The Winter Gardens of the Kakita
Fan Fiction for the Legend of the Five Rings
Disclaimer: I've stalled on writing this article for a while. I don't know how it will be received. Even people who have no problems with other aspects of being more inclusive with gaming might have a problem with 'getting' this part, and it makes me really nervous. Hoping for the best. 'Lord,' she said, 'if you must go, then let me ride in your following. For I am weary of skulking in the hills, and wish to face peril and battle.'
'Your duty is with your people,' he answered. 'Too often have I heard of duty,' she cried. 'But am I not of the House of Eorl, a shieldmaiden and not a dry-nurse? I have waited on faltering feet long enough. Since they falter no longer, it seems, may I not now spend my life as I will?' 'Few may do that with honour,' he answered. 'But as for you, lady: did you not accept the charge to govern the people until their lord's return? If you had not been chosen, then some marshal or captain would have been set in the same place, and he could not ride away from his charge, were he weary of it or no.' 'Shall I always be chosen?' she said bitterly. 'Shall I always be left behind when the Riders depart, to mind the house while they win renown, and find food and beds when they return?' 'A time may come soon,' said he, 'when none will return. Then there will be need of valor without renown, for none shall remember the deeds that are done in the last defense of your homes. Yet the deeds will not be less valiant because they are unpraised.' And she answered: 'All your words are but to say: you are a woman, and your part is in the house. But when men have died in battle and honor, you have leave to be burned in the house, for the men will need it no more. But I am of the House of Eorl and not a serving-woman. I can ride and wield blade, and I do not fear either pain or death.' - Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien There is a good argument to be made that Lord of the Rings is the foundation of modern Fantasy, and definitely Role Playing Games like Dungeons and Dragons, which drew heavily on on the book for its depictions of elves and dwarves, orcs and halflings, as well as the kinds of adventures that it wanted to tell. I still love the books with a fiery passion, and the movies only a little less so. And I, of course, adored Eowyn, as a female hero and warrior, sticking it to the men who told her to stay home by striking down the Witch-King and proving herself on the battlefield. She has been the model for many female heroes to come, and more power to it. But her argument here...the whole depiction of heroism in fantasy in general, touches on a point that becomes a real problem when taken in context of the history of gaming and how male-dominated it always has been. Staying home, governing her people, leading them to food and beds, keeping them safe. These things she takes, automatically, as given, with contempt. Aragorn tries to convince her that they are important, vital. But, the truth is, they aren't. Not in Lord of the Rings. We never know what person took up the role when Eowyn left it. It's vitally important...but not important enough that Theoden assigns a man to the job. It's only 'the most important task a woman can do', and Aragorn argues if she does not do it, then a man would have to. And wouldn't that be a waste of forces from the front line? Aragorn respects the role...for women. But not as an equally important task to the future of humankind. In our society, we've similarly, traditionally, bifurcated everything into tasks suitable for men and tasks suitable for women. Men's role, traditionally, has been spoken of, and expressed, in terms of domination. At first this was domination on the field of battle: either domination over an animal as a hunter, or domination over other human beings as a warrior. Later on, it became domination over nature, forcing nature to give up its bounty, and bend it to your will, or domination over the forces of capitalism, pushing your industry forward over the trampled businesses of your commercial opponents. Women's roles, traditionally, were about nurture and preservation. Nurturing children. Nurturing homes. This leads to some weird quirks in our modern society. Those who heal by destroying disease or defeating injury in bursts of intellect and insight are traditionally male...doctors. Those who heal by the long, slow requirements of regular nurturing care are traditionally female...nurses. Education was once primarily a male profession....men driving out the demons of ignorance. But it got 'rewritten' to become more about nurturing children...becoming a female profession in the process. Male = dominating and focused on conflict and overcoming enemies = exciting and important. Female = nurturing and passive/responsive and focused on reacting to outside circumstances = boring and unimportant. At least for a shieldmaiden of the House of Eorl. And those who wanted to be like her. I'm not really here to write about all the kinds of problems this framing causes in broad society, but more to talk about gaming. And L5R. Because it's relevant. When L5R came out, every single game that came out on the market was about dominance, and usually the associated violence. Dungeons and Dragons was completely overt about it. A game system is created to put mechanics in the places it wants to highlight, the places it wants to have conflicts and create stories about, and the primary set of mechanics was created to handle physical combat, as well as growing your power to become more dominant. Most other game systems for that first decade did the same. Vampire the Masquerade proposed an alternative. Now, instead of just physically dominating your opponent, here were mechanics to socially dominate your opponent too. It even had the term 'dominate'. It was very popular. Can you fall in love with the possibility of a game system to do something different? Even if it doesn't? Legend of the Five Rings, however, proposed, or even just hinted at, the possibility of something different. You had a tightly structured world, with tightly structured clans. The clans, and people within those clans, were opposed to each other. They had different agendas, different needs, and different ways of accomplishing them. But they were all human. They were all just people. They had a big supernaturally evil threat off to the side of the screen they all had to oppose together. None of them were evil. None of them had to be dominated. Not only that, but the game was not primarily about the Shadowlands conflict. It really was about these clans politicking around each other. There were even courtiers in this game, people whose primary reason to be was to negotiate and interact with other clans. There was a role for combat. But there was a role for negotiation too. And this was the kicker. There was a Right Hand of the Emperor...the Lion Clan, created to fight the Emperor's enemies, to express the Emperor's dominance in the world. Men's work. But there was also a Left Hand of the Emperor...the Crane Clan. Created to cultivate art and culture and beauty. To nurture prosperity. Women's work. And this group was set up, by the framing of the game itself, to be an equal to the Lion Clan. This was gaming. But, in L5R, nurturing and reacting, fostering growth, it seemed like it was so important that even men did it. It was the first time in gaming, that I'd ever encountered, where a game world had not only women characters who went out and did 'men stuff' to be heroes, but it had an equal amount of men being creative or nurturing, doing 'women's stuff'...and who could become heroes by doing it. Even today, many years later, this idea is really rare in RPGs. There are women's RPGs. Some of them use the domination framework readily, accepting it like Eowyn does. Some of them discard it completely, making a fairly soft-edged game focused entirely on nurture, with few of the harsh edges that ratchet up the tension in an RPG, giving it life or death circumstances. L5R, though, has, at least in the structure of its game world, the possibility that it could balance these two things. It could say both are equally important. Traditionally male-oriented and traditionally female-oriented tasks are both places where heroes can be found. Both men and women could be saving the Empire, guided by the Left or Right hand. It was an inspiration for me. I didn't have to look at what my gender was consigned to as boring, outside the bounds of being worth captured in the tale...at least the tales of adventure and excitement I wanted to read. L5R gave me a framework where I could have new stories that had a place for that part of me. That part of the world. I treasured it. Mechanically, it didn't quite pan out. AEG and later FFG didn't really come up with mechanics sufficient to address the need, even if the framework was there. And of course it didn't teach anyone how to run a nurture campaign. It was just too new. Social mechanics are still all win/loss, not trying to find win/win scenarios. I've tried to create rules for 4E and 5E that provide mechanics that can assist in finding the nurture game that is possible within the framework of Rokugan, in The Influence Game and The Prosperity System. We, at least, have been able to use these tools to work on such stories in L5R. And I hope, eventually such a thing could be fully integrated into core L5R. So maybe my hopes are unfounded, and will never become a full equal to conflict. But this one thing, I thought L5R did right.
2 Comments
So...come to the table, young ones...and I shall tell you a tale...
Dungeons and Dragons was introduced in 1974, drawing on the history of tin-soldier wargames combined with fantasy storytelling to create the first tabletop RPG. A significant number of roleplaying games were made in the subsequent decade, but they weren't broadly available the way RPGs are today. The idea of a game store was extremely rare, limited to certain urban centers in the Midwest. There was no internet to put gamers in contact with each other or to let new pockets of gamers learn about new RPGs. Before around 1981, you needed to already know about roleplaying games to begin with in order to learn more or purchase them, and the great gorilla in the room was Dungeons and Dragons. In 1981, the Dungeons and Dragons animated series on Saturday Morning took off, along with a marketing push that put Dungeons and Dragons magenta/red box in toy stores, a push that accelerated the popularity between 1981 and 1985. At that point, "satanic panic", which had been building since 1983, caused a decrease in popularity for Dungeons and Dragons, and it was removed from the shelves of toy stores and bookstores until the 1990s. Little games could not afford advertising outside industry-specific magazines, and even Dungeons and Dragons advertising was limited. This focus of games being sold in specific gaming shops, the rarity of those shops, and the reliance of RPGs on word-of-mouth advertising, meant that exposure to games other than Dungeons and Dragons was extremely limited across the country. The print runs for many systems were in the hundreds. That meant the market for purchasers and therefore the creators of such games were extremely un-diverse, concentrated around the communities where the game stores arose: affluent, small, white college towns and suburbs. Gaming was also, without question, predominantly male. There were women module designers, but they were associated with some of these small gaming clusters, and their works were considered very transgressive, getting pulled from the shelves. For myself, I first learned about role-playing games in 1982. At that time, in much of the country, it was unthinkable in the general public that girls should play D&D, even though I loved the idea and would "pretend to play" with my friends without ever being allowed to have access to the rules or knowing how. My brother received the box set in 1984, and I stole it, memorizing the rules, photocopying pages at the library. I got my first chance to play when a classmate who was running needed more players to make a group and allowed me to come as long as my brother came too. I was on top of the world for a few months of irregular weekly games of a few hours apiece. But then, as tends to happen with boys that age, the presence of girls became unwelcome. They shifted to playing at overnight sleepovers so I couldn't go. My attempts to start a gaming group of my own were met with ridicule...RPGs were for boys. No more books were available in any local stores, and so there were no more games until college when I could meet a broader range of players, including my future-husband. He had been introduced to D&D by his mother, who was determined to help her pre-teen son learn how to play this new game she got him at the toy store. He did live near a game store, and, due to the way he was introduced, didn't have the same prejudices about gaming most people had. He GMed for mixed and all-female groups while he was in high school. He's gone on to become an excellent game developer in his own right and has many game writing credits. He was rare, though. Most RPGs were made by and for white guys. This was because most different kinds of RPGs were played in Midwest towns with game stores, by white guys who were affluent enough to buy game systems and spend time gaming but poor enough not to have other, more popular things to do . Legend of the Five Rings was not the first attempt at an Asian-inspired game. Bushido was released in 1979 (broadly in 1980), and it was the game for Asian RP for most of the `80s and early `90s. Its rules were quite complex and it didn't take off compared to the behemoth that was Dungeons and Dragons, of course...in that environment, nothing could. It came in an era with Pendragon, where you were trying to be very realistic in your RPGs. Bushido was created with the intention of being a very simulationist game set in samurai-era (Sengoku/Edo) Japan-type world called Nippon. Bushido was rigid, with characters who rolled a social caste randomly and were locked into that social caste. It had a 'historical' depiction of the role of women, and very much intended to be 'just like Japan' with no other Asian influence. But it didn't appeal to me at all. There is much to admire about Japan...it's a beautiful country, with a fascinating history and a complex and unique approach to life and art that has developed out over centuries that I have come to admire. I've loved Japanese folklore and storytelling for ages. But its history, like the history of pretty much every nation on earth, is replete with incredible sexism, oppression, and brutality. I had no desire to play in a Japan-esque world that was 'realistic' to Japan in that fashion. The real world is bad enough. I would challenge anyone who thinks L5R should be more like historical Japan to research some of the really bad parts of Japanese history and decide if they want to reassess. Land of the Rising Sun was another small RPG released in 1980, this one set in 'actual' Japan, but it, again, was focused on a realistic depiction of Japan. This one did not last as long as Bushido, and was quite obscure. Oriental Adventures came out in 1985, at the height of D&D's original wave of popularity, and was broadly released in book and toy stores. It was not realistic at all. It was never really intended to be, in my opinion, a stand-alone world...the Dungeons and Dragons games I'd played in hardly did "worlds" at all. An individual game master would make up a game area big enough to suit their adventure, but the only parts filled in were the parts you needed for your adventure. There was no attempt to create or simulate a whole society. Oriental Adventures was created mostly to let you play Asian characters in traditional D&D groups. I thought this was quite silly. That character I played briefly in the 1980s was Asian, and was a perfectly fine, "normal" magic-user. She came from a distant land, she bowed to greet people, and had some other customs, but did not need a whole different set of schools and equipment in order to be Asian. But D&D was trying to expand rapidly, it was in its heyday, and it was trying to sell books. And to sell new player books, the thinking went, you needed to add new player schools. And to have an excuse to sell more schools, TSR made a "country" to go along with these Asian-inspired schools. It was slapdash, developed simultaneously with the much better Unearthed Arcana (and using a lot of Unearthed's mechanics, which also had a bunch of new European-inspired schools). Oriental Adventures was never meant to be a serious book talking about, or created to tell, stories from any Asian country, in my opinion. It was to play an 'exotic' Asian person in a Western/D&D-style world. I didn't like that from the very start. There really weren't more big Asian-inspired RPGs in the crash that followed D&D being taken from stores until Legend of the Five Rings came out. Independent game stores began to become more common in the late 1980s and early 1990s as satanic panic died down and RPGs became more popular. Teens like me who'd encountered gaming during the early `80s hit college and were able to interact with other gamers more broadly, forming new groups. With rise of the Internet in colleges, message boards carried word of new and independent RPGs farther than ever. RPGs came back to mainstream bookstores in 1991/1992 with Vampire the Masquerade. Magic the Gathering card game was also beginning to get a lot of mainstream attention, and both properties accelerated the movement of RPGs into mainstream college culture. This was all really fueled by the early internet. Message boards allowed word of new games, events, etc., to spread in ways they never had before. MUDs and MUSHs, online text-specific shared storytelling worlds, allowed people who never had had the opportunity to experience role-playing universes to enter an immersive shared fantasy experience that helped get a more diverse group of players to the table, including more women. Many little independent game companies, looking to capitalize on the success of Magic the Gathering, created new kinds of card games to try to interest audiences, and it was natural that someone would try to make an Asian-style game to distinguish itself from other card games. Legend of the Five Rings was formed as a card game in 1995. Without the internet, a game like L5R could not exist. The internet of 1995-2000, though, was not at all the same as the internet today. Universities were beginning to get fiberoptic/high speed internet, and gamers were able to communicate with each other through message boards or email, or through IRC Chat and MUSHs. But it was small. I remember what a huge revelation it was that I was in a chat with a person who was living in Israel at the time. The idea that you could be typing in a discord-like environment with someone from another country was incredible. Message boards contained information on many subjects, and were very centralized, so you could find, if you knew how, the places where people were posting story results or about new card sets. But Yahoo (founded in 1994) and Google (founded 1998) didn't really have the ability to help you find such information easily, and there was no Wikipedia (founded 2001) to store and serve a vast amount of human knowledge. There was no YouTube (founded 2005) to collect video and introduce people different than you, or to share all those great anime or Asian media sources that we now have available. And countries like Japan and China were later adopters to those services when they did become available. When the creators of L5R wanted to create an Asian-style card game, and subsequently a Roleplaying Game based on that card game, which was released in 1997, they could not look up information about Japan, or Asia in general, as easily as people can today. And there was not a wealth of game designers out there of diverse Asian backgrounds they could look to to assist...gaming was still very non-diverse for the reasons I've given above. The designers were relying on four main sources of information: non-gamer primary source information from people from Japan and China that they personally knew, historical Japanese works such as books of Japanese folktales, The Tale of Genji, The Pillowbook of Sei Shonogan, The Book of Five Rings, and the Hagakure, depictions of Japan that were present in popular media that they were trying to emulate, such as the Kurosawa movies that were quite popular at the time, and books. They used all four. Much of the combat system and commentary about swordplay in first edition came from their own martial arts instructors, for example. There was no concept of a cultural consultant at that time, but the work was read by Asian-Americans. References to Japanese works are visible throughout the system, from the Heian-era Tale of Genji-style courts to the Five Rings themselves. The popular media references used for L5R, unlike Oriental Adventures, were definitely focused on the more 'serious' works of Kurosawa, rather than the really, really cheesy action pulp that was popular at the time. And the research was serious...for example, you can see the veins of research into Chinese and Japanese religion I've discussed in previous blog articles. Some of the designers on the L5R Team were active academic researchers on the history and literature of Japan: Ree Soesbee, designer of the Crane Clan, and a far more influential member of the design group for L5R than she is ever given credit for, was getting her PhD in Edo literature at the time, for example. But even the best book research was limited. In the early 1990s, there were some excellent books on Chinese religion available; the Jesuits had been studying Chinese religion for centuries and it had become an area of in-depth scholarship. But there no books about Shinto or the development of Japanese religion available in English, even for professors who specialized in the field. The subject was rarely addressed in other textbooks on Eastern Religions. The focus of Japanese scholarship following WWII was on the post-Meiji cult religions that helped fuel Japan's actions in WWII, and little attention was spared for very early Japanese religion, and none at all for the religion in the Sengoku. At the time, given the predominance of Buddhism, it was assumed that there were few differences between pre-Meiji Japanese religion and Chinese religion, so scholars of Japanese religion and philosophy focused on more modern differences. Many of the sources I've relied on for explaining the development of honor and Bushido were published in 1997 and 1999, for example. Considering that L5R was created to capitalize on the Card Game moment, a lot of work and research went into the system. The flaws, with hindsight, may be painfully obvious, now we have access to a greater volume of information and a much more diverse perspective on gaming. But seeing where L5R fits with other role-playing games, and how it has developed, I truly respect what the designers were trying to do. It was a labor of love. This has been kind of rambling, I know so I'll wrap it up here. Hope it gives at least an interesting snapshot as to what the gaming industry was and something about the environment L5R was produced in. Different TTRPGs gamify, or create rules or mechanics, around areas around which the designers of the game think are important, areas where they could see the players getting into conflicts with or wanting to advance in. Advancement mechanics improve characters in ways that are relevant to the kinds of conflicts and stories the designers see the character experiencing within the framework for the RPG. A TTRPG about fashion design would have mechanics for evaluating and comparing fashions, and the advancement mechanics would be show how you will improve in fashion design. If there was no physical conflict in the Fashion Design TTRPG, and no stories about fashion designers fighting physically, there would be no combat stats and no advancement in combat skills. It'd be all about the Fashion.
Some TTRPGs, of course, do overdo their mechanics, making mechanics for everything the designers think could possibly be of interest. Some TTRPGs underdo their mechanics, thinking that mechanics are overly binding and intentionally keeping them minimal. And some TTRPGs misalign their mechanics with their theme for various reasons, like having an extensive combat system in a world with little combat just because combat is traditional in TTRPGs, for example. But in general, mechanics are there to serve the purpose of highlighting what is important and what are the sources of tension and desire in the story. Roleplaying in general means to put yourself in the role of a character. A character, by definition, is a person in a novel, play, film, or other kind of story. By playing a roleplaying game with others, you are agreeing to join in a kind of mutual storytelling, using game rules to arbitrate conflicts, for every story involves some sort of a conflict, leading to rising action, a climax, then falling action as the conflict is resolved. By gamifying Honor at all, the designers of L5R are trying to say 'Honor is Important for the stories we are trying to tell', and an area around which we think we shall see conflict. This could be tacked on artificially, just to make the game more 'Asian', and there have been games that do that, but I don't think that was ever the intent with L5R. Legend of the Five Rings was created to create stories that are similar to Japanese folktales and legends and stories about Samurai, because its intent was to allow the player to assume the character of a magical samurai. However, part of the complexity of RolePlaying a samurai for a Western audience is that the samurai comes from a Collectivist society, while many of the players are from North America or most of Europe, which is an Individualist society. In an individualist society, the interpretation of honor is individual: I don't care overmuch about what society overall thinks the Ideal Knight is like and would approach things, for example. I care how I believe the Ideal Knight would behave, and conform myself those actions (if I intend to be Honorable). I don't care how society overall sees my glorious deeds nearly as much as how I interpret how glorious those deeds are. In a Collectivist society, my personal idea of what is Honorable isn't really relevant....I will interpret how I see myself based on the view the whole society has of what the ideal samurai is. There is very little point in codifying Honor in an individualist society. Your character can have Honor as a motivating factor, but there won't be much of a conflict within their interpretation of it, and there's not much ability for a game designer to define what that honor is, because the interpretation of honor is all up to the individual, and no one really questions it. Individuals can easily rationalize great conflicts between principles without blinking when they define all the terms. But since a Collectivist society uses a shared codification of Honor, conflicts between conflicting principles become locked into the system. Conflicts between Honor and individual desire, or between Honor and Glory, begin to start building situations where the characters can be torn in two directions. These internal conflicts between Honor and Glory, getting the credit vs giving it away, deciding whether this path or this other path is the more correct, and how to thread the needle to find an honorable solution when everyone else has given up, becomes more poignant. Many of the stories related to Samurai, like the 47 Ronin I started out this series with, don't necessarily make a lot of sense to an Individualist society, but are ones players can have a reason, if they choose, to reach for if Honor is given a concrete and accumulatable value, and is considered valuable to the society. Having mechanics for Honor does not prevent you from telling stories about people who do not try to live up to the high ideal. As it stands, honor mechanics do not give very much advantage to the honorable, and that advantage is, in my opinion, far outweighed by the freedom of choice of action a low-Honor character has available. But having some mechanics associated with honor means that even the clumsy and slow Individualist-society member can pretend that honor matters...and can help pretend they are magical samurai. In my previous entries for this blog, I wrote about a whole lot of things: The history of Japan and the way it incorporated different Chinese philosophies with some home-grown philosophies of its own, Who the Samurai were, the evolution and purpose of Bushido, and What honor means in English. I could, maybe should, write about what Honor means in Japan, and maybe I'll take a crack at it someday, but I'm not really qualified and I hope that I've shared that there are enough different philosophies floating around that it's clear that the answer would be dependent on which philosophic framework you're working in, just as Honor changes depending on context when used in English.
Instead, I wanted to write about what Honor means in Legend of the Five Rings. Even from 1E, L5R has included advancement mechanics for status, glory, and honor. These advancement mechanics also have related mechanics and roleplay consequences in conflict. Having mechanics at all means that these things are supposed to be part of the conflicts that go into gameplay. The tag line for the game from early on was: Where Honor is stronger than Steel. It's meant to be important. But what is it, as interpreted in the context of L5R? In reading how Honor is described in the RPG Books, the kinds of things that generate or lose you honor, and how Honor works in the various clans, I have come to the conclusion that Honor is how well you measure up to the expectations of your social role. In L5R, that role is generally Samurai. You are measuring yourself against a scale from 'Everything a Samurai should never be' to the ultimate 'The Perfect Samurai' The Perfect Samurai, as defined by Society as a whole, is a purely collectivist and philosophical construct. It perfectly embodies a role, not as a real person. It has little value for individuality or freedom of thought or expression. It is not possible as a human being to reach that end, or even desirable. But all Samurai in Rokugan, even non-samurai, would know as members of their society, how well they internally paired up to that ideal. The most dedicated Scorpion knows he is not the exemplar Samurai the most noble Lion is. He believes that he cannot be...that there are ends more important than keeping to the strict bonds of the social role 'Samurai', and those things he is willing to sacrifice in order to achieve those ends. If they slip poison into an enemy's cup, they know it is not what a correct and proper samurai, the Perfect Samurai, would be doing. Honor is not a matter of opinion, at least not opinion that can be fixed in any meaningful way. Even if the Scorpion's player says 'I don't think my character will think that poisoning this person is a bad thing', that doesn't make the action of poisoning honorable. If the Scorpion were not of an extremely low honor score already, they would lose honor for doing it. Honor is how close that character is to Rokugan's image of the Perfect Samurai. In my opinion, if a Samurai were to undergo enough mental torture, humiliation, and beatdown, they could be convinced that they were less honorable than their actions would warrant, and if they were surrounded by sycophants and babied enough, they could come to believe that they were more honorable than their actions warrant, but this would require some serious storytelling and consideration and would generally require an adjustment of honor once they realized the standards they were living to were not the same as the rest of society. Just the character believing what they are doing is the right thing to do is not sufficient. Honor is dependent on your actions, or lack thereof. The Scorpion's deep and profound meditations on Honor will not make him more honorable. His words alone do not change his honor. He can try to define down or modify honor to improve himself, but it is what he does that will alter his honor, and the GM will award or remove honor accordingly. For Honor is internal. That Scorpion would still lose honor for poisoning the cup, even if the poison never detected and they are never found out. They know that is not what an Ideal Samurai should do. The Honor ideal varies from clan to clan as the image of the Perfect Samurai varies. This causes minor differences in what being Honorable means from one Clan to another and means the perfect measure you are going up against varies between the clans. A Unicorn Samurai sees the perfect Samurai as more Compassionate than a Crab Samurai, and therefore if the Unicorn fails to be Compassionate, they fail to meet that ideal more than a Crab Samurai of equal honor would if they experienced the same failure to be Compassionate. A Crab Samurai sees the perfect Samurai as more Courageous than a Unicorn Samurai would, and therefore if the Crab fails to be Courageous, they fail to meet the ideal more than a Unicorn samurai would of the same honor rank. The default or initial amount of Honor varies depending on your school or starting job. How well an individual Samurai will see themselves compared to the Ideal Samurai varies from school to school. Different starting honor: by doing what they do by default, the graduates of these different schools see themselves as hewing closer to or further away from the expectations of the social role of a Perfect Samurai. Both the typical Crab Bushi and the typical Unicorn Bushi, with their lower starting Honor, would know that they do not fulfill the role of 'The Perfect Samurai' as well as a typical Lion Bushi or typical Crane Bushi. They likely do not want to. Honor is logarithmic. The higher in honor you are, the closer you are to that ideal samurai, the harder it is to become even closer to that perfect ideal, and the easier it is to make a misstep that drags you further away from that ideal. The higher Honor a character has, the fewer options they have open to them. If a character does not care if they match a societal Ideal Samurai, they are free to use means that would not be used by the Ideal Samurai to achieve their ends, like, say, Poison. The same options are available to characters with high Honor, but if they use such means, they will very quickly be dragged away from being high Honor. The act of using such methods makes you low Honor. If a character values their honor, they would not use such methods, which makes achieving your goals more difficult. Most low-starting-honor School members tend to chafe at such bonds. Overall, this gamified definition of Honor matches the definition, in English, of Internal Honor - An internal code of virtue and behavior that captures that individual's obligations to their role and their social group. The character's role is Samurai. Their social group is The Empire adjusted by their Clan. Their amount of Internal Honor is how well they fulfill the code of virtue and behavior that describes the obligations of that Role. The other two gamified attributes similar to Honor in L5R: Status, and Glory. If Honor in L5R is Internal Honor, Glory can be seen as External Honor - The external recognition of respect, status, and praise, especially by those considered praise-worthy themselves. In 1-4E, Glory was your increasing reputation and recognition as an admirable person, and Infamy was your increasing reputation and recognition as a not-admirable person. If you had glory, you could influence people with your fame and their admiration for you, while you could use your infamy to intimidate people. In 5E this has changed...Infamy and glory are on the same scale. This does not shift the definition of Glory, though. It just doubles down on the idea that Glory is not just 'fame', but it is 'reputation of being a very fine, upstanding person'. Glory is earned doing public deeds that others find admirable and worthy, or even better than, your role as a Samurai. The key attribute is that it is public. The GM awards glory gains and penalties when the glorious action is observed or noted. As External Honor, Glory can also be potentially considered Face from the perspective of a Collectivist Society, though that has other implications. The last attribute, Status, is the Position the person has in the society, or the fealty network that Rokugan posits for Samurai and Lords, with the highest status person being the Emperor, and the lowest status persons being the bottommost caste of society. You advance in Status by being awarded new job titles or more prestigious appointments. Someone greater than you has to give you status. This is the same for 1-4E and for 5E. These three attributes work together to create the conflicts the storytelling of the game is designed to tell. But they all together work to describe the relationship of any Character to the ideal of 'The Perfect Samurai':
I was in my early-20's, standing in my room at home from college, three years in to a dual degree in English Literature and Geology, and crying at a graduation card. One not even my own.
One of my brothers was graduating, and he had received a card with the inspirational poem, "If" by Rudyard Kipling. It was a poem I knew well, having learned it from childhood. My parents had a copy they hung on the wall. But I was crying because I had received a card much like it when I had graduated high school a few years before, with another poem someone had based on the previous Kipling poem. "If" For Girls. There, in front of the wall of books I had hoarded since I was a child, all science fiction and fantasy heroes, the bold explorers and dry wits and grave thinkers which I loved, I was struck with the unfairness of it all. Why were the poems different? Why weren't the virtues of the first the virtues of the second, or visa versa? There were many women in those books...but their virtues were not the same. The words were the same to describe them, but their meanings were different. My father came into the room and asked me what was wrong. I tried to explain to him. "It's not fair," I told him. "Strength. Courage. Honor. Why are they different for men than for women in everything? A woman isn't even allowed to be honorable!" My father shook his head, confused. "I find that insulting to say," he said. "Your mother is the most honorable woman I know." I didn't say anything else. I was trying to describe masculine honor. He was talking about sexual purity. There was no point in continuing. But since that day...maybe long before it...I've tried to understand the words, the virtues, that mean different things when used in context of men or women. And I've tried to understand one of the most difficult concepts in the English Language: Honor. There are not just differences in the interpretation of the word Honor applied to men and women. The term means different things within English itself even for the same group. From the time Aristotle and Plato both explored the concept of Honor in their writings, it has been a challenge. Part of that is because the term itself is used different ways. What is Honor? "Honour … the spurr of vertue" - Robert Ashley (based on The Ovid) "A word… a mere scutcheon" - Falstaff "The opinion of Power" - Thomas Hobbes "A greatness of mind which scorns to descend to an ill and base thing" - George Stanhope "The finest sense of justice which the human mind can frame" - William Wordsworth We can see this complexities in a selection of phrases where we use the term in English. Note: None of these uses are intended to imply anything about any Asian sources, just their uses in English.
If you dig a little bit deeper, you discover that the kinds of actions that cause 'dishonoring', that offend the sense of honor, vary from region to region. In Germanic literature, a challenger that says a man is cowardly or unwilling to fight or otherwise conform to a martial challenge is considered 'dishonoring him'. In more Spanish or South American areas, challenging a man's manliness is considered more offensive to their honor. In the old US South, an honor code kept women and slaves 'in their place' and drove white men to respond to challenges with reprisals of violence, while in the Northern US the honor code encouraged dispassionate appraisal and the suppression of emotions in men. There are dozens of different meanings for honor, gendered and ungendered. And that's just in English! Most people try to split most of these definitions into two categories:
The Evolution of Honor Most religions and philosophies have some version of "the Golden Rule". "Whatever is disagreeable to yourself, do not do unto others,” in Buddhism. "Do not impose on others what you do not wish for yourself," in Confucianism. "Do unto others as you would have done unto you," in Christianity. "As you would have people do to you, do to them; and what you dislike to be done to you, don't do to them," in Islam. Ancient Egypt, Ancient India, Ancient Greece, Persia, Rome, Judaism. Almost all the worlds religions and philosophies hold this concept. But, while I sincerely believe that this is the heart of human ethical and moral behavior, when a lord's goal is to produce soldiers, men who will fight and kill for his cause, it ends up getting in the way. The Golden Rule does not permit the killing of your fellow human being. It takes fifteen to twenty years to train an elite martial artist/warrior, in any fighting tradition, and with ancient weaponry, an elite warrior could kill 20 or more regular fighters on the field. This training had to begin pretty much from birth. That is a huge investment for a lord to make. He wanted to create those who would fight to do his will, but he also wanted troops that were predictable, that could be trusted not to turn on him or his own people when his situation falters and he is weakened, who would stay fighting and not run even when things were dangerous and they were losing, and would not cause harm to the farmers, the women, or children within his territory who might, in turn, flee or rebel if they were oppressed by his soldiers. And that code had to be flexible enough to be self-enforcing, even when circumstances were such that the lord would not be able to enforce laws around the soldier's behavior. The lord needed his soldiers to have an internal moral code to obey, but one that was not rooted in non-violence and seeing others as equal to yourself. That moral internal code would be externally reinforced and promoted, with accolades, with praise, and advancement for those who followed it well. That's why honor has both this internal and external aspect, because they both derive from the same source originally: the code of behavior to enforce the obligations of the individual (namely, the warrior), and the recognition a lord will offer to those who fulfill those obligations publicly. This is also why honor, even going very far back in time, is an extremely gendered term -- because it is men that are expected to do war. And women who are expected to stay "pure". Honor and Face Although the concept of honor may have derived from this original requirement for ethically and morally bound men who are willing to kill others in service to their social role, by the time Aristotle was writing the term had expanded to a wide range of definitions, like some of the ones listed above and more I have not listed. What it actually means for any one society is going to be debated in many philosophy and ethics classes for years to come. So...why say all of this? Legend of the Five Rings was written in English. It was written based on English translations of Japanese and Chinese stories and philosophies and histories. And China and Japan had their own complex definitions of honor. Confucianism, Mohism, Legalism, Taoism, Bushido...All of these works have writings about what honor is and they don't all agree. So if anyone says 'Real Japanese Honor is ____________', you know they are talking BS. Even in English, that phrase doesn't have one definition. However, with many apologies for being a bad person to talk about such things, we can take a broad swipe at the two basic aspects: Internal Honor, and External Honor. More easily understood is External Honor. In a collectivist society, external honor is often referred to as Face and it is deeply paired to the concept of Shame. In such societies, your identity does not fully belong to you and you alone. Your actions are shared with those of your social in-group, your collective. Most of the time, this would be primarily your family, but it can also be your military company, your workplace, etc. If you do actions that bring credit, respect, prestige, and praise to your collective group, then you have saved or gained them Face, or External Honor. If you do actions that fail, that are embarrassing, and do not fulfill your role, then not only you, but your whole collective loses Face, or external honor. Family members within the collective, then, will use shame -- enforced consciousness of wrong or foolish behavior -- to compel you to do actions that would encourage greater external honor until Face is restored. As a side note, On is not Face. On is a limitless well of obligation and respect. Your parents give you a limitless amount of On, and you, in turn, will never be able to repay them, but you will owe them eternally for what they have given you. It is related to your Giri, which is an obligation that must be repaid, and your Ninjo, which is is that which both take without repaying. (Good article on what these really mean here). Internal Honor is more complicated. This is the actual internal code of behavior, as defined by your role, your obligations, and what is perceived to be morally right, to which you are supposed to conform. Your expectation would be that if you behave according to this Internal Honor, your External Honor would be increased, or at least not be lost. But your internal honor does not require external recognition of your act. Internal honor is 'doing what you are supposed to be doing in the role you are doing it.' It is your excellence, your moral power. When I've seen this aspect of a collectivist society's honor discussed in English separately from Face, the term Virtue is used. In Legend of the Five Rings, these ideas are turned into game mechanics. I'll talk about that, why the creators of the system did that, and how they translate in terms of philosophy next time. Following the Heian period where the Imperial court reigned, in the Kamakura period, the now-landed samurai grew in power. Their leader had been conferred by the Imperial Court with the authority to seize the undeveloped northern territory, and as such a commander was granted the title of Shogun. But, with that power, there was little inclination to give it back. The great Shōgun, Minamoto no Yoritomo, built a parallel power structure over the lands, a power structure controlled by Samurai in an interlocking web of fealty relationships.
At this point, there were not three, but four primary competing groups with different philosophies in Japan: The native Shinto religion, still practiced across the lower classes and from which the Emperor drew what power he had; the Chinese philosophies still dominating the the Imperial Court, who held both ancestral power and wealth, as well as having warriors of their own; the Buddhist monks growing ever increasing in power; and, now, the philosophy of the Samurai, or Bushido. There was no great scholar or work upon which Bushido was founded. (The Hagakure, by Yamamoto Tsunetomo, was written centuries later, and is a nostalgic view of Bushido 'from the old days'). Instead, Bushido is, in many ways, a philosophy of pragmatism. If you were a warrior, you made your living by the blade and you held your land by the strength of your weapons. You wanted to pass your land down to your children and wanted them to be able to hold it also. But how? First, you had to show weaker opponents that they could not steal your territory or displace you from it. They had to know you would defend it with force when necessary, and they weren't going to be able to wiggle it out of you by political or martial means. That meant demonstrating your courage and valuing your reputation as a serious warrior, and making sure your child learned the same ways. You had to show the farmers on your lands, from whom you were collecting taxes and financial support, that you were fair, compassionate, and just, so they would not rebel or betray you to your enemies. You had to prove to your peers that you were a man of your word and you would not break your promises, so that you could meet and negotiate and come to terms that would be kept without requiring too many hostages or onerous conditions. And you had to prove to those more powerful than you that you were loyal and brave and respectful of them, and would be a good soldier, so it was worth it to them to keep you in your land rather than strip it from you or your children. Requiring these virtues form the core of Bushido. At the same time, as a samurai, even though you gained your power with your skill at weapons and tactics, you still did not want to appear foolish or ignorant, to your peers, or to the Imperial Court. You at least needed to be able to read and write, keep books and calculate taxes. And an education meant you were being taught, and teaching your children, the teachings of Confucius and the tactics of Mozi, and the laws of the land derived from Legalism. And, religiously, the Buddhist Monks asserted the correct ways to honor your ancestors and prepare the dead, and taught what would happen after death. So the philosophies of the other non-Samurai groups seep into the Way of the Warrior, regardless. Even if you do not care for these topics the way a courtier or a monk or a priest would, you could not escape them. I think no clan in Rokugan better captures the essence of this Way of the Warrior than the Lion Clan. In AD 1274 and again in AD 1281, during the Kamakura period, invasions of the Mongols brought at least a hint of one more, much more foreign, faction to Rokugan, the Unicorn. Japan evolved much after the Kamakura period of course. The Imperial Court and the Shōgunate fought many times, though the Shōgun never completely wiped it out for many reasons (reasons you can find here.) The samurai and sects of monks such as the Ikkō-ikki fought many bitter wars, and the Samurai clans fought amongst themselves. That ended with the Edo period in 1603. When you watch samurai dramas, or see samurai depicted, they are almost always from the end of the civil wars that marked the Azuchi–Momoyama period, the wars dominated by Oda Nobunaga and Toyatomi Hideyoshi, or from the Edo period that followed. That is the period we are most familiar with. But that period had an extremely powerful Shōgun and an insignificant Imperial Court. Firearms from Portugal and open trade prior to the Edo lockdown brought in many Western Influences. The power of the monks had been violently crushed. None of these things are like Rokugan. Rokugan is Fantasy...it is not Japan. But if you did want to compare Rokugan to an Asian country of the real world, it would be Japan....but it would be a Japan much closer to the very end of the Heian or the beginning of the Kamakura period, where the court still had sway, and the wilds were still wild, and four great philosophies vied for dominance. Just in Rokugan, these philosophies come with clans attached, and all of the elite are called Samurai. |
Author
Kakita Kaori, also known as Jeanne Kalvar, has played the Legend of the Five Rings Role-playing game since 1st Edition. If you want to read her thoughts on things other than gaming, you can find them here:
Archives
April 2023
Timelines
|