I first saw Legend of the Five Rings, back when it was connected to some card game I didn't play. Card games, I thought. Sure, it had a story line, but so did Babylon 5, which didn't impress me overmuch. Television: entertainment for illiterates. Card games: artwork attempting to be fantasy.

    We got the roleplaying rules at Origins '96, and on the initial read-through, I wasn't too impressed. But it had some appeal.

    Legend of the Five Rings was a self-proclaimed "new-wave" fantasy RPG set in the world of Rokugan, the Emerald Empire. L5R borrowed heavily from Japanese history and literature, specifically the Tokugawa, Sengoku, and Fujiwara periods and A Book of Five Rings (anyone surprised?). Plenty o' world, cosmology, language, and useful -- I say, useful -- artwork that meshed together in the first two chapters to explain the most critical info necessary to 20th-century Earthbound gaijin: what this place looks like and how it all works.

    "Ah," I said, scratching end-of-convention stubble. "Not bad. It feels like a Japanese version of Earthdawn, only without nearly as much character detail." And this was its flaw. Each clan had a tiny paragraph describing it; each family within the clan, only a sentence or two. Still game, I designed a character in twenty minutes, and fried some bakemono in another twenty. The system seemed flexible, which was a plus, but where could I go that I couldn't in some other game?

    At Gen Con that year, I found out where.

    John Wick had implied a few things in the core rules, but at a gamemastering seminar, I got to hear him declare his vision of the game outright.

    "Let me get this straight," I thought. "You want me to play a fantasy RPG in which your characters bathe daily, are literate, polite to one another, and work in a team. You will be given a badge in the form of a pair of very sharp swords. Magic is considered a respectable, skilled profession among the upper classes, so five spellcasters in a group doesn't stretch plausibility. The warriors will be professionals with licenses to kill, but the second they overstep the bounds of their lord, they will be reined in, because the social order will be more powerful than any one man. There will be no mixing of incompatible characters such as thieves and ninja that inevitably lead to intra-party homicide.

    "You want a system where you can kill or die in one sword stroke, so you actually have to think about the ramifications of a fight beforehand. You want to get away from the Conan fantasy in which you collect enough treasure to buy your own kingdom and having problems you can't solve with swords will not be reserved for "high-level" characters.

    "You want courtly love, moral dilemmas, and loyalty to your lord to play an inherent part of the game system. You will define the role of women among each of the clans, creating a stereotype intended to be broken. You will have a responsibility to those you guard both above and below you, and you will have a license to kill. In other words, I as a GM will have a plausible reason why a mixed batch of armed psychos will get into trouble every week from now until eternity.

    "Twist my frickin' arm."

    But even then, plots did not spring out of my head like the fountaining tempera paint in Kurosawa movies. I had Earthdawn to run, and Vampire: Dark Ages on my waiting list. The roster of enemies-- bandits, manipulative Scorpion clan members at the Emperor's court, demonic Shadowlands creatures, and plenty of other arrogant samurai wanting to see whose kenjutsu was superior -- they didn't inspire me. Not yet.

    So I picked up Way of the Dragon.

    I will never understand the habit of game designers to, without fail, start off every "clan book" line with the misfits. Vampire gave us the anarchists, the loners, and the nutballs, in that order. Werewolf gave us feminazis, homeless underdogs, and peaceniks. Dragon starts us off with firebreathing monks, a living god, an obsessed duelist, and Sherlock Holmes characters who are the opposite of everything Rokugani custom holds sacred.

    Then came Way of the Unicorn. The guys who hadn't been in Rokugan for the last eight hundred years.

    Crab. The frickin' demon-hunters.

    I swear, if I have anything to say about Covenant's supplement release schedule, book number one will be Ta-Maat: The Backbone of Society Where All of Your First Campaigns Should Start the Hell Off Already.

    So I sniff at the game, and along come Way of the Scorpion, City of Lies, and Way of the Crane. And suddenly, the quality of the product line hits me like a tetsubo.

    I was chatting with an old-school gamer who complained that the character choices are limited. In a sense, this is true. In the basic game book, you "only" play samurai, not peasants or ninja. You "only" play humans, not half-human creatures or living rocks or fleshy-headed mutants. As a matter of fact, the one big choice is whether you are a bushi (warrior) or shugenja (holy spellcaster who focuses elements). Even your last name will already be filled out, for Chrissakes.

    This is the game's greatest strength.

    The Way of the Clans books showed there actually was a plan of information release within the company. The choice to only include human samurai as player characters was a conscious choice: it was not limitation they sought, but character definition.

    Most gamers don't have any idea what the hell that really is.

    L5R doesn't tell it, it shows it. Over and over again.

    I learned what it was when in college, when Jenny and I created our first LARP. Our LARP format was for the GMs to create thirty-five characters ahead of time, call up a person for each character, and polish them based on what the player wanted and who in our science fiction club they wanted to avoid. They costume, they show up, and, generally, get a little stat sheet with a paragraph, maybe two, on personality.

    You should realize that while in high school, I wrote up a 25-page short story over the course of a weekend just to flesh out my favorite Shadowrun character. Single-spaced, natch.

    So Jenny and I had that as our standard when we wrote character sheets. Most ended up at four pages each. Six for the old vampires.

    Why so much detail? Because we knew that when we picked up a character at a LARP, they were rarely as good as the ones we made in campaign play at home. If the player didn't care, the character was disposable, and that led to the inevitable combat-fest. To insure no one in the club complained about the part, we made each and every character...well...cool. Give them conflicting goals, and the story will tell itself.

    When we opened up Way of the Scorpion and Way of the Crane and saw the full story starting to coalesce, we put it together. Somebody else had the same idea. The major players in the world had to be as multidimensional as anything the gamemasters could create, or better. They had to have stories of their own that went on even if the players ran off into the wilderness to go hunt rabbits for a year. The enormous write-up on the love pentagon between Doji Hoturi, Bayushi Kachiko, Bayushi Aramoro, Bayushi Shoju and Yogo Asami created character-centered secrets that could bring down an empire. And you know what? The story it created was actually pretty good.

    City of Lies then gave the GMs exactly what I wanted from the first time I picked up the core rules. Sure, the maps and little adventures made me nod, but what made it shine was what I needed to run a campaign: a rationale for the players to have "adventures," and forty or fifty fleshed-out NPCs, half with secrets and half without, already tangled in their own webs.

    If, with all this set-up, you can't play an interesting human, you have no business playing elves or trolls or gods.

    So I ran a session or two (with the map of the world on the GM screen, so everyone could remember where they were!) and then I went on-line and read in the letters of the Clans, and read what happens to the Empire.

    Wow.

    To hell with Star Wars and Tolkien.

    To hell with Babylon 5.

    To hell with the monomyth the creative typists use in place of characterization just because they've read The Golden Bough and Joseph Campbell. I've read the books, too, honey. I ain't impressed easily.

    But if you tell this story linearly, beginning to end, correctly, in novel or TV format that fills in all the gaps implied by what goes on in the card game and end at the Day of Thunder, it would be phenomenal. Only two writers I know of bring this much reality into fantasy and sustain this many dramatic spikes over a long series. The first is Melanie Rawn. The second is Joss Whedon.

    They, also, create lovable characters. And screw them relentlessly.

    I like deadly combat. I grew up on Shadowrun: first edition without armor providing automatic successes (we thought it was extra dice) and in high school, I logged more hours of second edition than I did in English class. I'm on my twelfth long-term martial art instructor in real life. I know how fast it goes down.

    Even so, I don't favor the L5R system in the core rules, for a simple reason: unresisted success.

    Let us say we are two combat-oriented bushi. We have equal statistics, but I have higher Initiative than you. The target number to hit you is your Reflexes x5, which, while theoretically a good defense, is nowhere near a 50/50 chance if I have an equal number of "keep dice" and a decent skill to add onto it. Even with the +5 or +10 TN granted by armor, we are both serious about this...after all, there are swords drawn. We will both be spending Void like it's popcorn in order to hit each other. With the chance of rolling up 10s increasing the chances to hit, I am basically going to smack you in nearly every case.

    "Fair enough," you say. "I'll dodge, we'll roll dice, and may the best handful win."

    But wait...defense in this game is measured by the Defense skill. To use it, you must declare a Full Defense. In other words, you will sacrifice your action and be unable to deliver a counterattack.

    Let's say it works. The next round comes up. I, having higher Initiative, put you in the exact same situation.

    If this keeps up, you have no hope. I'll kill you.

    While my current sifus insist that speed and offensive techniques are the apex towards which martial artists strive in actual combat, I have met too many people who find the defense is a a stronger position. I don't think attack-by-combination is the only successful way to fight in reality

    Back on the game front, if you choose Full Defense, it doesn't really help. It prevents me from keeping dice that roll lower than your Reflexes + Defense. Say you have a Defense of 3 and Reflexes of 4, the highest possible for a starting character. I can't keep dice that roll 7s or less. But if I am hitting you with a TN of your Reflexes x5 plus armor (say, 20 to 30), I'm keeping the dice that roll sufficiently well to get me a 20 to 30 total anyway...so the dice I keep are probably greater than 7s. So Full Defense only really works when your opponent is adding up a ton of low-scoring keep dice or your Reflexes + Defense are sky-high. In other words, it works best when the shot would already miss.

    Right now, it's looking like the Quick Bayushi bushi with the spear is the only one worth betting on, eh?

    John Wick and the Gamemaster's Survival Guide, I understand, had the patch of "Roll your Reflexes + Defense, keeping 1 die, and add that to your TN to be hit." While this does provide a significant edge, it still ultimately tips the hat to the attacker. This might be said to reflect reality in that when two opponents get in true combat range, the one that moves first has the edge. It's an okay patch. It doesn't snap my suspenders much.

    But it still means that if I have the Rank 1 Bayushi technique, I control the fight utterly. Even if you have the Quick advantage or a longer weapon, I've got you dancing to my tune. I keep two dice.

    Patch #1: Shadowrun's system of counterattacking is my personal favorite way to handle melee combat: as soon as the pair get in range, there is a blur and a contested roll. She with the most successes hits.

    But were this the case in Legend of the Five Rings, Initiative would cease to mean much unless missile combat were involved, which is not usually the case. So I added a dodging rule.

    Once per round when attacked, you may elect to dodge (though the term would be "defend," since you are assumed to be blocking, backpedaling, and whatever it takes to avoid being struck). This is a Contested roll of your Reflexes + Defense versus their attack roll. If they roll lower than your roll, they miss. If they roll equal to or above it, they have made the TN, and hit. In either case, they must still make the original TN to hit you of Reflexes x5.

    If the attacker makes Raises, they must make the Raises at greater than your Contested Roll. Just add 5 for each Raise. Free Raises drop the TN similarly.

    The Full Defense option allows you to make a second dodge in a round.

    Any sort of multiple-attack or multiple-action School Techniques may be sacrificed for more dodging capability on a one-for-one basis. The Lost Hiruma Bushi School in Bearers of Jade simply gains yet more dodging capability than other schools, as is their nature.

    Creatures without Defense skills use their Reflexes to defend. Most are not very good at it.

    Armor is given as a change in the TN to be hit because "if you hit an armored area, you might as well have not hit at all."

    To some degree, this is true, but only when you are both swinging light weapons at the exact same moment. One of you hits truer, and the other one is cut. But you can still bash an armored person senseless Western-style with a katana or tetsubo, folks...it's just not a good idea when they are aiming for your unarmored parts.

    Patch #2: In my campaign, I have armor, including oni armor, subtract directly from damage: -5 or -10 points. Players love this rule. It means when hits do get through, they still have a decent chance of survival, and in wartime (the only time they strap on armor, remember), they are less likely to be whittled to death before they have a chance to react.

    We also apply this rule to the Battle table; rather than adding a die of wounds for unarmored people and subtracting one for the heavily armored, we let it stand on its own.  As per the rules, tetsubo and die tsuchi ignore this armor.

    The introductory adventure, "Ceremony of the Samurai," is a decent, leisurely introduction to Rokugan. The characters are pitted against one another in the Topaz Championship, a contest held to see who will be the most promising samurai of the coming generation. It's a game within a game, for honor and glory.

    The contest is pretty well balanced. There's etiquette, history, athletics and law as well as the inevitable climax of dueling. This allows our heroes to see how the dice system works before some character gets their head shwacked off for an ignorant mistake. The non-player character competition is, fortunately, on the same level or worse than the heroes. This has the benefit of rewarding players who, like me, were satisfied with "3s" in their stats. They still get to beat the "average" competition.

    Better still, the Ceremony provides a rationale why characters of seven different political factions would get together in a social situation rather than having their first encounter sound like "Ungh! This is what Clan Bru-Hah will do to all you Gangrel!"

    So on paper, the adventure looks good. From what I hear, nearly every home campaign runs it.

    I didn't.

    The reason why is very simple: I don't want to run my players through their gempukku. I also don't run my Vampire characters through a Prelude, and I never intend on running werewolves through their Rite of Passage. I would much rather start them off with in-character reasons to work together, and then, during the middle of the campaign, run a "flashback" session where they roleplay how they all met.

    My players created bushi who had been to war. One of them was twenty-eight and only became a samurai-ko after her husband died so she wouldn't be forced to re-marry. They really didn't want to play with the "kid stuff."

    And I agreed. There are a couple of heavy-handed "taps" the authors give to the characters, which I see as stylistic slips. This I call the Great Cthulhu problem, which was best exemplified in one of the first supplements originally released for the Call of Cthulhu game. The problem is this: You don't make Cthulhu rise and the world get destroyed in the first adventure.

    Now, "Ceremony" doesn't really make this mistake in such a dramatic fashion. But it does have one of the Fortunes take mortal form to bless your future. And once you get into town, the Emperor, Bayushi Shoju and Kachiko, Doji Kuwanan, and a slew of the other most powerful people in the game world are in attendance.

    This is not utterly implausible. Were you designing FUBAR: Roleplaying in the U.S. Army, you could start off the campaign with a Red Flag game. But wouldn't it feel a little odd to put the President, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Prince Charles and Vladimir Putin all watching in the stands just so the PCs can chat with them? Wouldn't you want a little roleplaying distance in case you made the dignitaries seem kind of low-powered or foolish with a slip of the tongue?

    Patch #3: If your players are like mine, I would start off with Honor's Veil and its companion adventure, Murder at Kyotei Castle. Both adventures have little life- threatening combat, and give you plenty of dice to roll if you have an Investigation skill. They also let the PCs realize how powerful a single Glory 6 daimyo is, and by implication, keep them absolutely petrified of the clan daimyo and the Emperor.

    The best of L5R products are fantasy taken seriously. If you're new to L5R and you want a hit of "what makes this game different?" the stuff to freebase is the basic book, Way of the Scorpion, Way of the Crane, and City of Lies. As an example of good introductory adventures, I would use the two in Honor's Veil, and once the player characters are weaned on four or five sessions' worth of experience, "The Hare Clan," from the old gamemaster pack (not the current one with Shadowlands creatures on the GM screen). Then, and only then, read what happens to the world over the course of the card game, and you will see why the "story line" craze in roleplaying games is taking off.