I find it particularly odd (and again, in fitting with the recent hard turn scramble, scramble, defenses up! in this thread) that we're choosing to focus now on the danger of abuse of the nebulous OOC/IC divide around TS while simultaneously defending privileged individuals engaging in those relationships?

For those of you strennuously defending NPC TS while warning against the dangers of emotional abuse & manipulation around TS relationships... does it not occur that these problems are almost certainly 1000% worse when a person doing the creeping/manipulation/other violation of boundaries is Staff?

This is a huge part of why it's a bad idea.

I was on TFW and played with the staffers elsewhere. They're nice, enjoyable people to RP with outside of a staff context, but probably a bit self-centric in it. In this light, them sandboxing is actually probably the correct choice (although I think it also implies a certain admission of guilt regarding TFW's original incarnation). At least they're being honest with the fact that they don't really want to share except with a few close friends.

That said, I really want to focus on this:

@Ghost said in The 100: The Mush:

@Kanye-Qwest Don't be like that. I have said repeatedly that staff should definitely RP on their own games and enjoy the work they've put in. I'm just saying that staff shouldn't pigeonhole the entire game to being about their PCs and need to understand that by opening a place of RP to the public, there is an unspoken expectation that the roleplayers that they have opened a play space for are joining the game to matter.

By matter I mean: beyond assisting staff PCs in being the big heroes, and not being unwittingly delegated into being supporting cast characters.

People join these games to get camera time, have arcs, and feel like they're causing an impact on roleplay, not to be listed in IMDB as "Guy in Coffee House #3"

(Last bit about homebound people removed, as not terribly relevant)

I do think there's a trend in a lot of these games (quick setup FS3 L&L games especially, though not wholly limited to them) to end up in this trap, probably not wholly because the staffers are evil and abusive, but because there's kind of a blind spot to how easily you end up there. It usually goes something like:

1. Well, the King and whoever else will be NPCs (run by us) because we need them for plot
2. then we create a bunch of tiered houses, the topmost leaders of which will be NPCs (see #1) or maybe top-tier feature PCs
3. their kids (and maybe some of the lesser house leaders) will be PCs
4. most of 2 & 3 will nonetheless still be played by staff (because they need real PCs too not just NPCs), and friends (take your pick of between first-come first-serve when their friends know first and casual nepotism)
5. Thus, the majority of actual, Joe off-the-street players will get third or fourth tier characters at best

I've seen this pattern on every game in the genre I've interacted with in the last several years, and have heard about it on other places besides. It's a real issue, and I think staff really does need to consider it when they're designing a game: you need to make space for off-the-street players to be important and impactful. If you're not doing this, whether by intention or accident, you may as well at least admit to what you're doing and retreat to the pillowfort.

@Pyrephox said in Arx's Elevation Situation:

Great Houses, in some ways, get hit harder by this than many others, because they have a severely limited number of duchies to work with, and only receive taxes from the duchies and any direct vassals they might have lower on the chain (like De Lire).

So you mean, the people who got the most free, totally unearned advantages early in the game, have less growth opportunities late in the game? This is unfair, how?

I've seen it repeated several times that playing a Barony-level PC is the least attractive option in the entire game, as you get none of the swag commoner market abusing code options and your house is probably tiny and poor. Do you have literally no empathy for other players or any sense of fairness? It's really mind boggling how greedy the atttitudes being expressed recently are, in contrast to the perpetual claim of universal, benevolent positivity on Arx. Really, all the complaints just seem hugely entitled.

This is so amazingly off topic but also so painfully stupid I feel like I can't NOT answer.

@Admiral She's a former IDF fitness/combat trainer, and knowing nothing about you, I'm pretty confident to say she'd beat your ass.

In the realm of 'this is Hollywood and we have to cast someone conventionally attractive or our movie will not receive a budget,' casting someone who could do the work seems reasonable (to say nothing of the fact that the rest of the Amazons got precisely the casting you're asking for, with MMA fighters, boxers, and other martial artists among them). And bear in mind that it is work. As with other comic action stars like Hugh Jackman, actors don't walk around with action bodies in their normal lives. It takes months spending more time working out in a day than most people do in a week (generously, more than most of us probably do in a month) to get in shape for those roles.

Also my personal take is that calling a real person a 'skinny little twiglet' while you're supposedly promoting body positivity makes you sound like a jackass.

The only thing you can do to make people complain more is take it seriously.

And I mean in general, collectively, across all games, as a cultural shift.

The more that staff respond seriously (and ethically, since people they know may be involved), vs. the kind of defensive hand-flailing and denials that we often see here, the more people will come forward. That is 100% the only solution.

While I'm pretty pro fuckery...

@Wretched said in Difference between an NPC and a Staff PC?:

Addendum: ALSO PLEASE STOP TSING PEOPLE WITH YOUR NPC'S AUGH

Yeah, I'm gonna come down on the 'if you use it to TS, it's a PC,' regardless of how pure you think you are about your separation of conflicts of interest etc.

If teh sex is needed to move plot along, that's fine. But teh sex (or, whatever, meaningful romance) can happen in summary without spending 4 hours typing elaborate bullshit with one hand. Once you're doing that, there's a player motivation involved that has nothing to do with any of the things that are supposed to be on the mind of a GM doing GM things. You're also by necessity devoting huge amounts of time to this person and that alone is a form of favoritism; people who are looking for NPC interaction to move their own plots along are not getting it in that time, and we know that time is precious in our aging hobby.

I can see why some of the people defending it are defending it, but. Yeah, c'mon. You can't pretend it doesn't open a huge can of worms.

I'm... starting to detect a pattern here, between the people defending this across multiple threads and conversations and the examples being used.

That aside, yeah. It's still bullshit. You can write about how sexuality is important to the lives of these characters all you want, or give examples of great stories revolving around romantic storylines.

TS is 100% irrelevant to that.

TS is not an IC construct. It is an OOC choice of activity that dips into RL sexuality. I've had characters that were ICly married, had active sex lives and ongoing stories, and where no TS occured because I did not have that sort of relationship with the player, or care to. I have also had multiple relationships across differing games with a small handful of players, many of which were ICly deeply romantic where TS was also an expected part of it because we had that OOC chemistry. I've also pursued TS more or less out of boredom with various randos, as a fun time-filler with almost no real story value. Oh, and I've hooked up with staffalts, and I can't think of a single time I didn't get some significant benefit from it?

When it's a staffer in a mix, there's no way the 100% OOC part of the activity isn't going to have some influence. We're currently having it implored that 'oh won't someone remember that some staffers are good!' and yes - certainly for some, this influence may not rise to the degree of game-destroying ethical compromise. Yet the subtle effects are pervasive, and it's a kind of willful blindness to pretend they don't exist.

I'd been planning on posting something here for a bit yet any time I started I'd get distracted. Ahem!

Even though I eventually stopped playing, this game is really something special. In a hobby that basically lives in its comfort zones, retreading familiar systems (albeit with some great new code) and well-tested ideas, it's perhaps the only place I've seen any sort of real innovation in terms of modes of play and what a MU can actually be. So it deserves attention not just in the sense of people checking it out, but also as an example for future game builders. MUing has its problems, but HorrorMU proves that banging your head against them applying the same old 'solutions' and throwing your hands up when the inevitable problems arise isn't the only option. We can think outside those boxes.

I think hard boundaries are definitely a good idea. We say no to evil characters in tabletop when it's not appropriate, and we set other boundaries to enforce the general RP themes we want (ie, its not uncommon for medieval games to nonetheless keep people from playing actual dirt farmer serfs because those characters would have few opportunities). So I don't see why there's any problem of 'Grimdark fantasy' plus 'but srsly no raping.'

There will still be gray areas if you want some historical verisimilitude, but setting the red lines helps. After that, it's probably easier to address the players who is nonetheless continuing to press things too far (IE: excluding the female doctor above from plots vs. 'A lady physician? My word!') as individual problem cases. There are always going to be people who want to press that RP whether or not its supported in your theme (I think I recall mention of hostile sexist players on, say, a BSG game, where the setting is totally fantastic AND does nothing to support it).

This turns back to the old adage that you can't design around bad players.

@Sparks

'Good people will be good, bad people will be bad, and we should only worry about the latter and not try and make rules for the former' is a dubious approach, largely because most people are not 100% one or the other. Outside of a few fringe cases, most staffers probably think they're ethical, good and right. So no ethical guidelines for anyone, right? In the reality of these gray areas, having guidelines can be valuable. Even for the 'good' people, whoever they are.

I know a few staffers are ruffled because you consider yourselves More Ethical than Average (tm) and yet also evidently fuck around on your NPCs a whole lot while handing out magic swords and babies, which some people consider shady as fuck by default. This is causing a truly bizarre amount of teeth-gnashing and bizarre testimonials wherein people talk about all the favors they're receiving and then ask for validation that they're good, really, and did nothing wrong. It seems pretty silly. No one is going to stop you, and if you're confident there are never any negative consequences, so be it.

@ganymede I have no special insight beyond my own

My motivation these days, on pretty much all games, is just my enjoyment of writing (and maybe as a form of practice, as well). I like some of the characters, and have fun writing big bombastic stuff as an alternative to what's usually more subtle/serious RP in other genres (something about getting old making 'mature' themes elsewhere less special and escapism more appealing?). There is a sort of license in comic-style RP to be more over the top, and the power scales can allow for more creative breadth. The other day I posed a whole robot army (and we lost).

I also only play on these games right now. I think there's a certain ease to them, as they're generally statless and consent based, vs having to grind a bajillion xp in WoD or Fantasy doing filler rp. That said, you're not wrong about the self-aggrandizing sorts. As ever, its ultimately about finding a playgroup.

In my experience, you tend to see mostly those of the broad category and some of the general. You almost never see any of the others. I'm curious if that's because people just have no interest in such games or because someone has just not come out and made on(or at least not made on in some time).

First, there's a current X-men+ game that's been around at least a year, as well as a new alt-universe game, so 'almost never' seems extreme.

Otherwise, there's a couple things being discussed here. Some of it is very general. 'Big and sandboxy' vs 'small and focused' is not comic specific, but rather one of our oldest topics. Insert the usual debates on total RP vs. getting lost in the crowd, or on whether logins are actually a measure of game quality or success. And 'include every IP' vs 'just X-Men' is definitely a subset of this.

But FCs do add some particular dynamics.

The slope on FC popularity is pretty damn steep, with a quick fall-off from the top characters. So, unlike with other big game vs. small game stuff, there's essentially an absolute cap based on how much IP you provide. You really can't make the choice to have a 'big' X-Men game. And the harsh cut-off really impacts style preference, too. Being a Gotham fan may be kind of pointless when there's so few key characters and your chance of ever landing your favorite might well be zero unless you help build the game.

This doesn't only apply to people wanting to take the characters, but also to people wanting to play with the characters. Vibe is simply not going to attract RP the same way as Wonder Woman.

And there's a tendency of staff not to be realistic about any of this stuff: no one wants to admit 'yeah, all the good characters are taken, no reason for you to really play here.' nor admit that a given character is just not very popular (or heck, kind of a joke) and probably won't get any RP unless the player is in the top 1% of proactivity and charisma. I feel like there's even a bit of that vibe in this thread already, in the 'why should power level matter?' refrain. It seems to make unrealistic assumptions about every player being cooperative, giving, self-aware, willing to write to others and generally share the spotlight. This are great ideals but... yeah. My experience is that a lot of the players of high powered characters are typically absolutely awful at this. Some outright are in it for the power trip, others are just blithely unaware (ie, I've seen people give the Superman 'World of Cardboard' speech/quote as an OOC context on multiple occasions on these games, offered as proof they were a 'good' Superman player and knew what was up. Except the context of the speech is literally the ultimate 'Lol I was just holding back, I am a living I Win Button', given before Superman solos Darkseid. It's 100% inappropriate in a MUSH context.).

So, IDK. My preference is not to play on a style of game. My preference is to play a character I want to play, and get recognizable comic-y RP. Any game that serves that goal is acceptable, but many games will fail at it.

I don't post much any more, and I've observed all the recent chaos at some distance. I have opinions on all the nitty-gritty details, but they're hardly relevant because my final reaction boils down to something very similar to the OP here and the general direction of the thread.

I have a similar history here as a combative and probably mostly negative poster, but as time as go on and old feuds have died (either by détente, as happened with one 'ancient enemy', or by people simply moving on, or both) I've found myself leaning more and more toward this kind of view. There was a previous instance where we debated the existence/purpose of the Hog Pit. At that time, I defended its need to exist, largely under the justification of the restrictive Advertising section rules. But at the same time, I basically nagged another more constructive subforum into existence (I think it was the Game Dev one, I've lost track with how things have been renamed/reorganized). In my mind, it was about balancing things, giving people the ability to vent or be constructive, and assuming the forum would somehow 'average out' on the larger scale. But this was pretty naive. I think we've all seen that it's very hard to maintain civility when the rabid hostility is a next-door neighbor. It breeds a simmering hostility, long grudges, bandwagons and dogpiles, and does very little to preserve useful discussion.

So I think this is an encouraging direction. Rather than precariously balanced extremes, it fully embraces the middle road, and hopefully that will allow some nuanced discussion that won't immediately derail into ad hominem. Or... maybe not, and it will just kill the forum, because it really was toxicity and negativity that was the main draw. If so, well, we've learned something that is pretty telling. But there's nothing inherently wrong with having two forums, and it's an interesting experiment to see how things might develop on each.

I'm definitely not voting, just trying to give feedback and ideas. I stick by the opinion that Crab lands work well as a newbie area (to a point: the deeper Shadowlands are very much not). Fighting goblins is a mainstay rank 1 action activity, and the less precarious social environment is a good warmup. But obviously it isn't going to be for everyone. The capital has appeal for not being tied to any clan, but the high-stakes environment makes it harder to give PCs major agency to shake up the local world.

The difficulty of picking a static setting that appeals to everyone is another MU/tabletop split. I'd argue the tabletop game is not designed with a stable setting in mind (outside the box set campaigns), foremost because it assumes characters of mixed clans. This is why the most archetypical L5R party is the 'traveling magistrates': the PCs are deputies of the Emerald Champion and can be sent from one corner of the Empire to another, righting wrongs and dispensing justice, with the authority of the office giving them the freedom to travel freely and meddle in local affairs (things that otherwise are very much not the norm).

For more neutral options, I'll go back to suggesting book stuff because they're bursting with ideas. Zakyo Toshi, also in Strongholds, is effectively a neutral Ryoko Owari-lite in minor clan lands, at least before the Scorpion annex it. Naishou Province is a single-book campaign setting from 4e. It's not as detailed as the box sets, but it's well designed to work as a sandbox, neutral lands under Imperial authority (the book doesn't actually give it a canon location for the sake of letting a GM work it into any game, although the described history and geography makes the foothills of the mountains between the Dragon & Phoenix a good candidate, above the Lion plains and Toshi Ranbo).

@reason Crab settings are good, as I think was mentioned somewhere I used a Crab city for my game, and I thought it was an element that worked well. Being close to the Shadowlands adds options for more traditional 'adventuring.' And although L5R is notorious for inconsistent maps, the Crane, Mantis (or their Minor Clan predecessors), Scorpion and Unicorn are all vaguely close by so you have those interactions to work with in terms of big politics.

You'd probably want to expand to the castle town vs. strictly focusing on the actual fortification. Even if it gets more outsiders than others, the garrison would be overwhelmingly Crab and pretty regimented in terms of their daily lives. The town would let you build on that with whatever local traders, entertainment, local temples, etc. to fill out a more lively and mixed population. You would have to do it yourself, as I don't think there's any kind of write-up for it, although I wouldn't swear to it with all the material L5R has. Regardless, it is kind of an unlikely setting for 'high' politics, as it wouldn't qualify to host an Imperial Winter Court. However, lower level courts also exist. I think this is kind of a hard question to answer in a vacuum without getting into the full scope of your setting, including things like time period and what conflicts you want to focus on as overarching stories.

Basically, there's waaaay too much material to easily summarize, so it really depends what you'd be most interested in. If you just want to hunt for ideas, I recommend, again, the Emerald Empire (any edition) and both Imperial Histories (4e) books, as well as the older Way of/Secrets of the Crab (1e and 3e). FFG has Courts of Stone which is both castle and court-focused. Strongholds of the Empire (4e) is where I got some of my Sunda Mizu Mura info (although it appears a couple places), and while it doesn't have any other Crab locations it might be worth a glance just to see the way they tend to present setting info.

@jennkryst If you really wanted to fix it, you could do something like 'Everyone gets 3/2/2/2/1 for rings and your 3 must appear in the clan/family/school' and 'Everyone gets 2, 2, 1, 1, 1, 1 (or w/e) for skills, also selected among clan+family+school.' However, this gets tricky because I think stuff like not being able to get MA is actually design intent, so do you exclude that? And what about the questions? They're important choices, but again it becomes 'unfair' if you allow them to stack, but if you don't allow it, have you devalued one choice?

I will say that I've not experienced these things being actual issues. If you look at the Questions and Heritage tables, it's clearly designed that no 2 characters should be exactly alike. It's not D&D (which I'm not knocking, I run a weekly game!), and what people can accomplish is much more contextual to their exact character and the situation. People will put 2s in skills they care about, not in just anything to save XP. Ie, a Doji courtier might take Courtesy 2 because its core, and Design 2 because they'd like to play a fashion maven who designs kimono, but not Culture 2 because... they're a little avant-garde and care more about setting new trends than aping what's popular? Or they just don't want it? And if they happen to buy Culture 2 a couple dozen sessions later because it's in their Rank 5 curriculum and they need to put a last few XP in to hit rank 6... is that a 'problem?' I'm not sure it is, especially as they had said dozens of sessions to get usage out of their other skill picks (that they probably DID continue to raise).

@Misadventure An XP refund at the end would probably be the best solution (aside from the issue of being able to buy things you couldn't have ended up with, like MA 3) and the easiest because you could just code it. You'd have to specify it not count as XP toward school advancement since the rest of CG doesn't.

@Jennkryst While I almost always prefer pure pointbuy CGs for this reason (I've complained about it for FS3), I think the issue you bring up is minimal in FFG because the gap is very small. Moreover, some of the questions outright let you choose between skill dots and other benefits (like honor). The game intentionally does not deliver 100% equivalent characters.

The 2/2/2/2/2 spread is so unlikely that you'd mostly only end up with it through an intentional sub-optimal/anti-type build. The natural result, because there are ring overlaps between Clans and most of their schools, or the families and their more unusual schools, is that you end up with 3/3/2/1/1 or 3/2/2/2/1 almost every time. The first one is 'worth' 6 more xp, but depending on your intended final Rings, the 2nd one may get you to your goal faster (remember the Void + lowest limit on Ring raises). There's also the simple fact that Rings at 1 are weaknesses. Do you live to reap that XP?

As the skills go... meh. None of the clans or families grant Martial Arts. The biggest 'main' skill you can get to 3 is Theology, and every Shugenja family gets it, as does every school, so most characters will get 2. Only Phoenix get 3 automatically, which... if you're annoyed by Phoenix being the best shugenja, L5R isn't the game for you But everyone can take it to 3 with Question 13. Other than that, the skills you can readily get to 3 without Heritage table results are Survival as Unicorn and the low skills you can raise from Question 8. Aside from sneaky Scorpion, most of these are skills people would avoid for min-maxing.

Conversely, I think if you just gave people XP... you'd see much more min-maxed results, even if they were more 'XP equivalent.' Everyone would max their chosen MA, Fitness, Theology, Courtesy, and perhaps a few others based on their character/build. They wouldn't end up reflecting their clans and families, which is important in L5R. It's part of the setting: characters strongly reflect their heritage, and breaking with tradition is rare and a big deal.

@Reason I think from all of this it should be obvious the game is a passion hobby of mine. I'd absolutely play a game using either recent system.

@reason The ring vs. attribute change is definitely interesting considering it's almost entirely an anti min-max change. For any who don't know, in prior editions, each Ring was composed of two attributes (and had the lowest value between them), but because non-Shugenja rarely rolled Rings directly, and each Ring pair split really clearly on combat/other roleplay, you'd usually polarize them. Water? Strength (damage) vs. Perception. Air/Fire? Reflexes/Agility (defense and attack) vs. Awareness/Intelligence. Earth was the exception where even though it had that physical/mental split (Stamina/Willpower) you rarely rolled Stamina and Earth gave you health points, so people left that even (and tried to get Earth 3 fast to not die so much!). This also led to a weird thing where Bushi lagged behind Shugenja in rank, because you calculated insight from Rings (among other things).

Curiously, this is a change you could actually patch backwards into the older L5R rules with almost zero issue, since any roll that required one of the old stats you could just replace with its Ring. You'd have to slightly adjust the chargen but it would be an almost trivial conversion.

re: the MU, I could get into it in a lot of detail that expands on ideas about what make MU's succeed in general, as I don't think it was any particular major thing. I was the only staffer, and it was a small playerbase, many of whom didn't know L5R, so I was teaching people through chargen and in every scene. That meant people weren't so confident to drive RP on their own. There's issues with the rigidity of Rokugani culture vs. player norms: while we had tea and sake houses, but 'bar RP' is trickier when the samurai ideal is polite emotional control. And then there's big stuff. L5R's themes are about honor and loyalty, and samurai willing to die for those things without hesitation. But MUers are risk-adverse. I created some incentives, XP refunds/ bonus XP for rerolling after a 'good samurai death.' Even had one taker, where a Battle Maiden suicide charged an oni on the Wall. That's the kind of story L5R wants to tell, but not that many players will go for it, and the game can fall pretty flat if people don't buy into those big ideas. And without those, as your average social, simulator it's going to be too stuffy for most.

@reason Better/worse is always going to be a matter of personal perspective, game goals, and so on.

The prior editions are all variations on a core design (ignoring the d20 version that came out temporally alongside 3e). They retain a distinctive system throughout, even as things have been balanced over the years. If you love it, you love it, and the FFG system may disappoint because it's not the same thing. You want to play it because technique names like Pincers and Tail or The Mountain Does not Move spark the imagination. I think 4e is the pinnacle version of that system, since it benefits from so many years of playtesting and design iteration. It's streamlined and slick, and as balanced as such a lethal game can be, shaving down some of the spikes while still giving superhero samurai as you rank up. I like it a lot and would always be happy to play it. It's why I was willing to code my own stuff to run a game in it.

But if you've played a lot of it you may run into the 'school clone' syndrome, where maybe you don't want to play another Hida Bushi because you've already played one and characters from the same school have a tendency of coming out the same (unless you heavily sacrifice mechanics to play against type). The mountain still isn't going anywhere.

So in that way, I do find something refreshing in the new system and that makes me want to play it also, especially for revisiting any of my 'old favorites' in terms of Clan and school. It lets you build characters that are a lot more varied, unique and personal. That said, because it's a new system, all those moving parts can lead to some poorly balanced outcomes. It's already got a lot of errata. There is also an outstanding question over how well the FFG approach works, as it blends modern narrative RPG design with hard crunch in ways that can be contradictory. This is going to be tough on a MU.

As a final small point: an interesting facet of L5R is that its consistency across editions, even between 1-4e and FFG, means that older sourcebooks and material are often still useful to newer games. I highly recommend 4e's version of the setting book, Emerald Empire (there is a 5e version too), or the two Imperial Histories as they offer great options on time periods and settings. Also City of Lies is basically my favorite RPG location/campaign setting boxed set ever.

As this is an FFG thread, its worth explaining that FFG L5R weakens the role protection/delineation between the traditional Bushi (warrior) / Shugenja (priest/mage) / Courtier / Monk / (Ninja, shh) schools considerably.

In prior editions, you picked a school, it fit into one of those categories, and you got a technique each rank from that school (or one technique + access to a new spell level each rank for Shugenja). So, absent (supposedly very rare) multi-schooling, Bushi would only get more combat techniques as they went on, and Courtiers only more courtier stuff. This meant that by higher ranks the niche protection was extreme: bushi could one-shot Oni and courtiers had abilities approaching mind control.

In FFG, the technique divisions exist not in Clan schools but in categories: Kata (fighty stuff), Kiho (monk chi techniques), Invocations (spells), Shuji (social, meditative and leadership techs), and Ninjutsu (dishonorable stealth-based techs that no one admits exist). There's also a general 'Rituals' category that includes stuff that is basically universal Rokugani practice (like the Tea Ceremony). Individual Clan schools have access to 3 of these, usually 2 'specialized' ones + Rituals. And MOST Bushi and Courtier schools have access to both Kata and Shuji. The differentiation comes in a rank 1 school specific advantage, and school 'curriculum' that reward you for advancing in a semi-defined path and provide early access to specific techniques or possibly even toss in something special 'out of class' (IE the Hiruma Scout has the usual Bushi selection of Kata, Shuji and Rituals, but can access a couple specific Ninjutsu techs for sneaking around).

On the whole, everything is much more mix-and-match, pick-and-choose. And with only Rings rather than stats, there's not much of the potential min-maxing statwise that would generate socially inept Bushi in earlier editions. Being high Earth means you are enduring; that can mean shouldering blows on the battlefield, but it can also mean standing firm in court. So basically, it's much truer to L5R fiction in that the average Bushi will be socially competent if they put even the tiniest effort into it.

But yeah, it also expects that you roll social stuff, in part because everyone CAN participate. If you're not comfortable with social dice, it's not a good choice of system whatsoever.