[00:00:00] Speaker A: RPG Lessons Learned. When the game is over, when your players are gone, that's when lessons are learned.
Find us
[email protected].
email us at rpgllpodcastmail.com and find us on BlueSkyPGL.
Hi, welcome to RPG Lessons Learned, the show where you can learn from our mistakes. I'm Dusty and with me, as always, is Tanner. Hi, Tanner.
[00:00:33] Speaker B: Hey, Dusty. What is good, man?
[00:00:35] Speaker A: What is good is L5R, fifth edition. I didn't think I would like the funky dice, but I have largely come around to them after a very successful conclusion to, uh, what's the name of this adventure?
[00:00:47] Speaker B: Uh, Sins of Regret, part two of two we played.
[00:00:50] Speaker A: I was gonna say Sins of the past, but that might be a Star Trek episode.
All right, Sins of Regret. Um, I think I have a lot of questions to ask you. I was the player, you were the gm.
[00:01:04] Speaker B: Mhm.
[00:01:05] Speaker A: Um, as always, we've discussed previously that I am very goals oriented when I am a player. Nothing frustrates me as a GM more than indecisive players not making choices to move the game along and trying to optimize every little thing. So I purposely don't optimize every little thing and I push through and I do not in a jerky way what my character would do. But I asked myself, okay, with the information that I had, like, what would I do if I were really there?
Not trying to optimize every little thing was my goals oriented play. Okay. Are you disappointed I missed out on content? Like, how'd you feel about that?
[00:01:46] Speaker B: I'm, um, not disappointed that you missed out on content, although you did. We talked last time about how maybe I think you only like saw a third of the part of the adventure that's in the village and the part of the adventure that's here in the castle. I think you saw maybe like 20% or 15%.
Frankly, this adventure throws a lot of threads at you and your players are kind of bound to bite on one and then you're supposed to take them from there. So I don't think that that's an issue. You just happen to bite on, like the first one that I kind of presented and yeah, you did not role play this. I think a crueler L5RGM would not have tried to work with you based on the things your character did in the castle and probably would have punished your character a little bit for what you did, uh, and been a little bit harsher. But I'm only playing with me and Dusty, so I might as well try and Keep the adventure flowing. So do you want to talk about maybe in broad terms, just so our listeners know what happened?
[00:02:51] Speaker A: Yeah. I took it upon myself to skulk around the castle at night to attempt to solve one of the Daimyo's problems without, you know, asking the Daimyo for permission. And lo and behold, I did make progress. And then I made myself extremely obvious to those involved and just basically told them what I discovered and kind of triggered some chaos within the castle. Uh, do I have a defense for my actions for not role playing a meek samurai in the world of Rokugan? I was playing Condoon. I was playing Duncan McLeod made samurai and Female.
[00:03:28] Speaker B: Do you want to talk about that? Like the expectation of roleplay in Legend of the Five Rings and whether or not you vibe with it or not, because it kind of implies that you're going to talk in subtext a lot in your role play and you're going to role play deference to higher, higher powered characters. And there's all these social carrots and sticks that you're supposed to get involved with in all five R. And where part of the fun is. Do you find that fun or is that just another kind of labor to get past, to get to your goals oriented play, do you think?
[00:04:04] Speaker A: Neither. I find myself ignorant of it. I don't consume enough, um, Japanese cinema, like Akira Kurosawa films. I don't consume enough of those, um, you know, modern stuff. I did watch 13. Was it 13 Ronin?
[00:04:18] Speaker B: 13 assassins.
[00:04:19] Speaker A: Yeah, 13 assassins. I did watch that and loved that. I did watch the Keanu Reeves, the 47 Ronin.
[00:04:27] Speaker B: So you have no touch point of anything made in the last 20 years, 15 years.
[00:04:32] Speaker A: But. Well, I have no. I have a lot of western fantasy fiction to draw from as far as understanding how to treat a baron or a knight in D and D.
I don't have any of that. So I would say I didn't realize how badly I was missing the mark.
[00:04:49] Speaker B: Yeah, and I don't think you were. I think that I try to be pretty lenient about it. Like, I like to see it, I guess, but like, it doesn't bother me if you, Dusty, say, hey, this is what I want to get across. And my character would probably know the right way to do that. Let's make a roll and see how it goes. And then we kind of narrate the scene from there. It doesn't have to be word for word.
Do you find it overbearing when I express the social customs and stuff of this world to you?
[00:05:17] Speaker A: No, I think Part of the fun of a role playing game is getting to learn a new world. When I think about the people talk about the three columns of RPG play. Well, forget about that for a second. Let's talk about the three columns of fiction, right? It's plot, characters, and setting. I like getting to know the setting when I played with Martin, and Martin runs sociology, um, simulations.
You're. It's. It's really setting driven. You're getting to know the setting, you're getting to know the local government, you're getting to know the religion, you're getting to know what's going on. I love learning about the setting. So, no, I dig that stuff when you do it.
[00:05:53] Speaker B: I also think it's a good fit for a ronin adventure where you are a masterless samurai. You are not somebody who's expected to have a ton of class.
You know, you're a wandering vagabond who inserts yourselves into situations and either creates problems or solves them.
[00:06:09] Speaker A: So.
[00:06:10] Speaker B: So I think that's a good fit for your level of comfort and your. Your play style, honestly. So I'm, I'm glad that we kind of figured out a good spot for, you know, your, Your proclivities as a, as a player.
[00:06:22] Speaker A: How many years would I have to go back in Tanner gm, um, career before I got to a Tanner who would be like, this guy doesn't have things working Rokugon, I'm gonna punish him.
[00:06:31] Speaker B: Um, um, maybe like the first year I was into L5R because I thought, oh, the cool thing about this is that you can't do whatever you want. So I would be a worse GM and I would try to punish that. But, um, I don't know, you probably have to go back, like, 10, 10, 12 years. But, um, I don't know. I think. I mean, I was a bad GM for a very, very long time. So I think, uh, yeah, I think part of the appeal for alphavar, like you said, is the setting and is trying to navigate interesting situations with this other layer on top of it. And, yeah, you kind of punched right through the layer in a lot of ways this time, but that made everybody else's responses to it kind of more fun and interesting to come up with. Right.
[00:07:18] Speaker A: Did I annoy you by doing that that I didn't, frankly, even always realize I was doing?
[00:07:24] Speaker B: Uh, no, I don't think so. I think, um, honestly, I had a lot of plates spinning. Like I was trying to think, like, two or three steps ahead of what the next several scenes were going to Be.
I didn't really have the mental capacity to be annoyed. Sometimes I would like ask you, what do you do in this moment between these two moments and Dusty, I am not listening to you. I'm trying to jot down and think what's going to happen next sometimes. So, um, I think I had. When I gm, um, this game, it is like 100% full engagement all the time. There's no. It's not like an OSR game where there's like a procedure to kind of fall back on of like, oh, we rolled this. You use one torch. We explore the room. What do you do now? Like, it is more fluid. It's more. I have to stretch different muscles and uh, it feels more like CrossFit than it does doing reps. Does that make sense?
[00:08:17] Speaker A: It does. I don't know how successful I would be at GMing this game and interpreting the bones of the opportunities and the exploding successes and the successes and the strifes.
[00:08:30] Speaker B: Yeah. Um, what'd you think overall of the session? You gave the last one a seven out of ten.
How do you feel this one went?
[00:08:36] Speaker A: Uh, eight out of ten. I am questioning that I enjoyed it more than last session. I enjoyed last session. But last session had a lot of uncertainty as I described.
And with. With. In retrospect, those things always seem more fun.
But, um, I had had less uncertainty. I was. I was concluding things. I felt like I was getting to the bottom of things. I felt like.
Which feels very satisfying. Um, it perturbs me to hear. Lightly perturbs me to hear that I was. Maybe I had a little bit of main character syndrome and was doing things a little more boldly than I should have.
[00:09:11] Speaker B: Yeah. But also you're the main character. You're the only character we're playing right now. You are there. There are supporting characters and antagonists and stuff, but you are the main character of the story. I still do believe that about Legend of the Five Rings despite it being a more structured. But your point is taken.
[00:09:28] Speaker A: I never role played my. What's uh, it called like it'd be a disadvantage in GURPs.
I never role played my adversity.
[00:09:36] Speaker B: Oh, that you were sure.
[00:09:38] Speaker A: My anxiety. That's what I meant.
[00:09:40] Speaker B: That you. So your anxiety which causes you strife is irrepressible flirtation. You find it difficult to pass up a chance to be flirty and delusions of grandeur. You're bad at honest work.
[00:09:55] Speaker A: I do think I probably had some delusions of grandeur.
True.
[00:09:59] Speaker B: I think in retrospect, the times where you were Given manual labor to do, like haul this rice around and stuff. I should have just given you more strife when that happened.
[00:10:10] Speaker A: That didn't occur to me either. I kind of forgot about that particular disadvantage. I was more interested in the flirtatious disadvantage.
[00:10:16] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think that's okay. I mean, I don't think disadvantages are meant to come up every session, really. Especially if you're playing a game with like four players. Like, it might be. I don't know. I think you picked those honestly. And we were honest to the fiction. Maybe we missed like one opportunity to throw them in there somewhere. But like, I don't know. I don't think it's worth constructing a scene where a disadvantage comes up just for the sake of using it, you know?
[00:10:44] Speaker A: Did we tell an interesting story together?
[00:10:46] Speaker B: I really think we did. I really liked the.
There was some symmetry between the first half and the last half in that you found Rin, this Ronin who was recently sworn into, um, service to the lord, to be overbearing and cruel. And you came to find the reasons why things were bad at the castle.
And then Rin's murderous past came up. Um, and you talked to an NPC that really stuck up for you that was related to that.
And then it ended with a duel with Rin, who was like the first character really you encountered or the second character you encountered in the story.
And she got her just desserts, which was a night, nice little bow to put on her story.
But also the duel served to put a bow on the story of the whole castle and the treachery going on there. So I think it kind of slid into place pretty nicely.
[00:11:46] Speaker A: I think it was interesting in the sense of I would have watched it as a movie.
[00:11:50] Speaker B: Yeah. I think it felt authored in a way that. You know, we've talked before about how we like role playing games because they're not focus grouped. They're not. They're weird experimental storytelling where sometimes stuff doesn't have a beginning, middle and end. But it sure is nice kind of and interesting when it happens.
[00:12:10] Speaker A: Right.
[00:12:10] Speaker B: Like this could have been an authored story.
[00:12:13] Speaker A: It really did have a nice beginning, middle and end.
[00:12:15] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think, I don't know, I find that happens in L5R more than in other games. I think there's some special sauce that either the way it interacts with my brain or the way that the game was constructed under the hood, that that kind of stuff seems to come up.
[00:12:31] Speaker A: Is it the dice? Is it the system? Is it the setting? Is it some strange mixture of all the above. Some alchemy that you can't put your finger on.
[00:12:39] Speaker B: Well, let's try and translate this to an OSR game. Say, say this situation. You were hired by a lord to look into what's going on at the village. You find one of the lord's cruel knights and she's abusing the villagers.
In an OSR game, you would kill her, sneak into her quarters and kill her at night. Or you challenge her right there. Or if you go to the castle, you know, you, you would cause more trouble there. I think the sense of restraint in Rokugan, the, the. The sense that it's a game all about the cool stuff that happens when katanas come out. But it can only be cool if we really resist taking our swords out when given the chance, I think is part of the magic. That's.
Yeah. Rin would not have been a recurring rival or antagonist for you in another setting.
[00:13:34] Speaker A: I think that's a phenomenal point because in this entire two session adventure, I got into a total of, uh, if I'm not mistaken, three fights.
A duel to the touch.
Mhm.
A.
Not even like someone trying to get past me. And I tried Scuffle. Yes, scuffle. Um, a murder.
And then I guess there was the big duel. I forgot about the murder.
[00:14:01] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:14:01] Speaker A: Um, so I killed a total of two people, uh, in four fights. And in an OSR game, I would have killed more like two dozen goblins.
[00:14:10] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:14:11] Speaker A: In six fights.
[00:14:13] Speaker B: I really think the magic comes from the fact that the NPCs that you're interacting with the pool, uh, the pool of NPCs that you are going to fight are in the adventure. And they all have names. They're all people with backstories. You were never going to fight a nameless samurai. You were never going to fight a nameless bandit. Like, and that part of that is the adventure writing, which I want to credit this adventure. I don't think it's flawless, but I will say that it gives like a good two paragraphs on every one of the 30 characters in this castle. And really gives you like, here's what they were doing, here's what their current anxieties are, here's how they might cause trouble or get involved. And like all that stuff is so cool. And the fact that the pool of adversaries you're drawing from are all people you've met and talked to before. I think that's the magic of it.
[00:15:06] Speaker A: I love how upset everyone was after the murder that I committed.
[00:15:11] Speaker B: Yes.
They.
It was Pretty bad.
[00:15:16] Speaker A: Uh, it was pretty bad. Um, I didn't see.
Because this person outclassed me socially, I didn't see a way for me to fast talk them into being held accountable or having whatever kind of like in. In universe, diegetic justice.
[00:15:37] Speaker B: You thought it was better to, um, um, ask for forgiveness than asked for permission.
[00:15:42] Speaker A: Yeah. And take care of the problem. And then when they couldn't argue with me with their better social standing, explain what I thought was happening.
[00:15:49] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think it's cool that that's the setting. Right? That's the setting driving you to a certain action that maybe you wouldn't have in another game or in another. Another setting.
[00:15:59] Speaker A: Right.
[00:15:59] Speaker B: Like, you felt like your option was to do this. Like the rules of honor in Rokugan only exists so that when you do something dishonorable, it has weight. Right. And like that, all that stuff is. It drives your choices, it creates a narrower canvas. And you've gotta paint the picture of your story in the shape of this canvas. And that's why it's an interesting one.
[00:16:23] Speaker A: That's huge, man. I hadn't put that together. But you're right. I made that choice to kill that guy because in the social world of Rokugan, that's what I felt like I had to do to solve the problem.
What's more RPG than a choice? Driven by the story and also driven by M. My previous choices, like I had M marked him when I discovered him in the shadows and didn't know who he was. And I, you know, gave him a black eye that I'd be able to find later in the light of day.
Um, and I chose not to tell the Lord about the black eye. If I had, this wouldn't have been so bad for me. I would have had, you know, I would have had some, ah, social currency or evidence, whatever, not knowing who I had struck. But once I discovered who I had struck, and it was the Shugenja of the entire castle and related to the Daimyo, I realized I'd screwed myself by not revealing the black eye and feeling emotions about having screwed myself and feeling the weight of the setting. Man, that's RPGs in a nutshell.
[00:17:25] Speaker B: And the only reason you got out of it is because you did the side quest with the wakizashi. You solved this other murder that happened a long time ago, and you had somebody of note, of import to stick her neck out for you and make sure you weren't killed on the spot. Right?
[00:17:41] Speaker A: I won't lie. That did factor into my decision to go ahead and kill the guy is that I knew this lady owed me a favor. Gotcha.
[00:17:46] Speaker B: Okay. Well even then it's great. So we've talked about the RP a lot. Do you want to talk about the G now that you have sort of a more complete understanding of the funny dice, the strife, the skill rolls, the dueling, that kind of stuff.
[00:18:00] Speaker A: I think it, I think the number of successes works. I think dueling is still a lot. It would take me a lot to get into. I don't know that I would ever do much other than a calming breath and a strike over and over and over again until I won the duel. I don't think, I don't think I see myself going into this center stance and I don't see myself doing a lot of the other stuff. Like you accumulate strife so quickly in the duel.
[00:18:20] Speaker B: Mhm.
[00:18:21] Speaker A: That I don't think there's time for anything except for water stance, calming breath, strike over and over and over again.
I don't, I don't get it.
[00:18:30] Speaker B: Yeah. So I will say, and this might be a little bit nitty gritty for you listening, but I just want to answer Dusty. One of the things that you can do is that you can do a predictive move which is the next time your opponent chooses their stance, you say, oh, you just went earth. I predicted that you'd go to earth. They must immediately take force strife and pick a different stance.
So the reason why that's cool to me is that this supports that you should duel a character that is important to the story. You know, you've had time to be around this other person. You know that their Earth ring is their highest ring because of opportunities you've spent or the way you've seen them role played or acted. And you have a pretty good sense that they're going to go into Earth Ring and if you called their bluff, they then you get a huge advantage. So I think in a very limited sense it's almost like it's. There's other stuff to do in duels when you know your target better. And we have only. We had a pretty brief. I think you have like two or three scenes with Rin the whole game. Can you imagine if this was your arch rival that you've been beefing with for 10 sessions and then it finally came to the duel and you felt like you could out fox them like that kind of stuff I think is what duels are for. But I guess I will admit I shoehorned the duel in because it's the Best way to resolve one on one conflict with one player.
[00:20:00] Speaker A: You know, call me on a bad player behavior that I committed and maybe didn't realize.
[00:20:06] Speaker B: Bad player behavior.
[00:20:09] Speaker A: Let me think.
[00:20:10] Speaker B: Did you read the beginner game between last session in this session?
[00:20:14] Speaker A: No.
[00:20:15] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:20:16] Speaker A: Excellent, Excellent.
[00:20:18] Speaker B: We identified that. That was an issue last time. And, um, you know what? We played these pretty. I'd have been more pissed about it if it was been like a month. But we play these back to back weekends, so it's holidays. There's a lot of stuff going on. But I think you could have put forth the effort to see a version of the rules that wasn't just Tanner explaining them to you.
[00:20:41] Speaker A: That's. That's an excellent call.
[00:20:42] Speaker B: What about me?
[00:20:43] Speaker A: Any.
[00:20:43] Speaker B: Any GM calls that you think were faux pas? I kind of identified one in the moment that I don't like it when NPCs talk to each other and the GM has to role play with himself.
[00:20:53] Speaker A: Uh, you did, but that was fine. Um, you. I think you think you committed faux pause that you didn't really. You apologize for looking up the rules. And I was like, no, no, no. Like, like. I like.
I hate the GM advice of don't
[00:21:04] Speaker B: look up the rules.
[00:21:04] Speaker A: I've said this before. I'll say it again.
I like pausing to look up the rules. That's the point of playing a game, is to pause and look up the rules.
So I like that you did that. Um, there was another moment too, that I was thinking of when I started this paragraph, for lack of a better term, where I think you thought you had messed up. And I was like, no, no, no, it's great. Oh. When I said I kill him, you paused for a long time and I could see you weighing whether or not to say anything.
And I remembered the cyberpunk session where I drew on the guy in the restaurant and you were like, uh, okay.
Um, so I could. I could see.
But you. But you didn't say anything. You. You let me do it.
[00:21:47] Speaker B: Um, can I tell you what I was thinking about in that moment?
[00:21:51] Speaker A: Do it.
[00:21:52] Speaker B: I was thinking about whether to roll that as a combat encounter or whether to roll that as it just happens.
I think I would have been justified in making it a combat encounter. The guy has stats in the book. He. He's armed and he knows you're there to mess with him.
And you. You guys talk some smack to each other as you approached. He was. He was ready for a fight. The reason I didn't is because I thought to myself, would this make the story of this game. Better to slow down, have this skirmish where you probably.
We take 30 minutes for you to carve this guy up anyway, and then we deal with the consequences. That was me as, like, the editor, almost like. There was a deleted scene from this movie where it was a big fight scene, but the director, Tanner, decided to cut that for time because he thought it made a better movie if we just cut to the last stroke of the fight scene.
[00:22:46] Speaker A: Ooh, I like that a lot. That's great GM stuff.
[00:22:49] Speaker B: So that's what I was thinking about. I was a little bit. The stuff that you were talking about was probably three seconds of that thinking, and the remaining 20 seconds were. Was that other thing.
[00:22:59] Speaker A: I like that. That's. That's. That's great. That's advanced GM stuff. That's. That's, um. That's excellent jamming. I did come up with what I think is a real one.
[00:23:07] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:23:08] Speaker A: Uh, a real criticism of Tanner is gm. When we were walking toward the castle, and I was trying to get more information from Setsuo about what I perceived to still be a monster in the woods. And you were like, well, when it comes to the bandits. And I was like, bandits, yeah.
[00:23:24] Speaker B: And then I had to catch myself and make him reveal it. Yeah, I got caught. So, um, I looked through this adventure about an hour before we started playing, and I made a checklist of scenes that I really wanted to hit to, um, make sure that I was on track for the adventure. One of them, my first thing that I wrote down is checking out the forest meeting Ichiro and the bandits.
So I had forgotten that you were left with the impression that it was a monster. And then I had been prepping for you to do this. And then when we got to the moment where you wanted to talk about it, I expected you to go and check it out. I didn't expect you to talk about it. And then when I role played, I said the word bandits, and I'm like, dang it. But, yeah, I did feel like a bit of a buffoon, but yeah, for sure. And I thought once that happened and you kind of figured out about it, you immediately lost interest in that plot thread. And I feel like I do. I did maybe rob you of something there.
[00:24:22] Speaker A: You know, I liked that because that's again, me role playing the world. I lost interest. Interest not. When I found out it was bandits.
I was still interested because I thought maybe they were from outside this province, troubling this village. I lost interest when you did the role play with Setsuo, revealing to me that the bandits were actually the disgruntled villagers pissed at the samurai. And I was like, uh, valid. I do not want to fight them. I think they're right.
[00:24:46] Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. Did you feel a dramatic tension from what you, Dusty, thought was the right thing versus what you thought your character should do?
[00:24:55] Speaker A: M.
I did have to think about Duncan McLeod a lot more.
Uh, for those that didn't listen to last episode, I based my characters on characters I'm familiar with from movies, TV and books and Duncan McLeod from the Highlander TV shows. Who I chose the tension between me, Dusty and Hindoon or Duncan? I don't know. Uh, I think my bad player behavior was my experience with Splinter Cell 3, Chaos Theory, and then and the Nightingale floor in a level in that game. And me being like, is this squeaking sound of nightingale floor? That felt to me like, you know, the person playing level one character who knows to burn the troll when they shouldn't know to burn the troll.
[00:25:36] Speaker B: Sure. But what is the realistic way to get around that?
[00:25:40] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:25:41] Speaker B: Uh, we have this farce where you, me, and you both pretend that you don't know it for 20 minutes until we Dusty that we've wasted enough of our time that, yeah, okay, we can do it.
Uh, what I should have done is I should have said, great, your character knows that. Tell me why. And I kind of just breezed through it. But, like, I should have put at least a bit of. Made you work for it a little bit, maybe.
Fair.
[00:26:07] Speaker A: And I would have fun a yarn about having an affair with someone who was a high place person who had a nightingale floor around their room, and what a pain it was to have illicit liaisons with a Nightingale floor between us.
[00:26:19] Speaker B: Yeah. And we would have robbed ourselves of that little bit of an understanding of your character a little bit more.
[00:26:24] Speaker A: No, I didn't feel a tension between what I, Dusty, knew and what Kindune or Duncan knew. Um, and I think I role played kin Dune pretty faithfully, and I don't think I did my standard Dusty thing. That's a good question for you. Did you feel kind Dune? Was that different from Jean, that different from Belloc?
[00:26:45] Speaker B: Yeah, I think so. I think, um, King Dune had different motivations, different proclivities.
Um, I do think that you're pretty good at playing roguish types, and maybe that's just because those are the types of characters that we see in media so much. I remember the last time we played L5R, though. You were playing Worth, right?
[00:27:05] Speaker A: No, I was playing. I was playing Shredder. Oh, Shredder.
[00:27:08] Speaker B: That's right.
[00:27:09] Speaker A: Playing War from other games. But I was playing Uruka Saki, uh, which is Shredder's real name from the Ninja Turtles.
[00:27:14] Speaker B: Yeah. So I think that, um, I think you've latched on to roguish characters a lot. And those are just the types of characters that are in stories.
So I. When you pick a new character, I want to challenge you to pick somebody who's maybe not so swashbuckling and pulpy. You know what I mean?
[00:27:34] Speaker A: I want you to challenge me with a character's name. Like, who do you want me to try to play?
[00:27:38] Speaker B: Like, what if as long as we're in the fantasy realm, instead of being Duncan, what if we said that you were King Arthur from Excalibur or something like that? Like somebody who is forthright and just. And somebody who people look up to, but you also are orthodox and you have, ah, a destiny that you believe in, stuff like that. I feel like your characters are. And maybe this is just the nature of role playing games, but they're very motivated by the thing that's 30ft in front of them and less motivated by any long term big, uh, goals. You know what I mean? And maybe we do one shots. I don't, I don't know.
[00:28:17] Speaker A: I was about to say the one shot thing is playing King Arthur who wants to rule Camelot. Fine.
But playing King Arthur wants to rule Camelot in a one shot. About the time he was fighting the Black Knight.
[00:28:32] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:28:33] Speaker A: And that's it. That's the whole one shot is the Black Knight.
[00:28:36] Speaker B: I don't know.
I would say you're picking successful character archetypes for the types of games we play. I would never say, uh, anything to the contrary of that, but I think it limits you to a certain portion of what characters there are out there. Does that make sense?
[00:28:52] Speaker A: It does. And I'm having a fascinating realization of.
I tend to choose characters from episodic things, which works great for a one shot because you start the one shot as Duncan McLeod, you end the one shot as Duncan McLeod, and in the next one shot you're Duncan McLeod. Like episodic stories where not much changes session over session. And how much character development occurs is interesting.
I need to figure out a non episodic show like Babylon 5 where it was more of a miniseries or more of a, uh. Like, you cannot watch these episodes out of order.
[00:29:24] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:29:25] Speaker A: And I need to figure out something with a very strong arc and play a character from that.
[00:29:29] Speaker B: You should watch Shogun from FX from last Year.
[00:29:32] Speaker A: I still do need to watch that.
[00:29:33] Speaker B: Uh, I sidebar. I think I recently rewatched that with my wife.
I think it's the best show I've ever seen, having seen it twice now. And I think there's a lot. It deals a lot with people, believe it or not, who are in Japan who don't know the rules about samurai and who are forced to learn it. So I think it would be kind of fun.
[00:29:54] Speaker A: Oh, I think Fraggle Rock is the best show I've ever seen.
[00:29:57] Speaker B: All right, so I've got two important questions for you. One, would you want to play this character and her story in the future? Would you want to continue playing it
[00:30:10] Speaker A: in the future, like in the year 2000? Like, no, it is immortal.
[00:30:15] Speaker B: Like. Like in the. In the coming months.
[00:30:17] Speaker A: Oh, yes.
[00:30:17] Speaker B: Me and you sitting down.
[00:30:19] Speaker A: Sorry. Yes.
I was like. If he meant play her again, he would just say, play her again. I was like, uh, I was fas. Okay.
[00:30:28] Speaker B: Do we want to see the continued adventures of Kindun?
[00:30:31] Speaker A: Yes, absolutely. I was answering in the way I was answering it. Not to be a jerk about your exact choice of wording. There used to be an L5R fan fiction site. Oh. Uh.
[00:30:40] Speaker B: I'm familiar with what you're about to say.
[00:30:42] Speaker A: And one of the universes is, like, cyberpunk Rokugan in the future, where the clans are now corporations.
[00:30:49] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:30:50] Speaker A: And I have been fascinated by this.
[00:30:54] Speaker B: It sounds so odious, but, like, kind of cool at the same time. Right? Like, take all of the.
All of the orientalism of L5R and apply it to cyberpunk, the most orientalist genre there is currently.
Could be good.
[00:31:12] Speaker A: Is it. Wasn't there a thing where, like, unicorn samurai are, like, mechanical centaurs?
[00:31:18] Speaker B: It's making me sick to think about it. Dusty.
[00:31:20] Speaker A: I don't want to. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.
[00:31:22] Speaker B: I'm getting a headache.
[00:31:23] Speaker A: I thought you were asking me that. But, yes, I would like to play King Dune again.
[00:31:31] Speaker B: Excellent. Second question, corollary. Do you want to play her in this system?
[00:31:37] Speaker A: I think so. I think we rolled her in the system. And I think I wouldn't know how to translate her into kaigaku or into L5R 4E or into, um, Ronan by the same guy who wrote Kaigaku. Uh, I wouldn't know how to translate her.
[00:31:55] Speaker B: I would love for us to.
So I guess backing up you can edit this out. Is your desire to keep playing her in L5R 5E, the fact that we have already rolled her or the fact that you Actually like the system.
[00:32:10] Speaker A: No, we can keep this in because I think it's both that I like the system and I think we made choices about her as a character as we were coming up with the mechanics. And I think if we change the mechanics, we're changing the character and I might as well just be some. In other words, if you want to play off of our four instead of five, I am with it, bro. But I'll probably be Connor McLeod instead of Duncan McLeod and we'll reroll a new character from scratch.
So I like 5e. I'd be happy to play 5e with kindun if, uh, if you want to play 4e, that's cool. Let's just do with a different character.
[00:32:46] Speaker B: Okay. I would like to keep playing 5e. I really do like this game.
I'm sure now you can see the warts that it has on it, that it is a little bit fiddly in some ways. But I hope I've converted you into kind of like the, the little glints of genius that this game has with the rings and the approaches and strife and stuff like that. I would love to keep playing the system with you because I do feel like I have a decent handle on how to run it. I've run a 10 session campaign in the past, actually about. I rediscovered my notes from like five years ago from that campaign and it was fun reliving that with my friends. So I would love to run some more of, uh, Stories of the Traveling Ronin if you'd like.
[00:33:34] Speaker A: I would like.
Can I, as a homework item, both to learn the rules and to make the next session played differently. I was playing with physical dice for those of you listening at home. And I, as a homework item like in roll 20, actually make a king dune character sheet where I could roll in roll 20 and have the rolls be a little bit more, um, rapid and not me like looking at stuff and trying to figure things out and remember which. Which thing is explode and which thing is opportunity.
[00:34:05] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. I think you've done your penance. You've bought funny dice and now you finally use them and they can go on the shelf of honor for.
[00:34:13] Speaker A: Yep. And now we can do the funny dice in the roll 20 chat.
[00:34:15] Speaker B: And we, uh, got to give them a shout out. First off, the fact that they made funny dice, if they're gonna have to give us funny dice, they gave us D12s and D6s. The best, the two best dice there is, you know, we gotta give them props for that.
[00:34:29] Speaker A: Uh, when you think about Plato's perfect solids.
I think D6s and D12s are. I mean, D10s are not Plato's perfect solid. D10s are an abomination in the eyes of God and man.
But D4s, D6s, D8s, D12s and D20s, those are Plato's perfect solids, baby.
[00:34:45] Speaker B: That's right.
Should, um, we get to some lessons learned?
[00:34:48] Speaker A: Let's do. Before we keep talking.
[00:34:50] Speaker B: Yes.
Why don't you hit me with one? I've got a couple, but I want to hear what you have to say.
[00:34:56] Speaker A: Uh, I keep saying it. We've said it time after time, but it really helps to base your character on a character that you're familiar with so that you make decisions quickly and story forward instead of mechanics or optimization forward.
[00:35:16] Speaker B: I love that. I want to add lesson, uh, learned number two.
Um, I want to compliment you for saying it's an advanced GMing skill that made me feel really nice, but delete scenes to help the pacing.
Your favorite director films a lot of stuff, and some stuff gets cut from the movie. We cut a fight that would have made sense but would not have made the game better or really probably had a chance of changing where it went, so I omitted it. And, uh, Dusty, I think the session is better than if it would have been in. Right.
[00:35:47] Speaker A: I agree. Lesson learned number three, which is going to sound contradictory to what you just said.
You paused the game at one point to look up rules, and you were nervous about that. But I expressed then and earlier in this recording and again now, my preference, despite what you see in countless YouTube videos and listen to in countless podcasts, my advice is do pause the session and look up the rules. In rpg, the RP is important, but so is the G. Pause the session, look up the rule, and learn the game that you're playing.
[00:36:23] Speaker B: And I want us to give you a special thank you for saying so in the moment. You didn't leave me hanging to think if it was a good idea or not. You said, Tanner, this is a good idea. You should do it. I like it. And so that alleviated a lot of my anxiety. So I want to thank you for that.
[00:36:38] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:36:39] Speaker B: We have a fourth lesson learned. Can you imagine? Usually we do, like, one or two or three, but I actually have a fourth one here.
[00:36:46] Speaker A: Oh.
[00:36:47] Speaker B: Settings force the story. The story we had could only exist because of the setting we had. And your setting might be less or more restrictive. Um, but the types of stories that happen are due to the settings of the stories. Like you said, it's one of the three pillars, story settings or, sorry, character settings. And what's the other one?
[00:37:10] Speaker A: Character settings and plot. Yes.
[00:37:11] Speaker B: Yeah, you can tell I'm not a writer, but setting, I knew setting was one of those three. So the setting is part of the, you know, it's the texture that you're making this from. It's. It's the medium on which you are sculpting a story. And I think sometimes, even if it's a restrictive canvas, it can lead to these stories that can only happen because of the setting.
[00:37:37] Speaker A: I'll offer a fifth lesson learned.
[00:37:38] Speaker B: Oh my God, we're getting out of control.
[00:37:41] Speaker A: We are. When I think about the importance of setting and I think about the main character syndrome that I allowed myself to have and kind of flouting the rules of the setting real quick, here's the lesson learned. Players have fun exploring the setting, letting them mess up, and gently correcting them as they learn the world by experiencing it through immersion. And I mean immersion this way in the sense of language immersion, not, you know, story immersion, is way more fun than lecturing your players for three hours at the start of the session about all the cultural things they'll need to know throughout the session. So thank you, Tanner, for letting me have a little main character syndrome. And I think a good tactic that we might use in the future is maybe the consequence that I suffered is the Daimyo is like, hey, I really appreciate what you did, but I just cannot hire you. You are way too much of a loose cannon, I think. I think there can be quote unquote punishments or quote unquote consequences where I can learn better for the next one shot. But still, you're not just. You're not punishing me with character death for not knowing the setting. You're letting me get to know the setting, which is so much of the fun of the game.
[00:38:50] Speaker B: Mhm. I never thought about it as being part of the fun. I always viewed it as a restriction. But you're right. Like it is a. It is part of the exploration of the setting. So I love that. Do we have a sixth lesson? Hold on.
No, I don't think.
[00:39:04] Speaker A: Yeah, same.
[00:39:05] Speaker B: Okay, that's enough lessons for today. Thank you for listening.
[00:39:09] Speaker A: People call them reviews, postmortems, retrospectives.
We call them lessons learned and we're sharing ours with you.
