I’ve been preparing to post about my “Alternative 20 Questions” for character creation, but before I do that, I need to set some new ground rules that are used in my version of the game. Status has changed only slightly. Glory and Infamy, on the other hand, not only got the most changes, but also became a vehicle for character advancement and greater connection to their Household.
Status
Status is mostly defined by your Social Class, which puts you into a particular bracket. For example, the head of a Major Clan family like the Matsu will have Status 8,0, with her direct family and the lords that serve in her court directly inhabiting the spectrum of 7,9 to 6,1. Which specific value they have will be derived from how much trust she puts in them and how willing she is to act on their counsel. So, for example, if the Matsu Daimyo listens to her consort’s counsel in most matters, the consort would have Status 7,9, while the other members of her court would be below that.
Obviously, this isn’t a magical number that the character themselves would know, but is a representation of the actual level of authority and respect given to a character by their immediate hierarchical superior. So, if a samurai is supposed to be the leader of a specific group, but their superior keeps listening to some other person, then that person has the greater Status. You can bet that this is a big source of conflict within samurai clans and the justification some use to jockey for position and prestige.
And I really meant “immediate hierarchical superior” in the previous paragraph. Ignoring the hierarchical structure in Rokugani society is a big deal. A lord going over the heads of a vassal to listen to the counsel of their servants signals to the vassal that they are not worthy and their station should go to the servant instead. On the other hand, a servant speaking out of turn signals that they don’t respect the organization of society as a whole and have an inflated sense of their own importance. In all of these cases, the vassal would be losing Honor for being disrespected and for not keeping their servants in line.
By these rules, a samurai can never have less than 1,0 Status, even if they are rōnin. A rōnin has Status 1,0, greater than any non-samurai, but still lower than even the lowest samurai. Below is a summarized Status table, ignoring some “alternative” power structures like magistrates, monastic orders, peasants and such. We’ll only focus on the most direct feudal structure of samurai, for now.
Glory and Infamy
Glory and Infamy, in comparison to the minor adjustments made to Status, are heavily changed from the Core Rulebook. Firstly, they are not a personal measure anymore, but associated with the Household the character belongs to. The Household is the family unit that lives under the same roof. It includes parents, still-living grandparents of the head of the household, uncles and aunts, even cousins and spouses that married in. Depending on how strict you want your game to be, you could even include the servants of the family in this definition. If a son does something terrible, the entire family is supposed to set things right or suffer the Infamy.
Secondly, instead of being bound to the same scale as Status, Glory and Infamy are free to infinitely increase and will almost never come down. Terrible actions that would make a character lose Glory makes them win Infamy instead. Situations like “idleness” or simply losing a duel are ignored, we’re discarding those changes in Glory. Infamy, like the new Glory, never decreases except with very few exceptions. Once an action is done that marks your family history negatively, it's hard to clear its stain…
Both Glory and Infamy are only accrued for actions that are witnessed by others or if you can provide proof of them after the fact.
The Glory Rank of a character’s household is used to determine many social situations in which Status is not the definitive factor. For example: at a banquet where two characters with similar Status must determine their seats, the samurai from a household with greater Glory is expected to sit closer to the lord. A samurai from a glorious family can expect to be given more important duties and rewards for their service.
Finally, every time the character’s household hits a new rank of Glory, they get 1 xp. Samurai from glorious families are expected to be paragons of their trade, be it war, politics or religion. This includes new character creation: an heir born to a great family will have more resources for their training, great masters will seek to serve under a prestigious family and plenty of other generational advantages that members of nobility can expect will be reflected on this extra XP.
New Skill
While I mostly disagree that L5R has a “skill bloat issue”, that affirmation is true in a few areas. Samurai are expected to use Lore: Clan to know things about their clan, Lore: Bushido to assess another samurai’s Honor, Lore: Heraldry to recognize mon, Lore: History to know… well, history. Way too many skills to simply know things they are supposed to know automatically.
For that reason, I collapsed all those different lores into a single skill, presented below. At least 1 rank of this skill is given for free to all characters of the Samurai caste, when using my alternative 20 questions.
Lore: Samurai (Intelligence or Awareness)
Sub-type:
Lore skill.
Emphases:
Clans, School tags, Recognize, Honor Assessment.
Description:
This skill provides knowledge about all kinds of subjects appropriate for a member of the samurai class to know. The closer the subject is to the character, the easier it is to know certain things. Simply having a point in this skill would let a character automatically know what Bushido is and which virtues it is composed of, the general history of Rokugan, the Great Clans and its Great Families, their mon and things like that, without even necessitating a roll.
When using this skill with the Intelligence attribute, it works as a traditional Lore skill. Things relating to the character’s lineage like their own Clan, Family, School and such are also mostly automatic successes, with things from their own clan but other families or schools being a TN 10 or 15 at most. Things start getting complicated when you’re trying to know information about more distant clans: Call a raise to know information about a neighboring Clan, two raises for clans that don’t share a border with yours, with one additional raise if they are a Minor Clan. Call an additional raise to know about information from Schools from a different tag than your own.
The Recognize skill allows you to identify samurai and their heraldry. The TN is set as above, but you subtract the target’s Glory and Infamy from it. You can get free raises to identify samurai that have particularly distinctive traits, like a distinctive birth-mark, an exotic pet or things like that.
The Honor Assessment emphasis allows you to discern the Honor of another samurai, using this skill with the Awareness attribute. You must either have observed them for a few hours or during a particularly emotional moment and achieve a TN equal to (the target’s Etiquette skill Rank x3)+(the target’s Awareness x5).
Raises:
1 Raise to know information about a neighboring Great Clan;
1 Raise to know information about a school with a different tag than yours;
2 Raises to know information about a distant Great Clan or a neighboring Minor Clan;
3 Raises to know information about a distant Minor Clan;
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