The Winter Gardens of the Kakita
Fan Fiction for the Legend of the Five Rings
I haven't been tending my Winter Garden as much as I should have recently. But I've done some updates now that I hope prove useful.
1) I have updated the List of 5E schools in the RPG Resources area to include the schools and Titles from Writ of the Wilds. 2) I added a brand new Article called Running an Intrigue. This is a step-by-step example of preparing and running an intrigue for your players, with my best recommendations for building Intrigue Goals and working with your players.
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I haven't done any changes for quite a long while. I'm still waiting to get updates to the Rokugan map...my art guru Onimaru has been tied up with many non-L5R things and really I need another artist because he's just so busy.
However, I have posted new rules for Grappling and Inflicting various status effects, which you can find here. I've also been working hard with the Emerald Legacy team so you can find all kinds of information about that. Overall for L5R, there hasn't been much new news worth pursuing so I haven't felt the need to go on any of my patented rants, however, if you have topics you'd like to see discussed, let me know. It's been a while since I updated my blog, so thanks for hanging with me (or coming back!) I've been busy working on Emerald Legacy. You can find my work here at Eme rald Legacy. I've also been doing a bunch of preparations and so on for interviews for Adventures in Rokugan. as well as other work. And I shouldn't forget real life! In any event....
I thought I'd write up some work on Opportunities I was requested for from our Court Games podcast you can find here: How to Use (and Speed Up) Opportunity Results in L5R 5E . I thought it might be helpful to have it written up as a reminder. Hopefully this is helpful to you. Anyway... In Legend of the Five Rings 5th Edition, Opportunities can be thought of as either a 'kicker' or bonus on a successful roll, or a participation prize for a failed roll. However, they are also one of the primary mechanisms to interact with or use techniques, as well as being required for several vital mechanics such as critical strikes. The benefits of opportunities can be so good, they may make a player want to intentionally fail a roll in order to also get the opportunities, and this is by design. With time, players can learn to shape their approaches to different problems to specifically take advantage of the kinds of opportunities associated with those approaches, and when players become skilled enough to do so, this causes a significant increase in the kinds of challenges they can overcome. However, opportunities are also the #1 culprit for causing analysis paralysis in a game. Instead of generally being able to pre-calculate your numbers, your reactions and planned course of action ahead of time, where you put the weight of your decision making outside of the gameplay time as you build your character, opportunities cause you to put a large part of your decision making after the roll is made, and that can be really hard to decide. Especially with tables and tables of opportunities spread out across multiple books, and different levels of character sheet building, from built into core mechanics, into techniques, skills, and even into individual types of equipment. It can quickly be too much for a player, especially a new player, to manage. So we present four different techniques for managing opportunities at your game table. These are: 1) Minimal Opportunity Types. 2) Constrained Opportunity Types. 3) Completely Free-form Opportunity types, and 4) Rules as Written. I'll present each type now. 1) Minimal Opportunity Types Approach: This type can be used when you have a table where the players do not want to or are not able to engage with either the Opportunity or Strife Mechanics. This might be for brand new players at their first session. In this approach, Opportunities are only used to negate strife or to fuel techniques, or for Critical Strikes. This approach vastly limits the functionality of opportunities, and also makes strife and the possibility of becoming compromised or reaching an unmasking is significantly reduced. It reduces the functionality of the Water approach especially, since that relies on its opportunities for its power. If you wish to use this approach, you may want to have the water approach reduce/remove 2 rather than 1 strife. 2) Constrained Opportunity Types Approach: This approach was proposed by The Last Province podcast in their episode that touches the topic Opportunities: The Last Province: Blood of the Lioness at 1 hour 14 minutes. I am sure Robert Denton will get around to writing it up soon, but in the meantime, I will write it up here. In this approach, rather than keeping the full list of opportunity types open on the table, players are limited to a short list of custom, but broad opportunity types, in addition to being allowed to use opportunities for techniques, and critical strikes, etc. However, the full list of opportunities from the books are not used or available. The Last Province suggests these 5 basic opportunity uses:
There are benefits and problems with this approach. This list of opportunity uses is, in fact, very finite and able to be remembered by players and GM, which helps reduce the decision making, and certainly means you don't need to have them spread out in all the books. These constrained opportunity uses do cover most of the major opportunity uses within the game system. So that is very good. However, most of these uses require a fair bit of negotiation between player and GM, with ambiguity about how significant an effect an opportunity expenditure should have or whether it applies. It also rewards quick response and being able to decide on new adverbs or effects very quickly. While that is good, and it is easy to argue it should be rewarded, the decision to try to choose the 'best' expenditure of opportunity through one of these uses can be just as time consuming as looking up an opportunity from a table. Finally, these opportunity uses can overtake some of the opportunity expenditures that require actual techniques in order to be able to achieve like techniques or weapons that cause specifically cause snare, or negate terrains, etc. A careful GM should be comfortable with their group and make sure this sort of abuse of constrained opportunity types leads to shared opportunity use between all members of the group and are not overshadowing techniques. 3) Free-form Opportunity Approach: This approach can be used by groups that are extremely comfortable with free-form play and shared storytelling between players and GMs, and do not need to have a whole lot in the way of rules to impede that play. In this approach, there is no set value or choice for what an opportunity can do. Its scale and limits are completely up to the imagination of the player, as approved the game master. The GM may choose to say that an opportunity needs to be used to do something that feels 'fire-ish' if it's a fire opportunity, or 'void-ish' for a void opportunity, but what that feel is or what it can do is not defined at all. Players use opportunities freely to modify or enhance their play in the moment. If players are used to doing this from other games, it is certainly an option here. Learning the feels of different approaches does not take long for most players, and the Constrained Types approach can be used as an interim until players become comfortable with it However, many players do not deal well with this lack of structure, and there are similar problems to the Constrained Types approach. 4) Rules as Written Approach: This approach can be summed up simply as rules as written. Opportunities can be spent in the opportunity tables provided through the books as written, or in techniques, or in weapons abilities or system mechanic uses as provided. Using this approach is the game as designed, and removes the ambiguity that causes trouble for many players. It can be used even when the players are unfamiliar with each other or the GM, and they do not require much negotiation with the GM. However, this has all the problems with analysis paralysis as described at the beginning of this article. A GM can prepare handouts to give the players rolling up the opportunity uses from the various books, but these go out of date, and the lists get quite long. My recommendation, if you use this approach, is to use the 5th Edition Opportunity website tool, as provided on this website. To use this tool, select the general category of what you are trying to do (General, Skirmish, Duel, Intrigue, Downtime, or regarding Conditions and Terrains). Then select a skill + approach and click on the word found at the intersection of the two. This will take you to all the opportunities from all the books that can be used for this specific skill + approach, plus relevant opportunity-driven techniques used for that combination if necessary. It is still a list, but it cuts all the information to only the relevant roll, which helps shorten the problem. Finally, in order to speed up using opportunities, try the following: As a player:
Hope that helped! Have a great week! I had an extremely fun but tiring four days doing Gencon Online. Since I live in Indianapolis, I could have gone to Gencon in person, but COVID has kept me away. I did get to host Kakita Onimaru (Trevor Cuba) for a few days, and got to attend the Dragon+ Clan dinner. It was very wonderful to meet so many L5R players.
Given that, a pretty short article this week. It's come up in other posts before and I realized I may never have explained it. That's the concept of Story Engines. Simply put, a Story Engine is something within the structure of a game world that will generate conflicts or problems that the PCs will need to address. Their addressing the problems they encounter is the source for the adventures that they go on. All decent games have a number of story engines. Story engines can be structural, event-driven, or mechanical. A structural story engine is built into the setting itself. It generally is beyond the ability of the PCs to affect or change, but its ongoing existence causes stories to occur. An example in L5R is The Shadowlands and its ongoing, un-appeasable desire to infiltrate and destroy Rokugan. The Shadowlands is part of the setting, and many adventures can be generated by people either going into the Shadowlands or the Shadowlands creeping into the Empire. Structural story engines can also be much more subtle than that. Systematic oppression of the lower classes in L5R is a story engine: It is unlikely that players will ever be able to end all treating people in the lower classes as less or non-human, but lords oppressing lower class people, and those peoples' response to such oppression is a story engine that can create many kinds of stories. An event-driven story engine is built off of integrating a series of big, dramatic events that impact the setting, and then those impacts spawn of new stories related to the effects of the previous story. Heroes of Rokugan, the 4E RPG group, does this masterfully. In this type of story engine, you begin an adventure that will alter the end state of the world by the end in some fashion, then you can create a new adventure out of the consequences of that change. This kind of story engine is the best for long term individual campaigns, but it is also the most restrictive. GMs creating stories built off of a pre-existing event-driven storyline require a module or in-depth explanation of the previous circumstances to create the new event, and then must use a lot of imagination to come up with the consequences and follow them up. It is great for campaigns, but the original circumstances need to be spelled out pretty specifically. In L5R, something like the Scorpion Clan Coup might be an event-driven storyline, with other adventures coming out of the consequences of the coup. A mechanical story engines use pre-built mechanics within the game system or the world to generate launch points for adventures. Examples of mechanical story engines can be Shadowlands Taint or severe injury in 5E. For example, if a character receives a severe injury, such as the loss of use of a limb, due to the mechanical consequences of a roll, it can lead to an adventure around acquiring a prosthetic or curing the injury. Minigames such as the Prosperity System found here can be used to generate adventures dealing with threat as it becomes built up. Mechanical things like disadvantages can also lead to stories in a combination with structural story engines. Anyway, I mostly wanted to get this concept of a story engine out there this week. How does this world spawn stories? What mechanically encourages more stories, and what kind of stories do they encourage? What structural areas of the world inspire more and more new stories without going outside the source? Or are all your stories event driven, and how do you come up with the ideas. All stories are, essentially, a source of ever new challenges for the player characters. You want to make sure your table has good ones. It's worth thinking of. When you are given to over-analysis, as I am, it's important to understand the framework or the reason something is written, if only to rein yourself in, to keep yourself from getting too arrogant. Or looking really, really silly. If you are a nutritionist, or even an excellent amateur cook, reading the works of George RR Martin you would, very correctly, determine that the many long descriptions of food in his work are not very nutritionally complete and are not very healthy food. You could even recreate the recipes in the books, even put together a cookbook! And you would not be invalid...your analysis is perfectly reasonable. You're right... It's /not/ necessarily very nutritious, and it might be quite yummy.
What you shouldn't do, however, is stretch too far beyond what the purpose of the item you're analyzing. You can reasonably determine from the many wonderful descriptions of food in A Song of Ice and Fire that George RR Martin is a man who likes food, who likes to write about food. That's not a big leap. You can determine, potentially, that the world he's writing about does not value nutrition the same way you would as a nutritionist, or you could argue that Martin is basing his food in his books on the food found in medieval Europe. But you can't say that Martin is trying to make some sort of statement in his inclusion of all that food in his books. It's a book about politics and fantasy. It wasn't created to be a treatise on diet and exercise. It is creating a universe, of which food happens to be a part. A nutritionist who uses the depictions of food in A Song of Ice and Fire to criticize Martin's diet, no matter what that diet is or how healthy Martin is, is going way too far. They're getting silly. If you want to criticize Martin's diet, you look at what he actually eats, or potentially, what he recommends other people eat, if he ever does. He doesn't in Game of Thrones. You need to look at what the work was created for when you are criticizing works. You also need to look at when that work was created. If I'm reading Shakespeare, something like, say, the Taming of the Shrew, the depictions of women are terrible, for example. It's pretty easy to go through the whole works of Shakespeare, and be certain, by modern standards, that Shakespeare was as sexist as can be. But his depictions of women, for his time, were, if not "woke", brought women out from behind closed doors and purely domestic roles, giving them initiative and some degree of power. Works like Uncle Tom's Cabin or Huckleberry Finn are absolutely racist by modern standards. But they also contributed greatly to abolition and the fight against racism. If you do your analysis and determine Shakespeare as sexist, or Mark Twain or Harriet Beecher Stowe as racist, you'd be right...but it's not a useful analysis, really. You'd only be pointing out that, yes, they existed in the time they existed in. It's in comparing them to other works of their own time that you get some benefit from that kind of analysis. So...L5R. It compares to other similar works of its time.... Vampire's Tokyo by Night, maybe, or Oriental Adventures, or Bushido. How you think it compares to the standards of its time...well, that's a different article. And it CAN change. It can be improved. But if we're looking at improvements, it's left with a balance of what we can change and what we have to leave because we can't change it too much. What you think can change, how much it can, and why it should....that's a different article. But what was Legend of the Five Rings written for? Well, I'm pretty sure it wasn't written to be advocacy for neoliberalism or any other economic system. There /ARE/ Game Systems created to advocate for, or against, economic systems, the unfairness and cruelty of the oligarchy, and the endless drip of the poisons of racism, sexism, hatred, and despair. But that's not what L5R was written for. I think it was created to allow players to put themselves in fantasy samurai stories, such as those depicted in Usagi Yojimbo (released 1984), Rurouni Kenshin (1994), many other fantasy and anime works that were becoming popular at that time, and, of course, on the older works of Kurosawa and chanbara cinema. It taps those sources, and Japanese history itself, to create a fantasy world that would let those stories play out, with details stuffed in there like A Song of Ice and Fire lemoncakes. And these literary works that it is based on, are all based on the fictionalization and mythmaking from Japanese history and folklore. It was written to recreate a literary experience. It was created to make myths and legends, the stories behind the stories that L5R was made to create. When your game system is created for mythmaking, it doesn't matter, for example, if Hantei really sliced open the moon with his sword. It's enough that the characters believe he did. In fact, in a mythmaking literary universe, it's OK that one of your PCs can pick up a sword and cut open the moon again. Because the PCs now are the legends behind a day yet to come. It doesn't matter that there are seven different explanations for why eclipses occur.... each PC believes the version they believe. Scholars may know of several, and pick their own most rational explanation. The Shadow lies...it wears the face of your lover...it brands unwary Scorpion...it is a piece of the nothing.... Everything can be true, and only the GM knows for sure...and the GM can make their own explanation. Having the different explanations makes it /better/.... It gives players things that they know and can guess, so instead of being led like children, they can derive and conclude and create based on what the GM offers. I love to feed details and ideas to players and GMs, from historic Japan, from China...honestly, from the west if I think it fits. My The Language of the Fan is based on Victorian fan language, not Japanese. But they are ideas, launching places for creativity and storytelling, telling these sort of stories. It's not 'true' or true to life, or anything. It was never intended to be so...not intended to be even an Edo Japan simulator. The universe of Legend of the Five Rings is a literary one, an exaggerated, larger-than-life one. Go ahead and get it wrong. Fix what is broken...or break what is fixed. Have your PCs become gods, or keep them as yoriki for a city magistrate. Have yoriki become legends, or shatter before the raw realism of a world caught between big dreams and human cravenness. It's really OK. Fields of Victory came out this week as a PDF on DriveThruRPG.net, so it's once more an excuse to answer an age old question: What do we do about Lion Honor?
In L5R, as I've kind of rattled on about before, honor is defined as 'How well you compare, through your actions, to the image of the "perfect" samurai', with that image of 'The Perfect Samurai' being something that has been taught to you from birth by your society. And, for samurai, that 'Image of a Perfect Samurai' is shaped by the code of Bushido, a set of virtues that a perfect samurai is supposed to have to the fullest. However, in the code of Bushido, one of those guiding principles of Bushido is Meiyo, or Honor. So how can your honor be evaluated by how well you adhere to the principle of honor? It's self-referential, to start off with. It also makes this principle very different from the other principles of Bushido, such as Compassion, Courtesy, Righteousness, and so on. If those are parts of honor, do they count in the principle of honor twice? Then you have the principle of Meiyo being placed foremost for the Lion clan, so how does that color their interactions with the other principles? Do they get double points for everything? It seems like a different translation of the word Meiyo is in order. In English, we also use Honor in a different sense. "I defend my honor!' is something a knight or duelist might shout after receiving an insult. When used in this sense, honor means 'dignity' or 'self-respect'. It is also used to encompass a set of professional ethics, implying craftsmanship and skill. Both of these definitions fit together in a respect for the role and 'job' one has in society. It is a very classist definition. An insult from an inferior is not treated the same as an insult from a superior or an equal, but a superior can offend an inferior's sense of honor if the breech is egregious enough. Because taking the insult is so significant it violates the respect due that person due to their role in society, even if they are lower class than the person making the insult. If we translate Meiyo, then, as Dignity, Self-Respect, and Respect for the role and obligations of Samurai, it makes the principle clearly 'part' of Honor, but not the same as honor. It sets it up as something that is violated when someone insults you or harms you or treats you badly, but also gives you something to sacrifice for other principles. In Legend of the Five Rings, we are always setting up virtues of Bushido in conflict with one another. Your lord gives you an order to cover up a crime. Do you follow duty or righteousness? The battle is lost, but if you retreat now you can lead the villagers to safety. Do you follow compassion or courage? These conflicts keep honor scores from going out of control, for every gain is likely to come with a (lesser) lost that negates some, or all of it, and the higher in honor you go, the more likely the honor gains will be negated, or even wiped out, by the losses. If Meiyo is Dignity, then you have something to contrast with the other virtues of Bushido in this dynamic equilibrium without making it all about substituting glory for honor. If you are insulted, you lose Dignity if you don't defend. But if the person who insulted you is much weaker than you, for example, a child, do you choose Compassion or Dignity? A superior disrespects you. Do you choose to respond in kind, keeping your dignity, or do you respond with Courtesy? Meiyo as Dignity can be seen, like the other virtues of Bushido, as the key to the whole thing. If you lack respect for your role as a samurai, why even try to follow Bushido at all? What does Bushido even mean, when you cannot value the ones who follow it? How can you serve your lord when even you do not know what you are good for? Without respect for what a samurai is, you cannot respect your brothers in arms. Is not an insult to you an insult to the Lord who trusts you and the clan that trained you? This sets up many of the traditional conflicts and behaviors of the Lion Clan. In the ancient battle between Kakita and Matsu, Kakita bowed to every opponent he defeated, embodying the principle of Courtesy. However, Matsu did not. She knew what she was worth, and what her skill was, and her Dignity was such that she knew she was superior to those she defeated and did not bow to them. When Kakita defeated her, and did not bow, he indicated to Matsu that he saw her, as a Samurai and follower of Lord Akodo, as inferior even to those Kakita had defeated. This was an unforgivable affront to her Dignity, causing her major honor loss. The feud as a result continued for generations. Anyway, I think it's a good switch. Hopefully it will help. Let me know what you think. I spent last weekend writing a new fiction for Emerald Legacy, and got a lot off my chest with the week before's article, so I didn't have an article last week. But today I thought I'd take the easy way out and give you an example of how an RPG created around the Nurture Game might run. For this example, I'll use the relatively simple scenario laid out in The Scroll or the Blade. This scenario is free, not too complex, and is kind of a good example at how close L5R at its most courtly could get to what I'm trying to grasp at. This example will have spoilers for the module, so please be warned. STandard RPGSpoilers for The Sword and Blade
In the module, a child is found by an Imperial Herald that has great magical potential. The Dragon and the Phoenix share parentage of the child. PC's of different clans are given different direction about how to use the child to get them what they need, and those plans are in direct opposition with each other. Either the Phoenix or the Dragon get the child, and clans that support one or the other benefit. A Deer NPC has to invite the PCs to get involved directly. A kemari tournament is held that the PCs can choose to join, but while they can gain XP or Glory for winning in the tournament, it does not relate to the decision about where to allocate the girl or how to benefit their clan. The 'action' is that a duel is declared during the tournament. An NPC may ask a PC (or a PC can offer to take the place of an NPC) in the duel, but the duel does not require the PCs to contribute and it does not settle the case or change the stakes considerably. Then Masako is kidnapped, and again, the PCs can find and beat some opponents, but this does not resolve the issue with Masako. Finally, there is a final intrigue which will determine the girl's fate, modified by circumstances from the previous events. The whole scenario boils down to two objectives: 1) Win a persuasion to get the girl to your scenario, or 2) Discredit the other side's candidate. Basically, make your side win, or the other side lose. The Scroll or the Blade is actually a fine little module, and is very much in the vein of expressing how L5R manages to get to negotiation and compromise rather than being a straight-forward domination game. It does suffer from a few areas of reasonable criticism. For the chase and combat, there's no purpose to it for the story, to the point where it's only 'extra' to choose to have the PCs investigate it. The duel, also, has minimal purpose to the story. The main reason that these events occur is that the PCs, by dint of having a PC tattoo tagged on their forehead, happen to be there and able to act, and therefore are in a stronger position to go into the final discussion. And in the end, those negotiations end with someone winning and someone losing. There's no chance for a middle ground. This is not that far off from a full "nurture" game. Elements of the game, like the combats, seem artificially plugged in, and the concluding intrigue seems like it captures the entirety of the conflict with little use for discussion outside the scene. If there were a way to let people work together better, set up compromises, and make the conflicts and games more directly serve the overall goal, I'd consider it a good nurture game. A Non-Domination Oriented RPG If I were to improve upon this and make it a full a non-domination style game , I would want to add a bit more depth into the characters of the NPCs. I'd also make sure the PCs had a strong agenda of their own, either shared or conflicting. This is because because playing in a nurture game requires seeing each of the NPC and PCs as a well-rounded person, with more than one objective. If the only purpose of the NPC is to advance the main talking point of the clan agenda, and two clan agendas are directly opposed, then it's very hard to find compromises The clan motivations also need to be expanded: It is not enough to just know that each clan wants the child, but each clan should have a general idea of exactly why they want that child so badly. You also kind of need to take the PC tag off the PCs. To begin the scenario, instead of having the clans or players be asked to intervene, a GM would first want to make it clear that intervening is in the characters' best interest. The letters from the clans can do this, or, better, the players could need assistance from the Dragon, Phoenix, or Deer clans, or from the Miya. This would cause them to seek out the members of these families who could share this situation with the child with them, and ask them for their help in swaying the decision to be made to their end. Spoilers
In the module itself, you would use the initial funeral of the child's parents for the first opportunity for the PCs to win favor (influence) in the eyes of the court, by their heroic deeds in dealing with the crisis. The fewer people that are hurt, the more respectful the PCs are, and the more honorably they act towards the child would increase their influence in the court's eyes, giving their first 'deposit' of influence.
Their participation in the Kemari tournament would give them another opportunity to earn more influence. As a GM, I would probably add a few other contests or events that they could use to gain more influence. There is no need in a non-domination game for the PCs to deal with ninja, though you can treat that as an event that can impress 'the court' too, if you like. An intrigue about the fate of the child, again, is seen not as 'forcing them' (or persuading an NPC to force them) to give up the child, but is another opportunity for the PCs to increase their influence in the court. In the table that I set up for the PCs, I would give them the option of 'buying' a rendez-vous with the Miya and the child with their influence, to learn more about them. This puts the initiative in the players hands, if they care to learn it. At the end of the game, I, as GM, would look at tallies. The Phoenix and Dragon will have certain influence they have accumulated in the course of the game (based on how their representatives did in the various events). The Miya would also have some amount of influence if you want him to factor in. The PCs will have the influence they earned through the events. At that point, the PCs are given a choice: Throw their personal influence to the Phoenix, to the Dragon, or to the Miya? Do they pool their influence together, or does each individual PC spend their influence on their own? If they give their influence to the Phoenix or the Dragon, do the Phoenix or Dragon offer something they want in return so it was a trade? Do the PCs convince the Phoenix to spend their influence on something much more immediately useful to them, maybe even spend their influence on something they want from the Dragon and giving up their claim to the child? Once the decision is taken out of the realm of black and white choices, but is more a matter of trade, of exchange and negotiation, then it doesn't have to be a domination game with a single winner or loser. But influence as currency is the way to make players see how these negotiations can happen. The way I'd do that is turn this module into a session of The Influence Game. 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. 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. 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. |
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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