Legend of the Five Rings
So there is a new edition of the Legend of the Five Rings roleplaying game system out now. Thankfully they are turning away from d20 finally and returning to their 'Roll & Keep' system as their primary focus. Not that I minded too much, I never had any intention of playing it with the d20 rules, but it means I hopefully won't have to wade through them in future products.
Really cool system and setting though. Many fun hours of playing it. Hoping the 3rd edition will stay true to the fun of the previous two. Starting characters in the 1st edition you were a little too powerful, in the 2nd edition you were a little underpowered if you went for a multi-faceted character, with luck they found the balance between the two with the 3rd.
Looks like the timeline has moved forward too. 1st was before the Scorpion Clan Coup, the second was two years after the Coup at the time of the Clan War. Supplements since then moved it through the second Day of Thunder and through the Spirit War. Looks like the 3rd edition takes place in the Four Winds era.
Missing a bunch of the 'Secrets of the' and the 'Way of the' supplements. Need to keep an eye out for them and remember to pick them up sometime. Have this sudden urge to run a campaign of it again. Not sure if I'd use the Rokugan setting, for as much as I love it the ideas I have don't quite mesh well with it. No clue. Still pondering.
posted by Hythian at 10:41:00 pm
2 Comments:
Bah. D20 is the spawn of gaming-satan and tends to eventually reduce most campaigns down to small scale tactical combat. Which is fine, but having played L5R as both D20 and R&K, the feel of the R&K is a lot more 'epic' and it just seemed a lot less insanely random.
Oh, and d20 shugenja are pansies.
Fri Feb 10, 11:01:00 pm GMT-8
D20 is pretty much the same as 3rd ed D&D. It still uses other dice (damage, hit dice, etc.) but the majority of the rolls (skill checks, saving throws, to-hit, etc.) are done with a d20.
Basically with third edition they open-sourced the D20 system and let other people put out RPG products based on their core rules. Which resulted in hordes of complete and utter crap swamping gaming stores and filling the 'Three for $5' bins of the world.
D20 Rokugan is the 3rd ed Oriental Adventures setting based on the 'Legend of the Five Rings' (hereafter referred to as L5R) RPG and CCG.
L5R uses a 'Roll & Keep' system where you roll a number of d10s equal to your skill rank and keep a number of them equal to your relevant stat. So if you had Katana 3 (skill) and Agility 2 (stat) you'd roll three d10s and keep two of them, presumably the two with the highest numbers. The d10s also open-end upwards, so if you roll a ten, you roll the die again and add it to the ten. So in the above example you could roll three dice and end up with a 14 (10+4), 7, 2 and presumably keep the 14 and 7 for a total to-hit value of 21.
Personally I like the Roll & Keep system more as it evens out the results so that they are less random then a single d20 roll.
Sat Feb 11, 05:41:00 pm GMT-8
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