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.

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!