Does anyone have other suggestions?
You ruled out my #1, #2, and #3 (L5R 5e, 3e, and 2e) in your first sentence. 5e really rocks. It's even passable using a conversion mat and normal 12's and 6's.
My #4 is John Wick's
Blood and Honor. It's VERY much in the storygame clade... In general, it's a d6 dice pool, anyone with a stake can participate in resolution.
The "Risk" resolution sequence:
- A participant declares an action that another participant feels needs a resolution. The GM can always declare; if player declares such on another player, either group consensus or the GM affirms and starts the process. (We used "no objections?", a somewhat easier to use bar)
- Determine who has a stake in the outcome. Generally, if the player...
- has their PC in scene
- controls a targeted NPC targeted
- have a fealty relationship with the PC/NPC...
- their PC's lands or businesses or reputation is being targeted
- Everyone with a stake announces the ability being used and by which character (if relevant). Max 1 character per player. GM has to approve the ability choice.
- All with stake split their dice pool; part A is the sequence pool, part B is the wager. If part A is not at least 2d, drop out of resolution.
- Everyone rolls their sequence dice; anyone with a 9 or lower total is out of resolution.
- The high roller determines the basic success/failure of the action
- in descending numerical sequence, spend¹ 2 wager dice (1 die if the high roller) to give a "yes, and..." or "yes, but...". If you opt not to say something, instead add 1 point to a reputation.
- Repeat step 7 until everyone's out of wager pool.
1: the actual rule is discard half your wager dice, and all spend 1 die, but it's easier to run by just doubling the cost.
Conflicts (social or physical) work by an initiative risk... but... no wagers are spent initially and their's no question for the high roller to resolve. Each kept wager (pool halved if not the high roller) is one turn in the round. Each turn is narrate until a risk.
The system is very similar to its stablemate, Houses of the Blooded. It's set up to easily enable a PVP situation; each house in play has its own honor pool. Honor gets used for bonus dice, triggering some specials, and such. Seriously dishonorable acts can also cost honor.
Another option, is Burning Wheel's
The Blossoms are Falling, and it's much earlier than most samurai games are set. It is beautifully written, but, since it uses
Burning Wheel Revised as its core system...
I found the Fuzion flavor of Sengokyu to be almost to Hero System levels, and would rather just use it as a HSR sourcebook with full up hero system 4 rules. (For those who don't know, Fuzion was a toolkit allowing use of a subset of Hero System or a subset of Interlock system (RTG's Cyberpunk, Mekton, etc), and it was a designer's choice of how much of which plus any Fuzion licensed modules to incorporate.
I cannot recommend the old FGU
Bushidō rules... much as I'd love to, they're just so typical 80's FGU. The adventures (few as they are) are excellent, tho'.
If you want D&Dish, go with the 3.5OA+d20 Rokugan. At least the guys writing it understood the differences between the clans... and that the game reiforced mechanically the stereotypes of the clans for good effect.
The 5e one doesn't use any of the stereotypes, and the PC races list is a kitchen sink of "it's an intelligent humanoid"... quite literally, the dev's defense for this paraphrases as "we wanted to allow stories in Rokugan that wouldn't be doable under L5R"...
GURPS Japan I don't recommend simply because I have come to hate GURPS and the player culture that dominated its fanbase last century. But it's a great setting treatment.
Ninja Hero isn't a good Japanese setting, but if one likes hero, it's useful.