Legend of the Five Rings RPG Beta Announced

Jacob Lewis · Oct 10, 2017

Still working through the entire pdf, but I am quite pleased from what I am seeing thus far. This system is, in fact, its own game and with good reasons. The designers have obviously done their research, not only with the mechanics and stories of previous editions, but also on the culture and legacy of Samurai, historically and in popular fiction. It would have been a greater mistake to try and shoehorn this into their new generic RPG system as some people expected. In this regard, it was the right call to make giving the game and its legacy a stand-alone system tailored specific for the setting with a unique style all its own.

aramis erak · Oct 18, 2017

I got a CGen session with half a session of play.

Note: I'm using a mat for dice conversion - roll the dice, and put them on the symbol with the correct number. This is slower than stickered dice, but faster than straight table lookup, and doesn't require nearly as much cash-out-of-pocket.

The Strife mechanic is good so far.
The dice are great so far.

The odds of success on the D6 are 6/12, and on the d12 are 7/12
The odds of success without strife are 2/12 on the d6, and 4/12 on the d12.
Odds of explosion are 1/6 with strife allowed on either; none and 1/12 for no strife allowed.

It's pretty dynamic, and a bit fiddly, but it works better than the SW engine for what it's doing.

Difficulties are BLOODY HARD...

My players chose to keep fewer dice several times to avoid strife.

Strife recovery at end of scene is fixed, not rolled - a nice change from FFG-SW.

The approaches need to be divorced from the skill groups, but once that is done, pick a relevant approach, find the attribute, pick a suitable skill, and roll.

They've incorporated bits of several games mechanics, not just WFRP3, FFG-SW, and L5R 1e-4e... I see bits of Fireborn, as well. The approaches system is a reasonable adoption of Fireborn's method of selecting attributes for tasks. (Fireborn is an older FFG RPG)

aramis erak · Oct 28, 2017

Jhaelen said:
Without having looked into the Beta rules, yet, this strikes me as the worst possible approach.

If FFG doesn't trust their Genesys system to work with their own RPGs, why should I?

This sends all the wrong signals, imho.

Seeing it in play, no, it's sending the right one. They are not going to try to shoehorn every new game setting into one engine...

I mean, look at SJG and Palladium. Both have their house engines, and use them for everything... but those things are not always good fits.

Star Wars' dice mechanic produces lots of wild swings - sometimes even to the silly.

Genesys is expected to do the same, since the dice are (save for the specific symbols used for the various values) identical in distribution to the Star Wars dice. (Yeah, people have counted in the illos.) And so it's likely to have the same wild-to-silly swinginess.

By lacking difficulty dice, and by lacking negative direct effects, and by using the "Keep ≤X of Y rolled" mode, the negative sybols, which are always 2 symbol faces, are thus always chosen. Perhaps, because you want to succeed, you keep them. Perhaps, because you don't want to go postal, you don't, but then you don't succeed.

Legend of the Five Rings RPG Beta Announced

Jacob Lewis

Ye Olde GM

aramis erak

Legend

aramis erak

Legend

Similar Threads

AD6_gamerati_skyscraper

Recent & Upcoming Releases