In Thunder's Echo (Legend of the Five Rings Quest)

[X] Yes
[X] Spend none

Saving our experience to increase our Reflexes/Agility. Skills are easy to upgrade, traits are not.
 
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I threw my head back and laughed holy shit that was great.

[x] Yes
[X] Etiquette 3
[X] Sincerity 2
[X] Commerce 1


We don't need Kenjutsu 3 quite yet, and we have incoming socializing to do. Let's stick to the 'plan' insofar as we have one, hmm?
e-COMMERCE! Can't forget that! A wonderful dip as we have Intelligence 4 already!
e2-@Maugan Ra seriously that was amazing :D
 
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[X] Yes

NOT participating in this one is worse than anything but outright atrocious perfomance... Like all-rolls-are-1 atrocious.
 
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Just as a note, if we save up our experience and get our Reflexes/Agility up we will advance to the next Insight rank, getting us access to the next Scorpion technique. This will be useful for getting the respect of the Lion in the tournament, and won't reduce our standing with the other Clans. Upgrading skills is also a lot easier than upgrading traits.

Edit: It costs 12 XP to up Reflexes to 3. We have three days to get another 6XP. I think we can do this.
 
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Essentially even if we lose badly. Participating is saying. "I ain't afraid of you Matsu fuckers, bring it" which they will respect a lot more than not saying that, even if we lose.
 
Essentially even if we lose badly. Participating is saying. "I ain't afraid of you Matsu fuckers, bring it" which they will respect a lot more than not saying that, even if we lose.
More than that. Matsu worded it as hard counter to Crane (and everybody else) court fuckery using home advantage. And we are hit twice as hard as we are Bushi and not Courtier, though even Courtier would be expected to participate.

It was worded that way so non-participation is self-inflicted insult. Not loss, not bad showing, but non-participation. "Show me that you have courage or you aren't worth my time" essentially.

PS. If we don't participate we can pack our things and go home.
 
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Just as a note, if we save up our experience and get our Reflexes/Agility up we will advance to the next Insight rank, getting us access to the next Scorpion technique. This will be useful for getting the respect of the Lion in the tournament, and won't reduce our standing with the other Clans. Upgrading skills is also a lot easier than upgrading traits.

Edit: It costs 12 XP to up Reflexes to 3. We have three days to get another 6XP. I think we can do this.

Rank 2 requires 150 Insight. You currently have 127. Raising Reflexes or Agility would raise a ring and put you to 137, which is a fair way off.

I'll be posting a full schedule of all of the officially sponsored events later (probably tomorrow), once I've had a chance to review all of the materials and my notes. It should of course be remembered that you'll have plenty of time to pursue your own interests and appointments between them.
 
Rank 2 requires 150 Insight. You currently have 127. Raising Reflexes or Agility would raise a ring and put you to 137, which is a fair way off.

I'll be posting a full schedule of all of the officially sponsored events later (probably tomorrow), once I've had a chance to review all of the materials and my notes. It should of course be remembered that you'll have plenty of time to pursue your own interests and appointments between them.
Gah, for some reason I thought that we'd get more Insight from upping the trait. :oops:
 
[X] Yes

[X] Plan Not-the-Crazy-One
-[X] Etiquette 3
-[X] Sincerity 2

I'd like to raise at least Kenjutsu to 3 before the tournament (or pick up some Iaijutsu if that's the format), but assuming we won't be time-skipping, we should earn a few more XP in the following days. Since several people have identified us as their preferred contact over the crazy one and the double cursed one, investing in our social skills now should have a fast turnaround. Also, this matches what we've been doing so far: being polite, sociable, and building ties.

I don't know very much about l5r, so if any particular social skill will be more useful here I'll happily change to that. For example would raising investigation be more useful to ferret out info from the people who approach us?

I'm not sold on taking any Commerce, since we have Pale Oak for that expertise.

I'd also prefer to raise other skills to 2s and 3s before taking, for example Caligraphy, unless we're going to have a lot of use for it.



Edit: By the way, if I was looking to educate myself about the l5r rpg, which edition should I be looking at? Which is this quest using?

Edit2: Another thing I was wondering, how seriously do Scorpions treat removing their masks? The wiki seems to make a pretty big deal of them, but we went without in the baths without much comment.
 
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You don't wear clothes to the baths silly.

And we are using 4th edition l5r

And as a rule outside of situations where clothing is not allowed. (Sometimes even then) a Scorpion always wears a mask of some sort.
 
We should definitely attend the tournament- being the quiet and helpful "good cop" doesn't mean we're Phoenix samurai and the impression we're giving to the Crane and Imperials is still fairly martial. Plus if we're too courtier/spymaster than we make our boss look like she's deviating from what the Scorpion want instead of being the "bad cop".
 
But you do, or at least should, wear your face. That was basically the impression I got for the masks at first - that for other than family and close friends our mask is our face. Guess I misunderstood.
It's a custom, not a law. Bayushi Yojiro for example didn't wear a mask until his later years. The closest thing he had to that was that he favored high collars.
 
I'm not sold on taking any Commerce, since we have Pale Oak for that expertise.
The reason I'm voting for it is because, yes, Pale Oak is our in; but to be able to properly utilize him would take a little bit of know how, more likely than not, and I think 1xp for being set the whole Winter Court is entirely worth taking it early. Also to edit: it's a floating bit of xp. We can't upgrade anything currently with it that we want to, so I say we might as well spend it now to get some instant bang for our buck, when we can meet what it is we have for our Social Skill 'goals' with the next batch of xp anyway.
 
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More than that. Matsu worded it as hard counter to Crane (and everybody else) court fuckery using home advantage. And we are hit twice as hard as we are Bushi and not Courtier, though even Courtier would be expected to participate.

It was worded that way so non-participation is self-inflicted insult. Not loss, not bad showing, but non-participation. "Show me that you have courage or you aren't worth my time" essentially.

PS. If we don't participate we can pack our things and go home.

Honestly, I'm tempted towards 'No' because we are trying to do something good cop, bad cop, but what I care more about is the matter of the XP spending. So I'm just going to assume that we're going to run right towards getting into a fight. Honestly, SV usually does, from my experience as a QM. :p

[X] Etiquette 3
[X] Sincerity 2
[X] Commerce 1

Incidentally, what's the scale for honor and glory? IE, like we've established that for a stat, 5 is the peak of human ability and totally badass, and 7 or something is for skills.

So for honor and Glory, do most people have in the double-digits? Is 100 really rare and representative of a super badass, or so high it's never seen, or stunningly common?
 
Honestly, I'm tempted towards 'No' because we are trying to do something good cop, bad cop, but what I care more about is the matter of the XP spending. So I'm just going to assume that we're going to run right towards getting into a fight. Honestly, SV usually does, from my experience as a QM. :p

[X] Etiquette 3
[X] Sincerity 2
[X] Commerce 1

Incidentally, what's the scale for honor and glory? IE, like we've established that for a stat, 5 is the peak of human ability and totally badass, and 7 or something is for skills.

So for honor and Glory, do most people have in the double-digits? Is 100 really rare and representative of a super badass, or so high it's never seen, or stunningly common?
Iirc, for honor the average Samurai is at 3-4. Glory is a measure of how recognizable you are to people at large. The Emperor only has a score of around four because even though people know he exists a lot of people have never seen him.
 
[x] Yes
[X] Etiquette 3
[X] Sincerity 2
[X] Commerce 1


We'll sign up for the tournament, we'll lose early to other Bushi but not embarass ourselves, and we'll show that we're willing to deal with the Matsu on their own level (even though we're not all that good at it). Not signing up would be a terrible mistake. We're Scorpion, and we're making a name for ourselves out of breadth of knowledge. We haven't pretended to be any sort of combat genius, and no one really expects it of us. We can be that guy that someone else beats handily in the first round and not have it reflect badly on us. If we don't show up at all, though, we essentially shame ourselves as a Bushi, and shame our lord by extension. It would be bad.

Etiquette and sincerity are our defensive skills. Commerce... I probably wouldn't have thought to take it myself, but given the situation, one point is worth it - if only to avoid the unskilled penalty. It's cheap, and it lets us know what we're talking about when the topic comes up, so that if and when we wind up in conversation with the Yasuki, we can avoid the obvious traps (and possibly garner a bit of respect as someone who's not completely clueless). I don't think I'd necessarily *ever* go for that second point, but one point is worth it.

Given our role in the delegation, buffing our courtier defensive skills right now is going to be far more useful to us than doing marginally better in a competition we're destined to lose anyway, three days from now. We're Scorpion. The only real question on how we do in that competition is what people think of us when we walk away - and that is far more about the face we present than about how effectively we fight. My plan/expectation is to lose to a Matsu of about our own age in the first round, in a way that will make said Matsu feel at least reasonably satisfied with the fight. Admittedy, if we by some miracle made it to the second round, that would be even better - but I don't expect it, and given what's going on here, I'd rather lose honestly in a fight that's satisfying to the spectators and to our opponent, then win on some sort of cheap play or obnoxious technicality. Among other things, only fighting in one round reduces the chance of injury, and it means that we can be done with the part where we're fighting and move on to the important bits that much sooner.

Also, our reputation-managing task looks like it's coming along nicely. Excellent.
 
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[x] Yes
[x] Etiquette 3
[x] Sincerity 2
[x] Commerce 1


After reading up a little on the rulebooks, I think that it would be a really good idea to try and get Calligraphy (Cipher) and Forgery fairly soon and raise them; apparently, writing letters is a really, really big thing at court. Calligraphy helps with that because it would allow us to write nicely and thus make a good impression that way, and with Cipher we can avoid our messages being easily read and understood by others if we don't wish them to be.
Forgery, on the other hand, would allow us to copy the writing styles of other delegates for purposes of subterfuge and manipulation.

That said, I'm alright with getting them a bit later and upping Commerce for now.
 
[x] Yes
[x] Etiquette 3
[x] Sincerity 2
[x] Commerce 1


After reading up a little on the rulebooks, I think that it would be a really good idea to try and get Calligraphy (Cipher) and Forgery fairly soon and raise them; apparently, writing letters is a really, really big thing at court. Calligraphy helps with that because it would allow us to write nicely and thus make a good impression that way, and with Cipher we can avoid our messages being easily read and understood by others if we don't wish them to be.
Forgery, on the other hand, would allow us to copy the writing styles of other delegates for purposes of subterfuge and manipulation.

That said, I'm alright with getting them a bit later and upping Commerce for now.

I'd rather avoid getting more honor-cost skills than we have real need to. It's worth noting that things like Forgery are contested rolls - and there are people here of *much* higher rank than we are. Having a forgery get caught would do bad things to us, and I really don't think it's worth the level of investment we'd need to ensure that we're safe there.

Let us be judicious with our strategies, and try to limit as much as possible the things we cannot afford to be caught at.

Calligraphy (Cipher) sounds like it might be sort of useful... but who would we be writing letters to? We have no real applicable contacts on the outside (our contacts are almost certainly limited to the Scorpion Clan - and letters won't be making it back there until Winter Court is over anyway). Once we have enough influence with the local heimen, then it may be useful to send them as runners at times... but that hasn't happened yet, and it's a bit of an edge case.

So, I'll agree that getting Calligraphy is a not terrible plan, but I don't think its anything like as valuable as you seem to be saying, and I think we want to avoid forgery altogether for now - at least until we start seeing situations where we might find use in it.
 
Honestly the Game of Letters is pretty amazing in that you can basically just put a letter somewhere and let people pick it up and go from there. Part of the fun is figuring out who the other writer is.
 
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