Legend of the Five Rings

In the Team Covenant podcast they talked about something that happened in a game, where a legendary swordsman was basically neutered, first by political intrigue and then by getting lost on his journey. While essentially the same thing as enchantments like Pacifism from MTG, the narrative they spin is so much more memorable in this L5R example.

1 Like

In the original L5R CCG, there were personalities (your primary characters and “creature” units) in your Dynasty deck, and then you could include followers (attachments that represented unnamed “common folk” under their influence) in your Fate (now called Conflict) deck.

I haven’t looked as closely at the cards in these teaser articles, but maybe the person you’re seeing in the Conflict deck example is a follower attachment?

I have to say that I like the subtle changes they’re implementing. In the L5R CCG, there were no “political conflicts” per se, just Fate cards that could initiate 1-on-1 duels between characters outside of military conflict, or political actions that could allow you to influence the opponent’s characters or cards in various ways. And if you lost a military conflict, even by just a hair, the entire opposing army was wiped out and discarded.

I like the idea of bidding for honor, reminds me kind of like psi game mechanics, and the idea of managing Fate to force you to consider the ebb and flow of your “army.” And, above all of these mechanics, I am just excited that it’s an LCG model. I hated not being able to make as competitive of a deck because I couldn’t afford to buy or collect all of the important rare cards.

It’s possible but a number of people including myself don’t think so.

http://i.imgur.com/AmR2Fo7.png

The card in question is Vengeful Oathkeeper. As for the evidence, it’s boarder is clearly that of a character as opposed to the name on the side as with all the other attachments we have seen. It has an influence cost which has not been seen on any other character, or dynasty card for that matter. People with sharp eyes have put the card number at 160 which is in the known block for the conflict deck. While we have yet to see a follower all none of the the other attachments has an glory value.

So I think it is a very reasonable guess that its not a follower but a character with a conflict back.

characters in both decks was confirmed by designers during reddit ama

1 Like

Basically, think of Vengeful Oathkeeper as a Event that creates a token personality, except the card itself is the token instead of having to use a external one. And that it’ll go away at the end of the turn because it won’t have any fate on it.

New article up!

The Conflicts of Rokugan

1 Like

Question: When you bid your honor to draw conflict cards, and you bid more than your opponent, does the honor you give him / her / other come from your personal pool or a bank?

Yup, you bid your honor - in the initial news post, there’s a graphic under the subheading “Uphold Your Honor” showing 4 honor being taken from one player and given to the other.

2 Likes

We recently did a video cast taking in the information we have so far on the game, and comparing it to the old CCG. Check it out:

2 Likes

I don’t understand the background of the game. I’m a rpg player.
Reading this, there was a rollback or ???

Is it in the past ? Does the universe forks ? Something else ?

So it looks like FFG is rolling the game back to the Clan War era.

Yeah, it’s a big question-mark right now where it’s going. It sure looks like the Clan Wars era, but there’s definitely differences that are showing up. Fudoism showing up in the Dragon lands a lot earlier than normal, for instance.

Which is good! They’ve said that they don’t want to just re-tell the same stories again. Would be interesting to see if they use some old stuff for inspiration for new stories, too.

1 Like

Yeah, it’s cool to get to reconnect to some of the older characters that were so cool in the storyline. I think it’ll be neat to see how new players see some of the old favorites as well.

Maybe someone can clarify since I didn’t read all the recent l5r reboot news.

The biggest selling point original l5r had was the player driven story line + the loyality to one clan.

But with the LCG system attached, impactful changes to the factions or characters are somewhat impossible since ffg’s casual appeal policy that every product must be legal and available for x years prevents any real change (like you can’t kill off a hero/faction from the core set).
So what’s left as a selling point besides the Asia theme and nostalgia? And without the story aspect and the “get everything you want” card distribution approach, do you really think there will be some guys sacrifing their ability to play the most powerful deck and instead stick to a weak clan?

Man, there were cards of personalities in the old version who died before the card they were on was printed & legal. I don’t think that’s going to stop them from killing a character in the new version, I just assume that being dead would keep them from getting picked for storyline prizes.

In regards to the other stuff, I think you underestimate how strong clan loyalty can be. Hell, I played Mantis in Gold, when we were paying extra for a trait that did nothing. There’s always going to be those that are going to go for a win above everything… (something something scumbag Dynasty something something) …but if they can keep one faction from pulling a Khol Wall/Anarchs/NBN and everyone’s about even? You might as well play your favorite faction instead.

2 Likes

I mean, I have played HB and Shaper exclusively since I bought the Core set. I used to only play Phoenix or Dragon, and don’t expect that to change much.

The clan loyalty and storytelling aspects will be the only things that get me into L5R. The hardcore Spike nature of ANR is what burned me out, as it codified the game to the point of boredom (for me). As long as the factions are reasonably balanced in L5R, I think the game will take off. As a Johnny/Spike hybrid, I can’t take losing 9 out of 10 games due to an imbalanced card pool. If I can win 4 to 6 out of those 10, with them all being engaging games, I’m sold. If I do invest, I look forward to a healthy meta of loyal players; I think Seattle in particular is a meta where the loyalty aspect will be a selling point.

4 Likes

UTZ!

new article: BANZAI!

3 Likes

I have no interest in picking up another card game, but I am impressed by the card design here. The cards are gorgeous.

Especially impressive, from a certain nerdy perspective, is how very close to the edge they’ve put the set info, copyright, and illustrator credits. They’re clearly depending on having very tight tolerances on how cards are cut. I assume they have whatever they need in place to be confident they’ll get away with that, which is very cool.

The rest of the card design doesn’t put necessary information that close to the edge, but most of the card frames do use very narrow borders, which would look a lot more “off” on any cards that are cut a bit off, so again they’re depending on that not happening. Then the narrow borders allow for wider text boxes, which allows the text boxes to be big enough while being quite short, which enables the cards to have a lot more space devoted to art, which is a big part of why they look so good.

I guess they’ve probably been moving in this direction for a while. Destiny cards have text closer to the edge than Netrunner cards, though not as close as L5R cards, and they also have more art space than Netrunner cards but less than L5R cards (averaged across the card frame types for each game).

Though now that I look at it, AGOT 2 has text very near the card edge, like L5R, so perhaps Destiny is actually an outlier. It does probably have a different manufacturing process, since they’re making random boosters, so it makes sense that they’d be a bit more conservative for it.

AGOT 1 has white borders all the way around every card, so I guess Netrunner was one of their early steps along the road to using more of the space on cards.

1 Like