Third edition?
And anyway, that’s basically done, isn’t it? Yet L5R LCG Edition is 2 years away… ILLUMINATI CONFIRMED
Oh god. I can feel myself being dragged back right now and it’s two years before it comes out…
Four win conditions. Nine factions plus countless mini factions. A combat system that is literally all or nothing. The ability to say “nah your super hard dude goes nowhere because he’s been caught with a geisha in the bath house”. Trecking across the Belgian underground with a two foot high samurai statue. Explaining to a border guard the reason why you have six samurai swords in your backpack is you won them in a card game. Being hated/loved forever because you killed off THAT character in a storyline tournement…
Urgh. If FFG do a decent job with it, it’ll be hard to stay away.
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I literally know nothing, but from their financial reports and insane cash-in on Star Wars products, it seems sensible that they are making good money, and will use some of it to invest in more talent. They need people and man hours to make their products good. I expect they’ll be hiring more staff and hopefully paying their top people more.
They’ve also recently merged with Asmodee which must help support what they are doing in some way related.
Can you elaborate more on this aspect of the game?
Obviously not the same person, but there has been a long history of ‘promotion’ as a tournament prize. Sometimes that means that another character dies, and they have had prizes like in the 2014 kotei season that if chosen allowed one clan (faction) to kill the daimyo (leader) of another in however way that the story team choose.
Imagine Shaper cleaning house in the regional season and deciding that the world would be better off with out Andy. Those are the kinds of prizes that L5R has previously handed out.
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I was hoping this was the case, but he’s indicating otherwise on Twitter at the moment.
“I’m no longer in the LCG department, but you never know!”
As a clarification to my post, L5R has long done “experienced” versions of cards and also “soul of” versions of cards. An exp version is the same character at a later (and generally) more powerful point in the time line, a “soul of” is a reprint of a card in the form of a new character. There are some characters in L5R that have many versions for example Bayushi Kachiko whom has had 8 versions printed. The vast majority of the time when killed the character will never get a new card.
And another storyline prize that is common is to develop a character meaning thry get an xp card with your name on printed on it and some storytime.
My favourite ever story “prize” was when someone won the prize from an early gencon of retriving the ancient sword of the emporers from the evil shadowlands god fu leng. They were playing a crab clan deck but one with lots of shadowlands cards. Fu leng returned the sword - by running the crab champion through with it.
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More generally L5R’s ‘selling’ aspect has been that they have a living storyline. There’s a ongoing storyline and the winner’s of major events can influence the direction of the story. The decisions range the gamut from who wins a duel between two people to who win certain high ranking offices to who becomes the next emperor. Generally you decide from the perspective of the clan you played with in the tournament.
As an example, I have a friend who’s a huge fan of the minor clans (basically small families, not quite important enough to be represented in the CCG). At a tournament the winner played the Lion Clan, and as a result chose to reneg on the Lion clan’s promise to protect some minor clan holdings. As revenge, my friend won a local event playing Lion so that they could nominate a Lion character to die in the story.
This was really cool IMO. And as a clarification, ‘killing’ a character of in the story doesn’t render any of there existing cards illegal, merely that they won’t get any new ones in the future (which with CCG’s rapid turnaround does get rid of them eventually). Also many L5R tournaments held side events that were a variety of non-CCG activities (costume contests, origami contests, food drives, theme decks, story-telling, etc…) to allow non-competitive players a chance to influence the storyline. Also the really big choices (next emperor, conquering new territories…) were decided in mega-games which were online competitions that incorporated tournaments wins, attendance, online votes, etc…
All of this encouraged a fairly strong sense of clan loyalty, even among some of the Spike players (getting into Netrunner I thought I was only going to play Shaper and NBN 
) The flip side of this is that some people took it way too far, holding grudges over perceived offences in a card game about magical samurai.
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just reposting b/c awesome
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yeah that sounds like one of the best parts of the game
I hope that they keep the four paths to victory in the game. In the CCG you could win through honor, military might, achieving enlightenment or thoroughly dishonoring your opponent. Some clans were better at certain strategies than others. Scorpion are masters of dishonoy others, while the monks of the Dragon often meditated on the meaning of Enlightenment.
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I’m not sure if it’s my kind of game, but I’ve always wanted to try L5R because of all the hype I hear from fans. Does it have the same problem as Magic where you can get locked out of doing anything during a turn if your hand sucks?
Technically possible but I’ve never seen it happen because in the CCG you have two 40 card decks. The dynasty deck had all of your personalities, your lands, and special events. Your fate deck had various action cards, items, and followers. Your fate cards make up your hand (starting hand is 5, maximum is 7), and you have the top 1-4 cards from your dynasty deck to select from at a time (depending on how many provinces you have in play, you start with 4 and can loose them through battle). You start with your stronghold which produces gold to play cards and depending on if you go second you might even have a second gold producing land in play.
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You can get gold-screwed, but the game experimented with various mechanics over time to deal with the issue. Some more successfully than others. I suspect FFG will cherry pick the best.
he’s too busy playtesting this game
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So hyped for this its unreal. I played L5R when i was first getting into gaming back when i as a kid 18 years ago, it seems unreal to me almost it was so long ago, and it was the only ccg i ever really took seriously. Cannot wait, even if it does mean im going to go without eating for a month/sell a kidney to fund it, agot and netrunner.
my only worry about l5r reboot is that card pool will be too small to get that feel u have with l5r now. diversity is the name of the game. wonder if every clan will get it’s own box? it may be also hard to make player’s pick they fav faction and stick to them. its exactly same as with everyone playing neh here at some point.
No longer.
I can discuss L5R when I get back from vaca.
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