L5R build advice

[Belkira]

I am going to be involved in a L5R game soon and have no practical experience with it, the GM suggested I take the Taoist swordsman school and gave me a home brew tattoo to be less squishy, I honestly have no idea what I am doing here and therefore throw myself onto the mercy of you nice people.

[BWR]

Ignore build, think character.

Have you answered the 20 questions (http://l5rmisty.wordpress.com/2008/09/15/the-20-questions-of-l5r/)?

If you have decided on that and just need help with build, I can't help you. 4e is pretty lame for non-shugenja and I have stayed well away from it. If the GM suggests one school, look at it and see if the flavor fits.

As a bushi you need a decent Earth Ring (prevent you from dying), Agility (hit things with melee weapons), Reflexes (avoid being hit, initiative and ranged weapons) and Void (Void points are nice and Void is necessary for Raises in 4e).
If you start out at Rank 1, I would make sure you have Void 3 to start with and Agility 3 and get your Reflexes and Earth there as soon as possible after that. A Kenjutsu of 3 is probably enough to keep you going for a while.

Apart from that I'm not familiar enough with 4e to be of much help.

[Asmodai]

BWR speaks well. He has covered the basics, but beyond that it really depends on the game and the style. A lot of L5R is less about bashing the brains out of monsters and acting a proper way.

[IdleMuse]

/agree with the above posters. L5R isn't a game where a 'build' makes much sense, particularly. If you want to 'optimise' your skill in, let's say, hunting, raise your Hunting skill... Getting all rings to 3 is a pretty good plan for a Bushi, on that front.

The official AEG forums have a lot more players there, and can help you more with sort of, setting and stuff, if you aren't comfortable with how a Samurai ought to act.

[BWR]

L5R isn't a game where a 'build' makes much sense, particularly.

Not quite true. Some Schools are better than others, some skills are more useful to some Schools than others, some Attributes/Rings are more useful than others. There is a great difference in the combat prowess between a good bushi school that has min-maxed for combat and a good bushi school with a wide spread of abilities. Heck, a Rank 1 optimized Akodo bushi could probably do a good job against an unoptimized Rank 5 Suzume bushi, at least in 3e/r. If you want to play a Hida bushi combat machine, throwing your xp into Intelligence and Awareness is a bad idea. Likewise, Stamina isn't much use to most Courtiers except as a source of Insight.

What most L5R games have is a society where it's good to have some competancy in a wide variety of skills. Unless you play Crab on the Wall, you'll want a couple of ranks in Etiquette and preferably Courtier. You'll want one or two Lore skills to show off with. You'll want some sort of arty-farty skill to impress gullible yet powerful Cranes and Imperials. If you're a bushi you'll need some ranks in Kenjutsu and Iaijutsu and a few other weapons if you can spare the xp. My characters tend to be accused of Insight farming when the GM looks at all the skills I have one or two ranks in, but they are all skills I have used at some point in game and found necessary to have. This is xp that could be used for increasing something more relevant to my focus but it means I'm less useful in situations beyond that narrow focus.

You won't find extreme multiclassing in L5R. It costs a lot of xp and there are very good fluff reasons why this doesn't happen very often.

[IdleMuse]

I meant, build, in the sort of sense of D&D character 'builds' where some options are just strictly better and you can design a character to do one thing very very very well by following a strict build guideline. Yeah, sure, it's possible to be more or less efficient at what you do, but super-'designed' characters don't make much sense in the setting.

[Suteinu]

So then, Belkira-san, tell us about your character.

[Belkira]

Sorry about the delay I lost internet for a while through a series of bizarre events that show Murphy's inherent hate towards me.

Shen Tamori is the youngest of three children. His father found him to be a natural with a sword and of a introspective bent so when it came time to decide what his path in life would be he was enrolled in the taoist swordsman school. On his way to the school he became lost in the twisting mountain paths and was driven into a cave by a ferocious storm. inside the cave he met an old man who had eyes that were like the soul of the mountain. The man reached out and touched Shen's forehead and he blacked out. When Shen woke up it was 3 days later and the mountaineers had found him. He now had a tattoo across his back of a dragon wrapped around a mountain, holding a broken sword and a cracked orb. The tattooed monks told him that it meant he would die in battle in an unjust manner, and that he would be called on to fulfill a favor that he could not refuse. His training went well after that despite his struggling to come to terms with what he now knew. as time passed he came to terms with it and accepted what fate had in store for him. His older brother became distant believing Shen to be a sign of bad luck for those around him and had it arranged for Shen to travel abroad as a member of a new order of samurai.

[BWR]

Tamori Shen. Remember, family name comes first.
Also, he probably should have the Disadvantage Gaijin Name with a name like Shen.
Other than that, looks good.

[Asmodai]

Maybe he's adopted from the Unicorn? :)

[Belkira]

I tried taking Gaijin Name but the GM said it was acceptable for Rokugan, a touch odd but acceptable