Why Gamify Honor

​Different TTRPGs gamify, or create rules or mechanics, around areas around which the designers of the game think are important, areas where they could see the players getting into conflicts with or wanting to advance in.  Advancement mechanics improve characters in ways that are relevant to the kinds of conflicts and stories the designers see the character experiencing within the framework for the RPG.   A TTRPG about fashion design would have mechanics for evaluating and comparing fashions,  and the advancement mechanics  would be show how you will improve in fashion design.  If there was no physical conflict in the Fashion Design TTRPG,  and no stories about fashion designers fighting physically, there would be no combat stats and no advancement in combat skills. It'd be all about the Fashion.

 Some TTRPGs, of course,  do overdo their mechanics, making mechanics for everything the designers think could possibly be of interest. Some TTRPGs underdo their mechanics, thinking that mechanics are overly binding and intentionally keeping them minimal. And some TTRPGs misalign their mechanics with their theme for various reasons, like having an extensive combat system in a world with little combat just because combat is traditional in TTRPGs, for example. But in general,  mechanics are there to serve the purpose of highlighting what is important and what are the sources of tension and desire in the story.

Roleplaying in general means to put yourself in the role of a character.  A character, by definition, is a person in a novel, play, film, or other kind of story. By playing a roleplaying game with others, you are agreeing to join in a kind of mutual storytelling, using game rules to arbitrate conflicts,  for every story involves some sort of a conflict, leading to rising action, a climax, then falling action as the conflict is resolved.

By gamifying Honor at all, the designers of L5R are trying to say 'Honor is Important for the stories we are trying to tell', and an area around which we think we shall see conflict.

This could be tacked on artificially, just to make the game more 'Asian',  and there have been games that do that, but I don't think that was ever the intent with L5R.

Legend of the Five Rings  was created to create stories that are similar to Japanese folktales and legends and stories about Samurai, because its intent was to allow the player to assume the character of a magical samurai.  However, part of the complexity of RolePlaying a samurai for a Western audience is that the samurai comes from a Collectivist society, while many of the players are from North America or most of Europe, which is an Individualist society.  

In an individualist society, the interpretation of  honor is individual:  I don't care overmuch about what society overall thinks the Ideal Knight is like and would approach things, for example.  I care how I  believe the Ideal Knight would behave, and conform myself those actions (if I intend to be Honorable).  I don't care how society overall sees my glorious deeds nearly as much as how I interpret how glorious those deeds are.   In a Collectivist society, my personal idea of what is Honorable isn't really relevant....I will interpret how I see myself based on the view the whole society has of what the ideal samurai is.

There is very little point in codifying Honor in an individualist society.  Your character can have Honor as a motivating factor, but there won't be much of a conflict within their interpretation of it, and there's not much ability for a game designer to define what that honor is, because the interpretation of honor is all up to the individual, and no one really questions it.  Individuals can easily rationalize great conflicts between principles without blinking when they define all the terms.  But since a Collectivist society uses a shared codification of Honor,  conflicts between conflicting principles become locked into the system. Conflicts between Honor and individual desire, or between Honor and Glory, begin to start building situations where the characters can be torn in two directions.  These internal conflicts between Honor and Glory, getting the credit vs giving it away, deciding whether this path or this other path is the more correct, and how to thread the needle to find an honorable solution when everyone else has given up, becomes more poignant.  

Many of the stories related to Samurai, like the 47 Ronin I started out this series with, don't necessarily make a lot of sense to an Individualist society, but are ones players can have a reason, if they choose, to reach for if Honor is given a concrete and accumulatable value, and is considered valuable to the society.

Having mechanics for Honor does not prevent you from telling stories about people who do not try to live up to the high ideal.  As it stands, honor mechanics do not give very much advantage to the honorable, and that advantage is, in my opinion, far outweighed by the freedom of choice of action a low-Honor character has available.  But having some mechanics associated with honor means that even the clumsy and slow Individualist-society member can pretend that honor matters...and can help pretend they are magical samurai.