Hello From the Other Side (Wrap Up)

[GhostWolfe]

Lessons Learnt

When I was designing/writing the Festival of Roses, I had a number of rough goals in mind. The basic design was a sandbox: a game setting in which I could allow players freedom to interact how they wished.

To combat boredom, I wanted to throw a few toys in the sandbox. These took the form of providing one or two Events for each game day, as well as some plot hook-shaped objects for people to run with. The idea behind these hooks was to allow the players to react to them, offering guidance and assistance as required.

It didn’t work.

It seems that this was a little too freeform. I know the feeling. When faced with too much choice (e.g. Nar Shaddaa’s “well, what do you want to do?” or Minecraft… just all of Minecraft) I tend to become somewhat paralysed. I am not a creative person, at least in the sense of ideas, they don’t come to me. I can’t call it a complete failure, however. I wanted to see how players and characters would react, and I got that, but I think things would have gone much smoother if they’d simply been run as abstracted Events.

Another of my goals was to provide some balance between combat-oriented events and non-combat events. I had the “story”, which was designed to utilise Intrigue skills to investigate, but lacked the same immediate rewards that the Tourney displays provided (in terms of competitiveness and Fame rewards). I decided to add some conventional events for the Intrigue-oriented, but this turned out to be harder than anticipated, as the same eating/dancing/being polite quickly became stale and repetitive.

I did come up with some activities that would have been suitable, but unfortunately too late to really work them into things. Midway through the Festival, I did a little more research, a little more thinking about the mechanics, and I started to formulate some ideas of more mental challenges that I could provide. However, a combination of the game having already started, and a certain sense of futility ultimately brought me to the decision to keep to the shorter timeline.

Something that came up on Discord was my feeling that I was spending a lot of time ‘tutoring’ players on the mechanics. Which was a terrible responsibility to entrust me with. To date, I have still never engaged in combat in L5R, and I had never done either Intrigue or Combat in the system I was supposed to be running.

When I wasn’t entirely forgetting things (armour penalties, injury penalties), I was trying to make sure that I was laying things out relatively clearly. Hindsight being what it is, however, I think I would have used a stricter template-style approach to combats and intrigues, something to make it simpler for players to copy, with enough information that they could generally infer things like damage without waiting for the opponent. The joust was getting there, template-wise.

[GhostWolfe]

So Many House Rules

The deeper and deeper I delve into the Rulebook, the more I hate it. The way it’s laid out is chaotic (take the Advanced Combat rules at the end of the Combat chapter for example), with a mish-mash of strange wording and inconsistencies. The Intrigue chapter includes a reference to “Base Will”, but that is the only use of the term in the entire book.

What troubles me most about house ruling, and having so many of them, is ensuring that all the players are on the same page about things. It’s difficult enough to be across an entire ruleset, without having to remember all the tweaks and adjustments.

This is something that I will spending far more time on than can be considered reasonable over the next few months. I want to deliver something more cohesive than a series of rulings, that will be simple and provide everyone with the same basic resource. (Ha ha, kill me now).

[GhostWolfe]

Who Was Leana Horpe?

Leana Horpe was initially concieved somewhat differently, and not just in spelling of her name...

Laena Horpe, Status 3
Non-canon Character
Lady-in-waiting to Lysa and Rayley, Laena accompanied Rayley to the Reach ahead of her wedding, and has remained at Grassfield Keep since. Though not as attractive as the two Ladies Meadows, she does have quite striking green eyes.

Originally, the idea was that she would be found at the bottom of the steps with a broken neck. It was as the Scene was running that I decided to add in the stab wound. I had two reasons for this: to give the players observing something to do, and to really underline that it had not been a simple accident.

Unfortunately, this proved to be too effective, with the characters focused intently on how she was killed, but not why. Downgrading her to handmaiden was the act of a desperate GM unable to deter her players from thinking they were Mystery Inc. I suspect that this was probably related to the mental switching of gears from being Samurai, honour-bound to do everything in their power to bring a killer to justice, to noblefolks in someone else’s home.

This is one of the major points where more structure/event-style would have been helpful.

[GhostWolfe]

The Story

Most of you put together most of the pieces OOC.

Around three months before the Festival, Lysa Meadows and Harben Varner engaged in a brief affair. It was initiated and ended by Lysa, who brought things to a halt when her engagement to Olymer was announced. Though both knew it was only a passing fancy, Harben still found himself somewhat enamoured, taking to wonder on occasion how things might have been different.

By the time the Festival rolled around, Lysa was beginning to feel the first effects of her trysts with the young knight: she had fallen pregnant. It was Leana, the most gossipy and nosey of the Ladies’ Meadows handmaidens who noticed first, and for that she found herself dead at the foot of those steps before she could spill the beans. Lysa was innocent of that crime, but had her suspicions.

Fearing that she couldn’t conceal her symptoms until the end of the Festival, Lysa took Moon Tea, fortuitously just prior to her betrothed’s arrival at Grassfield Keep. She rid herself of the child, though the process was not pleasant. This was not the end of the matter, however.

Acting to prevent any further potential disruption to what was, quite frankly, an exceptional match for the Lady Meadows, the same person who killed Leana attempted to take Harben’s life. Through the use of blackmail and intermediaries, they had a dose of Tears of Lys, an extremely rare and deadly poison from across the Narrow Sea, fed to the young knight.

Lastly, they disposed of the evidence in the form of an eye-catching “gift”, planted on the man-at-arms, Kevith Uller. This could have gone a number of ways, depending on Kevith’s reaction to the appearance of the knife (incidentally a near-ideal fencing weapon, now locked in the Grassfield Keep Treasury).

[GhostWolfe]

Those NPCs

In the pbp setting there is a lot less “fighting”, be it weapons or words. There are no lesser mobs to grind for XP, no dungeon crawling. So I set about creating Villains and Heroes to challenge the players on their own level. It’s something I’ve used before, but always against players who were better at building characters than me.

Another way of looking at it is to hark back to the Orokos that killed Chi-Pu at Dark Edge Village as a sort of benchmark. I definitely wasn’t aiming for deadly, but rather for something that could not be disposed of in a single roll (see this Intrigue for an example of a one-roll win).

The NPCs were built in a variety of ways, from the ‘misdirected’ Rayley Meadows, whose good stats derive from esoteric Specialities (such as Embroidery); to the ‘run of the mill’ Lord Bromley or Maester Hubert, who were given an appropriate spread of stats for their role, to the ‘focused’ Harben Varner, whose only dream was the joust.

The Rulebook provides loose guidelines as to how difficult an NPC should be. A “moderately” challenging Schemer should not have an Intrigue Defense higher than 12; the highest any of the NPCs - even the Big Bad - had was an 11. This is considered a twice-per-story level challenge, the guidelines allow for the major antagonist to have a Defense as high as 15.

By the same token, combat-oriented characters are benchmarked at 9, 12, and 15 Combat Defense. Kenway’s Defense of 12 met the mid-level, and was the highest of the NPCs… apart from one. The infamous cutpurse was born out of Kylie’s cohort, Claryssa. As Kylie was building the character, I offered some suggestions. Not all of them were taken, so I tried them out on the Cutpurse. Turns out some Benefits (like Acrobatic Defense or Berserker) are just too powerful to be outfitted on NPCs. Mark that one down to learning.

The guidelines for Jousting are a little more precise, specifying a build of Animal Handling 4 or 5, Ride 2B, Fighting 5, and Spears 2B or 3B for the “champion”, the final round contestant for characters to face off against. This build makes for a better jouster than the most famous denizens of Westeros, but at a cost.

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NAME        AH(Ride) Fight(Spears) Status(TK) Stats at: 2  3  4  5
Ser Harben   5  3B     4     3B       3   2B           11  4  2  1
Ser Jaime    4  1B     5     2B       4   1B           10  2  5  1
Ser Yohn     4  2B     5     2B       5   2B            8  6  3  2 
Ser Loras    4  2B     5     2B       4   2B           11  3  3  1

Even Ser Loras (who, for some reason has 40xp invested in Language), is not so narrowly focused in jousting, and for Harben, this showed in the Grand Melee, and would have been even more painfully obvious had he needed to roll for anything that wasn’t based on Fighting or Animal Handling.

All of that being said, however, the guidelines provide no information for scaling (as your player’s develop their characters), making the guides somewhat ineffective.

The big difference I’ve noticed between the Player Characters and the Narrator Characters is that I gleefully loaded up many of them with Drawbacks and Benefits, and left them with just one Destiny Point to spend. On one hand, this hopefully provided players with some live examples of Benefits they may not have considered; on the other, I’m disappointed that I didn’t get to showcase the variety of Drawbacks the NPCs have (such as Lorent’s ‘Trusting’ which imposed a blanket reduction to his Intrigue Defense, or Elwood’s ‘Haughty’).

[GhostWolfe]

Speaking of Jousting

For the most part, I’m happy with how the adjusted rules played. I don’t feel that the removal of the -1D for Charging biased rolls towards higher degrees of success and, while the jousts might have gone on longer if people were missing each more often, I feel that the roll versus TN is fairly nicely balanced.

That being said, despite the lowered damage, far too many competitors took falls in the joust, opting to be defeated instead of taking on Injury and Wound penalties. Even in the Championship bout, with no other pending rolls, the joust lasted only a single pass. I expected people to throw jousts in the early rounds, when characters might have a better chance working their way up from the lower bracket, but as the field narrowed, people continued to simply fall down.

One of the biggest sources of confusion around this game is the Wound/Injury Mechanics. It’s as if the game devs couldn’t decide whether they wanted combat to be deadly or not. With no mechanics for overflow, poorly understood/remembered Destiny rules, and the simply awful recovery rules, I cannot really fault anyone for opting to just DFO (done fall over).

Please enjoy the following meaningless numbers:

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Jousts won due to 0 Health:  50% (7)
Jousts won due to unseating: 43% (6)
Jousts won by adjudication:   7% (1)

Highest # of passes: 5 (7% / 1 joust)
Lowest # of passes:  1 (64% / 9 jousts)

Total # of passes:    23 (46 Fighting Tests)
Total strikes missed: 17 (37%)
1 degree:   9 (31% of hits | 20% of Tests)
2 degrees: 12 (41% of hits | 26% of Tests)
3 degrees:  3 (10% of hits |  6% of Tests)
4 degrees:  5 (17% of hits | 11% of Tests)

[GhostWolfe]

The Future?

GhostWolfe will (perhaps) return in Roses 2: Wedding of Roses, with a brand new sidekick!

Truthfully, the biggest barrier to running a second game will be Iron Hearts 3. At the risk of sounding sour because I dropped, IH2 did incredible damage to this game. Competing for player attention while combating burnout, disinterest, and apathy put the entire Festival on tenterhooks throughout its runtime.

The second biggest challenge is time. With a potential 10 months until the next Roses game, a lot could potentially happen. As a general rule, I am loathe to make commitments that far into the future.

The last hurdle worth mentioning is players. Over the course of the game, I’ve been keeping notes on where, when, and with whom characters were interacting. While I enjoyed having a small group, and feeling that I was working with most of you on a personal level, I also feel that nine players just might not be enough to keep everyone entertained, not in this format.

Running the Festival of Roses has certainly given me a lot to think about. If any of you enjoyed yourselves enough that you’d play again, I think I can call that success. Thank you.