FFG: New Legend of the Five Rings FAQ Out Now
Fantasy Flight Games has released a new tournament, FAQ, and Errata for Legend of the Five Rings and the designers have chimed in on the changes and why – come see what tweaks are being made in Rokugan!
Legend of the Five Rings has had a full year of Organized Play results and data collected. Based on that data, the folks at FFG have been hard at work analyzing it and making tweaks to the game. Some of these tweaks were just clarifications and some were corrections to how the game’s rules were written. Luckily the designers were on hand to explain these changes and, perhaps more importantly, why they implemented those updates.
“Throughout the gameplay of the Imperial and Elemental Cycles, we discovered in the rules a number of interactions between the rules and card text that operated unintuitively when using the rules as written, so we have altered the rules text slightly to allow for these card interactions to work the way players expect.”
Honor and Modifiers
There is a new exception to the way Modifiers work – a duel’s honor bid modifier is calculated independently of all other modifiers on the character. This applies even if the characters skills have been set to a value. This change was attributed to the “poor gameplay” experience caused by the interaction of Vengeful Berseker and Apprentice Earthcaller. It’s just not fun to miss out on a skill bonus because the order of operations can get convoluted.
Uniques and Control
Another clarification was added to gaining control of unique cards. Now, the text for unique cards allows for a player to take control of a unique card they own, but do not control. Otherwise, there was a unintended interaction where a player who owned a unique card which an opponent gained control of could not retake control.
Rebalancing ‘Who’s On First’
Initially, players who went first would get a bonus Fate. This was to account for the first player being able to attack more quickly than there opponent. However, after a year of gathering data, FFG discovered the Fate advantage gave players a distinct competative advantage. Therefore the extra Fate for going second has been eliminated.
In playtests, we have found that going second provides several natural advantages that provide an incentive to go second even without the extra fate:
- You gain the first opportunity to collect fate from rings.
- You gain the ability to react to the opponent’s first dynasty action.
- Going second also promotes the ability to play conservatively in the first round to create an explosive second round assault.
This is a pretty big change for the game and while it might not seem like that huge of a change, there are implications – but I agree with FFG on this one. It’s a good change and they also have the data to back-up their decision.
If you’d like to check out the rest of the FAQ/Updates those can be found below:
Tournament Regulations
Rules Reference
Also, if you’d like to get a quick rundown and/or insight from the designers check out the full article from FFG right HERE.
Knowledge is power…
