The Greatest Story In Gaming
The Game Story Series, Part V
Part One: The Plan | Part Two: Central Conflicts | Part Three: Up A Tree | Part Four: Verisimilitude | Part Five: Meaningful Choice
Greatest in both senses; large, epic, and excellent. I’m talking here about the best story I’ve ever encountered in any game of any type I’ve ever played. RPGs, Computer Games, whatever. The game is Legend of the Five Rings, a collectible card game, and the story is the Clan War that ran from 1995 to GenCon 1997, and this is the last in the Game Story series.
In 1996, collectible card games (CCGs) were only 3 years old and still a new idea. As my friends and I walked around the Exhibitor’s Room at Strategicon, we saw all sorts of CCGs. Most were obviously crap. There was even a brief period where my friends and I couldn’t really imagine a CCG that wasn’t Magic: The Gathering. Looking back, this fascinates me because I was there at the birth of an entirely new genre, and there was a time when I couldn’t separate the genre from the first instance of that genre.
Eventually, however, Magic became archaic, simplistic, and burdened with new rules designed to balance the old broken rules written before anyone really understood what a CCG could do, mechanically. People still play Magic even now but my friends and I stopped around 1995 as we discovered other, better games.
At first glance, we ignored Legend of the Five Rings (L5R). The logo was scrawled in such as way as to make it very difficult to read and the layout of the cards made it similarly difficult to distinguish the art and layout from the actual mechanics written on the card. It looked, basically, amateurish.
At this convention we met a couple of guys, Brandon and Anu, who gamed with us over the course of the weekend and became friends of ours. At one point Anu said “Hey, don’t forget to go get your L5R promo card!” He pulled out the card and showed it to us. Brandishing it like a golden pass that would admit him to the magical halls of some mad confectioner.
We weren’t interested in the game, and said so. “Man that game looks like shit.”
We got this blank look. It’s the blank look you get when someone who knows you realizes that you have missed out on something you would like, because you have misunderstood something about it.
“No, look,” he said, utterly certain that if we understood what he understood, we’d like this game. Even though we’d only known the guy for about 2 days, he was right. He was utterly correct. “Look at this card.”
I looked at the card.
“Read it,” he said.
I read it.
Looking at this, you may notice why my friends and I were turned off in the first place. The card title “The False Hoturi” was printed in a stylized font that evoked the setting, fantasy Japan, but make it a little hard to read in some instances and my friends and I for years afterwards would debate whether certain cards said “Iajitsu” or “Jajitsu” because we couldn’t tell the difference between a capital I and a capital J in this font. Furthermore the card layout intruded into the art. See that circle in the middle of the card art? And notice how the two dragons surrounding the card text actually overlap into the keywords “Scorpion Clan Deceiver * Samurai * Unique?” Later in my career, I could speak intelligently about why this is bad, but at the time all we knew was that the cards gave us a headache.
Even though I didn’t know how to play the game, I basically understood what the keywords meant. How they might work. But the first phrase there in the text; “This card is considered the Egg of Pan Ku for uniqueness purposes” made no sense whatsoever. I said so.
Anu grinned madly. This was precisely what made it cool, as he explained by pulling out another card. The Egg of Pan Ku. The Egg of Pan Ku was an item, a magic item, a legendary artifact in the world of L5R and read simply “this card becomes an exact copy of any other personality in play.”
Anu said “This game has a story.” This simple statement was monumental. No CCG had a story. They had settings, sure. But no…plot. No drama, no episodic content except for new expansions with new cards. How could a card game have a story? Anu went on.
“When you play this game you pick a clan and ally yourself with that clan. The Lion clan, or the Scorpion, or the Crane, or whatever. Most of the cards belong to a Clan. The False Hoturi is a Scorpion card. A card played by Scorpion players and it represents a Scorpion Clan personality. The Egg of Pan Ku has no clan and can be played by anyone.
“See, in a tournament, a Scorpion player faced off against a Crane player,” he pulled out another card. A personality, a samurai named Doji Hoturi. This card had a blue border and Anu explained this meant it was a Crane card. Doji Hoturi was the Crane Clan Champion. I’m not going to explain what that means because I didn’t know what it meant. But like you, I could guess.
“The Crane player brought Doji Hoturi into play, a very powerful personality, a very powerful card. The Scorpion have nothing to match it. Doji Hoturi is the greatest duelist in the Empire and this meant the Crane player was probably going to win the game by out-dueling the Scorpion player. But the Scorpion player used the Egg of Pan Ku to copy Doji Hoturi, so he also had the greatest duelist in the Empire. He beat the Crane player and won the tournament.”
I still didn’t get it.
“Because this was an official tournament, presided over by the designers, they created a new card and changed the story of the game based on the actions of the players. In the story, the Scorpion Clan use the Egg to make a copy of Doji Hoturi and cause all sorts of mayhem blaming the Crane clan.” There was more to this, Anu was deeply engaged in the story of this game and could talk about it for hours. But at this point, we understood, and we were hooked.
Even as I explain this, it’s not clear to me how much of this makes sense to someone who doesn’t already know it. It can be difficult to explain something as complex as aCCG (or an RPG for that matter) to people who haven’t played it. Much harder to convey why it’s fun.
My friends and I engaged with this game pretty deeply. We played all the time, in spite of the fact that there were 7 or 8 of us and the game took about 6 hours to play with more than 4 people. It wasn’t really designed for large groups and eventually interest in the game collapsed under the weight of these marathon sessions.
But in that year or more between 1996 and 1997, we loved L5R. We all adopted a Clan, even though we’d play other clans as the whim suited us, and we went to the local gaming conventions near LAX and play in the official tournaments. We were lucky; AEG , the company that made the game, was nearby and so adopted the local conventions as their home base. One way to describe how well you knew the rules of the game was to tell someone “I live in L.A..”
In spite of this, none of us did particularly well in official tournaments, because our tactics and strategies were developed in huge 8 player games, not the 2 or 4 person games they had at the Con. But we loved participating.
The story of the game, the Clan War in which several factions vied for control of the Throne in a fantasy mashup of Japan and China, was intended to end. At GenCon, the world’s biggest gaming convention, in 1999. There GenCon would host the Day of Thunder when the Seven Thunders, the Champions of each Clan, would stand before Fu Leng, the Big Trouble In Little China-inspired bad-guy of the story, and the Empire would either have a new, benevloent Emperor, or be plunged into 1,000 years of darkness.
The promise, in this case a literal promise delivered to my friends and I by John Zinzer, the guy in charge of the company that makes L5R was that the game, after this final battle, would be packed up, put away, and the company would move on to something else. I didn’t believe him and I told him so to his face at the company’s booth during one of our local conventions. This game was paying for his BMW and I didn’t think he’d have the courage to leave it behind.
The story ramping up to the Day of Thunder was filled with all sorts of romances, deceits, epic battles, new factions, betrayals, the opening of the 12th Black Scroll, all sorts of great stuff. I can’t really lay it all out for you, since it took place over several years, but also because…it wasn’t ever completely written down anywhere. You’d get snippets of it, written on the cards, and you talked to people who played, and you posted on the internet , but there wasn’t any official story document anyone could read. The designers did this on purpose. They not only created the first dynamic, interactive story in CCGs, they also made the deliberate decision not to write it down, ut rather to quote, hint, imply and turn the story into a literal oral tradition held by and told by the players to each other. On paper it may sound like this would never work, but in execution it worked perfectly. None of us in the trenches knew exactly what the story was, but we got it, and we each knew little bits of it that we’d sussed out from the cards, or the designers or people at conventions.
Every video game you’ve ever played, if it had a story, no matter how it ended, had to end in one of a series of proscribed endings created by the designers. Before you ever sat down, they knew what all your options were and there was no way for you to deviate from them.
But in L5R…no one knew what was going to happen. The designers didn’t know, because it was up to the players. Whoever won the final tournament, whoever won the Day of Thunder, that clan would win…and in what manner, no one could guess. Not only was the L5R story a great story in and of itself, filled with archetypal characters and engaging conflicts, the entire mode of storytelling was completely unique. Because we, the players, were involved, it created a sense of ownership over the property itself, that I’ve never felt with any other game.
In a sense, I was there at the Day of Thunder, GenCon 1997. In another sense, I was not. I was there because this was my first trip to GenCon. I went as an employee of Last Unicorn Games, my first real career-type job. I was a designer on the Dune CCG at the time and when one of the owners of the company, Christian, asked me if I wanted to go to GenCon and help at the Booth, I said “Sure, as long as I have time away from the booth to play in the Day of Thunder.”
“Sure,” Christian said. And he meant it.
What he didn’t know what that he, and everyone else at Last Unicorn, was going to get completely shitfaced the night before leaving me as the only person at the booth…pretty much all day during the Day of Thunder. So I was not there there. Yes…I am still bitter about this. 
But from my vantage point in the farthest reaches of the great hall in Milwaukee, I could hear the shouts and cheers coming from the last L5R tournament.
John Wick, the story guy for L5R brought with him 12 different envelopes, one for each of the factions in the game. Each envelope contained “the ending” of the story and the game if that faction won. As the tournament progressed, and various players were eliminated, John would destroy that faction’s envelope, and no one would ever know what would have happened if, say, the Monks had won the day.
The tournament was structured so that several of the best players from every faction would be present. At one point, two of the Naga players, the Naga being a race of snake-men alien to the bureaucracies of the human Court, faced each other. This was highly suboptimal as it meant only one Naga player could advance. The two players talked amongst themselves and agreed that war was a human notion, and rather than fight, they’d play the game for six rounds and whichever player mustered the biggest army at the end would advance.
The moderators of the tournament agreed. They had little choice; hundreds of impassioned fans were watching this happen. And in any event, everyone loved the idea.
Various people, including a competing company, were offering bribes to players if they’d reveal that they were, in fact, secretly member of the Scorpion clan, masters of lies, and defected at the end of the tournament. This gives you some idea of how much of a phenomenon this game had become.
In the end the two players who faced each other at the end of the Day of Thunder, watched by a huge crowd, went off before their game and talked. Anyone could have ended up in the final round, but in this case the two clans that faced each other were led by two characters who were childhood friends, each the Champion of their Clan. These are characters in the game, you understand, not the players.
The players agreed that these two clans should not fight. Unlike the Naga, however, they were martial clans, so they agreed to play out their final game as normal but with one condition; the Champion of the winning Clan would be named Emperor, and the Champion of the losing Clan would die, sacrificing his life to kill Fu Leng, the aforementioned bad guy.
They revealed their decision to the design team, and the design team agreed. Again, they kinda had to, held hostage by the eyes of several hundred fans. But at the same time, man what a story!
They played their game and afterwards John Wick destroyed the two outcomes he’d written for these last two clans, stood up in front of everyone once the battle was over, and extemporized the final story of the final tournament. The Death of Fu Leng , the final battle of the Seven Thunders. I was not there, I do not know what he said. He never wrote it down. In various forms it trickled back to us, the players, via the internet and word of mouth, and this is right and proper because that’s how the story’d been communicated the entire time.
Never before, or since, have I experienced a story as well-crafted, inventively told, and personally engaging in a game as the Clan War. Legend of the Five Rings wasn’t like other games. Lots of other games have a story, sure, but the story was written by the people who make the game. Here the story was guided by the people who create the game, but written by the people who play it. That synergy between the players and the designers was and remains unique. There’s nothing like it in any other gaming medium.
One critical element, and one reason I don’t think a traditional RPG can capture the same zeitgeist, is the fact that in L5R you do not create a character. You choose a Clan from a menu, you don’t get to create your own, and then you chose characters and items from that clan and put them into your deck, thereby determining your strategy. Pen and Paper RPGs like D&D can’t do this, or really anything like it, because the draw is creating your own characters.
But video games could do it. Why haven’t they? Hmmm…
In the end, I was proved right and thousands of L5R fans were disenfranchised. The game kept going after that fateful day. It wasn’t mothballed. There were more expansions, more story, but the magic was gone, and a lot of us stopped playing as a result.
Probably it didn’t matter. The Clan War leading up to the Day of Thunder was the proverbial lightning in a bottle and looking back, it should have been obvious that it would never be repeated. AEG came out with a new game, Legend of the Burning Sands, and maybe if they’d kept their promise, locked up L5R, more of us would have come along. Actually, I’m certain that’s the case. And the new game would have received more attention from the company and benefited as a result. Benefited from being the star of the show, rather than playing second banana to the continuing story of L5R. But even then, it wouldn’t have been the same.
The slug line for L5R was “A World Where Honor Is More Powerful Than Steel.” In this environment, telling the players the story would end the game would stop and how it ended was up to them…up to us, and then breaking that promise, was arguably the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen a company do. The fans believed, you understand. They believed in the magic of the setting, they loved it, and they loved the characters and they participated in the tournament because they had equity in the setting and the story. And this fact wasn’t unknown to the people in charge of AEG. They had to know their players would be crushed.
Many years later I was sitting down at the short-lived GenCon SoCal with my buddy Hyrum who was a Brand Manager at Upper Deck. He had learned…a lot about the CCG business and one of the things he learned was that building a large and profitable fan base was largely determined by what you offered as prizes in tournaments. That you would need tournaments, “organized play” as it’s called, to make your game a success was a given. Decipher, a company I’d worked for, offered cash. A lot of it. So that’s why their players showed up. When the cash prizes dried up, so did the players. They couldn’t switch to prizes or something else, they’d built a competitive player base around cash prizes.
AEG offered control over the story. A promise to the players that together we were going to tell this story. And that’s why their players showed up. AEG underestimated how much of “control over the story” hinged upon the story ending. Control over one chapter, an increasingly small one as time goes on, is very different than control of the end of the whole thing.
By the Day of Thunder, the guys in charge of AEG knew they weren’t going to pack it all up and move on to a different game and I’m 940% certain that at the very least the guy in charge of the company knew it wasn’t going to end when he told me it would over a year before. I remember the smile on his face. At the time, a new player, I thought “Stop the game? He can’t possibly be serious, this thing is making him tons of cash!” By the Day of Thunder I was thinking “Continue the game? They can’t possibly be serious! That was part of the whole thing!”
When they kept the story going, the fans left. Well, most of them. Dumb.
Hopefully now it’s clear why this is the last in my Game Story series. Meaningful Choice. AEG gave it to us like no other game company ever had before or since. Forgive me for having used an example rather than my usual rhetoric.
Choice is easy. Attack or run. East or west. But meaningful choice is hard. Choices have meaning when they change the world around you. AEG had a dynamic story, but even a computer RPG that’s merely interactive can have meaningful choice. You don’t need a dynamic story like L5R’s, but the players need to believe that their choices have meaning, and meaning means impact.
In many stories, Star Wars for instance, the actions of the heroes radically alter the entire Storyverse of the property. Darth Vader dies, the Empire falls. Life after Return of the Jedi doesn’t look anything like life before it.
But your story doesn’t need anything so radical. Impact can be local, it doesn’t have to be global. But it has to be real. This means you have to commit to what happens if the players make a choice other than the one you expected. In order for the players to enjoy finally killing Fu Leng, they have to believe that the Thousand Years of Darkness was a real possibility, and that their choices decided which road the story went down.
They have to believe that what happens is up to them, not you. Like Verisimilitude, there’s no easy way to do this. Put your players on the map, show them where they can go, and let them decide. Create a flowchart with branches showing which way the story can go depending on the player’s actions.
Allow me to end this with another, shorter, story about exactly why this is so hard.
I was sitting in the office of our Executive Art Director at Pandemic Studios. He’d taken it upon himself to sort out a specific debacle involving our cinematics and, as their author and one of the people responsible for implementing them, I was best positioned to explain them in all their complexity. They are complex purely from a production standpoint, bear in mind, not remotely in actual execution. They were hard to make they aren’t hard to understand.
At one point he asked me why there were two different cinematics at a particular point in the story, depicting essentially the same event but from two different points of view.
“Well,” I said, thinking it was obvious, “because there are different factions here at the end of the game and you can work for either one of them.”
He absorbed this.
“So each of these represents the end of a different mission?”
“Yes.”
“Can you go back and do the mission for the other faction?”
This seemed a strange question. “No,” I replied, “you cannot.”
“You mean we’re creating an entire mission, complete with cinematic, that the player will never see?“
You can see where this is going. The notion of spending time, which is to say money, on content that no single player could ever see in a single playthrough seemed like a huge waste of time and money to him. This was not the first time I’d encountered this attitude.
Lots of companies talk about providing choice as a bulletpoint on the back of their game, but meaningful choice, going down one road, never knowing what was down the other, but knowing there was another road, means spending money on content no single player will ever see in one playthrough.
It’s obvious to me why this is to the good, though it’s certainly not necessary. Story as a whole isn’t necessary. Tetris would not be improved by a narrative. But I believe that one of the pillars of good storytelling in games is Meaningful Choice because it’s something only games can do. Why tell a story, in your game, if the player can’t actively participate in it?
Yes, it’s going to require a lot of work on your part to create content the players may never see. If you’re running an RPG, you may be able to structure everything so that the players make their choice at the end of play tonight, and you’ve got a week until the next session to figure out what happens, so you spend as little time as possible creating content the players won’t see.
In the end, however, you must sit down and work out what can happen, where are the branches, what are the choices the players can make, and what might happen as a result. Probably your story won’t engage thousands of players the way Legend of the Five Rings’ story did, but it might engage your players to the same degree and then they’ll be blogging about your story the way I have L5R’s.
Hopefully the post won’t be as long as this one though.
End of Line.
Another personal project has consumed the time I might otherwise devote to blogging and I can’t bring myself to write the kind of ephemera that might otherwise fill up the space between posts of substance. Apologies to my loyal readers and my deep thanks for your continued readership.
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June 7th, 2008 at 2:38 pm
It’s worth the wait to read one of your posts (rather have long intervals of no posts but having high quality ones than have loads of "filler"), but i got to admit that i’ve checking your blog obsessively, as in everyday, waiting for a post, haha
Back on topic, I, in fact, disregarded Legend of the five rings as amateurish when I saw the design of the cards, now i kidn a regret that i’ve never played it, and i probably wont have a chance to (all my school mates now have "real" jobs, and they are "serious" people), but when I go back to the drawing board I’ll remember the concept of meaningful choice.
What you said about sessions on pen and paper roleplaying games, cannot be implemented on the actual standart of single player computer or console rpgs, but could be implemented on MMOS (in fact i know for sure that one MMO did it, i just can’t remember which game or how many times, but i’m certain it was at least once). I think it is a nice break of pace from the usual faction grinding, where nothing ever changes, but of course faction grinding is a design "tool" as it helps to retain players in between updates, you’ve only got to stay away from going to faction-centric.
Interesting post
June 9th, 2008 at 8:54 pm
God, I wish I could remember these right now, but in advertising there are nine forms of honest currency you can use to get people to be truly interested in your product. In other words, they are nine things that a business can give up or offer to the customer that, to the customer is an added bonus/plus/good deal.
They are: Money, Time, Control, Reputation, Dignity, Experience, and I can’t remember the rest.
Basically they are things you can offer people to entice them to invest into a product/service. That sounds sinister, but it isn’t.
A no-hassle money back guarantee is both offering Money, and Experience since unlike most big box stores you are letting people return product and not have to worry that they’re going to need their receipt or asked a thousand questions so that the manager can turn them down.
Other examples like Dignity would be dressing rooms in stores, not all clothing stores have them, or Reputation – Discount Tire built their Empire on this with the old lady throwing the tire through their front window.
Finally, you have Control. YouTube is famous for this, because they put the control of what there is to watch and what we, the consumer watch in our hands.
The other example of Control is exactly what I’m talking about. Zinser claimed that he would give up control of not only the storyline, but also the end of the game. However, while he let players determine the outcome of the game, which seems more of Wick’s doing, he never let the game end like he had promised.
Which is the great danger of using one of the nine currencies. If you fail to keep your promise then not only do you gain word of mouth, but the word of mouth is negative and the <i>worst</i> sort of advertising you can have.
These nine currencies (I’ll find the compete list and post it here later) are things that can be ported over to RPGs to gain interest in the game and make people want to play your game.
June 11th, 2008 at 4:59 pm
I wonder, not just "why doesn’t everyone do this?" but more "why doesn’t anyone do this?"
June 15th, 2008 at 3:48 pm
I always wanted to do one of these things. A game where everyone playing is participating in a story. But, I wonder, why would anyone want to do this with some ol’ M:TG clone? People have armies and stuff in their deck of cards and try to blow up other people’s armies and stuff in their deck. Why half-ass such potential ground for innovation? I read your description and think "They’re participating in this cool big story thing, but they’re using pretty shoddy tools. The interesting parts aren’t the armies wailing on each other, they’re about the relationships between the sides."
I think there is quite a bit of difficulty in "full-assing" the concept. When you follow the CCG model, you generate ‘knowns’ – Focuses of player attention (Tournaments), player-goals(make good decks) - Things that inform how to tell a story. When you try to do something completely different, you lose that know-how, and establishing the basics of the game to add-on the concept of a participatory story becomes a task in itself.
August 5th, 2008 at 9:05 pm
Thanks for the trip down memory lane. I remember having fights with my partners about 4 months before the Day of Thunder about if we should continue the game and story or not. I can guarantee you our plan was to stop the story at the end of the Day of Thunder. It was a passionate time. What we did not realize when we had designed L5R was that not only did we get it right with the story but also with the game play. The game was strategic and hard to master. It still is. We could see the Day of Thunder playing out the way we had hoped and we could also see that it was just the tip of the iceberg. I promise you that one year before the Day of Thunder we were going to shut it down but 4 months out we fought over the decision. So few people had actually heard about L5R and we realized that we had many stories yet to tell. I remember standing at the Day of Thunder with my partner Ryan, tears in my eyes players cheering and him looking at me and saying. You were right we can’t stop this now. For a number of players who had discovered L5R before it became known it was like discovering an amazing art house film before anyone else did they shaped the game we have today and how we run the business. Yes the original flyers said the story will end at Gencon 1997. It was a very tough decision to continue on. I know we lost a number of players who felt we had betrayed them and for this we have always been forthright and apologized. I think for us the bottom line was we were not done telling the story of L5R or pushing the game design. I cannot believe we are actually planning the 15th Anniversary celebration and we are currently involved in a story as engaging as any we have told this last 15 years. The story and game have ebbed and flowed since day one but it has always been fun. When I started AEG and L5R I just wanted to make fun games and tell cool stories. What started off as small idea has grown into a huge property and it is my hope that L5R and our other games deliver on the promise to make people happy. Thank you for the great compliment to our work and if we dishonored ourselves by not being able to stop something we loved so much we hope our actions from the last 13 years have cleared the stain of that dishonor. As a note I think industry people know that I seldom post on forums or troll the internet looking for news. This article was forwarded to me as good read by our L5R brand manager and I was feel nostalgic and a tad defensive. I invite anyone reading this to check out the L5R website at http://www.legendofthefiverings.com/ Thanks again John Zinser AEG
August 6th, 2008 at 1:04 am
There’s an addendum to this story that I never posted.
Many years later, 2005, at Pandemic Studios, my friends and I were playing some games at Game Night. Whatever company I’m with, there will be a Game Night and if I have to I will drag all the players through the entire history of gaming.
Because this is a video game company, many of my coworkers have never played *any* tabletop game of *any* stripe. It’s always a blast to watch new players, otherwise very sophisticated designers and gamers in the PC/Console department, suddenly and passionately fall into the standard gamer archetypes we’ve all seen since the 70s.
In this case we were playing Avalon Hill’s Dune Boardgame. Again, many of these people had never played any traditional adventure games. As they were winding their weary way through the absurdly complex (but brilliant) rules for Dune, I looked at them and thought "You know…I think you guys would like L5R."
"What’s that?"
Next week I went out and bought modern starters for everyone and spent some time quickly throwing decks together. The day after we played, one of my coworkers changed his AIM tagline to;
"I am L5R’s bitch."
The group ate it up. They just *consumed* the entire thing. 8 years after the Day of the Thunder and the game continues to engage a very different brand of gamer than what you normally get at a CCG tournament.
Of course, my personal experience is that the Clan War was special. I don’t think that’s controversial. In the years since the Day of Thunder, I’ve gotten to know a lot of the people involved at AEG in various capacities, including you Z, and while I think Dave Williams, who I see at Blizzcon and currently heads up Red5′s first product, is a brilliant designer, I think Wick was really at the height of his powers then, and this is what I find missing.
The Clan War had these astonishingly archetypal characters, thrown into classic conflicts. That, I think, was John’s specialty. He didn’t create these characters whole cloth, he’d get the art for Lion Clan Samurai #8, and then he’d figure out who that dude was, and weird though that process is, it *is* a process. And you cannot argue with its results.
Now I do, for the Mercenaries property, what John Wick did for L5R, and while I think I have many strengths as a storyteller and a designer, I don’t think I can do what John did. I don’t think I can create those mythic characters. Doji Hoturi, Kachiko, The Son of Storms. The Grey Crane. These characters *started* as myths and became legends. If the dumbest thing you’ve done is broken a promise because you loved L5R and wanted to see it continue…then you’re still miles ahead of the rest of us. Most people never get the chance to be apart of something as phenomenal. I don’t think you have anything to be defensive about, Z. It was Hobson’s Choice.
When I told my coworkers that this game I was going to show them had the greatest story I’d ever encountered in gaming they were…not shy about telling me how absurd this was.
They didn’t say that after we played.