Been reading the Legend of the Five Rings 4thEd corebook just recently, starting to think that Bushido World (a hypothetical DW hack I am now proposing :/) would be pretty frikken awesome. One of the things that often turns players off not-Japan settings is the fear that they’ll either have to learn a whole different ethical and cultural system or else ignore it and lose a lot of the flavour that makes it fun in the first place, but with the Moves structure you can build the core setting assumptions into the basic moves, allowing the mechanics to do a lot of the legwork of proper characterisation for you. In fact, you could create a core of seven moves based on the principles of bushido that would really help to get across the tone of the setting, e.g.;
Sincerity
When you speak with forthright conviction roll +Cha. On a hit, you are seen as both sincere and don’t cause offence. On a 7-9 pick one;
1. You are sincere but cause offence.
2. You cause no offence but are seen as a toady or a fool.
That’s a great idea! One of the things that intimidates me about mythic- or not-Japan (or in fact any culture not based in the Western or Classical tradition) settings is a feeling that I ought to be true to the history and myth, so we’re not just playing D&D in lacquered armour and straw hats. Moves that were specifically designed to teach the setting (and allow players to define it) would go a long way in opening that door.
Adam Drew Yeah, my thoughts exactly. If you have an Advanced Move for, say, calling someone out in a duel and it begins with “When you declare a duel, petition your Daimyo for the right or roll +Hon” (+Hon in this example being a proposed Honour stat) then that unpacks a lot of information about how that particular aspect of the setting (duelling) is handled.
L5R is just begging to be rewritten as an Apocalypse World hack since:
– the rings pretty much map directly to AW stats.
– L5R has a tonne of specialised schools but only really has four types of classes: bushi, courtiers, shugenja and monks.
You build four core playbooks then an advanced move or two for each warrior school or magic school or secret psychological technique etc. and you basically have a rules-light, balanced system that can cover the whole of L5R!
Alex Norris Perhaps you could have separate front and back pages for Clan/Class and School. ‘Family’ replaces Race as all L5R characters are going to be human most of the time. So you take, for example, Dragon Bushi as the front page, tick ‘Kitsuki’ for your family and then print the Mirumoto School page on the back, Lots of granularity there.
Matthew Keevil: this is why I think L5R World wouldn’t work as a DW hack – you’d have to have a minimum of five moves per class per school, which would be a stupidly high number of moves.
Apocalypse World works much better as a base because each playbook is 6-8 moves plus a special. This means you can have 3-4 moves that are specific to one of the four classes, 2-3 moves that are specific to a school/tradition, and a special per family (per clan isn’t granular enough since there’s stuff like the Yogo).
Then you have the five rings as the five stats, and you’re pretty much set – that’s a whole lot less work than converting things to a DW-style class system.