The Winter Gardens of the Kakita
Fan Fiction for the Legend of the Five Rings
When I first posted my article on One Thing L5R Did Right, it was really apparent I was feeling wary about posting it, feeling like that might be attacked. I was glad to find out there was a lot of support for it, far outweighing the attacks I did receive. It was wonderful. Thank you.
One question I got in the responses I received, however, was the question "Why was I so concerned about posting on that topic?" I've talked a lot about the history of gaming, and L5R in particular, and I guess to answer that question, I have to talk about some things that are not so positive. Every person carries scars related to previous interactions they have had with different types of people, and those scars color all the interactions they have currently going forward. I like to think if people seem irrational, even hateful, to me, it is usually caused by some sort of scar that they carry that I don't know about. As for me, I have my own. Everyone who knows me knows I really like the Crane in Legend of the Five Rings. Hopefully, the reason why I like the Crane so much is apparent in the One Thing L5R Did Right article; the Crane, more than any other clan in L5R, represent the world placing value on soft power, diplomacy, and nurture, rather than aggression, dominance, and martial, supernatural, or unethical power. For me, a game, a fantasy world, that valued those things was what I was looking for in the face of a real world that didn't. When I started playing L5R and interacting with the broader community, though, there was a lot of backlash against the Crane. Crane characters were called weak, pansies, sissys, gay, etc. There were lots of jokes about 'Not in the Face'. The idea that the Crane looked down on others more than any other clan was extremely pervasive. And people continually raised them as being cowards, hiding in the back, etc. Players described them as 'not really honorable'...but instead being really good at 'faking' being honorable while secretly using lying, cheating, blackmail, or whatever nefarious techniques they could think of to get ahead. The Scorpion were better, because they told you up front that they were going to lie, cheat, steal, etc, to get ahead, so that at least was honest. The Crane, according to many players, did the exact same thing, but pretended to be honorable. That all was the mild stuff...it got worse from there. I was pretty naive, at first, and thought that this backlash was because the Crane had a powerful type of deck in the card game before I joined. People complained... and still complain... about non-interactive honor runners and being wiped out. I naturally figured they must be right, and eagerly turned to tournaments to see if this would play out in tournament results. But it didn't. Over the years, it was clear that the complaints... about lack of interactivity, for example... could be applied to strategies from any clan. The term just meant 'a strategy that I cannot stop without modifying my deck.' The complaints and backlash continued whether Crane was a top tier clan or a bottom tier clan. While it was true that players of other clans might carry scars of previous defeats to Crane players, they did not offer the same backlash to other clans while they had been dominant. The complaints about the power of other clans were complaints to AEG about game balance, and were generally short lived, fading when that clan was no longer dominant. This was not the case with Crane. Considering I started playing in the late 1990's, homophobia seemed to be an obvious reason for this kind of backlash. Being Cis and coming from a relatively sheltered background, I did not have to experience much of that prior to L5R, but I knew it was a possible reason. After all, sitting down at a tournament and getting 'gay' jokes every turn is pretty blatant. And I don't doubt that there was an element of homophobia in the taunting that Crane received. But I, from my place of naiveté, did not understand why the Crane were being associated with LGBT people. Characters who were very, very clearly heterosexual, such as Doji Hoturi, were being labeled gay. Others, like Kakita Yoshi, never expressed an ounce of interest in anyone. AEG was really strict... overly strict, I'd argue... about excluding LGBT relationships from their storylines. And some of the Cis relationships for Crane were were very powerful and significant. It was more like the homophobia and gay slurs were being brought in to justify the dislike of the Crane, rather than slurring actual LGBT members of the Crane. As I understand it, this is very characteristic of the way homophobia works, so if I'm breaking things down to a far too obvious level, please forgive me. As homophobic attitudes lightened up with greater education and equality, the specific slurs about gays and playing Crane did seem to lighten up, over time. Certain extremely offensive words were no longer used. But it's not like the attitude towards the clan completely vanished, either. I was still left wondering about it. A lot of what I experienced or saw laid against the Crane, I eventually labeled as misogyny. These things that the Crane are into...the beautiful hair and clothes, focusing on soft power, courtesy, diplomacy...they are things that my society had labeled as being in the sphere of being 'female'. It was easy for me to think that the backlash was against the feminine. Or at least, male characters doing things that were feminine. But the term isn't actually very good for describing what I saw and experienced. Many players would gladly enjoy my offerings, as a female, of these soft skills, or even participate in the right context. There were people who would exclude me as a female player, who would express that misogyny that women weren't capable of playing. But that was uncommon, at least for me. That is not to say I did not see really terrible treatment towards women during my time playing L5R. I did. The worst of it, though, was towards Ree Soesbee, lead storywriter for the game for a good number of the early years I was playing. Ree was sweet, generous, welcoming, creative, and intelligent. And she was, to be perfectly honest, a beautiful person. The number of guys who would try to hit on her, attempt to convince her to put their personal ideas into the storyline, and then speak about her horribly when she refused either, or just behind her back when it was clear they could not use her, was really, really gross. She agreed to write Curved Blades for FFG in 2017 as the first Unicorn fiction, but the response she got to that fiction was a stream of 'Dumb woman doesn't know katanas are curved too' as male readers missed the point of the story and ignored the fact she was (and is) extremely knowledgeable about Japanese culture and had written for L5R for years. A bunch of dudes had acted like asses again...it brought back a lot of bad memories. I felt badly for her, and I am not surprised she did not write any further fictions for FFG. She's probably washed her hands of L5R, and I don't blame her. But Ree also committed another crime, beyond being an intelligent, beautiful female in a privileged position. She is the one who really created the Crane clan, and gave it its core stories that made it what it was. Something made it different than the other clans, and I think part of the reaction that Ree got was because of that difference. At the time, she was blamed for it as 'favoritism' towards the Crane, though she also wrote Hitomi and the Dragon with equal fervor and spread stories between all the clans just as much as all the other story leads do. The Crane were transgressive, then, even apart from Ree as the designer, in the eyes of many. It wasn't until just in the last year or two that I came across the right term for what is going on with the reaction the Crane have gotten in the L5R crowd. The better term, I think now, is Gender Policing. If that is familiar to you all, that's great. It was kind of new to me. Gender policing occurs when someone feels the need to enforce certain behaviors or gender expressions based on sex upon another person, or, in this case, an entire clan. Caring about beauty, fashion, art, poetry, politeness, meekness, diplomacy, and so on, all went against the expected expression of masculinity of the 90s/00s. And that really disturbed many players of L5R. I don't think they even knew what they were protesting. But for such people, the Crane made more sense if they were gay, or if they are just 'faking' being honorable and are secretly being conniving and hypocritical. If they were gay, then they weren't really male, and therefore their behavior did not challenge the definition of masculinity. If they were conniving and hypocritical, then they weren't really admirable, and therefore their definition of masculinity was 'in the wrong' and did not need to be addressed. Anger comes from expectations that are not met, and I don't think the Crane fit the expectations of expected masculinity correctly. That annoyed people. The homophobia or seeming misogyny or other issues seemed to come from different ways to put the Crane outside the definition of masculinity so it did not challenge that definition... or to make others acknowledge the clan as inferior so it was not a challenge. That experience, for what it's worth, explains my observations. And it's the source of my nervousness, presenting these ideas again. Gender policing is not exclusive to Legend of the Five Rings, or even to the Gaming Community. I do not blame those who have, even directly to my face, fallen back on really offensive behavior to enforce these norms. I think that certain gender norms are beaten into kids pretty strongly, sometimes literally. Certainly to the point where they are self-enforced and self-enforcing. I know such norms were drilled into me. But this enforcement cuts off whole swathes of the world to folks, based on their gender. Whole fields of beauty they are not allowed to see and admire and pursue. It is my hope that the whole goodness found in the human experience can be opened and appreciated by us all.
1 Comment
After my article last week, I was extremely grateful to only receive two kinds of comment: What was I so worried about when I posted it, and what did I mean when I said L5R had the promise, or the potential, of having a non-Domination oriented game, even if it did not fully deliver. I will venture to answer, potentially, the first question next week, but I'll tackle the second question this week and try to share what a nurture-oriented game might be, and how L5R does and does not live up to creating that game.
First, I'll talk about what a nurture-oriented game is. In order for something to be a good game of just about any kind, there needs to be an element of risk, an element of decision-making, an element of randomness, and an element of reward. The risk adds tension, the decision-making makes the player able to input into the game, the randomness makes each game play out differently, and the reward makes completing the game feel like a success. In most classic board and card games, there is also an element of competition: a requirement for a opponent to achieve victory over. But this is not necessary. Solitaire is a game without an opponent. There are also coming out new kinds of board games that are cooperative, not competitive, such as Pandemic. These have the elements of a game, but the end condition does not require dominating other players. Instead, the goal is to create sufficient cooperation between the players and achieve a strong enough board position that you can accomplish your goals, thus achieving victory, and the reward. For the world of Board Games, then, you can think of something like Monopoly or Poker as being Domination games, with the intent to dominate the other players, and something like Pandemic being a Nurture game, with the intent to work with the other players to set up the optimal board position and win. Role Playing games are a little different. In traditional RPGs, the players are cooperating with each other against NPCs that are run by the GM. So how do these translate into Dominate vs. Nurture games? Dominate games require active opposition. In a traditional Dominate RPG, the GM creates a scenario where the PC's are 'the good guys'...(not necessarily in alignment or action, though. ) The NPCs come in three categories: 'the bad guys', 'information sources', and 'sympathy pools'. 'The bad guys' are defined as opponents who must be defeated to reach the goal. 'Information sources' are NPCs who provide clues or steps along the way to help you defeat 'The bad guys'. 'Sympathy pools' are sympathetic NPCs who provide rewards for success and risk for failures'. Those NPCS who oppose the PCs are dominated in sequence until the 'boss' NPC is defeated and the scenario is won. The domination can be physical, social, or intellectual. But the scenario is won by defeating the opponents. In a nurture game, you still have a risk and a reward, but the method of 'winning' the game is not the same. Opposing NPCs are not necessarily 'Bad Guys'. They are, instead, competitors. They have interests that are not aligned with your own, but your goal is not to compel them to do as you wish. Your path to victory is not through defeating opponents. Your path to victory is to set up the best board position possible for you and the community you are acting on behalf of. In short: In a domination game, victory is achieved by defeating the opponents of your community. In a nurture game, victory is achieved by improving your community's board state. Every game can have nurture game aspects. It can be argued that character advancement in D&D is a sort of nurture game - it is about self-improvement, after all. But in the editions of D&D out at the time, the only way to advance was through defeating opponents, which grant XP, which let you advance. Other games have very, very light mechanics that allow a creative GM to add community-building elements to the game, generally with skill rolls. But skill rolls tend to be straight binaries, Pass/Fail. They don't have all the elements of a game. In general, they tend to be used in the same fashion combat skills are used: as a way to defeat a puzzle/room/environmental challenge. But GMs can take these light skill mechanics and use them to create nurture aspects to games. The games just aren't built for it. Since domination-oriented games require an opponent who must lose, every situation by default ends in a zero-sum game. One person wins, the other person loses. Compromise is not really an option. Even in games that were 'close' to co-op at the time L5R came out, like Diplomacy, the cooperative portion was a short-term affair as we join forces to take down a larger rival...eventually we would turn on each each other. There was no other way to win. Nurture-oriented games foster different solutions. Since we are rivals, or competitors, rather than opponents, we can look for solutions where we both get what we want. Maybe the dragon really doesn't like the taste of villagers, and would rather eat fish from the river, but the new dam the villagers have put in has stopped all the fish from reaching the dragon's lands. There was a classroom exercise that used to be done where three people were given the roles of negotiators on behalf of three towns needing peaches and the fourth was given the role of a peach farmer. The farmer had one crop of peaches, and each town needed all the peaches in order to survive. In a domination-oriented game, whichever negotiator gave the farmer the best price or convinced the farmer to reject the other negotiators 'won', and the others lost. But in a nurture-oriented game, the three negotiators and the farmer can talk to each other and find out that each town needed different parts of the peach...one needed peach skin, one needed peach pits, and one needed peach juice. All three could win. And, of course, the farmer wins most of all. This negotiation can be as tense and as full of conflict, etc, as one ending up without the exclusive win. There's as much 'story' there. It just uses different means to win. Now, obviously, per my discussion of last week, men are just as capable of doing this community-development task as women. And women are just as capable of defeating opponents as men. It is only a weird thing in our patriarchal society that makes it so negotiation and development is considered lesser, weak, or unrealistic, and associated with women, while a result in victory over an opponent is considered strong, assertive, direct, realistic, and associated with men. So what does L5R have that contributes to a nurture-oriented game, and what does it lack? I was a little too harsh when I said that L5R did not mechanically have a nurture game. It is more a case where its potential falls short of creating it. But mechanically, first of all, L5R had honor, glory, and the roll and keep system. Honor and glory are both stakes that can be risked and rewards that can be gained, without requiring a competitor lose an equal amount of honor or glory based on your win. If you gain money in a game, you have to get it from someone else in some fashion, causing them to lose it. But if you gain glory or honor in a game, you aren't taking that honor or glory from another. So that covers two aspects of gamifying a nurture scenario. The roll and keep mechanic adds the element of risk, randomness, and decision-making to every single roll...including unopposed rolls. Do you make a raise? Will you hit the TN if you do? How much can a raise do for you? This turns a 'perform on your musical instrument for the lord of the manor' roll into a little poker game, where you are weighing your odds of success vs your ability to make further impressions above and beyond the default success. Roll and keep + raises gamifies every skill roll, which means it can gamify nurture also. L5R 5th Edition has given up this mechanic. Although it still has roll and keep, the opportunities are going to be based on what comes out randomly on the dice. TNs are generally known ahead of time, and the chances of getting certain opportunity scenarios are not something that can be calculated ahead of time. Instead of it being a gamble you make to to try to 'succeed better', you roll the dice and, if opportunities come up, you use them to help you. You have to make your decisions after the roll. Now, 5E can be used for a nurture-oriented game, too; its mechanics just aren't as well tuned for gamifying that aspect. 5E does have shuji, and 1-4E did have courtier-focused schools, giving schools and techniques that focus on politics and negotiations. These do make nurture scenarios more satisfying, letting some characters be particularly good at optimizing in a way that will work in a fashion that does not require direct opposition. And 5E has strife, which can put pressure on a non-violent scenario, but strife is more useful as a tool of political/social domination rater than as an enhancement to negotiation and finding win/win scenarios. And as I said in my last article, L5R has a world that seems primed to create a balance between a nurture-oriented and domination-oriented game. There are enemies, including enemies in other clans, that can and should be defeated completely, both in the court or on the battlefield. But the clans aren't necessarily 'the bad guys'. Each clan performs a role and function in the Empire, and the lore for the clans is deep enough that it is clear that the clans are going to have competing points of view for many things. How to resolve hazards or defeat threats, for example, how to compete for resources, even for what constitutes a threat. Three clans might need the same peach crop for three different reasons. You can persuade the farmer to give your clan the crop and ignore the others...but you can maybe find out why the other clans need the peach crop and see if there are compromises where you all can accomplish your goals...and win allies in doing so. And in L5R, you have this overarching hierarchy and sense of required civil order that drives you to negotiate for peaches rather than just taking the peaches in the first place. However, L5R does fall short of this potential. The problem is that, while L5R has the mechanics and the means to create a nurture game, it never has, in any edition, told you how to create and run one. How do you, as a GM, set up a scenario where the players can advance their position without dominating opponents? What kind of conflicts do you make, and how do you string them together into a campaign? We knew, from Dungeons and Dragons, how to manage a dungeon crawl as a kind of campaign. In a dungeon crawl kind of campaign, the characters move as a group from scene to scene, usually physically from room to room or space to space, encountering an opponent or trap or puzzle in that room that must be defeated to move on to the next room. Once you have moved through all the rooms to reach the final room, you must defeat the final boss monster or boss trap, at which point you win the treasure that is there and go home. Investigations are another kind of dungeon. Instead of physical rooms or areas, an investigation campaign strings together locations and NPCs, which you search or interrogate or defeat, and each victory unlocks the next part of the 'dungeon', just as solving puzzles and defeating enemies does in a traditional dungeon. Eventually, you locate the 'boss' and defeat them. But how do you advance in a nurture-style game? How does a campaign center around accumulating virtue and improving your board position rather than moving step through step through a dungeon or an "investigation dungeon"? L5R has the tools to run it, but doesn't ever really show us how to string such a campaign together. It could. Pitting the players, AND the NPCs, against the forces of red tape, limited resources, tradition, or too much change, Shadowlands threat, slow spreading corruption, time, disease, outside encroachment...the tools are all there. GMs just need guidance to how to build that kind of campaign. And L5R could have put that in...and never did. |
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:
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