse, becoming useless due to penalties) in one shot. I also worry it might make Crane and Scorpion clan Bushi too strong, simply because they go first.

4

Going first is one of the successful combat strategies in L5R. It was actually more powerful in 1st edition (my group is all Crane duelists…). 3rd edition has a few other very viable strategies – increasing your TN to be hit, and soaking up or ignoring damage, mainly.

Primarily what it does is make combat scary. My players have had characters one-shotted out from under them by measly little DR 2k2 arrows. Not incapacitated: dead. They make very sure that they absolutely need to fight before they enter combat, and have to strategize unless they think they’ll just overhwelm their opponents.

In play what this means is that there’s a lot of time scheming and maneuvering for position… followed by a flurry of activity and then someone is dead. Good for modeling chambara-like games, but if your players are used to D&D-style play, they’re going to be mighty frustrated pretty quick.

5

You hit it. Let’s just say my group contains one loon, one psyotic killer who plays RPG’s like a first-person shooter (complete with trying to just replay his character if he dies again and again and again…), and one half-involved power-gamer, who doesn’t really care much now that half of our mutual friends are gone. All of them are used to having ridiculous amounts of hit points and never dying in one shot. Except psycho FPS guy. He does expect to die in one shot, but we’ve given up killing him because he doesn’t care. Needless to say, I’m thinking about moving to another group. :smiley: Only half joking.

I think the system works alright, but I’d add +10 points to the first wound level. It is a little much, but I don’t like one-shot-one-kill systems, and it’s hard to have a mighty duel of the swordsmen when even mighty warriors get taken down that easily. I don’t mind a death now and then; I just don’t like them constant. Except when playing in WW2 games. The you get to die several times per session.

6

When I played Rokugan several years ago it was ridiculously overpowered vis a vis D+D. The worst, not in overall power but in sheer Min-max ridiculousness, was Earth clerics: select an 18+ con and not only do you get better HP, you get better spells and DC on your spells!

7

Oooh, Ludovic, you appear to be speaking of the D&D Oriental Adventures (& Rokugan), of which is better not spoken. Mainly because the freelancers hired by AEG for D&D work seem to have been completely inept in balancing the rules for D&D, no matter how interesting some of their ideas looked. Some of their new Feats for L5R D&D were particularly overpowered or completely useless, IIRC. So, yeah, it was pretty dire.

smiling bandit was talking about the 3rd edition of the roll-n-keep rules set. It’s much prettier.

I actually think that the extremely large number of schools in 3rd edition is, in part, because of L5R’s sojurn through D&D – AEG kind of adopted that D&D theme of “all new books must have new crunch for characters”.

8

“Roll-n-keep”? Is that a method of generating characters? If so, how could that describe an entire rules set, and why couldn’t you use it for D+D?

9

Is LO5R strictly an RPG or is there table miniature gaming? I think I may be thinking of Clan War.

10

Tabletop RPG plus card game.

11

“Roll and keep” is the dice mechanic for the L5R system (and for 7th Sea). It is a dice pool system.

Under the current system, to see if you are successful at a task (e.g., attacking, composing your death haiku, etc.), you roll a number of d10s. The number in of dice in this dice pool is equal to your rank in the appropriate Trait and your rank in the appropriate Skill. You may only count (= “keep”) as many dice as your rank in the Trait.

If a die rolls “10”, you re-roll the die and add the next result to the 10.

So, if you are attacking an opponent whose target number to be hit is 25, you may roll your Agility trait + Kenjutsu skill – let’s say you’re Agility = 3 and Kenjutsu = 4. You roll 7 dice, and get to keep any 3 of those dice to add up in hopes of totaling 25+. If you do, you succeed. If not, you fail.

There are other quirks, but that’s the essentials of “roll and keep”. And you don’t roll dice to determine characteristics as you would in D&D.
And there is:

Legend of the Five Rings collectable card game (original product)

Legend of the Five Rings role-playing game (secondary product, based on the CCG)

Clan Wars miniatures game (discontinued, but based on the CCG and RPG)

I think there’s also a set of LARP rules, too.

12

As long as you’re drawing that distinction, I don’t have to claim that Rokugan was D+D, either, unless you’re talking about the Oriental Adventures that came out in the 1980’s :stuck_out_tongue:

13

Along with Deadlands, I thought Legend of the Five Rings 1st edition was one of the best RPGs released in the late 90s. I looked foward to 2nd edition but the changes they implemented made the game worse instead of improving it. Now third edition has come along and I’m currently running a Monday night magistrate campaign set in the City of Lies, Ryoko Owari. Here’s the good and bad about L5R third edition.

If you’re new to L5R then the setting information contained in the main book isn’t all that great. It covers a bunch of different eras within the game world but it doesn’t do so sufficently unless you’re already familiar with the setting. Furthermore, I just don’t think the progress of the setting since 1st edition has been for the better. I would rather have my Hentei Emperor than whoever is suppose to be Emperor now.

They made the roll & keep mechanics a little more complicated for this edition. Different skills will give you different bonuses based on their rank. Defense, for example, gives you a bonus at Rank 3 that you wouldn’t get at Rank 1. I kind of preferred the original method because it was a little more simple. On the other hand, this at least gives players a reason to increase their skills instead of concentrating on their attributes like they did in 1st edition.

Some of the spells are just horrible. I don’t mean they’re unbalanced, I mean there is almost no reason to use them. Tremor, a level 1 Earth spell, forces enemies to make a Fear test against a difficulty of 5. There are no options to raise in order to increase the difficulty of the Fear test meaning that even most peasant warriors, with a 2 Will, are going to be able to save.

Maho users got boned. Sure, they’re not typically PCs, but if you want to use Maho spells against players they pretty much suck for the most part.

Combat is deadly and that’s a feature not a bug and going first is a very big deal. Believe it or not, combat is third edition isn’t as deadly as it was in 1st edition. In 3rd edition, when you’re injured the difficulty to accomplish a task makes the target number go up. In 1st edition, the target number remains the same but you have less dice to roll, which ends up making characters nearly useless when injured.

The economy is all kids of screwed up. Should a tetsubo, a club with iron studs in it, really cost 20 koku to purchase? The metal studs are suppose to be iron not gold. If a character has a stipend of 150 koku a year then what does he spend it on? Yeah, I know samurai aren’t suppose to care about that kind of stuff, but you’d be surprised how often this kind of thing comes up during game play.

It’s not a bad game but it doesn’t recapture the glory or magic of 1st edition. It is a beautiful book though.

Marc

14

:confused:

I meant the Oriental Adventures put out by Wizards of the Coast for use with D&D edition 3.0. It used the L5R setting of Rokugan as its default setting, instead of Kara-Tur (as had the original Oriental Adventures).

And the Rokugan book put out by AEG also for D&D edition 3.0, expanding on the material in Oriental Adventures.

AEG then put out several books that had stats for both D&D and roll-n-keep systems.

The whole lot of 'em were rather dire for their D&D stats… but did you mean that you were playing some other game system with “Earth clerics”, “18+ con”, “HP”, and spell DCs?

15

That explains why no one seems to want to buy the huge pile of samurai minis I’ve been painting.

16

D20, man. I never played 3.0 OA, so I don’t know if it was D+D branded, but I don’t recall using any D+D rules other than the core D20 rules in Rokugan, i.e. no Wizards, Fighters, Magic Missiles, etc.

17

All of the rules in Oriental Adventures and Rokugan were for D&D, not just “d20”. Whether or not you were using Fighters & Magic Missiles, or not, that was all D&D.

The d20 games have much fewer carryovers from D&D – including dropping the experience system, IIRC. So, sorry if I’ve dashed a point of pride that you weren’t playing D&D… but, you were.

18

Such as d20 modern, which doesnt have experience levels, AC, HP…ohhh, wait.

19

On further research, I cannot believe they called that product D+D, as it had as much to do with the core rules as D20 modern has to do with them. Well, at least it wasn’t second edition, aka the blandness of 3.X married to the imbalances of 1.X.

20

Where do you live and can I move there? :smiley:

Might no matter. Most any Shugenja can pop out silver and gold like candy (in 3rd edition). Weird, but there it is.