Hey Game Fans, today we’re going to talk in brief about the new version of the Legend of the Five Rings Roleplaying game from Fantasy Flight Games. Currently it’s undergoing an Open Beta for playtesting and i personally think that’s a fantastic idea. Legend of the Five Rings is a long running franchise, featuring a Miniature Wargame, a Collectible Card Game that ran for several editions, and four editions of a Roleplaying game that featured drama, action, and intrigue.
Since the property was acquired by Fantasy Flight Games, rumors and questions have been circulating about what they would do with the property. They announced a new ideation of the Legend of the Five Rings card game, this time using the Living Card Game format that Fantasy Flight has had great success with in other properties (including Star Wars, Warhammer 40,000, and Call of Cthulhu to name a few). They are also offering a board game that features the Great Clans of Rokugan vying for control of the world of L5R in the aptly named Battle for Rokugan. I know that i was very interested to see what they did with the Roleplaying game side of the Franchise, and i have had a little bit of time to take a look at the first few chapters of the Beta (I think I’ve almost figured out how to make a character). I’d like to talk about those first few chapters today and give you folks my first impressions.
From the perspective of a long time player (I started with the 2nd editon, followed it when it became the Oriental Adventures book for 3rd edition Dungeons and Dragons, and then back to third and fourth edition), i like what i see. This still feels L5R, and i think it’s going to play like the L5R i remember (if i can actually get to a table to play with it). Pages 5-10 give a new player an idea of exactly what to expect from the setting, it’s core virtues, and what you should expect from the game when you settle in to play it. It’s familiar to me, and i find that very comforting i guess is the word.
When i heard that the game had been bought by another company i suspected that a new design team would be brought it in and i was honestly concerned that they would change the game drastically. That concern proved to be unfounded and i really like what the design team has done for this iteration of Legend of the Five Rings. There are some changes (and i’ll get into those in a minute) but a lot of those changes are ripple effects from the change to the way dice worked.
Legend of the Five Rings featured a Roll and Keep System where you could roll a lot more dice than you actually used to determine success or failure. For example, you could end up rolling 8 or 9 dice for a test, but only end up being able to keep 5 dice. You could choose to keep high results or low results, depending on what you wanted to have as an outcome. The system also featured the ability to raise the TN of your checks for extra effects (disarming your opponent, slicing an initial into their cheek, or a host of other cool things) and exploding dice (the highest result on the die allows you to roll an additional die and add the results). This version features a variation on this idea, and i am a fan.
Fantasy Flight has introduced setting specific dice for other games (Warhammer Fantasy and Star Wars both feature special dice), and they continue this trend with Legend of the Five Rings. Featuring special D6s and D12s, the numeric values have been replaced with narrative triggers that help shape the action in the story. (I would love for there to be an explanation for people who are using their own dice in the chart on page 11).
Mechanically, the system works the same way as it did with roll and keep system in earlier editions. Players roll the dice, but instead of choosing which numbers to keep, they choose the narrative storytelling elements they want to keep for the action they are performing. I find this to be a compelling merger of the narrative dice that Star Wars uses with the original ideas behind Legend of the Five Rings mechanical system.
That is the core driving mechanism of the game’s system and it works for me on the surface level. I want to get some games in to see how it plays out, but it feels familiar enough to me that i don’t see it being hard to process with more practice. That was a major worry i had with the new design and i am sort of glad i worried about something that turned out to be nothing.
The first two chapters of this book are an amazing way to put together an RPG game book and i would suggest anyone putting their own together to study this as a guide for doing it the right way. I’ve already gotten one E-mail about changes made as a response to playtesting with explanations for why things changed and why they didn’t. This team is on the ball to a level i someday hope to be. The next one of these i do, I’ll explain some new mechanics and hopefully dig into building a character.
That’s it for today’s quick first looks, and I hope you’ll tune in for more mischief as we go forward with an explanation of how the new dice work and the new rules for this edition. Game On, Game Fans.
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