Greetings,
This is a catch all discussion place for everything related to L5R. If you have a question or comment, post a reply to this post.
News
Yesterday, news of the core set has been out. The core set itself will be released at Gen Con this year.
May as well add the AMA link while weāre at it:
Edit 1: Going to add this to the AMA, seeing that the AMA is only an hour oldā¦Will update the answer when I have it.
Edit 2: No answer received.
Will players be able to affect the lore significantly by participating in tournaments, like how they were able to when AEG was doing it?
How did that work? Very intriguing.
You know how the winner of Netrunner Worlds gets to help create/design a card, which other people can later use in their own decks? Think about something like that, but on a larger scale and in a less direct way.
Winners of tournaments in L5R CCG could make votes/decisions about things that could happen to main characters in the gameās overall story meta. Different cycles of cards had different major conflicts or events going on, and outcomes for those events were determined by the results of tournaments. So for example, maybe thereās a war going on between two major clans/factions and their allies, and the outcome of which side wins is determined by which factions won more tournaments or special events being held during that event. The winning side might get a new or improved card released during a later set, while the losing side might have some other negative or intriguing consequences for their own cards.
Imagine, for example, if Mumbad Cycle and the results of the election were determined by results at GNKs or store championships during that season (e.g., maybe the faction with the most 1st place wins gets a special hardware/event that comes out in a later cycle). Itās a little harder to apply to Netrunner because the cards are already thematically centered around specific locations, but it would be kind of like that.
AGOT had a tournament series at the end of last year where the winner of the tourney got to pick whether he supported maesters, knights, or armies, and the team that got the most tourney wins would have an agenda built around them (ie something like āyou can include maesters of any house in your deckā). I wonder if some of that was FFG OP practicing for L5R.
Technically, it was more like the Plugged-In/Chronos Tour, in that everybody got to vote - the tournament winner simply got extra votes. Thus there was an extra incentive to do well, but you helped your team solely by participating. It was more likely just a sign of things to come, since FFG wants to have more events focused on the ācasualā segment, such as this, the Terminal Directive launch event, etc.
Man, I canāt wait now for more information.
I was already in at the original announcement years ago, if just because it meant I no longer had to rare chaseā¦ but everything theyāre saying about new mechanics and the changes are hitting ALL the right notes.
Yeah, the original announcement sounded like AGoT with extra ninjas and cherry blossoms, but the mechanics theyāve described so far all sound pretty interesting. ANR will likely be my number 1 for a long time to come, but Iām much more interested in jumping in on the ground floor of L5R than I have been for the other LCGs that have come out since I got back into the scene.
Sounds very interesting but Iām assuming itāll have the same expansion timescale that Netrunner does?
Not sure if I can sustain two.
same here.
i was somewhat interested in AGoT and only ended up playing it a few times before getting kinda bored of it. melee still looks fun, but meh the rest
arkham horror iām on the cusp of jumping into, but iām already so into LotR as my co-op of choice.
Destiny = CCG, so that was a hard nope.
ANR will also still prob be my first choice, but L5R looks really fun
Man, those Plugged-In/Chronos Tours got me so hyped. I never participated, but the idea alone gave me high hopes that FFG would support ongoing and diverse OP events. Sad that it was just a marketing stunt to kick off sales.
I would have been shocked if they had done anything like that again, after the plugged in announcement got them so much bad PR.
Bad PR? Why?
The first announcement was only for US, and didnāt have any locations in the southeast US (IIRC). There were a lot of people really upset that this cool thing was happening and they couldnāt participate. This was compounded by the fact that the announcement was on a Friday, so by the time the pitchforks started coming out there was no one at FFG to answer questions. By the time Monday rolled around and FFG could take action it had developed into a bit of a riot. Iāve always it figured it probably left a bad taste in FFGs mouth for trying to do cool stuff for the community.
See, I totally forgot that. I remember here in Europe we had similar reactions.
Thatās a shame. FFG should have embraced the lesson learned in this hard way.
The thing is that FFG had no idea what made this kind of event cool, and spent a lot of money sending out representatives from the company to basically host each and every single one of these events in the US. Imagine the cost of weekend/overtime pay + flying people out/hosting them + the cost of the tournament itself. I can imagine that the Plugged-In Tour was a financial pure fucking flop.
The same does not apply for the Chronos Protocol tour, since this was just hosted by LGSs.
In general, a lot of people were very mad because of the US-centric focus of the original announcement, since it was a cool event, you were able to influence the game and you could get a specific promo card that would only be available at this specific event, but ONLY if you lived in the US. There wasnāt even a āhey, weāll do a European thing soon, stay tunedā or anything. This was far from the only time it felt like any non-US location was simply an afterthought when it came to ANR, and I can see why people were pissed - especially since FFG could easily manage a European counterpart, which they did with Chronos Protocol.
For people familiar with both AGOT and L5R CCG, does the L5R LCG seem like too close to AGOT, mechanically? Or will it set itself apart? Iām not a huge fan of creature combat games; it was my impression that L5R CCG was different enough from other creature combat games.
I canāt answer the first as Iām not familiar with AGOT. But as for the secondā¦
Old-5R was very different from the more MTG inspired creature combat games (Some of the other styles of creature combat games are so different that you cant group them together ie. Pokemon, vanguard etc). Combat tricks are much more important to the average game than in MTG. Which means that the hidden info in a players hand is more impactful to the whole of the board state. The other big difference is that initiative (as in chess or go, not D&D) is at the heart of the combat system, with traditionally very few responsive actions (instants and interrupts) the timing and using of abilities is more like netrunner than most other creature based games.
Other large factors is the forced inclusion of āspellsā, Most games with a single deck require you to decide what card type you want to place your emphasis on. Where some decks would have very few creatures and a lot of tricks or whatnot. Heck even netrunner does this to some extent. On the other hand with between 80 and 90 total cards force-ably split between the two decks you have to have both types (might not be completely true anymore as they have spoiled at least one character card that is in the traditional spell deck).
As for the LCG we have not seen enough to know if all this is still true, but from what we saw it still looks very different from MTG inspired games.