Strife is one of the most unique mechanics in Legend of the Five Rings Roleplaying. Representing your character’s inner turmoil, strife accumulates throughout a game and can lead your character to an outburst ill-fitting for a samurai. Strife reinforces the core ideas behind Legend of the Five Rings Roleplaying—interpersonal conflict, the push and pull between duty and desire, and more.

Today, designer Max Brooke dives into the creation of strife as a mechanic, and its uses in a campaign!

Max Brooke on Strife in Legend of the Five Rings Roleplaying
Legend of the Five Rings Roleplaying has always rooted itself on a particular set of story ideas. The code that the samurai of Rokugan live by is demanding in the extreme. It tells a samurai to put the will of their sworn lord above what they personally desire, and even what they believe to be morally right.

On top of that, the iconic characters of the story have always been vulnerable in interesting ways. They are frequently uncertain—for all his experience at war and logistics, Akodo Toturi struggles with the pressures of rule at the Imperial court and the incredible responsibilities the Emperor puts on him. For all her brilliance and drive, even Doji Hotaru cannot foresee every outcome of her choices, so even she experiences doubts about the best path for her clan and the Empire. And the player characters are meant to follow in the mold of these figures—and protagonists of samurai genre stories within Legend of the Five Rings Roleplaying and beyond. While the external struggles these characters face create the flow of the story, their inner struggles make them dynamic and engaging. Their vulnerabilities make them relatable, and their emotions act as the catalyst to fuel their development as people.



Emotions in Play
As the team sat down to design Legend of the Five Rings Roleplaying, one major goal was to give the players tools that would help them grapple with the inner struggles of their characters as well as their external circumstances. We knew from talking to longtime players that many people saw subtle interactions, interpersonal drama, and the hopes and fears of individuals as crucial parts of roleplaying in Rokugan. After a significant series of discussions, we decided that this warranted a mechanic: something concrete, to provide a foundation for emotionally driven storytelling in the way that combat rules provide support for action-driven storytelling.

Strife grew out of this concept, and the idea naturally fit with another idea integral to Rokugan: choice and consequence. By placing strife icons on the dice, we sought to create a dynamic in which Roll and Keep had new weight. Instead of choosing the highest valued dice (or, occasionally, the lowest), strife allows the game system emphasize choice and consequences directly in its core interaction. A question a player must ask of their character is often “How much does my character want to succeed now?” rather than “Did they succeed?”

If the action is less important to the character, their player might consider letting them succeed less dramatically or even fail in order to avoid strife. By contrast, if the character is ardent in seeking something, they will naturally be more invested in the outcome—and more likely to accept the strife that comes with pursuing success at any cost. This engages the player to think about their character’s desires in all of their activities.



Strife in Development
Strife changed quite a bit during the early days of design, evolving from a stress-like concept to a broader, more multifaceted experience. It came to represent not just emotions like frustration or fear, but also joy, mirth, and a myriad other feelings. Just as fatigue helps you envision physical exhaustion that you are (hopefully) not experiencing personally, strife is a meter of the emotions your character is feeling that you might not always share.

Additionally, the consequences of strife evolved. While early versions called for outbursts when a character’s strife exceeded their composure, this was revised based on Beta feedback to a system for unmasking. Instead of happening to the character involuntarily, unmasking is always an intentional act, under the player’s control. This proved a much better fit with the system overall, and its focus on player choice in the way that characters’ stories develop.



How to Get the Most out of Your Strife
So, what are the benefits of a mechanic to help track your character’s emotions? People feel emotions at the gaming table already, after all. The answer lies in the fact that your emotions won’t always line up with your character’s feelings—but that disconnect doesn’t mean that understanding your character’s feelings is unimportant to roleplaying! Reflecting on how their emotions differ from yours is actually very important to roleplaying a particular character.

To think about it another way, consider why games distinguish between in-character knowledge and out-of-character knowledge. Creating a layer of separation between your character’s knowledge of the world and your own can help you better understand them as a person. Your character doesn’t know what you do about your individual studies or job—and by contrast, you probably don’t know nearly as much as your character about the specifics of Rokugani culture or the finer points of swinging a sword. When you look at your character's skill list, you see that they have strengths and limitations that are different from your own. This helps you imagine what it would be like to be that person, and how they would go about solving problems.



In the same way, creating a layer of separation between your character's emotions and your own with strife can help give insight into their existence. Choosing dice with strife can indicate that your character cares about something, and high levels of accumulated strife show that your character is reaching their emotional limit. Beyond that, it is often players, and not just the Game Master, who cast their characters’ fictional lives into ruin and disarray with disastrous choices or twists of fate. And this can be dramatic and fun (for you), but might well cause strife for the character. This helps you engage with the idea that your emotional state (excitement at a twist in the story) is very different from your character’s reaction (anger, surprise, or fear) to the events that you orchestrated. And, of course, this can be true for their positive emotions, as well—your character might be elated that they are near to completing their long-awaited vengeance, but you might understand that they will find no peace in bloodshed and feel a sense of sadness for them.

It also provides a mechanic by which to play out characters’ emotional reactions, which likely differ from your own. Part of the joy of roleplaying is considering unusual situations that vary from your daily life, and that can include roleplaying emotional experiences archetypical to the samurai drama, and emotions play a large part in that.



Other People’s Strife
Interpersonal conflicts aren’t only about one person’s emotions, and the way characters behave toward one another because of conflicting emotions is integral to many stories. Much as fatigue gives players a common parlance to discuss battlefield exhaustion and physical vulnerability, strife reflects emotional vulnerability. Learning how much strife a non-player character has accrued tells a player about their emotional state, and using abilities that inflict strife or remove it can affect that state.



In a game where intrigue scenes are so integral that they are listed first among types of conflict, we felt that it was important for characters to affect one another emotionally in tangible ways. The supporting words of a friend can bring someone back from being emotionally compromised, while a cutting insult can drive an enemy to attack at an inopportune time. Stoicism is an important part of samurai films, but so is emotional expression. These sorts of stories often turn on moments when a stoic character allows themselves to express some emotion—or when a smug enemy cracks and exposes their fatal flaw. Control over one’s emotions is founded on the idea that everyone has emotions, and these are the storm often brewing behind the calm façade.

Strife as a Resource
Ultimately, strife is a tool, and like most resources in roleplaying games, it helps the game system and the Game Master communicate more information about the world to the players. Strife conveys information that many games leave purely to roleplaying, because that information is especially important in the particular themes and motifs of Legend of the Five Rings. And even in Legend of the Five Rings, roleplaying still has a very important part to play in the emotional arcs of characters—strife is meant to enable this type of roleplaying and support it, not replace it, just as having a detailed combat system does not replace players narrating their actions.

Max Brooke is a designer for Legend of the Five Rings Roleplaying and a developer for roleplaying and miniatures games including Star Wars Roleplaying, and X-Wing™. His quest for new stories has taken him through medieval literature, giant robot anime, and countless games. It continues to this day.

Legend of the Five Rings Roleplaying invites you to play a firsthand role in the samurai drama of Rokugan, becoming a member of one of the Great Clans and serving your masters as best you can!

Last week, we expanded on the role of the elemental approaches and began the journey of character creation, looking at how you can use the Game of Twenty Questions to discover and establish the attributes of samurai in the Emerald Empire. Today, we'll progress through some more of these questions to see how impactful they are on your character’s abilities, personality, and the stories that you tell.



Schools of Thought
While the first two questions, those of Clan and Family, establish a character’s past, the next set of questions confirms their present. What is your character’s school, and what roles does that school fall into?

Here we move from “where they’re from” into “what they do,” which is the true meat of a character’s place in any roleplaying game.

A character’s role is a less formal descriptor than their school, and it can be thought of as a way to illuminate what a particular school prepares your character to do. Bushi meet enemies with steel, arrow, and fist. Shugenja provide religious counsel and commune with the kami to create spectacular magic. Monks contemplate a simple and introspective life, but their perfection of the spiritual, mental, and physical makes them quite formidable in matters of self-defense. Courtiers provide their lords and comrades with a deft voice and are masters of social encounters. Artisans are scholars, builders, and advisors whose value may be subtle but proves invaluable. And finally, secretive shinobi serve in secret as spies, saboteurs, and assassins.

These roles come into play more descriptively than prescriptively; a school prepares you to fill one or more of these roles, though different schools will do this in different ways.



For example, those of the Crane Clan who have studied at the Doji Diplomat School number among the most adept Courtiers in the realm. Their knowledge in social customs is surpassed only by their ability to maneuver inside these customs for the greatest and most impressive social interactions.

When this school is selected for a character, it increases your Air and Water Rings, as the students of this school are trained to be more cunning and perceptive. Then, the character gains one rank in five of the following skills: Aesthetics, Composition, Courtesy, Culture, Design, Government, or Martial Arts [Ranged]. Doji Diplomats also receive two shuji, or social techniques, including Lady Doji’s Decree, a very potent ability that keeps the Courtier safe from those who would do them harm. (We'll take a closer look at techniques in a later preview!)

Each school also includes an exclusive ability that enhances their ability to perform their primary duty, and for the Doji Diplomat School this ability is called Speaking In Silence. Once per scene, the courtier may add opportunity results to a skill check involving persuading or influencing someone!

But the path of a courtier is not the only path available to samurai of Rokugan.



Students of the Kuni Purifier School serve the Crab Clan as a combination of bushi and shugenja. By combining strength of arms with their communion with the kami of the earth, Kuni Purifiers are trained to battle the Tainted and impure abominations that invade Rokugan from the Shadowlands. By claiming this school, the character buffs their Earth and Fire Rings and chooses to increase three skills from Martial Arts [Melee], Medicine, Sentiment, Skulduggery, Survival, and Theology. If your character belongs to this school, you also begin play with five techniques, a mix of kata, invocations, and rituals.

The Kuni Purifiers’ unique School Ability is entitled Gaze Into Shadow, which lets them change the face of a kept dice showing the strife symbol if they are fighting or interacting with a being they know to be Tainted. The cursed monsters of the Shadowlands are their sworn enemies, and such conflict does not destabilize a Kuni Purifier's emotions; instead, such passion fuels their power.

In all, over 30 schools are described in the Legend of the Five Rings Roleplaying Core Rulebook, with each clan gaining a full range of schools, each themed around that clan’s own interpretation of Bushido.

Ups and Downs
Proceeding down the list of questions, we'll find a section dealing with a character’s advantages and disadvantages. What is your character’s greatest accomplishment? What holds your character back the most in life?



These features for your character are each tied specifically to different Ring Values. Rather than relating to your character’s clan, they have more to do with your samurai as an individual—they are your character's distinctions and passions, adversities and anxieties.

Distinctions are advantages that tie directly into how the rest of the world sees your character, and how your character sees the world. For instance, Indomitable Will is an Earth advantage that espouses your samurai’s stalwart soul in the face of danger. When making an Earth check that represents your samurai performing a feat of internal resolve, such as Meditation to withstand the terrifying visage of a Shadowlands creature, you can reroll two of your dice before you choose which dice to keep.


The mechanical effects of Indomitable Will.

Passions, on the other hand, are interests—places where your character can find joy in the small aspects of life. A passion for Sake couples with the Water ring, and results in the character removing strife after making a check to serve sake or other alcoholic beverages according to custom or to brew your own.

Passing over to disadvantages, adversities tend to be a circumstance or background that causes recurring issues for the character. For instance, Momoku is an inability to fully sense the spiritual world that surrounds and suffuses everything. When a character with Momoku makes a Void check to touch or interpret the spirits, such as a Theology check to request the aid of kami, any die showing a success or explosive success must be rerolled before any dice are kept. However, if you fail this check, you'll gain a Void point, which you can spend later for a variety of benefits.


The mechanical effects of Momoku.

Anxieties are negative emotions that the samurai cannot seem to push out of their minds. They arise in specific circumstances and must be dealt with by the samurai or, potentially, their allies. Cynicism, for example, is a reluctance to give credence to any new or unusual idea, no matter how promising it may look to others. Any time the character must think creatively to solve a problem, such as a Tactics check with a Fire Approach to overcome an enemy’s unusual defenses, the character receives three strife. Still, if this is the first time this has occurred in a scene, your samurai will gain one Void point to compensate.

These advantages and disadvantages are not merely meant to punish or reward mechanical abilities, and players and Game Masters are encouraged to explore the many ways that stories and scenes can develop that will challenge or illuminate these traits inside the narrative.



Rounded Out
While these questions establish the mechanical identity of your character, the rest round them out, breathing life into the samurai you will inhabit. What does your character long for, and how does this impede their duty? The push and pull between your character’s ninjō (their desire) and giri (their duty) are essential to Legend of the Five Rings storytelling, and discovering your characters inner turmoil will impact the game in ways only you can understand.

How would your character’s parents describe them? What does your character think of Bushido? Who has your character learned the most from during their life? Completing the Game of Twenty Questions will leave you with not just a character you are happy with, but gives context to that samurai’s place in the Emerald Empire.

In our next preview, we will examine the different categories of techniques and resources available, as well as the various pieces of equipment available to samurai across Rokugan.

Join us today as designer Max Brooke examines the cross-section of narrative and mechanics in  Legends of the Five Rings Roleplaying for our very first Roleplaying Designer Journal!

Max Brooke on the Dice System of Legend of the Five Rings Roleplaying
During our Legend of the Five Rings Roleplaying Beta, one question we occasionally received was “Why not use Narrative Dice System of Genesys for Legend of the Five Rings?” And it’s a valid question: the Narrative Dice System has a strong track record, and obviously works well for many different genres and game experiences, from science fiction to steampunk to the Realms of Terrinoth.

When we sat down to design Legend of the Five Rings Roleplaying, this was absolutely a topic we also discussed. Designer Katrina Ostrander and I had both developed books using the Narrative Dice System, and Genesys lead developer Sam Stewart was also a major contributor to the meetings—so the NDS perspective was certainly well-represented. However, we decided fairly quickly that we wanted to develop a new dice system for Legend of the Five Rings, for several reasons.



The Long History of Roll and Keep
Roll and Keep has been a fixture of Legend of the Five Rings Roleplaying since its first edition. While we also quickly decided that we wanted to depart from the traditional numerical dice to streamline resolution and add richness of results, much of the appeal of Roll and Keep is not in the dice themselves, but in this unique way of using them. The idea of rolling a set of dice and then choosing a set of the results is fundamentally a very intriguing mechanic. It gives players an unusual amount of control over the outcome of their role, which helps to reinforce key themes of the setting. “Rokugan is a land of choice and consequence,” and we wanted this to continue to be an important mechanical theme in the dice system of Legend of the Five Rings Roleplaying.



In earlier editions of Legend of the Five Rings, this was often illustrated in examples where players might actually choose to fail to preserve their characters’ honor—though this was a rare occurrence in actual practice. Still, even if it wasn’t often exercised, the fact that a player had to actively choose to succeed (or fail) gave them a certain ownership over their character’s fate.

When a bushi looses an arrow or a courtier spreads a rumor, they choose to set something into motion, and the consequences, even of success, are something the character and the player alike have chosen. We felt that this was an element we could explore even further, and so we set out to design dice that would encourage such moments of choice more often, giving players decisions that encourage them to empathize with their characters’ choices, even in a small way.

Different Mechanics Encourage Different Storytelling
Legend of the Five Rings owes a great deal of its roots to cinema—especially the films of Akira Kurosawa and other chanbara (samurai film) creators. However, in many of these films and the stories that inspired them, the personal moments and the subtle emotions that stir beneath are as important as the action and plot twists, if not more so. A look exchanged between two characters often bears vast weight of meaning. Internal emotion, external façade, and the significance to be found in the gulf between the two can be very important.

Of course, most of this will be expressed through roleplaying, but mechanics can serve as reminders and guideposts for roleplaying. Just as earlier iterations of Roll and Keep reminded players of the weight of their choices by making choice a key part of the process, the new edition’s Roll and Keep aims to encourage players to empathize with their characters and look deeply at their inner emotions.



Strife is therefore quite different from threat in Genesys, because it reflects the internality of the character rather than the narrative circumstances around them. Every time a player chooses a die with strife, they are interacting with their character’s emotional state. Their character might appear stoic to everyone looking at them—unmasking is always the player’s choice, after all—but their player can see the swirling emotions beneath in accumulated strife, and can incorporate it into their roleplaying as they think best fits the character.

Even opportunity is more oriented around the character than in the Narrative Dice System. While opportunity can be used to “add details,” in a similar manner to advantage and triumph, it is always a matter of the character noticing (or perhaps being the first to notice) an object, piece of terrain, or feature of a person. It is also linked to the Ring the character used, and gives different effects based on use. Therefore, like strife, it is also a reminder of the character’s individual perspective. A character who often uses Fire opportunity to add details will often spot absences or come up with wild theories—but fail to notice the patch of poisonous plants that another character later identifies by spending a Water opportunity.



The Role of the Five Rings
Another motive to develop a new dice system that we discussed in our early design meetings was to make sure that the Five Rings were appropriately central to a game entitled Legend of the Five Rings Roleplaying. In Legend of the Five Rings: The Card Game, the Five Rings have strong thematic identities, and when designing the RPG, we wanted to mirror this level of commitment to a core concept of the setting.

As a result, we decided that we wanted all five Rings to play a role in the lives of all characters. Instead of linking a character’s core statistics to physical qualities as past editions did (and as Genesys does), we wanted to explore the idea that a character’s Rings would reflect their aptitudes and tendencies in problem-solving rather than traits like Brawn, Agility, Intellect, or Willpower.



Legend of the Five Rings Roleplaying diverges from both its predecessors and from Genesys—each Ring relates to skills in terms of different approaches, and all Rings are useful for all types of character. A bushi (warrior) could specialize in their Fire Ring, reflecting a reliance on swift, overpowering attacks. Or, they might double down on their Water Ring, granting them a mobile and adaptable fighting style. There are circumstantial upsides and downsides to each approach, and some approaches will get little traction when applied to a particular problem. But overall, Rings do not determine which scenes a character can participate in effectively (battle, diplomacy, art, etc) as much as the tactics at which they excel. This goal required a different design for characteristics, skills, and the core mechanic than the ones used by Genesys.

Pacing and Checks
One final reason we settled on in the first design meeting for Legend of the Five Rings Roleplaying was a matter of pacing. In our early design meetings, we already knew that we wanted more results on the dice than binary success and failure, as this played well into our plans to develop and enhance Roll and Keep, often pairing the best results with results a player might sometimes choose to drop. Checks in Genesys are very information-rich, but this also necessitates that they occur less often. As a result, Genesys is quite restrictive about what calls for a check—and it is extremely rare for a character to be allowed to make more than one check in a turn.



Katrina suggested that the pacing for Legend of the Five Rings Roleplaying should be faster than Genesys, but still maintain a degree of informational richness absent from binary success/failure results. This came from her many years of playing previous editions of Legend of the Five Rings, and everyone agreed that it fit with our experiences in the long-running campaign she had run for us in the prior year. Compared with many RPG settings, it is much more common for PCs to undertake short activities solo—from duels, to minor intrigue scenes, to constant clandestine snooping on other PCs by the Scorpion character. However, with results as deep as the ones produced by the Narrative Dice System, it would be harder for GMs to allocate more than a single check for these sorts of micro-encounters. Sam Stewart suggested that a result (eventually strife) could result in resource depletion rather than more narrative results.

By having a lower GM load on each individual check, Legend of the Five Rings accommodates more rapid checks than Genesys, allowing for more back-and-forth in the sorts of micro-encounters that occur naturally based on the conceits of the setting.



The Right Tool for the Job
Each time a team sets out to design a new roleplaying game, they consider their options carefully. Even in games defined mostly by player imagination and shared fun, it is important to consider how a system runs, what behaviors it encourages, and how best these align with the sort of story it is trying to emulate. A system can be a very valuable guide for even experienced GMs and players. The Narrative Dice System and Roll and Keep are both systems that we’re very excited to continue to develop in years to come!

Tales of harrowing tribulation, perplexing mysteries, and glorious battle do not arise of their own volition; they are born of deeds—from those who endure what others cannot, learn what others do not, and brave what others will not. Before your adventures across Rokugan begin in the Legend of the Five Rings Roleplaying Game, you will make a series of choices to describe not only your character’s statistics and powers, but also their personality and place in the world.

Whether you have a firm concept in mind—a temple guardian who strictly follows his clan’s beliefs, or a contemplative monk whose curiosity sometimes gets the better of her—or you’re starting from scratch and exploring as you build, your character comes alive by answering the Game of Twenty Questions. What’s more, character creation is one of the key differences between the Legend of the Five Rings Roleplaying Core Rulebook and the Beginner Game!

Join us today as we take our first look at character creation in Legend of the Five Rings Roleplaying!



Approaching the Elements
Before we get into questions and answers, first we must explore the elements that compose every character. In the Legend of the Five Rings Roleplaying Game, characters are not defined with stats representing their strength, or their quickness, or their knowledge. Instead, the foundation of your character lies in their worldview and personality. The five core attributes, or Ring Values, align with the power of the Five Rings. Thus, your character’s traits are listed as Air, Earth, Fire, Water, and Void, each with a numerical score.

Each element stands for different traits that may be more or less present in your character:


Air: Subtlety, cleverness, shrewdness



Earth: Discipline, toughness, measured action



Fire: Passion, creativity, quickness



Water: Adaptability, observation, trustworthiness



Void: Enlightenment, spirituality, awareness



These connections start to come into play when you use a skill check to overcome a challenge. The appropriate ring depends on your character’s attitude and intentions, which means that similar or identical tasks can be approached in myriad ways.

For example, a courtier may be attempting to moderate a trade negotiation between two parties. If she genuinely wishes to see an equitable outcome, she may use a Water approach, while attempting to manipulate one side into accepting a disadvantageous contract becomes an Air approach. A noble general uses Earth to maintain discipline and order among her troops, while she would use a Fire approach to rouse her warriors’ hearts to bravery and glory on the dawn of battle.

As you create your character over the Game of Twenty Questions, your Ring Values change to reflect the history, personality, and goals of your character!



Answer the Questions
The first questions of character creation are some of the most important, reflecting your character’s core identity. For example, as your very first question, which guides all other essential choices, is your character’s clan. Are they an enigmatic Scorpion? A diplomatic Crane? A noble Lion? Your character’s clan dictates a great deal of your character’s story, both past and future. How others react to them, how their education shaped them, what ties they have to clan and family—all of these things and more return directly to the choice of clan.

Appropriately, your clan choice is also the first facet of your character that affects your Ring Values. For instance, a Crab Clan character will receive a higher Earth Ring and Fitness skill, as befitting a member of a clan renowned for toughness and resolve. A Phoenix Clan member instead gains an increased Void Ring and Theology skill, reflecting the meditative training all Phoenix receive as an essential part of their culture.

While all members of a particular clan start with the cornerstone of their clan bonuses, every subsequent question adds new layers, and further exploration into your character can cause significant (and interesting!) divergences.



Family Ties
For the second question, you must delve deeper into your character, and decide what family your character belongs. Each clan contains numerous large families, who all serve the clan and Empire in different ways.

The Lion’s Matsu family, for instance, are legendary warriors, fierce as they are loyal, while the Shiba family serving the Phoenix clan entwine their martial training with a close understanding of the mystical shugenja they protect. Both families are traditionally bushi, but each see their role and duty in different ways.

Like the choice of a clan, the family your character comes from also confers attribute benefits. A Dragon Clan member of the Kistuki family would have been raised around courtiers and magistrates, so this character would gain increased Government and Sentiment skills, as they have a better understanding of the workings of the courts and the nuances of interpersonal communication. Additionally, the character chooses between an increased Air Ring or Water Ring, reflecting a tendency toward cleverness or understanding.

The choice of family also influences what material goods your character begins with, as it is the first question that confers koku, the coin of the realm. Even within a clan, this amount can vary. The Unicorn Clan’s Ide family are known as prolific merchants and courtiers, and thus provide nine koku to new characters, while their Iuchi family of priests and shugenja place a much lower value on material goods, claiming only five koku.



Small Pieces of a Greater Whole
While clan and family are core parts of a character’s identity, they only answer the biggest and most blanket questions. In our next preview, we’ll dig even deeper into the Game of Twenty Questions to see how they will flesh out details about your characters that you may have never considered—even as a decades-long veteran of roleplaying games. Conversely, if Legend of the Five Rings Roleplaying is your first roleplaying experience, these questions can serve you for a lifetime in the hobby!

Pre-order your copy of the Legend of the Five Rings Roleplaying Game (L5R02) and Game Master’s Kit (L5R05) at your local retailer or online through our website today.

In the land of Rokugan, adventure awaits you. War, intrigue, and arcane mysteries will beset your journey, but you are not without power. In Legend of the Five Rings Roleplaying, your samurai’s skills, ambition, and honor will guide them through tumultuous times toward victory and glory, but not without cost or opposition.

Whether mighty bushi, cunning courtier, or mystical shugenja, skill checks are the fundamental interactions you and your character will have with the game itself to determine the course of your adventures, and provide a path to unexpected journeys!

Join us today as we explore how skill checks are made in Legend of the Five Rings Roleplaying and how they will help players and Game Masters shape stories together.



Finding the Path
Like most roleplaying games, Legend of the Five Rings Roleplaying uses dice to determine the success or failure of the tasks that you and other characters are trying to accomplish. These objectives could be very small and immediate (escape a room, convince a guard to let you pass unhindered) or huge and incredibly aspirational (such as finding the original text of an ancient prophecy in a forgotten temple atop a faraway mountain). But just as small steps lead to great adventures, individual skill checks are the foundation for determining your characters’ progress and how the game’s world reacts to their efforts. After all, a skill check in Legend of the Five Rings Roleplaying does not merely mark success or failure, but also what turns of fate may support or hinder an adventure as a whole.



While you're playing the game, the Game Master will determine when a skill check may be appropriate. A character walking across a bridge, even briskly, would not require a skill check, as this is a mundane activity. However, if your character is chasing or evading an opponent, or attempting to cross the bridge as a flash flood is washing away the support beams, then we have a consequence for failure and rolling the dice for a skill check is relevant.

The Flow of Fate
Every skill check in Legend of the Five Rings Roleplaying follows a similar path: determine the approach, roll the dice and choose which to keep, and interpret the results.

The method and attitude that your character exhibits toward the task is called their elemental approach. The approach is relevant because many actions can be accomplished in different ways, depending on the character’s personality and intentions. For example, you and Game Master may decide that your sword master is currently relying on precision and studied discipline in their strikes, which means the elemental approach is Air. A bushi whose sword is meant to be a ferocious talon, cowing their opponent with a combination of overwhelming speed and passion for battle, is using the approach of Fire.



After determining your character's approach, you'll gather the dice that you need. For your chosen elemental approach, you'll look at your character's ability in that ring and grab that number of black six-sided dice—ring dice. Then, your character’s training in the specific task is applied and you'll take white twelve-sided dice (called skill dice) equal to your skill number. These dice are all rolled together—but you can only keep a number of dice equal to your character’s ring score, which can lead to some tough choices.



Each die offers a number of symbols that all represent different things:

 Success: This symbol counts as one success toward achieving your goal. Some checks will only require one success for relatively simple tasks, while more difficult tasks can require more successes.


Explosive Success: Not only is this symbol counted as one success, but you may also roll an additional die to increase your chances of a better result. On difficult challenges, this can allow your character to overcome truly formidable opposition.

 Opportunity: Opportunity doesn't count as a success for the action, but it is a narrative tool representing a beneficial turn of fate. With opportunity, the character may notice something about their surroundings, or add a positive narrative twist that can make their successes even greater or their failures salvageable.

 Strife: The other side of the narrative coin is strife, which indicates unchecked emotion and inner turmoil that can destabilize your character. These emotions are not necessarily good or bad, merely strong. A character’s mounting strife may cause them to act out in rage against an adversary just as easily as it may cause them to abandon decorum and show their open affection for another person.



Once the dice have been rolled, you'll choose to keep a number of dice equal to your relevant ring score! Sometimes this decision is easy, but if multiple symbols appear together on a single die, the choice can be more difficult. You may need to choose whether to accept success with increased strife, or perhaps balancing success with increased narrative opportunity.

Once the dice have been chosen and the final results tallied, the player and Game Master describe the results together! A sword may find purchase in an opponent’s armor which makes future attacks more deadly, a merchant may assents to a deal but holds a grudge against the character, or a shinobi finds a familiar alley to hide in as her enemies waste time searching in vain.

A Rooftop Chase
When you put it all together, a skill check may look a little like the following:

Kat wants to have her character, Sakura, leap from one rooftop to another while pursuing a suspicious figure fleeing the scene of a crime. She describes her character’s reckless approach to the task—catching up is the most important thing right now!



The GM decides that since she’s trying to overwhelm a foe with a burst of speed, the check will use Sakura’s Fire Ring and Fitness skill. A rooftop chase is already an impressive feat, and the layer of snow across each surface isn't making anything easier, so the GM determines that Kat will need to roll three successes to achieve her goal. Sakura has a Fire Ring value of three, so Kat picks up three ring dice, along with the single skill die that represents her meager Fitness skill. After rolling, Kat views her results and sees one die showing a success, a second showing an opportunity, a third showing a strife and an oppurtunity, and her skill die showing an explosive success.

Kat must now choose three dice to keep. Kat needs three success symbols to succeed, but currently only has two. However, if she keeps the explosive success, she gets to roll an additional die, which may give her the final success that she needs! She chooses to avoid strife and keeps the dice showing success, explosive success, and opportunity. Kat rolls an extra skill die for the explosive success, and gains an additional success and a strife!



Kat records her newly gained strife on her character sheet, inching her closer to an innapropriate outburst. Kat then resolves her opportunity, deciding the chase has shaken her target, making him easier to question later. Finally, Kat resolves her three success symbols, which allows Sakura to leap across the gap and tackle her target!

Finding Center
At the core of the mechanics of dice and skill checks is the advancing story that you and your friends are telling together. The goal isn’t to say “yes” or “no,” but to ask “why” and “how.” By fleshing out the narrative of the actions rather than just declaring the actions themselves, players and Game Masters together tell a story of ideals, emotions, and purpose. Honor and glory await!

Stay vigilant for future previews for Legend of the Five Rings Roleplaying where we’ll examine the process of creating interesting and evocative characters, the world they inhabit, and the stories they’ll tell!

Find your center with the Legend of the Five Rings Roleplaying Core Rulebook (L5R02), available now for pre-order from your local retailer or our website!