Legend of the Five Rings 5e: How it actually works 👹 RPG Game Mechanics 

Your stuff is insanely high quality. Thank you. Can’t wait to watch this channel grow!

This is an excellent overview. It might be one of the most informative video overviews I've seen on RU-vid.

Honestly, FFG's dice system seems far more suited to this game than Star Wars, especially after running a long campaign. I am excited to give this o e a go at some point.

Honestly, I don't understand why this system is so underrated. I had much more trouble getting familiar with DnD but maybe that's just my personal expierence.

I ordered my copy of the 5E Core Rulebook yesterday and it should arrive sometime later this month.

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This was great! I learned a lot and enjoyed watching it!

I've been meaning to learn & play this game

This game was recently published and translated in Italy, where I live. I've never heard of it before but since I'm a huge fan of japanese history I immediately bought it, along with the game master screen and the dice pack. I have to be honest, the mechanics are so detalied that sometimes they're a bit overwhelming, especially for a GM (which it's my case), and the first approach with the manual wasn't the easiest. This video was incredibly clear, it gives a pragmatic solution to most of the doubts I had in the first place and I am deeply thankful for that, but I still have a few questions: aren't the Adversities a bit unbalanced compared to their counterparts? It's the first thing that came to my mind (and to my players'), because starting the game without a leg seemed too much really. Other than that, what do you think about the Discord Track? I still haven't used it, but if I understood it correctly, I think it kills the mood a bit, transforming a simple narrative gameplay into an intricate mechanic (for example as a game master I can simply choose what ninjo or giri I want to consider, based on the situation we currently are, rather than letting a dice roll decide it for me). I subscribed, keep doing what you're doing 'cause you're terribly good at it! :)

very well put together!

I used to love the card game. Will have to check this out!

"In every scene you are Compromised, you unmask..." I don't think this is necessarily true, it's up to the player as to when they unmask, right? A character could go to the end of the scene still Compromised. The downside being, of course, they cannot keep any dice with strife on it

Great video!

Awesome job!

Very helpful

Can you do a follow up for this for the new Adventures in Rokugan addition?

I find it amusing, while I read through the comments, what people's gripes are. "Why not just max out one ring and only use it?" Because that isn't flavorful. If you're so one-sided as a player/GM you should reconsider playing TTRPGs. "I hate the custom dice." That's a bit close-minded, but I understand penny-pinching. Thankfully, they have a chart which converts normal d6s and d12s into the symbols so you can use them if you don't want to buy custom ones. "The players have too much control." This is simply...incorrect. The book says numerous times (in the beginner pamphlet, as well) that the GM has ultimate say on whatever happens. "Why not hoard opportunity and spam it and force your GM to do something?" Again...does not work that way. See the previous statement. "Character creation is too dense." Yes, gods forbid you actually have to flesh out a detailed, well-written character for a roleplaying game... This isn't Dungeons & Dragons. This is a game dedicated to roleplay above most other things. "The mechanics are way too complicated." I actually found them to be more simple than 4e's mechanics. Everything is straight forward, but it is more story-oriented....not number oriented. "There's not enough mechanic behind ninjo/giri." Again, perhaps you should keep playing Dungeons & Dragons - a game where you can choose not to roleplay. This game is centered very heavily on story writing and roleplay. "There are too many approach/skill combinations. We don't know what to do." It's - more often than not - up to your GM, again, to decide. Although the book states the characters may choose, I told my players what they ought to roll in the situation (when appropriate) and it was fluid. I, as the GM, actually take responsibility and run my game. It's easy for me. "The lore is too dense." It is significantly less dense than Dungeons & Dragons, actually. Unlike D&D which has multiple realms, planes of reality, etc..... Rokugan just has Rokugan. "You need an understanding of Japanese culture, at least basic!" Also untrue. I had no experience with samurai culture. All of my knowledge stems from this game. If you are unwilling to play in a samurai drama....then don't play the game based on samurai drama. I could go on for days. All of the complaints are half-baked, thoughtless peeves. People are coming from a game which is very number & rule heavy - like D&D - and expecting it to play the same. It is its own RPG. I come from a background of a decade of D&D experience and about 5 years of Vampire: the Masquerade experience. This system was a breeze to catch onto. With one game session I have a strong grasp on everything. The beginner box is the ideal first buy, and literally comes with a "tutorial session" with well-made pregen characters (which are more than a sheet of numbers). All in all, Legend of the Five Rings is an incredible system and I'm very happy with what FFG has done for it. Again - like with D&D 5e and VTM v5 - the fifth edition was designed to attract more players and make things more accessible. I think they've succeeded.

Ironically, the one topic that had directed me to this video was not discussed, lol. I was searching for videos on how to handle Mass Combat in L5R 5e and perhaps tips on how to tailor custom armies to let players feel like perhaps they can work towards founding their own... and the end of the video just says that "yeah, mass combat is in here too." I find it funny that youtube recommended this one when very little is discussed about the mass combat stuff. Everything that you did discuss in the video, super helpful. I think I might just send this to my players so that it helps them get a better idea of the setting.

our GM used some homebrew stuff to make us (a party of 4) stronger than the base game... in 6 sessions (roughtly 16 in game hours) me and another one have become dragons, another one a kitsune and the last a raging buddha... seems "perfectly balanced" to me

I would like to throw my whole being into this game head first however, considering how many factors there are to consider it is pretty daunting for me.

A couple problems I have with the book is the lack of guidance, advice, and suggestions for players and GMs on spending Opportunity and gaining or losing Honor and Glory. If you are not a long-time L5R player well versed in Rokugani and Japanese culture and lore, these parts of the game will likely seem unintuitive. I'm not asking for more rules, just more discussion in the book. Secondly, I feel the rules, especially regarding the Conflict actions and character Techniques, could have been more tightly and carefully written. Finally, there is basically no mechanisms which feed off the struggle between Ninjo and Giri (Desire and Duty), which is one of if not THE central concept in the game. Overall, I am enjoying the game, but it needed more love and attention. As is, it's totally playable, but still feels a bit half-baked, which means more work for you as the player to pick up the slack.

Has this edition done away with the raise mechanic that previous editions had? You may have done a video on it. if you have, please direct me to it.

"Bushido juice"...trademarked!

My main problem with this game is that it thinks the only story you can have in Rokugan is a very specific kind of drama. The only character it allows you to play is a flawed human being who has to wear a perfect mask and struggles with their emotions and internal conflicts, which slowly boil inside them and sometimes explode. If you want to play anything else, book literally tells you to go think again (like on p.90). Some passages there remind me of D&D 4E DMG, with its immortal "The game spends a lot of game time in exploration mode. It’s what usually fills the space between encounters. [...] Encounters are the exciting part of the D&D game". You know, there was time when L5R core book said things like "Of course, in truth no one can tell you how to play L5R. This book belongs to you and you can play the game in whatever way you want." This edition can't say such things honestly. It's a shame because some mechanics, like the stance system, are really better here.

I found the rules in 5th to be a very bizarre experiment in trying to find some sort of.... how to put it... A way to let players force input on the GM's story. The Opportunity system specifically, but certainly the Ninyo / Giri system and Strife system all seem to put a mechanical harness on all of the fun stuff that's best handled by invested players in the hands of a attentive GM. Usually in games if someone has a neat plot point or addition to the story, if it's fun we run with it. "The samurai is chasing me. Is there a tree I can duck behind for a second?" In this game you need to roll for an action using the proper element, wait for an opportunity roll, keep it and then use the correct amount to force the GM to create the tree, then maybe succeed in hiding behind it. You can't even know if the tree actually exists before you roll. It's very strange. It's like the game was written for a target audience of people who have no idea how to roleplay, or people whose GMs hate them. Then I found the second problem. When we sat down to actually play the game, none of us could actually figure out how to *do* anything. Any action could be any one of the near endless approaches in the game, and there seemed to be nothing stopping a player from using adverbs to spam their hottest traits and rings. I dunno. All in all, it was a *nightmare* to GM, and almost incomprehensible to navigate as a player.

Anyone out there running a 5e text game? I've looked everywhere and still can't find one.

Great video. It gave me exactly the exposure to the system I needed to be certain I'm sticking with 4E. I'm sure this one is good at something, but just seeing yet another game with cute, specialized dice turns me right off. I'll be glad when that game design element falls out of fashion.

I like what L5R 5th did with the story, but mechanically I prefer 4th.

If I wanted to introduce this to my group of friends. What would I need to buy? Any story modules that I should get? I've DM'd Star wars once before so from my understanding this die system is similar to Star Wars.

I played this so much 20 years ago clan scorpion was always my kind of clan

It should be noted that the naming convention used here is "wrong" per 5e canon -- any samurai belonging to a "great" family would simply use that family name (ie. Kuni, not Ono, and without the "no" particle). Although personally I prefer the naming convention used in this video, it's rather misleading to use in an explainer video.

Random question, but is this park you're in located in Houston? Looks identical to our little Japanese park near the Medical Center. If so, I'm 100% LFG haha. I've never played L5R 5e but am super eager to play (even just a one-shot). I own all the books but my friends don't want to play anything other than Star Wars RPG or D&D.

Great video. This game seems so dense though. Character creation alone seems to require at least some basic understanding of the lore/setting. Have you ever GMed this game before?

I was really getting exited by this game. I played a L5R campaign in my university days, so, was kind of happy to see a new edition. Until; the stupid dice! What's it with game systems needing to reinvent the old humble die?

I still play 4th edition. They made this game needlessly complicated. And I hate how everything requires special dice now.

This is really well made! But I don't like the oohs and auchs ;)

The only thing I like about this new edition is the art direction and the book layout. They made it more approachable to new players and perhaps a bit faster at the table, but for me they dumbed down the system that they lost SO MUCH flavor and thematic style of the game. The last edition remains my favorite RP system ever made for it's feel of true ability of your character.

As much as I wanted to love this I'll stick with AEG 4e version

This is the weeb game, gotta love it.

10:16 the japanese is wrong. I'd say 鬼 instead of ogre, and 10:16 the japanese is wrong. I'd say 鬼 instead of ogre, and 首 insteadof 頭. 首 Was the feudal word when referring to a severed head, as it was the neck that was cut in order to separate it from the body of the defeated warrior. Samurai nerd here lol.

I really hate what FFG did to L5R. I really do not like the weird dice you have to use and then slow down the game to interpret what an 'advantage' is if you roll advantage on the dice. The combat system seems far to forgiving now compared to the older editions and people don't even get hurt until they lose fatigue. The ring system has made the game too basic and seems to want players to just min-max one ring and only ever use that approach to a problem. Finally your character losing your cool is no longer in the players hands. It used to a RP moment to do that and now there is a stat pool for your characters face and taking too much 'social damage' causes you to react in a certain way. Once again forcing the player to not think freely but just act as the book tells you to.

It's just a bit of a mess. A lot of neat ideas, but the mechanics don't live up to them. Strife, for example, was a cool idea, but the way it is accumulated is arbitrary and nonsensical. If it was more like Call of Cthulhu's Insanity, where it built up logically, and had to be shed logically, that might have been cool. As it stands, samurai in L5R are apparently just kinda spastic. The ability to control your Strife seems fairly punitive, especially at the entry level for characters. I don't think we get an "emulation of the social and psychological struggles of Bushido" at all. We just get a weird, Random Number Generated facsimile of them. It was always going to be difficult to "force" players to roleplay samurai "correctly." Incorporating it into the dice mechanics was a terrible way to attempt it. Dice rolls in a traditionally structured RPG (which this pretends to be mechanically) are there to facilitate *how* a character does, not what. If the game needs a mechanic to control *what* characters do (say, for example, a monster or situation that causes Fear), the dice should determine the *how* or *if*. The custom dice mechanic is now putting the *what* on the dice. But, even worse, the dice punish the characters for *succeeding*. I mean, I've never been a samurai, but I've been a real person, and I can tell you that I rarely get flustered by accomplishing things. The problem was, by the time the game hit Beta and all the testers pointed this out, the custom dice were already pressed and Strife was on them attached to success. If Strife was going to be a dice mechanic (still a bad idea), the smarter way would be to give them their own faces, and make them count even if they aren't Kept. I think 5th Edition started as an idea for custom dice (since that's FFG's schtick), and they tried to make the rules from there, rather than having a solid concept for their game first. The idea the designers gave of making the "Keep" a "choice" instead of just keeping the highest result seems fairly silly. You weren't "choosing" your kept dice in the old system. The Kept dice were just a limitation. They never needed a choice. You just had a dice pool, but only the best of them counted. The other problem is, that the new dice system has really bad probability curves. Systems like L5R and Shadowrun with exploding dice never seemed to learn that you should count a 10 (or a 6 in the case of Shadowrun) as a 9 and add the next roll to it. But that pales in comparison to the odds for raising a Target Number in L5R5E just by 1. Ninjo and Giri were interesting ideas that I've never actually seen used, after watching a few Live Play campaigns, because the mechanics for them are awful, and onerous for the GM to apply. My other problem with it is that it actually makes one of the character generation problems from early editions: Clan, Family and School choice, even more important, when they really should have been deemphasized. Entry level characters are basically cookie cutters in 5th, because they took out most of what little variation existed in the original game. 4th, for example, may have shoehorned a Matsu Samurai into a tight box, but the player still could choose to make them fairly personalized with their choice of skills and traits through the point building process. A Matsu Berzerker in 5E makes approximately 3 substantive choices during character creation, the rest just being small incremental adjustments to Glory, Honor and Status, sometimes via random tables. Otherwise, aside from my choice of Advantages and Disadvantages, my character will be almost identical to any other character that chose the same clan/family/school, and there are *definitely* Best Options out there. In the end, the only thing that makes this superior to 4th Edition is that it's actually in print. Otherwise, there's no reason to switch. It's a lot of half baked ideas that weren't properly playtested, shunted off into a "Beta" where the feedback from players was largely ignored because all of the functional issues with the system were tied to custom dice that Fantasy Flight had already printed and couldn't be changed.

Sorry but 5e is a massive step back to 4e

5th edition, huh? Thats the same as in dnd

social mechanics are made for people who do not want to roleplay, just play...