Opportunities

It's been a while since I updated my blog, so thanks for hanging with me (or coming back!) I've been busy working on Emerald Legacy. You can find my work here at Eme rald Legacy. I've also been doing a bunch of preparations and so on for interviews for Adventures in Rokugan. as well as other work.  And I shouldn't forget real life!  In any event....
I thought I'd write up some work on Opportunities I was requested for from our Court Games podcast you can find here: How to Use (and Speed Up) Opportunity Results in L5R 5E . I thought it might be helpful to have it written up as a reminder.  Hopefully this is helpful to you.

​Anyway...

In Legend of the Five Rings 5th Edition, Opportunities can be thought of as either a 'kicker' or bonus on a successful roll, or a participation prize for a failed roll. However, they are also one of the primary mechanisms to interact with or use techniques, as well as being required for several vital mechanics such as critical strikes.  The benefits of opportunities can be so good, they may make a player want to intentionally fail a roll in order to also get the opportunities, and this is by design.  
With time, players can learn to shape their approaches to different problems to specifically take advantage of the kinds of opportunities associated with those approaches, and when players become skilled enough to do so, this causes a significant increase in the kinds of challenges they can overcome.

However, opportunities are also the #1 culprit for causing analysis paralysis in a game. Instead of generally being able to pre-calculate your numbers, your reactions and planned course of action ahead of time, where you put the weight of your decision making outside of the gameplay time as you build your character, opportunities cause you to put a large part of your decision making after the roll is made, and that can be really hard to decide. Especially with tables and tables of opportunities spread out across  multiple books, and different levels of  character sheet building, from built into core mechanics, into techniques, skills, and even into individual types of equipment.  It can quickly be too much for a player, especially a new player, to manage.

So we present four different techniques for managing opportunities at your game table.  These are: 1) Minimal Opportunity Types. 2) Constrained Opportunity Types. 3) Completely Free-form Opportunity types, and 4) Rules as Written.  I'll present each type now.

1) Minimal Opportunity Types Approach:  This type can be used when you have a table where the players do not want to or are not able to engage with  either the Opportunity or Strife Mechanics.  This might be for brand new players at their first session. 
In this approach, Opportunities are only used to negate strife or to fuel techniques, or for Critical Strikes.  
This approach vastly limits the functionality of opportunities, and also makes strife and the possibility of becoming compromised or reaching an unmasking is significantly reduced.   It reduces the functionality of the Water approach especially, since that relies on its opportunities for its power.  If you wish to use this approach, you may want to have the water approach reduce/remove 2 rather than 1 strife.

2) Constrained Opportunity Types Approach: This approach was proposed by The Last Province podcast in their episode that touches the topic Opportunities: The Last Province: Blood of the Lioness at 1 hour 14 minutes.  I am sure Robert Denton will get around to writing it up soon, but in the meantime, I will write it up here.
In this approach, rather than keeping the full list of opportunity types open on the table, players are limited to a short list of custom, but broad opportunity types, in addition to being allowed to use opportunities for techniques, and critical strikes, etc.  However, the full list of opportunities from the books are not used or available.

The Last Province suggests these 5 basic opportunity uses:

• ​​Negate 1 strife on kept die per opportunity kept.
• Add a descriptive adverb to technique.  If it improves your chances of success, it can decrease the TN of the action by one.
• If you fail your check, narrate how you mitigate the loss or help someone else, so on the next check  (for yourself or other) to give assistance on the same check in the future.
• If you succeeded, win more, by adding an additional effect to your success (snare, disarm, protect, etc).
• Use 2 or more opportunity to create a 'twist of fate' to introduce a new fact, detail, or circumstance to the scene as if you were the GM.

In addition to these basic 5 opportunity uses, there are 5 additional opportunity uses that can be used in conflicts based on the stance you are in in conflict: 

• ​​Air: Gain a piece of information about your opponent or the scene you are in.
• Earth: Reduce fatigue, strife, or critical strike damage on you or an ally (by 1?). 
• Fire:  Force your target to focus their next action on you, or else suffer strife
• Water: Remove fatigue or recover strife from yourself, or Move a range band  (by 1 or 2?)
  Void: Remove a terrain effect or increase initiative (by 1?)

There are question marks here with my best guesses, because it wasn't completely clear in the podcast.

There are benefits and problems with this approach. This list of opportunity uses is, in fact, very finite and able to be remembered by players and GM, which helps reduce the decision making, and certainly means you don't need to have them spread out in all the books. These constrained opportunity uses do cover most of the major opportunity uses within the game system.  So that is very good.
However, most of these uses require a fair bit of negotiation between player and GM, with ambiguity about how significant an effect an opportunity expenditure should have or whether it applies.  It also rewards quick response and being able to decide on new adverbs or effects very quickly. While that is good, and it is easy to argue it should be rewarded, the decision to try to choose the 'best' expenditure of opportunity through one of these uses can be just as time consuming as looking up an opportunity from a table.  Finally, these opportunity uses can overtake some of the opportunity expenditures that require actual techniques in order to be able to achieve like techniques or weapons that cause specifically cause snare, or negate terrains, etc.  A careful GM should be comfortable with their group and make sure this sort of abuse of constrained opportunity types leads to shared opportunity use between all members of the group and are not overshadowing techniques.

​3) Free-form Opportunity Approach:  This approach can be used by groups that are extremely comfortable with free-form play and shared storytelling between players and GMs, and do not need to have a whole lot in the way of rules to impede that play.
In this approach, there is no set value or choice for what an opportunity can do.  Its scale and limits are completely up to the imagination of the player, as approved the game master.  The GM may choose to say that an opportunity needs to be used to do something that feels 'fire-ish' if it's a fire opportunity, or 'void-ish' for a void opportunity, but what that feel is or what it can do is not defined at all.  Players use opportunities freely to modify or enhance their play in the moment.
If players are used to doing this from other games, it is certainly an option here. Learning the feels of different approaches does not take long for most players, and the Constrained Types approach can be used as an interim until players become comfortable with it  However, many players do not deal well with this lack of structure, and there are similar problems to the Constrained Types approach.

4) Rules as Written Approach:  This approach can be summed up simply as rules as written.  Opportunities can be spent in the opportunity tables provided through the books as written, or in techniques, or in weapons abilities or system mechanic uses as provided.  
Using this approach is the game as designed, and removes the ambiguity that causes trouble for many players.  It can be used even when the players are unfamiliar with each other or the GM, and they do not require much negotiation with the GM.  
However, this has all the problems with analysis paralysis as described at the beginning of this article.  A GM can prepare handouts to give the players rolling up the opportunity uses from the various books, but these go out of date, and the lists get quite long.  
My recommendation, if you use this approach, is to use the 5th Edition Opportunity website tool, as provided on this website.  
To use this tool, select the general category of what you are trying to do (General, Skirmish, Duel, Intrigue, Downtime, or regarding Conditions and Terrains).  Then select a skill + approach and click on the word found at the intersection of the two. This will take you to all the opportunities from all the books that can be used for this specific skill + approach, plus relevant opportunity-driven techniques used for that combination if necessary.  It is still a list, but it cuts all the information to only the relevant roll, which helps shorten the problem.

Finally, in order to speed up using opportunities, try the following:

As a player:

• Pick what you might want to do with one or two opportunities /before/ you roll, when you are waiting on others' actions 
• Use your initiative opportunities for observations to help with conflicts,  rather than doing that mid-conflict 
• Generally pick your action without worrying about opportunities unless you are REALLY sure there's an opportunity you want.  When you get more confident, then you can turn that around.
  
  

As a GM:

•  Be ready with an idea or two for 'observation' opportunities.  
• To encourage spending opportunities for observations, save at least some clues for it
• Don't be too hesitant to give hints or suggestions about what good uses for opportunities might be.  Especially if you put clues there.

​Hope that helped! Have a great week!
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