Design Diaries: The Favor Icon

by Jeff Williamson
July 19, 2023

As Design proceeded into what would be the third post-Onyx expansion, Rise of Otosan Uchi, we started wanting to use the Imperial Favor as a card mechanic in increased ways (for reasons that will become clear once we start to preview the ROU cards sometime in the future). We found, however, that this increased usage came with the baggage of a lot of extra card space being taken up by references to the Favor. To that end, we developed a shorthand to be used both in card text and in the cost block of actions, governed by the rule below.

One of the challenges we faced was finding an icon that looked decent even when shrunk to approximately 1/5 of an inch in card text height (you can see how different the full-size picture looks vs. its shrunken counterpart on cards). Several iterations were generated, tested, and rejected; at one point we had a decent-looking silhouetted fan icon, but concerns were raised about the fan used in card design in other places, among other things. Most of the early chrysanthemum iterations unfortunately reduced down to tiny buzzsaws. Eventually the notion of using a color icon was broached -- these cards existed in a digital medium, after all, and we could test whatever options could be developed digitally. The end result is the reddish-hued chrysanthemum design seen in the attached cards.

An extremely vigorous debate on how the icon would be used took place, and arguments were made to keep it out of card text. Ultimately, Design made the decision that the text space savings afforded by using the icon within card text outweighed any potential confusion, as long as we were consistent with the wordings of common phrases. To that end, the rules governing the (FAVOR) icon are as follows:

The (FAVOR) icon, represented by a reddish chrysanthemum design, substitutes in text for “the Imperial Favor”. It can appear in a number of common phrases, such as “take (FAVOR)”, “If you control (FAVOR)”, etc. It may also appear in the cost block of an action (see below).
(FAVOR) as a cost: If the Favor icon appears in the cost block of an action, it is governed by the following rules:
- You must be able to pay the cost of the Imperial Favor. This means, ordinarily, that you must control the Imperial Favor and be able to discard it to pay this cost. The cost may be paid by alternate means, such as actions which read “pay the action’s (FAVOR) cost”.
- All actions with a (FAVOR) cost are considered to be Favor actions by default, and are affected by/create triggers for all cards referring to Favor actions. Actions which have alternate costs, such as "(FAVOR) or (4)" are only considered Favor actions if you are paying the (FAVOR) cost of the action, unless the action is printed with the Favor keyword.

Note the use of the icon in Favor-related phrases, including a slightly more complex example from the Road to Ruin expansion (Otomo Suikihime).

While this is an impactful change visually, we hope that you will find it as generally intuitive and beneficial as we feel it should be. Tabletop games (board and card games) have moved over time to less of a "wall of text" and more toward iconography, and while L5R will never be purely icon-driven, having additional design elements reflecting that philosophy is, we believe, a step in the right direction.

PLEASE PARDON OUR DUST

This article originally appeared on Facebook as a work-in-progress description of changes made during our initial Onyx Lives! design phases. The information in it may be outdated, but it is presented here as part of an ongoing attempt to consolidate all of the various public writings we have made along the way.

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