The rules note Flower Arrangement as something the GM might introduce - it is not actually in the skill lists.
When I ran an OA-flavoured Rolemaster campaign we didn't have any flower arrangers, but did have a landscape gardener.
D&D General Story Now, Skilled Play, and Elephants
When I ran an OA-flavoured Rolemaster campaign we didn't have any flower arrangers, but did have a landscape gardener.
clearstream
(He, Him)
Our GM did indeed introduce it. Ikebana I think it is called.
AbdulAlhazred
Legend
I seem to recall that Bushido had, if not skills for 'courtly things' at least an aesthetic which gave them some significance, potentially. The game we were in, to the extent I can recall, seemed to be set in some sort of urban setting. My impression is the game is trying to reproduce something like late Muromachi period upper class settings, like Kyoto or something along those lines. You can play rather less savory characters though, and I suppose there are other possibilities, like a war camp or something.
@pemerton yes, lower level PCs are either very niche in their core competencies, or else very bad at them, lol. We learned that fast, build to do one thing well, as much as that is possible. The other thing I remember is that advancing levels was monumentally difficult. Like only a few players ever managed to hit level 2. I don't recall that anyone ever got to be level 4. You basically advanced by getting kills, as @clearstream noted. Getting them without being filleted is very not easy.
@pemerton yes, lower level PCs are either very niche in their core competencies, or else very bad at them, lol. We learned that fast, build to do one thing well, as much as that is possible. The other thing I remember is that advancing levels was monumentally difficult. Like only a few players ever managed to hit level 2. I don't recall that anyone ever got to be level 4. You basically advanced by getting kills, as @clearstream noted. Getting them without being filleted is very not easy.
clearstream
(He, Him)
We also played Land of the Rising Sun (different GM, and our Bushido GM joined as a player). A somewhat different feel (it's based on C&S, which I was GMing), although both LRS and Bushido campaigns paid attention to social skills and factors. I played far more Bushido than LRS.
There are skills like Poetry (haiku), Go, Hawking, Tea Ceremony and similar. Flower Arrangement (Ikebana) is mentioned on p 17 as one of "many other Fine Arts which we have been unable to discuss in this chapter due to space limitations" but which "Gamesmasters who wish to broaden their campaign's cultural horizons may include . . . at their discretion."
In my re-reading I haven't yet got to the rules that explain what actually follows, in play, from these skills, beyond (i) studying them can raise mental stats, and (ii) successfully performing the Tea Ceremony can raise effective Status in the context of an influence attempt.
Well, I've just got to the section of the rules on Experience. To get to level 2 requires 10 Budo and 10 On. Defeating a 1st level warrior is worth 1 or 2 Budo (depending on whether s/he is "Rabble" or "Classic"); an Extra (a "minion" in 4e D&D terms) is worth 0.5 Budo. So that seems like quite a few risky combats to get to 2nd level! And that's before we get to the On requirements, which are comparably onerous. (If you'll forgive the transliterational pun.)
It's 50 for 3rd, 100 for 4th, 500 for 5th and 1,000 for 6th!
Allowing for the Avalon Hill-wargame style of rules presentation, it's actually quite evocative - reading the rules is generating mental images of these intriguing characters whose abilities (expressed in detailed RPG mathematics) and whose social context are both known in loving detail. (This is a contrast with eg Agon which I played for the first time on the weekend, and which by way of contrast paints in very broad brushstrokes both mechanically and in respect of setting details.)
But I worry about the play - everything that you say seems consistent with what I would expect these sorts of rules to lead to. If I wanted to run this sort of game these days I'd use Burning Wheel, perhaps through the lens of The Blossoms are Falling.
clearstream
(He, Him)
Thank you! My own recollections are incomplete. I do recall a session where we had (in rl) sake and were challenged to compose haiku.
What followed for us was risk of loss of face, chance to gain status (might have been temporary) and narrative opportunities (assassinations at the tea party and such like).
It was slow. Slightly mitigating is that the bonus felt very meaningful as it gave you a small buffer (allowed you to go to negative HP) and applied to all abilities attached to your class. It's funny how that presaged 5th, given the +1 to +6 scale that Bushido used. Our focus was often more on gaining special moves - okuden, right? - for our fighting styles. Seeking out teachers drove pleasant narratives (and again, social skills came in strongly there.) I liked the lethality: it never felt like a fault to me.
Good pun, highly forgiveable. On point, one might say.
For me also the game was evocative. Possibly it only works when your GM has really gotten into the time and culture. Maybe now one would also need to consider cultural appropriation (or at least reflect on if Bushido is an honest representation that Japanese people would feel a positive use of their history.)
Chances are, yes. FGU games were like that. Very detailed. Felt true to material. Mechanically baroque and we have better methods available to us today. Bushido itself had some elegant mechanics, e.g. if roll showed a 5 or 0, crit. (IIRC?) Reading it now, do you feel the concepts of play of Bushido could be retrieved and reformed?
AbdulAlhazred
Legend
Right, there are dozens of little counters and whatnot to keep track of, lots of book keeping is what I remember. Actually advancing in level was just not a thing, basically. Though I think the power curve is VERY steep! A 3rd level Samurai would, for example, basically kill the whole party before any of them moved at all if the PCs were level 1. That might require some bad luck or not having certain skills though, it is hard to remember all the details.
I do remember the game being quite evocative, though my later readings and whatnot put me in some question as to the handling of priests and such. Then again, I'm no expert on Japanese Culture, so I don't have a strong opinion. Bushido's interpretation of Buddhism for instance, is pretty 'out there' by comparison to the 'Pure Lands' and 'Chan' schools I'm familiar with, or their Tibetan equivalents (granting that some of it is pretty 'mystical'). Spell casting, if you want to call it that, certainly isn't anything like the dominant force that it is in D&D anyway.
But yeah, the fundamental truth is it is still a traditional 'DM sets everything up and tells the story' sort of game design (I mean it was written in about 1976, hardly a surprise). Like 2e it is kind of expecting to tell what is presumably a very dramatically focused and fairly complex story containing a mix of intrigue, magic, mystery, combat, etc. My recollection is that PCs are pretty much powerless pawn level guys in that setting. While higher level NPC warriors are not common at all, there are lords and organizations all over the place who can command plenty of forces and you really cannot fight them. You get told to do X, Y, or Z, it isn't generally up to you. Setting tourism seemed to be the most likely result, and largely what I remember. I mean, maybe not entirely unrealistic. I wouldn't expect some low level guys in Muromachi Kyoto to be all that much up to their own business, but a more story focused system might, for example, give you the ability to establish rivalries, love interests, a nemesis perhaps, etc.
It isn't a bad game, for what it is, and kind of the template on which later Japan/East Asian games and supplements were either based, or were pushing against. However, like Aftermath, I think it tends to be too wedded to being 'realistic' and far more detailed in little ways than what would really make the best game play for most people. I just remember Aftermath being basically a gun nut paradise sort of thing, where you could carry around 3 pistols and a dozen kinds of ammo and they would each do distinctly different things, but it could take 20 minutes to figure out what happened if you shot someone, and usually combat lasted about 2 seconds of game time. lol.
AbdulAlhazred
Legend
I'm just not sure why baroque mechanics have any advantage. I mean, I could reproduce the basic characteristics of Bushido's system in terms of being very focused on learning specific techniques, a theme of very careful focused mastery of very specific 'arts' (both combat and aesthetic), etc. Also a relatively slow but steep overall advancement curve, deadly combat, etc. I could do it with a variant of my own system, or you could certainly build a PbtA that would probably work nicely. Some kind of unified system would be pretty cool. Let the focus be on the very detailed setting and its feel and tone, rather than lots of different slots on your character sheet. And some mechanics to support "what sort of guy am I?" in some sense would really be welcome.
clearstream
(He, Him)
I didn't think they did. Perhaps a miscommunication? That said, I don't mind a game that is mechanically interesting.
In a way, FGU, ICE and games like Harn helped explore the limits of realism.
AbdulAlhazred
Legend
lol, no, it just seems to be a common refrain, the idea that somehow having a hodge-podge of different subsystems and resource types magically has some benefit.
Mmmm, yeah, I mean every theory gets explored in the early days of developing some new genre or activity. Nothing about that quest surprises me. I think there was a time (though honestly it is sometimes hard to know) when I probably thought that making things very realistic would somehow produce a game where players would act 'like they would in real life' and that somehow that would be a good thing. I admit, I was probably about 15 at that point...
And I can distinctly remember EVEN BACK THEN being a bit suspicious of all the extra rubbish you had to put on your character sheet in 1e (well compared with Holmes Basic, which is what we mostly played before that). lol. I always did like Traveller back then for being both vastly simpler and more unified and yet at the same time far less abstract (well, than D&D...).
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