Design Diaries: Repairing Honor

Just a quick update to people: Rise of Jigoku (RoJ) is about to go into a small, limited playtesting period. Once that's done (in a couple of weeks or so), we feel pretty good about it being released into the wild, so to speak. Then it's on to Road to Ruin (RtR), and then Rise of Otosan Uchi (RoU), both of which are undergoing revisions as we speak in various stages before heading into their own abbreviated playtest periods. 

I wanted to make a quick note about the Honor keyword. For those not familiar, it was a keyword that exists on Fate cards, allowing you to basically pitch Honor cards to increase or decrease an honor gain or loss from an action. It's not a secret that for those people that have been playing in the so called "Fauxnyx" environment over the last few years, that this keyword, specifically as a multiple trigger, was problematic. 

There had been discussion for quite a bit about making a change to give Honor a limit trigger of once per action, and many of us recall this change was intended to be made at some point. Given the state of L5R at the time the set it debuted in was being finalized, as well as that the game was sold shortly after, it's no surprise this ended up just not happening.

We old Design Team members were very hesitant to address this, despite it being a known concern, mostly because we did not wish to come off as seeming like we were issuing errata on things. That was never the intent of this project, and despite our team being composed of most of the Onyx era Design team, it made some of us uncomfortable. 

However, in this case, it seems more like a change that was meant to happen and simply didn't because of circumstances beyond our control. So, starting with RoJ, we are adding reminder text for Honor that reflects this intended change than never quite happened like it was supposed to.