The Edition War! (Please Don't.)

[Shiba Raizo]

All right, so, I'm pretty handily in the "5E ain't my cuppa" camp.

But rather than rant about how it sucks and how anyone who plays it instead of 4E is a fool, I want to be a bit more... clinical about this.


5E Character creation is quicker and more elegant- that's pretty much impossible to deny. Way less number-crunching in this stage, and loopy shit like my bushi knowing a kiho would have been very hard to replicate in 4E (note, though, that the kiho was the result of random chance). I will note however, that the number crunching hits with a vengeance pretty much the second you're done making the character.

5E bolts a lot of fiddly mechanics to roleplaying choices- and I'm not talking about Strife, I'm talking about "trying to find ways to use your Passion or Anxiety in a given scenario." That said, the Strife mechanic seriously rewards mudman builds like I ended up with for Raizo.

About Strife... it presumes that every single roll you make should be something of deep importance. Which is fine and easy to handwave in, say, fluffy sparring threads, but in events where the rolls pile up, hoo boy, it could be brutal.

Where a 4E character with low Awareness could still be played as having more or less whatever personality they want, 5E- by having way fewer skills- severely punishes low attributes... assuming you're ever called upon to roll them

Every Ring covering so many goddamn things makes the character build really abstract.

I like having every ring having an application to every skill. That said, it's REALLY demanding of GM bandwidth in a way a large PbP punishes.

Bidding farewell to called raises? Not gonna lie, I'm okay with that. Calling Raises sucks- especially when it's up to the player to determine how many to call- when the GM goes, "that takes two Raises," you're basically just shooting for a more difficult TN, and that's livable. But there's no denying that using Opportunities for flair is a more fun approach, and getting to even fail with flair is something 4E and prior R&K incarnations really didn't allow.

5E plays absurd favorites with school equipment. Like, just laughable.

There are a lot of "secret bid" mechanics that almost certainly work better on tabletop than online.

Those dueling rules are an absolute trainwreck.

In general, I think 5E would work quite well in a real-time small group session- large online games with time zones keeping real-time interaction to a relative minimum punish its failings while diminishing its strengths.

[Kitsu Moshumaru]

I'm also team 4e, and most of what Raizo says is correct.

I'd rather raises than opportunities, though, and have much worse things to say about 5e which I won't to be civil and because I'm tired.

[Susaki Tanabe]

I'm a big fan of opportunity and rather dislike (maybe hate?) The raise system. So that part of 5e feels really nice to me. Overall I think both games do different things well and serve different functions